#i mean also obviously what is going on here is that the geopolitics of Europe weren't. uh. subtle to people in Europe

[nonstandardrepertoire]

today in "continuing adventures reading the original Sherlock Holmes stories": there's this one story that was published in 1904 where Holmes is called in to help with an International Diplomatic Incident involving an ill-advised letter from a hot-headed European ruler. if Holmes doesn't solve the case, Doyle writes that it could lead to a "great war" between European countries. he then goes on to explain the general geopolitical state of Europe and Britain's status as a country that could entirely rearrange the power structure of the continent except they like to remain neutral mostly . . . in a way that more or less neatly describes the geopolitical calculations of the July Crisis that would lead to World War 1 ten years later. the estimation that such a war could lead to hundreds of thousands dead is off (the total death toll for WW1 is around 40,000,000), but it's still very eerily prescient to read at this remove. a catastrophic disaster hanging over all their heads being foretold in a trashy throwaway mystery story ten years in advance

[jyndor]

You’re so right about West Papua. Javanese colonizers are in the comments of the original tweet like “you don’t understand, these guys were arrested because they had weapons :( “ while celebrating the Palestinian right to armed resistance. You can’t say that you stand against genocide while ignoring or justifying the one that you happen to benefit from. The West Papuans should be able to resist Indonesian colonization in any way they see fit.

anon, this is one of the most bitter truths about all this, and I'm sorry I don't want to speak out of turn but I think perhaps for a lot of people in the west it can be odd to realize that for many people in the world Palestine is an issue that transcends ideology for the most part.

so even though we in the so-called west are used to solidarity with Palestinians being a leftist thing because ain't no centrist or conservative here giving a shit about them, that's not the norm globally.

obviously the Arab and Islamic worlds are largely in solidarity because they see Arabs and Muslims having been colonized by a western proxy, a settler colonial project that is also very hostile to most of them, even though of course Palestinians are not oppressed because they are Muslim (and Christian) but because they are Palestinians. and Palestine is very diverse - many people racialized in many ways. and as we see with the treatment of Sudanese people in Egypt and other largely non-Black Arab countries, people may hold onto solidarity with one group sincerely while failing another group going through similar brutality.

I think conversations like this are best left to communities to have because they have a better understanding of their communities and these issues than I ever could, but also if we are going to ally ourselves with anti-colonial struggles for self-determination and liberation, that means ALL of them. all peoples, all cultures, no matter what what the governments occupying their homes and oppressing them are doing for Palestine or any other oppressed people.

I am so happy that so many countries are standing up for Palestinians but let's not be fooled into thinking they're just doing it because they care about liberation period - if they do at all, it is because of internal pressure from their peoples. I appreciate South Africa's work on this matter and the decades of solidarity they have had with Palestinians - but South Africa abstained from a vote condemning Russia for its annexation and invasion of Ukraine, which notably puts indigenous Crimean Tatars at significant risk. this is about geopolitics of course, not just morality... and people need to understand that.

a lot of the global south has been... not terribly great on this issue, and I mean I get it because Ukraine hasn't exactly fostered great solidarity with the global south but tbh if people are going to care about liberation, anti-imperialism and indigenous rights it really should not matter if for once the US is actually on the right side of that issue, which is really what it comes down to lbr. Ukraine is a western, white-racialized country that has benefited from white European supremacy (never gonna forget that English reporter going ~bUt ThIs iS EuRoPe~~~ lol) and that is not something that can or should be overlooked by supporters of Ukrainian self-determination as it often is. and then there's the overwhelming support for Israel from Ukraine, which is abhorrent and I know there is also support for Palestine there too. But it's very telling that when push comes to show, that solidarity is lacking.

when it comes to Indonesia and West Papuans, there is no room for ambiguity - it is genocide, it is colonialism, it is occupation. one thing I have learned through this is that cognitive dissonance is a hell of a drug.

people BELIEVE there is a real substantive difference between whatever resistance movement they support and whatever groups that their own governments are oppressing, or that are not geopolitically "aligned" with their politics. as if their politics shouldn't be informed by liberation PERIOD.

every time there is a big post about multiple genocides/atrocities in general, there's always people in the comments going "Well actualllyyyyy x is not being genocided because y" and it's like... how do you know that? how do you know that the uyghur cultural genocide* is not happening???? we literally say all the time that genocide doesn't always mean the complete murder of every single person in a group, why are we being like this??? cultural genocide is genocide, and it can easily escalate into mass murder. how is this up for fucking debate.

anyway, I have to go to work but yeah anon I get it. people need to unlearn nationalism and learn how to critically engage with their governments' histories. all of us. sorry it's coming from a us american but I think I know a little something about that.

*I understand the US is full of shit on this and has pushed some propaganda but that does not mean I do not have solidarity with the Uyghurs.

[escmemesandstuff]

Song review: Ukraine

Well, we’ve got the first entry of Eurovision 2023! And as promised, I’m posting my review. Note that these reviews are based on the song right after its selection/release and are subject to change. If you don’t want to see these posts, just blacklist the tag “escmemes reviews”.

To give a small explanation on this and the upcoming reviews, they’ll consist of two or three parts: first, I’ll give my personal opinion on the song, then try to predict its chances of succeeding in the actual contest. Those two can contradict each other at times, because just because I might like a song doesn’t mean I see it as objectively successful, and vice versa. If the song was chosen in a national final, I’ll also give my opinion on the selection in general and mention some of my favourite songs from there.

Without further ado, let’s check what the latest winner has in store for us!

TVORCHI - Heart of Steel

Personal opinion: Let’s start by saying, I like the song. It’s a well-produced, catchy pop track. The lyrics might be more on the basic side, but I like the open nature of them; it can be interpreted as a song on Ukrainian peoples’ resilience during wartime (a message further supported by the Vidbir performance), but even when taken out of the context, it works well as a general empowerment song.

Speaking of the performance, I think it was the best of the selection alongside Krut’s. Some may think of the war-related imagery as a little bit too, what’s the word, anvilicious? But for some reason it didn’t feel preachy to me, maybe because they were still able to make a stylistic performance that supported the song rather than distracted from it. Which is good. And the lead singer was charismatic and confident on stage, so no complaints on that department, either.

Prediction: Here’s where the criticism comes in. While Heart of Steel stands well on its own, when it comes to the selection as a whole, there were multiple other songs with more success potential. What I liked about Ukraine’s latest entries was the willingness to take risks by sending a unique song with cultural influences, and the results have proven the risk was worth it (true, geopolitics also played a significant role in Kalush’s success, but even disregarding the war, the song in itself was outstanding and would've received a top ten result in any case). Now the country has gone back to playing it safe with an English-language, mainstream-friendly pop song. And while that doesn’t necessarily equal a low result, it’s likely we’ll hear similar songs from other countries, which won’t help in standing out. I also highly doubt we’ll see a Kalush effect for the second year in a row; the sympathies for Ukraine were high last spring, which obviously helped power them into a victory, but as the war goes on, it’ll fade into the background for the rest of Europe and have less of an emotional impact. Sounds horrible when put this way, but that’s how things tend to go. But even that aside, this song doesn’t have anything that screams “winner” to me. Winning entries tend to have some “wow” factor in them that encourages people to vote for them out of all songs; simply sounding nice isn’t enough.

So no, I don’t think this song has chances to win, but I do see potential for an otherwise good result (even though it’s hard to tell at this point, when no other songs are selected yet). For the reasons mentioned in my personal opinion, I can see this doing well in the jury vote, and it might very well please many televoters (aka the non-eurofan audience who may be put off by more “campy” songs). And of course, since it’s Ukraine we’re talking about, we can’t ignore the influence of neighbor/diaspora voting. At this point, I predict a placing on the left side of the scoreboard, maybe even on the top ten - but not on the podium.

Thoughts on the selection: First of all, props to the Ukrainian broadcaster for creating a well-produced show despite the circumstances. When watching, it was easy to forget this was filmed in a metro station. You don’t need a Melodifestivalen-style megashow to have a good selection.

As for the quality of the songs, it ranged from “blander than a slice of white bread” to “this could give Ukraine their second win in a row”. My favourite was Krut’s beautifully haunting ballad, and after the strong and emotional performance, I would’ve gladly backed the jury and sent it to Liverpool. (Seriously, this is the second year in a row that the Vidbir jury has a better taste than the general public. How about Ukraine just skips Vidbir next year and lets Jamala & Friends select internally about submitted entries?) I also loved Jerry Heil’s unique entry; sure, the live performance would’ve needed a massive revamp for the contest, but even tonight, Jerry’s emotional performance made up for the amateurish staging. My third place would go to Fiinka and her energetic song with ethnic vibes. 

[mithliya]

I was looking at your anons that you shared. But I feel you are missing the point though I maybe wrong. Thing is culture and environment does greatly affect the way men view and act on things. A man raised in a liberal, cosmopolitan environment is less likely to have violent misogynist tendencies and more likely to support women's rights (though liberal misogyny may still be present) than a man raised in a place where women are subject to chattel slavery and covered or locked up in houses. You can look up global opinion polls where there's a clear hostility towards women's equality and lgbt rights and more support for conservative religiousness in middle East, Africa and South Asia (obviously not all countries in those) compared to Europe or the Americas (including South America). Obviously a man who is from such an environment is more likely to be misogynistic (in terms of actions) than a man from a liberal environment on an average. This has nothing to do with race, because the same man had he been raised in a better environment would've likely been better (on an average). It is fair to blame the global geopolitical game and actions of the Western powers for the current situation in middle East or Afghanistan etc, but that doesn't change the fact that men from these places are more likely to be misogynist due to their environment and culture (not due to their race). What do you think?

i would like to preface this (for future anons) that im simply rbing and tagging that stuff for future reference, these aren’t all there is that ive said on the topic and it’ll take me time to go thru everything ive said on the topic so what ive reblogged is by no means the entirety of my perspective. additionally, ive talked so much about this that i actually have no desire to really have a discussion on it. maybe a civil private one in dms or something, but not a public one on my blog. it’s just bc i found talking about this topic and discussing it with very blatantly racist ppl last month was very emotionally draining for me. so i would appreciate if this discourse isnt reignited bc my intention isn’t to reignite it, but rather simply to find all thats been said on it so i can share it with another blogger on here.

OKAY so onto what u said. i agree that environment plays a massive role, in fact i think it’s predominantly what drives people’s behaviours in this context. however, i disagree with the argument that it’s about culture. i think it is about society and environment, but culture in itself isn’t the root of the issue a lot of the time. you brought up afghanistan, and i think that’s a good example of what i mean. culture is very deeply rooted and our cultures often have hundreds if not thousands of years of history behind them. what we’re seeing in afghanistan today isn’t the result of culture— it’s the result of an extreme societal change that happened several decades ago. not to say afghanistan didn’t have their own battles with misogyny before taliban got power, but taliban getting power and coming to exist isnt because of afghan culture (which ive seen many people argue and then use to point out that “well their culture led to this, and since they created their culture this goes to show these people are innately more misogynistic and violent”) but rather because of foreign powers. communism was on the rise in many nations in the middle east and in afghanistan as well. on another end, there were also islamists. they existed (afaik, we have saudi to thank for that) but they were weak and didn’t have influence. western powers, namely US, thought of communism as a threat to their power & to their livelihood, and thus supported and empowered the “lesser threat”, which are the Islamists. this helped the Islamists gain power and take over. this led to a major societal shift in afghanistan. what was once a country where women could walk around dressed however they liked, turned into a country where women were being forced to wear a burqa. what was once a country where women were getting educated, now became a country where women had to pretend to be boys if they wanted to learn. there’s some famous images showing this (ofc they don’t give us the full picture of life in afghanistan before taliban took over, but we get an idea), all of them being afaik from afghanistan in the 60s and 70s:

so i firmly am against the argument that the primary issues involve their culture. the islamists existence AND their power were both things that came from outside influence and outside powers. what i think is fairer to say, is that the difference in extremes of misogyny is to do with society and moreso social progress. we cannot argue that misogyny in Western Europe is less extreme because of Western European culture, especially when European society, around the same time as the images above, had a lot of undeniable misogyny. for example, at around the same time, italy had a law where women were forced to marry their rapists so that their rapist can basically get away with it, and in the 60s was the first time when a woman publicly refused to do so (her name is franca viola). women like the aforementioned one pushed for social progress which has made life better for women today, it wasn’t about the difference in culture.

with some practices, i would give culture more credit. for example, fgm is an ancient cultural practice in various countries. however, some practices aren’t cultural. taliban is far from a reflection of afghan culture. and of course men took advantage of the taliban and became more overtly misogynistic. the number of men that come from places where women’s rights have made massive progress, only to go to other countries and be incredibly misogynistic to the women in said countries, points to me that even with social progress, men will try to find a way to be misogynistic in a way thats acceptable enough (ex: sex tourism or mail order brides).

this is a long reply and by no means everything i think on this, but hopefully you understand now where im coming from. i don’t disagree culture can play a role, but a lot of the time what people blame on culture isn’t even about the country’s culture to begin with.

[xtruss]

Our Sprawling Empire

750 Bases in 80 Countries Is Too Many for Any Nation — But Just the Right Number for a Planetary Empire. Time for the US To Bring Its Troops Home. "Russia Two to Three Dozen. China Five."

— By Doug Bandow Posted | October 04, 2021

“The only sure way to close a local installation, it seems, is to lose a war, as in Vietnam and Afghanistan.”

President Joe Biden did what his three predecessors could or would not: halt a seemingly endless war. It took two decades, but American troops no longer are fighting in Afghanistan.

An important aspect of the US withdrawal was closing Washington’s bases, which once spread across the country. Uncle Sam left Bagram Air Base, America’s biggest facility in Afghanistan, on his way home.

However, some 750 American military facilities remain open in 80 nations and territories around the world. No other country in human history has had such a dominant presence. Great Britain was the leading colonial power, but its army was small. London had to supplement its own troops with foreign mercenaries, as in the American Revolution. In wars with great powers Britain provided its allies with financial subsidies rather than soldiers.

Previous empires, such as Rome, Persia, and China, were powerful in their own realms but had little reach beyond. The latter never reached outside Asia. Persia was twice halted by the Greek city states. As great as Rome became, its writ never went much beyond the Mediterranean, with Central Europe, North Africa, and the Mideast its boundaries. The New World remained beyond the knowledge let alone control of all three.

A new Quincy Institute study by American University’s David Vine and World Beyond War’s Patterson Deppen and Leah Bolger details the global US military presence. Washington has nearly three times as many bases as embassies and consulates. America also has three times as many installations as all other countries combined. The United Kingdom has 145. Russia two to three dozen. China five. Although the number of US facilities has fallen in half since the end of the Cold War, the number of nations hosting American bases has doubled. Washington is as willing to station forces in undemocratic as democratic countries.

The study figures the annual cost of this expansive base structure to be about $55 billion. Adding increased personnel expenses takes the total up to $80 billion. Wealthier countries, which needlessly enjoy what amounts to defense welfare, typically cover a portion of the cost through "host nation support." Not so Washington’s newest clients. Indeed, through the Global War on Terror over the last two decades the US military spent as much as $100 billion on new construction, mostly in countries, like Iraq and Afghanistan, which were financial black holes.

Although American bases face intense local opposition in some areas, such as Okinawa, facilities are seen as welcome money-makers in others. When President Donald Trump proposed pulling US forces out of Germany many locals’ greatest concern was economic. Indeed, the whining of local politicians who saw America’s presence as a financial rather than security issue was loud enough to heard across "the Pond." Not only did they believe that Americans owed them military protection. In their view Americans also had a duty to bolster their economies.

However, the price of Washington’s globe-spanning is more than economic. Explained Vine, et al.: "These bases are costly in a number of ways: financially, politically, socially, and environmentally. US bases in foreign lands often raise geopolitical tensions, support undemocratic regimes, and serve as a recruiting tool for militant groups opposed to the US presence and the governments its presence bolsters. In other cases, foreign bases are being used and have made it easier for the United States to launch and execute disastrous wars, including those in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya."

Perhaps the most expensive installations were those established in Saudi Arabia after the first Gulf War. By renting out members of the US military as bodyguards for the Saudi royals Washington underwrote one of the most vile dictatorships in existence, a veritable totalitarian state with no political, religious, or social liberty. Although Crown Prince Mohammed "Slice & Dice" bin Salman, responsible for the murder and dismemberment of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi three years ago, has loosened some social strictures, he has greatly tightened political controls.

Worse from a foreign policy standpoint, America’s presence is one of the grievances which motivated Osama bin Laden to target the US Then Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz admitted in February 2003, before the invasion of Iraq, that America’s regional presence had cost "far more than money." US bombing of Iraq and US troops in Saudi Arabia had "been Osama bin Laden’s principal recruiting device." After the planned invasion, he added: "I can’t imagine anyone here wanting to … be there for another 12 years to continue helping recruit terrorists."

Perhaps the most serious price of endless bases has been endless wars. Obviously, causation is complex. However, going to war usually leads to creation of new facilities. Such installations encourage a continuing military presence. Existence of nearby bases reduces the marginal cost of intervening and increases the maximal temptation to make new commitments, meddle in local controversies, and enter nearby conflicts. Observed the Quincy study: "Since 1980, US bases in the greater Middle East have been used at least 25 times to launch wars or other combat actions in at least 15 countries in that region alone. Since 2001, the US military has been involved in combat in at least 25 countries worldwide."

