Imagine you are the head of a grocery chain and one of your executives comes to you with a plan to boost sales of over-the-counter remedies. These are the things you buy for a sore throat or an upset stomach. His plan involves subtly infecting the customers with a mild virus. They will get sick and then come back to buy something to remedy the symptoms of the virus. The virus will be mild, but enough to cause most people some symptoms in the week after having been infected.
Unless you are a sociopath, you will think the guy is nuts. Odds are you will think it is some sort of elaborate gag. If he is serious, then you will call security to have the guy removed from the building. The reason is not just the ghoulish plan to poison people, but the fact that he could think of such a thing. You would quickly start to wonder what else this guy is capable of doing. If he is willing to poison thousands of people to boost sales, he is capable of anything.
The truth is though, companies are full of people who think like the ghoulish executive in that short example. For example, there was someone at the multinational that owns the Häagen-Dazs brand who decided to start shrinking the pint. It used to be that a pint is a pound the world around, but no more. A pint of ice cream in the United States has shrunk down to 14-ounces. The container has been subtly changed so the shrinkage is not as obvious to the consumer.
Shrinkflation has been a thing for a couple of decades now. Bottles of beer have started to shrink as well. Many are 11-ounces now. They changed the shape of the bottle to trick the consumer. This was a trick they started at ballgames. They made cups taller, but narrower, so they could call the regular sized beverage a large, when it was the same amount of fluid as the smaller size. Packaging science is now mostly about tricking the consumer into thinking less is more.
The marketplace has always been about deception. The seller is motivated to lie about his product and the consumer is motivated to lie about his interest. Since the dawn of the marketplace, authorities have promulgated rules in an effort to keep the lying to a minimum and therefore maintain a peaceful market. Those rules have fallen away in the modern age, where deception has now become a virtue. In this age, only suckers are honest in their dealings.
Mass media is the prime example. The big media operations publish stories that they know are false when they post them. They are not simply wrong about a few facts, but deliberately designed by a staff of people to tell a false story. We saw that with the Russian collusion hoax in the Trump years. The Post and Times had teams whose job was to make up fake stories, with the help of friends in government. Everyone involved volunteered for the job of deceiving the public.
We see this with the war coverage. This story is being pushed by the Drudge alternative called Revolver News. It looks very official, but a quick search of the three authors reveals they are Ukrainian activists sponsored by the usual suspects. All three are children, fresh from school, with no experience in this area. The people behind that institute had them do the copy editing and let them put their name on it in order to add to their resume. It is a common fraud in Washington.
That is the thing though. It is a swindle and a well-known one. Operations like “Institute for the Study of War” are just lie machines. Their task is to pump out regime friendly information that will get circulated by the media. The media, of course, knows this better than anyone, but they choose to pass it along anyway. Given what we saw in the Trump years, it is possible that the Washington Post put out an RFP for a fake study to fit the latest narrative on the war.
Joseph de Maistre famously said, “False opinions are like false money, struck first of all by guilty men and thereafter circulated by honest people who perpetuate the crime without knowing what they are doing.” This is true, in that the authorities in this age pump out false opinion in immeasurable volume. Normal people inevitably believe some of it and pass it onto friends. That gives it authority and before long a third of the public wants nuclear war over Ukraine.
Of course, that survey could be entirely fake. That is something else that has changed over the last several decades. It used to be that polling firms guarded their reputations by avoiding sensationalism. Now they only care about getting noticed, so we have polling firms publishing complete nonsense. Many are happy to give the customer what they want and those customers are sociopaths in the media. Polling is just a corrupt as everything else now.
If we return to our grocery store CEO and his psychopathic executive, the issue is not the scheme, but the person behind it. The sort of person who thinks it is normal to poison people is not going to think twice about poisoning his boss. Similarly, the sorts of people who think it is normal to fabricate studies, stories and so on in order to fool the general public is no different from the psychopathic executive. These are people who lack the ability to tell right from wrong.
It is tempting to think this is just the way the world is and we just see it more clearly now thanks to the mass media age. Some of that is true, but we also know that this sort of behavior was a primary concern in the past. Medieval governments passed rules to limit deception in the law and the marketplace. The ancients had draconian punishments for those who deceived the public. The ancient Persians treated deception more harshly than murder. People used to worry about this problem.
In this age, we have turned this on its head. Deception is a valued skill. The media selects for sociopathy. Our political parties admire those with a natural skill to deceive and quickly raise them to national status. That grocery store CEO would not exist as described, because he would have hand-picked that executive and probably gave him the idea for the mass poisoning campaign. The lie is the coin of the realm and the liars are the new aristocracy.
America is often called a great experiment and that is true. This is the first society to exist with nothing holding it together but impersonal economic relations. We are reaching the point where there are no rules, just who can get over on whom. It is the anarcho-capitalist society in which no one can trust anyone or anything. Instead, a war of all against all, it is an endless series of confidence games. Everyone has an angle and is trying to get over on someone else.
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Z’s de Maistre quote brings to my mind “Gresham’s Law” which simply observed that bad money drives out good. This was back in the days when money was made of [precious] metals. When debasement of coins, revaluations or other factors changed the relative values of monies, an individual had a rational reason to keep the more-valuable and use the less-valuable in transactions. The analogy to news and ideas at first seems weak, but maybe not. Even if one possessed the truth, it might be rational to hoard it, and pass on the untruth. Why? Many reasons. Not the least of which is to keep up appearances, reduce chances of being ostracized or worse. The hard truth is, the hard truth is very rarely welcome.
OT but I think maybe of importance.
Tonight, for the second day in s row, Tucker Carlson has called for the U S military to seal the U S border. I wonder how long he will be able to say that?
The usual suspects are presented, but I don’t think it will mean a thing.
@Scrivner
We may have already crossed the tipping point where it doesn’t matter anymore.
Remember when you were little and your mom said don’t talk to strangers? Never take candy from a stranger? We are now a atomized nation of strangers, hence the low trust Z is talking about.
Talking of false society the new “Covid Czar” in the US is a WEF “futurist” who will be looking for another $22.5 billion for coof funding.
http://www.weforum.org/agenda/authors/ashish-k-jha
He authored a piece for the WEF stating that “global health professionals can look to the climate movement for inspiration and guidance on how to better engage the business community”
And you thought the coof was over.
A Pajeet
And from Harvard no less.
Who’d a thunk it!
Tip of the hat to Z Man
I wasn’t so sure about but I just checked my bottle of Stella.
Eye balling it casually, yeah, it looks like it is a normal 12 ounce bottle
NOPE. On the side of the label in small print it reads 11.2 Ounces
It is all enough to make a man want to strangle someone
….anyway Happy ST. Patty’s Day to all. Been 3 full years since we were last allowed to celebrate it in Los Angeles.
Are there many Irish in LA?
It’s a European thing. 11.2 oz. approximates to 330 ml, a standard Euro volume. Checked a bottle of Smithwick’s Red Irish Ale, and it is indeed 11.2 oz. But I think that it may actually be brewed in the US, so shrinkflation it is.
My (other) US brews on hand were all still 12 oz., Yards, Victory, Leinenkugel. We’ll see how that holds up as the inflation kicks into high gear; the temptation will be to either shrink the bottle capacities, or sell 4-packs at the old price. Could go either way…
What a time to be alive!
I don’t know about the beer bottle example. I think the imports like Stella have always been 330mL (or 33cL as written on European bottles). By the way, just yesterday I commented on how great this beer is. It chased down my grilled pork kebabs last night very nicely.
There is a Quinnipac poll, on Ukraine/Russia/Biden.
The most interesting thing is the proxy measure for patriotism. The question was,
“If you were in the same position as Ukrainians are now, do you think that you would stay and fight or leave the country?”
BLACK: 38/59, WHITE: 57/35, HISPANIC: 61/33.
Among Whites: WOMEN: 43/47, Men: 75/19.
Basically, the only people who are patriotic are White men. No other group can or will sacrifice for the nation.
CAN the elites wage a two-front war, one on Whitey, at home, and abroad against Putin DEPENDING ON WHITEY? My guess is no, they cannot. What dude is going to fight and die for Black, Gay, Hispanic reparations. While his honey gets railed by rappers and he gets machine gun bullets flying his way, or missiles?
I think we might find out, “what if they had a war and nobody came?”
Smart people hate war, want nothing to do with it, and have to be fooled into it.
White men can be pretty stupid that way. The modern battlefield is suicide.
Winston Churchill figured it out and said it best:
“War, which used to be cruel and magnificent, has now become cruel and squalid.”
The modern battlefield is suicide.
Oh man, what a perfect setup to post a Sky Australia article with more detail and quotes on the Reddit Legionnaire base that was wiped out by Kalibr cruise missiles:
https://www.news.com.au/world/europe/unfair-fight-foreign-legion-volunteers-flee-ukraine-after-russian-missile-strike-on-training-base/news-story/3ad8c173eb17bfa4f2c8c002f8906689
A couple interesting points of speculation on this story have surfaced, I wish I could find better sourcing.
1) Apparently the legionnaires’ operational security (opsec) was so poor that they were posting selfies on Instagram.
If true, I bet the Russians were able to pull the GPS coordinates straight from the metadata embedded in the photo files.
2) Claims are being made there was some sort of NATO (Polish?) air defense radar station 12 miles/kilometers from the wiped out camp that was not able to pick up the incoming missiles.
If #2 is true, that is a potentially huge game changer that implies nothing good about the state of Western air defense vs. Russian cruise missiles.
That will give NATO a pause I would hope.
It won’t. But it should remind *us* that the Poles, however “based” they can seem, are fundamentally passive. Whoever owns them fully owns them.
I don’t understand. Isn’t this showing Hispanics are most willing to stay and fight?
for THEIR civilization, yes.
Jared Taylor looks at Patriotism gap among other things raised by Ukraine in an hour /15 podcast on What makes a Nation.
It fit well into a drive I had and was a good use of the time.
https://www.unz.com/audio/jtaylor_what-makes-a-nation/
Because globohomo at its very essence is an expression of sociopathy/psychopathy, it arises from the very core qualitative nature of globohomo and so is inevitable it selects for sociopaths and psychopaths. Worse, the more truly horrific and sick the individual sociopath or psychopath, the higher the individual rises within globohomo. It’s the globohomo way. Notice how the “environmentalists” always get their way? For instance, Poopy Joe’s first official “act” was to terminate the Keystone Pipeline. This is because “environmentalism” is a marketing brand and effort for some of the sickest pieces of shit in history (Soros, Gates, et al.) who fantasize in killing billions of people, you know, to get their kicks and jollies. This is literally the situation, painful as it may be to look at it head on and accept it as reality (sick and horror show as it is).
Thus, as mindless as well as soulless as so many NPC drones have now been successfully conditioned to be by globohomo, it’s no surprise to me, no surprise at all, that one-third of the respondents in some poll favor nuclear war, even though such a horrible thing really might as well be about nothing more than some crack pipes strewn about in Keeevv by Hunter Biden.
Now I see I really do owe Compsci an apology. I had, panic-stricken, thought out loud of an emptied-out America awaiting a Chinese population dump.
I’m sorry. No need to worry.
The Chinese won’t want a radioactive wasteland filled with roving hordes of ravenous, brain-damaged, infectious cannibal rage zombies.
I used to follow the “daily assessments” from the Institute for the Study of War as they are main sources for the similarly biased Wikipedia “2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine” page.
The Isw is a creature of Fredrick W. Kagan, who is the brother of the chief Kagan, Robert, the husband of Victoria Nuland.
Fred has got his own Wikipedia page, and used to author those ISW daily fantasy assessments directly, see https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-march-9 . Now by the looks of it seems he has sidestepped in favour of his protégés.
Invariably, each of these assessments has the Russian military very incompetent, and being beaten back on all fronts.I used to follow the “daily assessments” from the Institute for the Study of War as they are main sources for the similarly biased Wikipedia “2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine” page.
The Isw is a creature of Fredrick W. Kagan, who is the brother of the main Kagan, Robert, the husband of Victoria Nuland. He has got his own Wikipedia page.
Fredrick used to author these daily fantasy assessments directly, see https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-march-9 . Now it looks he has side-stepped to favour the protégés.
Invariably, the Russian military is incompetent and being beaten back on all fronts.
Repetita juvant
From the web:
“Bars and restaurants are now requiring proof of Ukrainian support”
Putin’s remarks from yesterday, when he addressed the whole world (in English):
https://halturnerradioshow.com/index.php/en/news-page/world/russian-president-addresses-the-world-over-ukraine
I’ve had people literally become hysterical and speechless when I casually remark that Russia’s position is reasonable. Someone might try a GoFundMe to buy airtime to broadcast Putin’s message but that would surely get the Canadian Trucker treatment. Worse, I suppose.
