My wife told me; "Sex on vacation is so much better than at home."
Not the postcard I was expecting.
*.*
There was a dance teacher who talked of a very old dance called the Politician.
"All you have to do" she told her class "is take three steps forward, two steps backward, then side-step side-step and turn around."
*.*
Saudi Crown Prince Begins 100 Hours Of Court-Ordered Community Service For Murdering Jamal Khashoggi
RIYADH, SAUDI ARABIA—Working with cleaning crews alongside the Riyadh-Dammam Highway, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman began serving his 100 hours of court-ordered community service Thursday for murdering journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
“Well, I’ll admit it—I got mixed up with the wrong people and I did some bad stuff, so this is what I get,” said the crown prince, who had reportedly been picking up trash since 5 a.m. that morning after a Saudi prosecutor found him guilty of ordering the assassination of Khashoggi. “Is 100 hours of work in the sweltering heat a lot of time? Yes. Is it perhaps too much? Of course! But in Saudi Arabia, we have to show our citizens that no one should be able to get away with murdering members of the media. Not even me.”
At press time, the crown prince had reportedly left the premises after convincing his parole officer to let him serve the rest of his time stoning women and beheading prisoners.
*.*
A stealth B-2 bomber was forced to make an emergency landing in Colorado.
It caused all kinds of problems when it landed near a senior center because someone cried out, "B-2!"
Another person yelled out, "Bingo!"
Then a brawl erupted.
*.*
Kristen Bell says she’s not sure about the message that “Snow White” is giving her daughters about a prince kissing a woman without their permission.
I have a feeling that a fairy tale where the princess was left in the forest in a glass coffin for eternity would have been a big hit.
Issue of the Times;
SELCO: The Brutal Truth About Violence When the SHTF, interviewed by Daisy Luther
Are you prepared for the extreme violence that is likely to come your way if the SHTF? No matter what your plan is, it’s entirely probable that at some point, you’ll be the victim of violence or have to perpetrate violence to survive. As always, Selco is our go-to guy on SHTF reality checks and this thought-provoking interview will shake you to your core.
If you don’t know Selco, he’s from Bosnia and he lived through a year in a city that was blockaded with no utilities, no deliveries of supplies, and no services. In his interviews, he shares what the scenarios the rest of us theorize about were REALLY like. He mentioned to me recently that most folks aren’t prepared for the violence that is part and parcel of a collapse, which brings us to today’s interview.
How prevalent was violence when the SHTF in Bosnia?
It was wartime and chaos, from all conflicts in those years in the Balkan region Bosnian conflict was most brutal because of multiple reasons, historical, political and other.
To simplify the explanation why violence was common and very brutal, you need to picture a situation where you are “bombarded” with huge amount of information (propaganda) which instills in you very strong feelings of fear and hate.
Out of fear and hate, violence grows easy and fast, and over the very short period of time you see how people around you (including you) do things that you could not imagine before.
I can say that violence was almost an everyday thing in the whole spectrum of different activities because it was a fight for survival.
Again, whenever (and wherever) you put people in a region without enough resources, you can expect violence.
We were living a normal life, and then suddenly we were thrown in a way of living where if you could not “negotiate” something with someone, you solve the problem by launching a rocket from an RPG through the window of his living room.
Hate stripped down the layers of humanity and suddenly it was “normal” to level an apartment building with people inside with shells from a tank or form private prisons with imprisoned civilians for slave work or sex slaves.
Nothing that I saw or read before could have prepared me for the level of violence and blindness to it, for the lives of kids, elders, civilians, and the innocent.
Again, the thing that is important for readers is that we were a modern society one day, and then in few weeks it turned into carnage.
Do not make the mistake of saying “it cannot happen here” because I made that mistake too.
Do not underestimate power of propaganda, fear, hate, and the lowest human instincts, no matter how modern and good your society is right now and how deeply you believe that “it can not happen here”.
You’ve mentioned warlords and gangs in several of your articles. Were they responsible for the majority of the violence or was it hungry families?
Fighting of the armies through the whole period of war brings violence in terms of constant shelling from a distance from different kind of weapons.
For example a few multiple rocket launchers (VBR) could bring in 30 seconds the destruction in an area of 3-4 apartment buildings, and being there in that moment and surviving it gives you a completely new view on life.
Snipers were a constant threat and over time you simply grow a way of living that you constant scan area in front of you where your next steps gonna be. Are you gonna be visible and from where? Etc.
Most brutal violence was actually lawlessness and complete lack of order between different factions and militias, so in some periods there were militias or gangs who simply ruled the cities or part of the city where they were absolutely masters of everything in terms of deciding of taking someone’s life.
In lawlessness, you as one person could be really small and not interesting, or join some bigger group of people to be stronger, some family or militia or gang.
An example of a gang would be group of people of some 300 or 500 people who “officially” were a unit or militia and operate for some faction, but in reality they operate mostly for themselves.
That included owning part of the black market, having prison (for forced labor or ransom), attacking people and houses for resources, smuggling people from dangerous areas.
Violence from those kinds of group was the most immediate violence, the most visible in terms of SHTF talking.
If those people came on your door you could obey, fight, or negotiate, but mostly you could not not ask for help from any kind of authority, because there was no real authority.
In any society, no matter where you are living, there are a great number of people who are waiting for the SHTF to go out and do violent things. Small time criminals or simply violent persons who are not openly violent because system is there to punish them for that. It is like that.
Some gang leaders that I knew were actually completely sick people with a strange type of charisma that makes people follow them, weird situations that can happen only in a real collapse.
They are people who just waited for their time to rise.
Those kinds of people together with criminal organization that are already there in any city in the world will be the backbone of SHTF gangs.
Who were the most likely victims?
A very simple answer would be that the most likely victims were people who had interesting things without enough defense.
But it was not always that simple.
For example one of the first houses that got raided in my neighborhood, right at the beginning of collapse while there was still some kind of order, was a rich family’s home.
They had a nice house with bars on the windows, a pretty good setup for defense, and they had enough people inside so they could give pretty good resistance to the mob.
But they got raided simply because they were known that they are rich, so they were attacked with enough force to be overwhelmed.
It was not only about how much manpower you had and how well-organized defense of your home was, it was also about how juicy a target you were.
If you are faced with 150 angry people attacking your home because they are sure you have good stuff inside your chances are low, no matter how good and tough you are.
People who were alone were a pretty easy target and old people without support of family or friends.
It was not always about killing someone or violence. For example, if you were alone and without resources but you had something else valuable like some kind of skill or knowledge you could easily be “recruited” for some faction or group, not by your will of course.
What were some ways to prevent yourself from becoming a victim of violence? How do you recommend that people prepare themselves for the possibility of violence?
It can be done in steps, or in layers.
Do not be interesting (or attract attention) when the SHTF.
This means a lot of things, for this article I can give a few examples with shortened explanations because it is a huge topic:
• Do not look like a prepper (before or after SHTF). There is no sense in announcing that you are prepping for EMP, civil collapse, apocalypse, or whatever. With that you are risking the probability that when the SHTF, people will remember that you have interesting things in your home
• Your home should look ordinary. For example, if you are living in the city on a street where all houses look similar, there is not much sense in making your home look like a fortress. You’ll just attract attention.
• Your defense should be based on more subtle means. Some examples are having means to reinforce doors and windows quickly when you need it, or to reinforce them from inside. Make changes in your yard to funnel possible attackers where you want them to be (trees, fence, bush…). You can make your home look abandoned or already looted.
Think about what survival is!
Survival is about staying alive, it is not about being comfortable at the expense of losing your life.
I have seen many times people lose their lives simply because they were too attached to their belongings (house, car, land, goods…) so they simply did not want to leave something and run in a particular moment.
Everything can be earned and bought again except life.
Forget about statements like “I will defend it with my life” or “over my dead body” or similar because the real SHTF is usually not heroic or noble. It is hard and brutal. When you are gone you are gone and there might be nobody to take care of your family just because you have been stubborn or trusted in movies when it came to violence.
To rephrase it: Be ready to leave your home in a split second if that means you and your family will survive, no matter how many good things you have stored there.
Be mentally ready for violence
In a way, it is impossible to be ready for violence, especially widespread violence when the SHTF, but you can minimize shock when that happens with some things.
If you are not familiar with what violence is, you can try to get yourself close” to it today (in normal times). It can be done, for example, by doing some voluntary work for example in a local hospital, ER or similar… or simply by working with homeless people.
Sounds maybe strange but activities like this can get you a bit of a feeling of what it is all about, not to mention that you can learn some practical and useful skills for SHTF.
Have means and skills (physically) to defend – or to do violence
No matter how old or young you are, your gender or religion I assure you that you are capable of doing violence. It is only a matter of the situation and how far you are going to be pushed.
It is not just “some people are capable of violence.” Everybody is capable. Not everybody enjoys doing it or is willing to do it so easily.
In today (normal times) you can learn some violence skills and you should do it, again no matter if you are a woman or old or young.
You should own a weapon and know how to use it. You should practice with it, or have at least some basic knowledge about hand-to-hand combat.
The worst case scenario is to have a weapon that you try for the first time when SHTF.
Be familiar with your means for defense, let your family members know what they need to do in case of attack of your home, have plan, and go through it.
Only through practice will you minimize chances for mistakes.
Use common sense
I know lot of survivalists almost dream about how they are going to use weapons against bad guys when SHTF, and that they will be something like super heroes from movies, saving innocents and killing villains.
Truth is that in a real collapse, a lot of things are kind of blurred and you are not sure who the bad guys are. Good guys turn out to be lunatic gang members who want to bring food to their kids.
There are no super heroes when SHTF, and if some of them show up they end up dead quickly.
There is only you and your skills and mindset and what you prepared.
Use violence as a last resort because of the simple fact that by using violence you are risking of getting killed or hurt. Remember when SHTF there is maybe no doctor or hospital to take care of your wound.
It is a time when even a small cut can eventually kill you through infection and lack of proper care.
I’m a single mom with a household full of girls. In an SHTF situation, what would our best strategies be to remain safe?
Just like I have mentioned before, strategy is always same for any part of survival, and shooting from the rifle is pretty similar no matter are you man or woman.
Being single mom with household full of girls on first look make you as a ideal target in some situations, but we are talking here in prepper terms so there is no reason not to be perfectly well prepared as a single mom with girls.
But yes I admit it is not perfect situation, even if you are prepared well, some things are sure, you need to connect with other people even more.
House with couple of girls will always look like easy prey for some people.
It is like that.
Were people in the city safer than people in the country? Can you tell us more about rural living during this time?
In my case definitely no.
In the essence it always come to the resources and people.
City meant more people less resources, country (rural) meant less people more resources, and because that level of violence simply was lower. That was most important reason.
There are few more reasons why it was much better in the country.
People in the country (rural settings) were much more “connected to ground” they were more tough if you like, they grew their own food, had cattle, lived more simple life prior SHTF and when everything collapsed they had less problems getting use to it.
Yes they also did not have electricity and phones, running water or connection to other places but they adapted easier to the new life because they had more useful skills then people in the city.
Life was harder for them too than prior to the collapse, but they had means to get resources: land, woods, river…
Another thing is that people in small rural communities “in the country” were more connected to each other, people knew their neighborhood and some things were easier to organize, like community security watch, help in case of diseases and similar.
What types of weapons did people have for self-defense?
It was different political system prior the collapse where it was not so usual to own a weapon legally. And to own one illegally could mean a lot of troubles.
Right prior to SHTF, it became possible to buy different weapons on the black market but still, a majority of people did not own weapons.
When it all collapsed, it was possible to get a weapon through trade.
Because of the military doctrine here prior to the collapse, we used “East Bloc” weapons. A favorite was AK-47 in all different kind of editions, or older weapons like M-48 rifle, SKS rifle, 22 and similar.
People used what they had, so in one period you would be lucky if you had any kind of pistol and knife.
Later through the different channels weapon become more available so people had them more. A lot of that was actually junk that some warlords somehow “imported”.
Weapons 50-60 years old without proper ammunition, or not in operating condition. A lot of people simply did not have a clue how to use any kind of weapon so a lot of accidental deaths happened.
I remember people storming abandoned army barracks that was mostly looted, but they found in one building a lot of RPGs while other part of the same building was burning.
Two guys were trying to figure out a single-use RPG, and while they were messing with it clearly not knowing how that thing worked, they accidentally armed it and launched a rocket that flew through the crowd, not hurting anyone and exploding in wall 100 meters from where they stood.
They were smiling, clearly happy because they thought they figured out how that thing worked.
What weapons do you suggest to have for SHTF?
It is a never-ending discussion and a favorite prepper topic, and I must say that whole discussion is overrated.
I have used them in a real situation, and tried and tested lot of different kind of weapons and what works for me may simply not work for you.
For example, here for me good choice is AK-47 rifle, maybe for you wherever you are it is very bad choice.
Good advice is : you need to have a weapon that most people have around you because of multiple reasons: spare parts, repairing, ammunition availability, possibility that you can pick that rifle from other people and you know how to use it.
What caliber and similar is a matter of discussion again. I am talking from the point of owning a rifle.
Another thing is that you need to know how that weapon works. Luckily, most of my readers live in an area where gun laws are great comparing to region where I am.
You have much more choices when it comes to owning a weapon and practicing with it. Use that.
And do not forget that using weapon in a real life situation is not like shooting at beer bottles with your friends after a barbecue.
In real life you might be in a situation to use a weapon while you are tired, dirty, and hungry and while someone is screaming next to you.
It is going to be maybe when you are not ready to do that, maybe in pitch dark, maybe after you have been awake for 48 hours.
At least think about that.
When should you use violence?
Contrary to some popular beliefs in the prepper community, the point is to use violence only as a last solution.
The reason is as I mentioned already, the risk that you can be hurt or killed too, but also once you do violence you change your own rules, or push it more forward, and it is easy to get lost in violence.
There are consequences to that, and you are not going to be the same person ever again.