American military facilities also raise expectations of host and neighboring nations. After Iran attacked Saudi oil facilities in September 2019 the well-pampered Saudi royals expected US retaliation but were sorely disappointed. Although President Donald Trump was right to allow the Saudis to "fight their own wars," as he had tweeted five years before, America’s military presence, which Trump had increased, encouraged Riyadh to expect more – and might have motivated a more conventional president to act.

Vine, et al. point to other costs as well. The Department of Defense is a terrible environmental actor. Although its practices have much improved in recent years, the accumulated damage is enormous. There also are questions about Washington’s tendency to load up US territories, such as Guam, with military installations. Such areas are not exactly foreign, but the Quincy report contended that the heavy base presence "helped perpetuate their colonial relationship with the rest of the United States and their peoples’ second class US citizenship."

Alas, DOD is less than forthcoming about the number of bases it maintains overseas. According to the report: "Until Fiscal Year 2018, the Pentagon produced and published an annual report in accordance with US law. Even when it produced this report, the Pentagon provided incomplete or inaccurate data, failing to document dozens of well-known installations. For example, the Pentagon has long claimed it has only one base in Africa – in Djibouti. But research shows that there are now around 40 installations of varying sizes on the continent; one military official acknowledged 46 installations in 2017."

The Biden administration should make rationalizing the US base network a priority. Indeed, this should be an integral part of the Global Posture Review that the president announced in his February speech to State Department employees. He explained that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin would lead the process "so that our military footprint is appropriately aligned with our foreign policy and national security priorities. It will be coordinated across all elements of our national security."

The initial task should be publicly listing military installations and their purposes. Then facilities should be consolidated, even if doing so angers local politicians and communities. After all, this process should be relatively painless overseas, in contrast to domestic base closures, which inevitably trigger fevered local and congressional opposition.

The next step would be tougher but necessary. The administration should rethink the underlying commitments used to justify the bases. Europe has no need of a US military presence for defense: the continent enjoys an 11-1 economic advantage and more than 3-1 population edge over Russia. South Korea has a 55-1 economic and 2-1 population superiority over the North. The Mideast Gulf monarchies are well-armed and now working with Israel as well as each other. Washington’s presence in Iraq is unnecessary, since it and its neighbors could together confront any remaining threats from the Islamic State. America’s intervention in the Syrian civil war never made sense. The Marine Expeditionary Force stationed on Okinawa is tied to Korean rather than Chinese contingencies and America’s bases there unfairly burden the local population.

Ending US security guarantees and avoiding fights not America’s own would allow Washington to shutter many existing military facilities. Halting endless wars in the Mideast would diminish the importance of logistical nodes in Germany and elsewhere. In appropriate cases the US could replace its bases with emergency access to foreign facilities to deal with unexpected contingencies. In broad sweep Washington should move from frontline to reserve status around the world.

The international threat environment has changed dramatically since the end of World War II, yet America’s global network persists. The impact of the Soviet collapse and Warsaw Pact dissolution was too great not to have eliminated some US facilities, but otherwise the Pentagon has been reluctant to leave existing bases.

The only sure way to close a local installation, it seems, is to lose a war, as in Vietnam and Afghanistan. That needs to change. America no longer can afford to garrison the globe. The Biden administration should make the US into a normal country again. And that means no more imperial legions stationed around the world for purposes other than America’s defense.

Doug Bandow is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute. A former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan, he is author of Foreign Follies: America’s New Global Empire.

— Anti-Empire

[johnboothus]

Wine 101: Germany

This episode of “Wine 101” is sponsored by E.& J. Gallo Winery. At Gallo, we exist to serve enjoyment in moments that matter. The hallmark of our company has always been an unwavering commitment to making quality wine and spirits. Whether it’s getting Barefoot and having a great time, making every day sparkle with La Marca Prosecco, or continuing our legacy with Louis Martini in Napa, we want to welcome new friends to wine and share in all of life’s moments. Cheers, and all the best.

In this episode of “Wine 101,” VinePair tastings director Keith Beavers discusses Germany’s wine region. Listeners will learn about all the Prädikats or categories that make up the region. Beavers takes listeners through the unique yet complicated history that is German wine law. Also, for listeners who know of German wine, chances are you have seen Riesling bottles on the American market.

However, Beavers will list the different white and red varieties that are made in Germany such as Silvaner, Grauburgunder, a Pinot Gris blend, Dornfelder, and Spätburgunder, a Pinot Noir blend. In terms of Riesling, there are six Prädikat categories that include Kabinett, Eiswein, and Trockenbeerenauslese, to name a few. And that is just scratching the surface!

Tune in to become an expert on Germany and its wines.

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Keith Beavers: My name is Keith Beavers, and did you know there are battery-powered lawnmowers now? Obviously, I got one. This is crazy.

What’s going on, wine lovers? Welcome to Episode 15 of VinePair’s “Wine 101” podcast, Season 2. My name is Keith Beavers, and I am the tastings director of VinePair. What’s happening? OK, so Germany’s nuts. It’s pretty deep. It’s pretty intense, but there are things we have to talk about. I can’t get into all of it, but we need to talk about Germany. We have to get to know what’s happening over there.

I know I say it a lot when we’re talking about a country and we’re talking about wine.I say, “You guys gotta understand, this is a unique thing going on here.” I know I say that a lot, but it’s true. Every country in Europe or every wine region in general has such a unique story. As we move through these episodes and we talk about European wine regions, I always start with the Greeks, Gauls, Romans, Saracens, Visigoths, Moors, dukes, monks, kings, and queens, and then the revolution. There are always these things going on, but within that, there’s all this uniqueness. I also say this because it’s hard to explain how intense the history of Germany is, and then to connect wine to that.

Of all the wine regions that I’ve researched, this country seems to change hands so frequently throughout history, that the wine industry is always playing catch-up with what’s going on politically and geopolitically in wartime in Germany. We’re talking all the way back before Charlemagne, because Charlemagne was German. Before Charlemagne all the way up to the 1980s, this country has been trying to equalize itself for so long. It’s finally getting there in modern times, we’re talking the last 30, 50 years.

Like the region of Champagne, Germany went through a trial-and-error situation as well. Where Champagne had all this crazy climate to deal with, so did Germany. The varieties that survive today are the varieties that survived this land along with the humans. I know this happens all over Europe. There are always these big shifts in history, but in Germany, it just seems so dramatic. It’s almost as when every time something shifted, the industry had to really move to acclimate the new thing. At some point in the wine region, the classical wine region of Germany, an entire section was lobbed off and given to France, the region of Alsace. It’s crazy. Imagine adapting to that.

OK, so we’ve lost an entire wine region. An entire section of the country is now given to France. All right, cool. Deal with that. There’s a really good chance that if you’ve heard about German wine, you first hear about Riesling, and then you hear about another Riesling, and then you hear about another Riesling and another Riesling. Riesling is becoming, what I read at one point, the calling card of German wine right now.

For white wine, there’s Müller-Thurgau, Silvaner, Grauburgunder (Pinot Gris), and Weissburgunder (Pinot Blanc). For red, there’s Spätburgunder (Pinot Noir), Dornfelder, Portugieser, Trollinger, Pinot Meunier, and Lemberger, which in Austria they call Blaufrankisch. There are a lot of different varieties being grown in Germany. The thing is, the percentage of those under vine is so small that we don’t see a lot of that over on the American market. Most of what we see here is either Riesling or everyday, affordable German wines. It’s not easy to find, but Dornfelder is a very affordable, easy-drinking, soft red wine that often comes in 1-liter bottles that is a great wine for a party. It’s awesome. We just don’t see a lot of it around.

Müller-Thurgau, Silvaner, these are grapes that make wines that are more popular in northern Italy than they are in Germany, even though they probably originated in Germany alone. Germany’s even messing around with Chardonnay these days. Also, the Pinot Meunier thing is crazy. In the Riesling episode, I gave you a rundown of the wine-growing region of Germany. I’m not going to get too deep into that because I really want to talk to you guys about German wine law. If you want to get into German wine these days, German wine law is happening. There are a lot of winemakers that are shunning it. There’s also even an organization that was formed to write their own laws within the law. It’s complicated, so I’m going to get into that more than anything else. If you want to get nice, deep, and wine region-specific, then go ahead and listen to the Riesling episode.

Just a quick recap. Wine-growing and producing regions in Germany are mainly located in the southern part of the country. That area is classically known as the Palatinate. In German, it’s named Pfalz. The lower part of the Palatinate would be named Unterpfalz. It’s here that the majority of the wine appellations of the wine regions exist. The oldest vineyards are on the left bank of the Rhine River, and then the right bank going south has more historically newer sites, if you will. That shows you how old this place is. These regions I get into more in the Riesling episode.

Here’s the capper: Across all 13 wine regions, the way German wine is classified is different than you would see in other places in Europe. The qualification and the classification of German wine is based on the must weight. You’ll remember the must from the first season all the way to the beginning, we’re talking about how wine is made. Must is that organic material after the crush that is just grape skins, moisture, flesh, pips, and skin. All that stuff. What’s also in that is all the natural sugar that the yeast is about to eat. That sugar adds to the weight of the must. The more sugar in the must, the heavier the must.

In Germany, they’ve developed a scale to weigh this must, it’s called the Oechsle scale. There are also other scales out there to weigh the sugar or waste must. There is Brix, which is very popular in the United States, another one called Baumé. They’re all interconnected. Usually when you’re weighing must weight, you’re estimating and calculating what will be the future alcohol percentage of the wine. For example, in America, 23 to 24 Brix, I think, is about 13 or 13.5 percent alcohol. There would be an equivalent Oechsle to that. The science and technology around this stuff are really cool. I don’t understand it completely but they use something called a hydrometer and something called a refractometer. A refractometer makes a little bit of sense to me. The less you can see, the more dense the sugar is. It’s hard to explain, but the German wine law states that depending on the must weight, depending on the sugar and the future alcoholic content of the wine, will determine where the wine is classified. I know, it’s crazy. It’s different. It’s cool. Let’s get into it.

German wine has two categories, and the second category has other stuff in it which we’ll get into. The first category was once called Tafelwein or table wine. It’s now called Deutscher Wein or land wine. This is similar to the entry-level categories in other European countries like vin de pays in France, which is country wine. Vino di Tavola in Italy, which means table wine. In Spain, Italy, and France, these categories exist, and a lot of wine is made within those categories. However, traditionally in Germany, not a lot of this category is made. It says about less than 4 percent of it is made. Right now on the American market, other than Riesling, that’s the majority of the wine we’re going to see. They’re often very affordable. They’re often a little bit sweet, red and white. But keep an eye on these. In Germany, they’re trying to elevate this level of wine a little bit. I believe they might be taking a little bit of the sugar out, trying to elevate the acidity. That’s just my theory, but keep an eye out. There is probably some awesome stuff coming in the future.

The second category is the largest category, and it is what we’re going to see most in the United States. When you look at a bottle of Riesling, this is what you’re going to see. This category is called Qualitätswein, which means quality wine from a specific region. Basically, that’s the AOC of France, the DOC of Italy, the DO of Spain. This is a regular run-of-the-mill EU-controlled appellations system, but all similarities with that end there. For a wine to be part of this category, the grape must originate from one of the 13 wine appellations of Germany, and it needs to reach the minimum must weight of that region. Even beyond that, the variety itself.

Every region has different must weight requirements. Every grape has its own must weight requirements. Within this category, there’s a superior category that you can be elevated to. It’s similar to the DOC and the DOCG of Italy, but not really. OK, let me explain. This is the scale. This is the thing. This is the 1971 German wine law saying, “Hey, we are going to categorize our wine by increasing must weights. We need to have categories for each of those must weights.” They created a category within Qualitätswein called Prädikatswein or Superior Quality Wine. There are six Prädikat or categories within the Prädikats, and all these categories are based on the Oechsle scale.

This is what you’re going to see and you’re going to see this on Riesling bottles. You have Kabinett, Spätlese, Auslese, Beerenauslese, Eiswein, and Trockenbeerenauslese. Kabinett, or the first level of these Prädikats, is the lightest of all of them. It has the least amount of sugar in Oechsle. It’s 70 to 82 degrees Oechsle. Basically, that just means it’s going to be about 10, maybe 11 degrees alcohol at the most. A lot of them are between 7 and 8 degrees alcohol. Some people like to say that because it’s the lightest, it can be some of the most affordable. The word Kabinett means you want to keep it in your cabinet just for any given time, which I think that there’s something about that is true. However, the word Kabinett was a word used to define quality, not just wine, but anything of quality, something you’d want to display on your cabinet. I don’t understand that too much, but that’s where it comes from. These are light wines. High acid, bright fruit, and in the Riesling category they’re fizzy, beautiful, and very refreshing.

The next category or Prädikat is called Spätlese. It translates as late harvest. For this Prädikat category, it really means the sugar levels at harvest. Sometimes they are picked later than grapes for Kabinett. Now, we’re straight-up on the Oechsle, you know what I mean? This category ups the Oechsle, and this is where wine will result in about 10 to 12 percent alcohol. You’ll notice a little more sweetness. You’re still getting a lot of acidity, but the sweetness is starting to increase a little bit. The next level is Auslese, which translates to selected harvest. Back in the day, traditionally, it was the grapes that were picked one week after the initial pick.

These days, it’s a little bit different. It just means the must weight at harvest. These wines reach about upwards of almost 14 percent, about up to 13.8 percent alcohol, which is around that normal percentage of what we know as American wine drinkers. Next, is Beerenauslese and also Eiswein. They’re in a similar category on the Oechsle scale. Beerenauslese means berry selection. Often, these wine grapes are infected with botrytis cinerea, otherwise known as noble rot. This is something I go into in the Bordeaux episode. The alcohol for these wines can be between 15 and 18 percent alcohol. We’re getting pretty alcoholic here. The thing about this category for Riesling, specifically, is where Riesling ages almost forever. This is the long-lived category for Riesling.

The last category is Trockenbeerenauslese and this means berry selection, but shriveled-on-the-vine berry selection. These berries have been infected with noble rot significantly and are made into wine. This is the highest must weight for any Prädikat, and at one time it was an infrequent category, but it’s getting warmer in Germany, so these Trockenbeerenauslese are being made more often. All of this was created in 1971. Then, there were all these tweaks going on throughout the years up until 2009. But that’s the general rule of how you will see wines on the American market, especially Riesling. Now, there’s something very specific happening here in that these wine laws are pretty dense. They’re really well thought out. It makes complete sense. All of it makes sense. It’s all about must weight. It makes sense.

However, there’s a quality control situation here because this is a broad rule across all regions, across all grape varieties. In the early 20th century, an organization called the VDP, Verband Deutscher Prädikatsweingüter, was initially developed by the few, a small group of fine-wine producers in the region, specifically for auctioning. This is when auctioning wines had come to Germany. Over the years, today, it actually includes winemakers from all 13 wine regions. What the VDP does is very interesting in that they design their own protocols within the Qualitätswein and Prädikatswein categories. They’re doing this because their eye on quality was like a hawk. This organization is so determined to produce quality that they will change the rules of the country. They will tweak the actual country’s wine laws to do whatever they want to make better wine. They have tried for a long time to get these new protocols into law. Obviously, it’s not working. What is happening is a lot of the winemakers around them that aren’t necessarily in the VDP are looking to the VDP and using their strategies as well, because it’s a quality-minded, quality-driven organization. It’s crazy.

To the VDP, which is now over 200 estates across the wine regions of Germany, they feel that lower yields are required and higher must weight is required for better quality wine than what is stated in the German wine law. They’re also very big on the varieties being traditionally associated with the area.

This is the group that really brought Riesling in as the calling card, being very strict and very adamant about it working there. They’re also big on lower yields, and they made a decision that their driest wines are going to be out of the Prädikat system. The Prädikat levels and categories are specifically for definite must weights, and a lot of other winemakers are following suit. This is the thing about Germany: It has a very old, complicated history with wine and just the country itself. It’s changed a lot, so much that today in 2021, the country understands itself. The wine region in Germany is old, established, incredible, and it’s amazing. But it still has more to do.

What we’ve talked about in this episode sets up the system and then sets up what’s changed or what’s changing. Now, when you go out there and enjoy German wine, you’ll start with Riesling and then go everywhere else. You get a sense of what’s happening. As Germany evolves and changes again, you’ll be up on that, and you’ll be ready to go.

@VinePairKeith is my Insta. Rate and review this podcast wherever you get your podcast from. It really helps get the word out there. And now, for some totally awesome credits.

“Wine 101” was produced, recorded, and edited by yours truly, Keith Beavers, at the VinePair headquarters in New York City. I want to give a big ol’ shout-out to co-founders Adam Teeter and Josh Malin for creating VinePair. And I mean, a big shoutout to Danielle Grinberg, the art director of VinePair, for creating the most awesome logo for this podcast. Also, Darbi Cicci for the theme song. Listen to this. And I want to thank the entire VinePair staff for helping me learn something new every day. See you next week.

Ed note: This episode has been edited for length and clarity.

The article Wine 101: Germany appeared first on VinePair.

