We have literally millions of Americans who threw away their right to have any say by comiting Felony crimes. They are usually the ones who complain the most. Actual voters if they don't like the results of an election and who won simply simply change who they vote for next time. America has the longest lasting form of government on the planet.
The test, on my phone and local radio actually happened at 1418 hr instead of 1420 hr. A single text message and the usual attention noise on the radio just like when a storm is coming. Pressing Done deleted the text.
Let us just say that how closely the women in a stripper bar in West Virginia follow the rules has a lot to do with both management and the local sheriff. In some areas they are fairly fastidious about the rules. In other counties you can go into a back room with the stripper for a private 'dance' and negotiate a price for doing whatever you would like to happen. In some places you can only throw your tip on the stage floor, in others you can place it into an anatomical opening if she so desires. The man I speak of went into one of the places that allows touching and private dances in a small room, but like I wrote, the second he walked in all the women and staff knew exactly who he was. He wasn't too bright a lottery winner and while one of the young women entertained him in a private room her BF broke into his car and took a briefcase containing a $100K the man had bragged about. LoL A fair price perhaps for the rental of his GF. The theft made the local papers and also led to an expensive divorce for the lottery winner.
I have had several strippers as paying tenants in my rental properties. Generally I find them to be good tenants who usually pay their rent on time and keep a clean house. They tend to have crummy taste in BFs though. Guys that hit them, etc. I agree with about actors and musicians.
Being found guilty of something in a civil trial is by definition Probable Cause to believe something occurred. So far in NY Trump has met this first step twice. A s*xual assault and now a fraud case. One wonders how long it will take the NY AG to file for a True Bill on a criminal case too.
It is probably locality dependent. Yes we had a few gray rainy days last week as a hurricane passed by, but for the most part my location has had clear blue skies in the day time, and clear enough at night for some good star viewing too.
It is a natural and prudent reaction to the Russian threats on their Federal TV to nuke the West if they are not able to conquer Ukraine. Since they have already virtually lost everything, we should assume their threat is serious and be prepared for a nuclear exchange. Ce la vie.
Frankly, since Russia already broke the Arms agreements by moving tactical nukes into Belarus, I think we should do likewise and give Ukraine some tactical nukes too. Gotta maintain that balance.
Those older women are okay to pass a rainy day with, but if you wish a child to leave the money you win at PowerBall to a younge,r more fertile, woman is a better choice. Fear not though. Once your name and photo are published as the winner a large number of young and fertile women will be knocking on your dorr or staking out your local supermarket in the hopes of 'accidentally' bumping into you. Also if you live near a stripper bar, rest assured your picture will be posted on the wall of the girl's dressing room with a be on the lookout for and as soon as you walk in all those young nubile women will be cuddling up and asking you to buy them a drink. <This actually happened to a lottery winner I know. His photo with the check went up in all the local stripper bars and he got mobbed when he walked in. LoL>
Many of my neighbors are much richer than me. My little farm (which is large by the South Bronx standards I grew up with) is one of the most tiny in this sector of the county. I know people with whole square miles of land and similar sized bank accounts or stock holdings. We get along ffine. I am not after their money and they are not Aholes. I get invites to social events and some come here to visit now and then. I don't think our friendships will change much if I win the PowerBall. or the MM. I have been thinking it over and have decided if I win a 100 million or more I swill donate some of that to Ukraine's purchase of additional Storm Shadows for use against things Russian. With a check for 100 Million in my bank account dumping a paltry 10 million to kill some things Russian would be a good use of the money.
Powerball is up over 1.2 Billion today. Ticket fever is rampant.
Actually, technically none of them were mercenaries. The term was (at the insistence of the USSR) formally defined in a UN Vote decades ago. I am surprised that as a South African you do not seem to remember the huballoo surrounding Daniel Gearhart and the other actual mercenaries executed in Angola. The UN resolution included Mercenary does not include anyone who is actually an enrolled member of the armed forces of one of the warring nations. Those persons are to be treated as POWs if captured.