Violence is a tool, not a toy. You need to know how to use it as best as possible, but also to avoid using it when it is not necessary.
It is a good idea to set up a clear set of rules (mentally too) when you are gonna use violence and to try to stick to it.
For example you will use weapon if someone tries to break your home and attack you, and you need to be ready to do that without hesitation.
What else should we know about post-collapse violence?
Think with your head and research.
One thing that is absolutely important when it comes to understanding how violent it is going to be and what can you expect in your own case of SHTF, is to understand how much media can influence people in making their decisions about violence.
In my case, the media built up situation where people feared so much from other people that they actually hated them. They hated them so much that they actually strip them down from humanity.
In a real-life example, it works in a way that people killed other people, including kids and women, because they hated them so much because media told them.
It may look ridiculous and not possible to you, and you might again think “that can not happen here” but please trust your own resources, look for independent information, not mainstream media, in order to get the right information about what is really happening in the beginning of collapse.
Do not be pulled into “popular opinion” just because the “man from TV” (whoever he might be) told you so.
It is easier today. Because of the internet, you have much more choices for correct information than in my time. But still be careful, you might find yourself rioting together with 500 people just because you trusted some media.
Real survival is not romantic or idealistic. It is brutal, hard and unfair. Let Selco take you into that world.
Read more of Selco’s articles here: https://shtfschool.com
Quote of the Times;
“You tend to close your eyes to truth, beauty and goodness because they give no scope to your sense of the ridiculous.” - Maugham
Link of the Times;
https://www.dailywire.com/news/38491/watch-ocasio-cortez-has-no-idea-what-3-branches-ryan-saavedra?fbclid=IwAR09Uxnsud7Udak1yROciAAH1qB2Jz9vuHH3z3K6bwG8Ik4QrHrH3QiY16U
When?
Electric?
Q: What did one German say to the other German?
A: I have no idea, I don't speak German.
*.*
Once there was a boy named Odd. He was the butt of jokes his whole life, because of his name. Eventually he grew up to be a very successful fisherman and owner of three fish processing plants.
When Odd was about to die, he said, "People have been teasing me my whole life and I don't want them doing that after I'm dead, so don't put my name on my gravestone."
After Odd died, people saw his blank tomb-stone and said . . .
"That's Odd ".
*.*
Three Facts That You Won’t Be Able To Unlearn
When you get scurvy, your scars start coming undone. Your body is constantly repairing old wounds, and without vitamin c, it can’t make collagen, so the seams start coming apart.
That “The Clap”, Gonorrhea, got its name from the treatment during medieval times known as “clapping” the penis or slamming the penis between both hands (or a hard surface) to get rid of the discharge and thus the infection.
That coughing noise the raptors make in Jurassic Park is the sound of turtles fucking. Steven Spielberg went to a zoo to get sounds for the roars and a zookeeper jokingly mentioned that it was mating season for the tortoises.
*.*
“Lemon Pickers Needed” read the ad in the newspaper.
Ms. Sally Mulligan of Coral Springs, Florida, read it, and decided to
apply for one of the jobs that most Americans are not willing to do.
She submitted her application for a job in a Florida lemon grove, but
seemed far too qualified for the job.
She has a liberal arts degree from the University of Michigan, and a
master’s degree from Michigan State University.
For a number of years, she had worked as a social worker, and also as
a school teacher.
The foreman studied her application, frowned, and said, "I see that
you are well educated, and have an impressive resume.
“However, I have to ask you, have you had any actual experience in
picking lemons?”
"Well, as a matter of fact, I have," she said
"I've been divorced three times, owned two Chryslers, voted twice for
Obama, and once for Hillary.”
She started work yesterday!
*.*
The teacher gave her fifth grade class an assignment:
Get their parents to tell them a story with a moral at the end of it.
The next day, the kids came back and, one by one, began to tell their stories.
There were all the regular type stuff: spilled milk and pennies saved , etc.
But then the teacher realized, she had missed Janie.
Janie, do you have a story to share?'
''Yes ma'am. My daddy told me a story about my Mommy.
She was a Marine pilot in Desert Storm, and her plane got hit.
She had to bail out over enemy territory, and all she had was a flask of whiskey, a pistol, and a survival knife.
She drank the whiskey on the way down so the bottle wouldn't break, and then her parachute landed her right in the middle of 20 Iraqi troops.
She shot 15 of them with the pistol, until she ran out of bullets, killed four more with the knife, till the blade broke, and then she killed the last Iraqi with her bare hands.
''Good Lord!” said the horrified teacher.
“… What did your Daddy tell you was the moral to this horrible story?”
"Best to stay away from Mommy when she's been drinkin’.”
Issue of the Times;
Child miners aged four living a hell on Earth so YOU can drive an electric car: Awful human cost in squalid Congo cobalt mine that Michael Gove didn’t consider in his ‘clean’ energy crusade by Barbara Jones
His name is Dorsen and he is one of an army of children, some just four years old, working in the vast polluted mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where toxic red dust burns their eyes, and they run the risk of skin disease and a deadly lung condition. Here, for a wage of just 8p a day, the children are made to check the rocks for the tell-tale chocolate-brown streaks of cobalt – the prized ingredient essential for the batteries that power electric cars.
And it’s feared that thousands more children could be about to be dragged into this hellish daily existence – after the historic pledge made by Britain to ban the sale of petrol and diesel cars from 2040 and switch to electric vehicles.
It heralds a future of clean energy, free from pollution but – though there can be no doubting the good intentions behind Environment Secretary Michael Gove’s announcement last month – such ideals mean nothing for the children condemned to a life of hellish misery in the race to achieve his target.
Dorsen, just eight, is one of 40,000 children working daily in the mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The terrible price they will pay for our clean air is ruined health and a likely early death.
Almost every big motor manufacturer striving to produce millions of electric vehicles buys its cobalt from the impoverished central African state. It is the world’s biggest producer, with 60 per cent of the planet’s reserves.
The cobalt is mined by unregulated labour and transported to Asia where battery manufacturers use it to make their products lighter, longer-lasting and rechargeable.
The planned switch to clean energy vehicles has led to an extraordinary surge in demand. While a smartphone battery uses no more than 10 grams of refined cobalt, an electric car needs 15kg (33lb).
Goldman Sachs, the merchant bank, calls cobalt ‘the new gasoline’ but there are no signs of new wealth in the DRC, where the children haul the rocks brought up from tunnels dug by hand.
Adult miners dig up to 600ft below the surface using basic tools, without protective clothing or modern machinery. Sometimes the children are sent down into the narrow makeshift chambers where there is constant danger of collapse.
Cobalt is such a health hazard that it has a respiratory disease named after it – cobalt lung, a form of pneumonia which causes coughing and leads to permanent incapacity and even death.
Even simply eating vegetables grown in local soil can cause vomiting and diarrhoea, thyroid damage and fatal lung diseases, while birds and fish cannot survive in the area.
No one knows quite how many children have died mining cobalt in the Katanga region in the south-east of the country. The UN estimates 80 a year, but many more deaths go unregistered, with the bodies buried in the rubble of collapsed tunnels. Others survive but with chronic diseases which destroy their young lives. Girls as young as ten in the mines are subjected to sexual attacks and many become pregnant.
When Sky News investigated the Katanga mines it found Dorsen, working near a little girl called Monica, who was four, on a day of relentless rainfall.
Dorsen was hauling heavy sacks of rocks from the mine surface to a growing stack 60ft away. A full sack was lifted on to Dorsen’s head and he staggered across to the stack. A brutish overseer stood over him, shouting and raising his hand to threaten a beating if he spilt any.
With his mother dead, Dorsen lives with his father in the bush and the two have to work daily in the cobalt mine to earn money for food.
Dorsen’s friend Richard, 11, said that at the end of a working day ‘everything hurts’.
In a country devastated by civil wars in which millions have died, there is no other way for families to survive. Britain’s Department for International Development (DFID) is donating £10.5million between June 2007 and June 2018 towards strengthening revenue transparency and encouraging responsible activity in large and small scale artisanal mining, ‘to benefit the poor of DRC’.
There is little to show for these efforts so far. There is a DRC law forbidding the enslavement of under-age children, but nobody enforces it.
The UN’s International Labour Organisation has described cobalt mining in DRC as ‘one of the worst forms of child labour’ due to the health risks.
Soil samples taken from the mining area by doctors at the University of Lubumbashi, the nearest city, show the region to be among the ten most polluted in the world. Residents near mines in southern DRC had urinary concentrates of cobalt 43 higher than normal. Lead levels were five times higher, cadmium and uranium four times higher.
The worldwide rush to bring millions of electric vehicles on to our roads has handed a big advantage to those giant car-makers which saw this bonanza coming and invested in developing battery-powered vehicles, among them General Motors, Renault-Nissan, Tesla, BMW and Fiat-Chrysler.
Chinese middle-men working for the Congo Dongfang Mining Company have the stranglehold in DRC, buying the raw cobalt brought to them in sacks carried on bicycles and dilapidated old cars daily from the Katanga mines. They sit in shacks on a dusty road near the Zambian border, offering measly sums scrawled on blackboards outside – £40 for a ton of cobalt-rich rocks – that will be sent by cargo ship to minerals giant Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt in China and sold on to a complex supply chain feeding giant multinationals.
Challenged by the Washington Post about the appalling conditions in the mines, Huayou Cobalt said ‘it would be irresponsible’ to stop using child labour, claiming: ‘It could aggravate poverty in the cobalt mining regions and worsen the livelihood of local miners.’
Human rights charity Amnesty International also investigated cobalt mining in the DRC and says that none of the 16 electric vehicle manufacturers they identified have conducted due diligence to the standard defined by the Responsible Cobalt Initiative.
Encouragingly, Apple, which uses the mineral in its devices, has committed itself to treat cobalt like conflict minerals – those which have in the past funded child soldiers in the country’s civil war – and the company claims it is going to require all refiners to have supply chain audits and risk assessments. But Amnesty International is not satisfied. ‘This promise is not worth the paper it is written on when the companies are not investigating their suppliers,’ said Amnesty’s Mark Dummett. ‘Big brands have the power to change this.’
After DRC, Australia is the next biggest source of cobalt, with reserves of 1million tons, followed by Cuba, China, Russia, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
Car maker Tesla – the market leader in electric vehicles – plans to produce 500,000 cars per year starting in 2018, and will need 7,800 tons of cobalt to achieve this. Sales are expected to hit 4.4 million by 2021. It means the price of cobalt will soar as the world gears itself up for the electric car revolution, and there is evidence some corporations are cancelling their contracts with regulated mines using industrial technology, and turning increasingly to the cheaper mines using human labour.
After the terrible plight of Dorsen and Richard was broadcast in a report on Sky News, an emotive response from viewers funded a rescue by children’s charity Kimbilio. They are now living in a church-supported children’s home, sleeping on mattresses for the first time in their lives and going to school.
But there is no such happy ending for the tens of thousands of children left in the hell on earth that is the cobalt mines of the Congo.
Quote of the Times;
“One looks at maps, and does not truly apprehend the extent and variety of the world.” - Williams
Link of the Times;
https://www.boredpanda.com/new-wildlife-photography-robert-irwin/
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An Images & Ideas, Inc. Service.
AOD 318
}; - >
A: I have no idea, I don't speak German.
*.*
Once there was a boy named Odd. He was the butt of jokes his whole life, because of his name. Eventually he grew up to be a very successful fisherman and owner of three fish processing plants.
When Odd was about to die, he said, "People have been teasing me my whole life and I don't want them doing that after I'm dead, so don't put my name on my gravestone."
After Odd died, people saw his blank tomb-stone and said . . .
"That's Odd ".
*.*
Three Facts That You Won’t Be Able To Unlearn
When you get scurvy, your scars start coming undone. Your body is constantly repairing old wounds, and without vitamin c, it can’t make collagen, so the seams start coming apart.
That “The Clap”, Gonorrhea, got its name from the treatment during medieval times known as “clapping” the penis or slamming the penis between both hands (or a hard surface) to get rid of the discharge and thus the infection.
That coughing noise the raptors make in Jurassic Park is the sound of turtles fucking. Steven Spielberg went to a zoo to get sounds for the roars and a zookeeper jokingly mentioned that it was mating season for the tortoises.
*.*
“Lemon Pickers Needed” read the ad in the newspaper.
Ms. Sally Mulligan of Coral Springs, Florida, read it, and decided to
apply for one of the jobs that most Americans are not willing to do.
She submitted her application for a job in a Florida lemon grove, but
seemed far too qualified for the job.
She has a liberal arts degree from the University of Michigan, and a
master’s degree from Michigan State University.
For a number of years, she had worked as a social worker, and also as
a school teacher.
The foreman studied her application, frowned, and said, "I see that
you are well educated, and have an impressive resume.
“However, I have to ask you, have you had any actual experience in
picking lemons?”
"Well, as a matter of fact, I have," she said
"I've been divorced three times, owned two Chryslers, voted twice for
Obama, and once for Hillary.”
She started work yesterday!
*.*
The teacher gave her fifth grade class an assignment:
Get their parents to tell them a story with a moral at the end of it.
The next day, the kids came back and, one by one, began to tell their stories.
There were all the regular type stuff: spilled milk and pennies saved , etc.
But then the teacher realized, she had missed Janie.
Janie, do you have a story to share?'
''Yes ma'am. My daddy told me a story about my Mommy.
She was a Marine pilot in Desert Storm, and her plane got hit.
She had to bail out over enemy territory, and all she had was a flask of whiskey, a pistol, and a survival knife.
She drank the whiskey on the way down so the bottle wouldn't break, and then her parachute landed her right in the middle of 20 Iraqi troops.
She shot 15 of them with the pistol, until she ran out of bullets, killed four more with the knife, till the blade broke, and then she killed the last Iraqi with her bare hands.
''Good Lord!” said the horrified teacher.
“… What did your Daddy tell you was the moral to this horrible story?”
"Best to stay away from Mommy when she's been drinkin’.”
