Always keep several get well cards on the mantel.
If unexpected guests arrive, they'll think you've been sick and unable to clean.
*.*
An 80-year-old man went to his doctor for his annual checkup.
The doctor asks him how he's feeling.
The 80-year-old says, "I've never felt better.
I have an 18-year-old bride who is pregnant with my child. What do you think about that?"
The doctor considers his question for a minute and says, "I have a friend who is an avid hunter and never misses a season. One day when he was going out in a bit of a hurry, he accidentally picked up his umbrella rather than his gun. When he got to the creek, he saw a prime beaver sitting beside the stream of water.
He raised his umbrella and went, "Bang, bang", and the beaver fell over dead. What do you think of that?"
The 80-year-old said, "I'd say somebody else shot that beaver."
The doctor replied, "My point exactly."
*.*
VATICAN CITY — The Pope has apologized for the Catholic Church's past activates burning heretics at the stake centuries ago, admitting that the practice was a carbon-emission-heavy activity that did not reflect good stewardship of the earth.
"It's clear now that the Catholic Church made missteps centuries ago, by not finding a carbon-neutral way to dispose of heretics," he said in a special address. "I am filled with regret when I think of the large carbon footprint left behind by the Reformers and other heretics previous Popes tortured and incinerated."
The Pope confirmed that going forward, the Catholic Church will be purchasing carbon credits to offset the footprint of any heretics they decide to burn at the stake, as well as any documents they decide to torch before investigators get too close.
*.*
Thanks to dating apps, many people will first lay eyes on the love of their lives while evacuating their bowels.
As a kid, I got lectured for only doing the bare minimum to complete a task. As an engineer, I get paid to do just that.
DNA is like the menu at Taco Bell, an endless recombining of 4 ingredients to achieve a new result.
Using energy from a wind farm to power a fan is like shipping wind long distance.
Math teachers help the world by creating problems.
The exhaustion after completing a difficult math problem should be known as the aftermath.
The world’s best masseuse will never get the world’s best massage.
*.*
When someone says "kiss my a$$" during an argument, there's probably no benefit to actually going along and doing it.
Sure, cooperation and affection are positive traits, but I think they might still be mad at you.
Quote of the Times;
To the extent the NBA has taken a stance, it has stood for China. Frankly, none of us should be surprised an organization that routinely opposes religious liberty in the United States would stand with a totalitarian communist regime that routinely exterminates religious minorities. – Erickson
Link of the Times;
https://johnbwellsnews.com/dead-men-dont-need-impeachment-swamp-in-panic-trump-in-danger/
Issue of the Times;
Journalists Are Prostitutes by Paul Craig Roberts
In a recent interview with USA Watchdog — I described Western journalists as prostitutes who whore for a living. One of them who did so—Udo Ulfkotte—describes what it is like. For the naive and insouciant Western people who need to hear the truth from the horse’s mouth, here is a translation of one of Udo Ulfkotte’s lectures on the subject.
In 2014, the German journalist and writer Udo Ulfkotte published a book that created a big stir, describing how the journalistic profession is thoroughly corrupt and infiltrated by intelligence services.
Although eagerly anticipated by many, the English translation of the book, Bought Journalists, does not seem to be forthcoming anytime soon.
So I have made English subtitles and transcribed this still very relevant 2015-lecture for those that are curious about Ulfkotte’s work. It covers many of the subjects described in the book.
Udo Ulfkotte died of a heart attack in January 2017, in all likelihood part of the severe medical complications he got from his exposure to German-made chemical weapons supplied to Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s.
TRANSCRIPTION
[Only the first 49 minutes are translated; the second half of the lecture deals mostly with more local issues]
Introducer Oliver: I am very proud to have such a brave man amongst us: Udo Ulfkotte
Udo Ulfkotte: Thanks…Thanks for the invitation…Thanks to Oliver. I heard to my great surprise from Oliver that he didn’t know someone from the intelligence services (VVS) would be present. I wish him a warm welcome. I don’t mean that as a joke, I heard this in advance, and got to know that Oliver didn’t know. If he wants – if it is a man – he can wave. If not?… no?…[laughter from the audience]
I’m fine with that. You can write down everything, or record it; no problem.
To the lecture. We are talking about media. we are talking about truth. I don’t want to sell you books or such things. Each one of us asks himself: Why do things develop like they do, even though the majority, or a lot of people shake their heads.
The majority of people in Germany don’t want nuclear weapons on our territory. But we have nuclear weapons here. The majority don’t want foreign interventions by German soldiers. But we do.
What media narrates and the politicians say, and what the majority of the population believes – seems often obviously to be two different things.
I can tell you this myself, from many years experience. I will start with very personal judgments, to tell you what my experiences with ‘The Lying Media’ were – I mean exactly that with the word ‘lying’.
I was born in a fairly poor family. I am a single child. I grew up on the eastern edge of the Ruhr-area. I studied Law, Political Science and Islamic Studies. Already in my student years, I had contact with the German Foreign Intelligence, BND. We will get back to that later.
From 1986 to 2003, I worked for a major German newspaper, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), amongst other things as a war reporter. I spent a lot of time in Eastern and African countries.
Now to the subject of lying media. When I was sent to the Iran-Iraq war for the first time, the first time was from 1980 to July 1986, I was sent to this war to report for FAZ. The Iraqis were then ‘the good guys’.
I was bit afraid. I didn’t have any experience as a war reporter. Then I arrived in Baghdad. I was fairly quickly sent along in a bus by the Iraqi army, the bus was full of loud, experienced war reporters, from such prestigious media as the BBC, several foreign TV-stations and newspapers, and me, poor newbie, who was sent to the front for the first time without any kind of preparation. The first thing I saw was that they all carried along cans of petrol. And I at once got bad consciousness, because I thought: «oops, if the bus gets stuck far from a petrol station, then everyone chips in with a bit of diesel’. I decided to in the future also carry a can before I went anywhere, because it obviously was part of it.
We drove for hours through the desert, towards the Iraqi border. Approx. 20-30 kilometers from the border, there really was nothing. First of all no war. There were armored vehicles and tanks, burned-out long ago. The journalist left the bus, splashed the contents of the cans on the vehicles. We had Iraqi soldiers with us as an escort, with machine guns, in uniform. You have to imagine: tanks in a desert, burned out long ago, now put on fire. Clouds of smoke. And there the journalists assemble their cameras.
It was my first experience with media, truth in reporting.
While I was wondering what the hell I was going to report for my newspaper, they all lined up and started: Behind them were flames and plumes of smoke, and all the time the Iraqis were running in front of camera with their machine guns, casually, but with war in their gaze. And the reporters were ducking all the time while talking.
So I gathered courage and asked one of the reporters: ‘I understand one thing, they are great pictures, but why are they ducking all the time? ‘
‘Quite simply because there are machine guns on the audio track, and it looks very good at home.’
That was several decades ago. It was in the beginning of my contact with war. I was thinking, the whole way back:’Young man, you didn’t see a war. You were in a place with a campfire. What are you going to tell?’
I returned to Baghdad. There weren’t any mobile phones then. We waited in Hotel Rashid and other hotels where foreigners stayed, sometimes for hours for an international telephone line. I first contacted my mother, not my newspaper. I was in despair, didn’t know what to do, and wanted to get advice from an elder person.
Then my mother shouted over the phone:’My boy, you are alive!’
I thought: ‘How so? Is everything OK?’
‘My boy, we thought…’
‘What’s the matter, mother?’
‘We saw on TV what happened around you’
TV had already sent lurid stories, and I tried to calm my mother down, it didn’t happen like that. She thought I had lost my mind from all the things that had happened in the war – she saw it with her own eyes!
I’ll finish, because I am not here to make satire today. I just want to say that this was my first experience with truth in journalism and war reporting.
That is, I was very shocked by the first contact, it was entirely different from what I had experienced. But it wasn’t an exceptional case.
In the beginning, I mentioned that I am from a fairly poor family. I had to work hard for everything. I was a single child, my father died when I was young. It didn’t matter further on. But, I had a job, I had a degree, a goal in life.
I now had the choice: Should I declare that the whole thing was nonsense, these reports? I was nothing, a newbie straight out of uni, in my first job. Or if I wanted to make money, to continue, look further. I chose the second option. I continued, and that for many years.
Over these years, I gained lots of experience. When one comes from university to a big German newspaper – everything I say doesn’t only apply to FAZ, you can take other German or European media. I had contact with other European journalists, from reputable media outlets. I later worked in other media. I can tell you: What I am about to tell you, I really discovered everywhere.
What did I experience? If you, as a reporter, work either in state media financed by forced license fees, or in the big private media companies, then you can’t write what you want yourself, what you feel like. There are certain guidelines.
Roughly speaking: everyone knows that you won’t, for example in the Springer-newspapers – Bild, die Welt – get published articles extremely critical of Israel. They stand no chance there, because one has to sign a statement that one is pro-Israel, that one won’t question the existence of the state of Israel or Israeli points of view, etc.
There are some sort of guidelines in all the big media companies. But that isn’t all: I learned very fast that if one doesn’t – I don’t mean this negatively – want to be stuck in the lower rungs of editors, if one wants to rise; for me this rise was that I was allowed to travel with the Chancellor, ministers, the president and politicians, in planes owned by the state; then one has to keep to certain subjects. I learned that fast.
That is, if one gets to follow a politician – and this hasn’t changed to this day – I soon realized that when I followed the president or Chancellor Helmut Kohl etc, one of course isn’t invited because your name is Udo Ulfkotte, but because you belong to the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine.
Then a certain type of reporting is expected. Which one? Forget my newspaper, this applies in general. At the start of the trip, the journalist gets a memo – today it is electronic – in his hand. If you are traveling abroad, it is info about the country, or the speeches that will be held. This file contains roughly what will happen during this trip. In addition there are short conversations, briefings with the politician’s press manager. He then explains to you how one views this trip. Naturally, you should see it the same way. No one says it in that way. But is is approximately what one would have reported.
All the time you…no one tells you to write it this or that way…but you know quite exactly that if you DON’T write it this or that way,then you won’t get invited next time. Your media outlet will be invited, but they say ‘we don’t want him along’. Then you are out.
Naturally you want to be invited. Of course it is wonderful to travel abroad and you can behave like a pig, no one cares. You can buy what you want, because you know that when you return, you won’t be checked. You can bring what you want. I had colleagues who went along on a trip to the US.
They brought with them – it was an air force plane – a Harley Davidson, in parts. They sold it when they were back in Germany, and of course earned on it. Anyway, just like the carpet-affair with that development minister, this is of course not a single instance. No one talks about it.
You get invited if you have a certain way of seeing things. Which way to see things? Where and how is this view of the world formed? I very often get asked: ‘Where are these people behind the curtain who pulls the wires, so that everything gets told in a fairly similar way?’
In the big media in Germany – just look yourself – who sit in the large transatlantic think-tanks and foundations,the foundation The Atlantic Bridge, all these organizations, and how is one influenced there? I can tell from my own experience.
We mustn’t talk only theoretically. I was invited by the think-tank The German Marshall Fund of the United States as a fellow. I was to visit the United States for six weeks. It was fully paid. During these six weeks I could…this think-tank has very close connections to the CIA to this day, they acquired contacts in the CIA for me and they got me access to American politicians, to everyone I wanted. Above all, they showered me with gifts.
Already before the journey with German Marshall Fund, I experienced plenty of bought journalism. This hasn’t to do with a particular media outlet. You see, I was invited and didn’t particularly reflect over it, by billionaires, for example sultan Quabboos of Oman on the Arabian peninsula.
When sultan Qabboos invited, and a poor boy like me could travel to a country with few inhabitants but immense wealth, where the head of state had the largest yachts in the world, his own symphony orchestra which plays for him when he wants – by the way he bought a pub close to Garmisch-Patenkirchen, because he is a Muslim believer, and someone might see him if he drank in his own country, so he rather travels there. The place he bought every day fly in fresh lamb from Ireland and Scotland with his private jet. He is also the head of an environmental foundation.
But this is a digression. If such a person, who is so incredibly rich, invites someone like me, then I arrive first class. I had never traveled first class before. We arrive, and a driver is waiting for me. He carries your suitcase or backpack. You have a suite in the hotel. And from the very start, you are showered with gifts. You get a platinum or gold coin. A hand-weaved carpet or whatever.
I interviewed the sultan, several times. He asked me what I wanted. I answered among other things a diving course. I wanted to learn how to dive. He flew in a PADI-approved instructor from Greece. I was there for two weeks and got my first diving certificate. On later occasions, the sultan flew me in several times, and the diving instructor. I got a certificate as rescue diver, all paid for by the sultan. You see, when one is attended to in such a way, then you know that you are bought. For a certain type of journalism. In the sultan’s country, there is no freedom of the press.
There are no human rights. It is illegal to import many writings, because the sultan does not wish so. There are reports about human rights violations, but my eyes are blind. I reported, like all German media when they report about the Sultanate of Oman, to this day, only positive things. The great sultan, who is wonderful. The fantastic country of the fairy tale prince, overshadowing everything else – because I was bought.
Apart from Oman, many others have bought me. They also bought colleagues. I got many invitations through the travel section in my big newspaper. 5-star. The reportage never mentioned that I was bought, by country A or B or C. Yemenia, the Yemeni state airline, invited me to such a trip.
I didn’t report about the dirt and dilapidation in the country, because I was influenced by this treatment,I only reported positively, because I wanted to come back. The Yemenis asked me when I had returned to Frankfurt what I wished…In jest, I said «your large prawns, from the Red Sea, from the Indian Ocean, they were spectacular.», from the seaport of Mocha (Mocha-coffee is named after it). Two days later, Yemenia flew in a buffet for the editorial office, with prawns and more.
Of course we were bought. We were bought in several ways. In your situation: when you buy a car or something else, you trust consumer tests. Look closer. How well is the car tested? I know of no colleagues, no journalists, who do testing of cars, that aren’t bribed – maybe they do exist.
They get unlimited access to a car from the big car manufacturers, with free petrol and everything else. I had a work car in my newspaper, if not, I might have exploited this. I had a BMW or Mercedes in the newspaper. But there are, outside the paper, many colleagues who only have this kind of vehicle all year round. They are invited to South Africa, Malaysia, USA, to the grandest travels, when a new car is presented.
Why? So that they will write positively about the car. But it doesn’t say in these reports «Advertisement from bought journalists».