I’ve had the same experience when I talk about how provocative NATO expansion has been from Russia’s POV. People literally can’t process the information; you can almost see the gears grinding to a halt.
One of the things I found interesting is that all of Zelensky’s speeches have been targeted at the ruling elite in each state (UK parliament, EU members, US congress, Canadian parliament etc), while from the ones I have seen of Putin they have been mostly directly to the general Russian population.
As Z says a lot the elite are mostly talking to themselves. The population are about as important as the stapler when it comes to making decisions in the west.
This guy is all over the map. Sometimes he hits the bull’s eye. Sometimes he comes across like a high-school girls writing in the back of your yearbook–he ends sentences with multiple exclamation points!!!!!
But here’s what he is reporting today:
https://halturnerradioshow.com/index.php/en/news-page/world/breaking-news-numerous-russian-air-force-planes-shuttling-people-out-of-moscow-to-ural-mountains
There are a whole LOT of things I’d expect before a nuclear first strike, but I don’t know what I don’t know. So FYI.
Please go easy on the links, Infant.
Your career professionally aggregating data is a hard habit to break, I see.
Run! Run for your lives!
It’s coming!
A Linknado!
Dang. I should’ve said, “please do go easy, would you” as a touch of Southron politesse, civility, and refinement.
Wasn’t this post about missing “straight from the shoulder” truth telling? However
Bending the kings English for diplomatic purposes can have a place & time.
Such as “you look great in those pants”
Moscow is huge and it has *deep* underground tunnels. Most of the population can find refuge from our nukes with 20 min. warning. The wealthy can get to their dachas outside the city inside 4 hrs. time by train or car. Although Kolomna is a target (I’m a former US member of the Russian Parachuting Association and I used to jump Kolomna Aerograd, which is a popular location for elite dachas). NATO forces would be annihilated if members attempted to invade even a tiny corner of Russia/Byelorussia. So I question the reported flight en masse.
I have a map above my dining-room fireplace depicting a previous attempt at teaching those damn Russians:
https://datavizblog.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/map-full-size1.png
Re: Ukraine, it’s crazy how the media event is now the geopolitical event. I remember when Russia invaded Georgia and of course the Crimean incident. Both big deals in the news but more or less geopolitically controlled.
This time Zelensky makes a fuss on social media or whatever he’s been up to, and the heads of state are struggling and possibly failing to tamp it down.
It’s taken on a life of its own. I almost wonder if Skynet has become self-aware or something.
One can’t help but think that, like the fetish for “deconstruction” in the humanities (which should now be called semiticies), or shystering among the law, it’s the result of the replacement of stern, staid Calvinist/Quaker businessmen who valued “fair dealing” and being “straight from the shoulder”, by a certain tribe, know for it’s fetish for “bargaining” and haggling and outright cheating (Got a spare birthright to sell?)
Consider the apparent inability to price anything without “.99”..
@ Wild Geese Howard: Thanks for the links WAY down there.
Oh heck. I repent of the above. You educated blokes are looking for parsed, quality information, aren’t you?
Sigh. For a barbarian, this civilization thingie is SO dammed hard.
the power of the media over the normie is complete. people on both sides of the “aisle ” that I know say stupid things like ” we should put in a no fly zone , I know it’s risky but if it stops Putin it’s worth it ” .
After the way they were controlled by the insane covid narrative , I was shocked and appalled . from what I am seeing now I am terrified. they can be made to believe anything . really anything .
A gerat example of this is Ferfal over at the modern survivalist is just unhinged in the latest podcast with matt bracken on odesse.
” … modern survivalist is just unhinged in the latest podcast with matt bracken … .”
Thanks. I’ll have a look b/c I have had my doubts about Bracken for a LONG time. I’ll have a look. Maybe I’m mistaken.
Brackin is on the latest black pigeon speaks, listened this morning.
On bitchute.
I think he knows what he’s talking about.
Bracken and co. do us a tremendous service, but are still damaged by the Holo religion, the source of ‘anti-racism’.
It was the “climate change” of the right, rewiring their moral calculation.
A kind of blinders, an effect of Newspeak.
Infant: I cannot speak to Bracken’s legitimacy or accuracy on anything, but my personal experience at Western Rifle Shooters (which I believe he started?) has been decidedly mixed. A lot of neoconnery and color blindness, a lot of bluster, way too much chest-thumping ‘kill a commie’ murricanism, with a dose of reality here and there that historic America is dead and gone. Takes some time to sift the occasional gems from among the dross.
His piece “What I Saw at the Coup” is a primer for dealing with today’s issues.
I have a question. Looking at the politics of today, 2022, where will the bulk of white people be from, 20 years from now, in the dissident movement? Will it be the left or the right? I have a sneaking suspicion that when our politics turn upside down from future crises, that more may actually come from the Portlandia et. al. left than the Southern Baptist Convention et. al. right. I may be wrong. The density of the right on Ukraine, the border, etc., basically shows the right to be nothing but brain stem, with absolutely nothing upstairs. How could they ever be dissidents? You first need a thought all your own to be one.
Well, I can see that you haven’t looked at the Southern Baptist Convention in quite some time. (And don’t, unless you want to be distressed.) They are LONG gone.
But you saying this:
“where will the bulk of white people be from,”
reminded me of that Deagle dot com population projection figures for 2025 that I visited a few times in Dec 2020 before it was taken down b/c it had caused quite a stir. Does anybody remember that?
Is that what we are looking at now?
I believe it is , Depop on an unimaginable scale . god help us all.
I agree completely
Among people I meet, the Portlandia types are far more reasonable and open to the DR than Joe Normie. They are soul searching right now and finding they don’t like current day America one bit but just have trouble expressing why.
Hence why I think it is time to write off Normie as a lost cause. And they are never going to like us anyway. They just think we’re weird. Push comes to shove, the chill and grill types would toss under the bus in a heartbeat.
My general view of normie-cons is that they are modest hedonists who are mostly concerned with maintaining or improving their current standard of living. Basically, when you reverse engineer their actions, if always comes down to what they feel is good for them in a material sense.
Lara Logan unchained and dropping non-stop truth bombs:
https://www.bitchute.com/video/yrwD23iIvO3M/
You owe yourselves the six minutes, especially near the end when she specifically references the SES (Senior Executive Service).
The SES- now you have my attention.
SERCO, I believe, is analogous, as a “private company providing government administrative servicing.”
Another unknown is the ESB, the Exchange Stabilization Board, that was given unlimited powers to wage economic war in 1947 (?), the same year the CIA was organized by Wall Street analysts.
So many rabbit holes. We must understand this overstructure, in the hopes of someday organizing against it.
Correction to comment in moderation: the ESB was empowered by Congress in 1940, not 1947. Good timing, I guess.
Watched. What people cannot wrap their minds around is that a political mafia, which happens to be J**ish, will hire other ethnic mafias as the situation demands.
The Mossad works with Muslim ISIS to attack Syria. How is this any different from using Azov in Ukraine?
Cherry on top: Azov renewed and staffed by Blackwater contractors, an American firm.
LexSaltu: Logan really seems to have done a total reassessment of her worldview after being raped and almost killed in Egypt. I knew little of her prior to her ordeal other than that she was your standard female television journalist. But any comments I’ve seen from her in the last 5 years or so has been pretty based.
Non-stop Czar bombas, I should say. And there are more from where those came from.
“It is tempting to think this is just the way the world is and we just see it more clearly now thanks to the mass media age.”
There is really no historical parallel for how brutally the myriad methods of communication have transformed the way the population behaves. I truly believe this to be uncharted territory.
For the first time in history, one can be saturated with news items from anywhere on the face of this planet. War in the Ituri Rainforest? Some wog has probably posted footage of the same on Youtube. Effigy of gay official burnt in Croatian village? Ditto, except it won’t be a wog, rather a Croat. Two male polar bears caught double teaming an arctic fox? Eskimo’s got it covered, check out his channel. Simply stunning. And of course, when this is brought first into your living room (TV), and then into the palm of your hand (smart phone), how can Mr Normal not care?
At the same time, it seems likely that the population generally thinks itself better informed because it can get access to such information. Of course, we have zero way of verifying most of this. And really, ought not to be concentrating on it. But it has a strangle hold over swathes of the populace.
The quote by de Maistre is one of the most pithy true statements ever put down. It’s a great way to think about the rumour mill as well as the flow of good money. On the ground here in The Isles, I’ve seen a handful of Ukrainian flags, and there has been much talk of the war, but not many are firmly in support of any side. That said, most will just say something derogatory about Putin and be done with it – possibly out of just wanting to fit in. But it doesn’t seem to be causing the degree of furore I’ve seen with other crusades.
An amusing side effect of the War to End All Wars is that due to it’s constant coverage on the Idiot Box, even Normals seem to be joking about how Covid has ‘disappeared’. Statements regarding the tepid virus that only one month ago may have been blasphemous toward That Most Dastardly of Chink Bugs are now OK to make. Just shows the power of the propaganda organs, I guess. Not that I’m surprised.
In other news fuel is rocketing – supposedly because “sanctions” and “New Hitler”. Seems reasonable, but it cost me 35 quid to fill half a tank today… the same would get me a full tank not too long ago. Items of all sorts don’t seem to be available – baby items, I’ve noticed – and we’re having an expected electricity hike at some point. Some quack said 100%, but who knows. In any case, we’re stocking up and planting our vegetables, trying to consume less – this seems the most sensible mental and practical approach to take at the moment.
I think sometimes you give a lot of these pyschopaths like your hypothetical grocery store fellow too much credit, Z. You state they cannot tell good from bad, but I’m willing to bet a sizeable lot can, and the scale of this society and it’s moral weakness allows them to conduct Their Evil with relative impunity.
Got the day off today, so I think I’ll go sharpen my chisels and kitchen knives. Got a good quality mono-crystalline diamond stone the other day… at least that’s what the advert said – and in this age of seller dishonesty we can never know. Now is not a good time to have dull bladed tools.
Spyderco Sharpmaster: best sharpening system I’ve come across:
https://spyderco.com/catalog/details.php?product=77
Add the diamond rods:
https://spyderco.com/catalog/details/204D/Tri-Angle-Stones-Diamond/79
A.G. Russell has *everything*
https://agrussell.com/
I trained myself to sharpen to perfection with Japanese water stones. Challenging until muscle memory obtains but the results are crazy sharp and durable.
honing rod, no diamonds
Atoma 400 grit with diamonds
Naniwa Chosera 1000, 3000
Suehiro Rika 5000
Polishing stones to 20,000
Anchored leather strops with jeweler’s paste
Heh. You’re a serious sharpener. I have an old man made oilstone of dubious quality. Really wanted to get myself an Arkansas stone or a Jap waterstone; not sure how easy it is to get Arkansas stones in the UK.
I have a great book by Leonard Lee about sharpening, which I think was first published in the late 80s. Even then he was lamenting the quality of new Arkansas stones and mentioning the best bet was to pick up an old one and re-true it if need be.
This summer when I attend estate and barn sales, I will keep my eyes peeled for a vintage Arkansas stone. If discovered, I will reach out to you and send it/them, gratis, after an anonymous protonmail exchange with you. I’ll calender this so I don’t forget; hopefully, we’ll find what you’re looking for. Cheers.
“Really wanted to get myself an Arkansas stone or a Jap waterstone; not sure how easy it is to get Arkansas stones in the UK.”
Go to
https://agrussell.com/
and ask them, They are IN Arkansas. And yes, they do sell, the Arkansas stones. In a fine cherry wood box. Numerous sizes and prices. Friendly and easy to deal with.
“I truly believe this to be uncharted territory.”
Oh it is. We’re adapting to a new technology. I feel like a flint chipper watching that guy over there doing magic with fire and some weird thing he calls “metal”.
I always thought the “Arkansas Stone” was buried with Thorin Oakenshield.
OrangeFrog: Hope you and yours are all well. So very glad the UK has dropped all its insane covid restrictions and most of the breathless ‘news reports’ on the same. Here, however, they’re ramping it back up. Past couple of days there have been 3-5 headlines about a covid ‘resurgence’ at the Daily Mail Online, and now Fauci has popped his head out of his hole again to warn of new lockdowns. It will never end – disease, war mania, one purported threat after another to justify every insanity.
