Youtube comments of TaichiStraightlife (@TaichiStraightlife).
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What I've always admired about this actor is his coolness; the power he finds in silence, in stillness, in pauses; like Steve McQueen (especially in Bullitt) but even more so. This is a guy who is a little wary, who doesn't easily trust. You could imagine a back-story where his character was deeply hurt and as a result likes to keep the world at a certain distance.
He'll build tension by dropping the volume of his voice and making you wait for what he'll say because you need to know what he'll say, which is a function of his magnetism; you're drawn in. This is not a guy who is hot or flamboyant, who acts out or chews the scenery.
That wariness and distance, that fundamental aloneness, was one reason he was so effective in Jeremiah Johnson, The Natural and 3 Days of the Condor, because it heightened the mystery behind his character and it's also why he was so good in The Candidate, because he fought so hard NOT to be the glad-hander that his handlers demanded he become.
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I love love love Dovilė Sakalienė because how can you not? She knows what she knows, she stands firm as a rock & has a backbone of the finest steel. And as a self-appointed representative of the citizens of the US (the good ones, anyone) I'd like to take this opportunity to apologize to Ukraine, & all NATO nations especially Canada & Denmark. Also Greenland, Mexico (including The Gulf of Mexico), Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, South Africa, Colombia and if I missed any place it was inadvertent, so please accept my humble apologies as well for the interminable asinine utterances of our orange bloviator. Thank you.
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Tee Jack- I liked Obama a lot, but I don't see him as one of the best presidents... one of the better presidents, yes, but he was unable to deal successfully with Congress when the Republicans were in charge, and he didn't fight for Garland on the SCOTUS, are two of the things that jump out to me. But in terms of tone and tenor, Obamacare, Bin Laden and a reset with a lot of the world (sans Russia), yes: he was a fine, and historic, president.
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@akayo815 "No, because Russia didn't accept Ukraine's borders before that" that's so not true; Russia GUARANTEED Ukraine's borders and promised to PROTECT those borders:
"The Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances comprises three identical political agreements signed at the OSCE conference in Budapest, Hungary, on 5 December 1994, to provide security assurances by its signatories relating to the accession of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). The memorandum was originally signed by three nuclear powers: the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom and the United States. China and France gave somewhat weaker individual assurances in separate documents.[1]
The memorandum prohibited the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom and the United States FROM THREATENING OR USING MILITARY FORCE OR ECONOMIC COERCION AGAINST UKRAINE, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, "except in self-defense or otherwise in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations." As a result of other agreements and the memorandum, between 1993 and 1996, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine gave up their nuclear weapons..." -from Wikipedia; google Budapest Memorandum.
akayo; I'm not saying you agree with Putin but you're right; that IS what putin believes, WRONGLY; he makes it up as he goes along; facts have nothing to do with what lies endlessly flow from his lips... much like his dog, trump.
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So, I used to fall heavily for someone (this happened a number of times). Hearts and flowers, etc. Then, after a few weeks, I'd wake up one morning and be absolutely cold about them (which was scary). I just wanted nothing to do with them, really. I'd hide this feeling for awhile, hoping that it would pass, but it never did, and I'd have to break up clean. Finally, I gave up on relationships totally- I thought it wasn't fair to the other party, and never wanted to hurt anyone like that, but it happened enough times that I thought: I can't keep doing this to others. PS- My mother was a narcissist (that's my own layman's diagnosis, for what it's worth). So what kind of attachment disorder is that?
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I'm a stock market guy; I tend to see things in cycles, a constant rising and falling of trends.
Bull Markets last until they die. For example, we had a bull that lasted from the late 1970's until 1980 or so; it was an oil bull; oil companies led it. Then we had a bear market that demolished the oil companies, The next bull market arrived in 1982 and I loaded up on oil stocks.
I was young; I didn't know that once a bull market dies, the sector that led it DOES NOT lead the next bull... oil languished; techs led the new bull.
Same here; the trump bull is DEAD. I foresee a massive trump bear that washes all the carnival barkers and other circus creatures out of office, probably for all time. There will probably be false starts (like the oils in 1982), and trump islands in the South, another nostalgic Lost Cause, but on the national scene, I see that trumpy trend, fueled by a growing national repugnance as Americans die in the hundreds of thousands due to monumental incompetence, as DEAD.
The next right-leaning opposition party to the Democrats will not resemble this curdled vision of Reaganism that wouldn't have been recognized by the Gipper himself, in his most famous quote from his best role, in Kings Row: "Where's the rest of me?!"
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@maryburke6776 - The interviewer put forth the concept that Ms. Hutchinson lied by omission by originally stating that she didn't remember any number of facts that she in fact DID remember, as instructed by her first, trump-paid for, attorney. She then got a new attorney & changed her testimony to a more truthful version, that fully recounted her memory. This happens all the time, especially with attorney who are being paid by trump and then give bad advice to their so-called clients (when actually trump is their main client, and to whom they owe their fealty & ultimate loyalty). This just recently happened yet again in the Florida case, the stolen documents case, where a Mar-a-Lago employee dumped his trump attorney, got his own attorney & changed his testimony to the Grand Jury, now implicating trump after all; saying that yes: trump DID want to wipe the hard drive.
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Pres. Carter had some bad luck in the '70s, as did this country... part of it was his feuding with a democratic congress... and then in came Reagan, which led to a 40 year blue collar union slide.
Maybe it was inevitable; we'd had our 7 fat years, so to speak (because right after WWll, we were the only nation that still had an intact industrial plant) , and by the the '70s the rest of the world started to kick our collective butts, started to make up for lost time... and while it's no doubt true what Alter said about a 14-fold increase in petroleum prices, what he left out is what level it started from; I think it was around $2 a barrel; so oil companies had been paying $2 for 42 gallons of oil... so at long last it was time to pay the pipers... and of course the Arabs.
Funny; while unions were weakening in the US (Reagan, a former union president, destroyed the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization- PATCO as a specific signal for the beginning of reactionary change), cartels like OPEC were flying high and ruling the roost.
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@dr.h.e.sawyerjr.9984 - Well doc, now that you mention stupid... listen; the authoritative book on this subject, "The Great Influenza", by John M. Barry, states exactly that: US/Kansas, on an army base. And if you want to mention stupid again: how the US dealt with that Influenza was pretty much as stupid as how the trump administration handled this one. So here's what it says on the back cover of the paperback edition of this book, currently in my hand: "In the winter of 1918, at the height of WWl, history's most lethal influential virus erupted in an army camp in Kansas, moved east with American troops, then exploded, killing as many as 100 million people worldwide..." It goes on from there. And doc? You're welcome for the education. PS- I recommend this book, along with Barry's Rising Tide, about the Mississippi floods of 1927 (and also the Randy Newman song about the same event: LOUISIANA 1927 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lB0I6uxRglY)
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This is a very, very interesting discussion, full of high drama, & both sides seem to have some right on their side. Surprisingly for me, I tended to agree with Sen. Paul, especially after he gave his second speech, where he gives an example of how this law may actually do unintended harm, but then again Senator Booker's thought, that Senator Paul's amendment would mean the proposed law would then have to go back to a House committee or even the full House for another vote (since the law had been changed in the interim by Paul's amendment) and that this amounted to an unnecessary or even fatal delaying tactic, is also worth considering.
Not being a member of either legislative body, I can't judge how much of a substantive problem that only appears to be, or could actually become.
Still, it does show you how a 30 second sound bite on TV could not convey the context, emotions or legal reality of such a law being passed... or, in this case, not being passed, especially during such fraught times as we're going through right now.
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I'm a stock market guy; I tend to see things in cycles, a constant rising and falling of trends.
Bull Markets last until they die. For example, we had a bull that lasted from the late 70s until 1980 or so; it was an oil bull; oil companies led it. Then we had a bear market that demolished the oil companies, The next bull market arrived in 1982 and I loaded up on oil stocks.
I was young; I didn't know that once a bull market dies, the sector that led it DOES NOT lead the next bull... oil languished; techs led the new bull.
Same here; the trump bull is DEAD. I foresee a massive trump bear that washes all the carnival barkers and other circus creatures out of office, probably for all time. There will probably be false starts (like the oils in 1982), and trump islands in the South, another nostalgic Lost Cause, but on the national scene, I see that trumpy trend, fueled by a growing national repugnance as Americans die in the hundreds of thousands due to monumental incompetence, as DEAD.
The next right-leaning opposition party to the Democrats will not resemble this curdled vision of Reaganism that wouldn't have been recognized by the Gipper himself, in his most famous quote from his best role, in Kings Row: "Where's the rest of me?!"
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Patrick- The saddest day in my life as a citizen is the day they elected trump POTUS. I thought: the morons have elected their king.
Every day since then, whenever Cadet Bone Spurs opens that orange mouth of his & starts haphazardly unleashing yet another word salad using that sad 5th grade vocabulary: full of pomp, aggression & need, in inane repetitive phrases, connected by ellipses and little else, that ends up leading nowhere intelligible. I say, sometimes out loud:
"What a moron!"
So, I've said this now several thousand times through these seemingly endless years... or maybe it only feels this way.
November is getting closer. Please, Democrats, for the sake of the life of our Republic and possibly our planet as well, remove this narcissistic bloviator's small fingers from the wheel of our ship of state.
The life you save may be your own.
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@MadPrinceSheo - At last, a comment that makes sense, that actually addresses the issue Senator Paul was raising, where I was surprised to find myself actually in agreement with him... EXCEPT for Senator second comment: that Senator Paul's amendment would mean the proposed law would then have to go back to a House committee or even the full House for another vote (since the law had been changed in the interim by Paul's amendment) and that this amounted to an unnecessary or even fatal delaying tactic (say, if the House then buries it in committee, or some such), is also worth considering.
Not being a member of either legislative body, I can't judge how much of a substantive problem that only APPEARS to be, or actually IS.
Still, it does show you how a 30 second sound bite on TV could not convey the context, emotions or legal reality of such a law being passed... or, in this case, not being passed, especially during such fraught times as we're going through right now.
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@23_Knows_ALL - I hate how he weakened this country and its institutions; I hate how he attacked our allies, damaged our friends (Kurdish allies), helped dictators, racists, terrorists, denigrated my fellow citizens, told tens of thousands of lies, hired criminals and other morally lax and downright sleazy characters for his cabinet... I really don't have the time still remaining in my life to catalog all the objectionable activities he took part in, but I'll just close with this last one: while leading the country that spends the most of any country in the world on health, he- and we- had the worst record on covid deaths of any country on Earth, because he indulged in endless lying and denial, his usual M.O., about every aspect of this disease that caused thousands of additional victims who died, and didn't have to.
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"Ukraine is the West's fault..." if you believe Russia should control the destiny and be the defacto ruler of its neighbors... if you believe that, you probably also believe that Hitler was right to invade the Sudetenland, because after all, didn't a lot of them speak German? So Hitler had a "natural right" to invade a sovereign nation, which in general is a lot of old thinking about spheres of influence, and before that, protectorates and colonies, which thinking brought us both WWl and WWll, and is one more reason why that mode of thought is moldy and doesn't pass the smell test. To bring Mearsheimer up to date: modern sovereign states are free to go their own way, free to vote for the destiny of their choice. Putin is now the president of Crimea which is an area he stole from another nation. That's simply wrong and evidence that what's currently happening in Ukraine is Russia and Putin's fault; don't forget, Russia is a signatory to a document (when Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons) that pledged to respect and protect Ukraine's territorial integrity. Which agreement, of course, it broke the moment it was convenient for them to do so, with their "little green men". Russia is ethically bankrupt; a kleptocratic fraud that can't be trusted to honor its own promises. Of COURSE Russia is at fault here, whatever theories and moldy ideas that Putin's apologists and intellectual lickspittles like Mearsheimer try to sell you.
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@the_jackal622 - Don't be a jackal, attacking the human race with unsubstantiated lies that more properly belong in a fever dream.
Here's a quote about another pandemic, for a true comparison "...Another difference is that today's vaccine roll-out is coordinated and required manufacturers to prove safety and efficacy, but in 1918, it was a free-for-all: A wave of independently developed vaccines were distributed throughout the country by doctors and researchers who were confident they'd found the answer.
One problem: The vaccines developed at the time were ineffective, largely due to the fact that the flu was mistakenly believed to be bacterial in nature."
