Just once, I want a username and password prompt to say: "Close Enough."
*.*
A man writing at the post office desk was approached by an older fellow with a postcard in his hand. The old man said, "Sir, I'm sorry to bother you but could you address this postcard for me? My arthritis is acting up and I can't even hold a pen."
"Certainly, sir," said the younger man. He wrote out the address and also agreed to write a short message and sign the card for the man. Finally, the younger man asked, "Now, is there anything else I can do for you?"
The old fellow glanced at the card a moment and said, "Yes, at the end could you just add, 'PS: Please excuse the sloppy hand-writing.'?"
*.*
Lines:
So apparently, Bill Gates was allowed to spend a weekend every year with his former girlfriend. Who knew the Gates were open?
New York City says they're going to offer free vaccine shots for tourists. The complimentary muggings will also continue.
New food alert: Cinnamon Toast Crunch Cereal Oatmeal. When you have to get past four words to get to the healthy one, it should be a warning.
Last week was World Bee Day. A honey of an idea.
Naomi Campbell welcomed a new baby daughter into the world this week at age 50. Apparently, the idea of raising a teenager in her late 60s sounded fun.
They're saying that up to 80% of France's vineyards have been damaged by heavy frost. That's some sobering news.
If I'm diagnosed with multiple personality disorder, does that make me a carpool?
Remember, it's physically impossible to make our own sunshine, but we can make moonshine.
Just out of curiosity, what made the Great Smokey Mountains so great?
For the record, the movie "Soylent Green" was set in the year 2022. I'd think twice about that fake meat you were considering.
*.*
A reporter asked a man how he felt when he found out that he won the lottery.
“As soon I saw the numbers line up, I knew it was going to be wife changing.”
*,*
Why haven't aliens visited our solar system yet?
They checked the reviews, but we only had one star.
Quote of the Times;
Adventure is a commitment made by the entire being, and can search our depths to bring out the best, most human qualities which remain in us. When the pack of cards has not been rigged so we win every time, then the game is real, and we find surprise, imagination, enthusiasm to succeed and the possibility of failure.
Link of the Times;
https://www.rooshv.com/30-christian-articles-i-recommend
Issue of the Times;
Escaping Serfdom by Jeff Thomas
The concept of government is that the people grant to a small group of individuals the ability to establish and maintain controls over them. The inherent flaw in such a concept is that any government will invariably and continually expand upon its controls, resulting in the ever-diminishing freedom of those who granted them the power.
When I was a schoolboy, I was taught that the feudal system of the Middle Ages consisted of serfs tilling small plots of land that belonged to a king or lord. The serfs lived a meagre life of bare subsistence and were subject to the tyranny of the king or lord whose men would ride into their village periodically and take most of the few coins the serfs had earned by their toil.
The lesson I was meant to learn from this was that I should be grateful that, in the modern world, I live in a state of freedom from tyranny, and as an adult, I would pay only that level of tax that could be described as “fair”.
Later in life, I was to learn that, in the actual feudal system, some land was owned by noblemen, some by common men. The commoners typically farmed their own land, whilst the noblemen parcelled out their land to farmers, in trade for a portion of the product of their labours.
As a part of that bargain, the nobleman would pay for an army of professional soldiers to protect both the farms and the farmers. Significantly, unlike today, no farmer was required to defend the land himself, as it was not his.
There was no exact standard as to what the noblemen would charge a farmer under this agreement, but the general standard was “one day’s labour in ten”.
This was not an amount imposed or regulated by any government. The nobleman could charge as much as he wished; however, if he raised his rate significantly, he would find that the farmers would leave and move to another nobleman’s farm. The 10% was, in essence, a rate that evolved over time through a free market.
Modern Serfdom
Today, of course, if most countries levied an income tax of a mere 10%, there would be dancing in the streets. And the days of one simple straightforward tax are long gone.
Today, the average person may expect to pay property tax (even if he is a renter), sales tax, capital gains tax, value added tax, inheritance tax, and so on. The laundry list of taxes is so long and complex that it is no longer possible to compute what the total tax level actually is for anyone.
And to this, we add the hidden tax of inflation. In the US, for example, the Federal Reserve has, over the last hundred years, devalued the dollar by 98%, a hefty tax indeed. And the US is not alone in this.
Only 50 years ago, the average man might work a 40-hour week to support a wife who remained at home raising the children. He often had a mortgage on his home but might have it paid off in ten years. He paid cash for nearly everything else that he and his family owned or consumed.
Today, both husband and wife generally must be employed full time. In spite of this, they can’t afford as many children as their parents could, and they generally remain in debt their entire lives, even after retirement. This is significant inflation by any measure.
In contrast, in the Middle Ages, the cost of goods might remain the same throughout the entire lifetime of an individual.
In light of the above, the 10% that was paid by the serfs is beginning to look very good indeed.
However, the great majority of people in the First World are likely to say, “What can you do; it’s the same all over the world. You might as well get used to it.”
Well, no, actually, it’s not. There are many governmental and economic systems out there and many are quite a bit more “serf friendly” than those in the major countries.
Countries such as the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Bermuda and the Bahamas have no income tax. Further, some have no property tax, sales tax, capital gains tax, value added tax, inheritance tax, and so on.
So how is this possible?
The OECD countries state that it is largely accomplished through money laundering, but this is not the case. In fact, low-tax jurisdictions are known to have some of the most stringent banking laws in the world.
The success of these jurisdictions is actually quite simple. Most of them are small. They have small populations and therefore need only a small government. Yet each jurisdiction can accommodate large numbers of investors from overseas. This results in a very high level of income per capita.
But unlike large countries, the money that is deposited or invested there is overseas money, so it is not captive. Investors can transfer it out overnight if need be.
So, even if the politicians are no better than those in larger countries (generally, they are of the same ilk), they’re aware that, like the noblemen of old, if they attempt to impose taxation, the business will dry up quickly.
In fact, such a free market dictates that the jurisdictions keep on their toes and keep trying to outdo their competitors by being more investment friendly.
Therefore, the politicians in these countries, who might be only too happy to promise entitlements to their constituents, then tax them to the hilt in order to pay for the entitlements, are kept restrained by their own system.
Are there downsides to living in a low-tax jurisdiction? Yes.
As most of them are small but require a very high standard of living in order to attract investors, they must import virtually all goods needed by residents. This means a higher cost of all goods, as compared to the cost in a country that produces such goods. However, the wage level is also higher, which tends to balance out the equation.
But there are also upsides.
Those who move to such a jurisdiction find that after the first year there (when the basics such as cars, televisions, etc., have been paid for), all further income that has been saved from taxation is beginning to get deposited in the bank.
At some point, the deposit level becomes great enough that investment becomes advisable. And as low-tax jurisdictions tend to be naturally prosperous, there is generally no limit to the opportunities for investment within the jurisdiction.
There is a further benefit to living in a low-tax jurisdiction that tends to become apparent over time. Any government that depends on major investments from overseas parties must, of necessity, be non-intrusive and non-invasive. Such a government stays out of people’s business, eschews electronic monitoring and most certainly is not given to SWAT teams crashing down doors for imagined wrongdoing.
Benjamin Franklin famously said, “Nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”
He was correct, but the level of tax can vary greatly from one country to the next. And just as important, the level of government intervention into the affairs of its citizenry varies considerably. In a country where the level of tax is low, the quality of life is generally correspondingly high.
A thousand years ago, noblemen, from time to time, became overly confident in their ability to keep the serfs on the farmland and demanded taxes beyond the customary “one day’s labour in ten”. When they did, the serfs of old often voted with their feet and simply moved. Today, this is still possible.
If the reader presently contributes more than one day’s labour in ten to his government, he may wish to consider voting with his feet.
News of the Times;
https://thenationalpulse.com/breaking/border-patrol-intercepts-child-rapists/
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2021/05/10/nearly-half-of-female-soldiers-still-failing-new-army-fitness-test-while-males-pass-easily.html
https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-5-9-new-scientific-scandal-shaking-the-climate-alarm-industry
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/05/the_father_who_fought_brearley_school_racism_has_a_message_for_everyone.html
https://www.theepochtimes.com/uk-plans-to-require-voter-id-to-ensure-election-integrity_3810942.html
https://conservativebrief.com/former-mayoral-candidate-40124/?utm_source=CB&utm_medium=RP78
https://newyork.cbslocal.com/2021/05/12/times-square-shooting-suspect-farrakhan-muhammad-taken-into-custody/
https://nypost.com/2020/11/20/scientists-reverse-human-aging-process-in-breakthrough-study/
https://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2021/02/03/raymond-michael-weber-vacaville-homicide/
https://www.visiontimes.com/2021/05/21/eric-clapton-astrazeneca-side-effects.html
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/05/with_shoplifting_legal_organized_crime_has_a_field_day_in_san_francisco.html
https://thelibertyloft.com/biden-waiving-sanctions-on-russian-company-raises-questions-about-colonial-pipeline-hack/
https://rumble.com/vhd2z3-jim-jordan-lays-out-the-democrat-agenda-they-dont-want-you-to-know-about.html?mref=23gga&mc=8uxj1
https://archive.ph/osCWD
https://bearingarms.com/camedwards/2021/05/20/mayor-illegal-guns-off-streets-police-found-one-her-home-n45478
Escaping?
Suvorov?
“So, you had a lads’ weekend in Amsterdam did you? Did you go with a prostitute?”, the girlfriend asked.
“Of course I didn’t, you daft cow. There’s hundreds of them there already”.
*.*
I hate it when engineering students call themselves "Engineers".
You don't see med students calling themselves "Doctor".
Or art students calling themselves unemployed.
*.*
Lines:
Diet Day 1: I have removed all the bad food from the house. It was delicious.
Ben and Jerry have rolled out a new flavor that includes unbaked cookie dough and brownie batter, called "Unbaked." I have a feeling that in developing that flavor, some baking was involved.
Rage Against The Machine never specified which machine they were angry with, but I'm going to assume it was a printer.
It isn't that I'm not a people person. It's just that I'm not a stupid people person.
I wish people came with a 30-second trailer so I could see what I'm getting myself into.
I'm the Best Man at my buddy's second wedding. Is it OK to open my dinner speech with, "Welcome back, everybody!"?
Getting older is one body part after the other saying, "Oh, you think that's bad. Watch this!"
A wise old man once told his wife... nothing. Because he was a wise old man.
A couple of kids asked me what it was like when I was growing up. So, I took their phones, shut off their Internet, gave them a popsicle and told them to go outside and play until the street lights came on.
I see people my age mountain climbing. I feel good about getting my leg through my underwear without losing my balance.
My kids laugh because they think I'm crazy. I laugh because I know it's hereditary.
It’s interesting growing up and realizing that most adults are not smart. I had my suspicions as a kid, but never thought the situation was this dire.
You know, everyone is waiting for things to get back to normal. What about those of us who weren't normal to begin with?
*.*
A little girl goes to the pet store
She ask the owner of the store if he has any bunnies.
“Well sure sweetie!” He says and takes her to where the bunnies are, “I have a few different bunnies I have this white one with floppy ears, or this fluffy little brown one, or I even have this cute one with black spots! What kind of bunny did you have in mind?”
So the little girl looks over the bunnies and then back to the pet store owner and replies, “quite frankly mister I don’t think my snake gives a damn.”
*.*
4, 6, 8 & 9 have all been killed.
2, 3, 5, 7 & 11 are all prime suspects.
Quote of the Times;
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. – Lewis
Link of the Times;
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/a-psychologist-says-parents-of-exceptionally-resilient-and-successful-kids-always-do-these-7-things-yes-some-are-a-little-intense/ar-BB1gCnfy
Issue of the Times;
Barbarossa: Suvorov's Revisionism Goes Mainstream by Laurent Guyenot
A review of Sean McMeekin, Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II
On Sunday morning June 22, 1941, driven by his hatred of “Judeo-Bolshevism” and his insatiable greed for Lebensraum, Hitler treacherously broke his pact of non-aggression with Stalin and launched the invasion of the Soviet Union. Caught off guard and badly commanded, the Red Army was overwhelmed. But thanks to the heroic resistance of the Russian people, the USSR finally routed the Germans, at the cost of some twenty million dead. It was the beginning of the end for the Nazis.
This is, in broad outline, the story of Operation Barbarossa as told by the victors.
The vanquished, naturally, had a different version. At 4:30 am on the morning of the attack, the Russian ambassador in Berlin received a formal declaration of war, later read to an international news conference, justifying the attack by the “steadily increasing concentration of all available Russian armed forces along a broad front extending from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea.” It justified the attack as preemptive:
Now that the Russian general mobilization is complete, no less than 160 divisions are deployed against Germany. The results of reconnaissance carried out in recent days have shown that the deployment of Russian troops, and especially of motorized and armored units, has been carried out in such a way that the Russian High Command is ready at any moment to take aggressive action at various points against the German frontier.
The US government ignored the German justification, and claimed that Germany’s attack was part of Hitler’s evil plan “for the cruel and brutal enslavement of all peoples and for the ultimate destruction of the remaining free democracies.”[1]
In the following months, referring to reports from the front, Hitler claimed that the Soviet forces massed on his Western border were even greater than he had thought, and proved that Stalin’s intention had been to invade not only Germany, but all of Europe. He told a large audience in Berlin on October 3, 1941:
We had no idea how gigantic the preparations of this enemy were against Germany and Europe and how immeasurably great was the danger; how we just barely escaped annihilation, not only of Germany but also of Europe. … Lord have mercy on our Volk and on the entire European world if this barbaric enemy had been able to get his tens of thousands of tanks to move before we could. All of Europe would have been lost.[2]
Hitler repeated it to the Reichstag deputies on December 11, 1941:
Today, we have truly crushing and authentic material to prove that Russia intended to attack. … [H]ad this wave of more than twenty thousand [Soviet] tanks, hundreds of divisions, tens of thousands of guns, accompanied by more than ten thousand planes, unexpectedly started to move across the Reich, then Europe would have been lost.[3]
This remained the line of defense of the military commanders accused of “crime against peace” before the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg in 1945-46. Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Chief of the Armed Forces High Command, argued that “The attack on the Soviet Union was carried out to preempt a Russian attack on Germany,” and was therefore a legal act of war.[4] His second, General Alfred Jodl, Chief of the Operations Staff, similarly testified: “It was undeniably a purely preventive war. What we found out later on was the certainty of enormous Russian military preparations opposite our frontier. … Russia was fully prepared for war.”[5] Both Keitel and Jodl were denied access to the documents that would prove their point. They were found guilty and hanged.
Was the Soviet threat to Germany and Europe real, or was it just Nazi propaganda? To this day, history textbooks say nothing about it. But it has entered the scholarly debate, thanks to the books of Vladimir Rezun, a former Soviet military intelligence officer who defected to the West in 1978, and wrote two groundbreaking books under the pseudonym of Viktor Suvorov: first in 1988, Icebreaker: Who Started the Second World War?, and in 2010, after new Russian archives had become accessible, The Chief Culprit: Stalin’s Grand Design to Start World War II. I first learned about Suvorov from Ron Unz’s 2018 article “When Stalin almost conquered Europe,” and I have since read what I could on the subject, starting with articles on Mark Weber’s indispensable site http://www.ihr.org/.
Suvorov’s thesis can be summed up as follows: on June 22, 1941, Stalin was about to launch a massive offensive on Germany and her allies, within days or weeks. Preparations had started in 1939, just after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and had accelerated at the end of 1940, with the first divisions deployed to the new expanded Soviet borders, opposite the German Reich and Romania, in February 1941. On May 5, Stalin announced to an audience of two thousand military academy graduates flanked by generals and party luminaries that the time had come to “switch from the defensive to the offensive.” Days later, he had a special directive sent to all command posts to “be prepared on a signal from General Headquarters to launch lightning strikes to rout the enemy, move military operations to his territory and seize key objectives.”[6] New armies were being raised in all the districts, with mobilization now reaching 5.7 million, a gigantic army impossible to sustain for long in peacetime. Close to one million parachutists—troops useful only for invasion—had been trained. Hundreds of aerodromes were built near the Western border. From June 13, an incessant movement of night trains transported thousands of tanks, millions of soldiers, and hundreds of thousands of tons of ammunition and fuel to the border.
According to Suvorov, if Hitler had not attacked first, the gigantic military power that Stalin had accumulated on the border would have enabled him to reach Berlin without major difficulty and then, in the context of the war, to take control of the continent. Only Hitler’s decision to preempt Stalin’s offensive deprived him of these resources by piercing and disrupting his lines and destroying or seizing about 65% of all his weaponry, some of it still in trains.
Suvorov displays an impeccable knowledge of the Red Army, and an acute expertise in military strategy. Regarding Stalin’s intentions, generally very secret, he produces numerous quotes from the 13 volumes of his writings. He sifted through mountains of archives and the memoirs of hundreds of Russian servicemen. It is not exaggerated to say that the “Suvorov thesis” has revolutionized World War II history, opening a totally new perspective to which many historians, both Russian and German, have now added details: among Germans can be mentioned Joachim Hoffmann, Adolf von Thadden, Heinz Magenheimer, Werner Maser, Ernst Topitsch, Walter Post, and Wolfgang Strauss, who has reviewed Russian historians on the topic.