Smart to learn to sharpen knives. I spent a fair bit on a set of Wusthof kitchen knives years ago, but I’ve never learned how to sharpen them properly (plus I’m lazy). Criminal, I know. I did buy a set of sharpening stones from Amazon a few months back, but I don’t know if they’re truly any good and I haven’t even opened them.
@3g4me
You should purchase an inexpensive chef’s knife, unserrated, in 1095 steel (not stainless).
Watch free videos re how to sharpen blades. Buy cheap bags of apples or potatoes.
Practice sharpening your throwaway knife using the presently unboxed stones and then slice/chop the veg. Dull the knife, bring it back. Experiment and revisit the videos until you begin to get it. After a few sessions, you’ll be enabled and you can sharpen the Wusthofs, which when sharp are lovely tools.
/s/a lovely tool
Mercer, out of Taiwan, is an outstanding line of knives. Buy your practice knife on Amazon, Mercer 1095 chef, say 6″. Inexpensive and as good in the higher pricepoints as the German and Japanese equivalents.
LexSaltu: Many thanks for the suggestions. My Wusthofs are in dire need of sharpening and I don’t want to damage them. As I said, I realize the need and thus bought the sharpening stones but haven’t yet done anything about it. Now sounds like I have a plan!
Putin may be a psychopath or sociopath; but if he is, he’s a smart one. My guess is that he anticipated most (if not all) of the reactions he’s facing now over Ukraine:
He anticipated western economic sanctions, and is ready to deal with them:
The Russian people are used to privation, and will adjust to it. And Russian state media will spin it to encourage the Russian people to blame the west.
If Europe and America boycott Russian wheat and gas, other markets for them will be found.
In fact, western boycotts might be what pushes Russia into greater alliance with China; possibly even to include a yuan-based international exchange/banking system that will replace the old dollar-based system, and eliminate one category of sanctions.
Putin doesn’t give a rat’s ass for what western “leaders” think about him, or what the western press says about him. He’s not infected with that particular form of neurosis in which he needs everyone to like him, and feels distressed when they don’t. He knew what was coming, and could care less.
I never fell for the notion that Trump was “playing four-dimensional chess”: anticipating all that his opponents might do, all the moves they might make, and never being caught by surprise by events he hadn’t anticipated.
But with Putin, it wouldn’t surprise me one bit. He sees the weakness of the west and its “leaders”, and is confident of his ability to endure and circumvent anything they throw at him.
And if Putin IS a psychopath, then the odds are good that he’s ENJOYING all the negative press he’s drawing.
While a normal person would be ashamed and distressed to see himself portrayed as a bloodthirsty devil, a psychopath would love it…. would revel in it…. would take it as a point of pride
Plausible.
Personally, I don’t think he cares.
There is no denying it. The world HAS to change. Russia cannot assure its future or its success in a world run by Globohomo. Zelensky, Biden, Turdo, Macron, et al – they are actors. That is all we’ve ever known for leadership for the last two generations in the west Perhaps we are so acclimated to the never ending ridiculous parade of eccentric fops, carnies, and lunatics… that we don’t recognize or respect a real warrior when we see one?
Putin is not nuts. He has been cold, cunning and brutal through every step of this fight. He’s made sure NATO knows exactly what he wants. He’s given them time to make changes. He’s tried to talk, several times. Nothing he wants is unreasonable. He wants a deal. I’m beginning to think it’s our guys that are nuts, and Putin is only acting in his country’s interest..
Big issues like Covid and the Ukrainian war sure seem to divide the comment sections. I agree with the assessment of Putin but take Putin as shorthand for Russian Leadership.
Meanwhile at Sailers blog the cold warriors sound like Rachel Maddow supporters and are waiting breathlessly for the Russian Army to collapse. Once the Russians collapse and depose Putin they can go back to thinking they can vote themselves into a new reality.
“Great men are rarely also good men.”
-Wretchard
Russians, talking about their politics, noted that Putin actually tries to be the neutral, objective middleman in their turbulent national debates.
He was hand-picked by Yeltsin to rebuild a wrecked nation, against the wishes of the predatory oligarchs, per Martin Armstrong.
His primary concern is what’s best for Russia’s future- and that she has one. (As she is, too, multicultural, not as some fantasy state.)
He was conscripted into the Soviet Communist Party, not a volunteer, it was required.
Not a Communist.
Of course he’s enriching himself.
A Tsar must project power and success, or be run over.
Dang. Meant to say that most impressive is his hard, calculating rationality.
I look into Putin’s eyes and see nothing. He is the consummate poker player. I can’t believe he’s crazy, perhaps a sociopath (aren’t the all?), but not crazy as in irrational. And if not crazy, then he has figured out several end game scenarios to the Ukraine conflict and prepared for every eventuality.
Yes, he has taken risk as certain eventualities are more desirable than others, but I’m sure all of them are acceptable in his mind and worth their entailed risk. That’s what the famous totalitarians of old did and are still remembered for. Example, Caesar and the battle of Gallic Alesia. A battle that is still taught in detail in war colleges around the world to this day. Is Ukraine Putin’s Alesia?
“I’m beginning to think it’s our guys that are nuts, and Putin is only acting in his country’s interest.”
This is the only thing an honest man *can* think b/c it is the truth.
Thee is a difference between right and wrong. There is a difference between truth and falsehood.
And the Russians are 100% in the RIGHT in this action. No ifs, ands, or buts about it.
The Ukrainian gov’t has killed around 14,000 civilians in the former Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts. When Zelinsky was installed by the US after the overthrow of the lawfully elected president in 2014, the first thing he did was to get the parliament to pass a law against use of the Russian language, including by the Russians in Luhansk and Donetsk, where they constitute 98% of the population.
That moved them to declare their independence.
Zelinsky has been shelling them ever since. Had killed around 14,000 civilians since January 2014.
Then he went to the Munich Security Conference las month and announced that the Ukraine was going to acquire nuclear weapons in direct contravention to the 1994 Budapest Accords.
Putin’s troops moved in within the week.
Putin and Lavrov and Ryabkov have acted in good faith right down the line. They have been met with scorn and lies and treachery every step of the way.
It was Pete Poroshenko who was installed after the 2014 revolution. Zelensky was elected in 2019.
Putin is doing the Lord’s work. Someone has to fight globohomo (‘our democracy’) and the WEF. There is no one in the USA who will stand up.
“The lie is the coin of the realm and the liars are the new aristocracy.”
Whether he said it or not, the pejorative of the United States attributed to Putin, “The Empire of Lies,” is wildly accurate. I don’t know if the description of low-trust society covers it given people have the attention spans of gnats. One lie follows another lie and another follows and people forget the earlier ones so the diminution in trust, while certainly there, is mitigated.
The old school of thought was trust was required to run a con or grift. Distraction, repetition and speed mitigates the need for trust and appears more effective.
To paraphrase the Baldwin character from GLENNGARY GLEN ROSS, “always be lying.”
i guess coffee is for liars then 😛
Coffee laced with meth.
ABC …always be Closing.
In any case, they were skilled liars
What I keep coming back to is the opium crisis. I saw it coming from a good mile. Safe if taken as directed. Slow release heroin. Until you crush it up and throw it back with a couple of jack&cokes.
My wife, a doctor, was recruited by a pain management clinic. Good hours, and very good money. I told her it would be better she preformed abortions.
Don’t get me wrong. There is a time and place for these drugs. If gut shot, or riddled with cancer. But to cynically foist these dangerously addictive drugs on a people. What kind of sociopaths would do such a thing? The Sackler and Sassons. That’s who.
From what I gather, the cost-benefit analysis for the Sackler family was fairly accurate and they ended up profiting wildly even with the settlements.
They made 12 billion. Paid 1 billion in fines (or something roughly proportional). It’s the equivalent of robbing someone of 100 dollars, and your punishment is paying that back 10 dollars, still profiting 90 dollars. Sounds simply like an operating expense for the (((Sacklers)))
That’s why I always insist (as if anyone listens) that these guys go to jail, never solely fined. They made a financial decision (to trade lives for $$$) and it’s hard to beat those guys at that game. Turn it into an existential decision and they might think twice.
The Chinese know this. It is “glorious to be rich”, but if you f&*k with their economic system, you win a bullet to the back of the head. End of story.
The funny thing is I remember the sex ed and anti drug lessons in school. You’d die if you drank alcohol or smoked pot, and that nice blonde girl you met at Sunday school almost certainly had AIDS.
Nothing about pills. Yet they’re killing more people than Vietnam every year now.
Side question-
Poppy opiates are still one of the most important drugs in the world.
The dog that didn’t bark is, what about that poppy production?
We fought two wars to control the world’s finest painkiller, in Southeast Asia and Afghanistan.
So what happened?
Opium’s political-historical significance is deep, large and long. Nations were broken and created over the Spice Trade..
Lies of fabrication, lies of omission, how to be rational in the empire of the Father of Lies?
These top-tier black markets are what have given us a criminal overclass. We’re ruled by a global mafia network.
“We’re ruled by a global mafia network.”
Yep. And it’s not a recent development.
“Opium’s political-historical significance is deep, large and long. Nations were broken and created over the Spice Trade.”
This book is for you:
https://www.alibris.com/Operation-Gladio-The-Unholy-Alliance-Between-the-Vatican-the-CIA-and-the-Mafia-Paul-L-Williams/book/28973726?matches=12
Fascinating chapter in it about the assassination of Pope John Paul I. You might be too young to remember him. He reigned for 33 days. Died mysteriously.
Much more.
How did Billie Holliday die?
Holy Smokin’ Jehosephat, now that’s what I call a synopsis!
A point: “the initial funding for these guerilla armies came from the sale of large stocks of SS morphine that had been smuggled out of Germany”
So they stole the dope, and put it to good use. This ancient gangster culture really don’t change.
Side note: the Nazis created methadone as a heroin analogue that would last for a day, instead of 5 hours between dosings.
You do put some quality linkage out there, yesirree.
is there even a market for opium or heroin, anywhere? i mean, with fentanyl being so readily available.
That’s just what I was wondering. Has synthetic elephant tranquilizer replaced the oldest and most valuable organic painkiller?
“Safe if taken as directed. Slow release”
And it was a good idea, a damm fine idea. Chronic pain sufferers are being murdered in the worst way- slowly, in agony- by the stiff-necked cruelty of the moralist zealouts.
Obamacare (and Romneycare before it) legislated the independent practitioner out of existence for all but the wealthy. Patient care became subservient to corporate dictates and corporate profits. It’s all defensive medicine now.
I used to smoke Drum tobacco, you had to roll em yourself. The bag was 1.41 oz. One day 1.14 oz. I called them up to tell them I was on to their bullcrap and was switching brands. They said I was the only person they herd from and send me some coupons. I don’t smoke anymore, but that was the first time I noticed something like that. On the drive in today ,the boomer radio was pontificating about Russia getting its ass kicked . And of course a new strain of kung fu dojo creeping crud….
This reduced content in packaging is at least 30 yo. Way back when, there was a coffee bean blight and the price of coffee went through the roof. All of a sudden we got the “new” containers with 14 oz’s at same pricing. However, in those days there was still a semblance of embarrassment of the seller and some respect for consumer sentiment, so there was an explanation printed on the can: “…new grind technique…14 oz brews the same amount of coffee as old 16 oz can…”.
Hell, even today ice cream in 16 or 32 containers is a rarity in my store—to the point that a few of the contrarian producers advertise their “honest quart” in big letters.
you would think people would check the store signs, next to each item, with the price per unit listed. but i suspect normies can’t bend over to read given their extreme bulk (and general aversion to reading and comparing).
“Note: Please don’t be alarmed if this package appears less than full as some settlement may have occurred during shipping.”
Blue Bell, to my knowledge, is the only commonly available ice cream that comes in a true half gallon (and is made like proper ice cream). Unsurprisingly, it’s the most expensive ice cream in the super market. It’s also the best, and the only one I consider buying anymore, primarily because they deal honestly with consumers.
What about “chicken wings”?
I have been asking that question for years and always falls on deaf ears. Isn’t this a class action lawsuit waiting to happen?
But when you order wings you get mostly drumettes, a cheaper part of the bird and not as tasty, and if you do get wings they are like a tiny bird’s or a quail.
Total TOTAL deception and gets me in a lather if I dwell on it
And HERE is another deceptive scam for any people out there who like to collect coins, but silver spot price is like $25/ounce, but goo d luck finding any seller willing to sell anything for $5 less than over spot, more like $7 to $10 over spot to start. Wasn’t long ago you were getting them for a few bucks over spot. So yeah, silver prices are not exactly spiking, but the sellers are baiting you in then hitting you with their huge markups.