Here's another quote, about flu vaccines, that take a few months to be developed: "Today, seasonal flu vaccines are designed by the WHO using data gathered from influenza surveillance centers to develop a new vaccination based off the three strains most likely to circulate in the upcoming season."
Also; you neglect to mention (or perhaps even realize) that data collection and the resultant study based on that post-released data, continue long after approval... ie; it's still going on. You obviously have no idea how happy I am to have been vaccinated, but I assure you it's a BIG LOAD off of my mind during these dark and fraught times we try to live through these days. GET VACCINATED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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@kshen7485 - Not true; Lee Kuan Yew was often lauded (although, it's true, sometimes criticized for his heavy-handed ways) for his ability to make Singapore work, even with it's mix of races and cultures, as opposed to China, whose solution to Uyghur upset (Tibetan, too) has been: concentration camps, re-education camps and slave labor prisons where textiles are manufactured for a pittance by slave labor, exported on the cheap and then denied & lied about by China... I'd prefer Lee Kuan Yew a 1000 times over (and I had the pleasure of visiting Singapore on several occasions when he was in charge ) next to your endlessly brutal dictator Xi. As far as your charges about 350K dead citizens, it's even worse than that; while China is a dictatorship, and the Chinese have no role in choosing their leaders, the USA is a democracy and thus FREELY CHOSE (with Russian internet "help") to be ruled by a malignant narcissist, a mental illness. GOD help us; the American voter has a lot to answer for, perhaps democracy too.
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@Sol-y-Mar-57 - Not ever seeing the inside of a jail cell, huh? Okay, so here's the plan: we pool our money, rent a limo & driver for a night, go to trump tower, and announce to the recently defeated would-be dictator, (he's depressed, down in the mouth), our driver tells him he's been comped to a fabulous meal at the world's best restaurant, the queen will be there, the pope, whatever, and he'll be awarded with the Nobel Peace Prize, or something else he's always hungered for, he won't be able to resist, right into the limo and directly (do not pass go, do not collect $200) to the closest jail, Riker's Island, say (NYC). He's never heard from again, if that's even possible. It's a thought.
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@svukic1041 - My pleasure. That was from the Mothers Of Invention Freak Out album (Historical note: Frank Zappa here introduced the first "concept" album to rock & roll. First double album in the history of rock.) . What a genius, dead way too soon, perhaps because he was poisoned as a child by mustard gas and radium while in Baltimore.. Wiki: "Zappa was often sick as a child, suffering from asthma, earaches and sinus problems. A doctor treated his sinusitis by inserting a pellet of radium into each of Zappa's nostrils. At the time, little was known about the potential dangers of even small amounts of therapeutic radiation,[12]:10 and although it has since been claimed that nasal radium treatment has causal connections to cancer, no studies have provided significant enough evidence to confirm this.[13]
Nasal imagery and references appear in his music and lyrics, as well as in the collage album covers created by his long-time collaborator Cal Schenkel. Zappa believed his childhood diseases might have been due to exposure to mustard gas, released by the nearby chemical warfare facility, and his health worsened when he lived in Baltimore...
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Arsenal Bismarck "In Europe we are tought history as it was." how smug a comment that is; if you know anything about history, you know that WWII was almost yesterday; in terms of books, diary entries and declassifying secrets, and it might take another 50 or 100 years to have even a hope of understanding what went on, then. Add to that, there are many vested interests in the West and the East with an interest in destroying or burying relevant facts for as long as possible. My essential points:
1. I really doubt that von Braun had anything to do directly with 25,000 deaths. I'm not saying these people didn't die, although I've read the number 20,000 as an approximation for Mittelbrau-Dora deaths. I'm saying he probably had nothing directly to do with that as he was a highly prized rocket technician (who, by the way, was once jailed due to a perceived insufficient loyalty to the Third Reich).
2. My main point however is the situation from a realpolitik viewpoint. As I wrote earlier to you earlier (the bulk of which also seems to have disappeared):
The main problem with your thinking is that of its simplicity about how the world really works. The truth of the matter is that as WWII was winding down, the British, The Americans, and the Soviets were scrambling as quickly as they could to round up as many of the German Peenemunde rocket crew as they could, along with their data. For example: Helmut Gröttrup was a German engineer, rocket scientist and inventor of the smart card. During World War II, he worked in the German V-2 rocket program under Wernher von Braun. From 1946 to 1953 he headed a group of 170 German scientists who were forced to work for the Soviet rocketry program under Sergei Korolev. (Wiki)
Then during the night on 22 October 1946, a selected group of more than 170 German scientists and engineers - plus equipment - from the Zentralwerke were unexpectedly and forcibly (at gunpoint) moved to the USSR by 92 trains as part of Operation Osoaviakhim with more than two thousand German specialists .[3] From 1946–1950, Gröttrup was in charge of the more than 170 German specialists brought to Branch 1 of NII-88 on Gorodomlya Island in Lake Seliger. The German team was indirectly overseen by Sergei Korolev, the "chief designer" of the Soviet rocketry program.
Gröttrup helped Korolev with the R-1 project, a recreation of the V-2 missile using Russian manufacturing and materials. At Kapustin Yar, he helped Korolev supervise the launching of 20 rebuilt V-2 rockets and analyzing failure causes. In October 1947 they succeeded for the first time. As a reality check on Korolev's missile proposals, official Dmitriy Ustinov asked Gröttrup and his small team to design several new missile systems, including the R-10 (G-1), R-12 (G-2) and the R-14 (G-4) which was similar to the A9/A10 long range missile von Braun designed during the war.[4] Gröttrup was also asked to consult on the R-13 (G-3) cruise missile. None of these projects went beyond the design stage. However, the theoretical work of the German scientists proposed improved solutions due to lack of material, and new ideas significantly contributed to the later success of Soviet space program. Some ideas were incorporated in the R-2 and R-5 missile systems.[5] The launcher Vostok 1 for Yuri Gagarin's space flight in April 1961 was based on a bundling of a total of 20 A4-like engines with conical rocket bodies, as already proposed by the German scientists in 1949 in Gorodomlja. For political reasons, however, the contributions made by the German collective of rocket scientists to Soviet missile development have long been considered insignificant by the public in East and West
Don't forget, it was the Soviets who were first into space with their Sputnik program, which scared the bejesus out of the US, and that fear gave the US the needed impetus for our own space program, which, yes: eventually landed us on the moon.
Finally, my summation: 1. everybody was grabbing German rocket guys, it wasn't just the US. 2. Of course this is what happens when one country shows the world it has unlocked the door to an advanced technical military future; when that country disappears, their technicians and inventors and data are grabbed up but pronto. Of course! This is how the world works! Is the US supposed to just sit around and let the Soviets have the skies, and space?!
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So, I used to fall heavily for someone (this happened a number of times). Hearts and flowers, lots of desire, etc. Then, after a few weeks, I'd wake up one morning and be absolutely cold about them (which was scary that this could happen to me so abruptly). I just wanted nothing to do with them, really. I'd hide this feeling for awhile, hoping that it would pass, but it never did, and I'd finally have to break it off clean. Finally, I gave up on relationships totally- I thought it wasn't fair to the other party, and I never wanted to hurt anyone like that, but it happened enough times that I thought: this isn't right, I I can't keep doing this to others. PS- My mother was a narcissist (that's my own layman's diagnosis, for what it's worth). So what kind of attachment disorder does that sound like?
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Hey Ian, here's another thought: individual Afghani soldiers were reported to be selling their American-supplied rifles to the Taliban for $80. apiece... and then in the middle of the night their president fled (probably with half the money in the treasury). The South Vietnamese soldiers were taking off their uniforms while in battle & were running away in their underwear. The Kurds stood their ground and fought... and then were betrayed by fat orange trump. But now we see the Ukrainian PEOPLE, men and women both, fighting bravely for their land, their country, for their very freedom to make their own decisions about their own destiny.
You have putin OUTRAGED that the Ukrainians want the freedom to run their own lives, associate with whom they want, read the books they want to read, debate the issues of the day and demonstrate in the public plazas of their cities and towns about their concerns.
And putin is OUTRAGED that the Ukrainians don't want to obey his every command, that they don't want him to jail and kill their patriots, or dismember their precious country, or nod dumbly at his outrageous and endless lies, the way republicans do with trump's lies in the USA.
So people see and remember these individual facts and we're frankly all of us very moved by all of these disparate facts... because we've seen time and again, ever since this dark century began, the crumbling of one democracy after another and Ukrainian courage is SUCH an invigorating breath of fresh air, such that we haven't seen in DECADES, that we're moved to tears by the very sight and sounds of it.
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I wanted Susan Rice but yeah, Kamala is probably the better pick, I'm now psyched, but my question is: why has this comment section been overrun by drones and other professional haters spouting trump talking points? How can there be a question about thought processes when trump is the man who spouts things like:
"If Biden is elected, there will be “no religion, no anything,” and he would confiscate all guns, “immediately and without notice.” He would “abolish” “our great,” “beautiful suburbs,” not to mention “the American way of life.” There would be “no windows, no nothing” in buildings."
I mean, I would vote for an ashtray for president before I would vote for trump. If a rabid dog was running... actually a rabid dog IS running. An orange one, & no; I'd never vote for him.
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@ShadyCool - "Wildly unsubstantiated claim"? Yeah, I know the drill, Ec 1; you have "alternate facts" that agree with your political interpretation of history. Well, here's John M. Barry, a graduate degree in history, and the reception his book received:
"...His 2004 book The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Greatest Plague in History was also a New York Times Best Seller, and won the 2005 Keck Communication Award from the United States National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine for the year's outstanding book on science or medicine. In 2005 he also won the "September 11th Award" from the Center for Biodefense and Emerging Pathogens at Brown University. He has served on a federal government's Infectious Disease Board of Experts, on the advisory board of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Center for Engineering Fundamentals, and on the advisory committee at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health for its Center for Refugee and Disaster Response."
John M Barry himself:
John M. Barry (b. 1947[1]) is an American author and historian who has written books on the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, the influenza pandemic of 1918, and the development of the modern form of the ideas of separation of church and state and individual liberty. He is a professor at the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine and Distinguished Scholar at Tulane's Bywater Institute.
But then there's the "eclectic 1" , w/ his "wildly unsubstantiated" alternate facts exhortations... gee; which one shall I believe??
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@Evil Rev - As is usual with you guys, everything you say (or write, here) is a broad-based slogan, could fit on a button or a banner, and is bereft of specifics; it always seems to be about emotionally lashing out, in anger and bitterness, with no hint that you understand any issues in depth or are prepared to write about them. Politics has often been called, "the art of the possible" but your attitude is anything but; it presents itself as nothing except argumentative, destructive and nihilistic at its heart... and you even present yourself, at the outset here, as "Evil".
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An off-topic remark: these are thoughtful, good-looking, well-dressed people questioned in an immaculately well-kept park (Moscow? St. Petersburg?). It's a shame where their leadership has taken them, with their national policies of brutal and unprovoked warfare on a neighbor's civilian population; it's horrible how they are making the Ukrainians suffer, but also how the Lebanese, Africans, & the Afghans etc. will suffer hunger due to the lack of Ukrainian wheat this year and in the future as farmers and their fields die; the hunger and even starvation of the innocents. The Europeans will suffer due to rising fuel costs as a result of this, also the rising military budgets, money no longer available to start new businesses, educate the young or house the homeless, will make people poorer in the USA, Europe, Russia; & everywhere, really... and the free-flow of information is dying, travel & tourism will die
Truly a crying shame & a huge backward step for the entire world. Only the rats and other parasites will benefit from the largess provided by so many artillery shells & missiles creating so many bloody fresh corpses for them to feast upon...
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Arsenal Bismarck - You're being naive and simplistic. I wrote you a long and detailed rebuttal that google completely disappeared on me, so I'm not doing that again. I'll summarize some points:
1. Wernher von Braun was for the most part a technician and not a high ranking one, though certainly a member of the Nazi party. I don't know where your claim for his responsibility for 25,000 deaths comes from; he was not in charge of that facility (Mittelbrau-Dora) or any facility for that matter.
2. These are murky moral waters for a variety of reasons; the Nazis detained von Braun for shakey loyalties:
According to André Sellier, a French historian and survivor of the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, Heinrich Himmler had von Braun come to his Feldkommandostelle Hochwald HQ in East Prussia in February 1944.[47] To increase his power-base within the Nazi regime, Himmler was conspiring to use Kammler to gain control of all German armament programs, including the V-2 program at Peenemünde.[13]:38–40 He therefore recommended that von Braun work more closely with Kammler to solve the problems of the V-2. Von Braun claimed to have replied that the problems were merely technical and he was confident that they would be solved with Dornberger's assistance.