Suvorov’s thesis has also generated much hostility. His opponents fall into two categories. Some authors reject completely his analysis and simply deny that Stalin was planning an offensive. When considering the symmetrical concentrations of the German and Russian armies on their common border in June 1941, they interpret them differently: German concentration proves German bellicose intentions, but the same movement among the Russians is interpreted as proof of the incompetence of Soviet generals for defense.
This trend is illustrated by David Glantz’s Stumbling Colossus, about which Ron Unz wrote: “Although purporting to refute Suvorov, the author seemed to ignore almost all of his central arguments, and merely provided a rather dull and pedantic recapitulation of the standard narrative I had previously seen hundreds of times, laced with a few rhetorical excesses denouncing the unique vileness of the Nazi regime.”
Another detractor of Suvorov is Jonathan Haslam, who attacks Suvorov for his “highly dubious use of evidence.” Haslam admits that, on May 5, 1941, Stalin had announced an imminent offensive, but interprets it as Stalin’s prevision of Hitler’s attack. He then adds: “The fact that every piece of evidence at our disposal also indicated that he showed considerable surprise when the Germans invaded on June 22 always created something of a puzzle for historians. How could Stalin both expect war and be taken by surprise at the same time?” To answer this question, Haslam gets lost in fuzzy conjectures, while Suvorov’s answer is the only logical one: Stalin knew war with Germany was imminent, but he didn’t expect Germany to strike first.
Not surprisingly, one of the harshest attacks against Suvorov came from a longtime apologist of Stalin, Tel Aviv University professor Gabriel Gorodetsky (Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia). Gorodetsky calls Suvorov’s books “flimsy and fraudulent” because they “engender myths and consistently and deliberately obstruct the search for truth by simplifying a complex situation.” Yet, as one reviewer notes, Gorodetsky “negligently ignores Suvorov’s work after page eight” and his book is replete with contradictions and unsubstantiated claims.
The second variety of authors criticizing Suvorov are those who agree with him in general, and differ only in details. One French example is a recent 1000-page book by French specialist Jean Lopez, Barbarossa 1941. La Guerre absolue (2019). Lopez does admit that Stalin was preparing to invade Europe, but treats Suvorov as a fraud and, in an earlier essay, discounted as a “myth” the notion that “Hitler anticipated an attack by Stalin,” with this argument: “According to several accounts, Stalin believes that the Red Army will not be ready until 1942. No Soviet attack, therefore, could have been undertaken before that date.”[7] This is provably false: it is true that Stalin had originally planned his massive offensive for the summer 1942, as Suvorov himself stated. But there is also plenty of evidence that, in 1940, worried by Germany’s quick victory over France, Stalin had accelerated his war preparations. According to General Andrei Vlassov, captured by the Germans in 1942, “the [Soviet] attack was planned for August-September 1941.”[8] It is hard to make sense of Lopez’s contradictions.
Even more paradoxical in its treatment of Suvorov is a book released a few weeks ago: Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II, by Sean McMeekin of Bard College in New York. I found out about it while searching (unsuccessfully) for an affordable copy of Ernst Topitsch’s book by the same title, Stalin’s War: A Radical New Theory of the Origins of the Second World War (1987). I expected McMeekin’s new book to quote from Suvorov extensively and favorably. I was surprised to find Suvorov mentioned only once. After noting that Suvorov “turned up thousands of intriguing documents” in support of his thesis and that “scores of Russian historians have investigated the ‘Suvorov thesis’,” producing in the process “two thick volumes” of more documents, McMeekin concludes: “But considerable mystery remains surrounding Stalin’s intentions on the eve of war,” and adds that no clear written document can be produced that unambiguously “proves that Stalin had already resolved on war, whether preemptive, defensive, or otherwise.”[9]
I struggled of make sense of this dismissive comment, since McMeekin actually agrees with almost every major points made by Suvorov. Just like Suvorov, and with the same sources, McMeekin shows that, despite his tactical pretense at “socialism in one country,” Stalin was unconditionally devoted to Lenin’s goal of the sovietization of Europe. His analysis of the way Stalin baited Hitler into a war on the Western front with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is totally in line with Suvorov. McMeekin attributes the same significance as Suvorov to Stalin’s announcement, on May 5, 1941, that “we must shift from defense to offence” (to which he devotes his “prologue”). His interpretation of Stalin’s simultaneous self-appointment as president of the Council of People’s Commissars exactly echoes Suvorov’s: “From this moment forward, all responsibility for Soviet foreign policy, for peace or war, for victory or defeat, lay in Stalin’s hands alone. The time for subterfuge was over. War was imminent.”[10] McMeekin repeats most of Suvorov’s evidence that Stalin’s war preparations were offensive and potentially overwhelming. He insists, like Suvorov, on the undefended air bases built near the border:
The most dramatic material evidence of more offensive Soviet intent was the construction of forward air bases abutting the new frontier separating Stalin’s empire from Hitler’s. The “Main Soviet Administration of Aerodrome Construction,” run by the NKVD, ordered the construction of 251 new Red Air Force bases in 1941, of which fully 80 percent (199) were located in western districts abutting the German Reich.[11]
In view of the evidence, McMeekin believes that “the ideal launch date for the Soviet offensive … fell in late July or August.”[12]
McMeekin even reinforces Suvorov’s argument that Hitler’s mobilization on the Eastern Front was a reaction to Stalin’s war preparations, rather than the opposite, by showing that, as early as June 1940, the Germans were receiving Intelligence reports that
the Red Army, capitalizing on the Wehrmacht’s concentration in the West, was preparing to march from Lithuania into virtually undefended East Prussia and German-occupied Poland. … On June 19, a German spy reported from Estonia that the Soviets had informed the departing British ambassador in Tallinn that Stalin planned to deploy three million troops in the Baltic region “to threaten Germany’s eastern borders.”[13]
McMeekin uses the same archives as Suvorov, but never gives him credit for first bringing them into the light. The only exception is in a single endnote, where he mentions that one of Stalin’s reasons for believing that Hitler would not attack in June was that he had “learned, via spies inside Germany, that OKW had not ordered the sheepskin coats experts believed to be necessary for winter campaigning in Russia, and that the fuel and lubricating oil used by the Wehrmacht’s armored divisions would freeze in subzero temperatures.” The note says: “Not all of Suvorov’s claims stand up, but this one gels well with Stalin’s sanguine attitude toward reports of the German arms buildup.”[14] In another footnote, McMeekin disputes Suvorov’s claim that Stalin ordered in spring 1941 the dismantlement of the “Stalin Line” of defense that would hamper the advances of his troops: it was not dismantled but simply “neglected”, says McMeekin, before adding: “Here, as elsewhere, Suvorov hurts his case by over-egging the pudding.”[15] Such criticism would be fair, if McMeekin had also acknowledged the overwhelming mass of facts that Suvorov got right.
Apparently McMeekin thought it tactically wise, not only to snub Suvorov even when he proves him right, but also to endorse his most virulent opponent David Glantz (who, he says, was “right to emphasize how poorly prepared for war the Red Army was in reality”)[16] even when he proves him wrong, with abundant evidence that in June 1941, the issue of the war “would be determined by who would strike first, gaining control of enemy airspace and knocking out airfields and tank parks.”[17]
It is not difficult to guess the motive for McMeekin’s ostentatious contempt of Suvorov. Suvorov has crossed the line by suggesting that Barbarossa saved Europe from complete sovietization. Although he expresses no sympathy for Hitler, Suvorov agrees with him that, if he had not attacked first, “Europe was lost.” Suvorov has committed an unforgivable sin. It is an untouchable cornerstone of both Western and Russian historiography that Hitler is the embodiment of absolute Evil, and that no good whatsoever could ever have come from him. And so academic historians of the Eastern Front are expected to display their good manners by shunning Suvorov, and by not asking: What if Hitler had not attacked first? They must not suggest that Hitler ever told the truth, or that his military commanders were wrongfully hanged.
Well, if the price for bringing Suvorov’s revisionism into mainstream scholarship is to deny one’s debt to Suvorov, so be it. World War II historians must be smart: one careless phrase or reference can cost you a career and a reputation, as happened to David Irving (not in McMeekin’s bibliography, incidentally). Some obvious conclusions are better left for others to draw. There is no question that McMeekin’s book is a great achievement and it must be hoped that it will become a new landmark in the historiography of World War II. It is already receiving mostly praise in the press, and giving “revisionism” a good name. Over with the “good war”!
McMeekin’s main thesis is that World War II was primarily willed and orchestrated by Stalin, whereas Hitler was only tricked into it. This is precisely what Suvorov meant when calling Hitler “Stalin’s icebreaker”. (This is also, more or less, what A.J.P. Taylor argued in The Origins of the Second World War in 1961).
There are, indeed, slight nuances between McMeekin’s and Suvorov’s perspectives. Rather than insisting on the fact that Barbarossa ruined Stalin’s plan for the conquest of Germany and Europe, McMeekin points out that Barbarossa was for Stalin “a kind of public-relations miracle” that turned him from a “mass murderer and swallower of small nations … into a victim in the view of much of the Western public.” Stalin himself, in his July 3, 1941 radio address, said that the German aggression had brought “tremendous political gain to the USSR,” creating a support in London and Washington that was “a serious and lasting factor that is bound to form the basis for the development of decisive military successes of the Red Army.”[18] That is a good point, but a minor one. From what we know of Churchill and Roosevelt’s secret intrigues before Barbarossa, it is doubtful that Stalin would have been deprived of their support if he had attacked first. Churchill had been urging him to attack Germany since 1940, and Roosevelt had started planning to help him right after his second reelection in November 1940, when he told Americans that their country must become “the great arsenal of democracy,”[19] and appointed pro-Soviet Harry Hopkins to start making arrangements.
In fact, McMeekin shows that “Roosevelt did everything he could to improve relations with Stalin” from the early years of his long presidency, starting with official recognition of the USSR in 1933. He purged the State Department of anti-Communists and staffed it with sympathizers or outright NKVD agents, such as Alger Hiss. As early as November 1936, he appointed a Soviet sympathizer, Joseph Davies, as his ambassador in Moscow, to replace William Bullitt who had become too openly critical of Stalin. “Where Ambassador Bullitt had seen deception and guile in Stalin’s foreign policy, his successor saw unicorns,” lavishing him with compliments: “You are a greater leader than Catherine the Great, than Peter the Great, a greater leader even than Lenin, etc.”[20]
And so, even though Barbarossa made it easier for Roosevelt to turn American public opinion favorably toward Stalin, it doesn’t mean that Roosevelt would have prevented Stalin from gobbling up Europe had he attacked first.
Just like Suvorov, McMeekin gives undisputable evidence that Stalin was planning to invade Europe in 1941, and had planned it for a very long time. Like Suvorov, he points out that the Comintern, founded in Moscow in 1919, aimed at the sovietization of the whole world, as symbolized by its emblem, later incorporated into the banner of the USSR.
Lenin’s primary goal was Berlin. For this, he wanted to blow up Poland, a country reconstituted after the First World War between Russia and Germany. During the summer of 1920, the Soviet cavalry attempted to invade Poland with cries of “to Berlin!” But the Poles pushed back the Russians and inflicted them losses of territory (Peace of Riga). Lenin then proclaimed a new strategy at a Moscow party congress on November 26, 1920: “Until the final victory of socialism in the whole world, we must exploit the contradictions and opposition between two imperialist power groups, between two capitalist groups of states, and incite them to attack each other.”[21]
The failure of the communist uprising in Germany in October 1923, confirmed that fomenting revolutionary unrest was not enough to overthrow Social Democracy in Germany. What was to be done was to help create the conditions for a new world war and, during this incubation period, put a damper on internationalist discourse in order to maintain trade relationships with the capitalist countries (who will ultimately “sell Communists the rope they would use to hang them”).[22]
McMeekin agrees with Suvorov that Stalin was the true heir of Lenin, whose public cult he orchestrated: “Stalin’s dialectical view of Soviet foreign policy—in which metastasizing conflict between warring capitalist factions would enable Communism to advance to new triumphs—was firmly rooted in Marxism-Leninism, based on the precedent of Russia’s own experience in the First World War, and clearly and consistently stated on many occasions, both verbally and in print”[23], most notably in his first major work after Lenin’s death, Foundations of Leninism (1924), in which he recalled that the Bolshevik revolution had triumphed in Russia because the two chief coalitions of capitalist countries had “been clutching at each other’s throats.”[24] When a new capitalist war breaks out, Stalin told the Central Committee of the Communist Party in 1925, “we will have to take action, but we shall be the last to do so. And we shall do so in order to throw the decisive weight on the scales, the weight that can turn the scales.”[25]
While preparing for World War II, Stalin’s domestic policy consisted, on the one hand, in consolidating his control over the population, and on the other hand, in building a huge military-industrial complex. “Stalin’s industrialization drive,” McMeekin writes, “was conceived, sold, and executed like a military operation targeting the capitalist world. … Whenever onerous production targets went unmet, capitalist saboteurs were blamed, as if they had been spies in an army camp.”[26]
Since the first Five-Year Plan was inaugurated in 1928, the Soviet economy had been on a war footing. The production targets of the third Five-Year Plan, launched in 1938, were breathtaking, envisioning the production of 50,000 warplanes annually by the end of 1942, along with 125,000 air engines and 700,000 tons of aerial bombs; 60,775 tanks, 119,060 artillery systems, 450,000 machine guns, and 5.2 million rifles; 489 million artillery shells, 120,000 tons of naval armor, and 1 million tons of explosives; and, for good measure, 298,000 tons of chemical weapons.[27]
Along with the establishment of a war economy, the first two five-year plans included the collectivization of agriculture. But here too, the goal was closely linked to the war, as Jean Lopez shows. In 1927, reports indicated that the peasant world, under the leadership of the kulaks, would sabotage the war effort. “The worst nightmare of the Bolshevik leaders lies in the emergence of a popular rejection of war similar to that which brought down the Romanov dynasty.”[28] This is what motivated the “Great Turn” of 1928, whose victims, either by execution, deportation, or famine, are estimated at between 10 and 16 million. During this time, Stalin sold an average of 5 million tons of grain abroad each year to finance his armaments.
In 1939, all Stalin needed was to maneuver capitalist countries into fighting each other in a new deadly war. That was the main purpose, from Stalin’s viewpoint, of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact signed on August 23, 1939, with a secret protocol for the partition of Poland and the distribution of “spheres of influence”.
Just two months earlier, Stalin was still negotiating, via his Foreign Minister Molotov and his ambassador to London Maiski, the possibility of a military alliance with England and France in order to contain Germany and protect Poland’s integrity. On June 2, 1939, Molotov handed the British and French ambassadors a draft agreement, under which the Soviets might provide mutual assistance to smaller European states under “threat of aggression by a European power.”[29] On August 12, an Anglo-French delegation arrived in Moscow for further discussion. But Stalin then changed his mind, and Molotov did not receive the delegates.[30] In a speech to the Politburo on August 19, 1939, Stalin explained why he had finally opted for a pact with Germany:
The question of war or peace has entered a critical phase for us. If we conclude a mutual assistance pact with France and Great Britain, Germany will back off from Poland and seek a modus vivendi with the Western powers. War would be avoided, but down the road events could become dangerous for the USSR. If we accept Germany’s proposal and conclude a non-aggression pact with her, she will of course invade Poland, and the intervention of France and England in that would be unavoidable. Western Europe would be subjected to serious upheavals and disorder. In this case we will have a great opportunity to stay out of the conflict, and we could plan the opportune time for us to enter the war. …
Our choice is clear. We must accept the German proposal and, with a refusal, politely send the Anglo-French mission home. Our immediate advantage will be to take Poland to the gates of Warsaw, as well as Ukrainian Galicia …
For the realization of these plans it is essential that the war continue for as long as possible, and all forces, with which we are actively involved, should be directed toward this goal …
Therefore, our goal is that Germany should carry out the war as long as possible so that England and France grow weary and become exhausted to such a degree that they are no longer in a position to put down a Sovietized Germany.
Comrades! It is in the interest of the USSR—the workers’ homeland—that war breaks out between the Reich and the capitalist Anglo-French block. Everything should be done so that this drags out as long as possible with the goal of weakening both sides. For this reason, it is imperative that we agree to conclude the pact proposed by Germany, and then work in such a way that this war, once it is declared, will be prolonged maximally. We must strengthen our propaganda work in the belligerent countries, in order to be prepared when the war ends.