Via https://vinepair.com/articles/wine-101-germany/

source https://vinology1.weebly.com/blog/wine-101-germany

[wineanddinosaur]

Wine 101: Germany

This episode of “Wine 101” is sponsored by E.& J. Gallo Winery. At Gallo, we exist to serve enjoyment in moments that matter. The hallmark of our company has always been an unwavering commitment to making quality wine and spirits. Whether it’s getting Barefoot and having a great time, making every day sparkle with La Marca Prosecco, or continuing our legacy with Louis Martini in Napa, we want to welcome new friends to wine and share in all of life’s moments. Cheers, and all the best.

In this episode of “Wine 101,” VinePair tastings director Keith Beavers discusses Germany’s wine region. Listeners will learn about all the Prädikats or categories that make up the region. Beavers takes listeners through the unique yet complicated history that is German wine law. Also, for listeners who know of German wine, chances are you have seen Riesling bottles on the American market.

However, Beavers will list the different white and red varieties that are made in Germany such as Silvaner, Grauburgunder, a Pinot Gris blend, Dornfelder, and Spätburgunder, a Pinot Noir blend. In terms of Riesling, there are six Prädikat categories that include Kabinett, Eiswein, and Trockenbeerenauslese, to name a few. And that is just scratching the surface!

Tune in to become an expert on Germany and its wines.

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Keith Beavers: My name is Keith Beavers, and did you know there are battery-powered lawnmowers now? Obviously, I got one. This is crazy.

What’s going on, wine lovers? Welcome to Episode 15 of VinePair’s “Wine 101” podcast, Season 2. My name is Keith Beavers, and I am the tastings director of VinePair. What’s happening? OK, so Germany’s nuts. It’s pretty deep. It’s pretty intense, but there are things we have to talk about. I can’t get into all of it, but we need to talk about Germany. We have to get to know what’s happening over there.

I know I say it a lot when we’re talking about a country and we’re talking about wine.I say, “You guys gotta understand, this is a unique thing going on here.” I know I say that a lot, but it’s true. Every country in Europe or every wine region in general has such a unique story. As we move through these episodes and we talk about European wine regions, I always start with the Greeks, Gauls, Romans, Saracens, Visigoths, Moors, dukes, monks, kings, and queens, and then the revolution. There are always these things going on, but within that, there’s all this uniqueness. I also say this because it’s hard to explain how intense the history of Germany is, and then to connect wine to that.

Of all the wine regions that I’ve researched, this country seems to change hands so frequently throughout history, that the wine industry is always playing catch-up with what’s going on politically and geopolitically in wartime in Germany. We’re talking all the way back before Charlemagne, because Charlemagne was German. Before Charlemagne all the way up to the 1980s, this country has been trying to equalize itself for so long. It’s finally getting there in modern times, we’re talking the last 30, 50 years.

Like the region of Champagne, Germany went through a trial-and-error situation as well. Where Champagne had all this crazy climate to deal with, so did Germany. The varieties that survive today are the varieties that survived this land along with the humans. I know this happens all over Europe. There are always these big shifts in history, but in Germany, it just seems so dramatic. It’s almost as when every time something shifted, the industry had to really move to acclimate the new thing. At some point in the wine region, the classical wine region of Germany, an entire section was lobbed off and given to France, the region of Alsace. It’s crazy. Imagine adapting to that.

OK, so we’ve lost an entire wine region. An entire section of the country is now given to France. All right, cool. Deal with that. There’s a really good chance that if you’ve heard about German wine, you first hear about Riesling, and then you hear about another Riesling, and then you hear about another Riesling and another Riesling. Riesling is becoming, what I read at one point, the calling card of German wine right now.

For white wine, there’s Müller-Thurgau, Silvaner, Grauburgunder (Pinot Gris), and Weissburgunder (Pinot Blanc). For red, there’s Spätburgunder (Pinot Noir), Dornfelder, Portugieser, Trollinger, Pinot Meunier, and Lemberger, which in Austria they call Blaufrankisch. There are a lot of different varieties being grown in Germany. The thing is, the percentage of those under vine is so small that we don’t see a lot of that over on the American market. Most of what we see here is either Riesling or everyday, affordable German wines. It’s not easy to find, but Dornfelder is a very affordable, easy-drinking, soft red wine that often comes in 1-liter bottles that is a great wine for a party. It’s awesome. We just don’t see a lot of it around.

Müller-Thurgau, Silvaner, these are grapes that make wines that are more popular in northern Italy than they are in Germany, even though they probably originated in Germany alone. Germany’s even messing around with Chardonnay these days. Also, the Pinot Meunier thing is crazy. In the Riesling episode, I gave you a rundown of the wine-growing region of Germany. I’m not going to get too deep into that because I really want to talk to you guys about German wine law. If you want to get into German wine these days, German wine law is happening. There are a lot of winemakers that are shunning it. There’s also even an organization that was formed to write their own laws within the law. It’s complicated, so I’m going to get into that more than anything else. If you want to get nice, deep, and wine region-specific, then go ahead and listen to the Riesling episode.

Just a quick recap. Wine-growing and producing regions in Germany are mainly located in the southern part of the country. That area is classically known as the Palatinate. In German, it’s named Pfalz. The lower part of the Palatinate would be named Unterpfalz. It’s here that the majority of the wine appellations of the wine regions exist. The oldest vineyards are on the left bank of the Rhine River, and then the right bank going south has more historically newer sites, if you will. That shows you how old this place is. These regions I get into more in the Riesling episode.

Here’s the capper: Across all 13 wine regions, the way German wine is classified is different than you would see in other places in Europe. The qualification and the classification of German wine is based on the must weight. You’ll remember the must from the first season all the way to the beginning, we’re talking about how wine is made. Must is that organic material after the crush that is just grape skins, moisture, flesh, pips, and skin. All that stuff. What’s also in that is all the natural sugar that the yeast is about to eat. That sugar adds to the weight of the must. The more sugar in the must, the heavier the must.

In Germany, they’ve developed a scale to weigh this must, it’s called the Oechsle scale. There are also other scales out there to weigh the sugar or waste must. There is Brix, which is very popular in the United States, another one called Baumé. They’re all interconnected. Usually when you’re weighing must weight, you’re estimating and calculating what will be the future alcohol percentage of the wine. For example, in America, 23 to 24 Brix, I think, is about 13 or 13.5 percent alcohol. There would be an equivalent Oechsle to that. The science and technology around this stuff are really cool. I don’t understand it completely but they use something called a hydrometer and something called a refractometer. A refractometer makes a little bit of sense to me. The less you can see, the more dense the sugar is. It’s hard to explain, but the German wine law states that depending on the must weight, depending on the sugar and the future alcoholic content of the wine, will determine where the wine is classified. I know, it’s crazy. It’s different. It’s cool. Let’s get into it.

German wine has two categories, and the second category has other stuff in it which we’ll get into. The first category was once called Tafelwein or table wine. It’s now called Deutscher Wein or land wine. This is similar to the entry-level categories in other European countries like vin de pays in France, which is country wine. Vino di Tavola in Italy, which means table wine. In Spain, Italy, and France, these categories exist, and a lot of wine is made within those categories. However, traditionally in Germany, not a lot of this category is made. It says about less than 4 percent of it is made. Right now on the American market, other than Riesling, that’s the majority of the wine we’re going to see. They’re often very affordable. They’re often a little bit sweet, red and white. But keep an eye on these. In Germany, they’re trying to elevate this level of wine a little bit. I believe they might be taking a little bit of the sugar out, trying to elevate the acidity. That’s just my theory, but keep an eye out. There is probably some awesome stuff coming in the future.

The second category is the largest category, and it is what we’re going to see most in the United States. When you look at a bottle of Riesling, this is what you’re going to see. This category is called Qualitätswein, which means quality wine from a specific region. Basically, that’s the AOC of France, the DOC of Italy, the DO of Spain. This is a regular run-of-the-mill EU-controlled appellations system, but all similarities with that end there. For a wine to be part of this category, the grape must originate from one of the 13 wine appellations of Germany, and it needs to reach the minimum must weight of that region. Even beyond that, the variety itself.

Every region has different must weight requirements. Every grape has its own must weight requirements. Within this category, there’s a superior category that you can be elevated to. It’s similar to the DOC and the DOCG of Italy, but not really. OK, let me explain. This is the scale. This is the thing. This is the 1971 German wine law saying, “Hey, we are going to categorize our wine by increasing must weights. We need to have categories for each of those must weights.” They created a category within Qualitätswein called Prädikatswein or Superior Quality Wine. There are six Prädikat or categories within the Prädikats, and all these categories are based on the Oechsle scale.

This is what you’re going to see and you’re going to see this on Riesling bottles. You have Kabinett, Spätlese, Auslese, Beerenauslese, Eiswein, and Trockenbeerenauslese. Kabinett, or the first level of these Prädikats, is the lightest of all of them. It has the least amount of sugar in Oechsle. It’s 70 to 82 degrees Oechsle. Basically, that just means it’s going to be about 10, maybe 11 degrees alcohol at the most. A lot of them are between 7 and 8 degrees alcohol. Some people like to say that because it’s the lightest, it can be some of the most affordable. The word Kabinett means you want to keep it in your cabinet just for any given time, which I think that there’s something about that is true. However, the word Kabinett was a word used to define quality, not just wine, but anything of quality, something you’d want to display on your cabinet. I don’t understand that too much, but that’s where it comes from. These are light wines. High acid, bright fruit, and in the Riesling category they’re fizzy, beautiful, and very refreshing.

The next category or Prädikat is called Spätlese. It translates as late harvest. For this Prädikat category, it really means the sugar levels at harvest. Sometimes they are picked later than grapes for Kabinett. Now, we’re straight-up on the Oechsle, you know what I mean? This category ups the Oechsle, and this is where wine will result in about 10 to 12 percent alcohol. You’ll notice a little more sweetness. You’re still getting a lot of acidity, but the sweetness is starting to increase a little bit. The next level is Auslese, which translates to selected harvest. Back in the day, traditionally, it was the grapes that were picked one week after the initial pick.

These days, it’s a little bit different. It just means the must weight at harvest. These wines reach about upwards of almost 14 percent, about up to 13.8 percent alcohol, which is around that normal percentage of what we know as American wine drinkers. Next, is Beerenauslese and also Eiswein. They’re in a similar category on the Oechsle scale. Beerenauslese means berry selection. Often, these wine grapes are infected with botrytis cinerea, otherwise known as noble rot. This is something I go into in the Bordeaux episode. The alcohol for these wines can be between 15 and 18 percent alcohol. We’re getting pretty alcoholic here. The thing about this category for Riesling, specifically, is where Riesling ages almost forever. This is the long-lived category for Riesling.

The last category is Trockenbeerenauslese and this means berry selection, but shriveled-on-the-vine berry selection. These berries have been infected with noble rot significantly and are made into wine. This is the highest must weight for any Prädikat, and at one time it was an infrequent category, but it’s getting warmer in Germany, so these Trockenbeerenauslese are being made more often. All of this was created in 1971. Then, there were all these tweaks going on throughout the years up until 2009. But that’s the general rule of how you will see wines on the American market, especially Riesling. Now, there’s something very specific happening here in that these wine laws are pretty dense. They’re really well thought out. It makes complete sense. All of it makes sense. It’s all about must weight. It makes sense.

However, there’s a quality control situation here because this is a broad rule across all regions, across all grape varieties. In the early 20th century, an organization called the VDP, Verband Deutscher Prädikatsweingüter, was initially developed by the few, a small group of fine-wine producers in the region, specifically for auctioning. This is when auctioning wines had come to Germany. Over the years, today, it actually includes winemakers from all 13 wine regions. What the VDP does is very interesting in that they design their own protocols within the Qualitätswein and Prädikatswein categories. They’re doing this because their eye on quality was like a hawk. This organization is so determined to produce quality that they will change the rules of the country. They will tweak the actual country’s wine laws to do whatever they want to make better wine. They have tried for a long time to get these new protocols into law. Obviously, it’s not working. What is happening is a lot of the winemakers around them that aren’t necessarily in the VDP are looking to the VDP and using their strategies as well, because it’s a quality-minded, quality-driven organization. It’s crazy.

To the VDP, which is now over 200 estates across the wine regions of Germany, they feel that lower yields are required and higher must weight is required for better quality wine than what is stated in the German wine law. They’re also very big on the varieties being traditionally associated with the area.

This is the group that really brought Riesling in as the calling card, being very strict and very adamant about it working there. They’re also big on lower yields, and they made a decision that their driest wines are going to be out of the Prädikat system. The Prädikat levels and categories are specifically for definite must weights, and a lot of other winemakers are following suit. This is the thing about Germany: It has a very old, complicated history with wine and just the country itself. It’s changed a lot, so much that today in 2021, the country understands itself. The wine region in Germany is old, established, incredible, and it’s amazing. But it still has more to do.

What we’ve talked about in this episode sets up the system and then sets up what’s changed or what’s changing. Now, when you go out there and enjoy German wine, you’ll start with Riesling and then go everywhere else. You get a sense of what’s happening. As Germany evolves and changes again, you’ll be up on that, and you’ll be ready to go.

@VinePairKeith is my Insta. Rate and review this podcast wherever you get your podcast from. It really helps get the word out there. And now, for some totally awesome credits.

“Wine 101” was produced, recorded, and edited by yours truly, Keith Beavers, at the VinePair headquarters in New York City. I want to give a big ol’ shout-out to co-founders Adam Teeter and Josh Malin for creating VinePair. And I mean, a big shoutout to Danielle Grinberg, the art director of VinePair, for creating the most awesome logo for this podcast. Also, Darbi Cicci for the theme song. Listen to this. And I want to thank the entire VinePair staff for helping me learn something new every day. See you next week.

Ed note: This episode has been edited for length and clarity.

The article Wine 101: Germany appeared first on VinePair.

source https://vinepair.com/articles/wine-101-germany/

[noelmu]

MONTH IN REVIEW 12/3/17 - 12/31/17

As another year ends, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means to “put everything in perspective.” It’s helpful advice, I think, though it’s advice that depends a lot on what kind of perspective the person proceeds to take. Throughout 2017, I know a lot of us have struggled with anxiety over geopolitical matters that are beyond the average person’s control. For me though, one of the takeaways from this year is that whenever possible I should remove myself from the daily discourse for a second, take a breath, and adopt either a broader or narrower view.

In the broader sense, I’ve found that it’s helped to look at history, and to think about the difficulties faced by civilizations before us, and the various cycles and swings: from prosperity to lack and back again, and between poles of authoritarianism and openness. Even in recent years, I’ve noticed that over and over our pundit class has made pronouncements about changes in the culture that they insist are locked-in and permanent, until they turn out to be anything but. I’ve seen Democrats and Republicans win elections after political scientists have declared that demographics and/or social attitudes should’ve made those victories impossible. In my lifetime I’ve seen radical changes in Eastern Europe, China, and the Middle East -- sometimes for the better, sometimes not. All I know for sure is that what we’re afraid of one day has been known to dissipate almost overnight (usually to be replaced by some new horror, granted). This doesn't make our fears unfounded, nor does it justify complacency. But it does mean that maybe we don’t have to be on edge 24-7.

In the narrower sense, 2017 to me has reemphasized the value of acting locally. Sweeping, nationwide changes are difficult; but there are plenty of daily opportunities to improve the quality of life in our immediate vicinity. Early this year I heard an interview with Asia Argento in which she said that after a lifetime of living under a corrupt Italian government, she’s learned to ignore what politicians do, and instead to focus on the people who live on her block. Granted, Argento is a well-known actress and filmmaker, which affords her the privilege to a little philosophical. But that doesn’t make her approach to life entirely wrong. All year long I’ve read stories about people on a local level getting things done. It’s been very encouraging, to know that on the smallest day-to-day level, a civil society can still click right along.

Narrowing my perspective even further, down to my house, I have to admit that we’ve had a pretty good year here. I worked pretty much non-stop, from January all the way up to this week. Donna has really connected with her last two freshman classes, and has settled into a personally satisfying role as a mentor to some truly outstanding young people. Our own two youngsters, Archer and Cady Gray, have accomplished some remarkable things both inside the classroom and at home, as they’ve pursued their various obsessions and hobbies. Cady Gray took a school trip to New York, became the designated artist for an on-line role-playing game, and got to sing with her choir at an Arkansas Symphony Orchestra Christmas concert. Archer made All-State in choir, got a 5 on the AP Physics test, a 4 on the AP World History test, and scholarship-worthy 1480 on the PSAT. We took our first real family vacation this summer, making memories we’ll carry with us for a lifetime.

One of the unexpected complications of our current time is that it’s hard not to feel a little apologetic when things are going well, given that social media and the incessant stream of news alerts never let us forget about how crummy others are feeling. But at the same time, I’ve invested a lot in my work, my marriage, and my children, and it would be ungracious not to appreciate the breaks I’ve been given, let alone to squander them.

So here’s how the Murray/Bowman household is ending 2017: stressed, but happy, and looking forward to better days, for all of us. Thank you for reading, and may God bless you all.

And now if you’re looking for something to do this New Year’s Eve, here’s a long list of links...