Von Braun had been under SD surveillance since October 1943. A secret report stated that he and his colleagues Klaus Riedel and Helmut Gröttrup were said to have expressed regret at an engineer's house one evening in early March 1944 that they were not working on a spaceship[5] and that they felt the war was not going well; this was considered a "defeatist" attitude. A young female dentist who was an SS spy reported their comments.[13]:38–40 Combined with Himmler's false charges that von Braun and his colleagues were communist sympathizers and had attempted to sabotage the V-2 program, and considering that von Braun regularly piloted his government-provided airplane that might allow him to escape to England, this led to their arrest by the Gestapo.[13]:38–40
The unsuspecting von Braun was detained on March 14 (or March 15),[48] 1944, and was taken to a Gestapo cell in Stettin (now Szczecin, Poland),[13]:38–40 where he was held for two weeks without knowing the charges against him.
Through Major Hans Georg Klamroth, in charge of the Abwehr for Peenemünde, Dornberger obtained von Braun's conditional release and Albert Speer, Reichsminister for Munitions and War Production, persuaded Hitler to reinstate von Braun so that the V-2 program could continue[5][13]:38–40[49] or turn into a "V-4 program" (the Rheinbote as a short range ballistic rocket) which in their view would be impossible without von Braun's leadership.[50] In his memoirs, Speer states Hitler had finally conceded that von Braun was to be "protected from all prosecution as long as he is indispensable, difficult though the general consequences arising from the situation."[51]
3. The main problem with your thinking is that of its simplicity about how the world really works. The truth of the matter is that as WWII was winding down, the British, The Americans, and the Soviets were scrambling as quickly as they could to round up as many of the German Peenemunde rocket crew as they could, along with their data. For example: Helmut Gröttrup was a German engineer, rocket scientist and inventor of the smart card. During World War II, he worked in the German V-2 rocket program under Wernher von Braun. From 1946 to 1953 he headed a group of 170 German scientists who were forced to work for the Soviet rocketry program under Sergei Korolev. (Wiki)
Don't forget, it was the Soviets who were first into space with their Sputnik program, which scared the bejesus out of the US, and gave the US the whole impetus for our own space program, which, yes: eventually landed us on the moon.
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@womanofsubstance8735 - Yes and no; people are people, yes, but if you look at history things have changed radically and not just the forms. Slavery used to be worldwide; everybody had them, kept them, bought and sold them. Now they're relatively rare. Colonialism in the 16th through 19th century: gone... yes, things are still unfair and to some extent probably always will be (people being people) but you can't argue that societies are the same as they were back when Princes, Kings, Emperors and Electors with their divine rights ruled unchallenged and their subjects were drawn and quartered (and worse) for merely questioning that right... and after they'd given up the ghost their heads were put up on spikes on castle walls and city gates, to serve as an edifying warning to others similarly minded. I won't even mention the plagues that every couple of years (whether typhus, typhoid, smallpox, or bubonic or pneumonic plagues or sometimes several at once) ravaged and sometimes decimated local and occasionally the world population because, though it added to the general misery, it's not directly germane; only tangentially so.
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It's simple; if they don't want to be called dumb, or idiots, then they shouldn't act idiotically or as dumb as a sack of hair (a Southernism).
In other words, follow the NEWS, don't run from it, don't watch Fox fantasies (which frankly promulgates stupid lies for morons) easily seen through, IF YOU FOLLOW THE NEWS.
If you don't, not only are you probably an idiot, or at least weak-minded (because you don't exercise your brain and really THINK.) but you're most certainly NOT a patriot, but instead a pawn for authoritarian zealots and, frankly, a rather dim bulb, all things considered.
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@The_Naughty_Kitten Yes putin did lie; that's what he does, he lies and he murders Russian dissidents, members of the Russian press, anybody who gets in his way, Ukrainian women, children, hospitals, Chechnyan civilians, Syrian women & children and other civilians & you'd realize it if you looked at actual facts, the chronological history:
In February 2014, Russian forces seized or blockaded various airports and other strategic sites throughout Crimea. The troops were attached to the Russian Black Sea Fleet stationed in Crimea, which placed Russia in violation of the Budapest Memorandum.
The Russian Foreign Ministry had confirmed the movement of armored units attached to the Black Sea Fleet in Crimea but asserted that they were acting within the scope of the various agreements between the two countries. Russia responded by supporting a referendum on whether the Crimea should join it. Crimea parliament announces referendum on Ukrainian region’s future in accordance with the law "On the Autonomous Republic of Crimea". On 16 March, Crimea was incorporated into the Russian Federation in accordance with the results of the referendum and Ukraine vigorously protested the action as a violation of Article 1 of the Budapest Memorandum.
In response to the crisis, the Ukrainian parliament requested the Memorandum's signatories to reaffirm their commitment to the principles enshrined in the political agreement and asked for them to hold consultations with Ukraine to ease tensions.
On 24 March 2014, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper led the G7 partners in an ad hoc meeting during the Nuclear Security Summit, at The Hague, for a partial suspension of Russian membership from the G8 due to Russia's breach of the Budapest Memorandum. He said that Ukraine had given up its nuclear weapons "on the basis of an explicit Russian assurance of its territorial integrity. By breaching that assurance, President Putin has provided a rationale for those elsewhere who needed little more than that already furnished by pride or grievance to arm themselves to the teeth." Harper also indicated support for Ukraine by saying he would work with the new Ukrainian government towards a free trade agreement.
In February 2016, Sergey Lavrov claimed, "Russia never violated Budapest memorandum. It contained only one obligation, not to attack Ukraine with nukes."[37] However, Canadian journalist Michael Colborne pointed out that "there are actually six obligations in the Budapest Memorandum, and the first of them is 'to respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine'". Colborne also pointed out that a broadcast of Lavrov's claim on the Twitter account of Russia's embassy in the United Kingdom actually "provided a link to the text of the Budapest Memorandum itself with all six obligations, including the ones Russia has clearly violated – right there for everyone to see." Steven Pifer, an American diplomat who was involved in drafting the Budapest Memorandum, later commented on "the mendacity of Russian diplomacy and its contempt for international opinion when the foreign minister says something that can be proven wrong with less than 30 seconds of Google fact-checking?" Russia argued that the United States broke the third point of the agreement by introducing and threatening further sanctions against the Yanukovych government.
On 20 April 2016, Ukraine established the Ministry of Reintegration of Temporarily Occupied Territories, to manage occupied parts of the Donetsk, Luhansk and Crimea regions, which are affected by Russian military intervention of 2014.
That was Feb. 2014. The Minsk agreement came later; AFTER putin invaded: Russia was guaranteeing Ukraine's territorial integrity right up to the very moment they invaded Ukraine & stole huge chunks of that country. Once they invaded fighting broke out and they came up with Minsk to contain that fighting:
The Minsk agreements were a series of international agreements which sought to end the war in the Donbas region of Ukraine. The first, known as the Minsk Protocol, was drafted in 2014 by the Trilateral Contact Group on Ukraine, consisting of Ukraine, Russia, and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), with mediation by the leaders of France and Germany in the so-called Normandy Format. After extensive talks in Minsk, Belarus, the agreement was signed on 5 September 2014 by representatives of the Trilateral Contact Group and, without recognition of their status, by the then-leaders of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) and Luhansk People's Republic (LPR). This agreement followed multiple previous attempts to stop the fighting in the region and aimed to implement an immediate ceasefire.
The agreement failed to stop fighting,[4] and was thus followed with a revised and updated agreement, Minsk II, which was signed on 12 February 2015.[5] This agreement consisted of a package of measures, including a ceasefire, withdrawal of heavy weapons from the front line, release of prisoners of war, constitutional reform in Ukraine granting self-government to certain areas of Donbas and restoring control of the state border to the Ukrainian government. While fighting subsided following the agreement's signing, it never ended completely, and the agreement's provisions were never fully implemented.[6] The Normandy Format parties agreed that the Minsk II remains the basis for any future resolution to the conflict.
Amid rising tensions between Russia and Ukraine in early 2022, Russia officially recognized the Luhansk and Donetsk people's republics on 21 February 2022.
Following that decision, on 22 February 2022, Russian president Vladimir Putin declared that the Minsk agreements "no longer existed", and that Ukraine, not Russia, was to blame for their collapse.[8] Russia then invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022.
So you see, Champagne? He breaches the Budapest treaty by invading with his "little green men" (Russian army units sans any identifying marks so they could deny being Russian army- so in essence, a lie). Then there's Minsk, Minsk ll etc. and then there's no Minsk ("putin declared that the Minsk agreements "no longer existed")
So he lies and lies and lies; he makes things up and then declare they don't exist anymore: "putin declared that the Minsk agreements "no longer existed"
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He's a good guy; DAL was 10 dollars higher when he did this interview & he was okay with it going down, which actually makes sense, emotionally. If you need money in the near to midterm, don't ever put it at risk, like in an equity/option/commodity/bond market. If you do and the markets go south, that will put a huge psychological burden on you, you won't be able to make a wise decision about what to do, holding or selling. But I think we're in a bad time; how long it'll last is not knowable at this point. I remember 2000; it was just one bad event after another. First the furor over the election, then a tech crash, then 9/11. We have Covid 19 now, but what if trump loses and refuses to leave office because he thinks the election was fixed? This Covid 19 is what's called a Black Swan Event & it''ll have to play out, but there's other dangers on the horizon. Bottom line: Buy when things are VERY bad, when there's "blood in the street", and your odds of ultimate success will be improved immensely. Ice water in your veins is good, too (not literally, of course). GLTA
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@mrbadnewzva1 - Obama could've gone to the Supreme Court over Moscow Mitch not holding hearings over Garland, as the Constitution demands; and he could've gone to the bully pulpit, the court of public opinion. But he did... NOTHING. He basically looked like a child whose toy had been snatched away by a bully: he looked hurt and cowed. And it wasn't a good look. Another thing; going to the Senate for back-up and asking for approval of HIS red-line on Syria was a big mistake too... and saying Putin would soon learn... whatever Obama thought Putin was supposed to learn, I guess.
But instead, Putin won. He is still in Syria, in control of part of the Middle East, and Obama is writing his memoirs or whatever. There's more, too, but it's all too depressing... but okay; here's one more: when Obama told Putin to "quit it" over the Clinton cyber hacks and the Facebook stuff... boy, Putin must've been quaking in his BOOTS! And did he "quit it"? Well, trump is president, so you tell me?
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RAP no, that's YOUR worry because you're completely brainwashed on a daily basis by your little MAGAt marching orders, the WH talking points of the day, & all because you refuse to believe the stories of corruption that EVERY DAY scream from the headlines because, like a a blind slug, you don't read,: someone said to you: DON'T BELIEVE WHAT YOU SEE IN THE PAPERS, BELIEVE ME & of course you do, because trump is a thief and a pathological liar who's got 6 bankruptcies to his name plus innumerable judgments against him in courts of law that, added up, amounts to: trump, give the money back to the people you swiped it from.
THAT'S who you've chosen to believe as you endlessly repeat your talking points. Does it ever occur to you that he's appointed DOZENS of corrupt officials who end up sliding off the public stage in disgrace like that Interior Secretary who insisted that a flag be raised every time he came to work and then had to leave office just when the investigators were getting too close... or the other side of the coin: they wise up, to a degree, like that Secretary of State who called trump F***K*NG IDIOT! And he wasn't the only one, not by a long shot.
Frankly I'm saddened by this whole ugly state of things because if trump's the king of the morons, who does that make you? You don't really need me to spell it out for you, do you?
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RAP - I know; your brain can't contend with more than one fact at a time: 1. trump still in office 2. ergo, trump okay. Well, no. Let's try to stretch your intellectual capacity a few millimetres, as in: 1. trump still in office, EVEN THOUGH THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES IMPEACHED HIM... 2....because the Senate took the Bill of Impeachment from the House and did nothing with it: refused to listen to witnesses; party line vote; trump skips free, as he's always done, because the process was corrupted: THEY VOTED NOT TO HEAR ANY WITNESSES. Please try to let that sink in; ponder what it means about the legislative process (where Moscow Mitch, the leader of the Senate, refuses, simply refuses, to schedule any debates or votes in the Senate on ANY bills coming from the House) and the process of justice (no witnesses: hear no evil). THAT'S what doesn't pass the smell test.