Issue of the Times;
Child miners aged four living a hell on Earth so YOU can drive an electric car: Awful human cost in squalid Congo cobalt mine that Michael Gove didn’t consider in his ‘clean’ energy crusade by Barbara Jones
His name is Dorsen and he is one of an army of children, some just four years old, working in the vast polluted mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where toxic red dust burns their eyes, and they run the risk of skin disease and a deadly lung condition. Here, for a wage of just 8p a day, the children are made to check the rocks for the tell-tale chocolate-brown streaks of cobalt – the prized ingredient essential for the batteries that power electric cars.
And it’s feared that thousands more children could be about to be dragged into this hellish daily existence – after the historic pledge made by Britain to ban the sale of petrol and diesel cars from 2040 and switch to electric vehicles.
It heralds a future of clean energy, free from pollution but – though there can be no doubting the good intentions behind Environment Secretary Michael Gove’s announcement last month – such ideals mean nothing for the children condemned to a life of hellish misery in the race to achieve his target.
Dorsen, just eight, is one of 40,000 children working daily in the mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The terrible price they will pay for our clean air is ruined health and a likely early death.
Almost every big motor manufacturer striving to produce millions of electric vehicles buys its cobalt from the impoverished central African state. It is the world’s biggest producer, with 60 per cent of the planet’s reserves.
The cobalt is mined by unregulated labour and transported to Asia where battery manufacturers use it to make their products lighter, longer-lasting and rechargeable.
The planned switch to clean energy vehicles has led to an extraordinary surge in demand. While a smartphone battery uses no more than 10 grams of refined cobalt, an electric car needs 15kg (33lb).
Goldman Sachs, the merchant bank, calls cobalt ‘the new gasoline’ but there are no signs of new wealth in the DRC, where the children haul the rocks brought up from tunnels dug by hand.
Adult miners dig up to 600ft below the surface using basic tools, without protective clothing or modern machinery. Sometimes the children are sent down into the narrow makeshift chambers where there is constant danger of collapse.
Cobalt is such a health hazard that it has a respiratory disease named after it – cobalt lung, a form of pneumonia which causes coughing and leads to permanent incapacity and even death.
Even simply eating vegetables grown in local soil can cause vomiting and diarrhoea, thyroid damage and fatal lung diseases, while birds and fish cannot survive in the area.
No one knows quite how many children have died mining cobalt in the Katanga region in the south-east of the country. The UN estimates 80 a year, but many more deaths go unregistered, with the bodies buried in the rubble of collapsed tunnels. Others survive but with chronic diseases which destroy their young lives. Girls as young as ten in the mines are subjected to sexual attacks and many become pregnant.
When Sky News investigated the Katanga mines it found Dorsen, working near a little girl called Monica, who was four, on a day of relentless rainfall.
Dorsen was hauling heavy sacks of rocks from the mine surface to a growing stack 60ft away. A full sack was lifted on to Dorsen’s head and he staggered across to the stack. A brutish overseer stood over him, shouting and raising his hand to threaten a beating if he spilt any.
With his mother dead, Dorsen lives with his father in the bush and the two have to work daily in the cobalt mine to earn money for food.
Dorsen’s friend Richard, 11, said that at the end of a working day ‘everything hurts’.
In a country devastated by civil wars in which millions have died, there is no other way for families to survive. Britain’s Department for International Development (DFID) is donating £10.5million between June 2007 and June 2018 towards strengthening revenue transparency and encouraging responsible activity in large and small scale artisanal mining, ‘to benefit the poor of DRC’.
There is little to show for these efforts so far. There is a DRC law forbidding the enslavement of under-age children, but nobody enforces it.
The UN’s International Labour Organisation has described cobalt mining in DRC as ‘one of the worst forms of child labour’ due to the health risks.
Soil samples taken from the mining area by doctors at the University of Lubumbashi, the nearest city, show the region to be among the ten most polluted in the world. Residents near mines in southern DRC had urinary concentrates of cobalt 43 higher than normal. Lead levels were five times higher, cadmium and uranium four times higher.
The worldwide rush to bring millions of electric vehicles on to our roads has handed a big advantage to those giant car-makers which saw this bonanza coming and invested in developing battery-powered vehicles, among them General Motors, Renault-Nissan, Tesla, BMW and Fiat-Chrysler.
Chinese middle-men working for the Congo Dongfang Mining Company have the stranglehold in DRC, buying the raw cobalt brought to them in sacks carried on bicycles and dilapidated old cars daily from the Katanga mines. They sit in shacks on a dusty road near the Zambian border, offering measly sums scrawled on blackboards outside – £40 for a ton of cobalt-rich rocks – that will be sent by cargo ship to minerals giant Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt in China and sold on to a complex supply chain feeding giant multinationals.
Challenged by the Washington Post about the appalling conditions in the mines, Huayou Cobalt said ‘it would be irresponsible’ to stop using child labour, claiming: ‘It could aggravate poverty in the cobalt mining regions and worsen the livelihood of local miners.’
Human rights charity Amnesty International also investigated cobalt mining in the DRC and says that none of the 16 electric vehicle manufacturers they identified have conducted due diligence to the standard defined by the Responsible Cobalt Initiative.
Encouragingly, Apple, which uses the mineral in its devices, has committed itself to treat cobalt like conflict minerals – those which have in the past funded child soldiers in the country’s civil war – and the company claims it is going to require all refiners to have supply chain audits and risk assessments. But Amnesty International is not satisfied. ‘This promise is not worth the paper it is written on when the companies are not investigating their suppliers,’ said Amnesty’s Mark Dummett. ‘Big brands have the power to change this.’
After DRC, Australia is the next biggest source of cobalt, with reserves of 1million tons, followed by Cuba, China, Russia, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
Car maker Tesla – the market leader in electric vehicles – plans to produce 500,000 cars per year starting in 2018, and will need 7,800 tons of cobalt to achieve this. Sales are expected to hit 4.4 million by 2021. It means the price of cobalt will soar as the world gears itself up for the electric car revolution, and there is evidence some corporations are cancelling their contracts with regulated mines using industrial technology, and turning increasingly to the cheaper mines using human labour.
After the terrible plight of Dorsen and Richard was broadcast in a report on Sky News, an emotive response from viewers funded a rescue by children’s charity Kimbilio. They are now living in a church-supported children’s home, sleeping on mattresses for the first time in their lives and going to school.
But there is no such happy ending for the tens of thousands of children left in the hell on earth that is the cobalt mines of the Congo.
Quote of the Times;
“One looks at maps, and does not truly apprehend the extent and variety of the world.” - Williams
Link of the Times;
https://www.boredpanda.com/new-wildlife-photography-robert-irwin/
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Lived?
What do you call an obese psychic?
A four-chin teller.
*.*
Oneliners
The real goal is to be rich the moment after you die.
Marriage is like a tourniquet; it stops your circulation.
Everything on land is within walking distance.
The road to success is marked with many tempting parking places
God speaks to us in hunches.
You'll notice that a turtle only makes progress when it sticks out its neck
No matter how bad it gets, I'm rich at the dollar store.
The tongue must be heavy indeed, because so few people can't hold it.
Change is inevitable, except from vending machines.
*.*
Jack decided to go skiing with his buddy, Bob. They loaded up Jack's minivan and headed north. After driving for a few hours, they were caught in a terrible blizzard. They pulled into a nearby farm and asked the attractive lady who answered the door if they could spend the night.
"I realize it's terrible weather out there and I have this huge house all to myself, but I'm recently widowed," she explained, "I'm afraid the neighbors will talk if I let you stay in my house."
"Don't worry," Jack said. We'll be happy to sleep in the barn. And if the weather breaks, we'll be gone at first light."
The lady agreed, and the two men found their way to the barn and settled in for the night. In the morning, the weather had cleared, and they got on their way. They enjoyed a great weekend of skiing.
About nine months later, Jack got an unexpected letter from an attorney. It took him a few minutes to figure it out, but he finally determined that it was from the attorney of that attractive widow he had met on the ski weekend. He dropped in on his friend Bob and asked, "Bob, do you remember that good-looking widow from the farm we stayed at on our ski holiday up North?"
"Yes, I do." said Bob
"Did you happen to get up in the middle of the night, go up to the house and pay her a visit?"
"Yes," Bob said, a little embarrassed about being found out, "I have to admit that I did."
"And did you happen to use my name instead of telling her your name?"
Bob's face turned red and he said, "Yeah, sorry, buddy. I'm afraid I did. Why do you ask..?"
"She just died and left me everything.!"
*.*
ISIS Claims Responsibility For 'Baby Shark'
NORTHERN IRAQ—Driven back into hiding, ISIS no longer holds the sway it once did in the Middle East. But the terror group recently claimed responsibility for its most vicious attack yet: the "Baby Shark" series of videos that targeted unsuspecting parents of toddlers on YouTube.
In a video uploaded to Twitter, ISIS claimed to have created the Baby Shark meme and set it loose in the West in order to drive parents up a wall for years to come.
"This attack was brutal, even for ISIS," said one political analyst. "We've come to expect the usual array of terror tactics from the group—but this—this is beyond the pale. To subject American families to the extremely catchy, extremely irritating Baby Shark videos represents the worst war crime the world has seen in decades."
"Baby shark do do do do do do," he muttered. "Dang it, there I go again!”
Not everyone is convinced ISIS is behind the attack. Several prominent Democrat think tanks released statements suggesting the attack has all the hallmarks of Russian interference, designed to destabilize and divide the populace. And Christian pastors across the country are pointing toward Satan as the obvious culprit.
Emboldened by the extreme success of its video assault, the terrorist group also teased an upcoming mashup between the incredibly annoying "Baby Shark" and "Let It Go" from Frozen.
*.*
What’s the real definition of a male chauvinist pig?
A man who hates every bone in a woman’s body.
Except his.
Issue of the Times;
Dear Resistance, listen to my lived totalitarian experience – you have no effing idea what you’re talking about by Arthur Chrenkoff
In a world that the identity politics has wrought, lived experience is a trump (apologies for the use of a triggering word) card: your viewpoint or opinion on an issue is automatically deemed invalid or at least less valid and valuable if you’re not a member of a group whose plight is being discussed. Men can’t really know what it’s like to be women, white people can’t really know what it’s like to be people of colour, the straight ones can’t really know what it’s like to have other sexual orientations. Your identity is your argument; “You wouldn’t know what it’s like; you can’t tell me what I should think or feel”. You’re only allowed to walk in somebody else’s shoes to the extent you can feel the same callouses, otherwise give me my shoes back. This sort of epistemological approach rears its head nowadays in everything from most political debates to the calls that fiction authors should not write through characters of different gender, race or sexuality. Just like cultural appropriation, identity appropriation is a grave sin against minorities (or, in case of women, majorities).
As a straight, white, Christian, right-wing, middle class male of European extraction I get told to shut up a lot. As you can imagine, this does not at all stop me from speaking out. The white privilege clearly makes me both uncontrollable and insufferable.
But if lived experience is indeed the be-all-end-all that the identarian left considers it to be, there is one area where my lived experience without a doubt shit all over the lived experience of the woke folk. Unlike all those among them who have been born and/or raised in the West and have zero or almost zero experience of living under anything other than a liberal democratic government (which is 99 per cent of them at least), I have lived the first 15 years of my life under the Soviet block-style communism, or “real socialism” as the Party used to call it. I’m not going to pretend that the 1970s and the 80s in Poland were as bloody and traumatic as the Stalinist Russia, Mao’s China or Pol Pot’s Cambodia (as P J O’Rourke who visited Warsaw at that time noted, the communism for most part doesn’t kill you any more, it just bores you to death) but I do know a difference or twenty-two between a totalitarian or authoritarian society and a Western democracy.
So to all the women dressing up in costumes from “Handmaid’s Tale” who think they’re on the brink of living in a misogynist theocracy,
To all those calling themselves “The Resistance”, as if they were the French Maquis or the Polish Home Army shooting collaborators and derailing trains after their country has been brutally occupied by a totalitarian foreign power,
To those who think that America is currently in a grip of fascism and are calling on the military to stage a coup to remove the President (that’s you Rosie O’Donnell, Sarah Silverman, Congressman Steve Cohen and others),
To the celebrities and commentators, from Michael Moore to former security officials like John Brennan, who think the United States is on the brink of dictatorship,
To all those who have compared Trump to Hitler,
(And a special mention of those who really should know better – professional historians of the German and the Russian totalitarianism, like Timothy “Bloodlands” Snyder and Charles “Ordinary Men” Browning, who have been only too happy to – without quite comparing Trump to Hitler – talk about illiberal democracy, authoritarian leadership, and draw parallels between the 1930s Europe and the 2010s America),
you really have no idea, and I mean it with the greatest possible respect. Actually, I don’t. Most of you are supposedly mature, rational adults but you seem to have at best the most superficial knowledge of history and a complete lack of self-awareness, any sense of perspective, and an ability to contextualise. Having spent your lives relatively free of hardship, deprivation and persecution on any remotely comparable scale to people in other, less fortunate corners of the world, you probably get some frisson from believing yourself to be big actors at a critical time in history, the last line of separating civilisation from the descent into new dark ages. You’re free to engage in whatever ideological cosplay you want, but don’t expect others to take you seriously.
You can pick up any of the thousands of books written about life under a dictatorship and read all about it, or you can watch a doco or listen to a podcast, but clearly you couldn’t be bothered to do so thus far in your life, so I’m going to give you potted version of how a real tyranny (it does not particularly matter whether communist or fascist as they are quite similar in practice, which is of course another thing you don’t want to hear, but that’s tough – they certainly have far more in common with each other than with a free society) works and what the world in which I was growing up looked like:
There is no democracy. There is only political party (actually there were two minor and irrelevant fig leaves, which were wholly controlled by the Party and would never act in any way contrary to the Party). All other parties and political activities are banned. Elections such as they are consists of a chance to vote for the Party candidate. It doesn’t matter if you vote against them as results will be falsified to show universal support and approval. The Party controls the government, so the two terms are interchangeable; in fact the Party pretty much controls everything. There is no way for an ordinary citizen to have a political impact, except by joining the Party, and even then the range of options is completely circumscribed by the guiding ideology.