But that is the reality. You should also know – since we are on the subjects of tests – who owns which test magazines? Who owns the magazine Eco-test? It is owned by the Social Democrats. More than a hundred magazines belong to the Social Democrats. It isn’t about only one party, but many editorial rooms have political allegiance. Behind them are party political interests.
I mentioned the sultan of Oman and the diving course, and I have mentioned German Marshall Fund. Back to the US and the German Marshall Fund. There one told me, they knew exactly, ‘hello, you were on a diving course in Oman…’ The CIA knew very precisely. And the CIA also gave me something: The diving gear. I received the diving gear in the United States, and I received in the US, during my 6-week stay there, an invitation from the state of Oklahoma, from the governor. I went there. It was a small ceremony, and I received an honorary citizenship.
I am now honorary citizen of an American state. And in this certificate, it is written that I will only cover the US positively. I accepted this honorary citizenship and was quite proud of it. I proudly told about it to a colleague who worked in the US. He said ‘ha, I already have 31 of these honorary citizenships!’
I don’t tell about this to be witty, today I am ashamed, really.
I was greedy. I accepted many advantages that a regular citizen at my age in my occupation doesn’t have, and shouldn’t have. But I perceived it – and that is no excuse – as entirely normal, because my colleagues around me all did the same. But this isn’t normal. When journalists are invited to think-tanks in the US, like German Marshall Fund, Atlantic Bridge, it is to ‘bring them in line’, for in a friendly way to make them complicit, naturally to buy them, to grease them with money.
This has quite a few aspects that one normally doesn’t talk about. When I for the first time was in Southern Africa, in the 80s, Apartheid still existed in South Africa, segregated areas for blacks and whites. We didn’t have any problems with this in my newspaper, we received fully paid journeys from the Apartheid regime to do propaganda work.
I was invited by the South-African gold industry, coal industry, tourist board. In the first invitation, this trip was to Namibia – I arrived tired to the hotel room in Windhoek and a dark woman lay in my bed. I at once left the room, went down to the reception and said ‘excuse me, but the room is already occupied’ [laughter from the audience]
Without any fuss I got another room.
Next day at the breakfast table, this was a journalist trip, my colleagues asked me ‘how was yours?’ Only then I understood what had happened. Until then, I had believed it was a silly coincidence.
With this I want to describe which methods are used, maybe to film journalists in such situations, buy, make dependent. Quite simply to win them over to your side with the most brutal methods, so that they are ‘brought in line’.
This doesn’t happen to every journalist. It would be a conspiracy theory if I said that behind every journalist, someone pulls the wires.
No. Not everyone has influence over the masses. When you – I don’t mean this negatively – write about folk costume societies or if you work with agriculture or politics, why should anyone from the upper political spheres have an interest in controlling the reporting? As far as I know, this doesn’t happen at all.
But if you work in one of the big media, and want up in this world, if you want to travel with politicians, heads of state, with CEOs, who also travel on these planes, then it happens. Then you are regularly bought, you are regularly observed.
I said earlier that I already during my study days had contact with the intelligence services.
I will quickly explain this to you, because it is very important for this lecture.
I studied law, Political Science and Islamology, among other places in Freiburg. At the very beginning of my study, just before end of the term, a professor approached me. Professors were then still authority figures.
He came with a brochure, and asked me: ‘Mr. Ulfkotte, what are your plans for this vacation?’
I couldn’t very well say that I first planned to work a bit at a building site, for then to grab my backpack and see the ocean for the first time in my life, to Italy, ‘la dolce vita’, flirting with girls, lie on the beach and be a young person.
I wondered how I would break it to him. He then came with a brochure [Ulfkotte imitating professor]:‘I have something for you…a seminar, Introduction to Conflict Studies, two weeks in Bonn…I am sure you would want to participate!’
I wondered how I would tell this elderly gentleman that I wanted to flirt with girls on the beach. Then he said ‘you will get 20 Marks per day as support, paid train journey, money for books 150 Marks…You will naturally get board and lodging.’ He didn’t stop telling me what I would receive.
It buzzed around in my head that I had to achieve everything myself, work hard. I thought ‘You have always wanted to participate in a seminar on Introduction to Conflict Studies!’
So I went to Bonn from Freiburg, and I saw other students who had this urge to participate in this seminar. There were also girls one could flirt with, about twenty people. The whole thing was very strange, because we sat in a room like this one, there were desks and a lectern, and there sat some older men and a woman, they always wrote something down. They asked us about things; What we thought of East Germany, we had to do role play.
The whole thing was a bit strange, but it was well paid. We didn’t reflect any further. It was very strange that in this house, in Ubierstraße 88 in Bonn, we weren’t allowed to go to the second floor. There was a chain over the stairs, it was taboo.
We were allowed to go to the basement, there were constantly replenished supplies of new books that we were allowed to get for free. Ebay didn’t exist then, but we could still sell them used. Anyway, it was curious, but at the end of the fortnight, we were allowed to go up these stairs, where we got an invitation to a continuation course in Conflict Studies.
After four such seminars, that is, after two years, someone asked me ‘you have probably wondered what we are doing here’.
He explained that a recruitment board from the intelligence services had participated. But I had no idea that the seminar Introduction to Conflict Studies was arranged by the defense forces and run by the foreign intelligence service BND, to have a closer look at potential candidates among the students, not to commit them. They only asked if they, after four such seminars, possibly could contact me later, in my occupation.
They gave me a lot of money. My mother has always taught me to be polite. So I said ‘please do’, and they came to me. I was then working in the newspaper FAZ from 1986, straight after my studies.
Then the intelligence services came fairly soon to me. Why am I telling you this?
The newspaper knew very soon. It is also written in my reference, therefore I can say it loud and clear.
I had very close contact with the intelligence service BND.
Two persons from BND came regularly to the paper, to a visiting room. And there were occasions when the report not only was given, but also that BND had written articles, largely ready to go, that were published in the newspaper under my byline.
I highlight certain things to explain them. But if I had said here: ‘There are media that are influenced by BND’, you could rightly say that ‘these are conspiracy theories, can you document it?’
I CAN document it. I can say, this and that article, with my byline in the paper, is written by the intelligence services, because what is written there, I couldn’t have known. I couldn’t have known what existed in some cave or other in Libya, what secret thing were there, what was being built there. This was all things that BND wanted published. It wasn’t like this only in FAZ.
It was like this also in other media. I told about it. If we had rule of law, there would now be an investigation commission. Because the political parties would stand up, regardless of if they are on the left, in the center or right, and say: What this Ulfkotte fella says and claims he can document, this should be investigated. Did this occur in other places? Or is it still ongoing?’
I can tell you: Yes it still exists. I know colleagues who still have this close contact. One can probably show this fairly well until a few years ago. But I would find it wonderful if this investigation commission existed.
But it will obviously not happen, because no one has an interest in doing so. Because then the public would realize how closely integrated politics, media, and the secret services are in this country.
That is, one often sees in reporting, whether it is from the local paper, regional papers, TV-channels, national tabloids and so-called serious papers.
Put them side by side, and you will discover that more than 90% looks almost identical. A lot of subjects and news, that are not being reported at all, or they are – I claim reported very one-sided. One can only explain this if one knows the structures in the background, how media is surrounded, bought and ‘brought onboard’ by politics and the intelligence services; Where politics and intelligence services form a single unity. There is an intelligence coordinator by the Chancellor.
I can tell you, that under the former coordinator Bernd Schmidbauer, under Kohl, I walked in and out of the Chancellery and received stacks of secret and confidential documents, which I shouldn’t have received.
They were so many that we in the newspaper had own archive cabinets for them. Not only did I receive these documents, but Schmidbauer should have been in jail if we had rule of law. Or there should have been a parliamentary commission or an investigation, because he wasn’t allowed…
For example if I couldn’t bring along the documents if the case was too hot, there was another trick. They locked me in a room. In this room were the documents, which I could look through. I could record it all on tape, photograph them or write them down. When I was done, I could call on the intercom, so they could lock me out. There were thousands of these tricks. Anonymous documents that I and my colleagues needed could be placed in my mail box.
These are of course illegal things. BUT, you ONLY get them if you ‘toe the line’ with politics.
If I had written that Chancellor Helmut Kohl is stupid, a big idiot, or about what Schmidbauer did, I would of course not have received more. That is, if you today, in newspapers, read about ‘soon to be revealed exposures, we will publish a big story based on material based on intelligence’, then none of these media have dug a tunnel under the security services and somehow got hold of something secret. It is rather that they work so well with intelligence services, with the military counterespionage, the foreign intelligence, police intelligence etc, that if they have got hold of internal documents, it is because they cooperate so well that they received them as a reward for well performed service.
You see, in this way one is in the end bought. One is bought to such a degree that at one point one can’t exit this system anymore.
If I describe how you are supplied with prostitutes, bribed with cars, money; I tried to write down everything I received in gifts, everything I was bribed with. I stopped doing so several years ago, more than a decade ago.
It doesn’t make it any better, but today I regret everything. But I know that it goes this way with many journalists.
It would make me very happy if journalists stood up and said they won’t participate in this any longer, and that they think this is wrong.
But I see no possibility, because media corporations in any case are doing badly. Where should a journalist find work the next day? It isn’t so that tens of thousands of employers are waiting for you. It is the other way round. Tens of thousands of journalists are looking for work or commissions.
That is, from pure desperation one is happy to be bribed. If a newsroom stands behind or not an article that in reality is advertising, doesn’t matter, one goes along. I know some, even respected journalists, who want to leave this system.
But imagine if you are working in one of the state channels, that you stand up and tell what you have received. How will that be received by your colleagues? That you have political ulterior motives etc.
September 30 [2015], a few days ago, Chancellor Merkel invited all the directors in the state channels to her in the Chancellery. I will claim that she talked with them about how one should report the Chancellors politics. Who of you [in the audience] heard about this incident? 3-4-5? So a small minority. But this is reality. Merkel started already 6 years ago, at the beginning of the financial crisis, to invite chief editors…..she invited chief editors in the large media corporations, with the express wish that media should embellish reality, in a political way. This could have been only claims, one could believe me or not.
But a couple of journalists were there, they told about it. Therefore I repeat: Merkel invited the chief editors several times, and told them she didn’t want the population to be truthfully and openly informed about the problems out there.
For example, the background for the financial crisis. If the citizens knew how things were, they would run to the bank and withdraw their money. So beautifying everything; everything is under control; your savings are safe; just smile and hold hands – everything will be fine.
In such a way it should be reported. Ladies and gentlemen, what I just said can be documented. These are facts, not a conspiracy theory.
I formulated it a bit satirically, but I ask myself when I see how things are in this country: Is this the democracy described in the Constitution? Freedom of speech? Freedom of the press?
Where one has to be afraid if one doesn’t agree with the ruling political correctness, if one doesn’t want to get in trouble. Is this the republic our parents and grandparents fought for, that they built?
I claim that we more and more – as citizens – are cowards ‘toeing the line’, who don’t open our mouths.
It is so nice to have plurality and diversity of opinions.
But it is at once clamped down on, today fairly openly.
Of my experiences with journalism, I can in general say that I have quit all media I have to pay for, for the reasons mentioned. Then the question arises, ‘but which pay-media can I trust?’
Naturally there are ones I support. They are definitely political, I’ll add. But they are all fairly small. And they won’t be big anytime soon. But I have quit all big media that I used to subscribe to, Der Spiegel, Frankfurter Allgemeine, etc. I would like to not having to pay the TV-license fee, without being arrested because I won’t pay fines. But maybe someone here in the audience can tell me how to do so without all these problems?
Either way, I don’t want to financially support this kind of journalism. I can only give you the advice to get information from alternative, independent media and all the forums that exist.
I’m not advertising for any of them. Some of you probably know that I write for the publishing house Kopp. But there are so many portals. Every person is different in political viewpoint, culturally etc. The only thing uniting us, whether we are black or white, religious or non-religious, right or left, or whatever; we all want to know the truth. We want to know what really happens out there, and exactly in the burning political questions: asylum seekers, refugees, the financial crisis, bad infrastructure, one doesn’t know how it will continue. Precisely with this background, is it even more important that people get to know the truth.
And it is to my great surprise that I conclude that we in media, as well as in politics, have a guiding line.
To throw more and more dust in the citizens’ eyes to calm them down. What is the sense in this? One can have totally different opinions on the subject of refugees with good reasoning.
But facts are important for you as citizens to decide the future. That is, how many people will arrive? How will it affect my personal affluence? Or will it affect my affluence at all? Will the pensions shrink? etc. Then you can talk with people about this, quite openly. But to say that we should open all borders, and that this won’t have any negative consequences, is very strange. What I now say isn’t a plug for my books. I know that some of them are on the table in front.
I’m not saying this so that you will buy books. I am saying this for another reason that soon will be clear. I started to write books on certain subjects 18 years ago. They have sold millions. It is no longer about you buying my books. It is important that you hear the titles, then you will see a certain line throughout the last ten years. One can have different opinions about this line, but I have always tried to describe, based on my subjective experiences, formed over many years in the Middle East and Africa.
That there will be migration flows, from people from culture areas that are like; if one could compare a cultural area with an engine, that one fills petrol in a diesel engine then everyone knows what will happen, the engine is great, diesel is great, but if there too much petrol, then the engine starts to splutter and stop.
I have tried to make you aware of this, with drastic and less drastic words. What we can expect, and ever faster. The book titles are SOS Occident; Warning Civil War; No Black,Red, Yellow [the colors in the German flag], Holy War in Europe; Mecca Germany.
I just want to say, when politicians and media today claim no one could have predicted it, everything is a complete surprise; Ladies and Gentlemen, this is not at all surprising. The migration flows, for years warnings have been coming from international organizations, politicians, experts, exactly about what happened and it is predictable, if we had a map over North Africa and the Middle East..
If the West continues to destabilize countries like Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, country by country, Iraq when we toppled Saddam Hussein, Afghanistan. We as Europeans and Germans have spent tens of billions on a war where we allegedly defend peace and liberty, at the mountain range Hindu Kush [in Afghanistan]. And here, in front of our own door, we soon have Hindu Kush.
We have no stabilization in Afghanistan. Dozens of German soldiers have lost their lives for nothing. We have a more unstable situation than ever.
You can have your own opinions. I am only saying that these refugee flows didn’t fall from the sky. It is predicable, that if I bomb and destabilize a country, that people – it is always so in history – it hasn’t anything to do with the Middle East or North Africa. I have seen enough wars in Africa. Naturally they created refugee flows.