All of the men you named enlisted in the army of Ukraine upon arrival. <At least one declined any salary.> The Ukraine Foreign Legion including the Wolverines are enlisted members of the Army of Ukraine under the command of Ukraine's military and not legally mercenaries.
Speaking about morale, you quote someone who is not on the front lines there. Check with Operator Starsky (he has a YT channel and is pretty easy to reach) and he spends a fair amount of his time actually on the front (killing Russians when he can) and chatting with others doing likewise, as well as with higher ups elsewhere in Ukraine. Or you cauld ask Anna, except she doesn't knowingly communicate with pro-Russia people. After all it wasn't Putin who murdered women and children in Bucha, Ukraine, it was Russians. Similar in Mariupol, etc. Like most actually in Ukraine they despise Russians. Filth of the planet. Orcs they call them, but only when they are being polite. Watch their broad smiles every time another Russian dies or Russian facility explodes into rubble. Off hand I would say their morale is pretty good.
I see the Russian ruble dropped below a penny for a few moments yesterday. It recovered a little bit and per Google and Forbes it is back up to 99.6 rubles to the US dollar.
The subsidies the Russian government had been paying the Russian suppliers for domestic gasoline have ended and the price of filling up your car or truck inside Russia today is accordingly much more costly than it was last year. At the same time because half of Russia's 44 refinery complexes have shut down a shortage of domestic gasoline exists which is why Putin ordered an embargo on exports of domestic oil products (gas, diesel, lube oil, etc.). Some of Russia's gas wells have been shut down too. Russia suffers both from a lack of gas storage facilities and also a lack of liquification facilities to make LBG (they have only one). Unemployment has officially dropped below 2%, which is a sign of pending economic woes. There is no reserve labor pool to draw on. A healthy economy runs about 5% unemployment. It is not yet known if the Central Bank will raise interest rates this week. Of course already the number of Russian corporate and personal loans in default is at an all time high. The Ruussian 2024 budget was supposed to be released this past Sunday. It wasn't. LoL Lots of creative number juggling is delaying it.
Poor Donald (not). Nothing has gone his way in court. His statements are so delusional I worry about his mental health. Like a worm on a hook he squirms every way he can to get away. But the hook is in and the barb is set.
In the US the statute of limitations on Fraud begins when something is discovered to be fraudulent. In the US any fictitious statement on a financial or government document is considered a crime on it's face. 18 US Code 1001 as a for instance. Under that statute any concealment of truth, even a verbal lie or failure to speak at an appropriate time can be prosecuted. No actual victim is required. It is enough that something false wziara in an official investigation or a written Federal document. Then there are the Bank, mail, tax and wire fraud statutes. Repayment of a debt has no bearing if it is found you lied to get a loan. NY State has similar laws. One wonders what fantasy world Trump's brain lives in when he claims the fraud should be ignored just because he paid the money back.
We all know people who were denied credit or loans because they told the truth on their application. Trump's solution to such situations was simply utter falsehoods. Which he almost always did.
It doesn't much matter to the Dems how they get their votes as long as they get them. That's the reality most Republicans (especially in the central states) have trouble understanding.
In the 1960a and 70s as a youth I went on a dozen cruises with my parents. Different ships each time. Some luxury cruise liners like the SS France, or the Independence (no comparison really, some on simple cargo ships such as the Santa Magdelana. Some cruises were as long as 2 1/2 weeks. The shortest cruise I was on was 6 days. Yes, you may get sea sick a day or two out. Especially if the ship encounters rough weather. <Many of my cruises were done in the days before satellite observation of storms and an Internet or a GPS. We sometimes got alerts by radio, but not if no one else had encountered the storm yet.> The good thing about being sea sick is it only lasts a day or two. Dramamine does help. Another good thing about being sea sick for the first time is the next time it is not nearly as long lasting or severe. Your body gets used to the motions of the ship. I don;'t believe I got sea sick at all after my 3rd or 4th cruise. Noting when you are at sea for a week, walking on land requires some adjustment which can take 20 minutes. You be lurching like a drunken sailor (they ain't drunk, just not used to land yet). I enjoyed the heck out of ocean cruises and will always be grateful to my relatives and parents providing me the experience of them. I saw many lands and observed many things that provided a much better understanding of the world and people. I have seen flying fish racing our ship, porterhouse man of war just drifting along, pods of whales, Soviet submarines surfacing along side us, cargo being loaded and unloaded by nets, the butterflies of the Panama Canal, Gibraltar, the harbor at Rio De Janeiro, super extreme poverty in several countries, the Pyramids and the Suez Canal, I have lunched in Marseilles and swam at the beach in Cannes, I have ridden the sleds in Majorca and watched the French Foreign Legion march in St. Martinique. I toured the Tower of London. ll of that before I was 15. All of it was because my parents had every year since age 4 booked me on ocean voyages twice a year. I watched the era of the cruise ship end as jet travel became practical. I totally miss the era of the big cruise ships and tramp steamer ships that accepted passengers on cargo runs.