There are no freedoms and civil liberties as they are commonly understood. There is no freedom of speech. Saying anything against the Party, even a joke, can lead to an arrest if you’re overheard and/or reported to the authorities. Unless you’re particularly lucky you can end up in jail. If you’re working, you can lose your job and be forced to take a menial one if you can actually get one. If you’re studying, you can be blacklisted from further education. Or your parents can lose their job over your joke, or your children might be denied a chance to go to university. There are no legal sources of information but the ones run by the Party. Creation, possession and distribution of alternative sources of news and opinion is a criminal offence. Listening to foreign radio broadcasts is illegal. Every news or cultural or scientific product is subject to government censorship. Nothing that the Party does not like for whatever reason can get published or broadcasted. Those who have shown themselves as ideologically unreliable are blacklisted and their careers put on ice. There are approved versions of everything, from history to entertainment. Everything beyond them is illegal.
There is no freedom of assembly. Unless the Party initiates and organises it it’s illegal. It does not matter whether you are peaceful or not, you will likely get beaten up by the police, arrested and charged, with similar consequences as mentioned above. There is no such thing as independent civil society; the Party decides what organisations, clubs and associations can exist. Those that are given permission to operate need to adhere to the Party rules and support the Party each in its own way, whether you’re in the Scouts or a philatelist group. The Party and its symbols are of course ubiquitous, from public monuments to the portraits of the current leader and political slogans. Your social and professional advancement is largely determined by your cooperation with the Party. There is a ceiling on how far you can go in life without at the very least becoming a member.
There is no rule of law and no justice as we understand these concepts. The laws are those of the Party and citizens have no role in shaping them or changing them. If you are accused of any of the large number of wrongdoings and offences against the state/government/Party, the system is stacked against you at every stage of the process. The fact that you have come into contact with the “justice system” is a de facto indication that you have done something wrong, because the system makes no mistakes. Neither the law enforcement nor the judiciary are in any way independent of the Party; they are its instruments; their actions and decisions are political. It’s just you against the system.
Needless to say, there is no general prosperity and huge inequalities of wealth exist. This is because economic opportunities are largely absent for an average person. The state is virtually the only employer, certainly on the large scale. The only routes of material advancement are through the Party and the official (but unheralded) privileges it provides as well as the opportunities for graft and corruption, or through black market and other criminal activity. The system is meant to provide everyone with at least the barest of minimum living standards but very often it cannot do even that. People manage to keep their heads above water through their wits and more often than not by breaking at least some laws. Because the options are so limited, people tend not to change jobs or move around too much. Certainly, the overseas travel is rare and completely at the government’s discretion, hence most of it tends to be either official or to other non-democracies. The government regulates every aspect of life. What’s not expressly provided for is assumed to be forbidden.
All this is a relatively mild, late form of communism, not the earlier version where you could end up in a gulag because the local secret police had a quota to fill or because you once corresponded with a pen pal in another country or wore glasses indicating your intellectual status or didn’t cry sincerely enough after another Dear Leader passed on. Also, this was Poland, which was one of the most liberal of the communist countries, with a relatively independent (but much circumscribed) Catholic Church and a strong tradition of independence and rebellion. The situation was much worse in other countries, and much worse in the past.
I feel almost silly for writing all this because to me I’m stating the blindingly obvious, but clearly it’s not obvious at all for far too many people today. Think of any activity you undertake during your average day and then realise that every little thing is different, more difficult, more involved about it under a dictatorship.
Now tell me how your life today in the United States or Australia or Great Britain is at all similar to life under the state oppression. Please. Anything that even remotely compares to what I have described.
If anything, all the recent attempts to police speech and dictate the correct ways of thinking, whether on the initiative of the state or by private businesses and non-government groups, are inspired by the left, i.e. pretty much the same section of the politically-aware society which is complaining about the descending fascism. This is why I get so agitated about issues like freedom of speech; it’s not just theoretical to me – it reminds me too much of my childhood. When my family escaped to the West it was precisely to leave these things behind not to discover them under a different guise amidst the supposed liberal democracy.
So, dear Resistance, excuse me while my lived experience under the actual dictatorship leaves me cold when listening to and looking at your hysterics and public exhibitions of ignorance and ideological blindness. Your generally white, coddled, middle class progressive privilege it’s showing, and it’s not a pretty sight.
Quote of the Times;
“The hallmark of a decision in line with one’s character is ease and contentment, and an ample, even provision of natural energy.” - Truitt
Link of the Times;
https://www.collective-evolution.com/2018/11/11/florida-midterm-election-drama-the-sun-is-finally-shining-on-deep-state-darkness/
A four-chin teller.
*.*
Oneliners
The real goal is to be rich the moment after you die.
Marriage is like a tourniquet; it stops your circulation.
Everything on land is within walking distance.
The road to success is marked with many tempting parking places
God speaks to us in hunches.
You'll notice that a turtle only makes progress when it sticks out its neck
No matter how bad it gets, I'm rich at the dollar store.
The tongue must be heavy indeed, because so few people can't hold it.
Change is inevitable, except from vending machines.
*.*
Jack decided to go skiing with his buddy, Bob. They loaded up Jack's minivan and headed north. After driving for a few hours, they were caught in a terrible blizzard. They pulled into a nearby farm and asked the attractive lady who answered the door if they could spend the night.
"I realize it's terrible weather out there and I have this huge house all to myself, but I'm recently widowed," she explained, "I'm afraid the neighbors will talk if I let you stay in my house."
"Don't worry," Jack said. We'll be happy to sleep in the barn. And if the weather breaks, we'll be gone at first light."
The lady agreed, and the two men found their way to the barn and settled in for the night. In the morning, the weather had cleared, and they got on their way. They enjoyed a great weekend of skiing.
About nine months later, Jack got an unexpected letter from an attorney. It took him a few minutes to figure it out, but he finally determined that it was from the attorney of that attractive widow he had met on the ski weekend. He dropped in on his friend Bob and asked, "Bob, do you remember that good-looking widow from the farm we stayed at on our ski holiday up North?"
"Yes, I do." said Bob
"Did you happen to get up in the middle of the night, go up to the house and pay her a visit?"
"Yes," Bob said, a little embarrassed about being found out, "I have to admit that I did."
"And did you happen to use my name instead of telling her your name?"
Bob's face turned red and he said, "Yeah, sorry, buddy. I'm afraid I did. Why do you ask..?"
"She just died and left me everything.!"
*.*
ISIS Claims Responsibility For 'Baby Shark'
NORTHERN IRAQ—Driven back into hiding, ISIS no longer holds the sway it once did in the Middle East. But the terror group recently claimed responsibility for its most vicious attack yet: the "Baby Shark" series of videos that targeted unsuspecting parents of toddlers on YouTube.
In a video uploaded to Twitter, ISIS claimed to have created the Baby Shark meme and set it loose in the West in order to drive parents up a wall for years to come.
"This attack was brutal, even for ISIS," said one political analyst. "We've come to expect the usual array of terror tactics from the group—but this—this is beyond the pale. To subject American families to the extremely catchy, extremely irritating Baby Shark videos represents the worst war crime the world has seen in decades."
"Baby shark do do do do do do," he muttered. "Dang it, there I go again!”
Not everyone is convinced ISIS is behind the attack. Several prominent Democrat think tanks released statements suggesting the attack has all the hallmarks of Russian interference, designed to destabilize and divide the populace. And Christian pastors across the country are pointing toward Satan as the obvious culprit.
Emboldened by the extreme success of its video assault, the terrorist group also teased an upcoming mashup between the incredibly annoying "Baby Shark" and "Let It Go" from Frozen.
*.*
What’s the real definition of a male chauvinist pig?
A man who hates every bone in a woman’s body.
Except his.
Issue of the Times;
Dear Resistance, listen to my lived totalitarian experience – you have no effing idea what you’re talking about by Arthur Chrenkoff
In a world that the identity politics has wrought, lived experience is a trump (apologies for the use of a triggering word) card: your viewpoint or opinion on an issue is automatically deemed invalid or at least less valid and valuable if you’re not a member of a group whose plight is being discussed. Men can’t really know what it’s like to be women, white people can’t really know what it’s like to be people of colour, the straight ones can’t really know what it’s like to have other sexual orientations. Your identity is your argument; “You wouldn’t know what it’s like; you can’t tell me what I should think or feel”. You’re only allowed to walk in somebody else’s shoes to the extent you can feel the same callouses, otherwise give me my shoes back. This sort of epistemological approach rears its head nowadays in everything from most political debates to the calls that fiction authors should not write through characters of different gender, race or sexuality. Just like cultural appropriation, identity appropriation is a grave sin against minorities (or, in case of women, majorities).
As a straight, white, Christian, right-wing, middle class male of European extraction I get told to shut up a lot. As you can imagine, this does not at all stop me from speaking out. The white privilege clearly makes me both uncontrollable and insufferable.
But if lived experience is indeed the be-all-end-all that the identarian left considers it to be, there is one area where my lived experience without a doubt shit all over the lived experience of the woke folk. Unlike all those among them who have been born and/or raised in the West and have zero or almost zero experience of living under anything other than a liberal democratic government (which is 99 per cent of them at least), I have lived the first 15 years of my life under the Soviet block-style communism, or “real socialism” as the Party used to call it. I’m not going to pretend that the 1970s and the 80s in Poland were as bloody and traumatic as the Stalinist Russia, Mao’s China or Pol Pot’s Cambodia (as P J O’Rourke who visited Warsaw at that time noted, the communism for most part doesn’t kill you any more, it just bores you to death) but I do know a difference or twenty-two between a totalitarian or authoritarian society and a Western democracy.
So to all the women dressing up in costumes from “Handmaid’s Tale” who think they’re on the brink of living in a misogynist theocracy,
To all those calling themselves “The Resistance”, as if they were the French Maquis or the Polish Home Army shooting collaborators and derailing trains after their country has been brutally occupied by a totalitarian foreign power,
To those who think that America is currently in a grip of fascism and are calling on the military to stage a coup to remove the President (that’s you Rosie O’Donnell, Sarah Silverman, Congressman Steve Cohen and others),
To the celebrities and commentators, from Michael Moore to former security officials like John Brennan, who think the United States is on the brink of dictatorship,
To all those who have compared Trump to Hitler,
(And a special mention of those who really should know better – professional historians of the German and the Russian totalitarianism, like Timothy “Bloodlands” Snyder and Charles “Ordinary Men” Browning, who have been only too happy to – without quite comparing Trump to Hitler – talk about illiberal democracy, authoritarian leadership, and draw parallels between the 1930s Europe and the 2010s America),
you really have no idea, and I mean it with the greatest possible respect. Actually, I don’t. Most of you are supposedly mature, rational adults but you seem to have at best the most superficial knowledge of history and a complete lack of self-awareness, any sense of perspective, and an ability to contextualise. Having spent your lives relatively free of hardship, deprivation and persecution on any remotely comparable scale to people in other, less fortunate corners of the world, you probably get some frisson from believing yourself to be big actors at a critical time in history, the last line of separating civilisation from the descent into new dark ages. You’re free to engage in whatever ideological cosplay you want, but don’t expect others to take you seriously.
You can pick up any of the thousands of books written about life under a dictatorship and read all about it, or you can watch a doco or listen to a podcast, but clearly you couldn’t be bothered to do so thus far in your life, so I’m going to give you potted version of how a real tyranny (it does not particularly matter whether communist or fascist as they are quite similar in practice, which is of course another thing you don’t want to hear, but that’s tough – they certainly have far more in common with each other than with a free society) works and what the world in which I was growing up looked like:
There is no democracy. There is only political party (actually there were two minor and irrelevant fig leaves, which were wholly controlled by the Party and would never act in any way contrary to the Party). All other parties and political activities are banned. Elections such as they are consists of a chance to vote for the Party candidate. It doesn’t matter if you vote against them as results will be falsified to show universal support and approval. The Party controls the government, so the two terms are interchangeable; in fact the Party pretty much controls everything. There is no way for an ordinary citizen to have a political impact, except by joining the Party, and even then the range of options is completely circumscribed by the guiding ideology.
There are no freedoms and civil liberties as they are commonly understood. There is no freedom of speech. Saying anything against the Party, even a joke, can lead to an arrest if you’re overheard and/or reported to the authorities. Unless you’re particularly lucky you can end up in jail. If you’re working, you can lose your job and be forced to take a menial one if you can actually get one. If you’re studying, you can be blacklisted from further education. Or your parents can lose their job over your joke, or your children might be denied a chance to go to university. There are no legal sources of information but the ones run by the Party. Creation, possession and distribution of alternative sources of news and opinion is a criminal offence. Listening to foreign radio broadcasts is illegal. Every news or cultural or scientific product is subject to government censorship. Nothing that the Party does not like for whatever reason can get published or broadcasted. Those who have shown themselves as ideologically unreliable are blacklisted and their careers put on ice. There are approved versions of everything, from history to entertainment. Everything beyond them is illegal.
There is no freedom of assembly. Unless the Party initiates and organises it it’s illegal. It does not matter whether you are peaceful or not, you will likely get beaten up by the police, arrested and charged, with similar consequences as mentioned above. There is no such thing as independent civil society; the Party decides what organisations, clubs and associations can exist. Those that are given permission to operate need to adhere to the Party rules and support the Party each in its own way, whether you’re in the Scouts or a philatelist group. The Party and its symbols are of course ubiquitous, from public monuments to the portraits of the current leader and political slogans. Your social and professional advancement is largely determined by your cooperation with the Party. There is a ceiling on how far you can go in life without at the very least becoming a member.