But all of us didn’t want to see this. We haven’t prepared. And now one is reacting in full panic, and what is most disconcerting with this, is when media and politicians, allegedly from deepest inner conviction, say: ‘this was all a complete surprise!’
Are they drunk? What are they smoking? What sort of pills are they eating? That they behave this way?
Ulfkotte?
Lie?
Q: How does a man know when his wife is losing interest?
A: When her favorite sexual position is next door.
*.*
Scientists have developed a blood test that can tell who will die in the next ten years. They've also gone on record as telling Charlie Sheen, "Oh, don't bother."
Walmart is suing Tesla after their solar panels broke out into flames. In Tesla's defense, they did break out in flames more efficiently than regular solar panels.
How many syllables are in the word "Gloria"? CATHOLICS: 18
I've always wondered why some people jump off the tops of buildings to see if they can fly. Wouldn't it be safer and make a lot more sense to try to fly UP to the top?
Boise, Idaho is ranked as the best city in which to buy a house. Unless, of course, you're commuting from Savannah.
*.*
A man picks up a young woman in a bar and convinces her to come
back to his hotel. When they are relaxing afterwards, he asks,
"Am I the first man you ever made love to?" She looks at him
thoughtfully for a second before replying. "You might be," she
says. "Your face looks familiar."
*.*
Millennials flock to join military’s new ‘Safe Space’ Force
BERKELEY, Calif. — Military recruiting offices have been overwhelmed with millennials seeking to join the Pentagon’s upcoming “Safe Space” Force, sources confirmed today.
The proposed force came at the suggestion of President Donald Trump while speaking to a group of young Marines stationed in Miramar, California. The speech was later shared on social media by a number of millennials currently lacking the requisite fitness to join the current military, but who were enthusiastic about reduced physical standards of the Safe Space Force.
“Since there is no gravity in space — and therefore no weight — they can’t discriminate against fit-but-fat people like me,” said Suzanne Paunchy, a gender-studies major that stands 5’4” and is now down to 195 pounds after her recent juice cleanse.
In interviews outside the Marine Corps recruiting office in Berkeley, a number of prospective enlistees spoke of the benefits of their service in the Safe Space Force, which senior defense officials say would likely fall under the Department of the Air Force.
“I haven’t been able to find a job that I am passionate about since I graduated with my poetry degree, so I moved back in with my dad and stepmom,” said Ezra Bard, who graduated from UC-Berkeley in 2013. “Outer space seems like a great way to escape the greed of the corporate world. I just hope the cafeteria serves avocado toast, and that they pay enough for me to afford my Spotify premium subscription.”
“This is the first good idea Trump has had,” said Hillary Stein, a liberal arts major whose father recently purchased her a Mercedes with his rebate from the new tax plan. “I heard that Elon Musk is going to be the Commanding General of the Safe Space Force, and he invented electricity so that means he’s really smart.”
Still, some were more enthusiastic about escaping Earth rather than the prospect of public service .
“I heard climate change will cause the earth to become uninhabitable next year, so humans will need to move to another galaxy to survive. I am excited to be a bona-fide Space Cadet, and I hope to fight the Buggers just like that kid from Ender’s Game,” said Dwight Dorkus, a gluten free vegan and serves as president of the U.C. Berkeley Comic-Con Club.
*.*
I'm glad "feta" isn't the plural of "fetus."
If it were, I might have to cut back on eating Greek salads.
Quote of the Times;
The superior man is distressed by the limitations of his ability; he is not distressed by the fact that men do not recognize the ability that he has. - Confucius
Link of the Times;
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/1019/hanson100319.php3?fbclid=IwAR2HJPRGrzI0j4o05EAXnpuFWWGtdQGOeJyovEBWY1UJU3ywK95LtAE0828#szlB7msyVDlZspKc.01
Issue of the Times;
Why Liberals and Progressives Lie to Blacks by Roger L. Simon
In a Slate article -- "Democratic Candidates Are Misrepresenting Michael Brown's Death"-- the reliably-liberal William Saletan wrote:
Last week, in a Democratic presidential debate, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro read a list of black Americans killed by police violence. Alongside Laquan McDonald, Walter Scott, and Eric Garner, Castro named Michael Brown, who was shot dead five years ago in Ferguson, Missouri. Several of the current Democratic candidates have accused the officer who shot Brown of murder. Brown’s death was a tragedy, but it wasn’t a murder.
Besides Castro, the candidates who have joined in this calumny were Kamala Harris, Tom Steyer, and quasi-frontrunner Elizabeth Warren. Saletan continued:
But at the core of the story, there was a problem: The original account of Brown’s death, that he had been shot in the back or while raising his hands in surrender, was false. The shooting was thoroughly investigated, first by a grand jury and then by the Obama Justice Department. The investigations found that Brown assaulted Wilson, tried to grab his gun, and was shot dead while advancing toward Wilson again.
Saletan, I suppose to protect his liberal bonafides, also notes: "Brown became an icon of the Black Lives Matter movement for understandable reasons." (Oh, really?) But let's leave that aside and examine why the candidates are promulgating such a well-proven lie (Saletan does a good job demonstrating its extent), not even correcting it when confronted by the press, in Warren's case most egregiously so.
The obvious is that they are fishing for votes. Warren has a putative weakness with African American voters. Tom Steyer is unknown to them (as he is to a lot of people). Harris is sinking fast and needs to shore up her rep and Julián Castro's campaign has barely been registering enough to keep him on the debate stage.
But beneath this are more disturbing beliefs, one of which is on the edge of disgusting and actually racist: that African Americans prefer to be lied to than told the truth. The corollary to this is that they are easily lied to if you stir them up. The level of disrespect in this is off the charts.
Also at play here, as it is everywhere in Democratic precincts, is Fear of Trump. African Americans are doing better under Trump than they ever have been in this country with unemployment at record lows and salaries up.
Further, Trump really did something never done before -- spearheaded and signed criminal justice reform legislation. Better not remind black people of that. Distract them or lie to them instead. Call Trump a racist, though why would a racist do such a thing? (At the end of the first paragraph of his article, Saletan cites such reform as necessary with, unsurprisingly, nary a mention of Trump's achievement.)
This is all of a piece with the exploitation of African Americans by the Democratic Party that has been going on since the Age of Johnson, Lyndon. This only got worse under Obama when numerous prevarications and exaggerations encouraged a new separatism in a society that had made immense strides in racial equality. (A new documentary on the Trayvon Martin case explores the dishonesty behind this particular episode.)
This dishonesty to black people practiced by Warren and the others -- fomenting anger toward the police -- makes the lives of African Americans worse, frequently endangering them and resulting in their deaths, as Heather Mac Donald details so well in her The War on Cops. I often wonder how many liberals have read this book. I imagine very few because it so undermines their virtue-signaling narrative with uncomfortable and overwhelming facts. For someone like Warren to fan the flames of cop-hatred is despicable and immoral, but not surprising for someone so willing to lie about her Indian ethnicity. If black lives truly did matter to her, she would never say such a thing.
Just the other day, legendary power forward Charles Barkley, put it this way in his usually pungent manner: "Democrats only talk to black people every four years." He could have added: "And when they do, they lie."
A: When her favorite sexual position is next door.
*.*
Scientists have developed a blood test that can tell who will die in the next ten years. They've also gone on record as telling Charlie Sheen, "Oh, don't bother."
Walmart is suing Tesla after their solar panels broke out into flames. In Tesla's defense, they did break out in flames more efficiently than regular solar panels.
How many syllables are in the word "Gloria"? CATHOLICS: 18
I've always wondered why some people jump off the tops of buildings to see if they can fly. Wouldn't it be safer and make a lot more sense to try to fly UP to the top?
Boise, Idaho is ranked as the best city in which to buy a house. Unless, of course, you're commuting from Savannah.
*.*
A man picks up a young woman in a bar and convinces her to come
back to his hotel. When they are relaxing afterwards, he asks,
"Am I the first man you ever made love to?" She looks at him
thoughtfully for a second before replying. "You might be," she
says. "Your face looks familiar."
*.*
Millennials flock to join military’s new ‘Safe Space’ Force
BERKELEY, Calif. — Military recruiting offices have been overwhelmed with millennials seeking to join the Pentagon’s upcoming “Safe Space” Force, sources confirmed today.
The proposed force came at the suggestion of President Donald Trump while speaking to a group of young Marines stationed in Miramar, California. The speech was later shared on social media by a number of millennials currently lacking the requisite fitness to join the current military, but who were enthusiastic about reduced physical standards of the Safe Space Force.
“Since there is no gravity in space — and therefore no weight — they can’t discriminate against fit-but-fat people like me,” said Suzanne Paunchy, a gender-studies major that stands 5’4” and is now down to 195 pounds after her recent juice cleanse.
In interviews outside the Marine Corps recruiting office in Berkeley, a number of prospective enlistees spoke of the benefits of their service in the Safe Space Force, which senior defense officials say would likely fall under the Department of the Air Force.
“I haven’t been able to find a job that I am passionate about since I graduated with my poetry degree, so I moved back in with my dad and stepmom,” said Ezra Bard, who graduated from UC-Berkeley in 2013. “Outer space seems like a great way to escape the greed of the corporate world. I just hope the cafeteria serves avocado toast, and that they pay enough for me to afford my Spotify premium subscription.”
“This is the first good idea Trump has had,” said Hillary Stein, a liberal arts major whose father recently purchased her a Mercedes with his rebate from the new tax plan. “I heard that Elon Musk is going to be the Commanding General of the Safe Space Force, and he invented electricity so that means he’s really smart.”
Still, some were more enthusiastic about escaping Earth rather than the prospect of public service .
“I heard climate change will cause the earth to become uninhabitable next year, so humans will need to move to another galaxy to survive. I am excited to be a bona-fide Space Cadet, and I hope to fight the Buggers just like that kid from Ender’s Game,” said Dwight Dorkus, a gluten free vegan and serves as president of the U.C. Berkeley Comic-Con Club.
*.*
I'm glad "feta" isn't the plural of "fetus."
If it were, I might have to cut back on eating Greek salads.
Quote of the Times;
The superior man is distressed by the limitations of his ability; he is not distressed by the fact that men do not recognize the ability that he has. - Confucius
Link of the Times;
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/1019/hanson100319.php3?fbclid=IwAR2HJPRGrzI0j4o05EAXnpuFWWGtdQGOeJyovEBWY1UJU3ywK95LtAE0828#szlB7msyVDlZspKc.01
Issue of the Times;
Why Liberals and Progressives Lie to Blacks by Roger L. Simon
In a Slate article -- "Democratic Candidates Are Misrepresenting Michael Brown's Death"-- the reliably-liberal William Saletan wrote:
Last week, in a Democratic presidential debate, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro read a list of black Americans killed by police violence. Alongside Laquan McDonald, Walter Scott, and Eric Garner, Castro named Michael Brown, who was shot dead five years ago in Ferguson, Missouri. Several of the current Democratic candidates have accused the officer who shot Brown of murder. Brown’s death was a tragedy, but it wasn’t a murder.
Besides Castro, the candidates who have joined in this calumny were Kamala Harris, Tom Steyer, and quasi-frontrunner Elizabeth Warren. Saletan continued:
But at the core of the story, there was a problem: The original account of Brown’s death, that he had been shot in the back or while raising his hands in surrender, was false. The shooting was thoroughly investigated, first by a grand jury and then by the Obama Justice Department. The investigations found that Brown assaulted Wilson, tried to grab his gun, and was shot dead while advancing toward Wilson again.
Saletan, I suppose to protect his liberal bonafides, also notes: "Brown became an icon of the Black Lives Matter movement for understandable reasons." (Oh, really?) But let's leave that aside and examine why the candidates are promulgating such a well-proven lie (Saletan does a good job demonstrating its extent), not even correcting it when confronted by the press, in Warren's case most egregiously so.
The obvious is that they are fishing for votes. Warren has a putative weakness with African American voters. Tom Steyer is unknown to them (as he is to a lot of people). Harris is sinking fast and needs to shore up her rep and Julián Castro's campaign has barely been registering enough to keep him on the debate stage.
But beneath this are more disturbing beliefs, one of which is on the edge of disgusting and actually racist: that African Americans prefer to be lied to than told the truth. The corollary to this is that they are easily lied to if you stir them up. The level of disrespect in this is off the charts.
Also at play here, as it is everywhere in Democratic precincts, is Fear of Trump. African Americans are doing better under Trump than they ever have been in this country with unemployment at record lows and salaries up.
Further, Trump really did something never done before -- spearheaded and signed criminal justice reform legislation. Better not remind black people of that. Distract them or lie to them instead. Call Trump a racist, though why would a racist do such a thing? (At the end of the first paragraph of his article, Saletan cites such reform as necessary with, unsurprisingly, nary a mention of Trump's achievement.)
This is all of a piece with the exploitation of African Americans by the Democratic Party that has been going on since the Age of Johnson, Lyndon. This only got worse under Obama when numerous prevarications and exaggerations encouraged a new separatism in a society that had made immense strides in racial equality. (A new documentary on the Trayvon Martin case explores the dishonesty behind this particular episode.)
This dishonesty to black people practiced by Warren and the others -- fomenting anger toward the police -- makes the lives of African Americans worse, frequently endangering them and resulting in their deaths, as Heather Mac Donald details so well in her The War on Cops. I often wonder how many liberals have read this book. I imagine very few because it so undermines their virtue-signaling narrative with uncomfortable and overwhelming facts. For someone like Warren to fan the flames of cop-hatred is despicable and immoral, but not surprising for someone so willing to lie about her Indian ethnicity. If black lives truly did matter to her, she would never say such a thing.
Just the other day, legendary power forward Charles Barkley, put it this way in his usually pungent manner: "Democrats only talk to black people every four years." He could have added: "And when they do, they lie."
Scheme?
If you ask my son why he joined the Army he will proudly tell you he joined to military to kill people.
He's a terrible doctor.
*.*
Two elderly ladies meet at the launderette after not seeing one another for some time. After inquiring about each other's health, one asked how the other's husband was doing.
"Oh! Ted died last week. He went out to the garden to dig up a cabbage for dinner, had a heart attack and dropped down dead right there in the middle of the vegetable patch!"
"Oh dear! I'm very sorry," replied her friend, "What did you do?"