The A.V. Club The best films of 2017 that we didn’t review (I wrote about My Happy Family, Uncertain, and Walking Out) The A.V. Club’s 20 best TV shows of 2017 (I wrote about Halt And Catch Fire) The best film scenes of 2017 (I wrote about BPM and Call Me By Your Name) The 20 worst films of 2017 (I wrote about The Shack, Flatliners, and CHiPs) The 20 best films of 2017 (I wrote about Logan Lucky, Baby Driver, and Get Out, and my ballot is here)

The Los Angeles Times First person: Being a film buff in Arkansas isn't as hard as it used to be Under The Radar: Keanu, Hasidic Jews and streaming support (I wrote about John Wick: Chapter 2, Menashe, My Happy Family, Nocturama, and Their Finest) The Year In Home Entertainment: The Vietnam War and the best new video and streaming picks of 2017 Movie Review: Human Barbie can't save The Doll from its own incompetent horror Movie Review: Qatari sheiks pursue passion for falconry in documentary The Challenge Movie Review: Hollow In The Land has a winning similarity to Winter's Bone Movie Review: Eclectic guitarist gets his due in Bill Frisell: A Portrait Movie Review: Arty approach to woodland horror bogs down Desolation Movie Review: Netflix gets epic with Will Smith's fantasy-action thriller Bright, but the result is less than thrilling New In Home Entertainment: Dunkirk is a stirring and stunning World War II epic New In Home Entertainment: Tom Cruise pairs intensity and charisma in American Made

The New York Times 11 Shows We’ll Be Talking About In December TV Review: A Christmas Story Live! Wasn’t Lively Enough

Rolling Stone 10 Best TV Episodes of 2017: Better Call Saul, “Chicanery” 10 Best Horror Movies of 2017 (I wrote about Super Dark Times, The Devil’s Candy, and The Blackcoat’s Daughter) 12 New TV Shows You Should Be Watching (I wrote about At Home With Amy Sedaris, Brockmire, Detroiters, Great News, Manhunt: Unabomber, Tales From The Tour Bus, Sweet/Vicious, and What Would Diplo Do?) TV Review: The Walking Dead Season 8 Episode 7: Eugene-ics 101 TV Review: The Walking Dead Season 8 Episode 8: The Son Also Rises

Uproxx What We Talk About When We Don’t Talk About Young Sheldon

The Verge The Twin Peaks: The Return Blu-ray set explains what the show is, not what it means The 20 best TV shows of 2017

The Week Why The Middle is TV's most underrated comedy Tonya Harding's belated moment to shine Are Molly's Game and The Post too obviously about 2017?

[janiedean]

i'm not really worried about "ethnic groups disappearing" in the sense that what matters in your body is, being healthy, not being that or that colour. on the other hand, i worry about the power of immensely rich people like the Qatari royals, who use Islam in the same way Americans use Hollywood and big brands to "softly" assimilate more and more people. It's like the cold war 2.0. I fear our cultures may be snuffed out in those geopolitical fights, and our rights as well. (1/2)

I mean, look at how Saudi Arabia was just elected to join the Women's Right Commission by the ONU. They are so powerful that they can manage a coup like that one and people hardly bat an eye! So that's why the idea of welcoming people who are already susceptible to these ideas, is a bit frightening to me. I feel like it'd be sitting on a ticking time bomb, that if it ever came to my best interests as a woman they would be massively against me. (2/2)

I get what you’re saying but I think you’re having it slightly wrong if you ask mvho. I mean, I don’t like saudi arabia one bit and I’m not surprised that they managed to get elected to the women’s rights commission just because it’s not the first time the ONU pulls off crap like that, but at the same time the brand of islam in saudi arabia is not the same that’s everywhere else (it’s worse, admittedly) and... out of all the migrants who come here, I think there’s none or very little from saudi arabia (but a lot from yemen, which is not by chance a place directly oppressed by SA), so like... that’s not what I’d get worried about. also: economical migrants might be susceptible to the worst part of islamic ideology, but that’s another point we’ll touch in a moment. people who come to europe or leave because they’re persecuted or for their lack of human rights or because they’re political dissenters and so on actually are less susceptible to these ideas or if they’re muslim they can’t really care less about not cohexisting peacefully and assuming that by welcoming *muslims* we’re welcoming potential terrorists we’re making a perspective mistake because the ones who come here mostly come to escape regimes that oppress them or wars that forbid them to have a decent life and so on, not to snuff out cultures. also, if you look at it, all of the most recent isis recruits or at least a large part of them which were responsible for the latest terrorist attacks in europe were second or third generation immigrants who were dissatisfied with their life conditions and which were weak subjects that isis recruited. our terrorists are already here at home, not trying to get in, and if we don’t solve that issue (by making second/third generations feel welcome in Europe instead of giving force to the isis-led WESTERNERS HATE OUR RELIGION rhetoric) then we aren’t going anywhere.

also, I think that... idk how to put it but sorry, we’re giving our cultural roots very little credit here. european culture/civilization/culture of rights has been evolving since forever but there are things we established in the last five centuries or so (idk, SEPARATION OF POWERS when it comes to the government to say one) that are... like... really tied in our culture/way of being. also, there’s some things that culturally survived since the greeks or the romans (I mean, europe as a name comes from a greek myth and we haven’t done away with it now have we), we have mostly similar language roots regardless of where they come from, we have a shared culture, we have shared values (at large, then obviously every place has its nuances/issues), we’ve spent years building up the EU with a vision in mind and I highly doubt that a further merging of cultures that’s been happening since forever (I mean guys we use ARAB NUMBERS, arabs brought coffee here and it’s not even the beginning of it, european and arabian culture haven’t been strangers) is going to threaten our system of values. idk I don’t get why everyone is worried about the collapse of european civilization because of... 6% of the total of migrants from the entire planet arriving here right now or because globalization is happening. it’s happened for ages. the japenese isolated themselves for years, then opened their doors and then a lot of goddamned shit happened a good part of it fairly horrid but I mean, has japanese culture died out? it changed some, but it hasn’t and neither will ours. let’s just... not be that pessimistic, shall we?

[russiancircles]

The Thin Air // Interview with Russian Circles

By Will Murphy

Ahead of shows at Dublin’s Whelan’s on Wednesday, March 22 and Belfast’s Empire Music Hall the following night, Will Murphy speaks to Brian Cook, bassist with Chicago instrumental masters Russian Circles about touring, politics, their latest album, the ideal audience, the craft of songwriting and more.

Hi, Brian. How’s the road been treating you? The next few months look pretty exciting in terms of venues and nations, is there anywhere that you’re all particularly looking forward to? What will you be listening to stave off the monotony of touring?

Touring has been good. We took care of our headlining U.S. dates last fall, and we divided Europe into two tours this time around just because there were so many cities we wanted to hit. We did Scandinavia and Eastern Europe back in October and November, which was pretty exhausting, but overall a great experience. Sometimes you get so accustomed to hitting the same places over and over again that it becomes easy to take things for granted, then you wind up playing a few shows in Romania and it serves as a reminder that we’re very fortunate to be able to do what we do. Now we’re out doing Western Europe and the UK, which is very familiar territory for us. Not as much of an adventure, but rewarding to be back in cities where we have friends and know the lay of the land. In terms of music, I’ve sort of reverted back to the old school touring listening habits. It used to be that you’d go on tour with a half dozen cassettes or a small book of CDs, then the iPod made it so that you toured with your entire music library and you’d never listen to the same album twice on a six-week tour. Now I’m back to traveling with just a few albums on my phone. I’ve been listening to a lot of Sun City Girls, Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk, Michael Rother, and Lungfish on my headphones. There has also been more than a few spins of the new Power Trip, Oranssi Pazuzu, and Rotting Christ albums in the van.

I remember seeing you when you were last in Dublin. What struck me was how unwilling you were to rush anything. Everything took exactly as long as it was going to take. It was a really ballsy move, and I’m wondering has it ever backfired horribly?

The bigger problem is not allowing enough time. Mike and I have so many changes and adjustments we have to do between songs—different tunings, different guitars, different pedal settings, different Taurus settings—and we do it all while bridging the songs with interludes. Plus, there’s the whole thing of trying to squeeze in a swig of beer and a toweling down of the face between all of that. We used to tour with these auxiliary delay pedals at the end of our chain that served zero purpose other than to silently notifying the rest of the band that we were ready to go into the next song. If the red light on Mike’s delay pedal was on, we knew he was ready. Same for me. The only problem is that sometimes one of us would forget to turn it on, and we’d stand there waiting for nothing until the guilty party remembered to stomp on the pedal.

Is there ever a frustration performing to an audience, given that so much intricate detail is lost when you port the songs to a live context? With that in mind, do you prefer to spend your time in studio constructing these mini epics or letting them loose on the audience night after night?

I’m not sure what the ideal audience would be. I remember Fugazi talking about how their anti-moshing stance grew to such mythical proportions that it seemed like people were afraid to dance at their concerts. I can empathize with that—I hate seeing violent dancing, but it also feels like a lot more work to play when people are totally stoic. The happy medium is when people are physically moving to the music but also respecting their neighbors. At this point, I try to look out into the audience as little as possible, because that happy medium is so difficult to achieve. As far as writing versus performing, they are both gratifying. I don’t think I’d be happy doing just one or the other. I love performing music live. Most of my love of other peoples’ music comes from watching it—or envisioning it—unfolding in real time. So the process of making a song happen in the present, in a very specific environment and with a select audience, is really magical. But if you don’t love the composition side of music, you should just stick to being in a tribute band.

You recorded a trio of albums with Brandon Curtis, each of which was absolutely stellar. Yet for last year’s Guidance, you opted to go with Kurt Ballou. What inspired this change? Was there ever a concern that Ballou might not bring out the same level of performance that Curtis helped to unleash? How hands-on was he during the recording?

Working with Brandon was amazing. We were really drawn to his ability to capture space and dimension with this work with Secret Machines. He’s also just an incredibly knowledgeable musician. He was good set of ears and a really good sounding board for those three records. We opted to go with Kurt Ballou on Guidance simply because we wanted to try something new, and we knew Kurt would share a lot of our musical reference points. Whenever you hire someone to produce a record there’s always that concern over their level of involvement, particularly if you come from a punk background. You don’t want some outside party compromising your vision and trying to make your songs appeal to a broader audience. But our songs tend to be so malleable and go through so many permutations that we have come to value having that set of fresh ears that can hear the different variations and have an unbiased opinion on what works and what doesn’t. In that respect, both Kurt and Brandon were amazing. I think Kurt tended to be a bit more focused on shaping tones while Brandon tended to have more ideas in terms of composition, but they both definitely made their mark on our albums. I can’t speak highly enough of either of them.

A number of groups who’ve recorded with Ballou have talked about Salem being a deeply unsettling town, given the commercialisation of its brutal history. Did any sense of this permeate the songwriting?

Salem is a strange place. It shuts down early. We would stop recording around 8pm just because dinner options after 9pm were virtually non-existence, which was an adjustments considering that we’re from Chicago and New York, where you can eat whatever you want at pretty much any hour of the night. But the witch trials weren’t really something that loomed in the back of our minds during our time there. The juxtaposition of the tourism trade and the public inebriate population was far more jarring.

Your songs feel so meticulously planned and crafted. How long do spend with a single song? How do you know when it is ready or, if it’s the kind that’ll never be perfect, when, if ever, do you throw your hands up and say “fuck it, it’s good enough”?

Some songs come together really quickly. Some songs are labored over for months and months, right up to and through the recording process. The album is bookended by two compositions that were crafted by individual members of the band and transformed into full-band songs with a minimal amount of effort. Then there are songs like Vorel that are transforming even as we play them over the course of this tour. We have to set deadlines for recording otherwise we’d tinker with songs forever. There’s an old lesson I learned in a painting class: every twenty minutes, step away from your work to reassess where you’re at. Inevitably, you’ll step away at some point and realize it’s done and any additional brush strokes are just detracting from the immediacy of the work. It’s a similar thing with songs in the studio sometimes. Every once and awhile you’ll hear a playback and realize that any additional changes or embellishments are just going to diminish the impact of the song.

Tracks like Afrika and Lisboa suggested a focus on geopolitics and a wider cultural sphere. What made you choose these subjects? What was it about the Portuguese capital that inspired you?

I was definitely drawn to political bands when I was younger. I liked topical punk bands. I liked ‘60s protest music. Basically, I just liked bands that obviously gave a shit about the world and expressed some capacity for empathy. I hated love songs. I hated songs about dancing, or partying, or money. Of course, being too topical can make your music a bit dated. I love punk music from the early ‘80s, but it’s a little distracting to hear bands ranting against Reagan and Thatcher. We’re not an overtly political band; there isn’t really a way for us to do that as an instrumental group, but I do like infusing our records with imagery that has some sort of historical or political context, just because it harkens back to a lot of the music I was obsessed with during my formative years. As far as specific song titles, they have very specific meaning to us personally, but we prefer to keep those meanings unclear to the general public. That said, we’ve already mentioned this before in other interviews so I guess I can say it again here, Lisboa was given its title simply because Mike began putting the song together during some downtime on tour in Portugal.

Memorial featured some spellbinding vocals, whereas with Guidance you opted for a purely instrumental approach. What was the reasoning behind this? Are there any plans to bring in vocals for the next release?

We dabbled with vocals on Memorial and Praise Be Man because they seemed like interesting experiments. We have no plans of making vocals a recurring part of our method, but that isn’t to say we won’t feel compelled to explore the option in the future. I enjoy the fact that we can draw heavily from the world of underground metal, but I don’t think borrowing from the vocal styles of those bands would do anything to enhance our music. If anything, I think it would be a distraction. I think being an instrumental band has allowed us a lot more stylistic fluidity, and that is far more important to us than having a lyrical component to our music.

There’s a lot of darkness in the world currently. Trump and Muslim ban, Aleppo, the continued success of Nickelback. How, if at all, does the current state of affairs affect your songwriting?

Well, Guidance is ultimately a reference to our collective uncertainty. For the three of us in the band, it literally referred to a lot of uncertainty in our personal lives, but we tried to extrapolate that to a general sense of apprehension towards the future for the sake of the album. In that sense, “guidance” can refer to the mistaken notion that there is some sort of benevolent leadership out there that has the public’s best interests in mind, or it can refer more generally to the allure of some overarching answer to all our problems. It’s all a carrot on a stick. So it goes.

Finally, given the foreboding and gloom that your work is shrouded in, where and how do you find the inspiration for the more delicate elements of the tracks?

Being that we don’t all live in the same city, we spend a lot of time writing independently. And while we all write with the idea of crafting songs that lend themselves to the darker and louder end of our spectrum, we don’t shut out any ideas that may come up. When you’re playing your instrument alone in your room, a lot of times the quieter and mellower stuff winds up sounding a lot more satisfying than the paired-down versions of the heavier stuff. For example, Asa was not meant to be a Russian Circles song, but those notes sounded good together and it turned into a little song, and I forwarded it along to the other guys in the band just because we have a pretty open sharing policy with our music. And it wound up being something that resonated with Mike and Dave. Overboard was actually two separate songs that were written completely independently by Mike and I and they just happened to fit together. So while we never deliberately set out to write those kinds of songs, sometimes they just happen.

Photos by Ryan Russell and Tomas Mladek 

(via The Thin Air)

[amanby]

Q&A Responses

Thanks for all the questions, everyone. Boy, did I have a hard time filtering through them all to pick the best ones! And here they are…

—————–

Sally, Geneva:

- What I would like to know is…how do you calculate how much money you should have on you at any one time? Enough to cover expenses but not enough to tempt anyone to rob you?

xx Granny

Good question Granny! In my wallet, which I keep in my pocket, I always carry no cards, and very little cash: the equivalent of £10 at most, which is enough for any meal, hotel room, bar bill or bus ticket. If that gets pickpocketed, it’s not the end of the world (although I would lose some precious beer labels)

Now here’s the ingenious bit: my very talented mother, who also happens to be your very talented daughter, improvised a secret pouch by sewing together some curtain lining, a bag strap and a zip, which I always wear around my waist, tucked into my shorts or trousers. It’s completely invisible, and in there I hold larger amounts of cash, my cards and my passport. If I need any of the above, I just nip to a toilet and reshuffle things!

Kit, USA:

- Have you had any nervous times while sleeping in your tent?

One occasion stands out. Sleeping on a quiet beach on Pemba, Tanzania, I woke up to the sound, smell, and heat of a brightly-burning nearby fire; my immediate reaction was that the local chief had objected to my unauthorised camping and was taking extreme measures against it! Fortunately, it was actually just a fisherman keeping himself warm with a bonfire while waiting for dawn to break.

- Are most things still relatively inexpensive even when you suspect you are getting ripped off?

Compared to Europe, definitely. I’ve found living on $15 a day pretty comfortable. But I’ve been surprised by the cost of any tourist activity here: tours and national park fees are significantly higher than in South America, for example.

- What has been your favorite beach or body of water?

Phwoar, that’s a tricky one! Diani in Kenya or Zanzibar would be the obvious choice for a postcard beach, but given my previously limited experience of freshwater lakes, I’ll go for one of the great Rift Valley lakes. Malawi was a perfect colour and temperature, but I’m going to choose a small beach at Jacobsen’s campsite on Lake Tanganyika; I had it all to myself at a time when I was still limping around with blisters and sore feet post-walk, and to lie half-submerged in the water for hours on end, reading my book, was unforgettable.

Charles, London:

- Alex, what has been the best way to engage the locals and not be the Mzungu? In which country has it been easiest?