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Republicans WIN because Republicans, whatever it is, WANT IT MORE. Democrats LOSE because Democrats are more concerned with being NICE, with how they'll be seen, the OPTICS of the situation. When Moscow Mitch stole the SCOTUS seat from Obama, what did Obama do? NOTHING. Did he go to FEDERAL COURT and say, "The Constitution of the United States says that the Senate WILL Advise and Consent, and they, Constitutional officers sworn by sacred oath to uphold that Constitution, are refusing to do that".
No he didn't.
Did he take to the Bully pulpit and start a firestorm of public protest? He did not. For all I know, he just made a face: that was showing that mean Moscow Mitch who was the boss!!! (hint: Moscow Mitch was the Boss. Because he ACTED like the Boss & nobody stopped him, he was, in fact, the Boss).
And what were the real world consequences? A right wing court; 20 years of NOT HAVING Merrick Garland decisions. And that's why I'm not a Democrat: you guys are wimps, pansies, whatever the operative word is these days. Every day the Republicans take your lunch money and every boy BOY do you guys get so mad! So mad you could spit! Well, ho hum. And every day the Republicans take your lunch money to the bank, turn it into more Dark Money and screw us all with it some more.
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@nitfitnit You mean crazy Kemp of Georgia? He's always been quite the jerk; back when he was Secretary of State in Georgia:
"In October 2015, the Georgia Secretary of State's office, under Kemp's leadership, erroneously distributed personal data (including Social Security numbers and dates of birth) of 6.2 million registered Georgia voters. This data breach occurred when the office sent out a CD with this information to 12 organizations that purchase monthly voter lists from the office. The office was not aware of the breach until the following month and did not publicly acknowledge the mishap until the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported the class action lawsuit against the office as a result of the data breach.[23] Within a month of the breach becoming publicly known, it had cost taxpayers $1.2 million in credit monitoring services for those whose data had been compromised, and $395,000 for an audit into Kemp's handling of the unauthorized data disclosure.[24]
Kemp drew criticism again in 2017 when it was revealed that a flaw in the State voting system exposed the personal information of all of Georgia's 6.7 million voters, as well as passwords used by county election officials to access voter files, and went unfixed for 6 months after it was reported.[25][26] After a lawsuit was filed, a server at the center of the controversy was wiped, preventing officials from determining the scope of the breach.[27] Kemp denied responsibility, instead saying researchers at Kennesaw State University, who managed the system, had acted "in accordance with standard IT procedures" in deleting the data.[28] " ...from Wikipedia
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JD Vance is never correct, because he always lies. He has no standing to talk about Free Speech because Free Speech is penalized the very same day in the White House, where the AP (Associate Press) was penalized for not using "Gulf of America", trump's bizarre and abrupt re-invention of the Gulf of Mexico. Instead continuing to use the common name that has stood the test of time for 400 years, From the Washington Post: "According to a letter from AP Senior Vice President and Executive Editor Julie Pace, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Tuesday warned of access restrictions if the wire service “did not immediately align its editorial standards” with the gulf-name mandate. The AP held firm, and the White House then blocked a reporter from an Oval Office event and later blocked another reporter from an event in the Diplomatic Room, according to the letter.
The blocking of AP access continued throughout the week, including events at the White House on Thursday and a presidential trip on Friday. A White House official on Friday tweeted that the wire service’s “privilege of unfettered access to limited spaces, like the Oval Office and Air Force One,” would go to “the many thousands of reporters who have been barred from covering these intimate areas of the administration.” The AP has been a member of the 13-person presidential press pool for more than a century.
How outraged is the White House press corps regarding this naked violation of the First Amendment? Not sufficiently: In her press briefing Wednesday, Leavitt faced questions from only one reporter — CNN’s Kaitlan Collins — about the matter. As Leavitt recited her position, she might as well have been stomping on a copy of the Bill of Rights under the lectern: “If we feel that there are lies being pushed by outlets in this room, we are going to hold those lies accountable. And it is a fact that the body of water off the coast of Louisiana is called the ‘Gulf of America,’” Leavitt said, noting that major tech firms have acknowledged the change.
With that, the president’s spokesperson in Orwellian fashion recategorized an editorial judgment as an assertion of fact. And yet Vance has the temerity to suggest that he (without sin) can lecture Europeans about Free Speech. What a hypocrite.
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Well, I'll tell you Michael Seo; if he's defunding... wait, the WTO? I hadn't heard that one... let's assume you meant defunding the WHO, which in fact he's said he's doing. That's a stupid thing to do in the middle of a pandemic... and speaking against vaccines? As usual he's saying and doing all the stupid & wrong things, because... well, I could venture a guess but it wouldn't matter: he's simply making all the wrong choices, which is not astounding as that's the story of his entire administration from its unpopular inception to this very minute. And Michael? When you're busy telling people they "arent" smart enough for whatever it is that's on your mind? It's best to spell aren't correctly, lest people begin to suspect that your own cognitive functioning, or at least your educational attainment, is somewhat less than perfectly adequate, if you catch my drift.
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@derek3266 No, not case closed at all. You've been simplistic this whole time under the guise of "knowing history" or whatever, which, of course, you don't. History is all-encompassing, it's not 2+2 =4. For example, in 1918 most of the world (and the citizens thereof) was owned by other parts of the world: world-wide colonialism, which didn't even start to end until after WWII, although there were liberation movements ongoing since the 1920s and before.
In fact WWI was a fight between cousins, as the Russian Czars and the German Kaiser were both related to Queen Victoria so it was a different world altogether, especially socially, because women and blacks were chattel and China was also partly owned by the west as well, with Spheres of Influence, Gunboat Diplomacy and every other kind of horror. For the preceding 1,500 years or so, China was the most or one of the most sophisticated & powerful nations on earth but from the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s they were in thrall to the West through the forced use of opium or don't you know about the Opium Wars? That's how the British got Hong Kong.
Well, I don't have the time or desire to school you, so I'll just make a quick point. This is 2020, not 1918. As a result of history, China is VERY attuned to slights, as are Asians in general: Japan doesn't own Korea anymore, the British no longer own Malaysia and Singapore, the Dutch no longer control Indonesia, & the French no longer own Annam (Vietnam), for example.
Also sensitive are Women, Blacks, Catalans, the Irish, Armenians, Native Americans, First Nation, Jews, Aboriginal Australians; you name it; people are tired of being disrespected, they see the harm that is caused by the type of Tribalism claimed by trump under the bogus term Nationalist but really it's blood & soil tribalism, which is racist & divisive and responsible for the enslavement, lynching, & wholesale slaughter of uncounted millions from time immemorial, BECAUSE when you don't think or act as if you think that other peoples can possibly be as intrinsically good or smart or anything else as you, then you can do to them whatever you wish, even turn them into lampshades and collect their gold teeth, because they're not fully human, they're unclean, Untermensch; so you don't think it really matters to your GOD or any of your neighbors what you do to them. Ask the Puerto Ricans how they felt about trump throwing paper towel rolls at them after their recent devastating hurricane.
It's a dog whistle that's always in trump's mouth and, especially during a fraught time when millions will take sick with a deadly disease, he should TAKE HIS DAMN "sh*thole countries" DOG WHISTLE OUT OF HIS MOUTH FOR A MOMENT and try to at least PRETEND that he has some respect for them, and then we might well find that GLOBAL co-operation will save lives.
Now IS NOT the time for any of his 2-bit retrograde crap.
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@California Prince Wow, you represent the Royal House of California!! Well, Prince, I think trump is for Americans who aren't Black, Latino, Muslim, Jewish, Women, Native Americans, Asian Americans, Gay Americans, Trans Americans, Americans with any pre-existing conditions, Americans of foreign origin, Urban Americans, Journalists or... anybody, really, that doesn't wear a red beanie and have their heads stuck way up where the moon don't shine. On the other hand, I think Biden is for all people who have an ounce of empathy.
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Spare a moment & a few tears in sympathy for the American taxpayer who paid a trillion bucks of their hard-earned money & watched it spent on the salaries of 80,000 Afghan-Potemkin troops, created from thin air to suck more paychecks paid for by Uncle Sugar, which money then sank without trace in the dark pit of warlord pockets... & in addition, taxpayers could also watch as $billion$ in US foreign aid went to Pakistan, only to find later that the Pakistanis took large swaths of that money, sending it on to their ISI (the Inter-Services Intelligence is the premier intelligence agency of Pakistan) which then spent it on arms and ammo for their proxies, the Taliban, who then used it to kill our soldiers.
So we paid for the damn weapons & ammo that killed US & NATO soldiers.
What happened in Afghanistan? It's simple, sadly; there's no there there, & never was. The illusion was that Afghanistan is "transitioning to a democracy"; the reality is we were propping up an illusion & all evidence to the contrary ignored as inconvenient.
Endless corruption (Hamid Karzai w/his tailored robes, his disdain for us & his brother the bag man, etc.), the "green-on-blue" murders of US forces by their Afghani "allies" was tut-tutted with a shrug, at best.
To the Pashtun, for the most part (who constitute the majority of our "allies"), we are unclean swine-eating infidels, pure and simple. I really, really feel bad for the women of Afghanistan, but wishing things were different just don't make them so. I remember the troops of South Vietnam shucking their uniforms in the field, then disappearing into the night; now it's here we are again.
I can't argue w/Pres. Biden; tho I hate that we're leaving NOW, w/the women so defenseless & all but no; Biden is strong enough to take away the pipe, crutch or whatever metaphor you want; this was bound to end in tears sooner or later & if later there'd be an even higher price paid in American lives & treasure. Another thing;
Pakistan, allied w/the Taliban, made our hopes for an Afghani future impossible (if they ever WERE possible). Imran Khan, leader of Pakistan, recently said we screwed up there, but if he wants to blame someone, he should look into a damn mirror. Talk about a failed state; I bet the Madrassa boys come to take Pakistan next.
The real and horrible truth is that Pakistan and Karzai (former President of Afghanistan) INVENTED AND SUBSIDIZED the Taliban... think about that for a moment.
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@johnnewsom2059 "John" - Can we agree that China is a dictatorship that practices slave labor and holds large sections of the population (Uighurs in Xinjiang are only one example) against their will in labor camps where they must manufacture clothing at slave labor wages while simultaneously the Chinese state is relentlessly trying to stamp out their cultural identity, and that, along with the treatment the Tibetans suffer, it's obvious that the Han people see themselves as the only acceptable role model for the nation?
And can we not also agree that "communism" as practiced in China is merely a cover for what is actually state-owned and run Capitalism? And can we further agree that China's belligerent attitudes towards its neighbors in the South China Sea (erecting islands where none existed before and then threatening to cut off the free right to transit this area) should speak volumes about the growing imperialism of the Chinese state?
Not to mention the Chinese covid outrages, including the recent laughable WHO scientific mission to China that was little more than a dumb show that fooled no one, completely lacking in any serious unfettered data collection by unbiased scientists? China investigates itself, finds itself completely blameless (quel surprise!) & then hands the untrustworthy and frankly laughable results over to the credulous WHO shills? Surely we can agree on that, n'est-ce pas?
Would YOU swear allegiance to such an aggressive entity at war with any basic concept of Human Rights?
Like Free Speech, the Right to practice one's own religion, and the Right to privacy, to pick three at random?
Well... I guess you already have, "John".
Too bad... China's past, especially its glorious artistic history, might have augured for another fate for its coming out party; one that would've, and should've, been the envy of the world. But now I fear a very dark time is drawing nigh for the entire world, and China will be one of the causes of that darkness, though not, of course, the only one.
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@kshen7485 Of course that's a lie, like the election returns numbers were lies as well. They make up numbers and answer to no one... except maybe Putin. In Belarus (as in Myanmar) the 26 year dictator seems to have the absolute loyalty of the army and police who in turn have no problem, evidently, in utterly jailing, torturing, in short crushing the common people and even (in Myanmar) shooting them down in the streets wholesale like dogs... and I'm sure you're one of them, K., even if you're only some guy at a desk writing propaganda lies for YouTube.
And as far as "safer society" is concerned, The Moscow Times said this:
"Two of Russia's post-Soviet neighbors, Belarus and Turkmenistan, have drawn criticism over their response to the coronavirus, with the two countries' leaders largely denying the severity of the pandemic.