Re chicken wings: having raised meat birds, “wings” disgust me. The birds they raise for that are some messed up abomination akin to the Eraserhead baby. It is surely a step along the “eat your bugs, podboy” pathway.
As for metals, gold was worse. After the first dip to 1600-ish, the actual retail market hasnt gone below $1900 irrespective of “spot price.” Gold market would swing $100 and retail would be 0% changed. The market for commodity market buyers and retail markets are entirely detached..
Yep, and the “premium” is more for US and Canadian coins. Those I assume are in demand as they are recognizable. As with most commodities, precious metals are not an investment, but rather a hedge and safety blanket. If the US government pulls a “Canada” on the populous and cuts you off from the banking system, you’ll at least have some barter for getting out of town. Beats caring around dead chickens or whatever.
Lies always cost money in the end. Businesses can make money on lies for sure, but the underlying transaction provides diminishing and usually negative returns. So, of course, when we look at the government/corporate/consumer debt pile that’s grown over decades, one giant lie comes to the forefront. In the words of Dick Cheney 20 years ago…”deficits don’t matter.” This is a man who spent his entire life enriching himself beyond belief darting between politics and the defense contractors. So that lie, the greatest of lies, was close to his heart from the beginning…and is still close to the beating heart of the Nicaraguan teenager who disappeared years ago so he could live.
In the words of that awful CNBC Jewess Susie Orman, “Lies destroy money, truth creates it.” I know she lifted it from somewhere to make her shekels, I’m sure it was quoted somewhere thousands of years ago, but it’s an absolutely correct statement.
“Lies always cost money”
True: but only when they’re recognized; hence the subtle shift from lying to deception.
If I can deceive you without telling you a recognizable lie— if I can lead you to believe that that container of Haagen-Dazs is still 16 oz.— then I’ve managed to fool you in a way that doesn’t have the monetary cost that an outright (recognizable) lie would incur.
This is precisely the Chinese way of doing business. Son has dealings over there and expresses this regularly. Basically, it is expected that the (Chinese) producer will do everything and anything to get it over on the purchaser and it is the purchaser’s responsibility to call him on it. In short, if you are stupid enough to be cheated you deserve it. And this is wrt to Fortune 500 type companies doing business over there—not just trivial consumer junk.
If people defraud for a short period of time without detection and/or prosecution, lies are quite profitable. Unfortunately, as a short-term matter, it is lucrative.
Scene: a high-end shopping mall with Lord & Taylor and Sacks 5th Ave as the anchor stores. From the sidewalk outside L&T, you can see through the menswear dept, all the way down the mall.
Rich, older matron exits store. Sees scruffy-looking black guy skulking around her Jaguar. She retreats to the sidewalk, uncertain what to do.
Well-dressed, clean-cut young white man notices. Asks, “Ma’am, is everything all right?”
“Oh, young man, well … ” and she points and explains.
Young man: “Oh, well, ma’am, I’d be glad to walk over there and get your car and bring it up here to you on the sidewalk. I’m not scared of him!”
“Oh, young man! How kind! Yes, would you please?”
“Oh, yes, ma’am. Give me your keys.”
The lady watches for a long time after the white clean-cut, well-dressed, courteous young white man AND the scruffy-looking black guy get into her Jaguar and drive off.
And even after she *finally* realizes what has happened, she is loath to tell anybody. So by the time she makes up her mind to summon the cops. the pair of con men are miles away.
True story.
It worked b/c they limited the time at that mall. Got four cars, then moved on.
Now 60 years later, that clean cut white boy is in the Oval Office and his irreputable compatriot has a presidential library.
Not if they are the only game in town AND the big players in town are all operating on the same shitty premise, think Target and Walmart. How is anyone going to beat them when they decide to collude and shaft the consumer. Chinese junk is now selling for almost what good German products are selling for, and you will notice there are more and more guys out there saying something like “Yeah, I know China used to make some real low quality tools and machines, but you should really take a look at Brand X. I was shocked at the quality, and it’s only a few bucks less than the German brands which quite frankly, are falling in quality.”
Not sure who cooks around here but Le Creuset used to be the gold standard in applying enamel to iron to make their cooking wears and dutch ovens, etc. Those things were indestructible and really a testament to excellent French manufacturing, along with their ovens like Le Cornue and even Lacanche. But I’m worried that if I order a Le Creuset that it won’t be of the same high standards as they used to be, wondering if a great company like that is powerless to resist the suck? I did however check out a Lacanche stove not long ago, and the quality seems still to be quite high.
But all that said, don’t we think that getting in bed with China has deadened us to the concept of quality? Certainly hasn’t helped. Needless to say I bought a cheap dutch oven from Costco, made in China, but usually Costco has pretty good vendor standards, but no, it was a piece of junk and chipped in a few months. Man I hate the Chinese with a passion, and it’s a passion I hope doesn’t soon direct at my own people who fall into the same shoddy standards of craftsmanship.
I seriously cook, and hunt and fish. The Chinese-manufactured cookware and tackle started to become absolute crap over the last five years. As an example, high end reels fall to pieces within two years, and the most expensive Dutch ovens have half the shelf life of their predecessors. The one thing that has maintained its quality are high end, American-made shotguns, in particular.
People have noticed, too. The first things snapped up at estate sales are pots, pans, and rods and reels.
My fishing reels are all over 30 years old. I take care of them and they will last the rest of my days. The new stuff is close to disposable.
I still have my late grandpa’s S.S. Kresge reels which predate WWII. Once I shine the brass, they look brand new. Built like tanks and butter-smooth actions. I don’t fish anymore, so I am wondering what they would sell for. Trivia.
Yeah, it’s amazing. The price vs. the quality of reels almost is inverse. Some of the brands are zombies. ABU Garcia reels, particularly the bait-casting line made in Sweden, have a cult following for those manufactured prior to 1980. I have an earlier one that gets oiled after every trip. Friends think I’m OCD over it, but once gone it cannot be replaced. Even in terms of actual dollars the ones made now cost more and are absolute junk.
There’s still Emile Henry:
https://www.emilehenryusa.com/
Different material, but first-rate French cook ware.
Thanks a million
I’m sold. Ordering a few of them.
Plus ceramic materials and earthen materials in general are best for slow cooking sauces
Ditto on the qc thing; i have been trying for around 14 months to get acceptable cast iron sinks. It is impossible to pay for quality, all you can pay for is warranty coverage on the backend after it inevitably fails.
Ditto for tools: why buy the Lincoln Electric for 600 when it’s made in the same Guangdong factory as the 150 dollar harbor freight? For power tools, the Blue brand with silver accents and red lettering, the yellow and black brand, all of it is made in the same Chinese province as the cheapo wallyword stuff and it ALL breaks 1 week after the warranty is up. Why bother anymore, its all Appleized planned obselescence. Its a sick, sad world.
Isn’t it funny how all the people pushing for “eat the bugs” “live in the pod” “net-zero emissions” never advocate for the near-indestructible appliances, furniture, housing that my grandparents took for granted?
I feel that colleges themselves have changed. Like in the old days you had the “joe college” stereotype where the average college student looked like some combination of Pat Boone, the lettermen (60s doowop group) or Fred from Scooby doo.
They tended to be the ones to go into the professions (doctor lawyer) and into business administration. Now it seems the business world is full of reddit types.
Spam filter kept this out of the other post:
This site is *always* reliable:
https://www.voltairenet.org/
Machine-translated English:
https://www.voltairenet.org/?lang=en
Spam filter again:
Always reliable (but written by a Russian):
http://thesaker.is/
Always reliable (also by a Russian):
https://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/
“Revolver.News also has stories from the Russian perspective on the war.”
I’ve scanned one of the articles three times, and it looks like disinfo to me. There are no specifics. There’s some repetition about the 150th Motorized Rifle Division, but the article says that that info is unconfirmed.
Disinfo or not, it’s not from the Russian perspective.
This is the one I looked at:
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-march-16
“In this age, only suckers are honest in their dealings.”
P.T. Barnum. The patron saint of the American Corpocracy. Except he was wrong in his assessment of suckers. Its really, “A sucker is born every microsecond.”
If you doubt the dumbing down of America, all you have to do is look at who TPTB are importing. You need low IQ, gullible people to rule a corrupt country. Its the same reason they made negroes citizens and gave the vote to women.
Excellent definition of “the great experiment.” Which of course was part of the rationale for the Republican assault on the South in the 1860s.
And the same folks are still running the show.
To the Z Man’s well-founded observations, I would add that there is a strong current of religious fanaticism behind the motivations of a certain segment of the liars and deceivers that plague what’s left of our society. In my lifetime, the old quote of how “you can’t make an omelette with out breaking a few eggs” was attributed to historical monsters like Stalin; now it is a dogmatic operating principle by our immoral elite and their rabid true believers. These people (cultists) have no qualms about lying because they do it in service of their degenerate, evil beliefs – in fact, they go out of their way to do so and take a disgusting sort of pride in it.
We are dealing with the fanaticism of non-believers
Ergo, it stands to reason that a fanatic disposition is a feature of humanity and only finds expression in whatever is put in front of someone be it a religion or an ideology or whatever else is cooked up. The fanatic WILL find something to sink his teeth into. Like my puppy, who opens his mouth and bears his teeth while running around for something to sink them into, most commonly the ankles of my other dogs. But he opens the mouth first, teeth in search of something to bite.
As the philosopher Bob Dylan once stated, “Gotta serve somebody.”
People look back on the middle ages as a barbarous period, but it was a time when extreme discipline was necessary. In the great reset, social credit score, etc., we see history starting to rhyme, but the people concocting these schemes are merely recognizing and attempting to surf the tide of history, not controlling it. They think they’re shooting the curl, but they’re headed for a gnarly wipeout, dude. (Lame, I know. Couldn’t resist 🙂 )
Here is an excellent example of deceptive propaganda from our controllers:
Younger Workers Believe ‘Remote Work Revolution’ Has Gone Too Far
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/younger-workers-believe-remote-work-revolution-has-gone-too-far
Yes, dear reader, they really expect you to sit here and believe that a generation that has been online since the cradle is just itching to get back into the office.
Someone is desperate to prop up the value of their commercial real estate so they can unload it to the next sucker…
the study was conducted by realtors. You can’t make that shit up.
“Yes, dear reader, they really expect you to sit here and believe that a generation that has been online since the cradle is just itching to get back into the office.”
Because everyone wants to be hectored by HR, cat-ladies, bug-men, and the H1-Bs from parts unknown, while having your internet blocked or filtered. And thanks to Puddin’head Joe, gas to drive to and from the office has skyrocketed.
Absolutely. We all knew that the propaganda campaign would be massive as there is so much money on the line.
if employees work from home, not only do office buildings empty out but all the ancillary businesses go up with them along with a huge chunk of the tax base.
There is a good chance that consumerism itself will go away. Another possible casualty of a “stay at home” culture is the mating/dating market
Its in awful shape now and city people after COVID go out less and less anyway but a larger decline will have interesting effects.
Reality though, the millennials are smart enough not to fall for such propaganda . They can be manipulated by convincing them that its bad to do something or that nice people do x but the office is horrible, spreads disease and is bad for the environment . I am not sure they have an in as it were.
as this story is pointing out, propaganda is in our midst. I would hope any reader of this, would understand that the author, is in fact spreading propaganda. The author is trying very hard to make you second guess yourself.
You know very well that the sky appears blue because of science. ( https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/blue-sky/en/) However this author is trying to tell you that the sky is in fact red. Even though you see blue, the author is trying to make you second guess and pretty soon you believe the sky is red.
Continue to think critically. Use your brain to tell you the truth, not some op ed that espouses what you believe to be false. Do not let the truth become lies, and lies become truth. We are stronger than that.
“as this story is pointing out, propaganda is in our midst.”
When you say, “the author,” to whom do you refer?
“We are stronger than that.”
When you say, “we,” to whom do you refer?
Good lord. Now they’re telling you the sky isn’t blue.
“Good lord. Now they’re telling you the sky isn’t blue.”
Well, on *their* planet, it prolly ain’t.
First, all is not lost. Solutions exist.
Second, the sociopaths that afflict us are best described as disease cells. If everyone was a disease cell, then our society would already be dead. The disease cells are still relatively few compared to the whole population. Most of the sheeple have just been trained to acquiesce to this sociopathy in exchange for a comfortable life in the burbs.