If you take too much you run the real risk of having your blood sugar drop below the level needed to keep your always hungry brain cells alive. Seizures, collapse and stroke and death can soon follow. Call it a consumer choice if they intake it for fun.
At the same time, the more of it in your blood, the less tolerant of it your cells become and insulin rejection becomes a possibility with more and more insulin needed to reduce the blood sugars. This why Diabetes is classified as a progressive disease. Diabetics who do nothing to change their diet and life style will begin to need larger and larger insulin doses as the years progress. But the risk of an overdose also grows and death can result.
We saw that in the 10 and 1700s when the 3rd world country known as England began sending Immigrants to the US.
The wisest and always true statement, "And this too shall change" applies to the US (and every country).
MYC began the practice of leasing and taking over hotels to house homeless folk way back in the 1960s during Mayor John Lindsy's (the most hated Mayor ever, he single handily virtually murdered the City).time. My Uncle and Aunt had a lovely permanent suite in the Hotel Webster on W 45th Street. Lindsy's administration began filling the Hotel with homeless Americans migrating up from the deep South. Although American, some had never seen running water before and there was a lot of defecation and urination in stariwells until hotel staff and social workers explained what toilets were for. (I saw the same thing when I was Refugee Camp Police (Special Deputy US Marshal) back in '79 and '80, but then it was Cubans and Haitians who had to be shown how toilets and light switches worked.) There were incidents of assaults and robberies in the hallways. Other off Broadway hotels had the same thing happen. It was upsetting to the long time residents. Florida was opening up and many took their money and moved there. My Aunt and Uncle moved over to an apt. in Yorkville which stayed pretty good until the 80s.
There is so much implicit racism in complaing about culture change. The USA has always been dependent on immigrant migration to make up it's people. Hell during the US Civil War while Ireland was suffering the US encouraged the Irish to migrate here and offered instant US citizenship to any Irish male who enlisted in the Union Army to go fight the Confederacy. Long time residents of NYC howled at the emergence of Irish people on sidewalks formerly occupied only be descendants of the English. More howling when the railroads wer built and NYC established it's first China Town and Harlem began expanding as Aftircan Americans began moving in by the thousands. Then the Italians in the 1890s began to arrive and Italian jokes began replacing the Irish donkey jokes. Then WWI and the Poles and Russians and Germans and again the Whites of English decent howled. The milloionss of Yiddish speakers after WWII (many of whom I knew not just by the language, but also by the blue numbers tattooed on their forearms) and some complained about them. When under Eisenhower Hispanics from our Puerto Rican colony were for the first time allowed to come to the mainland the screams were very loud. The birth of Spanish Harlem and West Side story.
New Yourk has always been a melting pot. Each group likes to pretend they are the last. LoL not.
Noting also the US didn't even have border check points until the early 20th century. Before that no one really cared if the guy working in the local store or living the next house over was from Mexico or not. The original purpose of those border checkpoints was to prevent Mexico from exporting cheaper cattle into the US. The original Border inspectors and Agents were actually Dept. of Agriculture inspectors. Then taxation got into it as the steam age began bringing in cheaper goods from Europe and Asia and suddenly there were Customs inspectors too. In truth in those early pre-WWII days no one really cared where someone was born.