Here’s a brief look at how these two countries in Russia’s backyard have been faring since the start of the outbreak:
Belarus (17,489 cases, 103 deaths):
— President Alexander Lukashenko, 65, has continued to hold public events and resisted enacting a lockdown to slow the spread of coronavirus, dismissing fears of the pandemic as a global “psychosis.” Lukashenko has not been tested for coronavirus himself because, according to his spokesperson, “there’s no need for that.”
— He has vehemently opposed closing parts of the economy to slow coronavirus, citing a potentially painful recovery for the nation of more than 9 million. Still, the country’s schools and businesses have started to voluntarily close without waiting for Lukashenko’s orders.
— Lukashenko has maintained that none of Belarus’ Covid-19 deaths had been from the disease itself but from other accompanying ailments, including cancer and obesity. In mid-April, the leader who has touted vodka, the sauna and tractors as anti-Covid therapies asserted that “no one will die of coronavirus in our country. I publicly declare this.”
— Lukashenko vowed to hold a military parade in Minsk marking 75 years since the Soviet victory in World War II, and on Tuesday invited fellow heads of post-Soviet states to attend it. Russia postponed its May 9 parade on Red Square to later in 2020 due to the outbreak.
— During Orthodox Easter in April, Lukashenko defiantly attended church service and criticized other countries for trying to enforce stay-home measures. The leaders of other countries with large Orthodox Christian populations did not attend Easter services, with many churches moving them online."
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Jhr- It must be comforting to see everything in black and white but the truth is far more complex. For perhaps 1,700 of the past 2,000 years, China was the most powerful and sophisticated nation on Earth, coming up with everything from inventing gun powder to the Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine, (written in part during the same period that the people of Britain were painting themselves blue, according to the writings of Julius Caesar) to their sublime arts; Ming vases and the heights of T'ang Dynasty poetry, for example. Because the Qing dynasty (Manchu) were on their last legs & had descended into political decadence at the same time (unfortunately for the Chinese) as the nations of the West were in the midst of throwing off their myopic Medieval religiosity and were expanding & conquering, it didn't go well for China. Britain turned the Chinese into opium addicts, wresting Hong Kong from them during the Opium Wars putting them in a world of pain, along with the other "great powers", especially The US (google Yangtze River Patrol) & Japan (see the Rape of Nanking) which didn't end until after the conclusion of WW ll. All these events should be remembered when considering the rising China of today, a China which has never` forgotten the humiliation and torture they were put through by the West for over a century.
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@zackwang9314 You have no idea what you're on about; there was no US involvement in the 1978 coup. The Soviets invaded Afghanistan to support their aligned communist allies and against the will of the people controlled it in a very bloody manner for a period of time.
"The soldiers' knock on the door in the middle of the night, so common in many Arab and African countries, was little known in Afghanistan, where a central government simply lacked the power to enforce its will outside of Kabul. Taraki's coup changed all that. Between April 1978 and the Soviet invasion of December 1979, Afghan communists executed 27,000 political prisoners at the sprawling Pul-i-Charki prison six miles east of Kabul. Many of the victims were village mullahs and headmen who were obstructing the modernization and secularization of the intensely religious Afghan countryside. By Western standards, this was a salutary idea in the abstract. But it was carried out in such a violent way that it alarmed even the Soviets."
— Robert D. Kaplan, Soldiers of God: With Islamic Warriors in Afghanistan and Pakistan
They were finally forced to leave by the Mujaheddin, and yes at that time the US did give some clandestine aid to the Mujaheddin to help throw the Soviets out.
Prior to that, the Saur Revolution or coup started the process by which internecine communists fought each other for years, which finally brought in the Soviets WHICH FIRST CAUSED THE RISE OF THE MUJAHEDDIN OR JIHADIS... and who are once again in control of that bloody nation.
My memories of Afghanistan date back to 1974 when I was last there, which was after King Zahir Shah had already been deposed while in Italy by his cousin Daoud Khan. The Saur Revolution and alternatively called the April Revolution or April Coup, was the process by which the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) overthrew Afghan President Mohammed Daoud Khan on 27–28 April 1978, who had himself taken power in the 1973 Afghan coup d'état. Daoud Khan and most of his family were killed at the presidential palace by military officers in support of the PDPA. The revolution resulted in the creation of a Soviet-aligned government with Nur Muhammad Taraki as President (General Secretary of the Revolutionary Council). Saur or Sowr is the Dari (Persian) name of the second month of the Solar Hijri calendar, the month in which the uprising took place
The revolution was ordered by PDPA member Hafizullah Amin, who would become a significant figure in the revolutionary government; at a press conference in New York in June 1978, Amin claimed that the event was not a coup but a revolution by the "will of the people". The coup involved heavy fighting and resulted in many deaths. The Saur Revolution was a significant event in Afghanistan's history, marking the onset of 43 years of conflict in the country.
In short, communist terror: People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan. Look to the Soviets of that time if you want to apportion blame.
Of course, since China is a country ruled by a communist party dictatorship, I imagine you won't do that at all, so again I waste my time in trying to school you.
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@twistedcherrypop Spare a moment & a few tears in sympathy for the American taxpayer who paid a trillion bucks of their hard-earned money & watched it spent on the salaries of 80,000 Afghan-Potemkin troops, created from thin air to suck more paychecks paid for by Uncle Sugar, which money then sank without trace in the dark pit of warlord pockets... & in addition, taxpayers could also watch as $billion$ in US foreign aid went to Pakistan, only to find later that the Pakistanis took large swaths of that money, sending it on to their ISI (the Inter-Services Intelligence is the premier intelligence agency of Pakistan) which then spent it on arms and ammo for their proxies, the Taliban, who then used it to kill our soldiers.
So we paid for the damn weapons & ammo that killed US & NATO soldiers.
What happened in Afghanistan? It's simple, sadly; there's no there there, & never was. The illusion was that Afghanistan is "transitioning to a democracy"; the reality is we were propping up an illusion & all evidence to the contrary ignored as inconvenient.
Endless corruption (Hamid Karzai w/his tailored robes, his disdain for us & his brother the bag man, etc.), the "green-on-blue" murders of US forces by their Afghani "allies" was tut-tutted with a shrug, at best.
To the Pashtun, for the most part (who constitute the majority of our "allies"), we are unclean swine-eating infidels, pure and simple. I really, really feel bad for the women of Afghanistan, but wishing things were different just don't make them so. I remember the troops of South Vietnam shucking their uniforms in the field, then disappearing into the night; now it's here we are again.
I can't argue w/Pres. Biden; tho I hate that we're leaving NOW, w/the women so defenseless & all but no; Biden is strong enough to take away the pipe, crutch or whatever metaphor you want; this was bound to end in tears sooner or later & if later there'd be an even higher price paid in American lives & treasure.
Another thing; Pakistan, allied w/the Taliban, made our hopes for an Afghani future impossible (if they ever WERE possible). Imran Khan, leader of Pakistan, recently said we screwed up there, but if he wants to blame someone, he should look into a damn mirror. Talk about a failed state; I bet the Madrassa boys come to take Pakistan next.
The real and horrible truth is that Pakistan and Karzai (former President of Afghanistan) INVENTED AND SUBSIDIZED the Taliban... think about that for a moment.
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@RobertRedford-u9z - Thank you for taking the time to write back and yeah, it somehow never occurs to me that anyone reads or considers what I write, so thank you for that too. I remember you from an early Twilight Zone; you weren't a star yet, a journeyman actor, you played Death incarnate, in the guise of a wounded policeman, trying to convince Gladys Cooper that she should help him, to allow him in, wounded as he was; to in effect reach out to someone other than herself; to break out of her self-obsessive shell, her fear of death, that she had fallen into, the denial of the natural process of life; it was entitled "Nothing In The Dark" I thought it was pretty special so, thanks for that too.
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@RobertRedford-u9z - Well thank you; that episode has a special resonance for me as well, because I have some PTSD issues which are expressed symptomatically as a kind of hyper-vigilance & agoraphobia- resulting in how I tend not to go out much in the last years or deal much with multiples of my fellow creatures- I don't do crowds- theaters, stadiums, airplanes... really any gathering where I'm surrounded by strangers, even friends; I start to feel uncomfortable, almost panicky.
So I'm sure you can see how, like so much art. "Nothing in the Dark" can be viewed as instructive, even inspirational for a person like me. One can take heart upon viewing it and further viewing can be a healing experience, at least I find it so.
Every year's end, they (? TCM? somebody...) run a Twilight Zone marathon, and I wait for it to run so I can record NITD, along with one or two others.
What a shining beacon Twilight Zone was in the conformist gray of the late 50s Eisenhower Era, and how utterly sad that Rod Serling had such an abruptly early departure from us. How crushing it is to see him do his stand-ups before the drama begins, with that omnipresent lit cigarette dangling, or at least it is in my mind's eye. I'll just wrap this up by thanking you again for responding; it lit me up so much I forced myself out to a library sale and bought a passel of used CDs, including Wes Montgomery's classic A DAY IN THE LIFE... which I'm listening to now as I tap tap tap away... You've done good in ways you've scarcely realized. Do have a good day, sir. -L.
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@RobertRedford-u9z - Please allow me sir, to lift a glass to your very good health after this most agreeable and stimulating exchange. I'll just add, parenthetically, that said glass will contain 50% tart cherry juice/ 50% cold water, (which will be yet another agreeable experience that you've inspired) a natural analgesic due to the presence of contained anthocyanin polyphenols in a deliciously refreshing liquid form, which not only help to moderate pain, particularly muscle soreness after exercise (and migraine pain too, I've found) but polyphenols, especially anthocyanins, contribute to its anti-inflammatory properties too. PS- tart cherry juice may also have other health benefits, such as improved sleep and reduced oxidative stress. (Research has even shown that regularly consuming tart cherry juice can improve cognitive function and memory in older adults... but I'm no scientist) PPS - I have no financial interest in any product containing tart cherry juice BUT if I could become a "Johnny Tart Cherry Seed", I would seriously consider the position. Vaya Con Dios my friend. -L.
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@RobertRedford-u9z Can you add anything to this: "There is a YouTube channel with the handle "@RobertRedford-u9z," which contains a playlist titled "AD Vids" featuring videos related to Jeremiah Johnson. However, it's not explicitly stated whether this is Robert Redford's official channel. The channel also includes a video titled "Robert Redford's Lifestyle 2025 House Tour, Wife..." which suggests it may not be directly managed by the actor himself.
In conclusion, while there might be content related to Robert Redford available on YouTube under the handle "@RobertRedford-u9z," the available information does not definitively confirm it as his official channel or that the content is AI-generated. The viral image associated with him that was claimed to be his Oscar was indeed AI-generated.
The account @RobertRedford-u9z on YouTube is not an official account of the actor Robert Redford.
Here's why:
No evidence of an official channel: Robert Redford's spokesperson has stated he lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and doesn't have an official account related to the account in question.
The image associated with the account was AI-generated: A viral image shared in conjunction with this account was found to be AI-generated by cybersecurity firm GetReal Labs. The shadows and lighting were deemed implausible for a real photo.
Account shared AI creations: The image was reportedly shared within Facebook groups for AI-creations and digital art. The account in question also frequently shares AI-generated images in other Facebook groups.
Robert Redford's Facebook page: Robert Redford has a Facebook page, where he discusses his projects and interests. However, this page is not the @RobertRedford-u9z YouTube channel.
In summary, the YouTube account @RobertRedford-u9z appears to be associated with AI-generated content and is not a legitimate representation of the actor Robert Redford. "
This was sent to me by a friend. Of course, it was generated by an AI, so it leaves me, to some extent, with the feeling that I may be in a hall of mirrors: one AI commenting about a possible other AI. Any clarification from you one way or the other would be helpful, especially in confirming or calming down my incipient vertigo. Thanks. -L. Modern times, eh?...
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Funny Girl - I don't agree, really. Postmodernism is (or was) more focused on skepticism about the established order and associated power structures. I don't know about that inverted pyramid you build, with GOD at the bottom and the individual at the top, either. Surely postmodernism, like any ism, had excesses, but skepticism is warranted certainly, when you look at the world we've created, what with trump at the top and ever-rising disasters, environmental and economic both, rising ever higher.
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Funny Girl - You love "your" president? You mean putin's president, because putin's the one who owns him. You're living in a hall of mirrors determined to see what you want to see.
You see a narcissistic president lacking all empathy who, speaking of 215,000+ American dead says: "It is what it is" and you say: "this is the man I love".