Third, if the sociopath in the example of today’s post were to die in a horrible accident in which he is run over by his own riding mower and experiences an agonizing death therefrom, most of his neighbors would get over it because of the rarity of such things. But that dynamic starts to change when the riding mowers start get more uppity more often. Think outside the box.
TomA, you should definitely consider taking up playing the Hitman series of video games. Your lawnmower thing is a perfect fit for it. He he he. Very devious ! But Good hitman !
This is a real drawback to the orderly court system that exists in “civilized” societies. The sociopath can hire a sociopath lawyer to work every angle until the system is operating opposite of what was intended.
You go to a place where the government doesn’t give a shit about your problems, and the villagers take it upon themselves to arrange lawnmower accidents for the guy who’s selling deceptively sized ice creams.
I think the central idea is that democracy is the kind of thing the must select for sociopaths as leaders. It’s the nature of the beast. There’s no getting back to a time when the democracy was not selecting for sociopaths, because that would be like looking for dry water.
That’s why there is some benefit to older systems where the elite was expected to fight. At the very least, your elite could be counted on to have the virtue of courage. In a world where the options are either to select for wickedness or else to select for a lonely, single virtue, you’d prefer the single virtue selection process.
I wonder if TV has anything to do with political office attracting sociopaths? The pull of seeing themselves on TV would certainly appeal to the latent megalomaniac in a person.
Deprived of divine authority, the concept of human personality has been relentlessly defined conditionally, and therefore arbitrarily. The concrete person is now an abstraction, the subject of legal freedoms and restrictions. Rights are now conditional. This is humanism put into practice. Resting as it now does on arbitrary, flimsy, and shifting foundations, Dostoyevsky observed that such unmindful, “humaneness is only a habit, a product of civilization. It may completely disappear.”
As a modern bard had it, don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you got til it’s gone?
Here’s a little thing anyone can do
I have a puppy. A beautiful chocolate lab. Everything he does cracks me up. He was walking around yesterday with a green grape hanging off his mouth and didn’t even know it.
And I think I remember Z saying something similar about the role of pets in our lives.
But imagine when the dog is sitting there that God created him solely to be our entertainment, that the dog is there for us and God made us to be the rulers of the earth. It may take a while to get your mind totally in it but at some point it clicks. And it is a strange feeling. I actually felt a bit dizzy. it is so unlike our general mindset and perceptions today. But you start to realize how life might have been viewed back in the day, with far less of the confusions and uncertainties and supposed advanced scientific knowledge. You certainly feel more at ease and “complete” for lack of a better word
So why not believe it? And imagine if all of a sudden people started to believe it. Talk about a revolution.
Revolver.News also has stories from the Russian perspective on the war. It’s not clear what their own position is. Their funders may be divided.
I’ve been taking note of all of this too
Breitbart and revolver are like 50/50
Gateway Pundit is 90/10 on Putin’s side
Populist Press has been 95/5 on Ukraine’s side. Which makes me wonder who might be behind it.
I’ve been reading Sputnik and the Saker and Southfront to get my info on how the war is going. These sites are definitely pro Putin /Russia but they seem fairly objective in their reporting.
And we all know Fox is 99/1 on the Ukraine side. The rest of the MSM is positive 1 million to negative 1 trillion
Russian cynicism works in favor of Russian sources. They assume everyone is lying, even the Russian government. That is a good starting point.
Their tendency to be laconic and dour helps as well. American extroversion always has this disingenuous salesman quality to it.
I think most people shouldn’t even pick a side. I know the dissident reflex is to support Russia, out of spite if nothing else. But many in our ranks would elevate the foulest leader of the most disgusting third-world shithole just because he doesn’t do globohomo. This little war is not about globohomo vs. its resistors. It’s an ancient turf war that the Liberal West and the Little Hats have stuck their pricks into. I’ve been to that part of the world and it sucks. Imagine Bismarck, ND but with a thousand Cabrini Greens instead of homes, and trash, dogs, and drunks everywhere. It’s not worth anyone’s time.
the Ukraine produce nearly 700 million bushels of wheat a year. Most of the wheat in the Middle East and N Africa comes from the Ukraine.
There’s an *enormous* amount of gas and oil beneath the Crimea.
This is resource war, but this one is for *all* the marbles. The stakes could mot be higher. We are watching the beginning of the Third World War.
Between the Big Guy kickbacks, the Newland Disease Centers (that may or may not have been “researching” corona viruses before 2019), the slush funds for Cloud Kids, the prostitution and kiddy diddling, etc etc – Ukraine was the playground of Dirty Deeds for western elites for the last decade. I am very hopeful that enough dirt comes out to sink a couple of our people’s bigger enemies, or failing that, turn a couple million more ppl to Our Side by the rank corruption and hypocrisy.
I mean, there are videos of street walkers rump-railing the stoned son of the US President: we are a silly country, apart from being agreement-incapable. How does Putin not just put up pictures of Biden’s son’s indiscretions every time he mentions the US in a press conference, like Zman’s clown horn intro for Reason Magazine? What other dirty laundry does Keeeev hold, once the Ruskie state security bureau gets to comb the archives?
In other words, I see the embarassment and ruination of my people’s enemies from a russian victory, but their enrichment and empowerment if russia loses.
Darren Beattie runs Revolver. He’s got pretty good DR bonafides and has expressed pro Russia sentiment on his personal twitter account. Since Revolver is largely a news aggregator, it mostly publishes things that other people write. Beattie’s problem now is that the coverage of the Ukraine conflict is so one sided against Russia that there are few credible new sources to publish with a pro Russia perspective. So when his news aggregator publishes news of the conflict, it naturally reflects the pro Ukraine bias of the MSM.
In the case of the ISW story, where else is he going to get this information (especially the detailed map)? Wikipedia? Chinese media? Something a guy on 4chan made? IMO, he picked the least worst option that showed a map of the conflict.
It’s easy to get taken in. The ISW site seemed legit to me, come to find out it was a Kagan operation. Or so I’m told by another site. The internet has turned into a hall of mirrors.
I must respectfully disagree. ISW looks like disinfo to me, just at a glance.
If it’s true that it’s connected with (((Kagan))), I’m not in the least surprised.
There is an entire fake, gay non-profit/think-tank industry that advances the interests of the lords of this world.
I read Marginal Revolution regularly, and Tyler Cowen doles out A LOT of grant money, and you start looking at all these “Institutes” and they are all connected and the money just pours in to employ these eaters.
“and they are all connected and the money just pours in to employ these eaters.”
Shameful.
It’s telling how Joseph Goebbels is always cast as the peak evil propagandist (for basically telling the truth about the nose), but he’s got nothing on our current j-media. How much death and destruction has resulted from their lies and distortions over the past couple of decades? Probably easily into the millions and they’re apparently not done yet.
Now, supposedly nearly 1/3 of Americans favor war with Russia even if it risks nucs. That’s just f-ning great. I have to say though, it may be true as nearly every conversation I hear is decidedly anti-Russia/Putin. The progagandist’s seem to be winning the battle for hearts and minds – we need a good guy divine intervention asap.
Most polls don’t mean jack. It all depends on how the question is framed. It’s probably trivially easy to get the same person to say he strongly supports X and strongly opposes X in the same survey/poll.
I want to know what the questions were and how big the poll was and if it was a truly random sample from across the US. I’m sure DC bugmen support war more than ranchers in Montana.
I am quite sure the question was not framed like “Would you support military action against Russia if it means a 40% chance the city closest to you is nuked?” or “Would you encourage your sons to sign up for a war defending Ukraine?”
Perhaps the real purpose of polling is to find out how to sell what you are going to do to the public. So that whatever framing polls the highest is how the thing will be framed to the general public through the ministry of propaganda.
Bingo. You should view much of polling not as an attempt to get the public’s views (let alone your informed views), but rather an attempt to find out how to exploit the public’s profoundly, jaw-droppingly, comprehensively uninformed views to vault the already decided upon regime propaganda. Very “Bernaysian”, if you catch my drift; implantation of a nose ring, and learning how much, and in which direction to tug on it.
There are basically two types of political polls. One type is to get results that produce a desired public response—favorable to whatever your agenda is. The other, secret/private/internal is to sample the public’s opinion as correctly as possible—again of course to aid in manipulating the public.
That’s why I try not to listen to poll results. You will never get the complete information as to the constriction of the polling and therefore are most assured of being mislead.
I’m not worried about nuclear fallout, I’m sure they have a mask and vaccine for that!😜
“The progagandist’s seem to be winning the battle for hearts and minds – … .”
Let’s see … hearts and minds … hearts and minds …
Nope. Ain’t buyin’ it.
Goebbels was born too early. He was made to run an American tv network.
Thinking about our evolutionary origins as human beings— in hunter-gatherer groups made up of 50 to 150 members of our extended family and their spouses and kids— it’s not hard to see why honesty was considered so vitally important.
Lying was corrosive of the social fabric of the group, in the same way that stealing and murder would be. A sociopath who was unable to refrain from lying would eventually be cast out from the group; and being separated from the group meant certain death.
So refraining from lying and deceiving was important on two levels: for the individual, since it alllowed him to remain in the group; and for the group, since only in a population characterized by mutual trust among honest individuals could social cohesion develop and flourish.
When (around 10-15,000 years ago) people abandoned their family bands and moved into cities, the entire dynamic changed. Individuals were no longer limited to one group of people who’d known them all their lives; if you lost the trust of people in one neighborhood, you could move to another neighborhood where you weren’t known. Or eventually, to another city.
Trustworthiness could no longer be assumed: rules were needed, and courts to enforce them. Assuming that your neighbor was lying, and acting accordingly, became the safest bet.
Fast-forwarding to today: we’re now at the point where it’s generally acknowledged that there are shades of honesty.
Not only is deception and prevarication assumed, a distinction has arisen between outright lying—- labeling a carton containing 14 oz. as ’16 oz.’— and clever deception: labeling the carton as ’14 oz’, while subtly changing the shape so it still appears to be 16 oz.
While both methods are aimed at the same result— preventing the consumer from realizing that the container now holds 2 fewer ounces of ice cream— the former is outlawed, while the latter is allowed.
So we have two categories of dishonesty: allowable deception, and illegal deception.
Whether we’re talking about politics, or retail marketing of ice cream, it’s in the former category of socially-acceptable deception where the sociopath truly comes into his own and shines.
“We are reaching the point where there are no rules, just who can get over on whom. It is the anarcho-capitalist society in which no one can trust anyone or anything. Instead, a war of all against all, it is an endless series of confidence games. Everyone has an angle and is trying to get over on someone else.”
This is as American as Apple Pie. The “medicine show”, patent medicines, “snake oil” etc. have been part of our scene from the beginning. The glib salesman is ingrained in our culture (Music Man, Death of a Salesman). The main difference today, I think, is that the pitchman has been elevated from the bottom of society to the top.
Meanwhile, unfortunately this isn’t what Zman calls” anarcho-capitalism”. We could cope with that. Instead, it’s fascism combined with cartel capitalism. From morning ’til night, Americans interact with one cartel after another; the cartels have captured their “regulators” (banks, health care insurers) or they pass “laws” requiring that you buy from them (Obamacare,Vaxx) or they have a stranglehold on media/”information” (Google, Facebook). Just ask any little kid trying to open a Lemonade stand.
“All restaurants are Taco Bell now.”
Instead of a Communist ration card system, we get a Capitalist one.
Fragility? Redundancy? What’s that?
I posted the comment below on an article related to the military support Biden recently announced that will be sent to Ukraine. Judging from the replies calling me a Russian puppet, Trumper, coward, et all, it seems alot of people enjoy being misled. Not much debate on the negative repercussions that may occur. While most couldn’t find Ukraine on a map yesterday they now give full-throated support for starting WWIII.
One of the greatest fallacies in decision-making at all levels, from personal, professional and especially in the political realm of foreign and domestic policy, is the belief that there are absolute solutions to every problem. Too many hold onto unrealistic expectations that a course of action taken will result in a tidy solution with no loose ends, or undesirable affects.
Persistently, well intentioned choices made to address a current issue led to worse outcomes. Blowback is the popular term for the unforeseen consequences that occur from these types of decisions made with no regard to the unknown variables that will be created from the outcome of our choices.
Is it the best idea to send over this massive amount of weaponry to a country that consistently dwells at the bottom of the list for the least corrupt?
Are we truly to believe that every piece of military-grade firepower and equipment will be used as intended? Or is a more realistic assessment that there will be U.S. supplied arms that end up being sold on the black arms market? Or used in future conflicts against groups other than intended?