The many bad laws NY's legislators passed in the 1960s contributed greatly to the decline of NYC. Communist Congress woaman Bella Abzug (an actual friend and staunch supporter of Josef Stalin before and after WWII) contributed greatly to the socialist agenda that destroyed NYC's economic base. Her Socialist successors do nothing to change things which is why the city never really recovered from it's bankruptcy in 1975 and we will probably see it go bankrupt again.
Noting many of those outside the US have no clue of the size of our current lotteries. Our PowerBall lottery prize is currently $1.04 Billion dollars. The cost of a ticket is $2.
Our MegaMillions lottery prize is currently a (paltry) $300 Million dollars. The cost of a ticket is $2.
Even if you hold a winning ticket, you must be a lawful resident of the US to collect your winnings.
Most stores in the US that sell the tickets sell tickets for both lotteries. During my time in DC while doing things involving keeping tabs on certain Embassy workers I became aware that several countries apparently decided why not? And lawful residents of the US associated with those embassies often bought hundreds (if not thousands) of those tickets. Makes perfect sense. The entire GDP in 2022 for the country of Tonga in 2022 was $460.2 Million dollars. South Sudan in 2022 $516 Million dollars. Burundi earned $891 Million dollars. Naturally suddenly having a citizen of that country lawfully in the US bring a lottery jackpot back to their country for deposit into their treasury would be a big shot in the arm. Anyone who hangs out at one of the 711s, like the one on S. Capital Street or Strick's liquor store in MD, *or Tik Tock Liquor in Chantilly (when it was open) would see cars with Dipple (Diplomatic) plates pull in the parking lot and some guy in a suit run in and buy a whole wad of tickets then scurry away. I would presume with the kind of payout sitting out there today that still goes on. Walk into a 711 10 minutes before lottery sales stop and there will be a line of at least 30 people waiting their turn to but a few tiickets.
Does anyone ever win? Absolutely. Some lucky person a Northeastern state won 899 Million dollars only a few months ago. Sadly sometimes multiple people who pick their number have a winning number. I remember last year 4 people had to share a $600,000,000 dollar jackpot. Broke their hearts for sure.
Do I play it?? Absolutely. The Risk / Reward ratio any time it passes a 12 Million dollar payout between the pay out and your $2 investment is so large you would have to be silly to not play it. A single jackpot win after 50 years of constantly buying a $2 ticket every 3 or 4 days days totally makes up for the investments with huge profit to spare. Have I ever won anything? A few times. A lot of $2 and $10 dollar payouts. A $50 payout once. I dopersonally know 2 people who won over $100,000 dollars. There was also a small business owner not too far away from me who won about $40 Million a few years ago.
Would I vanish from CS if the Billion dollar number to be alled in 2 days matches the number on the ticket in my pocket? Probably not. Some of the people on CS are actually just who they say they are. I have 'known' them for years. Late night video calls with some of them. Sometimes their night, my day, sometimes the other way around. Many conversations with multiple women from CS I would enjoy meeting in person and maybe more. But travel money is an obstacle. Having a Billion dollars in my back pocket wiould make that obstacle vanish for sure. Would I still visit CS? Sure, why not?
If you watch the video, Mr. Blogs gives the specifics as to the who a few of the executed CEOs were. Yes, I concede that the charge leveled prior to the execution was not simply bankruptcy, but more about their lying about the financial state of their company to both the common people and the Chinese bean counters in their government, while also living a lavish life style with money taken from the failed company. Donald Trump type shenanigans in which your company loses millions of dollars of investor money while your own bank account grows by about the same amount seems to not be tolerated well in China. Of course the fact that members of the Politburo were some of the investors and that the failed company had taken loans or funding directly from China's government also probably played a role in the executions.
You confuse long life with invulnerability. You should watch 'The Unforgiven' a few times. Some are lucky, some aren't. Ask any Insurance Agent. Statistics are real. The longer one lives the more time they get for bad things to happen. Those who make it to 100+ years without a fatal incident are just lucky. Your imaginary Adam and Eve could try to spend eternity hiding in an underground bunker, but eventually an earthquake (or a build up of CO2 gas would do them in. The Genesis fable never said God made the first humans invulnerable. Indeed Cain's killing Able would be hard if he was also invulnerable. Surely by now your reading of the Kabbalah or the Yazidi texts has taught you that even his Angels are not invulnerable and can die. The War in Heaven killed many of them, both cherubim and Seraphim corpses litter that battlefield. Lights dim and flames can be put out.