There is no rule of law and no justice as we understand these concepts. The laws are those of the Party and citizens have no role in shaping them or changing them. If you are accused of any of the large number of wrongdoings and offences against the state/government/Party, the system is stacked against you at every stage of the process. The fact that you have come into contact with the “justice system” is a de facto indication that you have done something wrong, because the system makes no mistakes. Neither the law enforcement nor the judiciary are in any way independent of the Party; they are its instruments; their actions and decisions are political. It’s just you against the system.
Needless to say, there is no general prosperity and huge inequalities of wealth exist. This is because economic opportunities are largely absent for an average person. The state is virtually the only employer, certainly on the large scale. The only routes of material advancement are through the Party and the official (but unheralded) privileges it provides as well as the opportunities for graft and corruption, or through black market and other criminal activity. The system is meant to provide everyone with at least the barest of minimum living standards but very often it cannot do even that. People manage to keep their heads above water through their wits and more often than not by breaking at least some laws. Because the options are so limited, people tend not to change jobs or move around too much. Certainly, the overseas travel is rare and completely at the government’s discretion, hence most of it tends to be either official or to other non-democracies. The government regulates every aspect of life. What’s not expressly provided for is assumed to be forbidden.
All this is a relatively mild, late form of communism, not the earlier version where you could end up in a gulag because the local secret police had a quota to fill or because you once corresponded with a pen pal in another country or wore glasses indicating your intellectual status or didn’t cry sincerely enough after another Dear Leader passed on. Also, this was Poland, which was one of the most liberal of the communist countries, with a relatively independent (but much circumscribed) Catholic Church and a strong tradition of independence and rebellion. The situation was much worse in other countries, and much worse in the past.
I feel almost silly for writing all this because to me I’m stating the blindingly obvious, but clearly it’s not obvious at all for far too many people today. Think of any activity you undertake during your average day and then realise that every little thing is different, more difficult, more involved about it under a dictatorship.
Now tell me how your life today in the United States or Australia or Great Britain is at all similar to life under the state oppression. Please. Anything that even remotely compares to what I have described.
If anything, all the recent attempts to police speech and dictate the correct ways of thinking, whether on the initiative of the state or by private businesses and non-government groups, are inspired by the left, i.e. pretty much the same section of the politically-aware society which is complaining about the descending fascism. This is why I get so agitated about issues like freedom of speech; it’s not just theoretical to me – it reminds me too much of my childhood. When my family escaped to the West it was precisely to leave these things behind not to discover them under a different guise amidst the supposed liberal democracy.
So, dear Resistance, excuse me while my lived experience under the actual dictatorship leaves me cold when listening to and looking at your hysterics and public exhibitions of ignorance and ideological blindness. Your generally white, coddled, middle class progressive privilege it’s showing, and it’s not a pretty sight.
Quote of the Times;
“The hallmark of a decision in line with one’s character is ease and contentment, and an ample, even provision of natural energy.” - Truitt
Link of the Times;
https://www.collective-evolution.com/2018/11/11/florida-midterm-election-drama-the-sun-is-finally-shining-on-deep-state-darkness/
Policy?
The difference between America and England?
Americans think 100 years is a long time.
The English think 100 miles is a long ways away.
*.*
An Englishman, a Frenchman, a Spaniard and a German are all standing watching a street performer do some excellent juggling. The juggler notices that the four gentleman have a very poor view, so he stands up on a large wooden box and calls out, “Can you all see me now?”
“Yes.”
“Oui.”
“Si.”
“Ja.”
*.*
101 Great Quotes on Computers
Computers
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."
(Pablo Picasso)
"Computers are like bikinis. They save people a lot of guesswork."
(Sam Ewing)
"They have computers, and they may have other weapons of mass destruction."
(Janet Reno)
"That's what's cool about working with computers. They don't argue, they remember everything, and they don't drink all your beer."
(Paul Leary)
"If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside."
(Robert X. Cringely)
Computer Intelligence
"Computers are getting smarter all the time. Scientists tell us that soon they will be able to talk to us. (And by 'they', I mean 'computers'. I doubt scientists will ever be able to talk to us.)"
(Dave Barry)
"I've noticed lately that the paranoid fear of computers becoming intelligent and taking over the world has almost entirely disappeared from the common culture. Near as I can tell, this coincides with the release of MS-DOS."
(Larry DeLuca)
"The question of whether computers can think is like the question of whether submarines can swim."
(Edsger W. Dijkstra)
"It's ridiculous to live 100 years and only be able to remember 30 million bytes. You know, less than a compact disc. The human condition is really becoming more obsolete every minute."
(Marvin Minsky)
Trust
"The city's central computer told you? R2D2, you know better than to trust a strange computer!"
(C3PO)
"Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window."
(Steve Wozniak)
Hardware
"Hardware: The parts of a computer system that can be kicked."
(Jeff Pesis)
Software
"Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves."
(Alan Kay)
"I've finally learned what 'upward compatible' means. It means we get to keep all our old mistakes."
(Dennie van Tassel)
Operating Systems
"There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence."
(Jeremy S. Anderson)
"19 Jan 2038 at 3:14:07 AM"
(End of the word according to Unix-2^32 seconds after January 1, 1970)
"Every operating system out there is about equal. We all suck."
(Microsoft senior vice president Brian Valentine describing the state of the art in OS security, 2003)
"Microsoft has a new version out, Windows XP, which according to everybody is the 'most reliable Windows ever.' To me, this is like saying that asparagus is 'the most articulate vegetable ever.' "
(Dave Barry)
Internet
"The Internet? Is that thing still around?"
(Homer Simpson)
"The Web is like a dominatrix. Everywhere I turn, I see little buttons ordering me to Submit."
(Nytwind)
"Come to think of it, there are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is nothing like Shakespeare."
(Blair Houghton)
Software Industry
"The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry."
(Henry Petroski)
"True innovation often comes from the small startup who is lean enough to launch a market but lacks the heft to own it."
(Timm Martin)
"It has been said that the great scientific disciplines are examples of giants standing on the shoulders of other giants. It has also been said that the software industry is an example of midgets standing on the toes of other midgets."
(Alan Cooper)
"It is not about bits, bytes and protocols, but profits, losses and margins."
(Lou Gerstner)
"We are Microsoft. Resistance Is Futile. You Will Be Assimilated."
(Bumper sticker)
Software Demos
"No matter how slick the demo is in rehearsal, when you do it in front of a live audience, the probability of a flawless presentation is inversely proportional to the number of people watching, raised to the power of the amount of money involved."
(Mark Gibbs)
Software Patents
"The bulk of all patents are crap. Spending time reading them is stupid.
It's up to the patent owner to do so, and to enforce them."
(Linus Torvalds)
Complexity
"Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming."
(Brian Kernigan)
"Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build and test, it introduces security challenges, and it causes end-user and administrator frustration."
(Ray Ozzie)
"There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies."
(C.A.R. Hoare)
"The function of good software is to make the complex appear to be simple."
(Grady Booch)
Ease of Use
"Just remember: you're not a 'dummy,' no matter what those computer books claim. The real dummies are the people who-though technically expert-couldn 't design hardware and software that's usable by normal consumers if their lives depended upon it."
(Walter Mossberg)
"Software suppliers are trying to make their software packages more 'user-friendly'. Their best approach so far has been to take all the old brochures and stamp the words 'user-friendly' on the cover."
(Bill Gates)
"There's an old story about the person who wished his computer were as easy to use as his telephone. That wish has come true, since I no longer know how to use my telephone."
(Bjarne Stroustrup)
Users
"Any fool can use a computer. Many do."
(Ted Nelson)
"There are only two industries that refer to their customers as 'users'."
(Edward Tufte)
Programmers
"Programmers are in a race with the Universe to create bigger and better idiot-proof programs, while the Universe is trying to create bigger and better idiots. So far the Universe is winning."
(Rich Cook)
"Most of you are familiar with the virtues of a programmer. There are three, of course: laziness, impatience, and hubris."
(Larry Wall)
"The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it's too late."
(Seymour Cray)
"That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers."
(Larry Niven)
"For a long time it puzzled me how something so expensive, so leading edge, could be so useless. And then it occurred to me that a computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things. They are, in short, a perfect match."
(Bill Bryson)
"Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter."
(Eric Raymond)
"A programmer is a person who passes as an exacting expert on the basis of being able to turn out, after innumerable punching, an infinite series of incomprehensive answers calculated with micrometric precisions from vague assumptions based on debatable figures taken from inconclusive documents and carried out on instruments of problematical accuracy by persons of dubious reliability and questionable mentality for the avowed purpose of annoying and confounding a hopelessly defenseless department that was unfortunate enough to ask for the information in the first place."
(IEEE Grid newsmagazine)
"A hacker on a roll may be able to produce-in a period of a few months-something that a small development group (say, 7-8 people) would have a hard time getting together over a year. IBM used to report that certain programmers might be as much as 100 times as productive as other workers, or more."
(Peter Seebach)
"The best programmers are not marginally better than merely good ones. They are an order-of-magnitude better, measured by whatever standard: conceptual creativity, speed, ingenuity of design, or problem-solving ability."
(Randall E. Stross)
"A great lathe operator commands several times the wage of an average lathe operator, but a great writer of software code is worth 10,000 times the price of an average software writer."
(Bill Gates)
Programming
"Don't worry if it doesn't work right. If everything did, you'd be out of a job."
(Mosher's Law of Software Engineering)
"Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight."
(Bill Gates)
"Writing code has a place in the human hierarchy worth somewhere above grave robbing and beneath managing."
(Gerald Weinberg)
"First learn computer science and all the theory. Next develop a programming style. Then forget all that and just hack."
(George Carrette)
"First, solve the problem. Then, write the code."
(John Johnson)
"Optimism is an occupational hazard of programming; feedback is the treatment."
(Kent Beck)
"To iterate is human, to recurse divine."
(L. Peter Deutsch)
"The best thing about a boolean is even if you are wrong, you are only off by a bit."
(Anonymous)
"Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration."
(Stan Kelly-Bootle)
Programming Languages
"There are only two kinds of programming languages: those people always bitch about and those nobody uses."
(Bjarne Stroustrup)
"PHP is a minor evil perpetrated and created by incompetent amateurs, whereas Perl is a great and insidious evil perpetrated by skilled but perverted professionals."
(Jon Ribbens)
"The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should therefore be regarded as a criminal offense."
(E.W. Dijkstra)
"It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC. As potential programmers, they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
(E. W. Dijkstra)
"I think Microsoft named .Net so it wouldn't show up in a Unix directory listing."
(Oktal)
"There is no programming language-no matter how structured-that will prevent programmers from making bad programs."
(Larry Flon)
"Computer language design is just like a stroll in the park. Jurassic Park, that is."
(Larry Wall)
C/C++
"Fifty years of programming language research, and we end up with C++?"
(Richard A. O'Keefe)
"Writing in C or C++ is like running a chain saw with all the safety guards removed."
(Bob Gray)
"In C++ it's harder to shoot yourself in the foot, but when you do, you blow off your whole leg."
(Bjarne Stroustrup)
"C++ : Where friends have access to your private members."
(Gavin Russell Baker)
"One of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that-lacking zero-they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs."
(Robert Firth)
Java
"Java is, in many ways, C++-."
(Michael Feldman)
"Saying that Java is nice because it works on all OSes is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders."
(Alanna)
"Fine, Java MIGHT be a good example of what a programming language should be like. But Java applications are good examples of what applications SHOULDN'
T be like."
(pixadel)
"If Java had true garbage collection, most programs would delete themselves upon execution."
(Robert Sewell)
Open Source
"Software is like sex: It's better when it's free."
(Linus Torvalds)
"The only people who have anything to fear from free software are those whose products are worth even less."
(David Emery)
Code
"Good code is its own best documentation."
(Steve McConnell)
"Any code of your own that you haven't looked at for six or more months might as well have been written by someone else."
(Eagleson's Law)
"The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time."
(Tom Cargill)
Software Development
"Good programmers use their brains, but good guidelines save us having to think out every case."
(Francis Glassborow)
"In software, we rarely have meaningful requirements. Even if we do, the only measure of success that matters is whether our solution solves the customer's shifting idea of what their problem is."
(Jeff Atwood)
"Considering the current sad state of our computer programs, software development is clearly still a black art, and cannot yet be called an engineering discipline."
(Bill Clinton)
"You can't have great software without a great team, and most software teams behave like dysfunctional families."
(Jim McCarthy)
Debugging
"As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs."
(Maurice Wilkes discovers debugging, 1949)
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are-by definition-not smart enough to debug it."
(Brian Kernighan)
"If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in."
(Edsger W. Dijkstra)
Quality
"I don't care if it works on your machine! We are not shipping your machine!"
(Vidiu Platon)
"Programming is like sex: one mistake and you're providing support for a lifetime."
(Michael Sinz)
"There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works."
(Alan J. Perlis)
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
(Bertrand Meyer)
"If McDonalds were run like a software company, one out of every hundred Big Macs would give you food poisoning, and the response would be, 'We're sorry, here's a coupon for two more.' "
(Mark Minasi)
"Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live."
(Martin Golding)
"To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer."
(Paul Ehrlich)
"A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history-with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila."
(Mitch Radcliffe)
Predictions
"Everything that can be invented has been invented."
(Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899)
"I think there's a world market for about 5 computers."
(Thomas J. Watson, Chairman of the Board, IBM, circa 1948)
"It would appear that we have reached the limits of what it is possible to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in 5 years."
(John Von Neumann, circa 1949)
"But what is it good for?"
(Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, commenting on the microchip, 1968)
"There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home."
(Ken Olson, President, Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977)
"640K ought to be enough for anybody."
(Bill Gates, 1981)
"Windows NT addresses 2 Gigabytes of RAM, which is more than any application will ever need."
(Microsoft, on the development of Windows NT, 1992)
"We will never become a truly paper-less society until the Palm Pilot folks come out with WipeMe 1.0."
(Andy Pierson)
"If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger."