This speech was leaked to the French news agency Havas the same year. Stalin immediately denounced it as a fake in Pravda, which was exceptional on his part. Its authenticity has long been debated, but in 1994 Russian historians found an authoritative text of it in the Soviet archives, and the authenticity is now generally accepted. In any case, there are other sources confirming Stalin’s ploy so that there is no doubt, for McMeekin, that with the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, “Far from wishing to forestall a European war between Germany and the Western powers, Stalin’s aim was to ensure that it would break out.”[31] For Stalin,
the benefits of the Moscow Pact for Communism were obvious. The capitalist world would soon be embroiled in a terrible war, and the USSR would be able to spread its territory substantially westward against seemingly helpless foes. All Stalin needed to do was ensure that neither Germany nor its opponents secured a decisive advantage. Once the two sides had exhausted themselves in a death struggle, the path would be clear for the armies of Communism to march in and seize the capitalist world by the throat.[32]
But how could Stalin be so sure that France and England would not declare war to Russia too? One part of the answer is that he had not broken off negotiations with Great Britain after signing a pact with Hitler. It is even thought that on 15 October 1939, less that two months after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, a British-Soviet secret agreement was signed behind Hitler’s back.[33]
With the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Hitler thought he had countered the British encirclement policy against Germany. And he believed that the pact would protect him from a declaration of war by Britain and France if both Germany and Russia intervened in Poland. He had grossly underestimated Stalin.
When Hitler invaded Poland from the west on September 1, the Red Army did not budge. On September 3, England and France therefore declared war on Germany alone. This was a bad surprise for Hitler. He urged the Russians to launch their attack, but the Russians turned a deaf ear. “On September 3,” McMeekin writes,
Ribbentrop wired Ambassador Schulenburg in Moscow, requesting that he ask Molotov whether the USSR would participate in the Polish war as promised and provide “relief” to the hard-pressed Wehrmacht. Did not Stalin, Ribbentrop asked, “consider it desirable for Russian forces to move at the proper time against Polish forces in the Russian sphere of interest and, for their part, to occupy this territory?”[34]
Molotov replied on September 5: “the time has not yet come. … it seems to us that through excessive haste we might injure our cause and promote unity among our opponents.” On September 8, a new Wehrmacht communiqué urged the Soviets to move forward as Warsaw was taken. The Soviets responded that the fall of Warsaw was not confirmed and that “Russia being linked to Poland by a non-aggression pact, she cannot march forward.” On September 10, Molotov declared point-blank to Schulenburg that, “for appearances’ sake we should not cross Poland’s border until the capital had fallen,” and that the pretext for Soviet entry into Poland would be to protect “endangered Ukrainians and Belorussians.”[35] Stalin even tried to persuade the Polish government, which had taken refuge in Kuty, to appeal to him for protection. Finally, on September 17, the Polish ambassador in Moscow was summoned at 3 a.m. and handed the following message:
The Polish-German war has shown the internal bankruptcy of the Polish State. During the course of ten days’ hostilities Poland has lost all her industrial areas and cultural centres. Warsaw, as the capital of Poland, no longer exists. The Polish Government has disintegrated and no longer shows any sign of life. This means that the Polish State and its Government have, in point of fact, ceased to exist. In the same way, the Agreements concluded between the U.S.S.R. and Poland have ceased to operate. Left to her own devices and bereft of leadership, Poland has become a suitable field for all manner of hazards and surprises, which may constitute a threat to the U.S.S.R. For these reasons the Soviet Government, who have hitherto been neutral, cannot any longer preserve a neutral attitude towards these facts. The Soviet Government also cannot view with indifference the fact that the kindred Ukrainian and White Russian people, who live on Polish territory and who are at the mercy of fate, should be left defenceless. In these circumstances, the Soviet Government have directed the High Command of the Red Army to order the troops to cross the frontier and take under their protection the life and property of the population of the Western Ukraine and Western White Russia. At the same time the Soviet Government propose to take all measures to extricate the Polish people from the unfortunate war into which it was dragged by its unwise leaders.
Although not mentioning Germany explicitly as an aggressor, the message was clear: the USSR is not the aggressor, but the defender of Poland. The Soviets had waited two and a half weeks before moving into Poland, leaving all the fighting to the Germans and giving the world the impression that they were intervening to prevent Germany from seizing the entire country. The USSR thus remained officially neutral, and incurred no blame on the part of France and England.
Although the partition of Poland had been Stalin’s idea, only Hitler was blamed for it. His Faustian pact with his worst enemy had not protected him from a war with France and England, and would not protect him either from a Soviet invasion. Clearly he had been duped. By enticing Hitler to invade Poland, Stalin had triggered the Second World War while staying on the sideline. All he had to do was wait for the countries of Europe to exhaust each other in a new war. On September 1, the very day of the invasion of Poland by Germany, the Supreme Soviet passed a general conscription law, which, under the guise of establishing military service for two years, was equivalent to a general mobilization. For Suvorov, this is proof that Stalin knew that the partition of Poland would trigger world war, rather than avoid it as Hitler hoped.
Meanwhile, Stalin would take every advantage he could of Germany’s predicament in the West, gobbling up three Baltic states bordering Germany and stuffing them with military bases. As McMeekin notes:
With his opportunistic moves against the Baltic states, Bessarabia, and northern Bukovina in the wake of the German humiliation of France, Stalin was wringing every last drop of nectar out of his honeyed partnership with Hitler while still, somehow, escaping the hostility of Hitler’s opponents. Britain, in what Churchill called the country’s “finest hour,” now stood alone against Nazi Germany. For some reason, though, Britain had not declared war on Berlin’s alliance partner, despite Stalin having invaded the same number of sovereign countries since August 1939 as Hitler had (seven). But there were limits to Hitler’s patience, and Stalin had just about reached them.[36]
Like Suvorov before him, McMeekin underscores the hypocrisy of the British. “The number of victims murdered by Soviet authorities in occupied Poland by June 1941—about five hundred thousand—was likewise three or four times higher than the number of those killed by the Nazis.” Yet Stalin received not even a slap on the wrist from the Western powers.[37] Foreign Minister Halifax explained to the British war cabinet on September 17, 1939 that “Great Britain was not bound by treaty to become involved in war with the U.S.S.R. as a result of their invasion of Poland,” because the Anglo-Polish Agreement “provided for action to be taken by His Majesty’s Government only if Poland suffered aggression from a European power,” and Russia was not a European power.[38]
In a meeting of the war cabinet on November 16, 1939, Churchill even endorsed Stalinist aggression: “No doubt it appeared reasonable to the Soviet Union to take advantage of the present situation to regain some of the territory which Russia had lost as a result of the last war, at the beginning of which she had been the ally of France and Great Britain.” McMeekin comments: “That Hitler had used the same justification for Germany’s territorial claims on Poland either did not occur to Churchill or did not bother him.”[39]
Stalin hoped that Germany would fight against France and England for two or three years before he would intervene. He therefore continued to supply Germany with raw materials, and was careful not to cut her supply of metals from Sweden, and oil from Romania, when he had the means to do so. When the Germans launched their offensive against France on May 10, 1940, Stalin rejoiced. “Finally, Communists could enjoy watching ‘two groups of capitalist countries … having a good hard fight and weakening each other,’ as Stalin had boasted to Comintern’s general secretary Dimitrov in September 1939.” But the war turned out less bloody than he had expected.
The rapidity of the German victories was alarming, however. Stalin and Molotov would have preferred a slow, grinding, bloody battle of attrition—a German victory, yes, but one that weakened Hitler almost as much as his enemies. According to Khrushchev’s later recollection, after learning the extent of the Allied debacle later in May, Stalin “cursed the French and he cursed the British, asking how they could have let Hitler smash them like that.”[40]
Germany’s military success forced Stalin to rush his preparation for putting the Red Army on the starting blocks in summer 1941. In spring, armament, troops and transport were ready, and preparations entered the final phase. On May 5, 1941, Stalin declared to military officers that the “Soviet peace policy” (meaning the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) had allowed the USSR to “push forward in the west and north, increasing its population by thirteen millions in the process,” but that the days of such conquest “had come to an end. Not another foot of ground can be gained with such peaceful sentiments.” Anyone “who failed to recognize the necessity of offensive action was a bourgeois and a fool”; “today, now that our army has been thoroughly reconstructed, fully outfitted for fighting a modern war, now that we are strong—now we must shift from defense to offense.” For this, we must “transform our training, our propaganda, our agitation, the imprinting of an offensive mentality on our spirit.”[41] Pravda began to prepare the people:
Raging just beyond the borders of our Motherland is the conflagration of a Second Imperialist War. The full weight of its woes is pressing down on the shoulders of the toiling masses. People everywhere want no part of war. Their gaze is fixed on the land of socialism, reaping the fruits of peaceful labor. They rightly see the armed forces of our Motherland—the Red Army and our Navy—as the tried and true bulwark for peace. … Given the current complex international situation you have to be prepared for all kinds of surprises. (Pravda , May 6, 1941 editorial)[42]
By that time, Hitler had realized he was trapped. It may have remembered what he had written in 1925: “the formation of a new alliance with Russia would lead in the direction of a new war and the result would be the end of Germany” (Mein Kampf, vol. 2, chapter 14). With Operation Barbarossa, he was trying to regain the advantage. But, according to Suvorov, it was impossible for Germany alone to defeat Russia, for reasons related to the vastness of its territory, the harshness of the winter, and Germany’s limited resources compared to Russia’s.
Hitler made one irremediable mistake, but not on July 21, 1940, when he ordered preparations for war against the Soviet Union. The mistake came on August 19, 1939, when he agreed to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Having agreed to the division of Poland, Hitler had to confront an unavoidable war against the West, having behind him the “neutral” Stalin. Precisely from this moment, Hitler had two fronts. The decision to begin Operation Barbarossa in the east without waiting for victory in the west was not a fatal error, but only an attempt to right the fatal error he had already made. But by then it was too late.[43]
Arguably, Hitler might have prevailed and conquered the Lebensraum of his dream, had Stalin not been saved by Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease Aid: more than ten billions—equivalent to trillions today— worth of airplanes and tanks, locomotives and rails, construction materials, entire military production assembly lines, food and clothing, aviation fuel, and much else. Through four dense chapters, McMeekin makes it abundantly clear (as Albert Weeks before him in Russia’s Life-Saver: Lend-Lease Aid to the U.S.S.R. in World War II, 2010), that without U.S. help, the Soviet Union could not have pushed back the Germans, let alone conquer Eastern Europe in 1945. Another factor, on which McMeekin duly insists, was Stalin’s almost unlimited supply of cannon fodder: a total of 32 million soldiers throughout the war, led to the slaughter with machine-guns in their back and the threat that, if they were captured rather than killed, their families would be punished: “The USSR under Stalin is the only state in recorded history to have declared the captivity of its soldiers a capital crime.”[44]
In the end, while Stalin actually entered the war on the side of Germany, he would come out on the side of the Allies. While the pact deciding the partition of Poland by Germany and Russia was signed in Moscow—in the presence of Stalin and not of Hitler—history will only retain the aggression of Germany, and will consider the USSR as one of the attacked countries. While England and France officially went to war to defend the territorial integrity of Poland, at the end of the war all of Poland will be under Stalin.
Yet, as Suvorov said, and as McMeekin leaves unsaid, it was probably thanks to Operation Barbarossa that Soviet troops failed to raise the red flag over Paris, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Rome, Stockholm and possibly London.
Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, destroyed its army, and crushed a large part of Soviet industry. In the end, the Soviet Union was unable to conquer Europe. Stalin lost the war for Europe and global domination. The free world survived, and it could not coexist with the Soviet Union. Therefore, the crumbling of the Soviet Union became inevitable. … The Soviet Union won World War II, but for some reason disappeared from the globe after this distinguishing victory. … Germany lost the war, but we see her, one of the mightiest powers of contemporary Europe, at whose feet we now beg.[45]
News of the Times;
https://www.wnd.com/2021/05/bidens-new-definition-sex-total-nightmare/
https://en-volve.com/2021/05/08/57-top-scientists-and-doctors-release-shocking-study-on-covid-vaccines-and-demand-immediate-stop-to-all-vaccinations/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/05/dr-cole-covid-jabs-seen-deaths-shot-vaccines-last-20-years-combined-audio/
https://worthypolitics.com/this-is-bidens-america-breaking-news-during-a-family-birthday-party-illegal-alien-gets-in-and-kills-six-people/
https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/bidens-middle-east-failure/
https://www.theepochtimes.com/former-professor-sentenced-to-37-months-in-prison-for-using-federal-grants-to-aid-chinas-medical-research_3816589.html
https://reason.com/2021/05/13/the-police-dog-who-cried-drugs-at-every-traffic-stop/
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/another-horrific-chicago-weekend-48-shot-including-2-police-officers-sunday-early-evening
https://nationalfile.com/nfl-argues-black-players-have-lower-cognitive-skills-than-whites-deserve-less-compensation-for-brain-injuries/
https://fee.org/articles/federal-court-rules-against-florida-man-fined-30k-over-tall-grass/
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2021/03/02/seresto-dog-cat-collars-found-harm-pets-humans-epa-records-show/4574753001/
https://vdare.com/posts/mexican-cartels-ratchet-up-their-human-trafficking-operations
https://barenakedislam.com/2021/05/10/ireland-watch-muslim-migrant-thugs-attacking-and-spitting-at-young-local-girls-on-train-platform/
https://tbdailynews.com/umass-kicks-3-girls-off-campus-refuses-to-refund-tuition-for-not-wearing-masks-at-party-while-college-president-marty-meehan-poses-without-mask-on-with-student/
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/05/scenes-from-the-college-meltdown.php
“Of course I didn’t, you daft cow. There’s hundreds of them there already”.
*.*
I hate it when engineering students call themselves "Engineers".
You don't see med students calling themselves "Doctor".
Or art students calling themselves unemployed.
*.*
Lines:
Diet Day 1: I have removed all the bad food from the house. It was delicious.
Ben and Jerry have rolled out a new flavor that includes unbaked cookie dough and brownie batter, called "Unbaked." I have a feeling that in developing that flavor, some baking was involved.
Rage Against The Machine never specified which machine they were angry with, but I'm going to assume it was a printer.
It isn't that I'm not a people person. It's just that I'm not a stupid people person.
I wish people came with a 30-second trailer so I could see what I'm getting myself into.
I'm the Best Man at my buddy's second wedding. Is it OK to open my dinner speech with, "Welcome back, everybody!"?
Getting older is one body part after the other saying, "Oh, you think that's bad. Watch this!"
A wise old man once told his wife... nothing. Because he was a wise old man.
A couple of kids asked me what it was like when I was growing up. So, I took their phones, shut off their Internet, gave them a popsicle and told them to go outside and play until the street lights came on.
I see people my age mountain climbing. I feel good about getting my leg through my underwear without losing my balance.
My kids laugh because they think I'm crazy. I laugh because I know it's hereditary.
It’s interesting growing up and realizing that most adults are not smart. I had my suspicions as a kid, but never thought the situation was this dire.
You know, everyone is waiting for things to get back to normal. What about those of us who weren't normal to begin with?
*.*
A little girl goes to the pet store
She ask the owner of the store if he has any bunnies.
“Well sure sweetie!” He says and takes her to where the bunnies are, “I have a few different bunnies I have this white one with floppy ears, or this fluffy little brown one, or I even have this cute one with black spots! What kind of bunny did you have in mind?”
So the little girl looks over the bunnies and then back to the pet store owner and replies, “quite frankly mister I don’t think my snake gives a damn.”
*.*
4, 6, 8 & 9 have all been killed.
2, 3, 5, 7 & 11 are all prime suspects.
Quote of the Times;
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. – Lewis
Link of the Times;
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/a-psychologist-says-parents-of-exceptionally-resilient-and-successful-kids-always-do-these-7-things-yes-some-are-a-little-intense/ar-BB1gCnfy
Issue of the Times;
Barbarossa: Suvorov's Revisionism Goes Mainstream by Laurent Guyenot
A review of Sean McMeekin, Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II
On Sunday morning June 22, 1941, driven by his hatred of “Judeo-Bolshevism” and his insatiable greed for Lebensraum, Hitler treacherously broke his pact of non-aggression with Stalin and launched the invasion of the Soviet Union. Caught off guard and badly commanded, the Red Army was overwhelmed. But thanks to the heroic resistance of the Russian people, the USSR finally routed the Germans, at the cost of some twenty million dead. It was the beginning of the end for the Nazis.
This is, in broad outline, the story of Operation Barbarossa as told by the victors.
The vanquished, naturally, had a different version. At 4:30 am on the morning of the attack, the Russian ambassador in Berlin received a formal declaration of war, later read to an international news conference, justifying the attack by the “steadily increasing concentration of all available Russian armed forces along a broad front extending from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea.” It justified the attack as preemptive:
Now that the Russian general mobilization is complete, no less than 160 divisions are deployed against Germany. The results of reconnaissance carried out in recent days have shown that the deployment of Russian troops, and especially of motorized and armored units, has been carried out in such a way that the Russian High Command is ready at any moment to take aggressive action at various points against the German frontier.