"Opened a can of peas."
*.*
Nobel Peace Prize Committee Informs Trump He Has Not Launched Enough Drone Strikes To Qualify
OSLO, NORWAY—The Norwegian Nobel Committee was reportedly considering President Trump as a recipient of its prestigious Nobel Peace Prize, as the president had submitted his name for consideration to them over 67 times. But after reviewing his credentials, the committee concluded that he had not launched enough drone strikes against foreigners to qualify.
"Yeah, you've dabbled in attacks, but what we're really looking for is someone who's really committed to a secret drone war," said a spokesperson for the committee. "Look at previous winners like Barack Obama: now there's a shining example of someone who achieved world peace not through lame diplomacy but by blowing up foreigners with impunity."
Obama also criticized Trump's drone strike count, saying they were "rookie numbers" and he needs to "pump those numbers up."
"My fellow Americans, it represents a danger to democracy when we have a president who's either unwilling or unable to bomb as many foreigners as I did," Obama said, reading off a teleprompter. "During my scandal-free presidency, I was able to drop over 26,000 bombs some years."
"Those were the days," he added, going off-script as his eyes glazed over and he recalled the feeling of dark, evil power that coursed through his veins when he ordered drone strikes on foreign nations we were not at war with, innocent civilians, and the occasional American citizen.
The Nobel Prize committee said they would consider Trump again next year, provided he starts a war with Iran.
*.*
There are at least 331 foreign words for positive emotional states and concepts that we don't have in English
One criticism levelled at positive psychology is that it takes an overly Western-centric view of the lighter side of
human experience. Addressing that problem, Tim Lomas at the University of East London has begun a deep investigation
into all the non-English words for positive emotions and concepts that don't have a direct translation in English.
Publishing his initial findings in the The Journal of Positive Psychology, Lomas' hope is not only that we might
learn more about the positive psychology of other cultures, but that hearing of these words might enrich our own
emotional lives. Of course there is a long-running debate about how much words influence our thoughts and emotions.
Few people these days would advocate the idea that you can't feel an emotion if you don't have a word for it. But
Lomas argues that at a minimum, if you don't have a way of identifying a specific emotion or feeling, it "becomes
just another unconceptualised ripple in the ongoing flux of subjective experience."
Lomas' method was to trawl websites devoted to "untranslatable words" (i.e. words that don't have a single
corresponding word in English), then to do some googling and finally to consult colleagues and students. This way he
ended up with a list of 331 untranslatable words for positive emotional states and concepts. To find approximate
English definitions of the words he used online dictionaries and academic references. Here are some examples of the
untranslatable positive words that Lomas has organized into three main categories:
Words relating to feelings, including the subcategories of positive and complex feelings:
Gula – Spanish for the desire to eat simply for the taste
Sobremesa – Spanish for when the food has finished but the conversation is still flowing
Mbukimvuki – Bantu for "to shuck of one's clothes in order to dance"
Schnapsidee – German for coming up with an ingenious plan when drunk
Volta – Greek for leisurely strolling the streets
Gokotta – Swedish for waking up early to listen to bird song
Suaimhneas croi – Gaelic for the happiness that comes from finishing a task
Iktsuarpok – Inuit for the anticipation felt when waiting for someone
Vacilando – Greek for the idea of wandering, where the act of travelling is more important than the destination
Gumusservi – Turkish for the glimmer that moonlight makes on water
Words relating to relationships, including the subcategories of intimacy and more general prosociality:
Nakama – Japanese for friends who one considers like family
Kanyininpa – Aboriginal Pintupi for a relationship between holder and held, akin to the deep nurturing feelings
Experienced by a parent for their child
Gigil – Philippine Tagalog for the irresistible urge to pinch or squeeze someone because you love them so much
Kilig – Tagalog for the butterflies in the stomach you get when interacting with someone you find attractive
Sarang – Korean for when you wish to be with someone until death
Myotahapea – Finnish for vicarious embarrassment
Mudita – Sanskrit for revelling in someone else's joy
Karma – the well known Buddhist term for when ethical actions lead to future positive states
Firgun – Hebrew for saying nice things to someone simply to make them feel good
Asabiyyah – Arabic for a sense of community spirit
Words relating to character, including the subcategories of resources and spirituality:
Sitzfleisch – German for the ability to persevere through hard or boring tasks (literally "sit meat")
Baraka – Arabic for a gift of spiritual energy that can be passed from one person to another
Jugaad – Hindi for the ability to get by or make do
Desenrascanco – Portuguese for the ability to artfully disentangle oneself from a troublesome situation
Sprezzatura – Italian for when all art and effort are concealed beneath a "studied carelessness"
Pihentagyu – Hungarian for quick witted people who come up with sophisticated jokes and solutions (literally "with a relaxed brain")
Kao pu – Chinese for someone who is reliable and responsible and gets things done without causing problems for others
Prajna – Sanskrit for intellectual wisdom and experiential insight
Wu Wei – Chinese for "do nothing" (literally) but meaning that one's actions are entirely natural and effortless
Bodhi – Sanskrit for when one has gained complete insight into nature
*.*
Q: How many Californians does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: Surprisingly just one but it may not do them much good during wildfire season.
Quote of the Times;
Take some personal accountability for yourself and your actions and watch your life improve immediately.
Link of the Times;
https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2019/09/25/fremont-police-tesla-out-of-electricity-pursuit/
Issue of the Times;
Ex-Google and Facebook employee says silicon valley’s use of H1B visa is “institutional slavery” by Didi Rankovic
The H1B visa scheme that the Unites States introduced in 1990 to allow companies to bring in highly skilled foreign workers who were otherwise unavailable in the domestic labor market, has become a very controversial political topic.
Originally, companies could bring in up to 65,000 workers from abroad – most of them computer and engineering talent, but in 2013, this limit was raised to 300,000.
The stated goal was to allow the US to attract the best and the brightest – but the way the program has since been implemented has drawn criticism on multiple grounds. Companies hiring in this way were not required to prove that they tried to fill the position with American workers, and they don't have to pay foreigners the same salary for comparable jobs, as Mother Jones noted back in 2013.
In addition, experienced highly skilled domestic workers are being hired less and less, as the more expensive option compared to the H1B workforce. And a Computerworld report from 2017 said that Apple was able to pay H1B visa holders as low as just over $50,000 a year – in an industry where the average was $93,000. The scheme has not only introduced questionable ethics and hindered job creation in the US, but has also motivated massive layoffs, carried out by vocal proponents of allowing more H1B workers into the country.
With this in mind, the current US administration led by Donald Trump made it one of its policy points to do something about the visa program, seeing it as harmful to the country's economy as cheap imported labor undermines the ability of Americans to find work in these industries. And true to that stance, in 2017 Trump signed an executive order introducing tighter rules around the granting of H1B visas.
The result has been a dramatic increase in rejections of H1B visa applications – from 13 percent in 2017 to 32 percent in 2019, Silicon Republic reports.
On the other hand, critics of the H1B visas also come from inside the tech industry, and from a different angle, that focuses on what seem to be unethical internal policies and poor treatment of foreign workers.
“Institutionalized slavery”
One of them is former Google and Facebook employee and programmer Patrick Shyu, who has made it something of a cause to continue to spill the beans on the inside workings of these giants on his YouTube channel TechLead.
In a new video – tellingly entitled, “Are Facebook employees depressed? (H1B slavery visa & abuse)” – Shyu explores the human cost of the H1B program, in the context of the overall poor treatment of tech employees that often results in mental issues such as depression, and sometimes even workplace suicide.
Shyu sheds light on why tech companies have such a strong preference for bringing in foreign workers over hiring equally qualified American counterparts, and his conclusion is damning: it comes down to a form of modern-day, institutionalized slavery.
According to him, the real reason for US companies to hire foreigners is not their difficulty in filling these jobs at home, but their desire to underpay and control workers in extreme ways. The fact that foreign workers depend on continued employment to avoid deportation means that they will accept working conditions and treatment by managers that US workers, with incomparably greater job options, never would.
Shyu gives the example of Facebook's relentless performance-based stack ranking, that encourages back-stabbing between colleagues, as making others appear less efficient elevates your own status. One of the things encouraged and implicitly expected of employees is to work long hours and weekends; and due to their vulnerable status in the US, H1B workers are more susceptible to accepting these conditions, which can eventually all too easily lead to burnout and harm their well-being.
Shyu goes so far as to say that the tech industry's biggest “innovation” has not been a technical invention, but this “modern slavery” that is beneficial to the companies' bottom line in the way any cheap labor, or indeed, slavery must be.
According to Shyu, the way companies fight to make the most of the H1B program is not merely by using it to its full potential, but also by abusing it – for example by creating job interview techniques that filter out American workers “to get cheap labor that they absolutely control.”
The H1B program has entered the public sphere once again as, last week, a Facebook employee who was reportedly on the H1B visa program took their own life – leading staff to start to speak out on “stressful” workloads at the company.
He's a terrible doctor.
*.*
Two elderly ladies meet at the launderette after not seeing one another for some time. After inquiring about each other's health, one asked how the other's husband was doing.
"Oh! Ted died last week. He went out to the garden to dig up a cabbage for dinner, had a heart attack and dropped down dead right there in the middle of the vegetable patch!"
"Oh dear! I'm very sorry," replied her friend, "What did you do?"
"Opened a can of peas."
*.*
Nobel Peace Prize Committee Informs Trump He Has Not Launched Enough Drone Strikes To Qualify
OSLO, NORWAY—The Norwegian Nobel Committee was reportedly considering President Trump as a recipient of its prestigious Nobel Peace Prize, as the president had submitted his name for consideration to them over 67 times. But after reviewing his credentials, the committee concluded that he had not launched enough drone strikes against foreigners to qualify.
"Yeah, you've dabbled in attacks, but what we're really looking for is someone who's really committed to a secret drone war," said a spokesperson for the committee. "Look at previous winners like Barack Obama: now there's a shining example of someone who achieved world peace not through lame diplomacy but by blowing up foreigners with impunity."
Obama also criticized Trump's drone strike count, saying they were "rookie numbers" and he needs to "pump those numbers up."
"My fellow Americans, it represents a danger to democracy when we have a president who's either unwilling or unable to bomb as many foreigners as I did," Obama said, reading off a teleprompter. "During my scandal-free presidency, I was able to drop over 26,000 bombs some years."
"Those were the days," he added, going off-script as his eyes glazed over and he recalled the feeling of dark, evil power that coursed through his veins when he ordered drone strikes on foreign nations we were not at war with, innocent civilians, and the occasional American citizen.
The Nobel Prize committee said they would consider Trump again next year, provided he starts a war with Iran.
*.*
There are at least 331 foreign words for positive emotional states and concepts that we don't have in English
One criticism levelled at positive psychology is that it takes an overly Western-centric view of the lighter side of
human experience. Addressing that problem, Tim Lomas at the University of East London has begun a deep investigation
into all the non-English words for positive emotions and concepts that don't have a direct translation in English.
Publishing his initial findings in the The Journal of Positive Psychology, Lomas' hope is not only that we might
learn more about the positive psychology of other cultures, but that hearing of these words might enrich our own
emotional lives. Of course there is a long-running debate about how much words influence our thoughts and emotions.
Few people these days would advocate the idea that you can't feel an emotion if you don't have a word for it. But
Lomas argues that at a minimum, if you don't have a way of identifying a specific emotion or feeling, it "becomes
just another unconceptualised ripple in the ongoing flux of subjective experience."
Lomas' method was to trawl websites devoted to "untranslatable words" (i.e. words that don't have a single
corresponding word in English), then to do some googling and finally to consult colleagues and students. This way he
ended up with a list of 331 untranslatable words for positive emotional states and concepts. To find approximate
English definitions of the words he used online dictionaries and academic references. Here are some examples of the
untranslatable positive words that Lomas has organized into three main categories:
Words relating to feelings, including the subcategories of positive and complex feelings:
Gula – Spanish for the desire to eat simply for the taste
Sobremesa – Spanish for when the food has finished but the conversation is still flowing
Mbukimvuki – Bantu for "to shuck of one's clothes in order to dance"
Schnapsidee – German for coming up with an ingenious plan when drunk
Volta – Greek for leisurely strolling the streets
Gokotta – Swedish for waking up early to listen to bird song
Suaimhneas croi – Gaelic for the happiness that comes from finishing a task
Iktsuarpok – Inuit for the anticipation felt when waiting for someone
Vacilando – Greek for the idea of wandering, where the act of travelling is more important than the destination
Gumusservi – Turkish for the glimmer that moonlight makes on water
Words relating to relationships, including the subcategories of intimacy and more general prosociality:
Nakama – Japanese for friends who one considers like family
Kanyininpa – Aboriginal Pintupi for a relationship between holder and held, akin to the deep nurturing feelings
Experienced by a parent for their child
Gigil – Philippine Tagalog for the irresistible urge to pinch or squeeze someone because you love them so much
Kilig – Tagalog for the butterflies in the stomach you get when interacting with someone you find attractive
Sarang – Korean for when you wish to be with someone until death
Myotahapea – Finnish for vicarious embarrassment
Mudita – Sanskrit for revelling in someone else's joy
Karma – the well known Buddhist term for when ethical actions lead to future positive states
Firgun – Hebrew for saying nice things to someone simply to make them feel good
Asabiyyah – Arabic for a sense of community spirit
Words relating to character, including the subcategories of resources and spirituality:
Sitzfleisch – German for the ability to persevere through hard or boring tasks (literally "sit meat")
Baraka – Arabic for a gift of spiritual energy that can be passed from one person to another
Jugaad – Hindi for the ability to get by or make do
Desenrascanco – Portuguese for the ability to artfully disentangle oneself from a troublesome situation
Sprezzatura – Italian for when all art and effort are concealed beneath a "studied carelessness"
Pihentagyu – Hungarian for quick witted people who come up with sophisticated jokes and solutions (literally "with a relaxed brain")
Kao pu – Chinese for someone who is reliable and responsible and gets things done without causing problems for others
Prajna – Sanskrit for intellectual wisdom and experiential insight
Wu Wei – Chinese for "do nothing" (literally) but meaning that one's actions are entirely natural and effortless
Bodhi – Sanskrit for when one has gained complete insight into nature
*.*
Q: How many Californians does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: Surprisingly just one but it may not do them much good during wildfire season.
Quote of the Times;
Take some personal accountability for yourself and your actions and watch your life improve immediately.