You see a corrupt man, possibly a sociopathic, who has directed millions into his coffers in exchange for lucrative favors, high appointments and pay-for-play contracts and you say: "I must live in a loving world". I'm guessing that you're hopelessly lost in your hall of mirrors but, luckily for you, I don't have the last word on your ultimate fate. You sound very young & may change in time, though personally, I doubt it.
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I seldom, to pretty much never, watch Sat. Night Live... but
occasionally I catch some of it's political humor on Youtube a day or so
after it airs, and I saw some of it yesterday.
On one bit they had John Goodman as Rex Tillerson (former CEO of
Exxon Mobil), furious at being fired: "I was the head of a $50 billion
dollar company & I was fired by a guy who sold steaks through the
mail!".
Which was pretty funny... but it would've been funnier to me if he'd said
"...I was head of a $300 billion dollar company..." (and in 2014, before
the the oil crash, was worth $400 billion).
A little research, please. XOM is the 6th or so largest company in
the S&P, while $50 billion dollar companies are a dime a dozen
(Costco, for example is an $81 billion company). If you're going to
pretend to be Rex Tillerson, make an effort to know something about Rex Tillerson. If anyone would know XOM's market cap, it would be Rex Tillerson. CEOs
live & die by a set of numbers & the market cap of your own company is high amongst them. Cavil over.
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Republicans WIN because Republicans, whatever it is, WANT IT MORE. Democrats LOSE because Democrats are more concerned with being NICE, with how they'll be seen, the OPTICS of the situation. When Moscow Mitch stole the SCOTUS seat from Obama, what did Obama do? NOTHING. Did he go to FEDERAL COURT and say, "The Constitution of the United States says that the Senate WILL Advise and Consent, and they, Constitutional officers sworn by sacred oath to uphold that Constitution, are refusing to do that".
No he didn't.
Did he take to the Bully pulpit and start a firestorm of public protest? He did not. For all I know, he just made a face: that was showing that mean Moscow Mitch who was the boss!!! (hint: Moscow Mitch was the Boss. Because he ACTED like the Boss & nobody stopped him, he was, in fact, the Boss).
And what were the real world consequences? A right wing court; 20 years of NOT HAVING Merrick Garland decisions. And that's why I'm not a Democrat: you guys are wimps, pansies, whatever the operative word is these days. Every day the Republicans take your lunch money and every boy BOY do you guys get so mad! So mad you could spit! Well, ho hum. And every day the Republicans take your lunch money to the bank, turn it into more Dark Money and screw us all with it some more.
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@ViktorAl-o9z What I said about your antisemitic country you may consider vile, but it is a vile truth that perhaps you've closed your mind to, that you evidently don't want to see; that's understandable but sad, because it's impossible to even attempt correct a problem you won't even acknowledge.
During the 1990s antisemitism in Russia was an enduring undercurrent and source of anxiety, its presence affirmed by easily accessible antisemitic newspapers and other publications, street or popular antisemitism. The number of antisemitic incidents rose sharply after the 1998 Russian financial crisis, the devaluation of the ruble, and the ensuing economic hardships affecting a broad segment of the general population.
High-profile antisemitic voices have included several Russian Communist public figures such as Nikolai Kondratenko, a former governor of Krasnodar Krai. He claimed the Kremlin was controlled by Jews and Zionists, to blame for the demise of the Communist Party, the Chechen conflict and other problems. He formed an alliance with local Cossacks and was said to believe that an international Jewish conspiracy rules the world.
Other high-profile figures have included deputies of the State Duma from the CPRF such as Albert Makashov and Viktor Ilyukhin. In November 1998 the State Duma considered and rejected a measure to denounce Makashov. In late December 1998 Gennady Zyuganov, leader of the Russian Communist Party, was under pressure to publicly censure the bigoted statements of his comrades and did indeed denounce antisemitism, but at the same time labeled Zionism "a blood relative of fascism".
Since the mid-2000s incorporation of antisemitic discourse into the platforms and speeches of nationalist political movements in Russia has been reported by human rights monitors in Russia as well as in the press. Antisemitic slogans and rhetoric in public demonstrations are frequently reported, most of them attributed to nationalist parties and political groups such as "Rusoslav Orthodox". Member of Duma Vladimir Zhirinovsky is known for antisemitic speeches.
In 2001, 98 United States Senators penned a letter to President Putin, expressing concern about popular antisemitism, radical extremists (such as former Klansman and Grand Wizard David Duke) in the Russian Federation.
In January 2005 a group of twenty members of the Duma published a statement accusing Jews of being anti-Christian, inhumane, committing ritual murder and that "the entire democratic world today is under the financial and political control of international Jewry".
On June 9, 2005, Russian Orthodox Patriarch Alexei II addressed the international conference of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe in Cordoba, Spain, to declare that the Russian Orthodox Church shares concerns over "incidents of antisemitism, xenophobia and other forms of racism". He described antisemitism, as "one of the more radical expression of misanthropy and racism", and said its perpetrators included “public figures, publicists, and the leaders of radical organizations".
For example, the February 23, 2006 rally celebrating “Defenders of the Fatherland Day”, a yearly tribute to war veterans, according to the newspaper Kommersant, marchers flourished signs with messages including "Zhids! Stop drinking Russian blood!", “White State!", and "Russian Government for Russia".
In 2019, Ilya Yablogov wrote that many Russians were keen on antisemitic conspiracy theories in 1990s but it declined after 2000 and many high-ranking officials were forced to apologize for the antisemitic behavior.[10]
The 2019 Pew Research poll found that 18% of Russians held unfavorable views of Jews, the number has dropped from 34% in 2009.
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And how did you divine this, Viking? Did something in the flimsy air speak only to you?
Oh, and PS- Somehow, like something = one word. And also, while I'm on the subject; from your original posting: it's you're, not your, as in: "you're way off on this, Ian" (which he wasn't, unless you'd care to posit an alternate theory of the case).
While I'm not the grammar police, these unedited mistakes tend to be signs of lazy thinking, is my assumption here. You just can't be bothered? Too many pressing matters elsewhere?
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@dave d Oh Puleeze! Quoting the Washington Examiner, which in turn quotes the Public Interest Legal Foundation and the Heritage Foundation. You might as well just quote trump. Here's what Wikipedia says about The Public Interest Legal Foundation:
"The Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) is an American conservative legal group based in Indianapolis, Indiana, which is known for suing states and local governments to purge voters from election rolls. The group has made false claims about the extent of voter fraud in the United States."
And the Heritage Foundation is even worse. You should read Dark Money, by Jane Mayer; it's the history of how the Right Wing 1% like the Koch Brothers, (whose father was a John Bircher & partnered with Nazi Sympathizers to build oil refineries in Nazi Germany) set up and funded all these dummy ops, these foundations and newspapers including funding college chairs in major universities.
From a review:
"...The father of the billionaires Charles G. and David H. Koch helped construct a major oil refinery in Nazi Germany that was personally approved by Adolf Hitler, according to a new history of the Kochs and other wealthy families.
The book, “Dark Money,” by Jane Mayer, traces the rise of the modern conservative movement through the activism and money of a handful of rich donors: among them Richard Mellon Scaife, an heir to the Mellon banking fortune, and Harry and Lynde Bradley, brothers who became wealthy in part from military contracts but poured millions into anti-government philanthropy.
But the book is largely focused on the Koch family, stretching back to its involvement in the far-right John Birch Society and the political and business activities of the father, Fred C. Koch, who found some of his earliest business success overseas in the years leading up to World War II. One venture was a partnership with the American Nazi sympathizer William Rhodes Davis, who, according to Ms. Mayer, hired Mr. Koch to help build the third-largest oil refinery in the Third Reich, a critical industrial cog in Hitler’s war machine.
The episode is not mentioned in an online history published by Koch Industries, the company that Mr. Koch later founded and passed on to his sons.
Ken Spain, a spokesman for Koch Industries, said company officials had declined to participate in Ms. Mayer’s book and had not yet read it.
"
The Washington Examiner, jeez... I see your stripes.
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@sharonreilly2202 Et Tu, Sharon? He quotes the Washington Examiner, which in turn quotes the Public Interest Legal Foundation and the Heritage Foundation. The Agit/Prop dept. of the Right Wing. You might as well just quote trump. Here's what Wikipedia says about The Public Interest Legal Foundation:
"The Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) is an American conservative legal group based in Indianapolis, Indiana, which is known for suing states and local governments to purge voters from election rolls. The group has made false claims about the extent of voter fraud in the United States."
And the Heritage Foundation is even worse. You should read Dark Money, by Jane Mayer; it's the history of how the Right Wing 1% like the Koch Brothers, (whose father was a John Bircher & partnered with Nazi Sympathizers to build oil refineries in Nazi Germany) set up and funded all these dummy ops, these foundations and newspapers including funding college chairs in major universities.
From a review:
"...The father of the billionaires Charles G. and David H. Koch helped construct a major oil refinery in Nazi Germany that was personally approved by Adolf Hitler, according to a new history of the Kochs and other wealthy families.
The book, “Dark Money,” by Jane Mayer, traces the rise of the modern conservative movement through the activism and money of a handful of rich donors: among them Richard Mellon Scaife, an heir to the Mellon banking fortune, and Harry and Lynde Bradley, brothers who became wealthy in part from military contracts but poured millions into anti-government philanthropy.
But the book is largely focused on the Koch family, stretching back to its involvement in the far-right John Birch Society and the political and business activities of the father, Fred C. Koch, who found some of his earliest business success overseas in the years leading up to World War II. One venture was a partnership with the American Nazi sympathizer William Rhodes Davis, who, according to Ms. Mayer, hired Mr. Koch to help build the third-largest oil refinery in the Third Reich, a critical industrial cog in Hitler’s war machine.
The episode is not mentioned in an online history published by Koch Industries, the company that Mr. Koch later founded and passed on to his sons.
Ken Spain, a spokesman for Koch Industries, said company officials had declined to participate in Ms. Mayer’s book and had not yet read it.
"
The Washington Examiner, jeez... I see your stripes.
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Joaquin- No, they don't care; so what? What are you going to do about it, make a face? Republicans WIN because Republicans, whatever it is, WANT IT MORE. Democrats LOSE because Democrats are more concerned with being NICE, with how they'll be seen, the OPTICS of the situation. When Moscow Mitch stole the SCOTUS seat from Obama, what did Obama do? NOTHING. Did he go to FEDERAL COURT and say, "The Constitution of the United States says that the Senate WILL Advise and Consent, and they, Constitutional officers sworn by sacred oath to uphold that Constitution, are refusing to do that".
No he didn't.
Did he take to the Bully pulpit and start a firestorm of public protest? He did not. For all I know, he just made a face: that was showing that mean Moscow Mitch who was the boss!!! (hint: Moscow Mitch was the Boss. Because he ACTED like the Boss & nobody stopped him, he was, in fact, the Boss).
And what were the real world consequences? A right wing court; 20 years of NOT HAVING Merrick Garland decisions. And that's why I'm not a Democrat: you guys are wimps, pansies, whatever the operative word is these days. Every day the Republicans take your lunch money and every boy BOY do you guys get so mad! So mad you could spit! Well, ho hum. And every day the Republicans take your lunch money to the bank, turn it into more Dark Money and screw us all with it some more.
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@23_Knows_ALL - I know, I know, you're a thoughtless person. You asked me a question about how I suffered from trump's narcissistic management of our beloved country, how he ran it into the ground, but that wasn't the answer you sought because, I guess, you don't know the meaning of the word "suffer". So I looked it up for your benefit, though I feel quite sure that you're incapable of fully grasping the word in its larger sense: SUFFER: "to undergo, be subjected to, or endure (pain, distress, injury, loss, or anything unpleasant): to suffer the pangs of conscience. to undergo or experience (any action, process, or condition): to suffer change. to tolerate or allow: I DO NOT SUFFER FOOLS GLADLY." I merely ask you to focus on that last included all-caps sentence ESPECIALLY as I take my leave from you for the very last time.
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@Ryanboy2020 - While I'm not exactly sure what you're on about, I can only assume that not only do I not agree with it, but that you obviously have no idea what I believe, though you seem to think you do, especially with your patronizing and conspiratorial air. In short, I remember the rapid fall of South Vietnam (a war that consumed all of us, in one way or another). The South Vietnamese government had no legitimacy among the people in S.V.; we'd been propping them up for ages, and when we left they collapsed like a house of cards. I see the same thing here. Your assumption that I'm somehow misled, and that somehow YOU know the real story is frankly offensive.