The US government ignored the German justification, and claimed that Germany’s attack was part of Hitler’s evil plan “for the cruel and brutal enslavement of all peoples and for the ultimate destruction of the remaining free democracies.”[1]
In the following months, referring to reports from the front, Hitler claimed that the Soviet forces massed on his Western border were even greater than he had thought, and proved that Stalin’s intention had been to invade not only Germany, but all of Europe. He told a large audience in Berlin on October 3, 1941:
We had no idea how gigantic the preparations of this enemy were against Germany and Europe and how immeasurably great was the danger; how we just barely escaped annihilation, not only of Germany but also of Europe. … Lord have mercy on our Volk and on the entire European world if this barbaric enemy had been able to get his tens of thousands of tanks to move before we could. All of Europe would have been lost.[2]
Hitler repeated it to the Reichstag deputies on December 11, 1941:
Today, we have truly crushing and authentic material to prove that Russia intended to attack. … [H]ad this wave of more than twenty thousand [Soviet] tanks, hundreds of divisions, tens of thousands of guns, accompanied by more than ten thousand planes, unexpectedly started to move across the Reich, then Europe would have been lost.[3]
This remained the line of defense of the military commanders accused of “crime against peace” before the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg in 1945-46. Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Chief of the Armed Forces High Command, argued that “The attack on the Soviet Union was carried out to preempt a Russian attack on Germany,” and was therefore a legal act of war.[4] His second, General Alfred Jodl, Chief of the Operations Staff, similarly testified: “It was undeniably a purely preventive war. What we found out later on was the certainty of enormous Russian military preparations opposite our frontier. … Russia was fully prepared for war.”[5] Both Keitel and Jodl were denied access to the documents that would prove their point. They were found guilty and hanged.
Was the Soviet threat to Germany and Europe real, or was it just Nazi propaganda? To this day, history textbooks say nothing about it. But it has entered the scholarly debate, thanks to the books of Vladimir Rezun, a former Soviet military intelligence officer who defected to the West in 1978, and wrote two groundbreaking books under the pseudonym of Viktor Suvorov: first in 1988, Icebreaker: Who Started the Second World War?, and in 2010, after new Russian archives had become accessible, The Chief Culprit: Stalin’s Grand Design to Start World War II. I first learned about Suvorov from Ron Unz’s 2018 article “When Stalin almost conquered Europe,” and I have since read what I could on the subject, starting with articles on Mark Weber’s indispensable site http://www.ihr.org/.
Suvorov’s thesis can be summed up as follows: on June 22, 1941, Stalin was about to launch a massive offensive on Germany and her allies, within days or weeks. Preparations had started in 1939, just after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and had accelerated at the end of 1940, with the first divisions deployed to the new expanded Soviet borders, opposite the German Reich and Romania, in February 1941. On May 5, Stalin announced to an audience of two thousand military academy graduates flanked by generals and party luminaries that the time had come to “switch from the defensive to the offensive.” Days later, he had a special directive sent to all command posts to “be prepared on a signal from General Headquarters to launch lightning strikes to rout the enemy, move military operations to his territory and seize key objectives.”[6] New armies were being raised in all the districts, with mobilization now reaching 5.7 million, a gigantic army impossible to sustain for long in peacetime. Close to one million parachutists—troops useful only for invasion—had been trained. Hundreds of aerodromes were built near the Western border. From June 13, an incessant movement of night trains transported thousands of tanks, millions of soldiers, and hundreds of thousands of tons of ammunition and fuel to the border.
According to Suvorov, if Hitler had not attacked first, the gigantic military power that Stalin had accumulated on the border would have enabled him to reach Berlin without major difficulty and then, in the context of the war, to take control of the continent. Only Hitler’s decision to preempt Stalin’s offensive deprived him of these resources by piercing and disrupting his lines and destroying or seizing about 65% of all his weaponry, some of it still in trains.
Suvorov displays an impeccable knowledge of the Red Army, and an acute expertise in military strategy. Regarding Stalin’s intentions, generally very secret, he produces numerous quotes from the 13 volumes of his writings. He sifted through mountains of archives and the memoirs of hundreds of Russian servicemen. It is not exaggerated to say that the “Suvorov thesis” has revolutionized World War II history, opening a totally new perspective to which many historians, both Russian and German, have now added details: among Germans can be mentioned Joachim Hoffmann, Adolf von Thadden, Heinz Magenheimer, Werner Maser, Ernst Topitsch, Walter Post, and Wolfgang Strauss, who has reviewed Russian historians on the topic.
Suvorov’s thesis has also generated much hostility. His opponents fall into two categories. Some authors reject completely his analysis and simply deny that Stalin was planning an offensive. When considering the symmetrical concentrations of the German and Russian armies on their common border in June 1941, they interpret them differently: German concentration proves German bellicose intentions, but the same movement among the Russians is interpreted as proof of the incompetence of Soviet generals for defense.
This trend is illustrated by David Glantz’s Stumbling Colossus, about which Ron Unz wrote: “Although purporting to refute Suvorov, the author seemed to ignore almost all of his central arguments, and merely provided a rather dull and pedantic recapitulation of the standard narrative I had previously seen hundreds of times, laced with a few rhetorical excesses denouncing the unique vileness of the Nazi regime.”
Another detractor of Suvorov is Jonathan Haslam, who attacks Suvorov for his “highly dubious use of evidence.” Haslam admits that, on May 5, 1941, Stalin had announced an imminent offensive, but interprets it as Stalin’s prevision of Hitler’s attack. He then adds: “The fact that every piece of evidence at our disposal also indicated that he showed considerable surprise when the Germans invaded on June 22 always created something of a puzzle for historians. How could Stalin both expect war and be taken by surprise at the same time?” To answer this question, Haslam gets lost in fuzzy conjectures, while Suvorov’s answer is the only logical one: Stalin knew war with Germany was imminent, but he didn’t expect Germany to strike first.
Not surprisingly, one of the harshest attacks against Suvorov came from a longtime apologist of Stalin, Tel Aviv University professor Gabriel Gorodetsky (Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia). Gorodetsky calls Suvorov’s books “flimsy and fraudulent” because they “engender myths and consistently and deliberately obstruct the search for truth by simplifying a complex situation.” Yet, as one reviewer notes, Gorodetsky “negligently ignores Suvorov’s work after page eight” and his book is replete with contradictions and unsubstantiated claims.
The second variety of authors criticizing Suvorov are those who agree with him in general, and differ only in details. One French example is a recent 1000-page book by French specialist Jean Lopez, Barbarossa 1941. La Guerre absolue (2019). Lopez does admit that Stalin was preparing to invade Europe, but treats Suvorov as a fraud and, in an earlier essay, discounted as a “myth” the notion that “Hitler anticipated an attack by Stalin,” with this argument: “According to several accounts, Stalin believes that the Red Army will not be ready until 1942. No Soviet attack, therefore, could have been undertaken before that date.”[7] This is provably false: it is true that Stalin had originally planned his massive offensive for the summer 1942, as Suvorov himself stated. But there is also plenty of evidence that, in 1940, worried by Germany’s quick victory over France, Stalin had accelerated his war preparations. According to General Andrei Vlassov, captured by the Germans in 1942, “the [Soviet] attack was planned for August-September 1941.”[8] It is hard to make sense of Lopez’s contradictions.
Even more paradoxical in its treatment of Suvorov is a book released a few weeks ago: Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II, by Sean McMeekin of Bard College in New York. I found out about it while searching (unsuccessfully) for an affordable copy of Ernst Topitsch’s book by the same title, Stalin’s War: A Radical New Theory of the Origins of the Second World War (1987). I expected McMeekin’s new book to quote from Suvorov extensively and favorably. I was surprised to find Suvorov mentioned only once. After noting that Suvorov “turned up thousands of intriguing documents” in support of his thesis and that “scores of Russian historians have investigated the ‘Suvorov thesis’,” producing in the process “two thick volumes” of more documents, McMeekin concludes: “But considerable mystery remains surrounding Stalin’s intentions on the eve of war,” and adds that no clear written document can be produced that unambiguously “proves that Stalin had already resolved on war, whether preemptive, defensive, or otherwise.”[9]
I struggled of make sense of this dismissive comment, since McMeekin actually agrees with almost every major points made by Suvorov. Just like Suvorov, and with the same sources, McMeekin shows that, despite his tactical pretense at “socialism in one country,” Stalin was unconditionally devoted to Lenin’s goal of the sovietization of Europe. His analysis of the way Stalin baited Hitler into a war on the Western front with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is totally in line with Suvorov. McMeekin attributes the same significance as Suvorov to Stalin’s announcement, on May 5, 1941, that “we must shift from defense to offence” (to which he devotes his “prologue”). His interpretation of Stalin’s simultaneous self-appointment as president of the Council of People’s Commissars exactly echoes Suvorov’s: “From this moment forward, all responsibility for Soviet foreign policy, for peace or war, for victory or defeat, lay in Stalin’s hands alone. The time for subterfuge was over. War was imminent.”[10] McMeekin repeats most of Suvorov’s evidence that Stalin’s war preparations were offensive and potentially overwhelming. He insists, like Suvorov, on the undefended air bases built near the border:
The most dramatic material evidence of more offensive Soviet intent was the construction of forward air bases abutting the new frontier separating Stalin’s empire from Hitler’s. The “Main Soviet Administration of Aerodrome Construction,” run by the NKVD, ordered the construction of 251 new Red Air Force bases in 1941, of which fully 80 percent (199) were located in western districts abutting the German Reich.[11]
In view of the evidence, McMeekin believes that “the ideal launch date for the Soviet offensive … fell in late July or August.”[12]
McMeekin even reinforces Suvorov’s argument that Hitler’s mobilization on the Eastern Front was a reaction to Stalin’s war preparations, rather than the opposite, by showing that, as early as June 1940, the Germans were receiving Intelligence reports that
the Red Army, capitalizing on the Wehrmacht’s concentration in the West, was preparing to march from Lithuania into virtually undefended East Prussia and German-occupied Poland. … On June 19, a German spy reported from Estonia that the Soviets had informed the departing British ambassador in Tallinn that Stalin planned to deploy three million troops in the Baltic region “to threaten Germany’s eastern borders.”[13]
McMeekin uses the same archives as Suvorov, but never gives him credit for first bringing them into the light. The only exception is in a single endnote, where he mentions that one of Stalin’s reasons for believing that Hitler would not attack in June was that he had “learned, via spies inside Germany, that OKW had not ordered the sheepskin coats experts believed to be necessary for winter campaigning in Russia, and that the fuel and lubricating oil used by the Wehrmacht’s armored divisions would freeze in subzero temperatures.” The note says: “Not all of Suvorov’s claims stand up, but this one gels well with Stalin’s sanguine attitude toward reports of the German arms buildup.”[14] In another footnote, McMeekin disputes Suvorov’s claim that Stalin ordered in spring 1941 the dismantlement of the “Stalin Line” of defense that would hamper the advances of his troops: it was not dismantled but simply “neglected”, says McMeekin, before adding: “Here, as elsewhere, Suvorov hurts his case by over-egging the pudding.”[15] Such criticism would be fair, if McMeekin had also acknowledged the overwhelming mass of facts that Suvorov got right.
Apparently McMeekin thought it tactically wise, not only to snub Suvorov even when he proves him right, but also to endorse his most virulent opponent David Glantz (who, he says, was “right to emphasize how poorly prepared for war the Red Army was in reality”)[16] even when he proves him wrong, with abundant evidence that in June 1941, the issue of the war “would be determined by who would strike first, gaining control of enemy airspace and knocking out airfields and tank parks.”[17]
It is not difficult to guess the motive for McMeekin’s ostentatious contempt of Suvorov. Suvorov has crossed the line by suggesting that Barbarossa saved Europe from complete sovietization. Although he expresses no sympathy for Hitler, Suvorov agrees with him that, if he had not attacked first, “Europe was lost.” Suvorov has committed an unforgivable sin. It is an untouchable cornerstone of both Western and Russian historiography that Hitler is the embodiment of absolute Evil, and that no good whatsoever could ever have come from him. And so academic historians of the Eastern Front are expected to display their good manners by shunning Suvorov, and by not asking: What if Hitler had not attacked first? They must not suggest that Hitler ever told the truth, or that his military commanders were wrongfully hanged.
Well, if the price for bringing Suvorov’s revisionism into mainstream scholarship is to deny one’s debt to Suvorov, so be it. World War II historians must be smart: one careless phrase or reference can cost you a career and a reputation, as happened to David Irving (not in McMeekin’s bibliography, incidentally). Some obvious conclusions are better left for others to draw. There is no question that McMeekin’s book is a great achievement and it must be hoped that it will become a new landmark in the historiography of World War II. It is already receiving mostly praise in the press, and giving “revisionism” a good name. Over with the “good war”!
McMeekin’s main thesis is that World War II was primarily willed and orchestrated by Stalin, whereas Hitler was only tricked into it. This is precisely what Suvorov meant when calling Hitler “Stalin’s icebreaker”. (This is also, more or less, what A.J.P. Taylor argued in The Origins of the Second World War in 1961).
There are, indeed, slight nuances between McMeekin’s and Suvorov’s perspectives. Rather than insisting on the fact that Barbarossa ruined Stalin’s plan for the conquest of Germany and Europe, McMeekin points out that Barbarossa was for Stalin “a kind of public-relations miracle” that turned him from a “mass murderer and swallower of small nations … into a victim in the view of much of the Western public.” Stalin himself, in his July 3, 1941 radio address, said that the German aggression had brought “tremendous political gain to the USSR,” creating a support in London and Washington that was “a serious and lasting factor that is bound to form the basis for the development of decisive military successes of the Red Army.”[18] That is a good point, but a minor one. From what we know of Churchill and Roosevelt’s secret intrigues before Barbarossa, it is doubtful that Stalin would have been deprived of their support if he had attacked first. Churchill had been urging him to attack Germany since 1940, and Roosevelt had started planning to help him right after his second reelection in November 1940, when he told Americans that their country must become “the great arsenal of democracy,”[19] and appointed pro-Soviet Harry Hopkins to start making arrangements.
In fact, McMeekin shows that “Roosevelt did everything he could to improve relations with Stalin” from the early years of his long presidency, starting with official recognition of the USSR in 1933. He purged the State Department of anti-Communists and staffed it with sympathizers or outright NKVD agents, such as Alger Hiss. As early as November 1936, he appointed a Soviet sympathizer, Joseph Davies, as his ambassador in Moscow, to replace William Bullitt who had become too openly critical of Stalin. “Where Ambassador Bullitt had seen deception and guile in Stalin’s foreign policy, his successor saw unicorns,” lavishing him with compliments: “You are a greater leader than Catherine the Great, than Peter the Great, a greater leader even than Lenin, etc.”[20]
And so, even though Barbarossa made it easier for Roosevelt to turn American public opinion favorably toward Stalin, it doesn’t mean that Roosevelt would have prevented Stalin from gobbling up Europe had he attacked first.
Just like Suvorov, McMeekin gives undisputable evidence that Stalin was planning to invade Europe in 1941, and had planned it for a very long time. Like Suvorov, he points out that the Comintern, founded in Moscow in 1919, aimed at the sovietization of the whole world, as symbolized by its emblem, later incorporated into the banner of the USSR.
Lenin’s primary goal was Berlin. For this, he wanted to blow up Poland, a country reconstituted after the First World War between Russia and Germany. During the summer of 1920, the Soviet cavalry attempted to invade Poland with cries of “to Berlin!” But the Poles pushed back the Russians and inflicted them losses of territory (Peace of Riga). Lenin then proclaimed a new strategy at a Moscow party congress on November 26, 1920: “Until the final victory of socialism in the whole world, we must exploit the contradictions and opposition between two imperialist power groups, between two capitalist groups of states, and incite them to attack each other.”[21]
The failure of the communist uprising in Germany in October 1923, confirmed that fomenting revolutionary unrest was not enough to overthrow Social Democracy in Germany. What was to be done was to help create the conditions for a new world war and, during this incubation period, put a damper on internationalist discourse in order to maintain trade relationships with the capitalist countries (who will ultimately “sell Communists the rope they would use to hang them”).[22]
McMeekin agrees with Suvorov that Stalin was the true heir of Lenin, whose public cult he orchestrated: “Stalin’s dialectical view of Soviet foreign policy—in which metastasizing conflict between warring capitalist factions would enable Communism to advance to new triumphs—was firmly rooted in Marxism-Leninism, based on the precedent of Russia’s own experience in the First World War, and clearly and consistently stated on many occasions, both verbally and in print”[23], most notably in his first major work after Lenin’s death, Foundations of Leninism (1924), in which he recalled that the Bolshevik revolution had triumphed in Russia because the two chief coalitions of capitalist countries had “been clutching at each other’s throats.”[24] When a new capitalist war breaks out, Stalin told the Central Committee of the Communist Party in 1925, “we will have to take action, but we shall be the last to do so. And we shall do so in order to throw the decisive weight on the scales, the weight that can turn the scales.”[25]
While preparing for World War II, Stalin’s domestic policy consisted, on the one hand, in consolidating his control over the population, and on the other hand, in building a huge military-industrial complex. “Stalin’s industrialization drive,” McMeekin writes, “was conceived, sold, and executed like a military operation targeting the capitalist world. … Whenever onerous production targets went unmet, capitalist saboteurs were blamed, as if they had been spies in an army camp.”[26]
Since the first Five-Year Plan was inaugurated in 1928, the Soviet economy had been on a war footing. The production targets of the third Five-Year Plan, launched in 1938, were breathtaking, envisioning the production of 50,000 warplanes annually by the end of 1942, along with 125,000 air engines and 700,000 tons of aerial bombs; 60,775 tanks, 119,060 artillery systems, 450,000 machine guns, and 5.2 million rifles; 489 million artillery shells, 120,000 tons of naval armor, and 1 million tons of explosives; and, for good measure, 298,000 tons of chemical weapons.[27]
Along with the establishment of a war economy, the first two five-year plans included the collectivization of agriculture. But here too, the goal was closely linked to the war, as Jean Lopez shows. In 1927, reports indicated that the peasant world, under the leadership of the kulaks, would sabotage the war effort. “The worst nightmare of the Bolshevik leaders lies in the emergence of a popular rejection of war similar to that which brought down the Romanov dynasty.”[28] This is what motivated the “Great Turn” of 1928, whose victims, either by execution, deportation, or famine, are estimated at between 10 and 16 million. During this time, Stalin sold an average of 5 million tons of grain abroad each year to finance his armaments.