Link of the Times;
https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2019/09/25/fremont-police-tesla-out-of-electricity-pursuit/
Issue of the Times;
Ex-Google and Facebook employee says silicon valley’s use of H1B visa is “institutional slavery” by Didi Rankovic
The H1B visa scheme that the Unites States introduced in 1990 to allow companies to bring in highly skilled foreign workers who were otherwise unavailable in the domestic labor market, has become a very controversial political topic.
Originally, companies could bring in up to 65,000 workers from abroad – most of them computer and engineering talent, but in 2013, this limit was raised to 300,000.
The stated goal was to allow the US to attract the best and the brightest – but the way the program has since been implemented has drawn criticism on multiple grounds. Companies hiring in this way were not required to prove that they tried to fill the position with American workers, and they don't have to pay foreigners the same salary for comparable jobs, as Mother Jones noted back in 2013.
In addition, experienced highly skilled domestic workers are being hired less and less, as the more expensive option compared to the H1B workforce. And a Computerworld report from 2017 said that Apple was able to pay H1B visa holders as low as just over $50,000 a year – in an industry where the average was $93,000. The scheme has not only introduced questionable ethics and hindered job creation in the US, but has also motivated massive layoffs, carried out by vocal proponents of allowing more H1B workers into the country.
With this in mind, the current US administration led by Donald Trump made it one of its policy points to do something about the visa program, seeing it as harmful to the country's economy as cheap imported labor undermines the ability of Americans to find work in these industries. And true to that stance, in 2017 Trump signed an executive order introducing tighter rules around the granting of H1B visas.
The result has been a dramatic increase in rejections of H1B visa applications – from 13 percent in 2017 to 32 percent in 2019, Silicon Republic reports.
On the other hand, critics of the H1B visas also come from inside the tech industry, and from a different angle, that focuses on what seem to be unethical internal policies and poor treatment of foreign workers.
“Institutionalized slavery”
One of them is former Google and Facebook employee and programmer Patrick Shyu, who has made it something of a cause to continue to spill the beans on the inside workings of these giants on his YouTube channel TechLead.
In a new video – tellingly entitled, “Are Facebook employees depressed? (H1B slavery visa & abuse)” – Shyu explores the human cost of the H1B program, in the context of the overall poor treatment of tech employees that often results in mental issues such as depression, and sometimes even workplace suicide.
Shyu sheds light on why tech companies have such a strong preference for bringing in foreign workers over hiring equally qualified American counterparts, and his conclusion is damning: it comes down to a form of modern-day, institutionalized slavery.
According to him, the real reason for US companies to hire foreigners is not their difficulty in filling these jobs at home, but their desire to underpay and control workers in extreme ways. The fact that foreign workers depend on continued employment to avoid deportation means that they will accept working conditions and treatment by managers that US workers, with incomparably greater job options, never would.
Shyu gives the example of Facebook's relentless performance-based stack ranking, that encourages back-stabbing between colleagues, as making others appear less efficient elevates your own status. One of the things encouraged and implicitly expected of employees is to work long hours and weekends; and due to their vulnerable status in the US, H1B workers are more susceptible to accepting these conditions, which can eventually all too easily lead to burnout and harm their well-being.
Shyu goes so far as to say that the tech industry's biggest “innovation” has not been a technical invention, but this “modern slavery” that is beneficial to the companies' bottom line in the way any cheap labor, or indeed, slavery must be.
According to Shyu, the way companies fight to make the most of the H1B program is not merely by using it to its full potential, but also by abusing it – for example by creating job interview techniques that filter out American workers “to get cheap labor that they absolutely control.”
The H1B program has entered the public sphere once again as, last week, a Facebook employee who was reportedly on the H1B visa program took their own life – leading staff to start to speak out on “stressful” workloads at the company.
90%?
A father thought it was about time to lecture his son, who was somewhat scatter-brained and frivolous.
"Jim," he said, "You're getting to be a man now and you ought to take life more seriously.
Just think . . .if I died all of a sudden, where would you be?"
"I'd be right here, dad," said Jim.
"The question is, where would YOU be?"
*.*
Amazing Anagrams of famous people
• Justin Timberlake: I'm a jerk, but listen
• Arnold Schwarzenegger: he's grown large n' crazed
• Clint Eastwood: old west action
• Jennifer Aniston: fine in torn jeans
• Sean Connery: on any screen
• Howard Stern: wonder trash
• Babe Ruth: he rub bat
• Robin Williams: I warm billions
• Monty Python's Flying Circus: strongly psychotic, I'm funny
• Steve Martin: I'm star event
• Princess Diana: ascend in Paris & end is a car spin
• Harry Potter: try hero part
• Academy Awards: saw drama decay
• the American Dream: meet a dear, rich man
• Declaration of Independence: no finer deed, an ideal concept
*.*
Why did the pastry chef hire a softball pitcher?
Because she knew how to handle the batter.
What is the difference between a softball player and a baby?
The baby will stop whining after a while.
Why don't orphans play softball?
Because they don't know where home is.
Q: Why can't you play softball in the jungle?
A: Because there are too many cheetahs.
What was the frog doing on the softball field?
Catching flies.
Why are frogs great outfielders?
They never miss a fly.
Why is an umpire like an angry chicken?
They both have foul mouths.
*.*
My wife, a registered nurse, once fussed over every pain or mishap that came my way. Recently, however, I got an indication that the honeymoon is over.
I was about to fix the attic fan, and as I lifted myself from the ladder in the attic, I scratched my forehead on a crossbeam. Crawling along, I picked up splinters in both hands, and I cut one hand replacing the fan belt. On the way down the ladder, I missed the last two rungs and turned my ankle.
When I limped into the kitchen, my wife took one look and said, "Are those your good pants?"
*.*
An Irish schoolteacher asks her class to use the word "contagious." Roland, the teacher's pet, gets up and says, "Last year I got the measles and my mum said it was contagious." "Well done Roland," says the teacher. "Can anyone else try?" Katie, a sweet little girl with pigtails, says, "My grandma says there's a bug going round, and it's contagious." "Well done, Katie," says the teacher. "Anyone else?" Little Seamus speaks up and says, "Our next door neighbor is painting his house with a two-inch brush, and my Da says it will take the contagious."
Quote of the Times;
Socialism is rape, capitalism is consensual sex.
Link of the Times;
https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Main_Page
Issue of the Times;
90% Of Plastic Waste Polluting Earth's Oceans Comes From Asia and Africa by Paul Joseph Watson
Despite westerners being lectured by climate activists like Greta Thunberg, a study has found that around 90 per cent of plastic waste polluting earth’s oceans comes from Asia and Africa.
During her U.S. tour, Thunberg cited “horrifying pictures of plastic in the oceans,” as one of the primary reasons why Americans should listen to her.
However, researchers at Germany’s Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research discovered that a small number of rivers account for the vast majority of plastic pollution and none of them are located in western countries.
“The 10 top-ranked rivers transport 88-95 percent of the global load into the sea,” Dr. Christian Schmidt, a hydrogeologist who led the study, told the Daily Mail.
“The rivers with the highest estimated plastic loads are characterized by high population – for instance the Yangtze with over half a billion people.”
Out of the top ten rivers that produce the most pollution, eight are in Asia and two are in Africa. The Yangtze River in China and the Ganges River in India were responsible for the most plastic pollution.
While westerners are being told to alter their lifestyles and have fewer children to save the planet, virtually nothing is being said about or to the people in the countries responsible for the vast majority of pollution.
This is probably one of the main reasons why many in the west remain skeptical about the true motives of the environmentalist movement.
As we reported earlier, only 38 per cent of Americans believe global warming is man made.
"Jim," he said, "You're getting to be a man now and you ought to take life more seriously.
Just think . . .if I died all of a sudden, where would you be?"
"I'd be right here, dad," said Jim.
"The question is, where would YOU be?"
*.*
Amazing Anagrams of famous people
• Justin Timberlake: I'm a jerk, but listen
• Arnold Schwarzenegger: he's grown large n' crazed
• Clint Eastwood: old west action
• Jennifer Aniston: fine in torn jeans
• Sean Connery: on any screen
• Howard Stern: wonder trash
• Babe Ruth: he rub bat
• Robin Williams: I warm billions
• Monty Python's Flying Circus: strongly psychotic, I'm funny
• Steve Martin: I'm star event
• Princess Diana: ascend in Paris & end is a car spin
• Harry Potter: try hero part
• Academy Awards: saw drama decay
• the American Dream: meet a dear, rich man
• Declaration of Independence: no finer deed, an ideal concept
*.*
Why did the pastry chef hire a softball pitcher?
Because she knew how to handle the batter.
What is the difference between a softball player and a baby?
The baby will stop whining after a while.
Why don't orphans play softball?
Because they don't know where home is.
Q: Why can't you play softball in the jungle?
A: Because there are too many cheetahs.
What was the frog doing on the softball field?
Catching flies.
Why are frogs great outfielders?
They never miss a fly.
Why is an umpire like an angry chicken?
They both have foul mouths.
*.*
My wife, a registered nurse, once fussed over every pain or mishap that came my way. Recently, however, I got an indication that the honeymoon is over.
I was about to fix the attic fan, and as I lifted myself from the ladder in the attic, I scratched my forehead on a crossbeam. Crawling along, I picked up splinters in both hands, and I cut one hand replacing the fan belt. On the way down the ladder, I missed the last two rungs and turned my ankle.
When I limped into the kitchen, my wife took one look and said, "Are those your good pants?"
*.*
An Irish schoolteacher asks her class to use the word "contagious." Roland, the teacher's pet, gets up and says, "Last year I got the measles and my mum said it was contagious." "Well done Roland," says the teacher. "Can anyone else try?" Katie, a sweet little girl with pigtails, says, "My grandma says there's a bug going round, and it's contagious." "Well done, Katie," says the teacher. "Anyone else?" Little Seamus speaks up and says, "Our next door neighbor is painting his house with a two-inch brush, and my Da says it will take the contagious."
Quote of the Times;
Socialism is rape, capitalism is consensual sex.
Link of the Times;
https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Main_Page
Issue of the Times;
90% Of Plastic Waste Polluting Earth's Oceans Comes From Asia and Africa by Paul Joseph Watson
Despite westerners being lectured by climate activists like Greta Thunberg, a study has found that around 90 per cent of plastic waste polluting earth’s oceans comes from Asia and Africa.
During her U.S. tour, Thunberg cited “horrifying pictures of plastic in the oceans,” as one of the primary reasons why Americans should listen to her.
However, researchers at Germany’s Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research discovered that a small number of rivers account for the vast majority of plastic pollution and none of them are located in western countries.
“The 10 top-ranked rivers transport 88-95 percent of the global load into the sea,” Dr. Christian Schmidt, a hydrogeologist who led the study, told the Daily Mail.
“The rivers with the highest estimated plastic loads are characterized by high population – for instance the Yangtze with over half a billion people.”
Out of the top ten rivers that produce the most pollution, eight are in Asia and two are in Africa. The Yangtze River in China and the Ganges River in India were responsible for the most plastic pollution.
While westerners are being told to alter their lifestyles and have fewer children to save the planet, virtually nothing is being said about or to the people in the countries responsible for the vast majority of pollution.
This is probably one of the main reasons why many in the west remain skeptical about the true motives of the environmentalist movement.
As we reported earlier, only 38 per cent of Americans believe global warming is man made.
Last?
The scene is sometime in the old era when cockpits had round dials plus
flight engineers and navigators. The crusty old-timer captain is breaking in
a brand new navigator.
The captain opens his briefcase, pulls out a .38 and rests it on the glare
panel. He asks the navigator, "Know what this is for?"
"No, sir," replies the newbie.
"I use it on navigators that get us lost," explains the captain, winking at
his first officer.
The navigator then opens his briefcase, pulls out a .45 an sets it on his
chart table.
"What's THAT for?" queries the surprised captain.
"Well, sir," replies the navigator, "I'll know we're lost before you will."
*.*
At my granddaughter's wedding, the DJ polled the guests
to see who had been married longest.’
It turned out to be my husband and I who had been.’
The DJ asked us, "What advice would you give
to the newly-married couple?"
I said, "The three most important words in a marriage are,
'You're probably right.'"
Everyone then looked at my husband.’ He said,
"She's probably right."
*.*
Democrats sue Iran over right to use ‘Death to America’ as 2020 campaign slogan
The Democratic National Committee has sued the sovereign country of Iran over the right to use “Death to America” as their 2020 Presidential campaign slogan.
The lawsuit, which includes the right to use “America is the great Satan (even though we don’t believe in God)” as well, will be the first lawsuit to capitulate at the outset and just give the world’s #1 state sponsor of terror a flat fee of $4 billion in cash.
“We believe that we have the right to use this slogan in our materials as we Democrats have been trying to kill America much longer than Iran has,” DNC Chair Franz Finklebottom said.
*.*
Exchanges Between Pilots And Control Towers:
Tower: "TWA 2341, for noise reduction turn right 45 Degrees."
TWA 2341: "Center, we are at 35,000 feet. How much noise can we make up here?"
Tower: "Sir, have you ever heard the noise a 747 makes when it hits a 727?"
-.-
From an unknown aircraft waiting in a very long takeoff queue: "I'm f-ing bored!"
Ground Traffic Control: "Last aircraft transmitting, identify yourself immediately!"
Unknown aircraft: "I said I was f-ing bored, not f-ing stupid!"
-.-
A Pan Am 727 flight, waiting for start clearance in Munich, overheard the following:
Lufthansa (in German): "Ground, what is our start clearance time?"
Ground (in English): "If you want an answer you must speak in English."
Lufthansa (in English): "I am a German, flying a German airplane, in Germany. Why must I speak English?"
Unknown voice from another plane (in a beautiful British accent): "Because you lost the bloody war!"
*.*
AUBURN, CA - Local 36-year-old man Nate Ripley, who identifies as a six-year-old, “absolutely crushed” a game-winning homer at a local tee-ball game and won the championship for his team Monday evening, reports confirmed.
Ripley reportedly walked up to the plate in the bottom of the 6th, pointed his bat toward the left-field wall looming 130 feet in the distance, and let her rip, sending the ball rocketing over the fence and into a parking lot as the fans cheered and his coach yelled out, “Attaboy, Nate! Good job, bud!”