What could this money have done in America’s communities? This is money that would have been great for job training programs, childcare, healthcare and a slew of other areas that used to be in the wheelhouse proclaimed by the Left.
Very true. Some of these weapons most assuredly will be sold off to nefarious third parties for a quick buck and then used outside the current theater of Ukraine’s war. Those future deaths will be blood on Biden’s hands also. And since the US chickenhawks will never stop promoting endless war, it’s a good bet that our military will once again be engaged in more hot conflicts overseas in the near future. What if Russia then decides in tit-for-tat to arm the goat herders with sophisticated arms that kill US servicemen in large numbers. That blood will also be on Biden’s hands. But since Biden is a vegetable, no one will be held accountable. And some still believe that we are not yet at Stage 4 in our societal cancer condition.
Arthur & TomA nail it.
The black market in arms must be white hot right now.
They’re arming the dusky invaders for the coming Conquest of White Europe.
the famine coming will cause mass migration out of africa, the middle east and central America. probably part of the plan
“What if Russia then decides in tit-for-tat to arm the goat herders with sophisticated arms that kill US servicemen in large numbers. That blood will also be on Biden’s hands.”
Good post. May I add to it?
What if the Russians decide to get serious?
What if they activate their assets *inside* the US and other countries?
What then?
I was marveling only yesterday that they haven’t activated assets inside the US already.
I’d expect that to happen before anybody goes nuclear. But somebody might go with tactical nukes in Europe.
We are skating on very thin ice.
Infant: my take is that Russia is holding off the zero days and “shut down the grid” stuff in case NATO gets too frisky. Deterence doesnt work if you pop your big guns at the outset. If those pollack migs take off from Rammstein, I expect some backbone american utility to have sudden, unexpected, practically permanent catastrophic failures. I do NOT think our ruling class is smart enough to counteract or prevent whatever it is that Ivan has planned. Dangerous times to have such stupid rulers.
” This is money that would have been great for job training programs, childcare, healthcare and a slew of other areas that used to be in the wheelhouse proclaimed by the Left.”
This would be pure grift. Everything in America is a racket.
Do we really want free or reduced childcare encouraging more of our mothers to work? Or blowing money on “training programs” for people who don’t work and won’t work. The training racket is real. What percentage of such money would be made available only to certain groups like Indian affairs.
True story. Working through school, I got a job in a gas station. Owner/operator had an unbelievable tool collection for such a small, two bay affair. I asked him where he got all the tools once. He simply explained he bought them all from “graduates” of the then government’s CERT program in automotive mechanics. All “graduates” received a voucher for tool purchase upon graduation. In those days, the best of the best, Craftsmen. They of course had no interest in employment, so simply picked up the tools—brand new—and sold them to gas stations in the neighborhood. 🙁
Correction to above. CERT should be CETA. That program has a long list of reviews and discussion.
My dad, who came from a childhood in Depression Era Arkansas, made something of himself. He was an only child, his dad an electrician for the Missouri Pacific RR originally from a family in Nebraska, his mother a stay at home mom with roots in Missouri. Dad grew up in Little Rock, as that was a nexus for his dad’s RR.
My dad earned his doctorate in Psychology, but focused on cognitive psych/human factors engineering, and not any sort of clinical work. Built his own company from scratch, and it was a grinding, years long effort. So he valued individual initiative quite highly.
When my stepson finished his training in automotive mechanics, dad gifted him with his starter toolkit and box, to the tune of several thousand bucks. That boy took it from there, and never looked back, first becoming an accomplished auto and commercial truck mechanic, and now as a mechanic in light/medium rail.
He was ever grateful to my dad who staked him when he was getting started when his own father would not help him with anything past high school. That young man never thought about doing anything so disreputable as selling those tools. But then, he was a white boy, who took advantage of the help from his mother and me getting him through his trade school education, followed by my dad’s benediction bestowed because of the drive he saw as mirroring that he had had to bring to bear in his own younger years.
Sorry for the long post, but I felt moved to share the tale.
Tars Tarkas,
The line about the money being spent otherwise for more gov’t cheese was meant as sarcasm against the Left, as they were allegedly the side that used to be anti-war. Kind of my attempt to use their own platitudes to point out the hypocrisy of this situation.
Ah, OK. Sorry about that.
I worked, and now run a contract lab, for a consumer products company. After successful launch of any product, the very next project is to “cost-save” the product. i.e., cheapen it up while given the illusion it still performs as well as the original. So, it was no surprise to me, and this many years ago, perhaps in the 90s, when the vending machine started featuring Mallo cups, three to a pack. Theretofore, it was two cups. Upon closer inspection, the package read, “now, with 33% more cups!” It goes without saying that the net weight had been reduced.
Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive
“The lie is the coin of the realm” indeed. Which means that marketing and all the rest solve toward the lie. The skilled work is in dressing the lie. Business schools teach innovation that is just fashion accessories for the lie.
Commodify, normalize/familiarize, then change. Collusion is also a regular part of this as well. Looking at any packaging across the absurd number of brands and amazingly they are almost all the same. Why are they all 3.45 ounces?
The shaker pint glass, that familiar shaped “pint” is everywhere. But while it used to be 16oz to the brim, there is an entire market of shaker “pints” that are 14oz to the brim.
The consumer only recognizes the shape. Which means you order a “pint” and get 12oz plus foam. At least the Brits have the Imperial Pint which is regulated by the crown. Fill line included.
The craft brewers are onto the scam as well. At some point the entire industry agreed that at some arbitrary ABV you get a short pour for the same price. And so a whole glassware market came about that stylizes getting less for more.
Again, a stone to the head of a psychopath puts an end to the disease vector. But instead we have a culture that is all in on the psychopaths charm. And so even as the world burns, we are stuck drinking miniature beers.
That should have read 50% more cups. It went from 2 to 3, and 1 is 50% of 2. Had it gone from 3 to 2, then it would be 33% reduction (1 in 3).
“People used to worry about this problem.”
During the entire human history, people used to think that good and evil were absolute things and you have a responsibility to do and enforce good and to avoid and persecute evil. This was not limited to laws (which are always the last emergency mechanism, only when conscience and stigma have failed). Read “Bring back stigma” by Roger Scruton https://www.city-journal.org/html/bring-back-stigma-11807.html
Now the theory is that good and evil are relative and that anybody can define these concepts by himself. Only the most important evils (like killing or stealing in a traditional way) are punished by law. This creates an anarchy of everybody trying to exploit everybody. We have an inertia from the old Christian tradition but this is gradually disappearing and the anarchy gradually increases.
“Only the most important evils (like killing or stealing in a traditional way) are punished by law.”
And as we’ve seen recently, even those laws are malleable if the murderer is non-white and the victim is white.
Stealing is de-facto legal in many localities across the country. The DA sends out a letter saying they will no longer prosecute “minor” crimes like shoplifting under 700 Dollars. We have SJW prosecutors getting elected in a lot of our cities. That is how they can get de-facto laws. The DA has ultimate discretion and cannot be punished for abusing that discretion. The very same discretion that allows de-facto legal stealing is also used to brutally enforce every jot a title of the law against disfavored people.
Roger Scruton. Always worth reading. Thanks for that link.
This reminded me of a conference I attended years ago which had numerous guest speakers. One of them was an accomplished entrepreneur who had worked in the automobile industry for a long time. He gave a presentation about how American car companies needed to reinvent themselves because their prior business model was to build cars that would crap out at around 70k to 100k miles so they could cash in on the service required to fix them.
Of course, this all came crashing down when Americans began buying Honda and Toyota vehicles.
Yep, the old planned obsolescence game
Spend your life making things that are made to break.
Lol. What a life and career. You spend more time and effort thinking of how to make something last for two years rather than making it last for 20 years.
I don’t see how decent people cannot either quit or lose a bit of themselves staying on with a company like that, but then people have to eat so you get guys who hang on and just become old and cynical. I know a number of them. They started out as decent people.
I used to be a skeptic, now I’m a cynic. It stinks.
Here at GloboBank, as valued employee number 35, 463, my health and safety is the companies number one concern.
Since I haven’t taken the experimental Covid19 gene therapy nor the required booster, the company cares so much that I can’t go into the office nor attend any client or business events.
Needless to say, I press the appropriate buttons and do the absolute minimum, each and every day. If something is broken or can be improved? I don’t care. “Not my job.”
I’m sure the serfs in the Polish or Indian offices are all over things. Or perhaps the 30 people who work directly on the corporate jet fleet.
I used to be a cynic, now I’m a hermit.
“One of them was an accomplished entrepreneur who had worked in the automobile industry for a long time. He gave a presentation about how American car companies needed to reinvent themselves because their prior business model was to build cars that would crap out at around 70k to 100k miles so they could cash in on the service required to fix them.”
I read Z’s post this morning and thought about how the “Big Three” committed the Sin of Omission in building cars. Two examples jumped to mind:
1) The Chevrolet Vega. Skimp on steel liners for the aluminum engine block since it saves us $8 / car. Result: Engine burns/leaks oil like a sieve and hand-grenades, stranding the driver.
Also: Churn out Vegas at a rate of 100 cars an hour instead of typical 60 cars an hour to up volume and reduce per-unit cost. Result: Pissed off workers hold a wildcat strike and practice active or passive sabotage. This atop the generally poor quality of the vehicle to start with (I’d crash Z’s server listing the faults with the Vega)
2) The one contemporary car that overshadowed the Vega’s quality issues: The Ford Pinto. A car produced to a price point of $2,000, a curb weight of 2,000 lbs, and a delivery date of 1971. Mr. Iaccoca, we have an issue with the gas tank rupturing in rear end collisions at 20 MPH or up. For just $5 – 10 a car, we can put either a nylon liner in the tank, add a structural protection for the tank between the rear bumper and it for $4 a car, or add a baffle between the tank and the rear differential.
$2,000
2,000 lbs
For sale in 1971
End Result: Well, those of us old enough to remember know the reputation the Pinto got as a rolling Hindenburg.
And that’s how you go from 50+% of the US market to barely 15 (GM).
You mean like this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9GGDOUDLhc
Ahhh, the 70s, what a great time to get your driver’s license. Cars with melting engines, rolling bombs, rust-buckets, planned obsolescence galor. It took the Japanese carmakers to shake US manufacturers out of their complacency.
Oldest vehicle I ever drove as a Toyota Tacoma. About 140k miles when I sold it. Changed the oil and timing belt. Nothing else, ever. Never was an “American” car that had this reputation. Funny thing was, the damn thing was made in Tennessee. So who’s fooling who. Americans can make good stuff if the company is behind them.
my 2006 ford crown vic has 272K on it . routine maint only .
I had a buddy in psyops who was fond of saying, “You want to know how the psyop campaign has begun? Don’t look for the flyers falling from the airplanes onto the civilians of the invaded country. Look on your TV for the first story about enemy bombs hitting a civilian hospital.”
Of course, in this kind of transactional con artist society (where even the authorities are on the take) the only kind of justice that can exist is frontier justice. You need to be able to string up the pickpocket quickly, and, though it’s barbaric (and stinky) you have to leave the body dangling on that tree at the town’s outskirts to let those passing through know not to bring snake oil or smallpox. Strange that progressives, so obsessed with lynching, have worked so tirelessly to create the conditions in which it will be almost unavoidable, unless they want something totally Hobbesian. And they don’t want that. A Chris Hayes or Rachel Maddow gets shredded mighty quick in a world red of tooth and claw.
I posted this at Severian’s site (linked here as Rotten Chestnuts) the other day:
Bombing Hospitals, Orphanages, and Schools is your go-to for propagandists on either side of the conflict. Gives you the moral high ground over the “Monsters” facing you. I remember the TV series “World At War” had an episode titled “Whirlwind” that covered the UK/US strategic aerial bombing campaign. Among the historical footage the producers included was a German newsreel that claimed the RAF targeted a children’s hospital.
Yeah, the Germans, who flattened Guernica, Rotterdam, Warsaw, London, Coventry, etc.
Yeah, and the aerial campaign was pretty much shown after the war to be ineffective strategically in after-war Air Force analysis (white paper still can be found online).
Some interesting facts I came across recently. Some relics in the UK (or US) war museums on heavy German armor, i.e., Panzerjäger, with a December 1945 serial number. Yep they were still making them with the Allies swarming over the Rhine.
The Allies were particularly interested in this weapon, which was built in Koln (Cologne). So after the surrender, they recalled the factory workers reopened the factory, and had them build another dozen or so out of parts on hand. These were send to UK and Stateside for evaluation.
So much for aerial bombing efforts.