Yo midge! Short answer: it’s been difficult to not be seen as the white man in every country. I was expecting it to an extent but have been surprised how, even in multicultural cities like Nairobi, I still attract so much attention based on the colour of my skin just walking around.

The way locals react to the mzungu differs: in Kenya and Zanzibar they’re more used to it and boisterously try their tricks to get money from you. In Ethiopia, there’s widespread begging (“hello, pen! Hello, money!”) whereas in Malawi and Rwanda they tend to sit and stare as you pass by. In Rwanda it was also a game of bravado for the kids in front of their friends, asking for money (“givameyamornee”), but only once I’d walked past, and never in any expectation of receiving it.

In terms of not being the mzungu, I’ve had most success sitting in the white Toyota Hiace matatus which serve as public transport everywhere. There, it’s a given that the person I’m sitting next to and I will be in each other’s company for some time, so conversation starts and continues on a more level footing than it does in other situations.

Premier League football, and particularly The Arsenal, is also a good leveller. And having a sense of humour and learning at least the basics of each language has definitely helped too.

But obviously my time with Moses and his family was the great success from this point of view. For me, this trip is a travel one more than a project one (like Ecuador or New Caledonia); but certainly, the best way to fit in would be to stay in the same place for an extended period of time, properly integrated into local life and serving a palpably useful purpose.

Angus, London:

- What role have you seen Islam play in day to day life out there? HOT TOPIC

Hot topic indeed, and an appropriate one for this relentlessly hard-hitting blog. Which is also the reason why some of your frankly lewd and ungodly questions will not be getting an answer on here, Angus.

Well, given its historical trade with the Middle East, the coast has a far greater Islamic influence than inland, and this has been evident from Mombasa to Zanzibar to Ilha de Mozambique, manifesting itself particularly obviously in dress and architecture.

In my limited experience, it seems to me that domestic conflicts tend to be drawn on tribal rather than religious lines; Ethiopia is a good example of this, where muslims and orthodox Ethiopian christians from Oromo and Amhara provinces are equally frustrated by perceived (and real) preferential treatment received by the Tigrai. There, as elsewhere, communities seemed to me to be pretty tolerant of different religious practices.

I have to mention one notable exception, which was a Christian conference in Dar Es Salaam entitled ‘How to Stop the Spread of Islam in East Africa’, which I unwittingly got caught up in when I caught the bus from Dar to Nairobi, sitting next to an attendee preacher and telling him straight off the bat about my atheistic beliefs. Cue 16 hours of frantic questions as he tried to save my soul…

- There’s a lot of geopolitical talk about which superpower is gaining influence in Africa: whether it be China, Russia, or the US. Have you seen any discernible evidence of this, and if so, what do you think the prospects are for the continent?

Well the Chinese are very visible in infrastructure construction throughout Africa. Apparently the deal they offer to all countries is to build their roads for free (employees and materials) in exchange for extraordinarily preferential rates on trade deals.

Lots of grains get carried around in recycled USAID bags, so our friends Stateside clearly have influence based on the reliance countries have on their charity. Let’s see how that one pans out…

And I’ve seen nothing at all of the Russians. Which probably means their spies and hackers have got fingers in all sorts of dodgy pies.

- What’s the best song you’ve heard out there?

Not sure I’ve heard this year’s Christmas #1 just yet. Although today I was treated to a live performance of Wrecking Ball by Mozambique’s answer to Billy Elliot, a young boy dancing naked on the beach using an empty plastic water bottle (which I’d given him five minutes earlier) as a microphone.

- How are you avoiding the pitfalls of the gapyah traveller - immersing yourself in poverty tourism to make for some authentic life experiences - and have you bumped into any western tossers who encapsulate this?

I’m in two minds about this. On the one hand, I do think that westerners can - and should - try to exert a positive influence during their visit. Giving dollars to white, western hotel and tour company owners doesn’t tick this box. And if I didn’t believe this, then I’ve wasted a lot of time in several continents since leaving school.

Having said that, oh yes, I’ve met a few 'egotourists’ and they can be excruciating. One self-satisfied English girl who had just painted a school wall and was so happy with herself that she’d tell anyone who would listen all about it was particularly painful. Nicely painted schools is not the answer to the issues this continent’s children have in their search for an education.

- If a gun was put to your head tomorrow and you were told you had to settle in Africa and start a business immediately, what would that business be?

Easy. I’d expand the Uganda Youth Football League to create a business arm to work alongside the charity. We’d be the agents to complement the coaches and get East African kids into European leagues.

And don’t worry about the gun, I’m seriously contemplating doing it of my own free will!

Nicky, London:

- Where are you planning to go in South Africa?

'Planning’ is not a word I would associate closely with this trip, Mum!

Seriously, I have little idea. Rambo is flying out on some trumped up excuse of a job, and his time is more precious than mine, so I’m leaving the itinerary for our ten days together to him. Which, as his former landlady, you’ll realise is a risky strategy…

Things I’d like to do (during my time with Rambo or in the two weeks after, when I’ll be on my own again): see relatives, walk Drakensburg, traverse Lesotho, visit St. Marks, explore the south east, watch live sport, learn to kite surf, enjoy comforts of Cape Town…

[anonymoustalks]

Do you know what happens when a man has nothing left to lose, feels like his country has betrayed him, and has a whole lot of anger

(6-17-20) You both like politics.

You: heyo

Stranger: Hello

You: anything on your mind?

Stranger: Not really

You: anything you're interested in then?

Stranger: Talking about Politics

You: sounds very general

Stranger: Yeah

You: do you have a political leaning?

Stranger: I am a Fascist

You: ahh

You: hmm...

You: I have a feeling you sound familiar

Stranger: Alright

You: hmm... I save my omegle conversations so I hope you don't mind me digging back a bit

You: are you on omegle a lot?

Stranger: I don't keep count

You: 

(6-14-20) You both like politics. You: heya Stranger: Hello You: anything on your mind today? Stranger: No You: fair enough ^^ You: any issues that you care about? Stranger: Not really You: is there a reason why you like this tag then? Stranger: To talk about Politics You: mhm anything particular about it? Stranger: Anything You: mhm do you have a particular political leaning? Stranger: Fascist You: ohh interesting You: why fascism, btw? You: I never really understood it Stranger: Because it aligns with my values You: your values being… strength? authority…? Stranger: Strength, Honor, Spirituality, Race, Masculinity

You: just the beginning

Stranger: Okay

You: sound familiar or nope?

Stranger: I didn't read it

You: oh okay

You: anyhow how was your day?

Stranger: Fine

You: mhm anything you're planning in the upcoming weeks and months?

Stranger: No

You: mhm

You: any goals that you have?

You: or dreams?

Stranger: To follow God

You: right

You: Okay, would you be interested in talking about masculinity?

Stranger: What about it

You: I'm just curious about your views on it

You: like that and fascism and things

Stranger: Masculinity is embracing the biological and spirtual truths of being a man

You: what are the spiritual truths of being a man?

Stranger: Men are meant to be leaders

You: mhm can you give some examples of masculine men and not-masculine men?

Stranger: hold on

Stranger: A Masculine man is a man that lives his life with discipline. He does not indulge in pleasure, and he does not allow his emotions to rule over him. He is a master of his body and of his mind. A masculine man enjoys violence and aggression and knows when and where to use them, he also knows when and where to be gentle. He follows God with all his heart and takes care of his family and people.

You: why is enjoying violence and aggression?

Stranger: A non-masculine male is pacifistic, indulges in pleasure, succumbs to his emotions, does not follow God, does not want a family

You: I guess I'm curious about the violence-pacificism dichotomy

Stranger: Because violence and aggression are a man's first love

Stranger: All men are natural predators

You: I'm not totally sure that I understand ^^

Stranger: Our natural instinct is to compete and fight

You: mhm okay

Stranger: Instead of repressing this instinct like the modern world would have us, instead we should embrace it

You: hmm, what would society look like if it were embraced?

Stranger: Like most of human history until it started becoming more liberal

You: hmm

You: idk I don't really like war

You: although I think I remember you saying you believe war is inevitable

Stranger: War is to man as maternity is to woman

You: Do you think war is good for society?

Stranger: Yes

You: how so?

Stranger: War is spiritual nourishment for men, without it, a large part of what it means to be a man is lost. War is essential to many functions, such as preventing over-population, creating opportunities for heroes to show their quality, as well as the acquisition of resources

You: can I ask you a hypothetical scenario?

Stranger: I suppose

You: so imagine that you are the emperor of a big empire

You: your empire has everything it needs, is wealthy, and lots of things are good

You: but you have smaller countries on your bordder

You: would you invade them just because you can?

Stranger: Yes

Stranger: What is the point of an Empire if not to rule the world?

You: I see, what if they are a different race/ethnicity/culture?

Stranger: They will be enslaved

You: why?

Stranger: Because they are not one of us

You: hmm

You: why is it necessary to rule the world again?

Stranger: Because if you do not rule the world, eventually the world will rule you

You: so what if the scenario was changed, and keeping your empire as is will leave things stable and continue to be a golden ages for many years

You: but trying to invade is risky and a chance of failure

You: would you still try to take the risk?

You: for... idk, glory?

Stranger: A coward spends all his time worrying about failure, because spiritually that is what they have doomed themselves to

Stranger: You cannot have ambition without risk, to be worried about failure in such a context is ridiculous

Stranger: As Tacitus once said

Stranger: "Great Empires are not maintained by timidity"

You: idk I think I'm just imagining some of the board games that I play. There are certain offensive moves that are good, but others when people are too greedy and they overextense

You: *overextend

Stranger: And

You: idk, isn't waging war constantly liable to overextension?

Stranger: You think too much about risks and failures

Stranger: Do you think great men in history would have achieved anything if all they did was sit around contemplating "what if this happens!!!!" "oh no!!! what if that happens!!!!"

You: idk, I think many people had goals

You: and sometimes war was a means to achieving their goals

You: but it gets a bit convoluted if war itself is your goal

Stranger: Nobody is saying war itself is the goal

You: aren't you saying that war is good? And countries should wage war if they have an opportunity for it?

Stranger: How is that remotely near the same thing as saying war itself is the goal

You: Mhm... I just don't see an objective behind war you advocate for, I guess?

Stranger: I already stated them

You: prevent overpopulation, provide a platform for heroes, and acquire resources?

Stranger: Yes

You: mhm......

You: hmm, what if in this hypothetical scenario, your empire isn't overpopulated, and your empire has plenty of resources?

Stranger: There are always rivals with resources. Even if we do not need them now, they do, and we should not tolerate that

You: ^^ I guess I don't know how to respond anymore

Stranger: I am not surprised

You: why is that?

Stranger: Because you are an organism of the modern world

You: mhm, I guess so

You: I think we have several fundamental differences in views that are just hard for me to surmount

Stranger: The modern world has blinded you people so effectively you cannot even recognize when you are being conquered. The Negro revolution is conquering the United States and nobody is noticing

You: sure go on

Stranger: Truly the Anglo-Saxon must be the most pathetic race from Europe

You: out of curiosity what is your heritage?

Stranger: Spanish

You: I see do you distinguish between spanish heritage and idk... french heritage when you imagine your state?

Stranger: Yes why wouldn't I

You: it's confusing because "white" often gets blurred together here

Stranger: There is no white identity in Nazi Racial science

You: are there races that you are more sympathetic to and friendlier to?

Stranger: Mine

You: do you distinguish between spanish-american and spanish?

Stranger: I don't know what you're talking about

You: I guess I'm trying to imagine if you somehow became the leader of the territory of land presently known as the United States

You: what would you do?

You: who would you consider your citizens?

You: that kind of thing

You: and I guess who you would enslave?

Stranger: I would not be a leader of any territory here, I do not care about this place

You: what do you care about?

Stranger: Following God

You: hmm... so you're not interested in fascism in a physical geopolitical sense?

Stranger: Where are you getting that from

You: idk you said you were interested in fascism

Stranger: Interested in Fascism?

Stranger: I am a Fascist

Stranger: What do you mean

You: for most people in the politics tag, usually that means they wish their country were fascist or socialist or whatever

Stranger: I don't really care about what happens to the US

Stranger: I don't have any connection to it

You: is there any country you have a connection to?

Stranger: Spain

You: I see, were you born in spain?

Stranger: No

You: oh have you been there?

Stranger: No

You: hmm...

You: do you speak spanish?

Stranger: Yes

You: oh okay ^^

You: was your mother an immigrant? I don't remember if I asked you before

Stranger: No

You: do you want to move to spain one day?

Stranger: Yes

You: oh okay

You: and become a spanish citizen?

Stranger: Obviously

You: cool, I didn't know that about you

You: I guess I feel like I understand a little bit better, I think

Stranger: You will never truly understand because we do not live in the same world

You: right, I wouldn't really pretend to say that I understand

You: but it's nice to know that you want to go to spain

You: do you have any distant relatives in spain?

Stranger: Yes

You: uncles? cousins?

Stranger: Yes

You: that's nice, are you in touch with them?

Stranger: No

You: oh, are you thinking of reaching out to them?

Stranger: No

You: so you're thinking of going to spain alone?

Stranger: Yes

You: hmm, a sudden question popped up in my head, but I feel like I would know your answer

Stranger: Alright

You: Are you doing okay?

Stranger: Yes

You: idk, sometimes I feel a little bit worried, more so today than last time I guess

Stranger: I do not feel worried

You: yeah, I wouldn't think you would feel worried

You: I really hope things go well for you

Stranger: I do not think you fully understand what that would look like

You: It's okay, don't worry about it ^^

You: even if you find it amusing I guess

Stranger: You will regret hoping things go well for me one day

You: sure ^^

You: did you have any interesting conversations today on omegle?

Stranger: This was the first one

You: ahh okay... I think this was my third or fourth today

You: hmm, I think I am probably a bad person

Stranger: I do not believe in good or bad people, only good or bad decisions

You: weirdly, I think I probably think something kind of similar

Stranger: That isn't what you said

You: I know, it's similar but different

You: like I don't think people are objectively good or bad

You: but I think everyone has their own sense of good and bad

You: and the objective good/bad doesn't exist

Stranger: I believe in an objectively good choice and objectively bad one

You: mhm, but you don't believe in an objectively good person and an objectively bad person

You: have you been religious your entire life?

Stranger: Most of it

You: When did you have the revelation that you were doing X things for the wrong reasons?

Stranger: All the time

Stranger: Improvement never ends, correction never ends

You: but I thought one day you decided to stop going to church. Why didn't you stop earlier?

Stranger: Because I did not get the revelation yet

You: I see...

You: what was the revelation like?

You: when you got it?

Stranger: I don't remember the date

You: so one day you just decided you were going to go to church?

Stranger: Re-read what you wrote

You: weren't sorry

You: typo

Stranger: I just realized I was going for the wrong reasons, that's all there is to it

You: okay

You: does your mom still go?

Stranger: She never went

You: really? that surprises me actually

You: for some reason I had imagined that you came from a religious family

Stranger: I don't

You: mhm how did you learn everything about christ that you did then?

Stranger: Reading the bible, following Him and experiencing the life for myself

You: What was it like when you first started reading the bible?

Stranger: It was a very long time ago

You: mhm

Stranger: I remember being filled with God's love

You: wow

You: I don't think I ever really felt that way

You: I think I mostly just read the children's versions when I was younger

You: I think the first time I tried reading it was a bit hard for me to understand

You: I also remember being scared by some of the stories too

Stranger: I never felt that way

You: mhm I didn't go to Sunday school for very long

Stranger: I never been to anything like that

You: idk, I don't have a lot to say about it

You: Do you write much at all?

Stranger: No

Stranger: Unless you count omegle conversation

You: well, only if you count it I guess

You: I'm just wondering if you formulate all of your thoughts in your head

You: or if you process them some way

You: I remember you saying that you read a lot of books too

Stranger: I don't read a lot of books

You: D: I remembered wrong?!

Stranger: I read the bible and sometimes other things

Stranger: But I've only fully read about 3 books in my entire life, I don't like reading in general

You: Oh...

You: I must have been mistaken then

You: I thought you mostly trained and read during your day?

Stranger: Yes

You: so you mainly read the bible?

Stranger: Yes

You: oh...

You: I thought you read many things

Stranger: The bible and military history / strategy, anthropology, nutrition and exercise, and that's about it

You: Do you read about military history online or something?

You: if not in books?

Stranger: Yes. Online is free

You: ah okay

You: are there websites you like for reading about these things?

Stranger: Wikipedia

You: mhm

You: ohhh

You: I feel like you would be a good person to ask

You: what do you know about the kosovo war?

Stranger: A fair amount

You: what is your opinion about it?

Stranger: I hope Serbia will retake that land and expel the Albanians

You: I met a serbian today on omegle

You: he said the wikipedia article is biased against them

Stranger: I can recognize bias

You: mhm

You: I guess that's a nice coincidence I guess

You: the serbian I met wanted to immigrate to the US and become a navy seal though

You: idk if that made a lot of sense to me though

Stranger: It is best not to dwell on things other way and instead worry about yourself

You: mhm I guess so

You: I just find omegle entertaining possibly?

You: why do you go on omegle?

Stranger: Because I can disconnect and not worry about people knowing how to contact me

You: Ahh what are you trying to disconnect from?

Stranger: The conversations

You: (brb I want to find a blanket)

You: what conversations?

Stranger: ..the conversations on omegle

You: you want to disconnect from the conversations on omegle?