His team, the Lil’ Padres, attempted to hoist him up on their shoulders in celebration of their great victory over the favored Tiny Tigers, but were unable to pick up the large 230-pound man.
Ripley’s feat comes at the end of a momentous tee-ball season, in which the self-identified six-year-old absolutely shattered every record set prior to that point. With a 1.000 batting average, 52 home runs, and an incredible showing at first base, second base, shortstop, third base, and pitcher, the man is being called an inspiration to other six-year-olds everywhere.
Quote of the Times;
“Macron cannot even avoid a foreseeable fire in a church that is a world heritage site,” Lorenzoni (chief of staff to Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro) said in a reference to the blaze that devastated the Notre Dame cathedral in April. “What does he intend to teach our country?
Link of the Times;
https://www.azbordertrash.gov/
Issue of the Times;
The Last Communist City by Michael J. Totten
A visit to the dystopian Havana that tourists never see.
Neill Blomkamp’s 2023 science-fiction film Elysium, starring Matt Damon and Jodie Foster, takes place in Los Angeles, circa 2194. The wealthy have moved into an orbiting luxury satellite—the Elysium of the title—while the wretched majority of humans remain in squalor on Earth. The film works passably as an allegory for its director’s native South Africa, where racial apartheid was enforced for nearly 50 years, but it’s a rather cartoonish vision of the American future. Some critics panned the film for pushing a socialist message. Elysium’s dystopian world, however, is a near-perfect metaphor for an actually existing socialist nation just 90 miles from Florida.
I’ve always wanted to visit Cuba—not because I’m nostalgic for a botched utopian fantasy but because I wanted to experience Communism firsthand. When I finally got my chance several months ago, I was startled to discover how much the Cuban reality lines up with Blomkamp’s dystopia. In Cuba, as in Elysium, a small group of economic and political elites live in a rarefied world high above the impoverished masses. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, authors of The Communist Manifesto, would be appalled by the misery endured by Cuba’s ordinary citizens and shocked by the relatively luxurious lifestyles of those who keep the poor down by force.
Many tourists return home convinced that the Cuban model succeeds where the Soviet model failed. But that’s because they never left Cuba’s Elysium.
I had to lie to get into the country. Customs and immigration officials at Havana’s tiny, dreary José Martí International Airport would have evicted me had they known I was a journalist. But not even a total-surveillance police state can keep track of everything and everyone all the time, so I slipped through. It felt like a victory. Havana, the capital, is clean and safe, but there’s nothing to buy. It feels less natural and organic than any city I’ve ever visited. Initially, I found Havana pleasant, partly because I wasn’t supposed to be there and partly because I felt as though I had journeyed backward in time. But the city wasn’t pleasant for long, and it certainly isn’t pleasant for the people living there. It hasn’t been so for decades.
Outside its small tourist sector, the rest of the city looks as though it suffered a catastrophe on the scale of Hurricane Katrina or the Indonesian tsunami. Roofs have collapsed. Walls are splitting apart. Window glass is missing. Paint has long vanished. It’s eerily dark at night, almost entirely free of automobile traffic. I walked for miles through an enormous swath of destruction without seeing a single tourist. Most foreigners don’t know that this other Havana exists, though it makes up most of the city—tourist buses avoid it, as do taxis arriving from the airport. It is filled with people struggling to eke out a life in the ruins.
Marxists have ruled Cuba for more than a half-century now. Fidel Castro, Argentine guerrilla Che Guevara, and their 26th of July Movement forced Fulgencio Batista from power in 1959 and replaced his standard-issue authoritarian regime with a Communist one. The revolutionaries promised liberal democracy, but Castro secured absolute power and flattened the country with a Marxist-Leninist battering ram. The objectives were total equality and the abolition of money; the methods were total surveillance and political prisons. The state slogan, then and now, is “socialism or death.”
Cuba was one of the world’s richest countries before Castro destroyed it—and the wealth wasn’t just in the hands of a tiny elite. “Contrary to the myth spread by the revolution,” wrote Alfred Cuzan, a professor of political science at the University of West Florida, “Cuba’s wealth before 1959 was not the purview of a privileged few. . . . Cuban society was as much of a middle-class society as Argentina and Chile.” In 1958, Cuba had a higher per-capita income than much of Europe. “More Americans lived in Cuba prior to Castro than Cubans lived in the United States,” Cuban exile Humberto Fontova, author of a series of books about Castro and Guevara, tells me. “This was at a time when Cubans were perfectly free to leave the country with all their property. In the 1940s and 1950s, my parents could get a visa for the United States just by asking. They visited the United States and voluntarily returned to Cuba. More Cubans vacationed in the U.S. in 1955 than Americans vacationed in Cuba. Americans considered Cuba a tourist playground, but even more Cubans considered the U.S. a tourist playground.” Havana was home to a lot of that prosperity, as is evident in the extraordinary classical European architecture that still fills the city. Poor nations do not—cannot—build such grand or elegant cities.
But rather than raise the poor up, Castro and Guevara shoved the rich and the middle class down. The result was collapse. “Between 1960 and 1976,” Cuzan says, “Cuba’s per capita GNP in constant dollars declined at an average annual rate of almost half a percent. The country thus has the tragic distinction of being the only one in Latin America to have experienced a drop in living standards over the period.”
Communism destroyed Cuba’s prosperity, but the country experienced unprecedented pain and deprivation when Moscow cut off its subsidies after the fall of the Soviet Union. Journalist and longtime Cuba resident Mark Frank writes vividly about this period in his book Cuban Revelations. “The lights were off more than they were on, and so too was the water. . . . Food was scarce and other consumer goods almost nonexistent. . . . Doctors set broken bones without anesthesia. . . . Worm dung was the only fertilizer.” He quotes a nurse who tells him that Cubans “used to make hamburgers out of grapefruit rinds and banana peels; we cleaned with lime and bitter orange and used the black powder in batteries for hair dye and makeup.” “It was a haunting time,” Frank wrote, “that still sends shivers down Cubans’ collective spines.”
By the 1990s, Cuba needed economic reform as much as a gunshot victim needs an ambulance. Castro wasn’t about to reform himself and his ideology out of existence, but he had to open up at least a small piece of the country to the global economy. So the Soviet subsidy was replaced by vacationers, mostly from Europe and Latin America, who brought in much-needed hard currency. Arriving foreigners weren’t going to tolerate receiving ration cards for food—as the locals do—so the island also needed some restaurants. The regime thus allowed paladars—restaurants inside private homes—to open, though no one from outside the family could work in them. (That would be “exploitative.”) Around the same time, government-run “dollar stores” began selling imported and relatively luxurious goods to non-Cubans. Thus was Cuba’s quasi-capitalist bubble created.
When the ailing Fidel Castro ceded power to his less doctrinaire younger brother Raúl in 2013, the quasi-capitalist bubble expanded, but the economy remains heavily socialist. In the United States, we have a minimum wage; Cuba has a maximum wage—$20 a month for almost every job in the country. (Professionals such as doctors and lawyers can make a whopping $19 extra a month.) Sure, Cubans get “free” health care and education, but as Cuban exile and Yale historian Carlos Eire says, “All slave owners need to keep their slaves healthy and ensure that they have the skills to perform their tasks.”
Even employees inside the quasi-capitalist bubble don’t get paid more. The government contracts with Spanish companies such as Meliá International to manage Havana’s hotels. Before accepting its contract, Meliá said that it wanted to pay workers a decent wage. The Cuban government said fine, so the company pays $8–$19 an hour. But Meliá doesn’t pay its employees directly. Instead, the firm gives the compensation to the government, which then pays the workers—but only after pocketing most of the money. I asked several Cubans in my hotel if that arrangement is really true. All confirmed that it is. The workers don’t get $8–$19 an hour; they get 67 cents a day—a child’s allowance.
The maximum wage is just the beginning. Not only are most Cubans not allowed to have money; they’re hardly allowed to have things. The police expend extraordinary manpower ensuring that everyone required to live miserably at the bottom actually does live miserably at the bottom. Dissident blogger and author Yoani Sánchez describes the harassment sarcastically in her book Havana Real: “Buses are stopped in the middle of the street and bags inspected to see if we are carrying some cheese, a lobster, or some dangerous shrimp hidden among our personal belongings.” Perhaps the saddest symptom of Cuba’s state-enforced poverty is the prostitution epidemic—a problem the government officially denies and even forbids foreign journalists based in Havana to mention. Some Cuban prostitutes are professionals, but many are average women—wives, girlfriends, sisters, mothers—who solicit johns once or twice a year for a little extra money to make ends meet.
The government defends its maximum wage by arguing that life’s necessities are either free or so deeply subsidized in Cuba that citizens don’t need very much money. (Che Guevara and his sophomoric hangers-on hoped to rid Cuba of money entirely, but couldn’t quite pull it off.) The free and subsidized goods and services, though, are as dismal as everything else on the island. Citizens who take public transportation to work—which includes almost everyone, since Cuba hardly has any cars—must wait in lines for up to two hours each way to get on a bus. And commuters must pay for their ride out of their $20 a month. At least commuter buses are cheap. By contrast, a one-way ticket to the other side of the island costs several months’ pay; a round-trip costs almost an annual salary.
As for the free health care, patients have to bring their own medicine, their own bedsheets, and even their own iodine to the hospital. Most of these items are available only on the illegal black market, moreover, and must be paid for in hard currency—and sometimes they’re not available at all. Cuba has sent so many doctors abroad—especially to Venezuela, in exchange for oil—that the island is now facing a personnel shortage. “I don’t want to say there are no doctors left,” says an American man who married a Cuban woman and has been back dozens of times, “but the island is now almost empty. I saw a banner once, hanging from somebody’s balcony, that said, DO I NEED TO GO TO VENEZUELA FOR MY HEADACHE?”
Housing is free, too, but so what? Americans can get houses in abandoned parts of Detroit for only $500—which makes them practically free—but no one wants to live in a crumbling house in a gone-to-the-weeds neighborhood. I saw adequate housing in the Cuban countryside, but almost everyone in Havana lives in a Detroit-style wreck, with caved-in roofs, peeling paint, and doors hanging on their hinges at odd angles.
Education is free, and the country is effectively 90 percent literate, thanks to Castro’s campaign to teach rural people to read shortly after he took power. But the regime has yet to make a persuasive argument that a totalitarian police state was required to get the literacy rate from 80 percent to 90 percent. After all, almost every other country in the Western Hemisphere managed the same feat at the same time, without the brutal repression.
Cuba is short of everything but air and sunshine. In her book, Sánchez describes an astonishing appearance by Raúl Castro on television, during which he boasted that the economy was doing so well now that everyone could drink milk. “To me,” Sánchez wrote, “someone who grew up on a gulp of orange-peel tea, the news seemed incredible.” She never thought she’d see the day. “I believed we would put a man on the moon, take first place among all nations in the upcoming Olympics, or discover a vaccine for AIDS before we would put the forgotten morning café con leche, coffee with milk, within reach of every person on this island.” And yet Raúl’s promise of milk for all was deleted from the transcription of the speech in Granma, the Communist Party newspaper. He went too far: there was not enough milk to ensure that everyone got some.
Even things as simple as cooking oil and soap are black-market goods. Individuals who, by some illegal means or another, manage to acquire such desirables will stand on street corners and whisper “cooking oil” or “sugar” to passersby, and then sell the product on the sly out of their living room. If they’re caught, both sellers and buyers will be arrested, of course, but the authorities can’t put the entire country in jail. “Everyone cheats,” says Eire. “One must in order to survive. The verb ‘to steal’ has almost vanished from usage. Breaking the rules is necessary. Resolví mi problema, which means ‘I solved my problem,’ is the Cuban way of referring to stealing or cheating or selling on the black market.”
Cuba has two economies now: the national Communist economy for the majority; and a quasi-capitalist one for foreigners and the elite. Each has its own currency: the Communist economy uses the Cuban peso, and the capitalist bubble uses the convertible peso. Cuban pesos are worth nothing. They can’t be converted to dollars or euros. Foreigners can’t even spend them in Cuba. The convertible pesos are pegged to the U.S. dollar, but banks and hotels pay only 87 Cuban cents for each one—the government takes 19 percent off the top. The rigged exchange rate is an easy way to shake down foreigners without most noticing. It also enables the state to drain Cuban exiles. A million Cuban-Americans live in south Florida, and another half-million live elsewhere in the United States. They send hundreds of millions of dollars a year to family members still on the island. The government gets its 19 percent instantaneously and most of the remaining 87 percent later because almost every place that someone can spend the money is owned by the state.
Castro created the convertible peso mainly to seal off Cuba’s little capitalist bubble from the ragged majority in the Communist economy. “Foreign journalists report on the creation of ever more luxurious hotels, golf courses, and marinas,” Eire says, “but fail to highlight the very simple and brutal fact that these facilities will be enjoyed strictly by foreigners and the Castronoid power elite. Apartheid, discrimination, and segregation are deliberately built in to the entire tourist industry and, in fact, are essential to its maintenance and survival.”
Until a few years ago, ordinary Cubans weren’t allowed even to set foot inside hotels or restaurants unless they worked there, lest they find themselves exposed to the seductive lifestyles of the decadent bourgeoisie from capitalist nations like Mexico, Chile, and Spain. (I cite these three countries because most of the tourists I ran into spoke Spanish to one another.) A few years ago, the government stopped physically blocking Cubans from hotels and restaurants, partly because Raúl is a little more relaxed about these things than Fidel but also because most Cubans can’t afford to go to these places, anyway.
A single restaurant meal in Havana costs an entire month’s salary. One night in a hotel costs five months’ salary. A middle-class tourist from abroad can easily spend more in one day than most Cubans make in a year. I had dinner with four Americans at one of the paladars. The only Cubans in the restaurant were the cooks and the waiters. The bill for the five of us came to about $190. That’s five months’ salary.
The Floridita bar in downtown Havana was one of Ernest Hemingway’s hangouts when he lived there (from 1940 until 1960, the year after Castro came to power). He was in the Floridita all the time—and, in a way, he still is. There’s a statue of him sitting on his favorite bar stool, grinning at today’s patrons. The décor is exactly the same, but there’s a big difference: everyone in the bar these days is a tourist. Cubans aren’t strictly banned any more, but a single bottle of beer costs a week’s salary. No one would blow his dismal paycheck on that.