Well the thing is supermarkets (and pharmacies) do sell poisonous products, that do induce further sales. Half the products in a grocery store are demonstrably unhealthy to consume, but there they are. The herd of normies isn’t getting obese (and diabetic) all on its own; they are getting plenty of help along the way – including from the media. Then there is Pfizer…
Isn’t it possible – if not likely – that having so many gullible people in the populace, not only allows, but actually causes, so many sociopaths all over the economy/government? i.e. society got dumb, first, then predatory.
An operative word and concept is chutzpah
The image that pops up in my head is you get starry eyed white people who want to become stars so they go onto something like a talent show and perform for the (((judges))) their version or interpretation of chutzpah. And they end up having to take it to increasingly absurd lengths to get noticed. Meanwhile the judges are sitting there smiling deviously and loving it, loving the taste. More more more.
And if you think about it, what has our society become but an endless parade of ambitious goys tripping over themselves to show the world they can do the chutzpah just as well as the originators?
But for me, though they have technical skills, I have never seen an Asian who can perform Beethoven as well as a white person with less technical skill but with superior feeling. And I have yet to see a guy or gal perform the chutzpah as well as an (((originator))). They are too self conscious and don’t just let it rip. So what we have throughout society are poor facsimiles of JJJs. Pale imitations but so very destructive!
” … products in a grocery store are demonstrably unhealthy to consume, but there they are. The herd of normies isn’t getting obese (and diabetic) all on its own; … .”
We have traded away health and real food for speed and convenience.
One of the worst things you can do to your body, btw, is microwave your food. Microwaving your food generates free radicals, which, long-term, are carcinogens.
Speed & convenience. That’s what we have traded away health for.
Here in Hochulstan a bag of Utz potato chips is now $4.29 for 7.75 oz.
In North African countries like Egypt, prosecutors are jailing people for, “storing food commodities to exploit recent price increases”:
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20220317-egypt-jails-merchant-to-5-years-for-hiding-commodities/
Egypt is also imposing price caps on unsubsidized bread:
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20220316-egypt-caps-unsubsidised-bread-prices/
I wonder what things will look like in that region in 3 months’ time…
thee will not be any bread for sale. for a start.
“thee will not be any bread for sale. for a start.”
Most of the Ukraine’s exported wheat goes to the middle east and N Africa.
And we already know what they will do when food prices rise beyond their reach.
Argentina has just decided not to export soy meal. Many countries are now stopping food exports.
The country of Algeria has banned the re-export of the food that it spends a mint to import:
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20220316-algeria-bans-food-exports-amid-fears-of-global-shortages/
Yeah, North Africa is gonna be lit in the near future…
” … Algeria has banned the re-export … .”
Thanks. Didn’t know that.
Not familiar with that site, either, so thanks for that, too.
that’s about $9/LB for effin potato chips, which are nutritionally garbage. i can get a can of tuna for $2 (3 or 4 oz) or a pound of ground chuck for $6. only a goober would pay that for chips (which i don’t buy regardless of price).
Come and live where I live. Potato chips, what potato chips? Here, real men eat taco chips—and there’s no shortage of them. Nothing like living just North of the border! 😉
And yet corn will be harvested for ethanol.
Btw – and I apologize for bringing up a an off-topic subject and promise not to do it again but I do think that this is important – is anyone else a tad concerned that the Senate voted unanimously and Biden said publicly that Putin is a “war criminal”?
They just made this whole affair a win or die situation for Putin. Why would he negotiate with the US? For that matter, why would the US negotiate with a war criminal?
Our leaders are so used to having absolute power over those whom they choose to “cancel,” that they act like hysterical teenagers. It’s astoundingly dangerous.
GAE funds and trains terrorists in Ukraine to endlessly* harass, murder, and maim Russian civilians for no other reason than to get a rise out of Putin, and Putin is the “war criminal”.
*I say “endlessly”, but their end is very near if not already in the rear view mirror. Good riddance.
The Gay American Empire is desperate and lashing out. These senile old fools and overgrown man-children who’ve never been punched don’t understand that the other powers aren’t scared of them anymore. It would be funny if it wasn’t risking WW3.
Z Man among others have studied up on the fall of the USSR
I wonder if there are parallels. Such as at that time, many guys in the upper ranks of leadership were saying just as many stupid things as our guys today? Were there guys in the background calling for Reagan’s assassination a la Lindsey graham? And things of that nature. I guess my larger point is to look for similar behaviors from a people whose worlds as they knew were similarly ending.
And if we find enough maybe we have yet more circumstantial evidence and hints that our system is also about to break apart.
” … maybe we have yet more circumstantial evidence and hints that our system is also about to break apart.”
I don’t think we need any more. And I’m being serious, not ironic or jocund.
Well, let’s do a checklist.
1. Geriatric, barely functional top leadership? Check. The Politburo’s choices near the end were Brezhnev (75), Andropov, (a spry 69), Chernenko, (73).
Biden’s already pushing 80, Pelosi (81) and of the Vichy Right, McConnell is 80.
2. Assassination as statecraft? Check. Andropov as KGB chief decided to kill the Polish Pope, contracting it out through cutouts to a Turk.
We found out after the Cold War ended that Andropov had suggested a nuclear first strike in response to missile defense systems. Like, seriously suggested it. A few days later he died. The claim was Andropov had developed a previously unknown illness.
The United States does not have people around those who would make the decision lined up to take out our would-be mass murderer (it would NOT be Biden and likely someone we don’t know). So as someone who loathed the USSR, I have watched my own country become something worse.
Did you see Pelosi’s recent incoherent rant about bombing the Russian convoy in Ukraine?
She’s looking and sounding way less functional than Joe right now.
“Did you see Pelosi’s recent incoherent rant about bombing the Russian convoy in Ukraine?”
No. Do you have a link? Was she serious–I mean, had such a thing actually happened, or was she talking tough or something?
TIP-
I do have a link for Pelosi:
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2022/03/15/nancy-pelosi-has-putin-strategery-figured-out-he-is-trying-to-bait-her-into-a-nato-attack/
I also have a link for Joe sputtering about how, “…every American knows someone blackmailed by explicit photos…”:
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2022/03/16/joe-biden-says-every-american-knows-someone-blackmailed-by-intimate-naked-and-sexually-explicit-pictures/
I suppose sometimes the mask slips a bit…
Completely reckless in an increasingly dangerous crisis. They, incredibly, still do not understand that they are not dealing with some backwater, desert sh*thole but the country with the largest – and most advanced mind you – nuclear arsenal in history. And they are just making absolutely sure there can be no meetings of the mind now. Wanting to avoid too much foul language, I have no words for this. They are literally provoking a nuclear war. [further thoughts deleted for the sake of decorum]
* for technical accuracy; largest nuclear arsenal in the world; the USSR in the 1970s or 1980s had the largest in history and far larger than today. Not sure how much of a silver lining that is.
It’s in the hands of fate if you ask me
I mean, if Putin truly is a righteous man, events will unfold accordingly. If we are truly an evil nation, the same. If there is a little bit of both in both sides, then who knows.
But it is like a duel, where righteousness gives one a slight edge.
My take is that the Russian side is the more righteous. Not only their military but their people. And their collective desires and prayers may outweigh ours and cause the cosmos to tilt and shine on them. Or however it works.
who knew that the cancel culture we inhabit would rise to America’s highest virtue or raison d’etre.
Tucker touched on something either last night or night before, but the idea was that the Covid thing may have even made our leaders crazy. The masking etc the shock of it all etc
Wouldn’t that be poetic justice that they set out to demoralize and cripple us mentally and spiritually and yet they are the ones who had it happen to them!
Never ever underestimate the powers of a guilty conscience even among the most sociopathic people. These people know they did wrong and no amount of lying to oneself will ever change it. Nature won’t be fooled !
“Never ever underestimate the powers of a guilty conscience even among the most sociopathic people.”
I doubt that some–probably most–of “them” don’t even have a conscience, let alone guilty ones.
Haste does make waste.
I doubt that they *have* a conscience.
Yeah, that’s great poetic justice, except for the fact these fools are on track to get us all killed in a nuclear WW3.
WWW3 is next episode
We are not there yet 😜
Yeah, I agree with Falcone here. W are not there yet.
They have assets inside the US and other countries that they can use. And they have some bad-a** conventional weapons they can use against North America.
Nukes are last-ditch utter-desperation weapons. And everybody involved has a lot of stuff they can do before going nuclear.
It would cause more problems than it would solve, and even our lunatic rulers know that.
But there was that Deagle dot com site with the population projections for 2025.
“Why would he negotiate with the US?”
You’d think he’d have asked that question of himself several years ago, but he continued negotiating in good faith with utterly faithless (((people))), until last month, when he seems to have realized–and accepted–that negotiating with liars and lunatics was pointless. Right up until the very last moment, he and Lavrov continued using the phrase “our Western partners.”
“For that matter, why would the US negotiate with a war criminal?”
They wouldn’t. They have no intention of doing such a thing. They never did. They are going hell-for-leather for their beloved “regime change.”
In Russia.
For the first time. I am beginning to feel a bit nervous.
These Great Reset freekazoids might do *anything.*
They are evil. Not “sick.” EVIL.
They know that a nuclear war would wipe out the dirt people. And thy know that they have their bunkers. And they know that the danger of radiation and fallout will disappear in a few weeks after the final exchanges.
And they are evil.
“I am beginning to feel a bit nervous.
These Great Reset freekazoids might do *anything.*”
Honestly I think the problem is that they basically know that drawing and quartering or burning at the stake, both meant literally, probably awaits them if they lose control now and their historically great mega-crime against their Western homelands were fully exposed and the veil lies dropped. They may actually have decided that they stand a better chance in nuclear war than if they lose control of the countries they have raped and destroyed for decades. We may be seeing that, them having concluded that only something like nuclear war will distract people enough that they can make a get-away to New Zealand or wherever.
“We may be seeing that, them having concluded that only something like nuclear war will distract people enough that they can make a get-away … .”
You know, you might be onto something with that. I hadn’t looked at it that way, but it makes a bushel and a peck of sense when you write it out and look at it in b & W.
@ Moran ya Simba:
Yeah, if they had told the truth in August of 2019, when Jerome Powell announced the Fed’s “special Repo market window for foreign central banks,” they would have been torn to pieces in the streets, and that’s why the chinkypox was proclaimed less than 5 months later. And that kept them safe for 2 years, but it has stopped working.
And who believes it’s coincidental that Fauci disappeared simultaneously with the arrival of the Ukraine business?
And Armstrong has reported that “they” actually believe that the world has only five years left if they don’t fix the climate.
And to even be able to believe such an idiotic superstition speaks volumes.
But “they” seem to *believe* that they have to save the world.
A powerful motivation, even to lunatics. Or, I might have said, *especially* to lunatics.
they all have bunkers with 3 years of supplies . no kidding , lots of them are in NZ.
https://theculturetrip.com/pacific/new-zealand/articles/bunker-up-why-the-worlds-rich-have-fled-to-new-zealand-to-escape-coronavirus/
https://www.businessinsider.com/silicon-valley-moguls-8-million-doomsday-bunkers-new-zealand-2018-9#:~:text=Super%20rich%20Silicon%20Valley%20moguls%20are%20buying%20up,it%20must%20be%20prepared%20for%20an%20apocalypse-like%20scenario.
Those bunkers need to be bombed now if that is real. Surely there is one patriotic and loyal soul left in the MIC who would do it.
“. no kidding , lots of them are in NZ.”
Yeah, that’s what I’ve read.
But going nuke would cause more problems–for them–than it would solve, and *some* of them know that.
They surely cannot imagine that they could come out of their bunkers in three weeks and just go back to their old lives, only with fewer dirt people in the world. Not even *those* idjits are that stupid.
And who are these true believers anyway? We saw the O’Bamas buy a multi-million-dollar beachfront property in some equally hellish place. Martha’s Vineyard, was it? Anyway, it is clear that the people whose faces and names we know are not the true believers. And if the people we know are advised by the true believers, then the true believers *also* are not true believers. They just want to reduce the population for some *other* reason that the writer and readers of this blog would be no more capable of imagining that any of us could imagine the sexual “behaviors” that I wish I could un-know but can’t.
I’m not worried that they’ll go crazy(er) and start a nuclear exchange right away. But these are people who have absolutely no concept of consequences, especially over the long term. They have zero ability to consider their actions, and all the possible outcomes and potential reactions. They are like children, where the totality everything is right here, right now.
That’s what worries me. The idea that there may be unintended consequences does not occur to them.