You: I'm not sure if I understand

Stranger: You seem kind of retarded

You: yup you told me that last time lol

Stranger: I am saying I go on omegle because there is no risk of a person wanting to be friends with me, I can just disconnect when I am done

You: ahh okay

You: yeah I can relate to that

Stranger: In real life people will want to be friends

You: I knew someone once who felt that friends are a liability

Stranger: I don't consider them to be a liability, I just don't have any use for friends

You: hmm

Stranger: You are a liberal right

You: lol

Stranger: Yes or no

You: if I was stupidly stubborn and didn't answer, would that annoy you?

Stranger: A conversation requires communication

Stranger: Are you not here for that

You: mhm yeah, but I just find it amusing that similar patterns arise since the last time we talked

Stranger: Why would you purposely withhold political views in a political conversation

You: I'm sort of moderate-left

Stranger: Are you American

You: yup

Stranger: And are you okay with the current witch-hunting against conservatives in this country

You: mhm I don't like witch hunts

Stranger: You realize what they're creating right

Stranger: Anyone that wasn't a radical anti-leftist is sure going to be one tomorrow

You: mhm it is deeply polarizing times ^^

Stranger: They want to take jobs away from people as punishment for not following the current political agenda of neo-liberalism

Stranger: Do you know what happens when a man has nothing left to lose, feels like his country has betrayed him, and has a whole lot of anger

You: violence

Stranger: Not just any everyday bar fight violence

You: do you feel this way too?

Stranger: I probably would have if I never bothered mastering my emotions

You: mhm

Stranger: Random violence never accomplishes anything except cyclical retribution

You: so you want something purposeful?

Stranger: My philosophy is that if you're going to strike at the enemy, strike them in such a way that they will never recover

Stranger: Otherwise what you're doing is just another pathetic form of suicide

Stranger: What would I gain from driving into a group of protestors

Stranger: What would I gain from shooting up a mall

Stranger: Nothing, and it would tear my soul apart to have destroyed innocent people in such a manner

Stranger: But I am used to having nothing left to lose, and this situation is not new to me, I can adapt

Stranger: Others wont, others cant

You: right

Stranger: And they will be driving cars into groups of protestors

Stranger: And they will be shooting groups of people

Stranger: People who otherwise would be mumbling to themselves about gay marriage and niggers and go to work the next day and leave everyone alone

Stranger: Has had everything taken away from them and are now a weapon

You: how would you fix things?

Stranger: "fix things"

You: if trump suddenly called you up and asked for your advice

Stranger: I would tell him there is no going back

You: when was the turning point?

You: or the critical mistake?

Stranger: The turning point was social media

You: so go back to idk 2000 something and ban social media?

Stranger: That is obviously not possible, hence no going back

Stranger: Social media has destroyed the art of language and communication

Stranger: Political arguments and disicussions are no longer about understanding one another

Stranger: They're about who can have the most witty comeback

You: mhm

Stranger: All that is left is violence

You: can you explain the link between social media and jobs?

Stranger: People are getting fired from their jobs for publicly expressing they don't care about black lives matter

Stranger: And the narrative around it, is "silence is complicity"

Stranger: "White" people in this country are being conquered by the Negro

Stranger: And they are fine with it

You: do you live in a liberal state?

Stranger: No

Stranger: I used to

You: oh

You: I feel like I haven't heard too many people getting fired from their jobs for not saying anything about blm

Stranger: I said for expressing they don't care about it

You: ahhh okay

Stranger: For not actively supporting it

You: mhm... it's a scary cycle, I think

You: managers/owners feel like they are responding to public image

You: and workers take the brunt of it

You: I guess it is the same with police officers too

Stranger: Your people aren't leaving room for anything other than violence, because it is what they want

Stranger: They think they are on a crusade

Stranger: They think they are righteous heroes

Stranger: Fighting against the evil white racist system

You: mhm

You: yeah I think it's sad

Stranger: When a person convinces themselves that they are oppressed without any real evidence, they cannot be convinced they are not oppressed with evidence

Stranger: They do not want to communicate

Stranger: They do not want to understand the other side

Stranger: They are nihilists that hate themselves and hate the world

Stranger: And they want to see others suffer like them

You: mhm... I think people are most attuned to their own suffering

Stranger: Not unlike the 'incel' mindset

You: and do not see the suffering of others

Stranger: They have turned suffering into an olympic competition

You: mhm I don't agree with that

You: but yeah I think there may be an extent of wealthy liberals empathizing with their friends and making it an issue

You: but it diminishes the experiences and suffering of other people

You: but wealthy liberals and powerful in american cities

Stranger: Suffering itself isn't a big deal

Stranger: These people have convinced themselves that any amount of suffering is the result of an oppressive system

Stranger: There is no accountability

You: in my mind I think there's some difference between "equality" views and "equity" views

You: I think many liberals prescribe to equity views, meaning that since idk there are not enough black americans attending college, therefore affirmative action should happen to help make the numbers more equal

Stranger: It doesn't make any sense to me

You: mhm... yeah, it is pretty different from you worldview, I can see that

You: I think it's similar in spirit to views like "nobody should starve" or "everyone should get healthcare"

Stranger: I don't see how it is similar

You: like one way is to think about redistribution of tax money

You: an equal distribution of tax money is like everyone getting $10 of value

You: but under progressive systems, poor people get more

You: because the idea is that all human beings should have a favorable experience in life I guess

Stranger: I cant relate

You: yup

You: there was an opinion article I read today

You: about a mother asking her sons

You: "In life you can choose between loving only your family/close ones, or loving as many people as you can. Which do you choose?"

Stranger: Yeah why would anyone choose anything other than family or close ones

You: XD for me I think I am closer to the latter haha, which is why you scoff when I wish for your best lol

You: but I think I find personal fulfillment out of that

You: at least, that is the way for me personally

Stranger: How bizarre

You: I told you before that I didn't really value myself that much

You: I think I get a lot of my meaning in life from how much I am able to bring value to other people / the world

You: in either case, that's not really important

You: but I can understand holding your family and close ones precious, even at the expense of making others your enemy, I guess

Stranger: Who said making them the enemy

You: I think you saying "war is inevitable" kind of stuck in my mind lol

Stranger: Are you suggesting you love your family and go to war with everyone else? That doesn't make any sense to me

You: huh? no?

Stranger: That's what it seems like to me

You: I am saying I understand the impulse of prioritizing your family at the expense of everyone else -- although that's not really my own view

Stranger: But it isn't at the expense of everyone else. I don't have the power to affect others

You: hmm, but if you did though?

You: Like if you somehow became a billionaire due to fate?

You: or if a ton of power landed in your lap?

Stranger: A billionaire?

You: idk I was saying random examples

Stranger: But that is the point

Stranger: I am not either of those things

Stranger: So others are beyond my purview

You: yes but your are ambitious and destined for great things?

You: *you are

Stranger: You're not understanding me

You: ordinarily I would presume that you seek power

Stranger: I am not

Stranger: in that

Stranger: posititon

Stranger: RIGHT NOW

You: right

Stranger: Explaining myself gets me so violent

You: sorry

Stranger: Many things get me violent, I am just a violent person

You: is that bad?

Stranger: Not for me

You: I am trying to comprehend if you are trying to hold back on your violence or not

Stranger: Of course. I am always holding back violence, anger, sadness, happiness, indulgence of all manner

You: I think I am a little confused again

Stranger: You are retarded, most things in the world are bound to confuse you

You: well I remember you saying that fascism is about masculinity, and masculinity is defined by violence

You: yet also you are holding back from it

Stranger: And I also said knowing when and where to use it

You: ah okay

You: is there a reason why emotions must be held back?

Stranger: Because they might take over

You: mhm okay

You: are there any emotions that you resent?

Stranger: I do not resent any emotion

You: I know you did not ask for this, but I wish your life could be filled with happiness

Stranger: I just don't have a desire or need for happiness

You: yes, you said that last time

You: you said some things I really appreciated today

Stranger: Lol

You: I mean seriously

You: the part about people driving into protesters

You: I thought it was powerfully said

Stranger: Well it is the inevitable conclusion of a population with nothing left to lose

You: mhm, but I'm just thinking about when they lost so much

You: I mean, it was before blm too

You: it's been happening for decades

You: it's been a slow and gradual thing I think

Stranger: When they freed the slaves without any kind of plan on what to do with them, they essentially dammed the country

You: I'm just thinking I guess

Stranger: This kind of behavior is endemic to American culture

You: usually the way I think about racism is that I think of it as scapegoating. But what do you mean?

Stranger: The "not my problem" and just handing things over to someone else

Stranger: They had no plan in place on what to do with slaves once they were free

You: I don't think the winner of a war is obligated to have a plan, are they?

Stranger: General Lee was right when he said Negros could not be freed yet

You: if the north won against the south, can't the north just say "fuck you"

You: ?

Stranger: To black people?

You: no to the south

Stranger: Because that's what happene

You: the civil war was to some extent an ideological war

You: the north won and enforced its ideology and left the south to pick up the pieces?

Stranger: Yet again you don't seem to follow

Stranger: And I'm running out of patience

Stranger: Let me put this in simple terms

Stranger: They opened the cages and told the nigs "Go do shit, we don't care" and now they're all living in fucked up conditions

You: mhm, I don't think people honestly cared that much

You: I have a cynical enough view that I think people do the minimum necessary for them

You: whether it is for publicity or something else

Stranger: They should have all been shipped off back to Africa

Stranger: It is the same mistake Europeans make with immigrants from the middle east

Stranger: "Just drop them in and they will integrate"

You: there was that view historically but I don't think it was mainstream enough

Stranger: Doesn't work out that way

You: liberia happened

You: in either case, I think leaders just try to appease the masses

Stranger: That's what happens in a democratic environment

Stranger: Public image is more important than competence or principles

You: I think of the salem witch trials. Doesn't matter if a person is a witch (or if witchcraft is real). Lynch someone and if it makes people happy and then they will do it

You: I mean this is what I mean by scapegoating too though

Stranger: They should all have been sent to Africa

You: Idk they were given a choice

You: some went to liberia and others didn't

Stranger: It shouldn't have been a choice

You: I think the plantations would have been devastated economically

You: soon after the civil war, many former slaves stayed employed by their former masters

You: just under a different name

You: there wouldn't have been the manpower to run the plantations otherwise

Stranger: Yeah I think it's worth it to not have today's problems

You: ^^

You: I dunno, I think there are many problems

You: automation hurt a lot of manufacturing america

You: as did the shift away from coal

Stranger: Alright listen

Stranger: I don't care about that

Stranger: Because none of that contributed to this BLM nonsense happening today and white people bowing down to them

You: um, but jobs and employment?

Stranger: Nevermind

Stranger: Those things would not exist if there were no black people here

Stranger: Do you not get that

Stranger: There would be no BLM

Stranger: There would be no culture of compromise

Stranger: or white guilt

You: but there would still be automation and china and environmentalist hippies?

You: kentucky miners still no job?

Stranger: What does that have to do with BLM

You: it doesn't, I just think that the anger would be focused onto something else

Stranger: And?

Stranger: I'm talking about BLM

Stranger: I am talking

Stranger: about

Stranger: BLM

Stranger: I am only

Stranger: talking

Stranger: about

Stranger: BLM

You: I don't know if I'm wrong

You: but I see a lot of anger

You: what are people angry about?

You: are they mainly angry about blm?

Stranger: Man

You: are they mainly angry about liberals?

Stranger: I don't care what people are angry about

Stranger: I am telling you I hate BLM

You: Okay

You: sorry

Stranger: When people say sorry it makes me think less of them

You: I don't really mind if you think less of me

You: in a way I say it for myself, so you can think of it as me being selfish if you want

You: I think I don't fully understand where all of your anger and hatred comes from

Stranger: It comes from me living in a situation I never created but have to be part of

You: isn't that all of us in a way?

Stranger: I don't care, I am answering the question

You: oh okay

You: would you be bothered if I changed the subject? ^^

You: is there anything that you like?

You: or love?

Stranger: Everything I mentioned that I read about

Stranger: And women

You: you mentioned you are not masculine unless you want a family

You: why do you like the idea of a family?

Stranger: Because that is how you grow your race, and continue your lineage

You: so it's a kind of honor/pride thing?

Stranger: It's a natural part of existence

You: hmm... and what do you love about women?

Stranger: Their physical beauty, and their nurturing nature

You: why do you like their nurturing nature?

Stranger: It is attractive, it is also a signal they would be a good mother

You: the girls whom you were attracted to in the past; were you mainly attracted to their appearance or their personality?

Stranger: Well it starts with appearance and continues with personality

You: what parts of personality?

Stranger: Their confidence, sense of humor, independence, and self-awareness

You: oh... that surprised me in a sense

You: I guess it seems different from the nurturing nature kind of thing that I imagined?

Stranger: Well I can detect a nurturing side to a woman without finding it personally attractive, since I am not a needy person

You: okay, so you're interested in the nurturing quality, but you don't personally like it?

Stranger: I personally have no use for it

You: why do you like confident/humorous/independent/self-aware women?

Stranger: Because that is a person I can spend time with and get along with, and makes them a reliable wife

You: (also is it late for you?)

Stranger: It is only 11pm

You: oh okay

You: I feel like it's been hard for me to get a sense of the things that you like, outside of your faith and beliefs

Stranger: You could just ask

You: can I ask then? ^^

You: (I am shameless lol)

Stranger: I have nothing to hide

You: so what do you like outside of your faith and beliefs?

Stranger: That is too broad and vague

You: and working out and military-things

You: mhm I guess it's just hard to imagine not having anything that you look forward to, etc, etc.

Stranger: I look forward to a lot of things

You: such as?

Stranger: Getting stronger

Stranger: Fighting

Stranger: Marrying a beautiful woman

Stranger: Building a strong family

You: These seem like very cerebral goals

You: btw how will you know when you meet someone that they are the right one?

Stranger: You spend time with them

You: and...

Stranger: What do you mean and

Stranger: Do you not know how relationships work

You: like you just magically know?

You: of course I do

You: but I mean, there's just passion and then something deeper too

Stranger: So why are you asking

Stranger: You meet someone, you spend time together, and grow together

Stranger: It's simple

You: okay

You: hmm

You: ^^ you are difficult haha

Stranger: How

You: idk, for me to connect to, I guess

You: sometimes I wonder if I have a kid and if they are like you, how I would connect to them

Stranger: You don't need to connect to your children

Stranger: Just need to prepare them for life

You: funny because someone else I spoke to said the most important thing was to give them love and support lol

You: not that I take either really particularly seriously I guess

Stranger: Love and support wont teach a person how to survive

You: mhm... do you believe in mental health issues?

Stranger: Everyone has a "mental health" issue. This is why you master your emotions and discipline yourself, so that even if the issue is there, it wont have any affect

You: mhm

You: I've just seen a lot of people collapse and break apart after leaving home

Stranger: Because they are weak

You: maybe

You: but what if they are your child?

You: leave them behind if they are weak?

Stranger: If they are an adult, yes

You: what if they are technically an adult, but in your eyes they are still a child?

Stranger: That doesn't make any sense

You: it means that someone is like idk 18 years old, but you still think they're immature

You: unrealistic

Stranger: There are plenty of people in their 40s I consider immature, it doesn't make me view them as a child

You: fair enough

You: a person I was talking to today too said something similar too

You: holding your children's "freedom" paramount

Stranger: Freedom?

Stranger: Once they're an adult their life is their own business

Stranger: It's not about a respect for freedom

Stranger: They're just no longer my responsibility

You: I guess

You: If it were me, I wouldn't stop worrying about them though

You: I think I have a little bit of a micro-managing habit

You: or tendency perhaps

You: but it may be part of the way I grew up

Stranger: Yes

You: I feel like it will be hard for me to let go

Stranger: Yet again more proof that mastering one's emotions is imperative

Stranger: Now you are controlled by your habits

You: why is it bad to want the best for your children?

You: even if they are an adult?

Stranger: When did I ever say it was bad to want the best for them

You: you said you would leave behind your child if they are weak if they are an adult?

Stranger: Yeah, weakness is a choice

You: oh...

Stranger: Their life is their responsibility at that point

You: yes it is, but I feel like I would want to do everything I can to continue doing something

Stranger: Why

You: because they are important to me?

You: as a parent, you won't be around forever, and you want them to live a fulfilling life?

Stranger: That is their responsibility

You: sure, but I don't care

You: even if I have to cheat I would want to give them what they need for a fulfilling life

Stranger: Cant relate

You: yeah sorry

You: I think we are just extremely different

Stranger: Yes we are

You: do you ever find anyone similar to you?

Stranger: I did once

You: and?

Stranger: It didn't work out

You: huh? you mean romantically?

Stranger: Yes

You: oh...

You: Do you mind if I ask what state you're from?

Stranger: Florida

You: Hmm... I feel like I have weird deja-vu that I asked this before

You: wait how is it only 11 pm in florida?

Stranger: I do not live in Florida

You: oh

You: I think I feel weird and baffled I guess

Stranger: Most people that preach diversity often do not know what to do when confronted with actual different people

You: Hm? What are you saying that I should do?

Stranger: Do whatever you feel is best

You: Hm, I think I am just doing whatever I want though?

Stranger: Doesn't matter to me

You: I think I ran out of words though

You: I guess I am just trying to figure out how to process this

You: what I should take away

Stranger: Process this?