If he were still around, Hemingway would be stunned to see what has happened to his old haunt. Cubans certainly aren’t happy about it, but the tourists are another story—especially the world’s remaining Marxoid fellow travelers, who show up in Havana by the planeload. Such people are clearly unteachable. I got into an argument with one at the Floridita when I pointed out that none of the patrons were Cuban. “There are places in the United States that some can’t afford,” she retorted. Sure, but come on. Not even the poorest Americans have to pay a week’s wage for a beer.
Cubans in the hotel industry see how foreigners live. The government can’t hide it without shutting the hotels down entirely, and it can’t do that because it needs the money. I changed a few hundred American dollars into convertible pesos at the front desk. The woman at the counter didn’t blink when I handed over my cash—she does this all day—but when she first got the job, it must have been shattering to make such an exchange. That’s why the regime wants to keep foreigners and locals apart.
Tourists tip waiters, taxi drivers, tour guides, and chambermaids in hard currency, and to stave off a revolt from these people, the government lets them keep the additional money, so they’re “rich” compared with everyone else. In fact, they’re an elite class enjoying privileges—enough income to afford a cell phone, go out to restaurants and bars, log on to the Internet once in a while—that ordinary Cubans can’t even dream of. I asked a few people how much chambermaids earn in tips, partly so that I would know how much to leave on my dresser and also to get an idea of just how crazy Cuban economics are. Supposedly, the maids get about $1 per day for each room. If they clean an average of 30 rooms a day and work five days a week, they’ll bring in $600 a month—30 times what everyone else gets. “All animals are equal,” George Orwell wrote in Animal Farm, his allegory of Stalinism, “but some animals are more equal than others.” Only in the funhouse of a Communist country is the cleaning lady rich compared with the lawyer. Yet elite Cubans are impoverished compared with the middle class and even the poor outside Cuba.
About half the dinners I had were acceptable, and a few were outstanding, but the breakfast buffets in my hotel, the Habana Libre, were uniformly disgusting. Bacon was half-raw, the sausage made from God-knows-what. The cheese was discolored, the bread hard and flavorless. Yet the grim offering was advertised in the lobby as “exquisite.” Maybe if you’ve spent your entire life on a Cuban ration card, it’s exquisite, but otherwise—no. The question wasn’t what I wanted to eat, but what I thought I could eat without my stomach rising up in rebellion.
Leftists often talk about “food deserts” in Western cities, where the poor supposedly lack options to buy affordable and nutritious food. If they want to see a real food desert, they should come to Havana. I went to a grocery store across the street from the exclusive Meliá Cohiba Hotel, where the lucky few with access to hard currency shop to supplement their meager state rations. The store was in what passes for a mall in Havana—a cluttered concrete box, shabby compared even with malls I’ve visited in Iraq. It carried rice, beans, frozen chicken, milk, bottled water, booze, a small bit of cheese, minuscule amounts of rancid-looking meat, some low-end cookies and chips from Brazil—and that’s it. No produce, cereal, no cans of soup, no pasta. A 7–19 has a far better selection, and this is a place for Cuba’s “rich” to shop. I heard, but cannot confirm, that potatoes would not be available anywhere in Cuba for another four months.
Shortly before I left Havana, I met a Cuban-American man and his wife visiting from Miami. “Is this your first time here?” he asked. I nodded. “What do you think?” I paused before answering. I wasn’t worried that I would offend him. He lives in Miami, so his opinions of Cuba are probably little different from mine. But we were in a crowded place. Plenty of Cubans could hear us, including the police. They wouldn’t arrest me if I insulted the government, but I didn’t want to make a scene, either. “Well,” I finally said. “It’s . . . interesting.” He belted out a great belly laugh, and I smiled. His wife scowled.
“I hate this place!” she near-shouted. Fidel himself could have heard, and she wouldn’t have cared. She wasn’t going to be quiet about it. Tourists who visit Cuba and spend all their time inside the bubble for the “haves” could leave the country oblivious to the savage inequalities and squalor beyond the hotel zone, but this woman visits her husband’s family in the real Cuba and knows what it’s really like.
“His family is from here,” she said, “but mine’s not, and I will never come back here. Not while it’s like this. I feel like I’m in Iraq or Afghanistan.” I visited Iraq seven times during the war and didn’t have the heart to tell her that Baghdad, while ugly and dangerous, is vastly freer and more prosperous these days than Havana. Anyway, Iraq is precisely the kind of country with which Castro wants you to compare Cuba. It’s the wrong comparison. So are impoverished Third World countries like Guatemala and Haiti. Cuba isn’t a developing country; it’s a once-developed country destroyed by its own government. Havana was a magnificent Western city once. It should be compared not with Baghdad, Kabul, Guatemala City, or Port-au-Prince but with formerly Communist Budapest, Prague, or Berlin. Havana’s history mirrors theirs, after all.
An advertisement in my hotel claimed that the Sierra Maestra restaurant on the top floor is “probably” the best in Havana. I had saved the Sierra Maestra for my last night and rode the elevator up to the 25th floor. I had my first and only steak on the island and washed it down with Chilean red wine. The tiny bill set me back no more than having a pizza delivered at home would, but the total nevertheless exceeded an entire month’s local salary. Not surprisingly, I ate alone. Every other table was empty. The staff waited on me as if I were the president of some faraway minor republic.
I stared at the city below out the window as I sipped my red wine. Havana looked like a glittering metropolis in the dark. Night washed away the rot and the grime and revealed nothing but city lights. It occurred to me that Havana will look mostly the same—at night, anyway—after it is liberated from the tyrannical imbeciles who govern it now. I tried to pretend that I was looking out on a Cuba that was already free and that the tables around me were occupied—by local people, not foreigners—but the fantasy faded fast. I was all alone at the top of Cuba’s Elysium and yearning for home—where capitalism’s inequalities are not so jagged and stark.
flight engineers and navigators. The crusty old-timer captain is breaking in
a brand new navigator.
The captain opens his briefcase, pulls out a .38 and rests it on the glare
panel. He asks the navigator, "Know what this is for?"
"No, sir," replies the newbie.
"I use it on navigators that get us lost," explains the captain, winking at
his first officer.
The navigator then opens his briefcase, pulls out a .45 an sets it on his
chart table.
"What's THAT for?" queries the surprised captain.
"Well, sir," replies the navigator, "I'll know we're lost before you will."
*.*
At my granddaughter's wedding, the DJ polled the guests
to see who had been married longest.’
It turned out to be my husband and I who had been.’
The DJ asked us, "What advice would you give
to the newly-married couple?"
I said, "The three most important words in a marriage are,
'You're probably right.'"
Everyone then looked at my husband.’ He said,
"She's probably right."
*.*
Democrats sue Iran over right to use ‘Death to America’ as 2020 campaign slogan
The Democratic National Committee has sued the sovereign country of Iran over the right to use “Death to America” as their 2020 Presidential campaign slogan.
The lawsuit, which includes the right to use “America is the great Satan (even though we don’t believe in God)” as well, will be the first lawsuit to capitulate at the outset and just give the world’s #1 state sponsor of terror a flat fee of $4 billion in cash.
“We believe that we have the right to use this slogan in our materials as we Democrats have been trying to kill America much longer than Iran has,” DNC Chair Franz Finklebottom said.
*.*
Exchanges Between Pilots And Control Towers:
Tower: "TWA 2341, for noise reduction turn right 45 Degrees."
TWA 2341: "Center, we are at 35,000 feet. How much noise can we make up here?"
Tower: "Sir, have you ever heard the noise a 747 makes when it hits a 727?"
-.-
From an unknown aircraft waiting in a very long takeoff queue: "I'm f-ing bored!"
Ground Traffic Control: "Last aircraft transmitting, identify yourself immediately!"
Unknown aircraft: "I said I was f-ing bored, not f-ing stupid!"
-.-
A Pan Am 727 flight, waiting for start clearance in Munich, overheard the following:
Lufthansa (in German): "Ground, what is our start clearance time?"
Ground (in English): "If you want an answer you must speak in English."
Lufthansa (in English): "I am a German, flying a German airplane, in Germany. Why must I speak English?"
Unknown voice from another plane (in a beautiful British accent): "Because you lost the bloody war!"
*.*
AUBURN, CA - Local 36-year-old man Nate Ripley, who identifies as a six-year-old, “absolutely crushed” a game-winning homer at a local tee-ball game and won the championship for his team Monday evening, reports confirmed.
Ripley reportedly walked up to the plate in the bottom of the 6th, pointed his bat toward the left-field wall looming 130 feet in the distance, and let her rip, sending the ball rocketing over the fence and into a parking lot as the fans cheered and his coach yelled out, “Attaboy, Nate! Good job, bud!”
His team, the Lil’ Padres, attempted to hoist him up on their shoulders in celebration of their great victory over the favored Tiny Tigers, but were unable to pick up the large 230-pound man.
Ripley’s feat comes at the end of a momentous tee-ball season, in which the self-identified six-year-old absolutely shattered every record set prior to that point. With a 1.000 batting average, 52 home runs, and an incredible showing at first base, second base, shortstop, third base, and pitcher, the man is being called an inspiration to other six-year-olds everywhere.
Quote of the Times;
“Macron cannot even avoid a foreseeable fire in a church that is a world heritage site,” Lorenzoni (chief of staff to Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro) said in a reference to the blaze that devastated the Notre Dame cathedral in April. “What does he intend to teach our country?
Link of the Times;
https://www.azbordertrash.gov/
Issue of the Times;
The Last Communist City by Michael J. Totten
A visit to the dystopian Havana that tourists never see.
Neill Blomkamp’s 2023 science-fiction film Elysium, starring Matt Damon and Jodie Foster, takes place in Los Angeles, circa 2194. The wealthy have moved into an orbiting luxury satellite—the Elysium of the title—while the wretched majority of humans remain in squalor on Earth. The film works passably as an allegory for its director’s native South Africa, where racial apartheid was enforced for nearly 50 years, but it’s a rather cartoonish vision of the American future. Some critics panned the film for pushing a socialist message. Elysium’s dystopian world, however, is a near-perfect metaphor for an actually existing socialist nation just 90 miles from Florida.
I’ve always wanted to visit Cuba—not because I’m nostalgic for a botched utopian fantasy but because I wanted to experience Communism firsthand. When I finally got my chance several months ago, I was startled to discover how much the Cuban reality lines up with Blomkamp’s dystopia. In Cuba, as in Elysium, a small group of economic and political elites live in a rarefied world high above the impoverished masses. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, authors of The Communist Manifesto, would be appalled by the misery endured by Cuba’s ordinary citizens and shocked by the relatively luxurious lifestyles of those who keep the poor down by force.
Many tourists return home convinced that the Cuban model succeeds where the Soviet model failed. But that’s because they never left Cuba’s Elysium.
I had to lie to get into the country. Customs and immigration officials at Havana’s tiny, dreary José Martí International Airport would have evicted me had they known I was a journalist. But not even a total-surveillance police state can keep track of everything and everyone all the time, so I slipped through. It felt like a victory. Havana, the capital, is clean and safe, but there’s nothing to buy. It feels less natural and organic than any city I’ve ever visited. Initially, I found Havana pleasant, partly because I wasn’t supposed to be there and partly because I felt as though I had journeyed backward in time. But the city wasn’t pleasant for long, and it certainly isn’t pleasant for the people living there. It hasn’t been so for decades.
Outside its small tourist sector, the rest of the city looks as though it suffered a catastrophe on the scale of Hurricane Katrina or the Indonesian tsunami. Roofs have collapsed. Walls are splitting apart. Window glass is missing. Paint has long vanished. It’s eerily dark at night, almost entirely free of automobile traffic. I walked for miles through an enormous swath of destruction without seeing a single tourist. Most foreigners don’t know that this other Havana exists, though it makes up most of the city—tourist buses avoid it, as do taxis arriving from the airport. It is filled with people struggling to eke out a life in the ruins.
Marxists have ruled Cuba for more than a half-century now. Fidel Castro, Argentine guerrilla Che Guevara, and their 26th of July Movement forced Fulgencio Batista from power in 1959 and replaced his standard-issue authoritarian regime with a Communist one. The revolutionaries promised liberal democracy, but Castro secured absolute power and flattened the country with a Marxist-Leninist battering ram. The objectives were total equality and the abolition of money; the methods were total surveillance and political prisons. The state slogan, then and now, is “socialism or death.”
Cuba was one of the world’s richest countries before Castro destroyed it—and the wealth wasn’t just in the hands of a tiny elite. “Contrary to the myth spread by the revolution,” wrote Alfred Cuzan, a professor of political science at the University of West Florida, “Cuba’s wealth before 1959 was not the purview of a privileged few. . . . Cuban society was as much of a middle-class society as Argentina and Chile.” In 1958, Cuba had a higher per-capita income than much of Europe. “More Americans lived in Cuba prior to Castro than Cubans lived in the United States,” Cuban exile Humberto Fontova, author of a series of books about Castro and Guevara, tells me. “This was at a time when Cubans were perfectly free to leave the country with all their property. In the 1940s and 1950s, my parents could get a visa for the United States just by asking. They visited the United States and voluntarily returned to Cuba. More Cubans vacationed in the U.S. in 1955 than Americans vacationed in Cuba. Americans considered Cuba a tourist playground, but even more Cubans considered the U.S. a tourist playground.” Havana was home to a lot of that prosperity, as is evident in the extraordinary classical European architecture that still fills the city. Poor nations do not—cannot—build such grand or elegant cities.
But rather than raise the poor up, Castro and Guevara shoved the rich and the middle class down. The result was collapse. “Between 1960 and 1976,” Cuzan says, “Cuba’s per capita GNP in constant dollars declined at an average annual rate of almost half a percent. The country thus has the tragic distinction of being the only one in Latin America to have experienced a drop in living standards over the period.”
Communism destroyed Cuba’s prosperity, but the country experienced unprecedented pain and deprivation when Moscow cut off its subsidies after the fall of the Soviet Union. Journalist and longtime Cuba resident Mark Frank writes vividly about this period in his book Cuban Revelations. “The lights were off more than they were on, and so too was the water. . . . Food was scarce and other consumer goods almost nonexistent. . . . Doctors set broken bones without anesthesia. . . . Worm dung was the only fertilizer.” He quotes a nurse who tells him that Cubans “used to make hamburgers out of grapefruit rinds and banana peels; we cleaned with lime and bitter orange and used the black powder in batteries for hair dye and makeup.” “It was a haunting time,” Frank wrote, “that still sends shivers down Cubans’ collective spines.”