(Frank Lloyd Wright)
*.*
My uncle represented this guy getting a divorce from his wife of 15 years. Super toxic breakup and they split everything 50/50, even the land that the house they lived in sat upon. Well she decides to build a house right behind the other house, mind you this was a lot of land probably 200 yards separating both home sites, so that the back of the houses faced each other. The house gets built and my uncle gets a call from his client asking about the legality of a situation he had gotten himself into. Apparently his ex wife would spend a lot of time in her backyard, so he saw her all the time. What he did was buy a female dog and name it the same name as his ex-wife. Anytime he would let his dog back in from letting her out he would yell “Susan you bitch! Get in here!” He would also yell if she was peeing on the flowers,”Susan you bitch! Quit pissing on the flowers!” or “Susan you bitch! Quit digging in the dirt!” The ex-wife called the cops on him a couple of times, but there was nothing they could do because the dog was registered under the name of Susan, and it was in fact a bitch so there you go.
*.*
As I slipped my finger slowly inside her hole, I could immediately feel it getting wetter and wetter.
I took my finger back out and within seconds she was going down on me.
I thought to myself; "I really need a new fucking boat."
Issue of the Times;
Trump’s Foreign Policy Is Coming into Focus by Conrad Black
Gradually, almost imperceptibly, the outline of a coherent Trump foreign policy is emerging and succeeding. The elements were to withdraw from the role as the default war-maker in the Middle East without creating a vacuum, render Russia less adversarial without facing it down into the arms of the Chinese, and revitalize the Western Alliance to a plausible notion of multilateral contributions and not just an American military guarantee for everyone, ex gratia and pro bono.
At the same time, there would be unrestricted war on terrorist organizations, a revival of nuclear non-proliferation by direct and overbearing threats to North Korea and Iran, and the reconstruction of America’s status as the world’s preeminent economy by tax reductions, deregulation, renegotiation of trade treaties, and encouragement of energy self-sufficiency.
There have been some unfortunate moments from a presentational standpoint, but it is a good plan and it is working.
Changing the Game in the Mideast
Turkey had attempted to masquerade as the patron of the Arabs and was sent packing in remembrance of the Arabs’ 500 years of involuntary enjoyment of Turkish occupation, and after a regional musical chairs game with ancient rivals Iran and Russia, all pretending a common cause in Syria. Turkey was left standing when the music stopped and largely has reconciled with the United States. The two countries will operate joint patrols to keep the Kurds from aggravating Kurdish discontent within Anatolia (Turkish Asia Minor).
Turkish President Erdogan is a distasteful and inconstant ally, but more manageable than the Russian leader Putin, and a Lincolnian statesman compared to the Iranian ayatollahs. The Trump Administration is not prepared to accept permanent involvement of U.S. ground forces in the Middle East. But neither will it accept the creation of vacuums there which foment terrorism, as after Obama’s petulant and abrupt departure from Iraq. This led to the swift rise of ISIS, the disintegration of Shiite Iraq, and thrust 60 percent of the country’s population into dependency on Iran. The entire American effort there: two invasions under the Bushes and Obama’s wind-down, handed Iran the greatest accretion of its influence since the height of the Parthian Empire nearly 2,000 years ago.
Now, making a partial virtue of the failings of the previous two administrations, the crumbling of Iraq and Syria, formerly two of Israel’s most fanatical enemies, strengthens Israeli security, and the encroachments of the Arabs’ ancient enemies and oppressors, the Turks and Iranians, bring Egypt and Saudi Arabia into quasi-alliance with Israel. ISIS and al-Qaeda effectively have been smashed, the United States doesn’t care if Russia has a naval base on the Mediterranean (since Russia could not challenge the U.S. Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean without bankrupting itself). The Russians protect Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his Alawite faction, and the Turks and Americans protect the secular adversaries of Assad and keep the Kurds out of Turkey, protecting Kurdistan from the Turks.
Obviously, the war in Yemen has to end without an Iranian victory and the pressure on Iran must be maintained until this dismal theocracy in Teheran either repents of its ambition for an arc of influence, or collapses from internal anger at its comprehensive corruption and failure.
The Arab powers have greater concerns than continuing to try to distract the Arab masses from the misgovernment inflicted on them with the red herring of Israel, and no one cares a jot about the Palestinians, as the inexcusably delayed movement of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem demonstrated. The bedraggled and discredited PLO leader, Mahmoud Abbas, should soon make a deal which implicitly includes the Egyptians uprooting Hamas in Gaza with America’s and the world’s blessing. Palestine will have to accept a narrower West Bank and a deeper Gaza strip in compensation, with a secure road between them. It will settle down as another dusty, but industrious little country, and the last piece of the puzzle will be Hezbollah—one peep from it and all the neighboring forces will be pleased to dispatch it.
Given the importance of the factors in play, the Trump Administration cannot allow the fracas over purported “journalist” Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi citizen and member of the Muslim Brotherhood, to derail progress in the Middle East. His murder is one of the stupidest and most barbarous acts in the unenlightened history of the House of Saud, and has been hyped to the rafters by the Democrats and their media ciphers, but will be talked out effectively by Trump and Secretary of State Pompeo. It was a disgusting crime, but these are frequent in the Middle East and no significant part of the world’s future can be mortgaged to the victim.
Khashoggi was no great friend of America, despite the mournful caterwauling of the increasingly desperate Democrats, and some well-meaning Republican dupes (like Senator Lindsey Graham, who padded around the Middle East 15 years ago with John McCain demanding fair treatment of the Muslim Brotherhood).
Upending Popular Wisdom on Russia and China
The fixation of the Democrats, and of some gullible Republicans such as Marco Rubio, on the Russians, and the unutterable but now scarcely audible nonsense about collusion between the Russian government and the Trump campaign in 2016, has caused many Americans to forget the strategic correlation of forces in the world. But the president and his close advisors have realized that Russia could only be dangerous if it were so coldly rebuffed before the whole world that it were driven into the arms of China.
Despite the passing hubbub about his comments in Helsinki (which essentially meant that Trump had more confidence in the assertions of Russian intelligence than in the partisan fabrications of former U.S. intelligence chiefs John Brennan and James Clapper, with some reason), the president has succeeded in shifting America’s attention to the fact that China is its only rival for strategic preeminence in the world.
Trump has struck up and retained a cordial personal relationship with Chinese President Xi Jinping, but has steadily moved to break down China’s trade surplus with the United States, encouraged China’s neighbors to join hands in resisting Chinese hegemony in the Far East, and used the preeminence of the United States Navy to assure that the Chinese effort to convert the South China Sea into Chinese territorial waters does not succeed.
The fretful assertions that China would surpass the United States as a power, economically and otherwise, in the next 20 years, have died away, as did the claims that Japan would surpass America as an economic power and the USSR as a military power. Now, it is even acknowledged by popular wisdom, Trump-haters, and the somewhat broader and more international category of anti-Americans, (though many of them are Americans), that prejudging the outcome of that contest is unwise.
As he opened relations with China and triangulated the super power rivalry with the Soviet Union in 1972, Richard Nixon said that the world’s five great centers of strategic strength (in terms of population, industry and technology) were the United States, USSR, Western Europe, Japan, and China. Now the Russians are itinerant international troublemakers, inelegantly and inconsistently trying to replicate the feat of Charles de Gaulle in reminding the world of the importance of France, but they are a crumbling custodian of vast geopolitical possibilities, awaiting the development of mature and efficient political institutions. Europe is a cocoon for the containment of Germany, paying Danegeld, for notorious historical reasons, to the working and agrarian classes, but only the British and French retain the remotest concept of how Great Powers conduct themselves. Japan is almost as reticent, but stirred to greater activity than the Europeans by their proximity to China.
Trump and Xi understand that they are the rivals, and there is no real military issue; it is economic predominance and the prestige of the nations. The Americans retain the advantage-the world’s greatest democracy and promoter of democracy. China has no institutions of any public trust except, up to a point, the armed forces. The United States, as in the times of James Monroe and John Quincy Adams, is unchallenged in its hemisphere. Western Europe is slumbering quiescently and is, to an adequate extent, an American ally, and palsied Russia is waiting to begin the primordial task of trying to devise political institutions that will serve its legitimate aspirations. Japan seeks American assistance as a bulwark against resurgent China. This is a constellation that President Trump is steadily strengthening, and it is one that, with continued management, cannot fail to win, and will not try to bar China from being the first of the world’s great nations to regenerate itself. In this process, though not in some of its more jingoistic manifestations, China should not be discouraged.
No one would call Donald Trump a sophisticated geopolitician, (including Donald Trump). But in practice, he is. He is not a historian, but he is a realistic analyst of the present and is building a fine future for his country. Americans sense this, and will respond to it.
Quote of the Times;
“Only a few prefer liberty; the majority seek nothing more than fair masters." – Sallust
Link of the Times;
https://fleporeblog.wordpress.com/
Americans think 100 years is a long time.
The English think 100 miles is a long ways away.
*.*
An Englishman, a Frenchman, a Spaniard and a German are all standing watching a street performer do some excellent juggling. The juggler notices that the four gentleman have a very poor view, so he stands up on a large wooden box and calls out, “Can you all see me now?”
“Yes.”
“Oui.”
“Si.”
“Ja.”
*.*
101 Great Quotes on Computers
Computers
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."
(Pablo Picasso)
"Computers are like bikinis. They save people a lot of guesswork."
(Sam Ewing)
"They have computers, and they may have other weapons of mass destruction."
(Janet Reno)
"That's what's cool about working with computers. They don't argue, they remember everything, and they don't drink all your beer."
(Paul Leary)
"If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside."
(Robert X. Cringely)
Computer Intelligence
"Computers are getting smarter all the time. Scientists tell us that soon they will be able to talk to us. (And by 'they', I mean 'computers'. I doubt scientists will ever be able to talk to us.)"
(Dave Barry)
"I've noticed lately that the paranoid fear of computers becoming intelligent and taking over the world has almost entirely disappeared from the common culture. Near as I can tell, this coincides with the release of MS-DOS."
(Larry DeLuca)
"The question of whether computers can think is like the question of whether submarines can swim."
(Edsger W. Dijkstra)
"It's ridiculous to live 100 years and only be able to remember 30 million bytes. You know, less than a compact disc. The human condition is really becoming more obsolete every minute."
(Marvin Minsky)
Trust
"The city's central computer told you? R2D2, you know better than to trust a strange computer!"
(C3PO)
"Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window."
(Steve Wozniak)
Hardware
"Hardware: The parts of a computer system that can be kicked."
(Jeff Pesis)
Software
"Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves."
(Alan Kay)
"I've finally learned what 'upward compatible' means. It means we get to keep all our old mistakes."
(Dennie van Tassel)
Operating Systems
"There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence."
(Jeremy S. Anderson)
"19 Jan 2038 at 3:14:07 AM"
(End of the word according to Unix-2^32 seconds after January 1, 1970)
"Every operating system out there is about equal. We all suck."
(Microsoft senior vice president Brian Valentine describing the state of the art in OS security, 2003)
"Microsoft has a new version out, Windows XP, which according to everybody is the 'most reliable Windows ever.' To me, this is like saying that asparagus is 'the most articulate vegetable ever.' "
(Dave Barry)
Internet
"The Internet? Is that thing still around?"
(Homer Simpson)
"The Web is like a dominatrix. Everywhere I turn, I see little buttons ordering me to Submit."
(Nytwind)
"Come to think of it, there are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is nothing like Shakespeare."
(Blair Houghton)
Software Industry
"The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry."
(Henry Petroski)
"True innovation often comes from the small startup who is lean enough to launch a market but lacks the heft to own it."
(Timm Martin)
"It has been said that the great scientific disciplines are examples of giants standing on the shoulders of other giants. It has also been said that the software industry is an example of midgets standing on the toes of other midgets."
(Alan Cooper)
"It is not about bits, bytes and protocols, but profits, losses and margins."
(Lou Gerstner)
"We are Microsoft. Resistance Is Futile. You Will Be Assimilated."
(Bumper sticker)
Software Demos
"No matter how slick the demo is in rehearsal, when you do it in front of a live audience, the probability of a flawless presentation is inversely proportional to the number of people watching, raised to the power of the amount of money involved."
(Mark Gibbs)
Software Patents
"The bulk of all patents are crap. Spending time reading them is stupid.
It's up to the patent owner to do so, and to enforce them."
(Linus Torvalds)
Complexity
"Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming."
(Brian Kernigan)
"Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build and test, it introduces security challenges, and it causes end-user and administrator frustration."
(Ray Ozzie)
"There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies."
(C.A.R. Hoare)
"The function of good software is to make the complex appear to be simple."
(Grady Booch)
Ease of Use
"Just remember: you're not a 'dummy,' no matter what those computer books claim. The real dummies are the people who-though technically expert-couldn 't design hardware and software that's usable by normal consumers if their lives depended upon it."
(Walter Mossberg)
"Software suppliers are trying to make their software packages more 'user-friendly'. Their best approach so far has been to take all the old brochures and stamp the words 'user-friendly' on the cover."
(Bill Gates)
"There's an old story about the person who wished his computer were as easy to use as his telephone. That wish has come true, since I no longer know how to use my telephone."
(Bjarne Stroustrup)
Users
"Any fool can use a computer. Many do."
(Ted Nelson)
"There are only two industries that refer to their customers as 'users'."
(Edward Tufte)
Programmers
"Programmers are in a race with the Universe to create bigger and better idiot-proof programs, while the Universe is trying to create bigger and better idiots. So far the Universe is winning."
(Rich Cook)
"Most of you are familiar with the virtues of a programmer. There are three, of course: laziness, impatience, and hubris."
(Larry Wall)
"The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it's too late."
(Seymour Cray)
"That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers."
(Larry Niven)
"For a long time it puzzled me how something so expensive, so leading edge, could be so useless. And then it occurred to me that a computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things. They are, in short, a perfect match."
(Bill Bryson)
"Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter."