You: yup

Stranger: It is just a conversation

You: mhm, and I think about the conversations I have and digest them?

You: that would be processing?

Stranger: I suppose I am quicker

You: sure

You: btw why do you bother talking to me?

You: I feel like I annoyed you a few times

Stranger: Because I am taking a break from other things

You: it's a pretty long break

Stranger: Yes

You: you don't think this is a waste of your time?

Stranger: I have already done whatever I needed to for the day

You: hmm, I feel like normal people have better things to do than spend an hour or more on omegle

Stranger: What am I supposed to say

Stranger: I have finished everything I needed to for the day

You: idk you could something... more enjoyable, I guess?

You: did you play games growing up?

Stranger: Yes

You: you don't now?

Stranger: I do

You: what games?

Stranger: Military strategy games

You: eu4?

You: is that what it's called?

Stranger: No

You: hmm... total war?

Stranger: I have played total war games before

You: i don't know any others lol

Stranger: Alright

You: I've never heard you talk about your father I think

Stranger: You do not hear me talk about anything unless asked

You: mhm true enough

You: is there a reason why you're open to me asking so much?

Stranger: I am open in general, I have nothing to hide

You: do you have a good relationship with your father?

Stranger: I have not heard from him since I was 8 years old

You: did he leave?

Stranger: My parents were divorced

You: ah... do you know much about it?

Stranger: My father was lazy and not very helpful around the house, and had mental disorders he gave into from the Vietnam war

You: ptsd?

Stranger: He just had anti-social tendencies like me but was too weak to master them

You: oh...

You: antisocial as in the psychology definition or the mainstream one?

Stranger: The actual definition

You: oh I didn't know

Stranger: How could you, I never told you

You: mhm

You: were you diagnosed with it?

Stranger: No, I do not claim to have any disorder either, I said tendencies

You: mhm okay

You: did you worry about it a lot in the past?

Stranger: No

You: do you know if your father is doing okay right now?

Stranger: I have had no information about him since I was 8

You: mhm... and it sounds like you don't have a very close connection with him either

Stranger: How could I have a close connection to him

You: I don't know, I guess before you were 8

You: but common sense would dictate that you didn't have a favorable relationship

Stranger: I did not really care about the situation much at the time, I still do not

You: right

You: how was your mom... during the years thereafter?

Stranger: Fine

You: do you know much about gangs?

Stranger: I know that they tried to recruit me a few times, so I told them to suck my dick

You: ah okay

You: I was just thinking about it because I read a news article

You: of a freshman at the university I attended

You: was stabbed by three teen gang members

You: was just reflecting on it today

Stranger: Gangs are scum, and if it was up to me the members would be rounded up and boiled alive

Stranger: But of course that is not saying much considering that is my solution to many things

You: the kids were like 13-14 years old

You: tried to mug the girl

Stranger: I am not interested in hearing more

You: sorry

Stranger: Boil them alive, that is all I have to say

You: do you believe a lot in revenge?

Stranger: No

You: hmm... so justice then?

Stranger: Yes

You: What if your sense of justice differs from the letter of the law?

Stranger: It already does, and is one of the reasons I stay away from many situations

You: ah okay

You: but you are interested in politics?

You: or is that just an omegle thing

Stranger: I am thinking this is the last time I talk about politics to anyone online, and will only do it in person

You: okay, sorry

Stranger: Sorry for what

You: idk I feel responsible for giving a bad experience or something

Stranger: It has nothing to do with you

You: oh okay

You: I think uncomfortable things are probably good for me

Stranger: Lol

You: for some reason I find it funny when you "lol"

You: you do it very sparingly

You: I think you remind me of darker things

Stranger: What are you talking about

You: nothing that matters to you, I think

You: I am probably rambling I guess

You: I guess I am thinking about self-esteem

You: yours seems to be quite strong

Stranger: Yes it is

You: mine is not lol

Stranger: I am not surprised

You: I am not surprised that you're not surprised lol

You: I think what is nearly impossible for me to comprehend is how you're so confident that you are destined for greatness, etc

You: or well, relate to

Stranger: That is because you view it as something to aspire to rather than something that is inherent to one's station in life

You: mhm... do you believe that you are born with self-worth?

Stranger: I do not consider myself destined for greatness because I am great, that is simply what God has mandated for me

Stranger: I do not know what you mean by born with self-worth

You: mhm... this is a cynical thing to say, but basically like born "worth" something

Stranger: Worth what to whom

You: essentially born "great"

Stranger: I do not see it that way

Stranger: God saw what my life was going to be like and the kind of man I would be, so He decided to confer upon me a great responsibility

You: hmm

Stranger: I separate greatness from the person

You: but you use language like "I am great"?

Stranger: I do not claim to be great

You: um, I'm confused

Stranger: It is not me that is great, it is the responsibility that God has given me that is great

You: I feel like that kind of thinking hasn't been always very effective for me

You: i.e. "I have great responsibility" therefore "I have self-esteem"

You: for some reason I end up drifting back to thinking about some kind of abstract intrinsic sense of self-worth

Stranger: I do not have self-esteem because of great responsibility, I have self-esteem because I have been very independent most of my life and am confident in my abilities

You: hmm, I lack self-esteem because I don't like myself a lot, but in terms of objective performance and abilities I think I am doing okay but somehow not appreciating.

Stranger: If you do not like yourself then simply become better and worth liking

You: I need to try harder

Stranger: Then do so

You: Do you spend a lot of time reflecting about yourself?

Stranger: Introspection has always been a pastime of mine

You: Hm... I don't do it enough

You: it's much easier to think about other people and other things

You: to the extent of avoiding thinking about myself I guess

Stranger: That is strange to me

You: I have a younger brother

You: it is easier to give him advice than to think extensively about my own faults

Stranger: If that is the case nobody will take your advice seriously

You: mhm there's different kinds of advice I guess

You: emotional advice is probably not my forte

You: okay, I think I will probably go to bed and think about this

You: thanks for giving me things to think about

Stranger: Alright go do that

You: goodnight, best wishes with everything!

You have disconnected.

[52ciab-blog]

bacardi and cola with taxis, scott richard 2004

the beauty of old friends….

PRESS PLAY

faith ft. Mr. Probz galantis & dolly parton

and now an essay on why america needs to debunk itself from anti-american AMERICAN racist USURERS & "color coding" racism ….

***********************

recently i was laid into by an unsolicited critic. but you know me, i lap that stuff up like delicious poison!!!!

the most delighting part in all of this criticism was when the phrase LETHAL ACTIVISM was levied against me. as if i’ve ever harmed anyone or my intentions on here are to harm others!!!! i know it was levied unfairly because i know the critic. and the critic was hurt. so it was more of a personal attack designed to hurt me back for being honest.

but, for the record, my battle is against USURY. and the spirit of USURY is not a person.

this is a lifetime struggle against an invisible demon which has been infecting the human people since long before its earliest recordings/sightings/mentionings (it is first recognized and named in the INDIAN text the Mahabharata).

USURY is a destructive LIVING FORCE that infects humans just like AIDS did (yep, the lap dogs of USURY did that, too). Usury, as a spiritual force manifests as a mental disease that leads the victim of the disease to believe that they are better than other human and non-human life forms and can enact schemes of power and control over those other humans and other life forms in taking by force the CONTROL of their reproduction cycles and sexual habits.

it is the equivalent of BESTIALITY. and many people are so delusional that they think bestiality is people fking animals. this is simply NOT TRUE.

BESTIALITY is when you (as a human force) take over the reproduction and sex rights of other species and imprison them for practical purposes.

it is an ancient prohibition because of how it leads to social disorder by OBVIOUSLY favoring those who would abuse the spirit of life to gain sht. THINK RWANDA, duh!? it was a cow blood war started by belgian setups of economic disparity and favoritism. they used animal husbandry to divide the two populations.

and i call these sideline instigators the FOOD AND BEVERAGE cartels (F&B cartels). you’re welcome.

and BESTIALITY is a natural physical deformation of the spirit of USURY when it acquires henchmen like the F&B cartels. so is SLAVERY. and pharmaceutical drug addiction.

but back to LETHAL ACTIVISM…

as INACCURATE AND UNKIND as this attack on my personhood is — i am not this stream, i am not this essay, i have written over 1300 hundred essays and they are in the group THINK CLUB if you dare to want to know/piece together more of who you think i am. good luck keeping up, i have chased after the great spirits for decades without resting — and added to it that i practice GENTILITY and DISTANCE from other humans.

i will also protect other people’s children from harm. sometimes i will also protect others, but it might also look to some like i’m doing it as an attack against the aggressor, but those people with that view generally think more slowly AND do little in any time of REAL crisis.

they are flighters. the cowards among our species. ironically, these are the same cowards who later call us heroes for just doing the VERY ORDINARY THING. their award is just more shame on people who don’t run away.

so perhaps my critic was really expressing a fear of the nearness of LETHAL ACTIVISM in our societies? perhaps the HUMAN SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE has had enough of this INFECTION of USURY in the elites of human society?

perhaps my critic is realizing for themself that the spiritual world is once again calling upon ALL OF US through "fate and destiny" (geopolitical locationing) to rise up against the weight of this construct. but my critic doesn’t even realize time has weight!!??!? pity the sciences and maths which could leave something so basic off the menu!!!

perhaps this critic has identified a rising spirit and sees in me a harbinger of this ENERGY. fair play.

but if my words could KILL, i would say this to my critic,

"i hope you live forever!! i hope my love for you stays inside your heart and keeps you company throughout the ages!! i hope you weren’t lying about love like you are lying about most things in your life. I didn’t even want you to be free. I just wanted to have fun. WTF, playboy!!!!"

and perhaps my critic now knows that there is a greater magic than the feeble white man’s sciences of falsely identified and defined numbers, of falsely applied logics of math without philosophical support — sorry, kids, stories ALWAYS come before numbers. always have, always will. and science is just a wee little story based on astrology which converted into astronomy with the astrolabes of discovery, and then slowly headed into a collective concept that eventual gave birth to physics as the role of the "real" star interpreter took on precedence in the courts of europe. and china. and india. because there are many cultural responses to the idea of the sky and the idea of stars and the idea of rotational charting and map making. i know, it was all just for FUN right from the start [wink wink, glad the lore of the young and all the unknown lovers could chime in on all the personal criticism. ah, how disgusting and messy polyamory gets, it just never ends…].

but SERIOUSLY, it was just for fun. it still is!

the innocence of someone looking up in the sky and thinking, "there’s that ONE light again! and LOOK! the other!!!"

but this isn’t magic. it is correlation. it’s us seeing something and going, "hey, look at that!" and then agreeing, "I SEE IT, I SEE IT, WE SEE IT". and the WE is born of this endeavor.

obviously, real magic can take place when you conjoin these correlations.

in my life real magic is grafted directly from circumstance and variables and available energy. and it is directed through the voice or the imaginative voice of the spell caster. everyone sort of already knows this. we’ve been told all about it since we were children.

for example, how many "astronauts", the children of those early astrological wanderings, have actually "touched" the surface of anything NOT human made but out of the orbit? [he falls over laughing, but all the gold bars wasted and laundered through fake space programs have piled up so high above his head that he can only see glittering skyscrapers] www.flickr.com/photos/gazeronly/albums/72157650835706423

we are fking funny!!! and now, how much FAKE money has been dumped into the lavish lifestyles of those employed and funded by this expansive waste of money?

this is not magic.

so to my critic, perhaps there should be some gratitude that those like me who touch these powers are kind to our critics? perhaps it would behoove said critic to acknowledge that their narcissism is not the source of my inquiries and does not direct my willingness to accept answers. i am not magical in order to entertain narcissists. that’s what hollywood is for anyway. and "court magicians". that is SLEIGHT OF HAND, which is USURY, not magic.

so what do they know of love? they still use it like a back hoe and everyone who wants a job sucks dck to get it. if you have bad knees or they get tender fast from kneeling, buy knee pads, cckskr. [and that’s a compliment if you do it well. you’ll get the job cuz anyone can act.]

so please, let me state for ALL PUBLIC RECORD that i am not a LETHAL ACTIVIST. in fact, i’d never even heard of it before.

i am a cultural activist and i fight for the spirit of humanity and the preservation of those gifts which manifest themselves as forms in our lives — community, identity, stability.

i fight against usury and those who debt-enslave others, sell weapons to kill children and their parents, sell drugs to kill the caretakers of children, and those who traffic humans or fk kids (whether by economic coercion or actual action) — so BOO HOO HOO. sue me!

or educate yourself. but please, lethal activism??!! that’s just mean. and i can shrug that one off. i get it, you’re hurt.

but more importantly, there was a startling book written and released in russia (allegedly) back at the turn of the 20th century. it’s a short handbook that describes in realistic and profoundly brutal terms the manner in which a TINY group of CLAIMED ELITES can take over and enslave the masses, which are LESS HUMAN than these elites.

and while it is TRUE that the book was purportedly foisted onto a group called the LEARNED ELDERS (the kingship of jews, actually, because apparently it’s more complicated than people want to believe…) who were apparently attempting to destabilize the governments/aristocracies/oligarchs of western europe. i mean, anti-semitism was a GD section in the book stores in russia and germany and other "nation states" of the day. and apparently it was a huge section. and if you know me, i’ve been trying my best to get people to understand that the UNITED STATES is literally MANUFACTURING its own breed of anti-semitism on television and streaming. shows like AMERICAN DAD, which have had top ratings for years, are disgustingly ladened with all manner of jokes and put-downs and weird sideways. (yes, i wrote an essay about that, too, seven years ago…)

www.flickr.com/photos/gazeronly/6931096786

this is often INVERSE DUMPING. if you watched the video you’ll know what i’m talking about, as MATT WEITZMAN’s role in all of this is totally suspect:

"Matt Weitzman was born to a Jewish family[2] in Los Angeles, California. His father is Lew Weitzman, a long time literary agent for over 40 years. Matt attended American University, where he became and brother of Alpha Epsilon Pi,[3] and graduated with a communications degree. Shortly after college, he pursued acting with some success, then later began writing for television sitcoms. As a child, Weitzman was an avid comic book collector and reader of fantasy and science fiction. This is what he has called "inspiration" for upcoming projects." wiki

if you read my work, you know that i know all about the super hero creation market and who started it and how it’s literally a LOSER’S spirit buried in skin tight homosexual man worship. but you can do some of your GD research about history because darnit, there’s so much of it to swallow. let’s just say that people who are genocided (this includes homosexuals) definitely dream of striking back against their "oppressors".

and super heroes are the capitalized/capitalistic version of the pantheon gods of the ancient world.

the primary difference is that super heroes work for the highest human agencies of government control so you can see how this fantasy framework immediately instigates conspiracy and dread-laced confectionaries of BETRAYAL, DECEPTION, LIES AND MURDER. super heroes are embedded in contemporary politics, whereas the ancient "gods" are fantastical and have been relegated to olive leaves and togas. i hope this makes sense. anyway, if you read the PROTOCOLS, again, you don’t need to hear the messenger!!!!

the comic book industry is insidious and mentally deformational on young people’s minds. it is a vulgarity and glamorized FAKE body types (historically) to gain market claims before becoming powerful enough to overtake alternate markets in foreign lands. after being blown to bits in wwii, manga took off like mad in japan: " Since the 1950s, manga has steadily become a major part of the Japanese publishing industry.[7] By 1995, the manga market in Japan was valued at ¥586.4 billion ($6–7 billion),[8] with annual sales of 1.9 billion manga books and manga magazines in Japan (equivalent to 15 issues per person).[9] Manga have also gained a significant worldwide audience.[10] In 2008, in the U.S. and Canada, the manga market was valued at $175 million. Manga represent 38% of the French comics market, which is equivalent to approximately ten times that of the United States.[11] In France, the manga market was valued at about €460 million ($569 million) in 2005.[12] In Europe and the Middle East, the market was valued at $250 million in 2012.[13]" wiki

we could talk a long time about the after effects of being holocausted or target hunted, but let’s get back to the PROTOCOLS!!!!

and again, who cares who wrote this book??!?!

it was written and it’s been around long enough to have been read by all humans who can read. so READ IT!!!! (then you can listen to the 27hours of information released by the u.s. governement on the four decade collusion that led to the manufacturing of 9/11. IT’S CALLED A COMMISSION REPORT in case one doesn’t already know that the U.S. released a very weird and disturbing BODY OF TEXT to the world. perhaps if YOU read it, you’d know more, too. at least you’d be able to see the amazing LIES that this nation’s government TELLS and gets CAUGHT telling and then TELLS more and gets CAUGHT telling and then TELLS more…)

anyway, who cares? i mean, let’s be liberal and BLAME all men, because FK it was a MAN who wrote the book after all. EVERYONE can agree that it was NOT written by a woman. that much is true!!!

but instead, "they" want you to believe and focus on the jewish part of authorship. and you will see this in the introduction of the book. because it’s old enough to be an antique, the book has acquired its own sense of history.

but AGAIN, i’m a gnostic. i don’t care if it is about to be written and released tomorrow for the first time ever, i think you should read it!!

it is the INFORMATION AND STRATEGIES inside the book that are so valuable.

just like every girl should STEAL the book THE GAME from somewhere and read it so she can know what SHTTY men are out there and also what shtty girlfriends do to each other.