“I’m not worried that they’ll go crazy(er) and start a nuclear exchange right away.”
I hope to God you’re right. But for them, it might not be “right away.” They’ve been planning this for a long time.
Armstrong is saying the week of April 18th (Paul Revere’s Ride!) going into the first week of May are possibilities for this crisis to become a “confrontation.”
NATO has mobilized hundreds of thousands of soldiers. The US has mobilized 100,000. Apparently since yesterday.
“Mobilized” usually means to call up your reserves to active service. As one of those reservists, I have yet to see any mass mobilizations, especially not the huge number you suggest.
@Outdoorspro
on:
Good catch. I was relying on my memory. Here’s the exact quote:
” … Lloyd Austin, stating that hundreds of thousands of NATO troops were placed on high alert along with 100,000 US troops.”
My fault.
Major airlines in the US are full of reserve military pilots. At least 10-20% of total staffing.
These guys aren’t getting war orders; if they do, you’ll know, because every major airline schedule will go in the toilet overnight (pilots are trained to specific aircraft, retaining en masse takes many months)
Just a tea leaf reading. Take a deep breath, real war drums haven’t started yet.
I suppose another proxy would be if US lady soldier LARPers start getting preggers in high numbers.
These types would rather enjoy a nuclear war if they thought, delusionally or not, they would survive it. These are evil people, perhaps the worst in history.
To the pack of morons known as the ruling class, this is just another attempt at doing anything and everything the opposite of the previous administration.
Living in the fantasy world they live in, using hashtags to smear Putin will surely defeat him, right?
I expect bad things from Democrats. But I am still surprised at the poor quality of Republicans in the Senate. Isn’t there a single Republican there that sees things from even a vaguely DR perspective? What is going on?
“We are reaching the point where there are no rules, just who can get over on whom. It is the anarcho-capitalist society in which no one can trust anyone or anything. Instead, a war of all against all, it is an endless series of confidence games. Everyone has an angle and is trying to get over on someone else.”
In essence, we’ve taken on the culture of our rulers – the usual suspects – who slowly gained control of the commanding heights of society, particularly media, over the second half of the 20th century and took full control (behind the scenes) at around the turn of the 21st century.
Naturally, this situation can’t last. We can’t all be the scheming middle-man. A functioning society runs on trust, which is being consumed at an alarming rate and not being replenished. Just a matter of time before such a society falls.
I’d watched a show on Tokugawa era Japan that mentioned that towards the end of the system the merchants, who were technically on the bottom of the rigid social hierarchy, had amassed more wealth than the nobles. It was part of what led the Shogunate to try and reform their system, though in hindsight the proper course of action would have been to put all the merchants on a boat and sink it in the ocean.
Fascinating era. Towards the end, however, reform of the noble classes wouldn’t have done much. The shogunate system and samurai class were nearly as disconnected from the common person as our beloved cloud people. People saw them as severely anachronistic, even alien.
“It is tempting to think this is just the way the world is and we just see it more clearly now thanks to the mass media age.”
NO! Since Glubb, civilizational cycles should be considered established knowledge, not speculation. Cultures can be healthy or sick. The West is culturally terminal and is becoming the ugliest d*mn thing you could ever imagine. The Woke disease is absolutely real, the West IS dying.
The initial scenario doesn’t sound so crazy to me.
I mean something like a McDonald’s puts chemicals in their foods so you don’t feel like you’ve eaten enough and eat more. Think about that. Not a bridge too far to them poisoning you lightly so you buy an aspirin. Or look at how insane our pop culture is, which I know has some planning involved around it so people feel confused and buy anxiety meds and stuff like that to help cope. I wouldn’t be surprised if the cartels are behind it so people buy heroin and fentanyl to cope. Look at how they poison the minds with all sorts of other things so we keep buying whatever or subscribe to a certain belief system or political ideology.
Sick sick sick
Anyway, we may need our own St Patrick to chase away these snakes !
I feel impotent, murderous rage tbh
The Dorito Effect is a great example of why you cannot allow markets to determine morality. The food makers found that industrial food production resulted in food that was not very tasty. The solution to that problem was the chemical industry and their flavor enhancers. That sounds like a win, but the result is it tricks the brain into thinking the food is more nutritious than it is in reality. You have the Happy Meal and you are still hungry.
In other words, they were not trying to fool you into eating more. They were trying to fool you into eating their industrial created crap. The original lie was in the false presentation.
Oh geez, well isn’t that even worse? Why not just sell them chemically-deceptive cardboard or saw dust burgers ? Why even bother with the food at all?
But who am I kidding. They are already trying to pass off flavored slime as alternatives to meat.
And the media and press and oligarchs like Gates are cheering them on like coaches on the sidelines
Back before our modern era of processed foods, our bodies developed two means of gauging when we’d eaten enough:
1) there are ‘stretch receptors’ in our stomach walls that alert our brains when our stomach is becoming distended: sending us the message “You’re full; stop eating”.
2) there are ‘calorie detectors’ or ‘richness detectors’ in our stomach and intestinal walls that gauge how rich the food is that we’ve eaten: what the ‘caloric density’ is. The more calorie-rich the food in our digestive tract, the quicker satiety signals are sent to our brains to tell it to shut off the hunger sensations that prompted us to eat in the first place.
These mechanisms evolved during a time when rich foods were rare. There were no natural equivalents of the super-rich foods we commonly eat today. And eating until our stomachs were bursting was a rare phenomenon.
But today our nutritional situation is such that we’re constantly overloading these mechanisms; to the point where they no longer work:
If at practically every meal we eat to the point where our stomachs are bulging, we gradually desensitize our ‘stretch receptors’: they stop signalling satiety to our brains.
If most of the food we eat is (by earlier standards) super-rich and calorie-dense, we overload that system as well: the ‘richness gauge’ is pegged at 10 all the time. And like all overloaded systems, it responds by scaling back, adjusting to present conditions:
> so that food which once registered as ‘super-rich’ now registers as ‘normal’.
So our ‘shut-off mechanisms’ are no longer functioning…. and when we introduce foods like Doritos into our diet, which include ingredients deliberately designed to make us want more…. it takes a combination of awareness and willpower to keep from getting fat.
And all advertising and marketing, including that of foods, exists for one primary purpose: to turn us all into addicts, aka “consumers”, of their product.
You bring up great points
One thing I am I guess proud of or at least fortunate for was that I had the luxury of spending much of my youth and adolescence in Italy and Spain and France and if home then among Italians and the French cajuns etc. So eating well has always been an important thing in my life, but more importantly I was “trained” in Italy on how to eat. How you want small portions but a nice balance of foods. But after a while you “get it” and realize you are just as well fed and nourished from small amounts as from large ones, and it makes you feel different and more “efficient” I guess as a machine, for lack of better words. You just feel tight and ready. All buttoned up. And what also helps is you get the stink eye if you pig out. So society there is, or at least was, organized to keep a person from becoming a pig. So at least I have been able to impart these ancient wisdoms to my kids.
“…and before long a third of the public wants nuclear war over Ukraine.”
Paging General Pinochet, paging General Pinochet; the f*cktards are getting us all killed. We need you to take charge immediately. The helicopters are being lined up outside per your request.
” … a third of the public wants nuclear war over Ukraine.”
And they just might get it:
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/world-news/war/nato-calls-up-hundreds-of-thousands-of-troops-ready-to-begin-wwiii/
Somehow the US managed to sneak over 100k troops into Europe for the first time since 2005.
The normies at work are all excited because, “…this Ukraine thing is gonna provide job security!”
“The normies at work are all excited because, “…this Ukraine thing is gonna provide job security!”
Okay, if this is stupid, just tell me so point blank. But things are so weird nowadays that I have to ask: Are normies saying that?
TIP-
Not a bad question at all.
That is a direct quote from an early 60s technician that watches Faux News and surfs Citizen Free Press.
Of course, he got double-jabbed and boosted with Moderna as soon as they were available.
the power of the media over the normie is complete. people on both sides of the “aisle ” that I know say stupid things like ” we should put in a no fly zone , I know it’s risky but if it stops Putin it’s worth it ” .
After the way they were controlled by the insane covid narrative , I was shocked and appalled . from what I am seeing now I am terrified. they can be made to believe anything . really anything .
A gerat example of this is Ferfal over at the modern survivalist is just unhinged in the latest podcast with matt bracken on odesse.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but the article Z referenced from the ISW has a bunch of citations at the bottom which I think are listed as sources.
The provider of the citations is…wait for it…
Facebook
I burst out laughing when I saw that.
Next week, read the story that is sourced by Looney Tunes.
Seems like alot of the guys that are doing war reporting and analysis from open sources (so called open source intelligence – OSINT) grab information from all over the place facebook, twitter, telegram, vk, etc. This type of analysis became a big deal in 2014 when it was used to attribute the MH17 shootdown to Russian troops that had crossed the border into Ukraine.
Newish thing that is happening this war is that Russians soldiers seem to be posting less online than they did in 2014, so less Russian intel overall. On the other hand, Ukrainians seem pretty comfortable propagandizing their postings (truths mixed with lies mixed with Geneva Convention violations – desecration of dead bodies, names faces of captured prisoners). Feels post Christian. If we don’t believe in anything anymore, what prevents us from desecrating the dead and humiliating the captured.
The ISW link that Z posted has many Ukrainian references and few Russian references and thus likely reflects a pro-Ukrainian bias.
“The ISW link that Z posted has many Ukrainian references and few Russian references and thus likely reflects a pro-Ukrainian bias.”
I know for a fact that the Russian gov’t cut off access to Facebook for Russians last week.
I haven’ seen what you are referring to, but look at the dates of the postings from those posting as Russians.
Access to Facebook for Russians (in Russia) was cut off on or about the 7th of March.
Russians’ access to instagram was cut off o/a the 13th.
Hi Infant Phenomenon. I was referring to the citations included in the linked ISW article.
For example, 21 of the 30+ linked citations reference the “General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine” facebook postings, all the links with the GeneralStaff.ua extension. This is Ukrainian government press release and thus reflects Ukrainian bias.
Our ruling and pundit class resemble more and more carnival barkers. All have or pushing a hustle to see who bites. It’s lies and manipulation 24/7. Social media just expedites it.
‘’ Our political parties admire those with a natural skill to deceive and quickly raise them to national status.‘’ sounds like a certain evolutionary genetic trait.
No little hat for you!!
I think another social aspect that plays into the lurch toward mass caption is that we have more and more gay men in politics, and these guys will do anything. Growing up my friend’s dad was a proctologist, and the stories he would tell us of the the things they stick up their butts was just crazy. Then look at how they slime around public parks. Lure children. All sorts of slimy nasty behavior.
But to our rulers, they are just tender hearted innocents lost in forbidden love 🙄
So it’s a deception about a deception.
Caption = deception
” … and these guys will do anything.”
You have NO idea.
I am retired from CDC, where I wasted 23 years in medical research and publishing. And during that time, I edited hundreds of articles from behavioral scientists, whose research was intended to find out what kinds of *behavior* transmitted sexually transmitted diseases.
And I learned a lot of things that I wish I could unlearn, but can’t. I know things I wish I could unknow, but can’t.
You really have NO idea.
Really, really, really REALLY NO idea.
I can only vaguely imagine, but then take what you know and every time you see a guy like jake Sullivan on tv or some other creep, imagine these are the guys who engage in those behaviors.
Why I think one of the best illustrations of just how corrupt and sick our society is was in the move the devils advocate. It just clicked with me on a very base but also higher level. If you haven’t seen it, give it a try.
Saw it when it was first released. Riveting and disturbing.
And you are right. I hadn’t thought of them as “them” but yeah, you’re right.
“I can only vaguely imagine, … .”
Lord! I HOPE not! No, I don’t think you can. I’d bet the rent that you can’t. That’s why I say I wish I could unknow this stuff, but can’t. Ordinary imaginations can’t get to those places. Believe me.
“ You really have NO idea.
Really, really, really REALLY NO idea.”
Oh yes I do. I have a Reddit account. The only ideas I don’t have are to try out any of the shit I see there. The normalization of perversion is amazing to behold, but then again I never had great faith in humanity. My knowledge will only help in understanding when God puts the hammer down on this shitshow.
Several years ago a former housemate was on call at Christmas and got called in the wee hours to surgically remove a gourd from a man’s anus. This sort of thing happens all the time.
Guess that tops a live, scrabbling ferbil on a string, eh?
Eh, gerbil. Rumor had it that a TV news broadcaster in Philly indulged in this particular behavior some years back. Sucked to be him when that rumor came out.