(Eric Raymond)
"A programmer is a person who passes as an exacting expert on the basis of being able to turn out, after innumerable punching, an infinite series of incomprehensive answers calculated with micrometric precisions from vague assumptions based on debatable figures taken from inconclusive documents and carried out on instruments of problematical accuracy by persons of dubious reliability and questionable mentality for the avowed purpose of annoying and confounding a hopelessly defenseless department that was unfortunate enough to ask for the information in the first place."
(IEEE Grid newsmagazine)
"A hacker on a roll may be able to produce-in a period of a few months-something that a small development group (say, 7-8 people) would have a hard time getting together over a year. IBM used to report that certain programmers might be as much as 100 times as productive as other workers, or more."
(Peter Seebach)
"The best programmers are not marginally better than merely good ones. They are an order-of-magnitude better, measured by whatever standard: conceptual creativity, speed, ingenuity of design, or problem-solving ability."
(Randall E. Stross)
"A great lathe operator commands several times the wage of an average lathe operator, but a great writer of software code is worth 10,000 times the price of an average software writer."
(Bill Gates)
Programming
"Don't worry if it doesn't work right. If everything did, you'd be out of a job."
(Mosher's Law of Software Engineering)
"Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight."
(Bill Gates)
"Writing code has a place in the human hierarchy worth somewhere above grave robbing and beneath managing."
(Gerald Weinberg)
"First learn computer science and all the theory. Next develop a programming style. Then forget all that and just hack."
(George Carrette)
"First, solve the problem. Then, write the code."
(John Johnson)
"Optimism is an occupational hazard of programming; feedback is the treatment."
(Kent Beck)
"To iterate is human, to recurse divine."
(L. Peter Deutsch)
"The best thing about a boolean is even if you are wrong, you are only off by a bit."
(Anonymous)
"Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration."
(Stan Kelly-Bootle)
Programming Languages
"There are only two kinds of programming languages: those people always bitch about and those nobody uses."
(Bjarne Stroustrup)
"PHP is a minor evil perpetrated and created by incompetent amateurs, whereas Perl is a great and insidious evil perpetrated by skilled but perverted professionals."
(Jon Ribbens)
"The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should therefore be regarded as a criminal offense."
(E.W. Dijkstra)
"It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC. As potential programmers, they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
(E. W. Dijkstra)
"I think Microsoft named .Net so it wouldn't show up in a Unix directory listing."
(Oktal)
"There is no programming language-no matter how structured-that will prevent programmers from making bad programs."
(Larry Flon)
"Computer language design is just like a stroll in the park. Jurassic Park, that is."
(Larry Wall)
C/C++
"Fifty years of programming language research, and we end up with C++?"
(Richard A. O'Keefe)
"Writing in C or C++ is like running a chain saw with all the safety guards removed."
(Bob Gray)
"In C++ it's harder to shoot yourself in the foot, but when you do, you blow off your whole leg."
(Bjarne Stroustrup)
"C++ : Where friends have access to your private members."
(Gavin Russell Baker)
"One of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that-lacking zero-they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs."
(Robert Firth)
Java
"Java is, in many ways, C++-."
(Michael Feldman)
"Saying that Java is nice because it works on all OSes is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders."
(Alanna)
"Fine, Java MIGHT be a good example of what a programming language should be like. But Java applications are good examples of what applications SHOULDN'
T be like."
(pixadel)
"If Java had true garbage collection, most programs would delete themselves upon execution."
(Robert Sewell)
Open Source
"Software is like sex: It's better when it's free."
(Linus Torvalds)
"The only people who have anything to fear from free software are those whose products are worth even less."
(David Emery)
Code
"Good code is its own best documentation."
(Steve McConnell)
"Any code of your own that you haven't looked at for six or more months might as well have been written by someone else."
(Eagleson's Law)
"The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time."
(Tom Cargill)
Software Development
"Good programmers use their brains, but good guidelines save us having to think out every case."
(Francis Glassborow)
"In software, we rarely have meaningful requirements. Even if we do, the only measure of success that matters is whether our solution solves the customer's shifting idea of what their problem is."
(Jeff Atwood)
"Considering the current sad state of our computer programs, software development is clearly still a black art, and cannot yet be called an engineering discipline."
(Bill Clinton)
"You can't have great software without a great team, and most software teams behave like dysfunctional families."
(Jim McCarthy)
Debugging
"As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs."
(Maurice Wilkes discovers debugging, 1949)
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are-by definition-not smart enough to debug it."
(Brian Kernighan)
"If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in."
(Edsger W. Dijkstra)
Quality
"I don't care if it works on your machine! We are not shipping your machine!"
(Vidiu Platon)
"Programming is like sex: one mistake and you're providing support for a lifetime."
(Michael Sinz)
"There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works."
(Alan J. Perlis)
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
(Bertrand Meyer)
"If McDonalds were run like a software company, one out of every hundred Big Macs would give you food poisoning, and the response would be, 'We're sorry, here's a coupon for two more.' "
(Mark Minasi)
"Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live."
(Martin Golding)
"To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer."
(Paul Ehrlich)
"A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history-with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila."
(Mitch Radcliffe)
Predictions
"Everything that can be invented has been invented."
(Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899)
"I think there's a world market for about 5 computers."
(Thomas J. Watson, Chairman of the Board, IBM, circa 1948)
"It would appear that we have reached the limits of what it is possible to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in 5 years."
(John Von Neumann, circa 1949)
"But what is it good for?"
(Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, commenting on the microchip, 1968)
"There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home."
(Ken Olson, President, Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977)
"640K ought to be enough for anybody."
(Bill Gates, 1981)
"Windows NT addresses 2 Gigabytes of RAM, which is more than any application will ever need."
(Microsoft, on the development of Windows NT, 1992)
"We will never become a truly paper-less society until the Palm Pilot folks come out with WipeMe 1.0."
(Andy Pierson)
"If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger."
(Frank Lloyd Wright)
*.*
My uncle represented this guy getting a divorce from his wife of 15 years. Super toxic breakup and they split everything 50/50, even the land that the house they lived in sat upon. Well she decides to build a house right behind the other house, mind you this was a lot of land probably 200 yards separating both home sites, so that the back of the houses faced each other. The house gets built and my uncle gets a call from his client asking about the legality of a situation he had gotten himself into. Apparently his ex wife would spend a lot of time in her backyard, so he saw her all the time. What he did was buy a female dog and name it the same name as his ex-wife. Anytime he would let his dog back in from letting her out he would yell “Susan you bitch! Get in here!” He would also yell if she was peeing on the flowers,”Susan you bitch! Quit pissing on the flowers!” or “Susan you bitch! Quit digging in the dirt!” The ex-wife called the cops on him a couple of times, but there was nothing they could do because the dog was registered under the name of Susan, and it was in fact a bitch so there you go.
*.*
As I slipped my finger slowly inside her hole, I could immediately feel it getting wetter and wetter.
I took my finger back out and within seconds she was going down on me.
I thought to myself; "I really need a new fucking boat."
Issue of the Times;
Trump’s Foreign Policy Is Coming into Focus by Conrad Black
Gradually, almost imperceptibly, the outline of a coherent Trump foreign policy is emerging and succeeding. The elements were to withdraw from the role as the default war-maker in the Middle East without creating a vacuum, render Russia less adversarial without facing it down into the arms of the Chinese, and revitalize the Western Alliance to a plausible notion of multilateral contributions and not just an American military guarantee for everyone, ex gratia and pro bono.
At the same time, there would be unrestricted war on terrorist organizations, a revival of nuclear non-proliferation by direct and overbearing threats to North Korea and Iran, and the reconstruction of America’s status as the world’s preeminent economy by tax reductions, deregulation, renegotiation of trade treaties, and encouragement of energy self-sufficiency.
There have been some unfortunate moments from a presentational standpoint, but it is a good plan and it is working.
Changing the Game in the Mideast
Turkey had attempted to masquerade as the patron of the Arabs and was sent packing in remembrance of the Arabs’ 500 years of involuntary enjoyment of Turkish occupation, and after a regional musical chairs game with ancient rivals Iran and Russia, all pretending a common cause in Syria. Turkey was left standing when the music stopped and largely has reconciled with the United States. The two countries will operate joint patrols to keep the Kurds from aggravating Kurdish discontent within Anatolia (Turkish Asia Minor).
Turkish President Erdogan is a distasteful and inconstant ally, but more manageable than the Russian leader Putin, and a Lincolnian statesman compared to the Iranian ayatollahs. The Trump Administration is not prepared to accept permanent involvement of U.S. ground forces in the Middle East. But neither will it accept the creation of vacuums there which foment terrorism, as after Obama’s petulant and abrupt departure from Iraq. This led to the swift rise of ISIS, the disintegration of Shiite Iraq, and thrust 60 percent of the country’s population into dependency on Iran. The entire American effort there: two invasions under the Bushes and Obama’s wind-down, handed Iran the greatest accretion of its influence since the height of the Parthian Empire nearly 2,000 years ago.
Now, making a partial virtue of the failings of the previous two administrations, the crumbling of Iraq and Syria, formerly two of Israel’s most fanatical enemies, strengthens Israeli security, and the encroachments of the Arabs’ ancient enemies and oppressors, the Turks and Iranians, bring Egypt and Saudi Arabia into quasi-alliance with Israel. ISIS and al-Qaeda effectively have been smashed, the United States doesn’t care if Russia has a naval base on the Mediterranean (since Russia could not challenge the U.S. Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean without bankrupting itself). The Russians protect Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his Alawite faction, and the Turks and Americans protect the secular adversaries of Assad and keep the Kurds out of Turkey, protecting Kurdistan from the Turks.
Obviously, the war in Yemen has to end without an Iranian victory and the pressure on Iran must be maintained until this dismal theocracy in Teheran either repents of its ambition for an arc of influence, or collapses from internal anger at its comprehensive corruption and failure.
The Arab powers have greater concerns than continuing to try to distract the Arab masses from the misgovernment inflicted on them with the red herring of Israel, and no one cares a jot about the Palestinians, as the inexcusably delayed movement of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem demonstrated. The bedraggled and discredited PLO leader, Mahmoud Abbas, should soon make a deal which implicitly includes the Egyptians uprooting Hamas in Gaza with America’s and the world’s blessing. Palestine will have to accept a narrower West Bank and a deeper Gaza strip in compensation, with a secure road between them. It will settle down as another dusty, but industrious little country, and the last piece of the puzzle will be Hezbollah—one peep from it and all the neighboring forces will be pleased to dispatch it.
Given the importance of the factors in play, the Trump Administration cannot allow the fracas over purported “journalist” Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi citizen and member of the Muslim Brotherhood, to derail progress in the Middle East. His murder is one of the stupidest and most barbarous acts in the unenlightened history of the House of Saud, and has been hyped to the rafters by the Democrats and their media ciphers, but will be talked out effectively by Trump and Secretary of State Pompeo. It was a disgusting crime, but these are frequent in the Middle East and no significant part of the world’s future can be mortgaged to the victim.
Khashoggi was no great friend of America, despite the mournful caterwauling of the increasingly desperate Democrats, and some well-meaning Republican dupes (like Senator Lindsey Graham, who padded around the Middle East 15 years ago with John McCain demanding fair treatment of the Muslim Brotherhood).
Upending Popular Wisdom on Russia and China
The fixation of the Democrats, and of some gullible Republicans such as Marco Rubio, on the Russians, and the unutterable but now scarcely audible nonsense about collusion between the Russian government and the Trump campaign in 2016, has caused many Americans to forget the strategic correlation of forces in the world. But the president and his close advisors have realized that Russia could only be dangerous if it were so coldly rebuffed before the whole world that it were driven into the arms of China.
Despite the passing hubbub about his comments in Helsinki (which essentially meant that Trump had more confidence in the assertions of Russian intelligence than in the partisan fabrications of former U.S. intelligence chiefs John Brennan and James Clapper, with some reason), the president has succeeded in shifting America’s attention to the fact that China is its only rival for strategic preeminence in the world.
Trump has struck up and retained a cordial personal relationship with Chinese President Xi Jinping, but has steadily moved to break down China’s trade surplus with the United States, encouraged China’s neighbors to join hands in resisting Chinese hegemony in the Far East, and used the preeminence of the United States Navy to assure that the Chinese effort to convert the South China Sea into Chinese territorial waters does not succeed.
The fretful assertions that China would surpass the United States as a power, economically and otherwise, in the next 20 years, have died away, as did the claims that Japan would surpass America as an economic power and the USSR as a military power. Now, it is even acknowledged by popular wisdom, Trump-haters, and the somewhat broader and more international category of anti-Americans, (though many of them are Americans), that prejudging the outcome of that contest is unwise.
As he opened relations with China and triangulated the super power rivalry with the Soviet Union in 1972, Richard Nixon said that the world’s five great centers of strategic strength (in terms of population, industry and technology) were the United States, USSR, Western Europe, Japan, and China. Now the Russians are itinerant international troublemakers, inelegantly and inconsistently trying to replicate the feat of Charles de Gaulle in reminding the world of the importance of France, but they are a crumbling custodian of vast geopolitical possibilities, awaiting the development of mature and efficient political institutions. Europe is a cocoon for the containment of Germany, paying Danegeld, for notorious historical reasons, to the working and agrarian classes, but only the British and French retain the remotest concept of how Great Powers conduct themselves. Japan is almost as reticent, but stirred to greater activity than the Europeans by their proximity to China.
Trump and Xi understand that they are the rivals, and there is no real military issue; it is economic predominance and the prestige of the nations. The Americans retain the advantage-the world’s greatest democracy and promoter of democracy. China has no institutions of any public trust except, up to a point, the armed forces. The United States, as in the times of James Monroe and John Quincy Adams, is unchallenged in its hemisphere. Western Europe is slumbering quiescently and is, to an adequate extent, an American ally, and palsied Russia is waiting to begin the primordial task of trying to devise political institutions that will serve its legitimate aspirations. Japan seeks American assistance as a bulwark against resurgent China. This is a constellation that President Trump is steadily strengthening, and it is one that, with continued management, cannot fail to win, and will not try to bar China from being the first of the world’s great nations to regenerate itself. In this process, though not in some of its more jingoistic manifestations, China should not be discouraged.