In 1939, all Stalin needed was to maneuver capitalist countries into fighting each other in a new deadly war. That was the main purpose, from Stalin’s viewpoint, of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact signed on August 23, 1939, with a secret protocol for the partition of Poland and the distribution of “spheres of influence”.
Just two months earlier, Stalin was still negotiating, via his Foreign Minister Molotov and his ambassador to London Maiski, the possibility of a military alliance with England and France in order to contain Germany and protect Poland’s integrity. On June 2, 1939, Molotov handed the British and French ambassadors a draft agreement, under which the Soviets might provide mutual assistance to smaller European states under “threat of aggression by a European power.”[29] On August 12, an Anglo-French delegation arrived in Moscow for further discussion. But Stalin then changed his mind, and Molotov did not receive the delegates.[30] In a speech to the Politburo on August 19, 1939, Stalin explained why he had finally opted for a pact with Germany:
The question of war or peace has entered a critical phase for us. If we conclude a mutual assistance pact with France and Great Britain, Germany will back off from Poland and seek a modus vivendi with the Western powers. War would be avoided, but down the road events could become dangerous for the USSR. If we accept Germany’s proposal and conclude a non-aggression pact with her, she will of course invade Poland, and the intervention of France and England in that would be unavoidable. Western Europe would be subjected to serious upheavals and disorder. In this case we will have a great opportunity to stay out of the conflict, and we could plan the opportune time for us to enter the war. …
Our choice is clear. We must accept the German proposal and, with a refusal, politely send the Anglo-French mission home. Our immediate advantage will be to take Poland to the gates of Warsaw, as well as Ukrainian Galicia …
For the realization of these plans it is essential that the war continue for as long as possible, and all forces, with which we are actively involved, should be directed toward this goal …
Therefore, our goal is that Germany should carry out the war as long as possible so that England and France grow weary and become exhausted to such a degree that they are no longer in a position to put down a Sovietized Germany.
Comrades! It is in the interest of the USSR—the workers’ homeland—that war breaks out between the Reich and the capitalist Anglo-French block. Everything should be done so that this drags out as long as possible with the goal of weakening both sides. For this reason, it is imperative that we agree to conclude the pact proposed by Germany, and then work in such a way that this war, once it is declared, will be prolonged maximally. We must strengthen our propaganda work in the belligerent countries, in order to be prepared when the war ends.
This speech was leaked to the French news agency Havas the same year. Stalin immediately denounced it as a fake in Pravda, which was exceptional on his part. Its authenticity has long been debated, but in 1994 Russian historians found an authoritative text of it in the Soviet archives, and the authenticity is now generally accepted. In any case, there are other sources confirming Stalin’s ploy so that there is no doubt, for McMeekin, that with the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, “Far from wishing to forestall a European war between Germany and the Western powers, Stalin’s aim was to ensure that it would break out.”[31] For Stalin,
the benefits of the Moscow Pact for Communism were obvious. The capitalist world would soon be embroiled in a terrible war, and the USSR would be able to spread its territory substantially westward against seemingly helpless foes. All Stalin needed to do was ensure that neither Germany nor its opponents secured a decisive advantage. Once the two sides had exhausted themselves in a death struggle, the path would be clear for the armies of Communism to march in and seize the capitalist world by the throat.[32]
But how could Stalin be so sure that France and England would not declare war to Russia too? One part of the answer is that he had not broken off negotiations with Great Britain after signing a pact with Hitler. It is even thought that on 15 October 1939, less that two months after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, a British-Soviet secret agreement was signed behind Hitler’s back.[33]
With the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Hitler thought he had countered the British encirclement policy against Germany. And he believed that the pact would protect him from a declaration of war by Britain and France if both Germany and Russia intervened in Poland. He had grossly underestimated Stalin.
When Hitler invaded Poland from the west on September 1, the Red Army did not budge. On September 3, England and France therefore declared war on Germany alone. This was a bad surprise for Hitler. He urged the Russians to launch their attack, but the Russians turned a deaf ear. “On September 3,” McMeekin writes,
Ribbentrop wired Ambassador Schulenburg in Moscow, requesting that he ask Molotov whether the USSR would participate in the Polish war as promised and provide “relief” to the hard-pressed Wehrmacht. Did not Stalin, Ribbentrop asked, “consider it desirable for Russian forces to move at the proper time against Polish forces in the Russian sphere of interest and, for their part, to occupy this territory?”[34]
Molotov replied on September 5: “the time has not yet come. … it seems to us that through excessive haste we might injure our cause and promote unity among our opponents.” On September 8, a new Wehrmacht communiqué urged the Soviets to move forward as Warsaw was taken. The Soviets responded that the fall of Warsaw was not confirmed and that “Russia being linked to Poland by a non-aggression pact, she cannot march forward.” On September 10, Molotov declared point-blank to Schulenburg that, “for appearances’ sake we should not cross Poland’s border until the capital had fallen,” and that the pretext for Soviet entry into Poland would be to protect “endangered Ukrainians and Belorussians.”[35] Stalin even tried to persuade the Polish government, which had taken refuge in Kuty, to appeal to him for protection. Finally, on September 17, the Polish ambassador in Moscow was summoned at 3 a.m. and handed the following message:
The Polish-German war has shown the internal bankruptcy of the Polish State. During the course of ten days’ hostilities Poland has lost all her industrial areas and cultural centres. Warsaw, as the capital of Poland, no longer exists. The Polish Government has disintegrated and no longer shows any sign of life. This means that the Polish State and its Government have, in point of fact, ceased to exist. In the same way, the Agreements concluded between the U.S.S.R. and Poland have ceased to operate. Left to her own devices and bereft of leadership, Poland has become a suitable field for all manner of hazards and surprises, which may constitute a threat to the U.S.S.R. For these reasons the Soviet Government, who have hitherto been neutral, cannot any longer preserve a neutral attitude towards these facts. The Soviet Government also cannot view with indifference the fact that the kindred Ukrainian and White Russian people, who live on Polish territory and who are at the mercy of fate, should be left defenceless. In these circumstances, the Soviet Government have directed the High Command of the Red Army to order the troops to cross the frontier and take under their protection the life and property of the population of the Western Ukraine and Western White Russia. At the same time the Soviet Government propose to take all measures to extricate the Polish people from the unfortunate war into which it was dragged by its unwise leaders.
Although not mentioning Germany explicitly as an aggressor, the message was clear: the USSR is not the aggressor, but the defender of Poland. The Soviets had waited two and a half weeks before moving into Poland, leaving all the fighting to the Germans and giving the world the impression that they were intervening to prevent Germany from seizing the entire country. The USSR thus remained officially neutral, and incurred no blame on the part of France and England.
Although the partition of Poland had been Stalin’s idea, only Hitler was blamed for it. His Faustian pact with his worst enemy had not protected him from a war with France and England, and would not protect him either from a Soviet invasion. Clearly he had been duped. By enticing Hitler to invade Poland, Stalin had triggered the Second World War while staying on the sideline. All he had to do was wait for the countries of Europe to exhaust each other in a new war. On September 1, the very day of the invasion of Poland by Germany, the Supreme Soviet passed a general conscription law, which, under the guise of establishing military service for two years, was equivalent to a general mobilization. For Suvorov, this is proof that Stalin knew that the partition of Poland would trigger world war, rather than avoid it as Hitler hoped.
Meanwhile, Stalin would take every advantage he could of Germany’s predicament in the West, gobbling up three Baltic states bordering Germany and stuffing them with military bases. As McMeekin notes:
With his opportunistic moves against the Baltic states, Bessarabia, and northern Bukovina in the wake of the German humiliation of France, Stalin was wringing every last drop of nectar out of his honeyed partnership with Hitler while still, somehow, escaping the hostility of Hitler’s opponents. Britain, in what Churchill called the country’s “finest hour,” now stood alone against Nazi Germany. For some reason, though, Britain had not declared war on Berlin’s alliance partner, despite Stalin having invaded the same number of sovereign countries since August 1939 as Hitler had (seven). But there were limits to Hitler’s patience, and Stalin had just about reached them.[36]
Like Suvorov before him, McMeekin underscores the hypocrisy of the British. “The number of victims murdered by Soviet authorities in occupied Poland by June 1941—about five hundred thousand—was likewise three or four times higher than the number of those killed by the Nazis.” Yet Stalin received not even a slap on the wrist from the Western powers.[37] Foreign Minister Halifax explained to the British war cabinet on September 17, 1939 that “Great Britain was not bound by treaty to become involved in war with the U.S.S.R. as a result of their invasion of Poland,” because the Anglo-Polish Agreement “provided for action to be taken by His Majesty’s Government only if Poland suffered aggression from a European power,” and Russia was not a European power.[38]
In a meeting of the war cabinet on November 16, 1939, Churchill even endorsed Stalinist aggression: “No doubt it appeared reasonable to the Soviet Union to take advantage of the present situation to regain some of the territory which Russia had lost as a result of the last war, at the beginning of which she had been the ally of France and Great Britain.” McMeekin comments: “That Hitler had used the same justification for Germany’s territorial claims on Poland either did not occur to Churchill or did not bother him.”[39]
Stalin hoped that Germany would fight against France and England for two or three years before he would intervene. He therefore continued to supply Germany with raw materials, and was careful not to cut her supply of metals from Sweden, and oil from Romania, when he had the means to do so. When the Germans launched their offensive against France on May 10, 1940, Stalin rejoiced. “Finally, Communists could enjoy watching ‘two groups of capitalist countries … having a good hard fight and weakening each other,’ as Stalin had boasted to Comintern’s general secretary Dimitrov in September 1939.” But the war turned out less bloody than he had expected.
The rapidity of the German victories was alarming, however. Stalin and Molotov would have preferred a slow, grinding, bloody battle of attrition—a German victory, yes, but one that weakened Hitler almost as much as his enemies. According to Khrushchev’s later recollection, after learning the extent of the Allied debacle later in May, Stalin “cursed the French and he cursed the British, asking how they could have let Hitler smash them like that.”[40]
Germany’s military success forced Stalin to rush his preparation for putting the Red Army on the starting blocks in summer 1941. In spring, armament, troops and transport were ready, and preparations entered the final phase. On May 5, 1941, Stalin declared to military officers that the “Soviet peace policy” (meaning the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) had allowed the USSR to “push forward in the west and north, increasing its population by thirteen millions in the process,” but that the days of such conquest “had come to an end. Not another foot of ground can be gained with such peaceful sentiments.” Anyone “who failed to recognize the necessity of offensive action was a bourgeois and a fool”; “today, now that our army has been thoroughly reconstructed, fully outfitted for fighting a modern war, now that we are strong—now we must shift from defense to offense.” For this, we must “transform our training, our propaganda, our agitation, the imprinting of an offensive mentality on our spirit.”[41] Pravda began to prepare the people:
Raging just beyond the borders of our Motherland is the conflagration of a Second Imperialist War. The full weight of its woes is pressing down on the shoulders of the toiling masses. People everywhere want no part of war. Their gaze is fixed on the land of socialism, reaping the fruits of peaceful labor. They rightly see the armed forces of our Motherland—the Red Army and our Navy—as the tried and true bulwark for peace. … Given the current complex international situation you have to be prepared for all kinds of surprises. (Pravda , May 6, 1941 editorial)[42]
By that time, Hitler had realized he was trapped. It may have remembered what he had written in 1925: “the formation of a new alliance with Russia would lead in the direction of a new war and the result would be the end of Germany” (Mein Kampf, vol. 2, chapter 14). With Operation Barbarossa, he was trying to regain the advantage. But, according to Suvorov, it was impossible for Germany alone to defeat Russia, for reasons related to the vastness of its territory, the harshness of the winter, and Germany’s limited resources compared to Russia’s.
Hitler made one irremediable mistake, but not on July 21, 1940, when he ordered preparations for war against the Soviet Union. The mistake came on August 19, 1939, when he agreed to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Having agreed to the division of Poland, Hitler had to confront an unavoidable war against the West, having behind him the “neutral” Stalin. Precisely from this moment, Hitler had two fronts. The decision to begin Operation Barbarossa in the east without waiting for victory in the west was not a fatal error, but only an attempt to right the fatal error he had already made. But by then it was too late.[43]
Arguably, Hitler might have prevailed and conquered the Lebensraum of his dream, had Stalin not been saved by Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease Aid: more than ten billions—equivalent to trillions today— worth of airplanes and tanks, locomotives and rails, construction materials, entire military production assembly lines, food and clothing, aviation fuel, and much else. Through four dense chapters, McMeekin makes it abundantly clear (as Albert Weeks before him in Russia’s Life-Saver: Lend-Lease Aid to the U.S.S.R. in World War II, 2010), that without U.S. help, the Soviet Union could not have pushed back the Germans, let alone conquer Eastern Europe in 1945. Another factor, on which McMeekin duly insists, was Stalin’s almost unlimited supply of cannon fodder: a total of 32 million soldiers throughout the war, led to the slaughter with machine-guns in their back and the threat that, if they were captured rather than killed, their families would be punished: “The USSR under Stalin is the only state in recorded history to have declared the captivity of its soldiers a capital crime.”[44]
In the end, while Stalin actually entered the war on the side of Germany, he would come out on the side of the Allies. While the pact deciding the partition of Poland by Germany and Russia was signed in Moscow—in the presence of Stalin and not of Hitler—history will only retain the aggression of Germany, and will consider the USSR as one of the attacked countries. While England and France officially went to war to defend the territorial integrity of Poland, at the end of the war all of Poland will be under Stalin.
Yet, as Suvorov said, and as McMeekin leaves unsaid, it was probably thanks to Operation Barbarossa that Soviet troops failed to raise the red flag over Paris, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Rome, Stockholm and possibly London.
Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, destroyed its army, and crushed a large part of Soviet industry. In the end, the Soviet Union was unable to conquer Europe. Stalin lost the war for Europe and global domination. The free world survived, and it could not coexist with the Soviet Union. Therefore, the crumbling of the Soviet Union became inevitable. … The Soviet Union won World War II, but for some reason disappeared from the globe after this distinguishing victory. … Germany lost the war, but we see her, one of the mightiest powers of contemporary Europe, at whose feet we now beg.[45]
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https://worthypolitics.com/this-is-bidens-america-breaking-news-during-a-family-birthday-party-illegal-alien-gets-in-and-kills-six-people/
https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/bidens-middle-east-failure/
https://www.theepochtimes.com/former-professor-sentenced-to-37-months-in-prison-for-using-federal-grants-to-aid-chinas-medical-research_3816589.html
https://reason.com/2021/05/13/the-police-dog-who-cried-drugs-at-every-traffic-stop/
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/another-horrific-chicago-weekend-48-shot-including-2-police-officers-sunday-early-evening
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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2021/03/02/seresto-dog-cat-collars-found-harm-pets-humans-epa-records-show/4574753001/
https://vdare.com/posts/mexican-cartels-ratchet-up-their-human-trafficking-operations
https://barenakedislam.com/2021/05/10/ireland-watch-muslim-migrant-thugs-attacking-and-spitting-at-young-local-girls-on-train-platform/
https://tbdailynews.com/umass-kicks-3-girls-off-campus-refuses-to-refund-tuition-for-not-wearing-masks-at-party-while-college-president-marty-meehan-poses-without-mask-on-with-student/
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/05/scenes-from-the-college-meltdown.php
Grocery?
Bill and Melinda were happy for 27 years.
And then Bill started working from home.
*.*
Two prison guards are changing shifts in the morning.
“You know that a prisoner ran off in the night?”
The other guard sighs, “Ah finally, no more of that dang hammering!”
*.*
Step by step guide to falling down the stairs:
Step 1:
Step 4:
Step 8:
Step 11:
Step 17:
Hospital
*.*
According to anonymous sources, the CIA has replaced enhanced interrogation techniques such as waterboarding with 12-hour academic lectures on intersectional feminism.
"Waterboarding has been shown to be very effective," said the anonymous source. "But that's been replaced now. Now we just pop in a tape of Robin DiAngelo, Stacey Abrams, or Joy Behar. Sometimes we'll really ramp things up and make them watch Coca-Cola's diversity training on a 12-hour loop."
Terror suspects will be subjected to lengthy lectures about cis-male privilege, heteronormative patriarchy, and microaggressive mansplaining.