In any case the 1/137 rule essentially prohibits anything magical in this Universe and again shows us statistics amd Chaos are the true rulers of everything.
He never was. He sat in the chair, But all who saw him there knew he had to go. And he did. Should he be convicted on the Federal charges his Presidential pension will of course cease. In thirty years when he gets out of jail (if)m he will probably re-trace the foot steps of former President Polk and beg for dimes on a street corner in NY's Bowery district. It is probable many of the Crack whores that can be found on Ave A, B, 3, etc. will not take kindly to being grabbed the way he used to do and one of them may shank him for it. Almost none will notice or care. Just another dead bum in the Bowery..
A VERY ;large percentage of American homeless are habitual users of illegal drugs. Your story includes an account of her already having been arrested for entering restricted wetlands. A lot of durg users do that as a place to get high. She probably OD'd near the water she was already told not to go near and the poor alligator picked up the meat left on the shore. The alligator did as God made him to do. No reason to harm it existed.
The Genesis book/chapters was a plagarism of Hebrew texts allowed as a result of negotiation at the first council of Nicea. Hebrew scripture has always acknowledged Lility as Adam's first wife. The business about her wandering until the Red Sea is totally based on the Western (post ice age) belief Eden was in the middle East. However the Sumer tablets and some recent archaeology finds of pre-Ice Age constructs suggest that complex may have actually been in the part of the world we now call Southern Africa. In that case Lilith walking up to the Red Sea would have indeed been a long and difficult journey. It is recognized it is very important for several religions and the egos of those believing them that all of Genesis before Abraham took place in the Middle East. Even if that is a rorally false belief.
That this would of course open the door to the possibility that the mark of Cain is White skin is beyond the scope of this blog. Suffice to say that the egos of those with White skin would prefer it not be so. However we do notice in the scripture about Moses when he married an African woman and his friends objected to that, God put them all in their place by making their skin white at dinner time until they accepted the union. How many wives did Moses actually have? More than Cecil DeMills showed in the movie for sure.
Both the Christian Bible and the Sumer tablets attest that the first men were very long lived. I believe the Sumer tablets use the word immortal barring accident or violence. Certainly, someone like Methuselah hanging around breeding children for over 899 years might seem immortal to someone lucky if they barely make it to 115 years. So I am not sure they really meant 10 or 100 thousand year life spans.
Today we know that there is a counter inside our cells that regulates how many times a human cell can undergo mitosis (i.e., replication) before dying. There have been successful experiments on small animals (mice, rats, etc.) at turning the counter off. There are now dozens of lab animals that have lived 3 or 4 lifetimes (in a cage, poor things) more than do others of their kind and many exhibit no visible signs of aging. True Algernons for those that remember that story, or the mouse in the Green Mile. Yes, rich old people follow those experiments closely. I am sure eventually some of them will get the treatment.
As you say, it may turn into a curse. Would I want to live until the Earth's sun goes Nova and learn the hard way if we ever get our species off the planet? Then again immortality without invulnerability may result in a less than full life. Imagine losing both legs and arms in an accident, being 'saved' and for the rest of eternity being stuck in a bed dependent on various attendants coming in and flipping you over now and then or sliding a bowl under you so you can pass your wastes.
Then there is the fun of watching everyone you ever knew grow old and crumble. Almost none of our child hood friends are still alive when we are 80. Imagine how few there are when you are 380. Love becomes a brief fad as every 50 or so years you bury that one (or shuffle them off to a nursing home) and have to find a new one.