Your suggestion that somehow I should only "do your research and reevaluate your assessment" and that somehow the scales will fall from my eyes, even without regard to the work of trained reporters for the New York Times, Wall St. Journal, Washington Post etc. is a joke that reminds one of the MAGA rant about news sources being "enemies of the people".
I've been to Afghanistan; it's a complex place with many different tribes and clans (Pashtun, Hazara, Uzbeks) and languages like Pashto and Dari and dialects of Farsi and Urdu, none of which I speak, so pardon me; when I have cancer I don't go to "natural healers" (see: Steve Jobs ), I go to MD.s; and when I want information I read the experts.
There was zero chance that we'd succeed in nation building in Afghanistan, especially with the back door that Pakistan provided the Taliban (and also North Vietnam provided for the Viet Cong). There comes a time and it's now, after 20 years, when the Afghani army has to simply stand or fall on its own. They seem to be choosing to fall.
I'm truly sorry for the women of Afghanistan... but don't blame us; blame their armed men who are collapsing everywhere without a bullet being fired in many cases, and simply handing over their arms and ammunition (paid for by American taxpayers) to the Taliban.
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@shazmosushi You know, it bugs me the way some big yahoo like Kronenberg will come up with some sweeping generalization that's awesome in its sheer vacuity (it's especially irksome because it's almost short enough to be a slogan for a kind of lazy & thoughtless stupidity) and then poor shazmosushi has to trundle up and in a much more fulsome way, dripping with politesse, he has to say: "no, no; that's not actually true, because..." etc....
When I read those notes, 2 images came to my mind: 1. a big 5 year old lout smashes a tower of blocks with a single blow of his hammy fist, & then his nurse scuttles up and with a "no, no, we shouldn't let our temper get the best of us..." rebuilds the tower and also 2. the old adage: A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on. (Winston Churchill).
Good going, shaz...
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@sh230968 - Yeah, yeah and once you succeed in electing trump again you can safely oppose him once more and go "tut, tut' and wag your little finger at him like Susan Collins as he continues to take America apart at the seams, with his alienating bigotry, his corruptions, his attacks on the environment as he releases more poisons into the air and water and attacks, not Putin, his buddy, but our allies, while the Turks waste our friends, the Kurds, and he effectively wastes healthcare, and takes aim at Medicare & Social Security, offering hydroxychloroquine & other witches' brews; and all that while he's busy assigning more henchman, more billionaires as Cabinet Officers & diplomats, and regulators who will be asleep at the wheel as he looses his dogs on the economy and the people. And you think that I hate this? Yes I do; and I think deep in your hibernating SOUL you either know about none of this or simply don't care ENOUGH.
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@sh230968 Kamala Harris is a United States Senator and former prosecutor and two term Attorney General of the state of California, a state of 40 million persons which, were it a country, would be the 7th largest economy in the world. While it is not up to me to school you on the facts, your bigotry is showing loud and clear; EVERYBODY'S RELATIVES COME FROM SOMEWHERE. It means NOTHING. My own relatives came from Russia, whose government I dislike intensely. I've been to India and in fact I worked my way around the world & while there's a lot to like & respect about India, their government is not one of them, as they're racists who attack the Muslims in their midst with a religious passion that belongs back in the late Middle Ages. I would never confuse the Indian government and Kamala Harris, nor should you, but you've already hoisted your "irreversibly" flag so I'll waste no more of my precious time responding to you. I'll leave you with this last thought: you won't vote for Kamala because of where her mother was born, but you will vote for trump who HIMSELF, as a youth, was caught by a mother who found him throwing rocks at her baby who was in a playpen at the time. Think about that for awhile, if you're at all capable of sustained reflection on a single image.
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This is very complex stuff... for example, I have IBS, etc., and thought I'd try some probiotic foods, like olives and sauerkraut and some good fats like avocado. Simple, right? Except they all gave me vicious migraines because they're all high in tyramine, which has powerful BP effects like vasoconstriction and rebound vasodilation, plus I was eating turmeric (allegedly good for osteoarthritis) for the curcumin (& too, because it tasted good)... but curcumin also acts like an MAOI, and MAO brings levels of tyramine down... except, of course, when you inhibit it, which is what curcumin does... complex, right?
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Yeah, that & 2 bucks will get you onto a bus. Listen; Republicans WIN because Republicans, whatever it is, WANT IT MORE. Democrats LOSE because Democrats are more concerned with being NICE, with how they'll be seen, the OPTICS of the situation. When Moscow Mitch stole the SCOTUS seat from Obama, what did Obama do? NOTHING. Did he go to FEDERAL COURT and say, "The Constitution of the United States says that the Senate WILL Advise and Consent, and they, Constitutional officers sworn by sacred oath to uphold that Constitution, are refusing to do that".
No he didn't.
Did he take to the Bully pulpit and start a firestorm of public protest? He did not. For all I know, he just made a face: that was showing that mean Moscow Mitch who was the boss!!! (hint: Moscow Mitch was the Boss. Because he ACTED like the Boss & nobody stopped him, he was, in fact, the Boss).
And what were the real world consequences? A right wing court; 20 years of NOT HAVING Merrick Garland decisions. And that's why I'm not a Democrat: you guys are wimps, pansies, whatever the operative word is these days. Every day the Republicans take your lunch money and every boy BOY do you guys get so mad! So mad you could spit! Well, ho hum. And every day the Republicans take your lunch money to the bank, turn it into more Dark Money and screw us all with it some more.
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@tekannon7803 - I really don't agree, because this USA (& maybe the world, I don't know) is one angry place; people shoot each other for every reason, from road rage to a dirty look. You're positing a scenario where shooter goes into a market with his rifle, customers own a hand gun ("and preferably wear it at all times") pull out their always-ready guns, everybody blasts away... & even in that situation wild shots are going everywhere, is what's going to happen... but outside of that, you got to pull back the camera, see the big picture: absent that 10 minutes, those armed people ("...wearing it at all times") are going to be toting death machines 24/7, which means those guns are not locked up, they're on the table, under the pillow, kid or baby picks one up & BLAM, mommy or little sister is dead. Just to cap it off, I live in NYC; THIS WEEK ALONE an 11 month old baby is dead & an 11 year old girl too; gangbangers are trying to shoot each other, they're MISSING again & again & hitting a little girl going to school, a baby in a car etc. These are not trained combat-hardened soldiers, these are crazy kids totting much less accurate handguns, not rifles & they're triggered by trigger-happy hopped-up youth. No & NO!
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For John C. (his "red blood" comment) and Harold Morris (for his "Homozygous carriers of the Delta 32 mutation"):How blood group A might be a risk and blood group O be protected from coronavirus (COVID-19) infections (how the virus invades the human body via ABO(H) blood group carbohydrates).2020-05-02T13:42:20Z (GMT) by Peter Arend When according to the numbers of Wikipedia (although they are disputed) in countries like Chile, Ecuador, Colombia, Simbabwe and Mexico 59 to 85 percent of the people have blood group O and these countries officially publish extremely low COVID-19 cases and death rates per 1 million inhabitants, this may not alone result from insufficient investigations but might suggest a lower susceptibility of blood group O to the disease. The molecular biology of a virus infection pathogenesis determines the genetic target and the human phenotype-determining enzymes decide about the difference between infection and disease. In the case that O-glycosylation plays a key role in the pathogenesis of coronavirus infections, as was discussed already 14 years ago in a SARS-CoV virus infection and is currently again predicted for SARS-CoV-2 or COVID-19, this would involve the formation of hybrid, serologically A-like, O-GalNAcα1-Ser/Thr-R, Tn (“T nouvelle”) antigenic structures. Although the ACE2 (angiotensin-converting-enzyme 2) protein is defined as the primary SARS-CoV receptor, it is the history of the amino acid serine, suggesting the actual or additional binding via an intermediate hybrid O-glycan. The protease-mobilized, virus-encoded serine molecule gets access to the host's N-acetyl-D-galactosamine (GalNAc) metabolism and the resulting intermediate, hybrid A-like/Tn structure performs the adhesion of the virus to host cells primarily independent of the ABO blood group, while the phenotype-determining sugars become the final glycosidic target: individuals with blood group A cannot respond with either acquired or innate antibodies to the synthesis of A-like hybrid structures due to clonal selection and phenotypic accommodation of plasma proteins but perform a further (blood group-A-specific) hybrid binding. A first statistical study suggests that people with blood group A have a significantly higher risk for acquiring COVID-19, whereas people with blood group O have a significantly lower risk for the infection compared with non-O blood groups (Zhao, J. et al., 2020). While these findings await confirmations, blood group O individuals, lacking the blood group-A-determining enzyme, may develop the least molecular contact with the virus and maintain the anti-A/Tn cross-reactive, complement-dependent isoagglutinin activity, which is exerted by the polyreactive, nonimmune immunoglobulin M (IgM), representing the humoral spearhead of innate immunity and a first line of defense. Reference: Zhao, J. et al. Relationship between the ABO Blood Group and the COVID-19 Susceptibility. medRxiv (2020) doi:10.1101/2020.03.11.20031096.
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Listen John, it's all very well to demonize landlords, but the truth is, if landlords don't get rent money, they can't pay their real estate taxes and their buildings can be taken away from them by the state or city for non-payment of those taxes (leaving out for one moment the money landlords also need to pay their employees, & pay for electricity, heating fuel and the mortgage payments on their buildings).
I'll be honest with you; I'm the president of a very small co-op: 12 apartments. The owners have, for the most part, moved on with their lives, moving to other cities and even other countries, often renting out their apt., as is their right. And now I'm hearing that their tenants have, to some degree fled, or they're not renewing their leases, and frankly I'm worried; wondering whether they'll be able to pay their maintenance and then what am I supposed to do about nonpayment of maintenance? Yes; I'm supposed to go to court and take that apt. and sell it... and what about the city? PEOPLE AREN'T PAYING THEIR TAXES EITHER! Which means yes; defund the cops... and the firemen too! Defund garbage collections, schools...
Long story short, this is a 100 year tsunami rushing towards us at 500 miles an hour (that's like, I don't know, 800 kilometres an hour or, LORD knows: many many many versts every hour) and we need Titanically large FDR thinking here, but instead we have someone who's less thoughtful than a wooden ash tray at the helm of our foundering ship of state: glug, glug, glug...
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Crazy Celt- Anger & disappointment don't do squat. They're joke responses. Republicans WIN because Republicans, whatever it is, WANT IT MORE. Democrats LOSE because Democrats are more concerned with being NICE, with how they'll be seen, the OPTICS of the situation. When Moscow Mitch stole the SCOTUS seat from Obama, what did Obama do? NOTHING. Did he go to FEDERAL COURT and say, "The Constitution of the United States says that the Senate WILL Advise and Consent, and they, Constitutional officers sworn by sacred oath to uphold that Constitution, are refusing to do that".
No he didn't.
Did he take to the Bully pulpit and start a firestorm of public protest? He did not. For all I know, he just made a face: that was showing that mean Moscow Mitch who was the boss!!! (hint: Moscow Mitch was the Boss. Because he ACTED like the Boss & nobody stopped him, he was, in fact, the Boss).
And what were the real world consequences? A right wing court; 20 years of NOT HAVING Merrick Garland decisions. And that's why I'm not a Democrat: you guys are wimps, pansies, whatever the operative word is these days. Every day the Republicans take your lunch money and every boy BOY do you guys get so mad! So mad you could spit! Well, ho hum. And every day the Republicans take your lunch money to the bank, turn it into more Dark Money and screw us all with it some more.
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@adiggidydawg - I appreciate your response, thank you; I'll check on its veracity tomorrow. PS- I would also have appreciated an official company response on progress towards a return to tradability for the CONXF security earlier. It's advantageous for an American to build a position in CONXF (which affects NKL.V because NKL.V must be purchased in Canada by the market maker for convertion to CONXF when the latter is purchased in the USA). Otherwise, for an American to purchase NKL.V, there's a $50 surcharge per trade, plus applicable foreign currency translation fees. There's also often (but not always) a $50 fee to purchase CONXF, (which I've paid several times) but no foreign translation fee, hence the desirability of CONXF to Americans... and then, when all holdings in CONXF abruptly become frozen, and only silence is heard from the company about it, it feels like a continuing betrayal. I believe you should stand behind CONXF and support your shareholders AND also list in the USA, so that discussions like this become academic and historical in nature. Also- what's a bd?