No one would call Donald Trump a sophisticated geopolitician, (including Donald Trump). But in practice, he is. He is not a historian, but he is a realistic analyst of the present and is building a fine future for his country. Americans sense this, and will respond to it.
Quote of the Times;
“Only a few prefer liberty; the majority seek nothing more than fair masters." – Sallust
Link of the Times;
https://fleporeblog.wordpress.com/
Babies?
What did the pig say on a hot summer day?
I’m bacon!
*.*
I got my mate an Elephant for his living room
He said "Thanks".
I said "don't mention it".
*.*
Why do girls like softball?
It's the only sport played on a diamond.
*.*
Navy SEALs no longer allowed to wear blackface
FORT BRAGG, N.C. — Special operators will no longer be allowed to wear black face paint after biting criticism from activist groups, sources confirmed today.
The move is aimed to stop the controversial practice of channeling one’s inner black dude before infiltrating a compound.
“We are not 100 percent woke, but this is a big step,” said Lt. Gen. Scott Howell, the current nominee to head Joint Special Operations Command. “We must stop perpetuating the stereotype that all black people are good at tactical operations.”
Recent studies show “blending in with the dark of night” to be a racist artifact of the past. SEALs will now be required to use inclusive rainbow patterns and biodegradable glitter.
“I never felt like I was being racist,” said Petty Officer 1st Class James Largo, “but I understand how cultural biases can find concealment in the covert corners of your mind.”
The changes, which go into effect next month, have support of allies and critics alike. Even hostile countries like Syria and Somalia are excited for the progressive step forward.
*.*
Remember!
The temptation to sing 'The Lion Sleeps Tonight' is always just a whim away a whim away a whim away a whim away.
Issue of the Times;
The True History of Millstone Babies by Ann Coulter
Having mastered fake news, now the media are trying out a little fake history.
In the news business, new topics are always popping up, from the Logan Act and the emoluments clause to North Korea. The all-star panels rush to Wikipedia, so they can pretend to be experts on things they knew nothing about an hour earlier.
Such is the case today with “anchor babies” and “birthright citizenship.” People who know zilch about the history of the 14th Amendment are pontificating magnificently and completely falsely on the issue du jour.
If you’d like to be the smartest person at your next cocktail party by knowing the truth about the 14th Amendment, this is the column for you!
Of course the president can end the citizenship of “anchor babies” by executive order — for the simple reason that no Supreme Court or U.S. Congress has ever conferred such a right.
It’s just something everyone believes to be true.
How could anyone — even a not-very-bright person — imagine that granting citizenship to the children of illegal aliens is actually in our Constitution?
The first question would be: Why would they do that? It’s like being accused of robbing a homeless person. WHY WOULD I?
The Supreme Court has stated — repeatedly! — that the “main object” of the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment “was to settle the question … as to the citizenship of free negroes,” making them “citizens of the United States and of the state in which they reside.”
“No Supreme Court has ever held that children born to illegal aliens are citizens.”
Democrats, the entire media and House Speaker Paul Ryan seem to have forgotten the Civil War. They believe that, immediately after a war that ended slavery, Americans rose up as one and demanded that the children of illegals be granted citizenship!
You know what’s really bothering me? If someone comes into the country illegally and has a kid, that kid should be an American citizen!
YOU MEAN THAT’S NOT ALREADY IN THE CONSTITUTION?
Give me a scenario — just one scenario — where the post-Civil War amendments would be intended to grant citizenship to the kids of Chinese ladies flying to birthing hospitals in California, or pregnant Latin Americans sneaking across the border in the back of flatbed trucks.
You can make it up. It doesn’t have to be a true scenario. Any scenario!
As the court has explained again and again and again:
“(N)o one can fail to be impressed with the one pervading purpose found in (the 13th, 14th and 15th) amendments, lying at the foundation of each, and without which none of them would have been even suggested; we mean the freedom of the slave race, the security and firm establishment of that freedom, and the protection of the newly made freeman and citizen from the oppressions of those who had formerly exercised unlimited dominion over him.”
That’s why the amendment refers to people who are “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States “and of the state wherein they reside.” For generations, African-Americans were domiciled in this country. The only reason they weren’t citizens was because of slavery, which the country had just fought a Civil War to end.
The 14th Amendment fixed that.
The amendment didn’t even make Indians citizens. Why? Because it was about freed slaves. Sixteen years after the 14th Amendment was ratified, the Supreme Court held that an American Indian, John Elk, was not a citizen, despite having been born here.
Instead, Congress had to pass a separate law making Indians citizens, which it did, more than half a century after the adoption of the 14th Amendment. (It’s easy to miss — the law is titled: “THE INDIAN CITIZENSHIP ACT OF 1924.”) Why would such a law be necessary if simply being born in the U.S. was enough to confer citizenship?
Even today, the children of diplomats and foreign ministers are not granted citizenship on the basis of being born here.
President Trump, unlike his critics, honors black history by recognizing that the whole purpose of the Civil War amendments was to guarantee the rights of freed slaves.
But the left has always been bored with black people. If they start gassing on about “civil rights,” you can be sure it will be about transgenders, the abortion ladies or illegal aliens. Liberals can never seem to remember the people whose ancestors were brought here as slaves, i.e., the only reason we even have civil rights laws.
Still, it requires breathtaking audacity to use the Civil War amendments to bring in cheap foreign labor, which drives down the wages of African-Americans — the very people the amendments were written to protect!
Whether the children born to legal immigrants are citizens is controversial enough. But at least there’s a Supreme Court decision claiming that they are — U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark. That’s “birthright citizenship.”
It’s something else entirely to claim that an illegal alien, subject to deportation, can drop a baby and suddenly claim to be the parent of a “citizen.”
This crackpot notion was concocted by liberal zealot Justice William Brennan and slipped into a footnote as dicta in a 1982 case. “Dicta” means it was not the ruling of the court, just a random aside, with zero legal significance.
Left-wing activists seized on Brennan’s aside and browbeat everyone into believing that anchor babies are part of our great constitutional heritage, emerging straight from the pen of James Madison.
No Supreme Court has ever held that children born to illegal aliens are citizens. No Congress has deliberated and decided to grant that right. It’s a made-up right, grounded only in the smoke and mirrors around Justice Brennan’s 1982 footnote.
Obviously, it would be better if Congress passed a law clearly stating that children born to illegals are not citizens. (Trump won’t be president forever!) But until that happens, the president of the United States is not required to continue a ridiculous practice that has absolutely no basis in law.
It’s often said that journalism is the first draft of history. As we now see, fake news is the first draft of fake history.
Quote of the Times;
Once you start down the road of equality of outcome as the measure of justice, rather than equality under the law, you inevitably start dividing humans into groups, and one of the most obvious ways to do so is race. So, having spent years denying that there is any objective reality to racial classifications, liberals start sifting people into racial categories with an obsessiveness that puts South African policemen under the old regime to shame. Race, among other classifications, becomes a lens through which the whole of social life is examined. In short, there is no racist as fanatical as an anti-racist.
Link of the Times;
http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/trump-is-right-the-federal-reserve-is-crazy-and-here-are-101-reasons-why-it-should-be-shut-down
I’m bacon!
*.*
I got my mate an Elephant for his living room
He said "Thanks".
I said "don't mention it".
*.*
Why do girls like softball?
It's the only sport played on a diamond.
*.*
Navy SEALs no longer allowed to wear blackface
FORT BRAGG, N.C. — Special operators will no longer be allowed to wear black face paint after biting criticism from activist groups, sources confirmed today.
The move is aimed to stop the controversial practice of channeling one’s inner black dude before infiltrating a compound.
“We are not 100 percent woke, but this is a big step,” said Lt. Gen. Scott Howell, the current nominee to head Joint Special Operations Command. “We must stop perpetuating the stereotype that all black people are good at tactical operations.”
Recent studies show “blending in with the dark of night” to be a racist artifact of the past. SEALs will now be required to use inclusive rainbow patterns and biodegradable glitter.
“I never felt like I was being racist,” said Petty Officer 1st Class James Largo, “but I understand how cultural biases can find concealment in the covert corners of your mind.”
The changes, which go into effect next month, have support of allies and critics alike. Even hostile countries like Syria and Somalia are excited for the progressive step forward.
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Remember!
The temptation to sing 'The Lion Sleeps Tonight' is always just a whim away a whim away a whim away a whim away.
Issue of the Times;
The True History of Millstone Babies by Ann Coulter
Having mastered fake news, now the media are trying out a little fake history.
In the news business, new topics are always popping up, from the Logan Act and the emoluments clause to North Korea. The all-star panels rush to Wikipedia, so they can pretend to be experts on things they knew nothing about an hour earlier.
Such is the case today with “anchor babies” and “birthright citizenship.” People who know zilch about the history of the 14th Amendment are pontificating magnificently and completely falsely on the issue du jour.
If you’d like to be the smartest person at your next cocktail party by knowing the truth about the 14th Amendment, this is the column for you!
Of course the president can end the citizenship of “anchor babies” by executive order — for the simple reason that no Supreme Court or U.S. Congress has ever conferred such a right.
It’s just something everyone believes to be true.
How could anyone — even a not-very-bright person — imagine that granting citizenship to the children of illegal aliens is actually in our Constitution?
The first question would be: Why would they do that? It’s like being accused of robbing a homeless person. WHY WOULD I?
The Supreme Court has stated — repeatedly! — that the “main object” of the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment “was to settle the question … as to the citizenship of free negroes,” making them “citizens of the United States and of the state in which they reside.”
“No Supreme Court has ever held that children born to illegal aliens are citizens.”
Democrats, the entire media and House Speaker Paul Ryan seem to have forgotten the Civil War. They believe that, immediately after a war that ended slavery, Americans rose up as one and demanded that the children of illegals be granted citizenship!
You know what’s really bothering me? If someone comes into the country illegally and has a kid, that kid should be an American citizen!
YOU MEAN THAT’S NOT ALREADY IN THE CONSTITUTION?
Give me a scenario — just one scenario — where the post-Civil War amendments would be intended to grant citizenship to the kids of Chinese ladies flying to birthing hospitals in California, or pregnant Latin Americans sneaking across the border in the back of flatbed trucks.
You can make it up. It doesn’t have to be a true scenario. Any scenario!
As the court has explained again and again and again:
“(N)o one can fail to be impressed with the one pervading purpose found in (the 13th, 14th and 15th) amendments, lying at the foundation of each, and without which none of them would have been even suggested; we mean the freedom of the slave race, the security and firm establishment of that freedom, and the protection of the newly made freeman and citizen from the oppressions of those who had formerly exercised unlimited dominion over him.”
That’s why the amendment refers to people who are “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States “and of the state wherein they reside.” For generations, African-Americans were domiciled in this country. The only reason they weren’t citizens was because of slavery, which the country had just fought a Civil War to end.
The 14th Amendment fixed that.
The amendment didn’t even make Indians citizens. Why? Because it was about freed slaves. Sixteen years after the 14th Amendment was ratified, the Supreme Court held that an American Indian, John Elk, was not a citizen, despite having been born here.
Instead, Congress had to pass a separate law making Indians citizens, which it did, more than half a century after the adoption of the 14th Amendment. (It’s easy to miss — the law is titled: “THE INDIAN CITIZENSHIP ACT OF 1924.”) Why would such a law be necessary if simply being born in the U.S. was enough to confer citizenship?
Even today, the children of diplomats and foreign ministers are not granted citizenship on the basis of being born here.
President Trump, unlike his critics, honors black history by recognizing that the whole purpose of the Civil War amendments was to guarantee the rights of freed slaves.
But the left has always been bored with black people. If they start gassing on about “civil rights,” you can be sure it will be about transgenders, the abortion ladies or illegal aliens. Liberals can never seem to remember the people whose ancestors were brought here as slaves, i.e., the only reason we even have civil rights laws.
Still, it requires breathtaking audacity to use the Civil War amendments to bring in cheap foreign labor, which drives down the wages of African-Americans — the very people the amendments were written to protect!
Whether the children born to legal immigrants are citizens is controversial enough. But at least there’s a Supreme Court decision claiming that they are — U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark. That’s “birthright citizenship.”
It’s something else entirely to claim that an illegal alien, subject to deportation, can drop a baby and suddenly claim to be the parent of a “citizen.”
This crackpot notion was concocted by liberal zealot Justice William Brennan and slipped into a footnote as dicta in a 1982 case. “Dicta” means it was not the ruling of the court, just a random aside, with zero legal significance.
Left-wing activists seized on Brennan’s aside and browbeat everyone into believing that anchor babies are part of our great constitutional heritage, emerging straight from the pen of James Madison.
No Supreme Court has ever held that children born to illegal aliens are citizens. No Congress has deliberated and decided to grant that right. It’s a made-up right, grounded only in the smoke and mirrors around Justice Brennan’s 1982 footnote.
Obviously, it would be better if Congress passed a law clearly stating that children born to illegals are not citizens. (Trump won’t be president forever!) But until that happens, the president of the United States is not required to continue a ridiculous practice that has absolutely no basis in law.
It’s often said that journalism is the first draft of history. As we now see, fake news is the first draft of fake history.
Quote of the Times;
Once you start down the road of equality of outcome as the measure of justice, rather than equality under the law, you inevitably start dividing humans into groups, and one of the most obvious ways to do so is race. So, having spent years denying that there is any objective reality to racial classifications, liberals start sifting people into racial categories with an obsessiveness that puts South African policemen under the old regime to shame. Race, among other classifications, becomes a lens through which the whole of social life is examined. In short, there is no racist as fanatical as an anti-racist.
Link of the Times;
http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/trump-is-right-the-federal-reserve-is-crazy-and-here-are-101-reasons-why-it-should-be-shut-down
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And someone shot a duck.
An Images & Ideas, Inc. Service.
No Vegans were harmed in the making of this site. We're looking for a new provider.