Alternatively, you will see and know so much. Nothing social will be new to you. You will probably know dozens of language and be a superb cook as well. You will by the end of the first 1,000 years know all things mechanical and many things chemical and scientific. As civilizations fall and rise, you will learn how to hide lest you be labeled a witch and burned or thrown into a volcano. You will probably become very rich with time. Compound interest in your bank savings account becomes a powerful friend after only a few hundred years. Are you sterile too? If not your girlfriend 400 years from now may be one of your own great great x3 grand children. Will you care or just go with the moment?
Here is a Wike article about how Mad Cow (called BSE on that side of the pond) resulted in a ban on beef products with bones. There the original cause was feeding the cows food that contained minced up parts of infected animals (including chicken) with their grain as that food was cheaper to buy.
One can still buy T-bone steak and Prime rib in the US (as well as beef short ribs), but as I indicated above, good luck still finding calf brains or stew bones in much of the US.
Because it offends the egos of those in barren Western US states to learn there is nothing special about them, producers of cattle in the Eastern US states are not, even if they sometimes wear cowboy boots, a cowboy hat, dungarees and a six shooter on their side, called cowboys. My neighbors are instead called farmers. That their working days are pretty much identical is considered socially irrelevant.
One of my neighbor's properties. <The bulls can be aggressive, so Danger Will Robinson, Danger.> Caution, alertness and knowing what you are doing is strongly suggested before climbing this fence.
Regarding chickens. Birds are thought to be somewhat immune to Prion disease. It seems however to be about what they are eating. There has been testing of chicken and ducks with nothing found as this article implies.
However, this 2018 report shows some folks did successfully infect chicken with prion disease (skip to the last sentence of the Abstract to avoid chemical DNA mumbo-jumbo.
Anyway, a lot of rural Americans raise cows (or goats or pigs or sheep) for sale as meat. Our USDA and FDA regulate the process. Prions build up over time. Due to mad cow (BSE) disease the current regulations prohibit the sale for use as meat of any bovine more than two years old. They also need to be registered and have a vaccination history.
The sound of the gas campfire? LoL Noticing an expectation the desert is where she wants to sit. Back in '75 I hiked across the Death Valley. Spent more than a few nights under the desert sky. No way I wish to repeat that. I much prefer mountain skies on a 75-80F summer night.
Seeing also this poster is apparently ashamed to risk having friends or acquaintances knowing she posts on CS. Or why else would this 'graphics designer' post a photo is which (allegedly) she hides her face behind her camera while also providing very poor lighting for the photo? Even the most novice of Graphics Designers would instantly recognize the photo needs more Gamma.
In point of fact star gazing can be fun. Just a few days ago I sat sipping some Jack Daniels Fruit Punch with my (healing slowly) tenant around the hot coals of our (wood) campfire identifying constellations while also watching invisible without an IR viewer (we had two) satellites and seeing if we could ID them on our Night Sky and Sky Watch phone apps (yes, to most (but not all) of them. Gotta love seeing the same object on the Sky View app with the logo Unknown alongside it.). It was a fun night. We had cooked hot dogs and toasted marshmallows. Later sipping cool drinks and just talking. The sound of deer and other mammals in my woods was fairly constant and we debated what critter snapped this or that branch or made a rustle in the leaves over there. Sometimes our NVDs confirmed the guess, sometimes we never did find out. Once we heard two owls squabbling over something. That was interesting. Eventually I called it a night. We put the fire out and I trudged back the long (100 foot) walk to my front door while she disappeared into her RV.
There is another health related issue, which is why in the US pre-flensed bones and certain other old time foods have vanished in many stores.
Prions
The active ingredient in Mad Cow, Kuru, Chronic Wasting and a dozen other names for an animal (or human) who has consumed enough prions to begin climbing Jacob's Ladder with death not far in the future.