Sources report these lectures are 1,200% more effective than traditional torture.
*.*
My parents came over to meet my new girlfriend for the first time, my mum described her as "a girl next door type".
My girlfriend was really pleased.
She doesn't know they live next door to a brothel.
Quote of the Times;
You can fuck your whole life up just by hanging out with people with no goals or ambition.
Link of the Times;
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-decline-of-violence/
Issue of the Times;
Why Your Grocery Bills Are Going Up (And Are Only Expected to Get Bigger) by Hannah Cox
It’s official: food inflation has arrived. Food prices soared 3.9 percent in 2020, the Department of Agriculture recently reported.
Americans spent a lot of money on groceries over the past year—and it isn’t just because they were eating more meals at home. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, food prices jumped 3.9 percent in 2020, nearly triple the rate of inflation.
Unfortunately, this trend seems poised to continue. The US Department of Agriculture estimates grocery bills could increase by another 3 percent in 2021, while some experts are betting on even longer-term problems.
“I think food prices are going to continue to increase for probably a good year, year and a half,” warns Phil Lempert, founder of SupermarketGuru.com.
Shoppers are already feeling the crunch. Long Island resident John Kermaj recently told NBC News, “We used to buy this stuff for $30. Now it's $60.”
Diet staples like wheat, corn, soybeans, and meat are among the products seeing the sharpest price uptick. Meat shot up 5.5 percent last year, and prices for fruits like apples, strawberries, and citrus went up by 11.3 percent.
This is no small matter.
Before the pandemic, the number of Americans experiencing food insecurity had been steadily falling. That trend was reversed last year. Northwestern University researchers estimate that food insecurity doubled during this time—placing 23 percent of households in danger of going hungry. It is likely this problem will only worsen as the cost of food continues to grow.
So, what’s causing the spike? A perfect storm, really. Bad weather, stockpiling, increased demand from China, global shipping interruptions, and inflation caused by the extreme money printing by central banks all get honorable mentions. But a significant number of the factors to blame can be traced back to the government’s lockdowns and regulatory policies.
Meat processing plants were one of the industries hardest hit by the lockdowns. Many were forced to close for extended periods of time, and others invested in expensive new equipment and technology to reduce their in-person workforce. These costs were of course ultimately borne by the consumer, and the closures led to supply chain disruptions. Both made the price of meat go up.
These closures not only affected the meatpacking plants and their employees, but those of many related businesses in the food processing industry as well. The lockdowns also impacted farmers, shipment and distribution facilities, companies that produce the containers and plastic needed to store the meat, and grocers. In a market, one government action can have a ripple effect across hundreds of other industries, and that’s certainly what happened here.
The coronavirus and lockdowns didn’t necessarily cause all of the problems in the meat industry, but they did exacerbate existing issues. The industry was already struggling under absurd government regulations that force farmers to waste good livestock and block them from selling directly to consumers. Combined with the lockdowns, these policies began to threaten our supply chain.
Congressman Thomas Massie called attention to this problem more than a year ago and warned it could lead to a meat shortage. The Kentucky Republican urged Congress to support his PRIME Act to repeal these regulations, but his warnings went unheeded.
The PRIME act would allow small American owned meat processors to take up much of the slack as giant multinational meat packers shut down. The alternative to not passing the PRIME Act is meat shortages, wasted animals, and bankrupt farmers. https://t.co/Yo2ud5AARf
— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) May 3, 2020
Other producers in the agriculture sector have struggled to obtain the workers needed to ramp up production. Across the country, small businesses have been unable to attract Americans back to the workplace as many remain on increased unemployment benefits that pay more than work.
Esteemed economist Thomas Sowell famously said, “There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.” This principle has certainly been put on display during the pandemic, as the government made many trade-offs in its attempts to mitigate the crisis.
Ultimately, we know that many of their prescribed solutions—closing outdoor spaces, lockdowns, scrubbing surfaces with alcohol—were abject failures. But the trade-offs made in exchange for promises of increased security won’t be fading away anytime soon.
The current food price spikes, and the resulting food instability issues they have fueled, are only the latest in a long line of consequences Americans have suffered as a result of the government’s attempts at solutions in 2020.
Viruses are scary. But the surge in food insecurity is a reminder that all policies come with trade-offs—and that panic-fueled government interventions often only make a crisis worse.
News of the Times;
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/05/never-forget-called-experts-completely-wrong-covid-predictions-mortality-rate-still/
https://gellerreport.com/2021/05/france-one-mosque-is-erected-every-15-days-while-one-christian-building-is-destroyed-at-the-same-pace.html/
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/phoenix-netts-murder-dismembered-gareeca-gordon-jailed-bristol-crown-court-b933139.html
https://thefederalist.com/2021/05/05/beware-the-permanent-pandemic-and-the-promise-of-vaccines-as-a-return-to-normal/
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2021/05/07/gop-chairwoman-gives-update-on-maricopa-county-ballot-audit-and-details-of-push-back-by-arizona-state-senate-against-doj-intervention/
https://www.wnd.com/2021/05/tucker-carlson-pokes-hornets-nest-spotlighting-vaccine-deaths/
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/disney-caught-indoctrinating-employees-critical-race-theory-white-privilege-checklist
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/10/french-soldiers-accuse-government-of-trying-to-silence-warnings-of-civil-war
https://www.texastribune.org/2021/05/04/gary-o-connor-oreo-texas-democrats/
https://www.yahoo.com/news/dark-child-abuse-image-400-140816085.html
https://pamplinmedia.com/pt/9-news/507253-405959-former-oregon-house-speaker-dave-hunt-cited-in-sex-trafficking-sting?wallit_nosession=1
https://wmbriggs.com/post/35507/
https://thenationalpulse.com/breaking/woman-charged-for-over-a-dozen-fake-ballots/
https://www.theepochtimes.com/alcohol-deaths-in-england-and-wales-rise-to-20-year-high-during-pandemic_3805211.html
https://vdare.com/posts/his-name-is-kristopher-roukey-white-father-working-as-a-lyft-driver-murdered-by-black-male
And then Bill started working from home.
*.*
Two prison guards are changing shifts in the morning.
“You know that a prisoner ran off in the night?”
The other guard sighs, “Ah finally, no more of that dang hammering!”
*.*
Step by step guide to falling down the stairs:
Step 1:
Step 4:
Step 8:
Step 11:
Step 17:
Hospital
*.*
According to anonymous sources, the CIA has replaced enhanced interrogation techniques such as waterboarding with 12-hour academic lectures on intersectional feminism.
"Waterboarding has been shown to be very effective," said the anonymous source. "But that's been replaced now. Now we just pop in a tape of Robin DiAngelo, Stacey Abrams, or Joy Behar. Sometimes we'll really ramp things up and make them watch Coca-Cola's diversity training on a 12-hour loop."
Terror suspects will be subjected to lengthy lectures about cis-male privilege, heteronormative patriarchy, and microaggressive mansplaining.
Sources report these lectures are 1,200% more effective than traditional torture.
*.*
My parents came over to meet my new girlfriend for the first time, my mum described her as "a girl next door type".
My girlfriend was really pleased.
She doesn't know they live next door to a brothel.
Quote of the Times;
You can fuck your whole life up just by hanging out with people with no goals or ambition.
Link of the Times;
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-decline-of-violence/
Issue of the Times;
Why Your Grocery Bills Are Going Up (And Are Only Expected to Get Bigger) by Hannah Cox
It’s official: food inflation has arrived. Food prices soared 3.9 percent in 2020, the Department of Agriculture recently reported.
Americans spent a lot of money on groceries over the past year—and it isn’t just because they were eating more meals at home. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, food prices jumped 3.9 percent in 2020, nearly triple the rate of inflation.
Unfortunately, this trend seems poised to continue. The US Department of Agriculture estimates grocery bills could increase by another 3 percent in 2021, while some experts are betting on even longer-term problems.
“I think food prices are going to continue to increase for probably a good year, year and a half,” warns Phil Lempert, founder of SupermarketGuru.com.
Shoppers are already feeling the crunch. Long Island resident John Kermaj recently told NBC News, “We used to buy this stuff for $30. Now it's $60.”
Diet staples like wheat, corn, soybeans, and meat are among the products seeing the sharpest price uptick. Meat shot up 5.5 percent last year, and prices for fruits like apples, strawberries, and citrus went up by 11.3 percent.
This is no small matter.
Before the pandemic, the number of Americans experiencing food insecurity had been steadily falling. That trend was reversed last year. Northwestern University researchers estimate that food insecurity doubled during this time—placing 23 percent of households in danger of going hungry. It is likely this problem will only worsen as the cost of food continues to grow.
So, what’s causing the spike? A perfect storm, really. Bad weather, stockpiling, increased demand from China, global shipping interruptions, and inflation caused by the extreme money printing by central banks all get honorable mentions. But a significant number of the factors to blame can be traced back to the government’s lockdowns and regulatory policies.
Meat processing plants were one of the industries hardest hit by the lockdowns. Many were forced to close for extended periods of time, and others invested in expensive new equipment and technology to reduce their in-person workforce. These costs were of course ultimately borne by the consumer, and the closures led to supply chain disruptions. Both made the price of meat go up.
These closures not only affected the meatpacking plants and their employees, but those of many related businesses in the food processing industry as well. The lockdowns also impacted farmers, shipment and distribution facilities, companies that produce the containers and plastic needed to store the meat, and grocers. In a market, one government action can have a ripple effect across hundreds of other industries, and that’s certainly what happened here.
The coronavirus and lockdowns didn’t necessarily cause all of the problems in the meat industry, but they did exacerbate existing issues. The industry was already struggling under absurd government regulations that force farmers to waste good livestock and block them from selling directly to consumers. Combined with the lockdowns, these policies began to threaten our supply chain.
Congressman Thomas Massie called attention to this problem more than a year ago and warned it could lead to a meat shortage. The Kentucky Republican urged Congress to support his PRIME Act to repeal these regulations, but his warnings went unheeded.
The PRIME act would allow small American owned meat processors to take up much of the slack as giant multinational meat packers shut down. The alternative to not passing the PRIME Act is meat shortages, wasted animals, and bankrupt farmers. https://t.co/Yo2ud5AARf
— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) May 3, 2020
Other producers in the agriculture sector have struggled to obtain the workers needed to ramp up production. Across the country, small businesses have been unable to attract Americans back to the workplace as many remain on increased unemployment benefits that pay more than work.
Esteemed economist Thomas Sowell famously said, “There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.” This principle has certainly been put on display during the pandemic, as the government made many trade-offs in its attempts to mitigate the crisis.
Ultimately, we know that many of their prescribed solutions—closing outdoor spaces, lockdowns, scrubbing surfaces with alcohol—were abject failures. But the trade-offs made in exchange for promises of increased security won’t be fading away anytime soon.
The current food price spikes, and the resulting food instability issues they have fueled, are only the latest in a long line of consequences Americans have suffered as a result of the government’s attempts at solutions in 2020.
Viruses are scary. But the surge in food insecurity is a reminder that all policies come with trade-offs—and that panic-fueled government interventions often only make a crisis worse.
News of the Times;
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/05/never-forget-called-experts-completely-wrong-covid-predictions-mortality-rate-still/
https://gellerreport.com/2021/05/france-one-mosque-is-erected-every-15-days-while-one-christian-building-is-destroyed-at-the-same-pace.html/
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/phoenix-netts-murder-dismembered-gareeca-gordon-jailed-bristol-crown-court-b933139.html
https://thefederalist.com/2021/05/05/beware-the-permanent-pandemic-and-the-promise-of-vaccines-as-a-return-to-normal/
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2021/05/07/gop-chairwoman-gives-update-on-maricopa-county-ballot-audit-and-details-of-push-back-by-arizona-state-senate-against-doj-intervention/
https://www.wnd.com/2021/05/tucker-carlson-pokes-hornets-nest-spotlighting-vaccine-deaths/
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/disney-caught-indoctrinating-employees-critical-race-theory-white-privilege-checklist
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/10/french-soldiers-accuse-government-of-trying-to-silence-warnings-of-civil-war
https://www.texastribune.org/2021/05/04/gary-o-connor-oreo-texas-democrats/
https://www.yahoo.com/news/dark-child-abuse-image-400-140816085.html
https://pamplinmedia.com/pt/9-news/507253-405959-former-oregon-house-speaker-dave-hunt-cited-in-sex-trafficking-sting?wallit_nosession=1
https://wmbriggs.com/post/35507/
https://thenationalpulse.com/breaking/woman-charged-for-over-a-dozen-fake-ballots/
https://www.theepochtimes.com/alcohol-deaths-in-england-and-wales-rise-to-20-year-high-during-pandemic_3805211.html
https://vdare.com/posts/his-name-is-kristopher-roukey-white-father-working-as-a-lyft-driver-murdered-by-black-male
Rest?
My friend just came to me all depressed because his kid’s failing 3rd grade, and he doesn’t know how to break it to him.
Apparently “slowly” wasn’t the advice he was looking for.
*.*
I caught my son chewing on electrical cords...
So I had to ground him...
He's doing better currently...
And conducting himself properly.
*.*
Wayne was returning home from a business trip, bags in hand, and slowly making his way to his vehicle in the crowded airport garage. Suddenly a large dark car screeched to a stop in front of Wayne, and the driver pointed menacingly at him. "Get in," the driver ordered. "I'll take you to your car."
Startled, Wayne took a step backward. "Ah...no thanks," he answered. "I can get there myself."
"No!" the man barked back as he threw open his passenger side door. "Get in!"
Wayne's eyes now darted around the garage, hoping to find a security guard.
Just then, the driver's face softened. "Please," he said, "I've been driving up and down for two hours. I can't find a space to park, and I want yours."
*.*
The wife phones.
“Hi!”
“Hi! Did you clean the house?”
“Uhh…YUP!”
“OK, I’m coming home. Need anything?”
“Yes, about 2 hours.”
*.*
People say being a waiter is a bad job.
Hey, it puts food on the table.
Quote of the Times;
The law of the universe is; the more you try the more you get. - Roosh
Link of the Times;
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/03/gary-d-barnett/the-covid-vaccine-is-a-weapon-of-mass-destruction/
Issue of the Times;
To defeat woke tyrants, the rest of us must treat them like the monsters they are by Glenn H. Reynolds
Most Americans hate woke politics — and most minorities don’t share “woke” priorities. Indeed, according to pollster David Shor, woke excesses are causing black voters to flee the Democratic Party. Despite endless charges of “racism,” former President Donald Trump took the biggest share of minority voters of any Republican in my lifetime.
Woke tyrants ride high, even so; according to a Cato/YouGov poll, 62 percent of Americans self-censor their political expression. Only a tiny minority of consumers care about Mr. Potato Head’s toxic masculinity, about “Aunt Jemima” as a brand or about the #MeToo aggressions of Pepé Le Pew. Yet corporations, universities and governments rush to placate that minuscule slice of the population, trashing large chunks of our culture in the process.
It’s happening not because anybody voted for it, but because a small but determined and vicious minority is bullying people to go along, relying on cowardice and groupthink to achieve ends that could never happen via majority vote: How do you think Dr. Seuss would have done in a referendum?
How does this happen? To some degree, the woke abuse the good nature of Americans. For the most part, Americans want their fellow citizens to be happy. If they hear something makes others unhappy, they generously look to change things.
And there’s fear. Writing about the goings-on at New York’s Dalton School, Bari Weiss notes that even parents who think the political correctness has gone too far are afraid to speak out: They think their kids’ shot at the Ivy League could be at risk. And it’s not just Dalton.
Weiss quotes one mother: “I look at the public school, and I am equally mortified. I can’t believe what they are doing to everybody. I’m too afraid. I’m too afraid to speak too loudly. I feel cowardly. I just make little waves.” Another says: “It’s fear of retribution. Would it cause our daughter to be ostracized? Would it cause people to ostracize us? It already has.”
In his book “Skin in the Game,” Nicholas Nassim Taleb writes about the surprising ability of small but intransigent minorities — 3 percent to 4 percent is enough — to change the direction of entire societies. He writes: “The most intolerant wins. . . . Yes, an intolerant minority can control and destroy democracy. . . . [I]t will eventually destroy our world. So, we need to be more than intolerant with some intolerant minorities.”
Does this mean we should be less tolerant of our own minoritarian tyrants? In a word, yes.
I don’t mean that they should be forced into camps, or even driven from their jobs and from polite society, as the woke are all too willing to do to their opponents. But they need to be deprived of the thing that is most important to their self-image: moral credibility.
The woke think of themselves — and want everyone else to think of them — as deeply moral. If they have a flaw, it’s that they just care too much. They’re too idealistic, too empathetic, too eager to make the world a better place.
That’s bulls–t (pardon my French, Pepé!). If you look at what they do, rather than what they say about themselves, it quickly becomes obvious that the woke are horrible, awful people, and they should be treated as such and reminded of this whenever they raise their head.
Historically, it’s not the good guys who are out burning books and censoring speech. It isn’t the caring, empathetic people who try to destroy lives based on something someone said years ago, often while young, often taken out of context. It isn’t the good guys who take undisguised glee at the ruining of lives, families and careers.