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@AgelessBeautyForever-nk3qn - Frankly, I'm beginning to suspect, Aging, that you don't have the cognitive wattage necessary to rival a candle. As I wrote somewhere else: Yo Steve; it's not doctor's, it's doctors: it's plural, not possessive. Secondly, don't use blanket statements, it ill becomes you. Third, you're flat out wrong because, well, let's parse that statement: yes, it IS physically possible to open schools, but that's as far as I'll go. Now, can you open schools SAFELY? That's really the point of this inane discussion, yes? Well, I think it may well be possible to do that as well, but at a prohibitive cost, in cleaning, in much smaller class size, Plexiglas separation, and with mask and social distancing. Is anyone having that discussion, of cost and process? Have there been any proposals along those lines? No. It's the same old dim-bulb trump; my-way-or-the-highway stupidity. On the other hand, even though you didn't capitalize the first letter of your sentence, you misspelled nothing so, I award you a gold star.
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@AgelessBeautyForever-nk3qn Aging moron forever- and yes: forever is actually one word, not two. Secondly, "Because you are very ignorant." is not a sentence; so drop the period after history, add a comma, drop the capital B to a small b, and then you've got a complete, if completely incorrect, thought (and sentence).
So tell me: Why are you MAGAts so poorly educated (now mind you, I didn't say stupid, or even dumb, though lord knows I could). But, to answer your poorly asked sentence: no. I'm quite certain that my knowledge of history, whether geological, geographical, anthropological, prehistoric, ancient AND modern, would dwarf your own feeble attempts at same. Call it a very strong hunch. PS- I always got an A in history; it was my strongest subject, back in the day. Now shoo; I've got better things to do than natter on with you.
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JD Vance is never correct, because he always lies. He has no standing to talk about Free Speech because Free Speech is penalized that very same day in the White House, where the AP (Associate Press) was penalized for not using "Gulf of America", trump's bizarre and abrupt re-invention of the Gulf of Mexico. Instead continuing to use the common name that has stood the test of time for 400 years.
From the Washington Post: "According to a letter from AP Senior Vice President and Executive Editor Julie Pace, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Tuesday warned of access restrictions if the wire service “did not immediately align its editorial standards” with the gulf-name mandate. The AP held firm, and the White House then blocked a reporter from an Oval Office event and later blocked another reporter from an event in the Diplomatic Room, according to the letter.
The blocking of AP access continued throughout the week, including events at the White House on Thursday and a presidential trip on Friday. A White House official on Friday tweeted that the wire service’s “privilege of unfettered access to limited spaces, like the Oval Office and Air Force One,” would go to “the many thousands of reporters who have been barred from covering these intimate areas of the administration.” The AP has been a member of the 13-person presidential press pool for more than a century.
How outraged is the White House press corps regarding this naked violation of the First Amendment? Not sufficiently: In her press briefing Wednesday, Leavitt faced questions from only one reporter — CNN’s Kaitlan Collins — about the matter. As Leavitt recited her position, she might as well have been stomping on a copy of the Bill of Rights under the lectern: “If we feel that there are lies being pushed by outlets in this room, we are going to hold those lies accountable. And it is a fact that the body of water off the coast of Louisiana is called the ‘Gulf of America,’” Leavitt said, noting that major tech firms have acknowledged the change.
With that, the president’s spokesperson in Orwellian fashion recategorized an editorial judgment as an assertion of fact."
And yet Vance has the temerity to suggest that he (without sin) can lecture Europeans about Free Speech. What a hypocrite.
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Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) (11 people live in Wyoming, 7 voted for him): "Since I don't want to answer YOUR question Erin, I'll answer a question that nobody would've asked, which is really a time-consuming rant against Nancy and that evil party whose name must not be mentioned... ...and I'll also just add that in the 29 times a SC vacancy has occurred, when the Party of the first part, which is us, is held on a Tuesday and it's a full moon, we win and if there's no moon, we also win, because we have flashlights that enable us to see the truth & they have no radioactive glasses & besides, Nancy simply can't win, there's a rule they're still writing to that effect somewhere behind closed doors in the Rules Committee... anyway, that's what the boss told me to say."
Erin Burnett: "Thank you for your time, Senator."
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Of course you can live in a debt-based society. Debt, the ability to create and package debt, is great; the same is true for stocks, which are also a kind of currency, the price of which is adjusted moment by moment, and anything else on that asset spectrum, like convertible debentures; they all serve a particular purpose.
Otherwise the economy would be tiny; only old people, who had saved their entire lives would be afford to buy homes with their savings, accumulated over decades... same with any high ticket item, like cars. Young people starting out would have to live with their parents virtually FOREVER. Instead, they forward sell the value of their FUTURE EARNINGS; that's called taking out a mortgage, and it's secured by the value of the home itself. Pay what you promised to pay and nobody will ever be able to take it away.
You're throwing a lot of hazy and unconnected statements against the wall and hoping a few of them stick... but it's doubtful they will, because you simply don't understand capitalism.
On the other hand, nothing is good when taken to extremes, and extreme debt IS bad. Indentured servitude, by the way, is not slavery. Slavery is slavery; it's endless. Indentured Servitude is indentured servitude over a particular period of time agreed upon by both parties, which is not the same thing as having a job. A job you can quit, indentured servitude is for the period contracted for, for example pay off a debt, like passage to the New World. So, in essence, the worker said: pay my fare to the New World & I will work for you for a period of 7 years to pay off that debt: he was forward-selling the value of his labor. Now, what if he died during the voyage from a giant wave or smallpox or whatever? The other side of the contract, the guy who paid the fare, was out of luck. There's always a risk; capitalism is about quantifying risk in hopes of making a profit... but, like the man said: "there's many a slip between the cup and the lip" Or, as Robert Burns said: the best laid schemes of mice and men gang aft agley...
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The implications here about human nature and our society are Wildly disturbing... but, it enlightens us to the darkness that's enveloping our culture; it's very well done. PS- Most of these fools, lemmings, gullible morons, knuckle-draggers, knaves got their "information" (noise) off of FB; you will never see me on Facebook, a corrosive business acting as poison to a once thriving, honored democracy, that works by splintering us into yammering tribes, too many of which are very angry and destructive. This is smoke, this is fire and this is lava threatening a downhill racing pyroclastic flow... ignore it at your peril.
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The lasting stain of electing the stupidest and most venal man ever to be POTUS will be indelible for as long as his supporters remain alive; because, for example, what's Teapot Dome next to a pandemic wherein our losses are the worst in the world, though our health expenditures are the highest, and where his oft-repeated advice has more to do with magic than medicine?
A man thoroughly devoid of facts or the ability or even the desire to absorb them, and who lacks the ability to think clearly and even form coherent thoughts for public consumption without veering sharply off into a thicket of word salad nonsense??
Covfefe?
Next to the mushrooming horror of our friends & relatives dying in the hundreds of thousands without so much as an empathetic word from POTUS, this highly embarrassing story that would've sunk any other POTUS will be seen as just a blip, like the hundreds of other stories that will depress future historians, for as long as there are historians.
We will be known and remembered as a generation of morons, and trump* will be known as the Pied Piper of Morons.
So yet again I lower my head in shame, this time over the bounty paid for our soldiers deaths, bought and paid for by this awful man's best international friend.
This shame has lasted almost four years now: that our electorate, our neighbors, have brought this doom down upon our country, & themselves & yet they STILL do not see him for what he is.
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I found this to be a fascinating hour; there's NO ONE I'd rather listen to on politics; Steve Schmidt's a professional, & was the senior campaign strategist and advisor of John McCain's 2008 presidential run against Obama, in addition to working for numerous other Republicans candidates through the years.
I think he's the most eloquent person out there when he opines on America's political ills, putting all his insights within their historical context and often quoting liberally from the writings of our Founding Fathers and other great statesmen of the past, and while I don't agree with him on everything he says, I certainly pay attention when he has something to say on any political topic, because he tends to go deep, rather than the fact that he's from New Jersey).
From Wikipedia:
Departure from the Republican Party
In May 2018, when President Donald Trump moved the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, sparking violent Gaza border protests, Schmidt said Trump "has blood on his hands".[31]
On June 19, 2018, Schmidt formally withdrew from the GOP over Donald Trump's policy of separating immigrant families at the U.S. border with Mexico. He also cited Republican leadership for their failure to challenge the policy. Schmidt said of Trump, "We have in America—right now, at this hour—to understand that you have a lawless president, a vile president, a corrupt president, a mean, cruel president, who is seeking to remake the world order."[32]
He tweeted "the Republican Party ... is fully the party of Trump. It is corrupt, indecent and immoral.
With the exception of a few Governors like Baker, Hogan and Kasich it is filled with feckless cowards who disgrace and dishonor the legacies of the party's greatest leaders ... Today the GOP has become a danger to our democracy and our values."[33]
Describing his new political orientation, he stated:
This Independent voter will be aligned with the only party left in America that stands for what is right and decent and remains fidelitous to our Republic, objective truth, the rule of law and our Allies. That party is the Democratic Party.
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I didn't go to college (okay: a year), but so what? If you can read, you can educate yourself. After all, neither George Washington or Abraham Lincoln went to college. Anyway, I agree with your points about what should be the thrust of education: the teaching of critical thinking. You only aired a small part of the CNN piece, but what really pissed me off the most (and there were many uneducated observations made by that panel that vied for that honor) were the thoughts voiced about the money that we spent on Ukraine, and foreign aid in general. First of all, while not an ally by treaty, Ukraine is a front line state next to Russia AND IT'S IN OUR INTEREST to support them. As Lord Palmerston (and Charles de Gaulle, among others) said, nations don't have friends, they have perpetual interests.
Secondly they were groaning about the amount that Ukraine was getting, while there were homeless people about (which I believe is rather a state and local concern, but no matter). What do these uneducated people not know? They don't know that, as a percentage of GDP, ALL FOREIGN AID, not just what's going to Ukraine, consumes 0.18%. That means 18 CENTS OUT OF EVERY 100 DOLLARS generated goes to foreign aid. And as a percentage of the Federal budget? One percent. China gives more in foreign aid than we do... which means, obviously, that China derives more benefit than the United States, which means that China gets more and better trade relations; contracts and the like. Because foreign aid hasn't only costs, it has obvious benefits, unless of course you have no vision because your eyes (and thoughts) are small and closed.
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Don't look now, but both of you are pundits, 2 members of the punditocracy that I'm paying attention to. Don't pretend you're not, just because you may not hew the line of certain other pundits doesn't mean you're not one. (I, personally, am a member of the pundocracy, but that's because I tell more than my fair share of puns... can't help it; blame my father, a notorious and yet much loved pun maven... but I digress),
And another thing; you say that Biden NEEDS progressive voters or we're doomed, DOOMED! To FOUR MORE MORE YEARS of Cadet Bone Spurs!!
Not so, grasshoppers; the way things are going now, what with the pandemic and all, I think an empty cigarette pack could beat Don the Con. Personally, I think if Bernie's ideas were so popular, he would've scored more votes in the primaries... and have you noticed: he didn't! So, by by Senator BS!
PS- I still like you guys even if I don't agree with you. -L.
PPS- We're doing book picks? How could I have forgotten my book pick? "GLOBAL CRISIS by Geoffrey Parker; subtitle: War, Climate Change & Catastrophe in the 17th Century" (a real barn burner)... also: THE DOG OF THE SOUTH, by Charles Portis, who so recently passed on. This book is a very fine shaggy dog story AND has no connection to my previous pick but hey: sometimes you just have to back off from too much news about reality and all its fetid bottom-of-the-shoe crud.
Shaggy Dog Story (for them what doesn't know): a long, rambling story or joke, typically one that is amusing only because it is absurdly inconsequential or pointless.
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@leeuniverse Lee, Lee, Lee, I gotta tell you... but first, a minor beef: you right-wing dogs are always barking the same thing; leftists are "libtards", and stupid, idiot, morons, ad nauseum, but then... look: YOU WROTE: "That's the most stupidest thing in creation" Really, Lee? "The most stupidest"? Only a very dim bulb would write that, and probably while drooling.
You see, pal; if something is "the stupidest" that's a singular accomplishment! The superlative of stupid is most stupid "Most stupidest" is therefore quite awful & very incorrect (which you'd know if you'd ever been in the fourth grade) and therefore: You are therefore, in actual fact, the Most STUPID!!!
But not the most stupidest, because that's not even a term.
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