By the 1990s, Cuba needed economic reform as much as a gunshot victim needs an ambulance. Castro wasn’t about to reform himself and his ideology out of existence, but he had to open up at least a small piece of the country to the global economy. So the Soviet subsidy was replaced by vacationers, mostly from Europe and Latin America, who brought in much-needed hard currency. Arriving foreigners weren’t going to tolerate receiving ration cards for food—as the locals do—so the island also needed some restaurants. The regime thus allowed paladars—restaurants inside private homes—to open, though no one from outside the family could work in them. (That would be “exploitative.”) Around the same time, government-run “dollar stores” began selling imported and relatively luxurious goods to non-Cubans. Thus was Cuba’s quasi-capitalist bubble created.
When the ailing Fidel Castro ceded power to his less doctrinaire younger brother Raúl in 2013, the quasi-capitalist bubble expanded, but the economy remains heavily socialist. In the United States, we have a minimum wage; Cuba has a maximum wage—$20 a month for almost every job in the country. (Professionals such as doctors and lawyers can make a whopping $19 extra a month.) Sure, Cubans get “free” health care and education, but as Cuban exile and Yale historian Carlos Eire says, “All slave owners need to keep their slaves healthy and ensure that they have the skills to perform their tasks.”
Even employees inside the quasi-capitalist bubble don’t get paid more. The government contracts with Spanish companies such as Meliá International to manage Havana’s hotels. Before accepting its contract, Meliá said that it wanted to pay workers a decent wage. The Cuban government said fine, so the company pays $8–$19 an hour. But Meliá doesn’t pay its employees directly. Instead, the firm gives the compensation to the government, which then pays the workers—but only after pocketing most of the money. I asked several Cubans in my hotel if that arrangement is really true. All confirmed that it is. The workers don’t get $8–$19 an hour; they get 67 cents a day—a child’s allowance.
The maximum wage is just the beginning. Not only are most Cubans not allowed to have money; they’re hardly allowed to have things. The police expend extraordinary manpower ensuring that everyone required to live miserably at the bottom actually does live miserably at the bottom. Dissident blogger and author Yoani Sánchez describes the harassment sarcastically in her book Havana Real: “Buses are stopped in the middle of the street and bags inspected to see if we are carrying some cheese, a lobster, or some dangerous shrimp hidden among our personal belongings.” Perhaps the saddest symptom of Cuba’s state-enforced poverty is the prostitution epidemic—a problem the government officially denies and even forbids foreign journalists based in Havana to mention. Some Cuban prostitutes are professionals, but many are average women—wives, girlfriends, sisters, mothers—who solicit johns once or twice a year for a little extra money to make ends meet.
The government defends its maximum wage by arguing that life’s necessities are either free or so deeply subsidized in Cuba that citizens don’t need very much money. (Che Guevara and his sophomoric hangers-on hoped to rid Cuba of money entirely, but couldn’t quite pull it off.) The free and subsidized goods and services, though, are as dismal as everything else on the island. Citizens who take public transportation to work—which includes almost everyone, since Cuba hardly has any cars—must wait in lines for up to two hours each way to get on a bus. And commuters must pay for their ride out of their $20 a month. At least commuter buses are cheap. By contrast, a one-way ticket to the other side of the island costs several months’ pay; a round-trip costs almost an annual salary.
As for the free health care, patients have to bring their own medicine, their own bedsheets, and even their own iodine to the hospital. Most of these items are available only on the illegal black market, moreover, and must be paid for in hard currency—and sometimes they’re not available at all. Cuba has sent so many doctors abroad—especially to Venezuela, in exchange for oil—that the island is now facing a personnel shortage. “I don’t want to say there are no doctors left,” says an American man who married a Cuban woman and has been back dozens of times, “but the island is now almost empty. I saw a banner once, hanging from somebody’s balcony, that said, DO I NEED TO GO TO VENEZUELA FOR MY HEADACHE?”
Housing is free, too, but so what? Americans can get houses in abandoned parts of Detroit for only $500—which makes them practically free—but no one wants to live in a crumbling house in a gone-to-the-weeds neighborhood. I saw adequate housing in the Cuban countryside, but almost everyone in Havana lives in a Detroit-style wreck, with caved-in roofs, peeling paint, and doors hanging on their hinges at odd angles.
Education is free, and the country is effectively 90 percent literate, thanks to Castro’s campaign to teach rural people to read shortly after he took power. But the regime has yet to make a persuasive argument that a totalitarian police state was required to get the literacy rate from 80 percent to 90 percent. After all, almost every other country in the Western Hemisphere managed the same feat at the same time, without the brutal repression.
Cuba is short of everything but air and sunshine. In her book, Sánchez describes an astonishing appearance by Raúl Castro on television, during which he boasted that the economy was doing so well now that everyone could drink milk. “To me,” Sánchez wrote, “someone who grew up on a gulp of orange-peel tea, the news seemed incredible.” She never thought she’d see the day. “I believed we would put a man on the moon, take first place among all nations in the upcoming Olympics, or discover a vaccine for AIDS before we would put the forgotten morning café con leche, coffee with milk, within reach of every person on this island.” And yet Raúl’s promise of milk for all was deleted from the transcription of the speech in Granma, the Communist Party newspaper. He went too far: there was not enough milk to ensure that everyone got some.
Even things as simple as cooking oil and soap are black-market goods. Individuals who, by some illegal means or another, manage to acquire such desirables will stand on street corners and whisper “cooking oil” or “sugar” to passersby, and then sell the product on the sly out of their living room. If they’re caught, both sellers and buyers will be arrested, of course, but the authorities can’t put the entire country in jail. “Everyone cheats,” says Eire. “One must in order to survive. The verb ‘to steal’ has almost vanished from usage. Breaking the rules is necessary. Resolví mi problema, which means ‘I solved my problem,’ is the Cuban way of referring to stealing or cheating or selling on the black market.”
Cuba has two economies now: the national Communist economy for the majority; and a quasi-capitalist one for foreigners and the elite. Each has its own currency: the Communist economy uses the Cuban peso, and the capitalist bubble uses the convertible peso. Cuban pesos are worth nothing. They can’t be converted to dollars or euros. Foreigners can’t even spend them in Cuba. The convertible pesos are pegged to the U.S. dollar, but banks and hotels pay only 87 Cuban cents for each one—the government takes 19 percent off the top. The rigged exchange rate is an easy way to shake down foreigners without most noticing. It also enables the state to drain Cuban exiles. A million Cuban-Americans live in south Florida, and another half-million live elsewhere in the United States. They send hundreds of millions of dollars a year to family members still on the island. The government gets its 19 percent instantaneously and most of the remaining 87 percent later because almost every place that someone can spend the money is owned by the state.
Castro created the convertible peso mainly to seal off Cuba’s little capitalist bubble from the ragged majority in the Communist economy. “Foreign journalists report on the creation of ever more luxurious hotels, golf courses, and marinas,” Eire says, “but fail to highlight the very simple and brutal fact that these facilities will be enjoyed strictly by foreigners and the Castronoid power elite. Apartheid, discrimination, and segregation are deliberately built in to the entire tourist industry and, in fact, are essential to its maintenance and survival.”
Until a few years ago, ordinary Cubans weren’t allowed even to set foot inside hotels or restaurants unless they worked there, lest they find themselves exposed to the seductive lifestyles of the decadent bourgeoisie from capitalist nations like Mexico, Chile, and Spain. (I cite these three countries because most of the tourists I ran into spoke Spanish to one another.) A few years ago, the government stopped physically blocking Cubans from hotels and restaurants, partly because Raúl is a little more relaxed about these things than Fidel but also because most Cubans can’t afford to go to these places, anyway.
A single restaurant meal in Havana costs an entire month’s salary. One night in a hotel costs five months’ salary. A middle-class tourist from abroad can easily spend more in one day than most Cubans make in a year. I had dinner with four Americans at one of the paladars. The only Cubans in the restaurant were the cooks and the waiters. The bill for the five of us came to about $190. That’s five months’ salary.
The Floridita bar in downtown Havana was one of Ernest Hemingway’s hangouts when he lived there (from 1940 until 1960, the year after Castro came to power). He was in the Floridita all the time—and, in a way, he still is. There’s a statue of him sitting on his favorite bar stool, grinning at today’s patrons. The décor is exactly the same, but there’s a big difference: everyone in the bar these days is a tourist. Cubans aren’t strictly banned any more, but a single bottle of beer costs a week’s salary. No one would blow his dismal paycheck on that.
If he were still around, Hemingway would be stunned to see what has happened to his old haunt. Cubans certainly aren’t happy about it, but the tourists are another story—especially the world’s remaining Marxoid fellow travelers, who show up in Havana by the planeload. Such people are clearly unteachable. I got into an argument with one at the Floridita when I pointed out that none of the patrons were Cuban. “There are places in the United States that some can’t afford,” she retorted. Sure, but come on. Not even the poorest Americans have to pay a week’s wage for a beer.
Cubans in the hotel industry see how foreigners live. The government can’t hide it without shutting the hotels down entirely, and it can’t do that because it needs the money. I changed a few hundred American dollars into convertible pesos at the front desk. The woman at the counter didn’t blink when I handed over my cash—she does this all day—but when she first got the job, it must have been shattering to make such an exchange. That’s why the regime wants to keep foreigners and locals apart.
Tourists tip waiters, taxi drivers, tour guides, and chambermaids in hard currency, and to stave off a revolt from these people, the government lets them keep the additional money, so they’re “rich” compared with everyone else. In fact, they’re an elite class enjoying privileges—enough income to afford a cell phone, go out to restaurants and bars, log on to the Internet once in a while—that ordinary Cubans can’t even dream of. I asked a few people how much chambermaids earn in tips, partly so that I would know how much to leave on my dresser and also to get an idea of just how crazy Cuban economics are. Supposedly, the maids get about $1 per day for each room. If they clean an average of 30 rooms a day and work five days a week, they’ll bring in $600 a month—30 times what everyone else gets. “All animals are equal,” George Orwell wrote in Animal Farm, his allegory of Stalinism, “but some animals are more equal than others.” Only in the funhouse of a Communist country is the cleaning lady rich compared with the lawyer. Yet elite Cubans are impoverished compared with the middle class and even the poor outside Cuba.
About half the dinners I had were acceptable, and a few were outstanding, but the breakfast buffets in my hotel, the Habana Libre, were uniformly disgusting. Bacon was half-raw, the sausage made from God-knows-what. The cheese was discolored, the bread hard and flavorless. Yet the grim offering was advertised in the lobby as “exquisite.” Maybe if you’ve spent your entire life on a Cuban ration card, it’s exquisite, but otherwise—no. The question wasn’t what I wanted to eat, but what I thought I could eat without my stomach rising up in rebellion.
Leftists often talk about “food deserts” in Western cities, where the poor supposedly lack options to buy affordable and nutritious food. If they want to see a real food desert, they should come to Havana. I went to a grocery store across the street from the exclusive Meliá Cohiba Hotel, where the lucky few with access to hard currency shop to supplement their meager state rations. The store was in what passes for a mall in Havana—a cluttered concrete box, shabby compared even with malls I’ve visited in Iraq. It carried rice, beans, frozen chicken, milk, bottled water, booze, a small bit of cheese, minuscule amounts of rancid-looking meat, some low-end cookies and chips from Brazil—and that’s it. No produce, cereal, no cans of soup, no pasta. A 7–19 has a far better selection, and this is a place for Cuba’s “rich” to shop. I heard, but cannot confirm, that potatoes would not be available anywhere in Cuba for another four months.
Shortly before I left Havana, I met a Cuban-American man and his wife visiting from Miami. “Is this your first time here?” he asked. I nodded. “What do you think?” I paused before answering. I wasn’t worried that I would offend him. He lives in Miami, so his opinions of Cuba are probably little different from mine. But we were in a crowded place. Plenty of Cubans could hear us, including the police. They wouldn’t arrest me if I insulted the government, but I didn’t want to make a scene, either. “Well,” I finally said. “It’s . . . interesting.” He belted out a great belly laugh, and I smiled. His wife scowled.
“I hate this place!” she near-shouted. Fidel himself could have heard, and she wouldn’t have cared. She wasn’t going to be quiet about it. Tourists who visit Cuba and spend all their time inside the bubble for the “haves” could leave the country oblivious to the savage inequalities and squalor beyond the hotel zone, but this woman visits her husband’s family in the real Cuba and knows what it’s really like.
“His family is from here,” she said, “but mine’s not, and I will never come back here. Not while it’s like this. I feel like I’m in Iraq or Afghanistan.” I visited Iraq seven times during the war and didn’t have the heart to tell her that Baghdad, while ugly and dangerous, is vastly freer and more prosperous these days than Havana. Anyway, Iraq is precisely the kind of country with which Castro wants you to compare Cuba. It’s the wrong comparison. So are impoverished Third World countries like Guatemala and Haiti. Cuba isn’t a developing country; it’s a once-developed country destroyed by its own government. Havana was a magnificent Western city once. It should be compared not with Baghdad, Kabul, Guatemala City, or Port-au-Prince but with formerly Communist Budapest, Prague, or Berlin. Havana’s history mirrors theirs, after all.
An advertisement in my hotel claimed that the Sierra Maestra restaurant on the top floor is “probably” the best in Havana. I had saved the Sierra Maestra for my last night and rode the elevator up to the 25th floor. I had my first and only steak on the island and washed it down with Chilean red wine. The tiny bill set me back no more than having a pizza delivered at home would, but the total nevertheless exceeded an entire month’s local salary. Not surprisingly, I ate alone. Every other table was empty. The staff waited on me as if I were the president of some faraway minor republic.
I stared at the city below out the window as I sipped my red wine. Havana looked like a glittering metropolis in the dark. Night washed away the rot and the grime and revealed nothing but city lights. It occurred to me that Havana will look mostly the same—at night, anyway—after it is liberated from the tyrannical imbeciles who govern it now. I tried to pretend that I was looking out on a Cuba that was already free and that the tables around me were occupied—by local people, not foreigners—but the fantasy faded fast. I was all alone at the top of Cuba’s Elysium and yearning for home—where capitalism’s inequalities are not so jagged and stark.
Several animals were savagely beaten in the making of this page, including but not limited to; kittens, rabbits, zebu, skunks, puppies, and platypus. Also several monkeys where force fed crack to improve their typing skills.
And someone shot a duck.
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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.