You know who does these things? Horrible, awful people. Selfish people. People with serious mental and emotional problems who seek some sort of vindication for their deficient characters by taking power trips while imposing suffering on others.
Treat these tyrants as what they are: awful people who shouldn’t be listened to and who need to work hard on joining the better half of the human race. And remind them of it, over and over. Because it’s true. Deep down, they know it, too.
News of the Times;
https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/04/im-still-not-getting-the-vaccine/
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-56969414
https://www.voanews.com/south-central-asia/taliban-overrun-afghan-base-capture-troops-us-nato-forces-exit
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/05/devout-catholic-joe-biden-doesnt-mention-god-national-day-prayer-proclamation/
https://www.sott.net/article/452262-Significant-jump-this-week-in-reported-injuries-deaths-after-COVID-vaccine
https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2021/05/04/biden-goes-off-the-rails-in-a-gaffe-arama-including-one-word-that-has-people-talking-n374171
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/05/breaking-former-oregon-democrat-house-majority-speaker-arrested-human-sex-trafficking/
https://issuesinsights.com/2021/05/03/who-gets-to-define-whats-patriotic/
https://www.amren.com/commentary/2021/02/squeezed-to-zero-how-the-woke-and-the-chinese-are-destroying-academic-mathematics/
https://www.breitbart.com/immigration/2021/05/03/exclusive-david-ray-the-u-s-is-an-accomplice-to-the-largest-child-trafficking-operation-in-u-s-history/
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/03/florida-governor-desantis-suspends-all-remaining-covid-restrictions.html
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/05/irish-police-break-mans-home-remove-children-3-films-police-barging-shutting-catholic-mass-video/
https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2021/05/03/insanity-wrap-198-looted-burned-target-store-puts-up-mural-celebrating-arson-n1443948
https://vdare.com/posts/seriously-black-lives-truly-matter-1-dead-3-injured-in-mass-shooting-at-black-heritage-festival-in-fla
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/05/video-blm-militants-draw-ar-15s-ak-47s-portland-motorists-no-police-scene-reign-terror-continues/
Apparently “slowly” wasn’t the advice he was looking for.
*.*
I caught my son chewing on electrical cords...
So I had to ground him...
He's doing better currently...
And conducting himself properly.
*.*
Wayne was returning home from a business trip, bags in hand, and slowly making his way to his vehicle in the crowded airport garage. Suddenly a large dark car screeched to a stop in front of Wayne, and the driver pointed menacingly at him. "Get in," the driver ordered. "I'll take you to your car."
Startled, Wayne took a step backward. "Ah...no thanks," he answered. "I can get there myself."
"No!" the man barked back as he threw open his passenger side door. "Get in!"
Wayne's eyes now darted around the garage, hoping to find a security guard.
Just then, the driver's face softened. "Please," he said, "I've been driving up and down for two hours. I can't find a space to park, and I want yours."
*.*
The wife phones.
“Hi!”
“Hi! Did you clean the house?”
“Uhh…YUP!”
“OK, I’m coming home. Need anything?”
“Yes, about 2 hours.”
*.*
People say being a waiter is a bad job.
Hey, it puts food on the table.
Quote of the Times;
The law of the universe is; the more you try the more you get. - Roosh
Link of the Times;
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/03/gary-d-barnett/the-covid-vaccine-is-a-weapon-of-mass-destruction/
Issue of the Times;
To defeat woke tyrants, the rest of us must treat them like the monsters they are by Glenn H. Reynolds
Most Americans hate woke politics — and most minorities don’t share “woke” priorities. Indeed, according to pollster David Shor, woke excesses are causing black voters to flee the Democratic Party. Despite endless charges of “racism,” former President Donald Trump took the biggest share of minority voters of any Republican in my lifetime.
Woke tyrants ride high, even so; according to a Cato/YouGov poll, 62 percent of Americans self-censor their political expression. Only a tiny minority of consumers care about Mr. Potato Head’s toxic masculinity, about “Aunt Jemima” as a brand or about the #MeToo aggressions of Pepé Le Pew. Yet corporations, universities and governments rush to placate that minuscule slice of the population, trashing large chunks of our culture in the process.
It’s happening not because anybody voted for it, but because a small but determined and vicious minority is bullying people to go along, relying on cowardice and groupthink to achieve ends that could never happen via majority vote: How do you think Dr. Seuss would have done in a referendum?
How does this happen? To some degree, the woke abuse the good nature of Americans. For the most part, Americans want their fellow citizens to be happy. If they hear something makes others unhappy, they generously look to change things.
And there’s fear. Writing about the goings-on at New York’s Dalton School, Bari Weiss notes that even parents who think the political correctness has gone too far are afraid to speak out: They think their kids’ shot at the Ivy League could be at risk. And it’s not just Dalton.
Weiss quotes one mother: “I look at the public school, and I am equally mortified. I can’t believe what they are doing to everybody. I’m too afraid. I’m too afraid to speak too loudly. I feel cowardly. I just make little waves.” Another says: “It’s fear of retribution. Would it cause our daughter to be ostracized? Would it cause people to ostracize us? It already has.”
In his book “Skin in the Game,” Nicholas Nassim Taleb writes about the surprising ability of small but intransigent minorities — 3 percent to 4 percent is enough — to change the direction of entire societies. He writes: “The most intolerant wins. . . . Yes, an intolerant minority can control and destroy democracy. . . . [I]t will eventually destroy our world. So, we need to be more than intolerant with some intolerant minorities.”
Does this mean we should be less tolerant of our own minoritarian tyrants? In a word, yes.
I don’t mean that they should be forced into camps, or even driven from their jobs and from polite society, as the woke are all too willing to do to their opponents. But they need to be deprived of the thing that is most important to their self-image: moral credibility.
The woke think of themselves — and want everyone else to think of them — as deeply moral. If they have a flaw, it’s that they just care too much. They’re too idealistic, too empathetic, too eager to make the world a better place.
That’s bulls–t (pardon my French, Pepé!). If you look at what they do, rather than what they say about themselves, it quickly becomes obvious that the woke are horrible, awful people, and they should be treated as such and reminded of this whenever they raise their head.
Historically, it’s not the good guys who are out burning books and censoring speech. It isn’t the caring, empathetic people who try to destroy lives based on something someone said years ago, often while young, often taken out of context. It isn’t the good guys who take undisguised glee at the ruining of lives, families and careers.
You know who does these things? Horrible, awful people. Selfish people. People with serious mental and emotional problems who seek some sort of vindication for their deficient characters by taking power trips while imposing suffering on others.
Treat these tyrants as what they are: awful people who shouldn’t be listened to and who need to work hard on joining the better half of the human race. And remind them of it, over and over. Because it’s true. Deep down, they know it, too.
News of the Times;
https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/04/im-still-not-getting-the-vaccine/
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-56969414
https://www.voanews.com/south-central-asia/taliban-overrun-afghan-base-capture-troops-us-nato-forces-exit
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/05/devout-catholic-joe-biden-doesnt-mention-god-national-day-prayer-proclamation/
https://www.sott.net/article/452262-Significant-jump-this-week-in-reported-injuries-deaths-after-COVID-vaccine
https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2021/05/04/biden-goes-off-the-rails-in-a-gaffe-arama-including-one-word-that-has-people-talking-n374171
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/05/breaking-former-oregon-democrat-house-majority-speaker-arrested-human-sex-trafficking/
https://issuesinsights.com/2021/05/03/who-gets-to-define-whats-patriotic/
https://www.amren.com/commentary/2021/02/squeezed-to-zero-how-the-woke-and-the-chinese-are-destroying-academic-mathematics/
https://www.breitbart.com/immigration/2021/05/03/exclusive-david-ray-the-u-s-is-an-accomplice-to-the-largest-child-trafficking-operation-in-u-s-history/
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/03/florida-governor-desantis-suspends-all-remaining-covid-restrictions.html
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/05/irish-police-break-mans-home-remove-children-3-films-police-barging-shutting-catholic-mass-video/
https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2021/05/03/insanity-wrap-198-looted-burned-target-store-puts-up-mural-celebrating-arson-n1443948
https://vdare.com/posts/seriously-black-lives-truly-matter-1-dead-3-injured-in-mass-shooting-at-black-heritage-festival-in-fla
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/05/video-blm-militants-draw-ar-15s-ak-47s-portland-motorists-no-police-scene-reign-terror-continues/
Tensions?
Anthony Hopkins won the 2021 Oscar for best male actor and Frances McDormand won for best female actress.
The Academy have yet to state who won the other 62 gender awards.
*.*
My wife claims I'm a baseball fanatic. She says all I ever read about is baseball. All I ever talk about is baseball. All I ever think about is baseball.
I told her she's way off base!
*.*
Oneliners:
Those who confuse burro and burrow don't know their ass from a hole in the ground.
Currently helping my son search for his chocolate that I ate last night.
I wonder how many WTF's today will bring.
Quick question; can I still use the carpool lane if the other person is in the trunk?
Diet tip: Your pants will never get too tight if you don't wear any.
I have found that these days, people don't like holding hands in public, especially if they don't know you.
I've never seen an alcohol company use a drunk person in any of their advertising.
Bread is like the sun; it rises in the yeast and sets in the waist.
Dear Facebook, quit pointing out people I may know, I do know them I just don't like them.
I don't think we get smarter as we get older, we just run out of stupid things to do.
Now that we have everyone washing their hands properly, next week: turn signals!
*.*
Top 5 Signs your Accountant has some Bad News:
He asks you not to look at what you owe until he gets a 10-minute head start.
"Before I show you how much you owe, would you like some black tar heroin?"
He'd tell you how much you owe, but he won't stop crying.
Offers you travel brochures to places without a U.S. extradition agreement.
Right before he shows you the results, he says, "Boy, I'm glad I'm not you."
*.*
A 39 year old woman in Colorado has been killed in a bear attack.
Let's paws and reflect on this grizzly tragedy, and prey that her family can bear the grief.
Quote of the Times;
You must find the courage to leave the table if respect is no longer being served. - Edwards
Link of the Times;
https://mishtalk.com/
Issue of the Times;
How China is stoking America’s racial tensions by Ian Williams
A government that would never dream of allowing free elections in its own country mocks America’s democratic process
Footage of a brutal late March attack on a 65-year-old Asian American woman in Manhattan drew widespread outrage on social media. It also made for a productive afternoon for Zhao Lijian. From his Beijing office, the Chinese government spokesman retweeted 20 posts and shared the video 12 times on his official Twitter account. ‘We can’t help but wonder, who will be the next victim? When will it all end?’ he asked his almost 900,000 followers.
Zhao isn’t the only one who’s been busy. In the wake of the Atlanta spa shootings on March 16, Chinese state media used Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to stoke a narrative of American racism and hatred. One Twitter post from Global Times, a Communist party tabloid, shows the Statue of Liberty, gun in hand, towering over a tiny cardboard cutout figure marked ‘Asian’, with a target on its chest. Another cartoon, shared by CGTN, the international arm of China’s state broadcaster, shows an American COVID-19 vaccination center, and a young Asian asking the doctor, ‘By the way, is there also a vaccine for racism?’
Two years ago, China had almost no diplomatic presence on western social media. Now around 200 diplomats growl and troll their way around these platforms — the vanguard of a concerted push by party-controlled organizations, working in concert with a vast and shifting array of bogus accounts, to sow disinformation and discord.
They cut their teeth early in the COVID-19 pandemic, promoting conspiracy theories about the origin of the virus. Beijing pumped out propaganda and disinformation internationally through thousands of fake and hijacked Twitter accounts. It sought to portray itself as a leader and benefactor in public health, at the same time trashing the faltering efforts of Western democracies.
The EU accused China of running ‘a global disinformation campaign to deflect blame for the outbreak of the pandemic’. In June last year, Twitter shut down 170,000 accounts linked to the Chinese government, citing ‘a range of manipulative and coordinated activities’. YouTube banned almost 2,600 Chinese channels in the second quarter of 2020 alone, as part of what YouTube calls ‘our ongoing investigation into coordinated influence operations linked to China’.
CGTN was accused of spreading disinformation and propaganda on Twitter about the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. State media manipulated images and videos, and depicted protesters as violent tools of the West, practicing ‘terrorism’. In response, Twitter removed nearly 1,000 accounts and suspended thousands of others, which were part of what it described as a ‘significant state-backed information operation’. Facebook and YouTube also removed accounts.
Last summer, Chinese diplomats reveled in American protests over policing and race, embracing the Black Lives Matter movement with relish and accusing the US government of hypocrisy and double standards on human rights. When it came to the presidential election campaign and its messy aftermath, Beijing largely avoided showing a preference for either Trump or Biden. Instead, a government that would never dream of allowing free elections in its own country mocked America’s democratic process. Party-controlled media stoked a narrative of US national decline, highlighting chaos, dysfunction and the threat of violence — all amplified by social media.
China has pursued this theme in its coverage of the recent anti-Asian violence, using it to deflect attention from the persecution of the Uighurs in Xinjiang and the coordinated response, sanctions against Chinese officials by the US, UK, Canada and the EU. With western companies under pressure over the use of forced labor in Xinjiang, spokesman Zhao Lijian tweeted, ‘It is a historical fact that the #UnitedStates forced black slaves to collect cotton. Who on earth engaged in forced labor?’ Later he tweeted: ‘Shocking conspiracy of the US & West: destabilize #Xinjiang & contain China’s development. The cotton smears are just part of the bigger plot.’
China’s state-controlled news outlets appear to be among the highest ranked accounts on Twitter and Facebook. CGTN has 13.6 million Twitter followers and 116 million on Facebook. Global Times has 1.8 million on Twitter and 62 million on Facebook. Xinhua, a state news agency, has 12.4 million on Twitter and 89 million on Facebook. Obscure diplomats have quickly built followings to rival Hollywood celebrities.
Can there really be such an audience for stultifying propaganda? Perhaps, but there are many dark social media arts, which China has quickly learned. The figures are almost certainly false, inflated by automated programs (bots) that generate fake followers and fake likes. The idea is to give the pages more credibility and reach, and thereby pull in legitimate users. Bogus or hijacked accounts are used as ‘amplifiers’ to push posts and tweets and get them trending.
There used to be a distinction between Russian and Chinese activities in cyberspace. While China concentrated on cyber-espionage, plundering secrets from Western corporate and government systems, the Russians were the vandals. They launched destructive cyberattacks while engaging in disinformation and hack-and-leak operations, tactics with their roots in the Cold War heyday of ‘active measures’. Their aim was to sow division, doubt and distrust, spotting and exploiting cracks to weaken the target. Those aims have not changed.
Now Russian and Chinese tactics are converging. Both use social media to peddle disinformation and toxic content, amplifying fringe media, obscure ‘experts’ and conspiracy theorists.
The aim of both is not only to obscure facts but to disorient and depress: when Zhao Lijian pumped out tweets after the Manhattan attack, the content was carefully chosen. The posts he shared were not the angriest, but they were full of despair: ‘What the hell is wrong with people?’, ‘This is incredibly difficult to watch’, ‘Oh my God, what is happening to this country?’ ‘This is a state of emergency.’
And China has a wider policy goal — framing hate crime as a consequence of the US government’s more assertive recent stance against Beijing. ‘Experts say [hate crime] results from US politicians’ smearing of China as culprit of COVID-19. Worsening bilateral ties play part in discrimination surge,’ Global Times said in a recent tweet, without naming the ‘experts’.
The Communist party also has formidable weapons in the form of TikTok and WeChat.
The TikTok app, popular among 16- to 24-year-olds, is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. TikTok is a platform for catchy short videos, with an estimated 100 million users in the US. It has been criticized for its zealous collection of personal data and intrusions on the data security of users, and recently agreed to pay $92 million to settle a class-action lawsuit alleging it illegally tracked users and shared biometric data from photos and videos. The data, which included face scans, was allegedly shared with third parties, some in China. The company denies any wrongdoing.
More invidious is TikTok’s opaque algorithm that determines what a user sees. On Twitter and Facebook, users are mostly served content from accounts they subscribe to. On TikTok the videos can come from anywhere, and the app takes account of a range of information. This includes the type of videos you look at, the duration, your likes, comments and sharing, as well as user data such as age, gender and location. The precise recipe is unknown, since it has been designated a state secret. Last year, when it looked like ByteDance might be forced to sell its US operations, the Chinese government imposed export controls on the algorithm. While the company does employ engineers in the US, control is firmly in the hands of secretive China-based teams, which have been experimenting with advanced inputs including facial and voice recognition and sentiment analysis. In China the com- pany deploys this tech to censor content and promote CCP propaganda. It claims it does not censor in the US, but all Chinese companies must by law cooperate with the Communist party on ‘national security’, a very elastic concept. While the US algorithm might not be massaged as blatantly as in China, there is ample room for subtle manipulation.