Prions are a (basically) left handed spiral protein that mates nicely with the proteins found in such places as brain tissue, trunk nerves and bone marrow cells. They do not normally accumulate in muscle cells in significant numbers. Like all proteins they tend to grab components from around them and use them to replicate endlessly. Because it is a protein and not a virus or an invading cell no animal on Earth has antibodies that can negate their effect. They are not the right handed twist proteins our bodies need for healthy function, but they look enough like them so our (all animal (and fish)) cells try to use them. Needless to say, when building a brick house you don't wish to use red blocks made out of Styrofoam. Even less, self replicating Styrofoam blocks. The inclusion of Prions in a cell results in a loss of function. Our bodies use proteins for many different things. Surplus proteins are released back into the circulatory system. Over time as the number of prions in a host animal grow larger two things happen. Prions find their way into the excretion systems and the host animal excretes some in both urine and fecal material. Meanwhile as they begin to infest nerves and bone marrow cells the animal begins to experience side effects. The observable side effects most often manifest by strange behavior and in humans increased palsy and impaired brain function. There is no cure. There is no way of removing prions from a host. Ultimately as the number of prions accumulate in the host, the host will die. If a dead host is eaten the prions will of course begin to accumulate in the next host. Animals such as deer, rabbits, cows, dogs & cats that lick or consume the droppings or carcass remnants of the prion affected animal may themselves eventually succumb to a prion buildup. How fast the rush towards death is run is directly related to how many prions have lodged in the new host's body. It is worth noting it is possible to salt a field with prions so that all future crops grown there will contain prions in the harvest. It is a great military weapon if you wish to eliminate a country's population in a 20 year span. Just put it in their primary grain or fruit fields. Like a lethal virus of course due to exported food stuffs there is no controlling where it spreads. It is not yet known if one side or the other has salted yet the grain fields of Russia or Ukraine or even China or the US. Given the crazy things some bloggers write it is quite possible some of them have high prion concentration in their brains. In the US a resident of West Virginia who was known to almost exclusively eat deer meat and often made marrow soups died of prions about a decade ago. The US Dept of Agriculture had stupidly allowed an experiment with Mad Cow disease in Colorado to expand out of control when local deer, antelope and elk merged with the herd of very sick cows at feeding time. Prion poisoning has since been observed in wild deer, elk, rabbits and even fish across much of the US. Some states have mandatory testing of hunted animals, some do not. Many states have prohibited licensed butchers from selling deer or beef bones. Calves brains are no longer sold in US supermarkets. Etc. No one I know of tests the corn or wheat grain in bread, or beer. Death awaits us all anyway, but dying like someone in the final stages of Alzheimer probably doesn't appeal to many.
There is a lot of certifiable delusionary fantasy in the above posts. True dat.
DEW referred to Distant Early Warning. A radar system of the 1960s designed to detect incoming Soviet ICBMs approaching the US over the Arctic. The invention of 'Look Down' radar and a proliferation of satellites capable od etecting the same thing sooner from orbit made it obsolete and much of it was dismantled and sold as scrap.
HAARP was a harmless USAF radar study of the ionosphere (discontinued back in 2014 as being of not producing data of much value).
Blaming HARP or even directed energy weapons for earthquakes is asinine. The math doesn't support it. It takes 746 watts of power to lift one pound one foot off the ground. The largest nuclear reactor ever built only can generate 1 Billion watts. Continental plates weigh hundreds of thousands Trillions of pounds. The idea that something small enough to lift into orbit possesses enough power to slide a continental plate a dozen feet in any direction (the recent earthquakes in Turkey/Syria moved the plates more than 25 feet in some spots) is insanely ludicrous.
A conspiracy THEORY is any speculation about a conspiracy that has no proof. If it can be proven (like the failed insurrection attempt on Jan. 6, 2020 in support of Trunp), then it is no longer a theory. It becomes an actual conspiracy. In fact any allegation not provable is just a theory. Many of them (no matter how popular) eventually show themselves to just be fantasy cooked up by not well in the head people.
I worked around the HQ of SDIO High Frontier project HQ during the Ronald Regan years. I knew a lot of the key players by first name and chatted with several of them (including Dr Ed Teller). There are major problems to be overcome when trying to burn something with a laser from miles away. Each molecule of water encountering the projected stream of coherent (in step) photons both becomes hot steam and also attenuates and scatters the no longer coherent photons. You fire your laser into a cloud bank and what comes out the other side is both greatly reduced in power and is also widely scattered. A similar problem exists even on a clear day if your beam is anywhere even near an ocean. Our atmosphere is miles thick and anywhere near an ocean (such as the island of Maui) has at any time thousands of tons of water vapor in it. Contrary to myth laser beams naturally spread with distance. The spread can be controlled by adjustments of the laser output power and the size of the lens it emits from. I won't bother to cite the formula but suffice to say an enormous amount of power is required to ignite paper on an island from space, and a huge laser lens is also needed.