WeChat presents a different sort of challenge. It is aimed at Chinese speakers, with an estimated 19 million regular users in the US. For immigrants it has become a vital way of keeping in touch with friends, family and developments in China, where it is known as the ‘app for everything’, such is the range of its services. This has made it an important component of the surveillance state, a weapon of social control, censorship and disinformation. Overseas, it has been used to intimidate Uighurs, Tibetans and other dissidents, often with threats relayed via relatives at home. But the broader danger is that by pumping nationalist propaganda into Chinese-speaking communities, shaping what they read and see, it is creating bubbles and magnifying divisions within America.
The Trump administration sought to ban both TikTok and WeChat on national security grounds. Both have fought back in the courts, and President Biden has paused the action against them while his staff becomes ‘familiar with the issues in this case’.
China has been quick to take advantage of this opening, presenting itself as the champion of Asian American communities in the wake of the recent anti-Asian violence. Older established migrants and political exiles have little time for Communist propaganda, but newer communities, particularly those drawn to the US by economic and educational opportunities, may be more receptive to WeChat-enabled propaganda and nationalist blandishments.
China’s use of social media can at times be clunky and crude. The irony is that the reach of its increasingly toxic and combative message, its ability to reach a Western audience, is being enabled by American social media platforms — platforms that are blocked in China, where trying to access them can lead to interrogation and jail.
Twitter, Facebook and YouTube do crack down on Chinese disinformation when it becomes impossible to ignore, as with COVID and Hong Kong, but their actions are inconsistent and patchy. Twitter and Facebook have now started labeling Chinese accounts as ‘state-affiliated’ but that has not dampened unease, even among Facebook’s own employees. Staff there are reportedly concerned the company is being used as a conduit for state propaganda, with a wave of sponsored posts of happy Uighurs, dancing, singing and generally thriving under Chinese rule.
Still, the Chinese embassy in Washington is having to do without its Twitter account, which was suspended in January after diplomats responded to evidence of forced sterilizations with a tweet claiming Uighur women had been ‘emancipated’ from extremism and were no longer ‘baby-making machines’. It was typical of China’s approach to try to whitewash an atrocity by appealing to feminism. In this case they misjudged their audience and overstepped the mark.
In targeting identity politics, China is stoking the most difficult and divisive issues in America. The absurd part is that Xi Jinping’s rule is built on an increasingly virulent ethnic nationalism. This fuels the CCP’s combative stances internationally — see, for instance, China’s top diplomat Yang Jiechi unashamedly berating secretary of state Antony Blinken for America’s record on human rights.
At home, meanwhile, the Communist party crushes human rights and regards any cultural and religious difference as a threat. This is what drives the appalling repression in Xinjiang, where the party is seeking to neuter Uighur culture and subjugate it to the Han Chinese. China’s Communist leadership is no position to lecture anybody about racism. Yet they do.
News of the Times;
https://lidblog.com/chinas-navy/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/04/german-police-ransack-home-doctor-provides-evidence-court-children-endangered-mental-physical-spiritual-obligation-wear-face-masks/
https://electionwiz.com/2021/04/28/arizona-school-board-flees-parents-elect-new-board-vote-to-end-mask-mandate/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/04/police-officer-made-viral-tiktok-video-mocking-lebron-james-suspended-fundraiser-launched/
https://summit.news/2021/04/29/uk-christian-pastor-arrested-for-saying-marriage-is-between-a-man-and-a-woman/
https://thefederalist.com/2021/04/29/stanford-student-government-candidate-says-white-people-need-to-be-eradicated/
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/general-motors-make-1-bln-electric-auto-investment-mexico-2021-04-29/
https://www.theblaze.com/news/delaware-officer-who-was-brutally-assaulted-dies-from-injuries-suspect-now-charged-with-murder
https://summit.news/2021/04/30/poll-majority-of-french-agree-with-military-generals-that-the-country-is-heading-towards-civil-war/
https://abc7news.com/exclusive-trump-supporter-infiltrates-north-bay-anti-fascist-group/10558396/
https://nypost.com/2021/05/01/maryland-firefighters-indicted-on-arson-charges-and-setting-fires-while-working/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/05/california-release-63000-violent-repeat-felons-back-onto-streets-create-safer-prisons/
https://americandigest.org/noted-in-passing-think-of-how-stupid-the-average-person-is-and-realize-half-of-them-are-stupider-than-that/
https://www.theorganicprepper.com/crazy-conspiracy-theories-2020/
https://davidthompson.typepad.com/davidthompson/2021/03/washday-blues.html
The Academy have yet to state who won the other 62 gender awards.
*.*
My wife claims I'm a baseball fanatic. She says all I ever read about is baseball. All I ever talk about is baseball. All I ever think about is baseball.
I told her she's way off base!
*.*
Oneliners:
Those who confuse burro and burrow don't know their ass from a hole in the ground.
Currently helping my son search for his chocolate that I ate last night.
I wonder how many WTF's today will bring.
Quick question; can I still use the carpool lane if the other person is in the trunk?
Diet tip: Your pants will never get too tight if you don't wear any.
I have found that these days, people don't like holding hands in public, especially if they don't know you.
I've never seen an alcohol company use a drunk person in any of their advertising.
Bread is like the sun; it rises in the yeast and sets in the waist.
Dear Facebook, quit pointing out people I may know, I do know them I just don't like them.
I don't think we get smarter as we get older, we just run out of stupid things to do.
Now that we have everyone washing their hands properly, next week: turn signals!
*.*
Top 5 Signs your Accountant has some Bad News:
He asks you not to look at what you owe until he gets a 10-minute head start.
"Before I show you how much you owe, would you like some black tar heroin?"
He'd tell you how much you owe, but he won't stop crying.
Offers you travel brochures to places without a U.S. extradition agreement.
Right before he shows you the results, he says, "Boy, I'm glad I'm not you."
*.*
A 39 year old woman in Colorado has been killed in a bear attack.
Let's paws and reflect on this grizzly tragedy, and prey that her family can bear the grief.
Quote of the Times;
You must find the courage to leave the table if respect is no longer being served. - Edwards
Link of the Times;
https://mishtalk.com/
Issue of the Times;
How China is stoking America’s racial tensions by Ian Williams
A government that would never dream of allowing free elections in its own country mocks America’s democratic process
Footage of a brutal late March attack on a 65-year-old Asian American woman in Manhattan drew widespread outrage on social media. It also made for a productive afternoon for Zhao Lijian. From his Beijing office, the Chinese government spokesman retweeted 20 posts and shared the video 12 times on his official Twitter account. ‘We can’t help but wonder, who will be the next victim? When will it all end?’ he asked his almost 900,000 followers.
Zhao isn’t the only one who’s been busy. In the wake of the Atlanta spa shootings on March 16, Chinese state media used Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to stoke a narrative of American racism and hatred. One Twitter post from Global Times, a Communist party tabloid, shows the Statue of Liberty, gun in hand, towering over a tiny cardboard cutout figure marked ‘Asian’, with a target on its chest. Another cartoon, shared by CGTN, the international arm of China’s state broadcaster, shows an American COVID-19 vaccination center, and a young Asian asking the doctor, ‘By the way, is there also a vaccine for racism?’
Two years ago, China had almost no diplomatic presence on western social media. Now around 200 diplomats growl and troll their way around these platforms — the vanguard of a concerted push by party-controlled organizations, working in concert with a vast and shifting array of bogus accounts, to sow disinformation and discord.
They cut their teeth early in the COVID-19 pandemic, promoting conspiracy theories about the origin of the virus. Beijing pumped out propaganda and disinformation internationally through thousands of fake and hijacked Twitter accounts. It sought to portray itself as a leader and benefactor in public health, at the same time trashing the faltering efforts of Western democracies.
The EU accused China of running ‘a global disinformation campaign to deflect blame for the outbreak of the pandemic’. In June last year, Twitter shut down 170,000 accounts linked to the Chinese government, citing ‘a range of manipulative and coordinated activities’. YouTube banned almost 2,600 Chinese channels in the second quarter of 2020 alone, as part of what YouTube calls ‘our ongoing investigation into coordinated influence operations linked to China’.
CGTN was accused of spreading disinformation and propaganda on Twitter about the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. State media manipulated images and videos, and depicted protesters as violent tools of the West, practicing ‘terrorism’. In response, Twitter removed nearly 1,000 accounts and suspended thousands of others, which were part of what it described as a ‘significant state-backed information operation’. Facebook and YouTube also removed accounts.
Last summer, Chinese diplomats reveled in American protests over policing and race, embracing the Black Lives Matter movement with relish and accusing the US government of hypocrisy and double standards on human rights. When it came to the presidential election campaign and its messy aftermath, Beijing largely avoided showing a preference for either Trump or Biden. Instead, a government that would never dream of allowing free elections in its own country mocked America’s democratic process. Party-controlled media stoked a narrative of US national decline, highlighting chaos, dysfunction and the threat of violence — all amplified by social media.
China has pursued this theme in its coverage of the recent anti-Asian violence, using it to deflect attention from the persecution of the Uighurs in Xinjiang and the coordinated response, sanctions against Chinese officials by the US, UK, Canada and the EU. With western companies under pressure over the use of forced labor in Xinjiang, spokesman Zhao Lijian tweeted, ‘It is a historical fact that the #UnitedStates forced black slaves to collect cotton. Who on earth engaged in forced labor?’ Later he tweeted: ‘Shocking conspiracy of the US & West: destabilize #Xinjiang & contain China’s development. The cotton smears are just part of the bigger plot.’
China’s state-controlled news outlets appear to be among the highest ranked accounts on Twitter and Facebook. CGTN has 13.6 million Twitter followers and 116 million on Facebook. Global Times has 1.8 million on Twitter and 62 million on Facebook. Xinhua, a state news agency, has 12.4 million on Twitter and 89 million on Facebook. Obscure diplomats have quickly built followings to rival Hollywood celebrities.
Can there really be such an audience for stultifying propaganda? Perhaps, but there are many dark social media arts, which China has quickly learned. The figures are almost certainly false, inflated by automated programs (bots) that generate fake followers and fake likes. The idea is to give the pages more credibility and reach, and thereby pull in legitimate users. Bogus or hijacked accounts are used as ‘amplifiers’ to push posts and tweets and get them trending.
There used to be a distinction between Russian and Chinese activities in cyberspace. While China concentrated on cyber-espionage, plundering secrets from Western corporate and government systems, the Russians were the vandals. They launched destructive cyberattacks while engaging in disinformation and hack-and-leak operations, tactics with their roots in the Cold War heyday of ‘active measures’. Their aim was to sow division, doubt and distrust, spotting and exploiting cracks to weaken the target. Those aims have not changed.
Now Russian and Chinese tactics are converging. Both use social media to peddle disinformation and toxic content, amplifying fringe media, obscure ‘experts’ and conspiracy theorists.
The aim of both is not only to obscure facts but to disorient and depress: when Zhao Lijian pumped out tweets after the Manhattan attack, the content was carefully chosen. The posts he shared were not the angriest, but they were full of despair: ‘What the hell is wrong with people?’, ‘This is incredibly difficult to watch’, ‘Oh my God, what is happening to this country?’ ‘This is a state of emergency.’
And China has a wider policy goal — framing hate crime as a consequence of the US government’s more assertive recent stance against Beijing. ‘Experts say [hate crime] results from US politicians’ smearing of China as culprit of COVID-19. Worsening bilateral ties play part in discrimination surge,’ Global Times said in a recent tweet, without naming the ‘experts’.
The Communist party also has formidable weapons in the form of TikTok and WeChat.
The TikTok app, popular among 16- to 24-year-olds, is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. TikTok is a platform for catchy short videos, with an estimated 100 million users in the US. It has been criticized for its zealous collection of personal data and intrusions on the data security of users, and recently agreed to pay $92 million to settle a class-action lawsuit alleging it illegally tracked users and shared biometric data from photos and videos. The data, which included face scans, was allegedly shared with third parties, some in China. The company denies any wrongdoing.
More invidious is TikTok’s opaque algorithm that determines what a user sees. On Twitter and Facebook, users are mostly served content from accounts they subscribe to. On TikTok the videos can come from anywhere, and the app takes account of a range of information. This includes the type of videos you look at, the duration, your likes, comments and sharing, as well as user data such as age, gender and location. The precise recipe is unknown, since it has been designated a state secret. Last year, when it looked like ByteDance might be forced to sell its US operations, the Chinese government imposed export controls on the algorithm. While the company does employ engineers in the US, control is firmly in the hands of secretive China-based teams, which have been experimenting with advanced inputs including facial and voice recognition and sentiment analysis. In China the com- pany deploys this tech to censor content and promote CCP propaganda. It claims it does not censor in the US, but all Chinese companies must by law cooperate with the Communist party on ‘national security’, a very elastic concept. While the US algorithm might not be massaged as blatantly as in China, there is ample room for subtle manipulation.
WeChat presents a different sort of challenge. It is aimed at Chinese speakers, with an estimated 19 million regular users in the US. For immigrants it has become a vital way of keeping in touch with friends, family and developments in China, where it is known as the ‘app for everything’, such is the range of its services. This has made it an important component of the surveillance state, a weapon of social control, censorship and disinformation. Overseas, it has been used to intimidate Uighurs, Tibetans and other dissidents, often with threats relayed via relatives at home. But the broader danger is that by pumping nationalist propaganda into Chinese-speaking communities, shaping what they read and see, it is creating bubbles and magnifying divisions within America.
The Trump administration sought to ban both TikTok and WeChat on national security grounds. Both have fought back in the courts, and President Biden has paused the action against them while his staff becomes ‘familiar with the issues in this case’.
China has been quick to take advantage of this opening, presenting itself as the champion of Asian American communities in the wake of the recent anti-Asian violence. Older established migrants and political exiles have little time for Communist propaganda, but newer communities, particularly those drawn to the US by economic and educational opportunities, may be more receptive to WeChat-enabled propaganda and nationalist blandishments.
China’s use of social media can at times be clunky and crude. The irony is that the reach of its increasingly toxic and combative message, its ability to reach a Western audience, is being enabled by American social media platforms — platforms that are blocked in China, where trying to access them can lead to interrogation and jail.
Twitter, Facebook and YouTube do crack down on Chinese disinformation when it becomes impossible to ignore, as with COVID and Hong Kong, but their actions are inconsistent and patchy. Twitter and Facebook have now started labeling Chinese accounts as ‘state-affiliated’ but that has not dampened unease, even among Facebook’s own employees. Staff there are reportedly concerned the company is being used as a conduit for state propaganda, with a wave of sponsored posts of happy Uighurs, dancing, singing and generally thriving under Chinese rule.
Still, the Chinese embassy in Washington is having to do without its Twitter account, which was suspended in January after diplomats responded to evidence of forced sterilizations with a tweet claiming Uighur women had been ‘emancipated’ from extremism and were no longer ‘baby-making machines’. It was typical of China’s approach to try to whitewash an atrocity by appealing to feminism. In this case they misjudged their audience and overstepped the mark.
In targeting identity politics, China is stoking the most difficult and divisive issues in America. The absurd part is that Xi Jinping’s rule is built on an increasingly virulent ethnic nationalism. This fuels the CCP’s combative stances internationally — see, for instance, China’s top diplomat Yang Jiechi unashamedly berating secretary of state Antony Blinken for America’s record on human rights.
At home, meanwhile, the Communist party crushes human rights and regards any cultural and religious difference as a threat. This is what drives the appalling repression in Xinjiang, where the party is seeking to neuter Uighur culture and subjugate it to the Han Chinese. China’s Communist leadership is no position to lecture anybody about racism. Yet they do.
News of the Times;
https://lidblog.com/chinas-navy/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/04/german-police-ransack-home-doctor-provides-evidence-court-children-endangered-mental-physical-spiritual-obligation-wear-face-masks/
https://electionwiz.com/2021/04/28/arizona-school-board-flees-parents-elect-new-board-vote-to-end-mask-mandate/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/04/police-officer-made-viral-tiktok-video-mocking-lebron-james-suspended-fundraiser-launched/
https://summit.news/2021/04/29/uk-christian-pastor-arrested-for-saying-marriage-is-between-a-man-and-a-woman/
https://thefederalist.com/2021/04/29/stanford-student-government-candidate-says-white-people-need-to-be-eradicated/
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/general-motors-make-1-bln-electric-auto-investment-mexico-2021-04-29/
https://www.theblaze.com/news/delaware-officer-who-was-brutally-assaulted-dies-from-injuries-suspect-now-charged-with-murder
https://summit.news/2021/04/30/poll-majority-of-french-agree-with-military-generals-that-the-country-is-heading-towards-civil-war/
https://abc7news.com/exclusive-trump-supporter-infiltrates-north-bay-anti-fascist-group/10558396/
https://nypost.com/2021/05/01/maryland-firefighters-indicted-on-arson-charges-and-setting-fires-while-working/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/05/california-release-63000-violent-repeat-felons-back-onto-streets-create-safer-prisons/
https://americandigest.org/noted-in-passing-think-of-how-stupid-the-average-person-is-and-realize-half-of-them-are-stupider-than-that/
https://www.theorganicprepper.com/crazy-conspiracy-theories-2020/
https://davidthompson.typepad.com/davidthompson/2021/03/washday-blues.html
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.
An Images & Ideas, Inc. Service.
No Vegans were harmed in the making of this site. We're looking for a new provider.
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.