The USAF experimentally played with one several times in the early part of this century. The YAL 1 was mounted is a Boeing 747 and took up much of the interior vast space of the plane. The laser consumed megawatts of power. It required cryogenic cooling and vast quantities of fuel. It attempted to avoid the attenuation and disruption of water vapor in the atmosphere by firing thousands of pulses a second in a 5 second burst of laser energy. The theory was each pulse would disrupt (move) some of the water molecules out of the way and each successive pulse would tunnel in a little deeper before water vapor could cool and refill the tunnel. Aiming the monster while in flight at a fast target was a separate project. On the laser's first operational test in 2007 it actually pitted the skin of a liquid fueled missile. The scattered coherent light also burned out the retinas of thousands of flying birds thousands of miles away and they crashed and died. Although a second in flight test did destroy a solid fuel missile and another test damaged another one, by now ecologists were waking up to what was dropping huge numbers of birds in many parts of the Earth. In 2012 the YAL-1 made it's final flight and it was dismantled in 2014.
I agree regarding the 20,000 amputees. Not mentioned is about 20% at least are civilians injured by Russian bombings. Russia began mobilizing their own doctors and nurses last September. A lot of them fled when they could. It is important to note as a comparison the US Public Health Service is a military arm of the US. Technically they are (in peacetime) civilians with a military rank and Form 2 ID card. Anyway, yes of course any government has a right (and obligation) to use personnel resources inside it's territory.for defense of the territory. In fact the not too long ago removal of some of Ukraine's recruiters was not, as someone alleges above, because they conscripted old people, but rather instead because they took large bribes to exempt or forget to call young healthy males from rich families. My personal opinion is those corrupt people should be used to clear landmines and other obstacles in advance of Ukraine's infantry, but I am not President Zelinsky, so jail is all they face. I need a small surgery. I consented to postpone it a few months ago so my surgeon could go do some volunteer service in Ukraine. He should be back in a month. I strongly suspect he is not the only surgeon volunteering there, and I do know of other medical professionals going there to volunteer. Nothing is worse than having to remove Russian shrapnel from a small child. .
There are about a dozen on CS that have died in the past decade. Some of them were superb bloggers and also good people. They are missed. Some folks who were prolific writers just disappeared and no one knows anything. Whatever happened to Sistah? Some left because of anti-Muslim rhetoric (that was sad to see). Some got tired of the BS that began emerging when Trump ran in 2015 and just walked away.
I ofren engage wiuth the scammers when I am bored. I have had several admit they are full of BS in their profiles. Some are in Europe, some in the Balkans and Pakistan, only a few this year seem to really be in Africa. Once they make some admissions to their lies I sometimes have some good chats with them. It helps a lot getitng at the truth when they claim to be in a town nearby or in which I have friends that will go check an address for me. Absolutely amazing to me how many of them claim to be in Ashburn VA or Los Angeles or NYC or DC. I have chatted / interrogated / interviewed so many of the CS scammers I hardly ever get emails from them anymore. LoL
Even if China did have a laser powerful enough to blast through water vapor and still ignite fires on the ground a from space and light enough for both it and the enormous amount of fuel it would need to be carried up in a single launch vehicle (which no country does), why if the attack was done in Secret, would you imagine a US response would be publicly announced? Here is a reality. A lot of things the US does are never talked about in public, not for decades anyway. If your fantasy was real, rest assured, we did something, but you were not deemed to have a need to know about it.
ken_20 Blog Comments (358)
RE: Carlin on voting, horrible truth.
We have literally millions of Americans who threw away their right to have any say by comiting Felony crimes. They are usually the ones who complain the most. Actual voters if they don't like the results of an election and who won simply simply change who they vote for next time. America has the longest lasting form of government on the planet.