and again, i am not the one on the cover of this SHTTY DATE RAPE HANDBOOK FOR MEN that is saying i’m of "jewish" descent. he does that himself, but again, i hope my FKING hating his book and the tricks he has gathered and compiled from america’s rich history of DATE RAPE ARTISTS doesn’t make me the bad guy. and i’m certainly not going to look at all the awesome people that i know of personally and throughout the world who call themselves jewish and think, hmmm, they’re all date rapists!!!! nope, just him. and harvey weinstein. and what do we call people who go to date rapes on purpose more than once? are they victimizing the date rapist? i get so confused when there is such a moral sexual breakdown in breeder semantics. if you have to give hed to get ahed, how many times do you have to give hed and STAY AHED?

like am i supposed to hate catholics because machiavelli wrote a political treatise on how the medici’s could do the same thing to their own people — fiscally date rape and murder their peers? rather, you should hate the catholic state for its actions and historical thuggery and it’s sexual violations against thousands and thousands of boys. that would make a lot more sense instead of putting it on the dupes who fall for such drivel. and i’m so distrustful i’m like, "what is the vatican hiding that they are willing to use PEDOPHILIA as a distraction?!?!" HLY FK!!!! how come we never go for real answers?!?!"

but isn’t that how REVERSE DUMPING works?

just ask MALCOM X!!!!! here’s a quote you can look at: ""the F.B.I. can feed information to the press that makes your neighbor think you are something subversive. the F.B.I. can do this very skillfully. they maneuver the press on a national scale and the C.I.A. maneuvers the press on an international scale" 1964

and let’s be honest, that was 55 fking years ago!!!! do you not think that the information societies that play nation states like checker pieces haven’t become paranormous?

when/if you get to the FACEBOOK essay down below, you’ll see this more clearly and you will understand how it’s a TRILLIONAIRE’s front who is using SCHOOLS and their products — including zuckerberg’s whole life (he’s being "hannah montana-ed©"!!!) — as fronts to generate dominant world control of new surveillance technology and ALL of its advancements.

so you do know malcom got reversed dumped, right!?!?! you DO at least know that, right? and you do know that whenever black men of power rise they are beaten down with the myriad temptations of the USURERs CLUB (drugs, sex, power, alcohol, attention). and if that doesn’t work, assassination.

that’s hardcore REVERSE DUMPING. whites usually don’t end up getting the bullet, poor Vincent foster…

but in our real world, in our daily lives, SOFTCORE reverse dumping happens when you tell someone honestly that they have a problem and then suddenly they try to reduce your world to ruins simply because you objected to THEIR DISHONESTY or TREACHERY or UNKINDNESS or ECONOMIC SLANDERING. suddenly, for saying, "hey!! you’re lying to me!!!" i am the LETHAL ACTIVIST? "hey! you’re giving people AIDS!! and i’m the LETHAL ACTIVIST? and worse, somehow giving people AIDS on purpose is better than FIGHTING BACK? better than letting them do it again to a new target group? really?

but it’s true. if you say anything about this book, you are probably going to be labeled anti-semitic.

but for me, that’s the LIE. i have hung out with way too many cool people that i admired and respected and adored and have also been HIGHLY influenced by to care about their JEWISHNESS. more often than not, i wasn’t even concerned with their "jewishness". if they wanted to share their ideas and what this "meant" to them, they would. not unlike gays who must constantly come out of the closet so that people don’t accidentally say something irrevocably hateful because they couldn’t tell the person was gay because they weren’t having sex in front of them and there were no other visual clues.

as a homo, i resent people who would take an entire ethnicity or culture or way of being and say EVERYONE in this "fake group" is

a: in agreement with each other b: the same c: so easily reducible

these are things STUPID (by choice) and IGNORANT (disengagement and self-interested) people share — judging LITERAL groups that have been intellectually arranged on very BARE and SEPARATIZING notions is PRIMARY BULLSHT. and the USURERS love this because it deflects from the FACT that they are a REAL GROUP in their "servitude" to the demonic forces of USURY. read plato if you need to understand some of things socrates was railing on against.

so USURY forces us to talk about these FAKE CLUSTERS or SHARDS as if they are real and have a genuine existence. they don’t, they’re just like everything else — they are proximity ideas that will die and pass away. there is a historylessness to most of us.

as a result these dynamics are all constructs of fate and birth. you happen to be colombian, you happen to be vietnamese, you happen to be [insert something here], cuz you’re just a gosh dern human at the beginning and the end.

they are all mutable and they all come with their own seeds of separation and distinction. they all create their own INTERIOR hierarchies where they enact the same

all that aside, the truth is that this book is FKNG amazing. and you’d know if you read it. it’s BRILLIANT and the game is on.

it is a playbook for raping the little people who don’t matter. it’s where the original idea of a MASTER CARD comes from, for fks sake!!!!! it is the birth of the credit system we fking use everywhere these days!!!!

but i guess most of you don’t realize that our dear president in the 1920s read this short work of political theory. that alone should give you cause to go and read it just to see how useful this information is and how much of it is CURRRENTLY IN USE and how easily it would be to dismantle this strangulation if more people would educate themselves instead of fking around indulging in their side lives of debauchery and social mayhem, lol. but those are the treats of the USURER!!

take more loans!! live beyond your means!!!!

and now that we are again in a period where ANTI-SEMETISM is being blatantly and openly promoted by ECONOMICALLY PRONGED SEMITES (why is it so cool to throw your own people in front of the bus for your cause? who told you that was legit politics? — seriously, look at the producers of almost any television show. you will immediately start to see a trend that is alarming — as if anyone is still even reading this essay. but if you are an american who was of asian descent you might notice the clear absence of your ethnicity on television and in television production roles. but china and japan and many other countries in those regions have their own ENTERTAINMENT CARTELS in full-swing, too. but in "america" you have to admit really fast that NPR and other outlets of alleged news are stocked and renewed with a fk lot of people who also identify with minority groups that have been historically punished throughout centuries for running USURY GAMES on the "humans" they deemed less worthy.

and you should be able to figure out that i’m not talking about homos. but you can do your research instead of lambasting me for referring to the idea that there are ACTUAL DATA POINTS worth noting. after all, isn’t the OLD TESTAMENT the most anti-semitic book ever written? i’ve read it. it’s a history of shtty people who never got along with anybody and it always ends in genocide and slavery. i’m fking literate!!!! i didn’t write that GD book!! i just read it. it’s fking anti-semitic.

so if you are curious instead of a KNEE-JERK, read the protocols and you will find out that i’m not SAYING ANYTHING, i’m just the messenger alerting LAZY FKRS that sht is going on and has been in process for over a century. it’s NOT new.

further, i’m just the guy who got jumped by the side of the road and there was no good samaritan to assist me.

but, i survived. and now, i know how to spot the robbers. i’ve been jumped endlessly since then. i learned from camille paglia that einstein was wrong.

repeating the same act over and over again actually does eventually lead to breakthrough depending on who is performing the experiment. WE are the magical element in science!!!! it’s OUR imagination that gives science life, not the other way around.

and, unlucky for me, my "self constructs" have been shattered so many times that i no longer perceive information the way i did when i could hide behind those constructs. i’ve been lied to and cheated on in every imaginable way. i scare the SHT out of people with how quickly i unravel all their hateful lies in person. people are scared to be around me because i can "see" their sins and write them in the sand — they become terrified of my experience.

alternately, only by accident, have i lied and cheated. and when i do, i grovel back and apologize and i take it on myself to acknowledge my awfulness. and i don’t PRETEND that i deserve forgiveness.

lucky for me, this is very rare and usually under strange and weirdly unimportant circumstantial moments when the character or nature of another being alters my balance. that is to say, i remember almost every lie i’ve ever told and how it hurt the person or aided me to my "advantage".

and i didn’t like myself as a liar. i have a good memory and i don’t practice denial. it is not the gnostic way. denial does not lead to KNOWING. i don’t want to be with a lover or a friend and know that i lie to them or told them a lie. i find that so uncomfortable and disgusting and faithless.

lying is humanity’s greatest toy. and people play with it constantly. and then they are old and feel stupid about how they spent their lives. yay!

research can lead you to a different outcome. and if you take the time to read this political tract, you won’t need me to explain anything to you.

instead you will read the words which are well over one hundred years old at this point. and who cares about its origin or anti-semitism?!??! study the ACTUAL CONTENT. it is like a book of magic spells (barely, magic is so much cooler). learn to see that to this fking day people use ANTI-SEMITISM to keep you from reading the book. they don’t want you to know about it. they want you to ignore this book. and THEY are white, yellow, blue, green and red, for all you COLOR CODED RACISTS who think people are GD colors!!!! THEY are the oligarchs and secret emperors who control the drug trade, the weapons disbursement programs and the natural resource allotments for "nation states" — the USURERS’ favorite little pet projects and "clients".

if you take time to read this tract (it’s only about 100 pages), the realizations will also help elucidate a lot of things about the history of HUMANS who have actively used these techniques to undermine cultures and societies wherever they go. they are information collectors and litigators. these are their tools to bind.

but first, to give you some boundaries on this, i will use myself as an example.

let’s make it personal for just one second…

as a HOMOSEXUAL who was tortured as a four year old child and had my penis raped with a steel object by a white male doctor in his thirties under the auspices of something medical — no one will tell me to this day what the reason was for doing this to two little boys, two pretty decent little twins — i have spent my life being degraded and humiliated by other people for not running away from the horror that overtook my life.

for example, even before i thought i was gay my father completely disowned me for "having a negative reaction" to being raped in the dck. he came home and found two crazy kids instead of the fun ones he’d maybe seen the day before. he told me very directly when i was 28 that he had come home one day when i was about four and i was a "cold, aloof and a distant prick." those were his exact words. and this was before i knew what had happened. and i said, that sounds like child abuse! he said, "i figured if you wanted to be that way, i could be that way, too." and he never talked to me or touched me again. and i mean LITERALLY. in speech he shifted over to using only the objective command form of language from then on. it was very isolating, but i was terrified of him anyway since he used corporal punishment in the same way male hookers in hollywood use cocaine — liberally when available!!!!

anyway, i didn’t find out till age seven that "fag" and "fairy" and "queer" somehow vaguely applied to me like a death sentence… san diego was very homophobic and murderous and one of the pilot cities where the idea of a "hate crime" was born to separate HUMAN HUNTERS from ordinary murderers…

so as a child i was terrified of going into a bath room with other men/males after this episode. and this meant ALL public bathrooms.

i was literally terrified that i would be brutalized again. every time i had to urinate and was out in the world, i became desperately afraid that if i went into the bathroom and couldn’t lock everyone out, i would be raped again. that’s how four year olds perceive the world. once raped, ten times shy.

and the horror of this was with me constantly. weirdly, i had no memories of the incident. it had shattered my mind, my being, everything about me.

i only "know" it happened because I demanded to know at least the dates when it became clear that it had actually happened (there were two follow up visits to the damage). my twin brother never forgot it. somehow, his mind stayed in tact during the episode. during my childhood he would frequently bring up the event but he was just four years old as well. all he could actually remember was the book he was reading in the waiting room before it happened. and weirdly, i, too, remember the entire book that i was reading.

and sadly, he hated me for not remembering. all i remember is that he kept saying something about a farm bird ( a red rooster) over and over again asking me if i remembered. but i had no idea what it meant. finally, when i was 38 he actually told me. he had no idea that i had no memories and he thought i was colluding against him all these years.

his book was about a red rooster. my book was about a little red hen, which is also the title of the book. the little red hen wants to make bread but also wants company during the process and seeks that instead of making bread. finally, in desperation, the little animal gives up and goes out to do ALL the tasks to make bread. then, the bitter pill at the end, the smell of the baking bread brings ALL the other animals that were asked for help. they all want baked bread!!!! heheheh.

then the doctor stuck a sounding device (metal rod) up our dicks. i don’t remember that part.

so yes, scott has shame!!!! i can’t remember. it sits on top of me like a desperate crime committed by someone else.

forgive me if i want to make sure that this stuff doesn’t happen to other children while their mother is in the waiting room. forgive me if i don’t trust doctors and lawyers and mortgage brokers and bankers. forgive me if i know their dark side.

i guess that’s why i am a "living sign" of this shame. so be it. i will be brave. i can withstand the shame of others. besides, it is PERSONAL shame that i have no room for in my life — the shame one lavishes up for oneself — a shame that has come from within instead of from without. a shame that sickens the GOD within and ails its arrival. this is the shame of INTENTIONAL DECEPTION and TRICKERY.

at least my shame has been given to me by society.

it’s not mine, which is why i can use it in magic. and it’s surprisingly powerful. and most people know this, because there is so much shame in these essays i write. it’s almost unbearable, which is why so few readers make it to the end of any of them. again, this is intentional.

i don’t want all of you to suffer. just those of you who have the courage to stare into the horror without flinching. just those of you who are actually brave enough to become REALIZED.

so my magic of shame erodes and undermines everyone who reads these essays all the way through to the end. and these few readers are the only audience i care about. because they are agents of change. they can taste the poison and find the cure. it is our task!!! and they know it, too.

like me, they have made it their goal to make sure that people who think this kind of behavior is “okay” are taken out of positions of power. and i use these essays that i write to plant seeds and to allow others to see their voice in another, because i KNOW i’m not alone.

when PHILOMEL’s tongue was ripped from her throat, the gods made a new bird that could sing that shameful crime of the king who raped her and then tried to silence her by stealing her voice.

i don’t write these essays because i think ANYONE reads them and goes, “right on!! i’m hitting the fave button!!!"

i write these essays and do the research so that those whose voices are being ripped away can use their new wings to be more than a bird song. so few, these birds who will now fly and sing!

in fact, i don’t imagine most people make it to the end of any of these “essays”. it’s a MACHINE GUN MASSACRE form of writing that INTENTIONALLY only speaks to one or two people who WILL make changes. the INFORMATION will change them — it will not be me, it will not be my personality and it will not be my writing “style”. it will be the idea of the truths that reach into their hearts. and the truth hurts all the time. but even if it doesn’t set you free, it liberates you from LYING!!!! and the lying must stop.

so, as an open HOMOSEXUAL (though it could be easily argued that sexual abuse caused a major deviation), i’ve been clustered grouped my whole life with a stunning array of MEN who are also drawn into the actions of sex with other men. and even in our tiny percentage of ABNORMALITY, there are stand-outs. and these stands out are traditionally distinguished separately.

these stand-outs were called FAGS and TRANNIES and LADY MEN and QUEENS. these are the homosexuals who have serious disagreements with normalized “GENDER ISSUES”.

they are also the most ANTI-MALE of the homosexual community and often dipped/drenched in STEALTH AND TRICKERY AND DECEPTION as a means of counter-balancing the wretchedness of interior feelings and the way the outside society has responded/treated/abused them as people.

they are notably, an attention-deficient group of people who are deeply damaged and wounded from an early age for being different and expressing that difference. the negative treatment reiterates the behavior and more often than not practicers of this type of homosexuality are drawn to the whoredom of the female sexual personae — they end up enacting the slutty side of female sex behavior.

this in turns creates a repulsion in the normalized community — holy sht, a man-woman slut that is parading full-speed and lecherously commanding the attention of everyone or anyone around them.

but isn’t this just the succubus? this isn’t really a homosexual thing as much as it is a social deviation away from the norms that repress and punish homosexuality. the desire to be butterfly attractive is a REACTIONARY stance. it’s not generative and creative. it’s a deviation and a lash-back. it’s a way of vamping. and this same horror is being practiced in the emerging "trans" community. using THEY and THEM to separately disassociate from those who came before is a sign of grammatical desperation. US and WE would be the right choice and the trans community, by allowing the MEDIA to take THEMS over, are being used in the exact same way homos were used — to POLARIZE the majority which makes it easier for banks to weasel into people’s lives with cheap loans and get people to vote for gigantic tax breaks for corporations. but i get it, most of you are TREE PEOPLE and you don’t know you live in a forest. well, not until there’s a fire or the tree cutters show up…

so let’s be serous, having DRAG QUEENS and limp-wristed female copyists representing a community of men who are mostly MARRIED FATHERS is pretty fkt up. right?

because how does that seem like a mature or realized way of embracing the circumstances — that we aren’t allowed to be who we are.

it’s a "DRAG up". it’s dressing like royalty when you’re a pauper. it’s a halloween night that everyone wants to forget later.

in the meantime, the vast majority of homosexuals remain invisible out of fear of being lumped together with the strange HARVEY MILK FREAKS that keep getting chosen to reflect the community.

and the media has been using this polarizing effect to control voting in the united states for the past ten years. the fake front that controls the media now pits homosexuals against others. it pits cops against fking crazy criminals. it promotes car crashes as news. it tracks weather mods and pretends that it’s actually REAL weather instead of manipulated fkery (to this day it is so strange to me that there aren’t classes being taught about this stuff). and it ALWAYS supports tourism unless the intended country is being sanctioned by the invisible front. then they run bad ads.

and i don’t know why all of you don’t know this already. malcom x was pretty clear about it and was even killed for being so clear about it: that is, and I QUOTE

and our human society is super pissed off at the idea of a polygendered society. this is not the USURER’s dream. polygenderism does not put bi-polar gender PARENTING at the forefront of all life. and this would devastate the USURERS. because if PARENTS are the focus of CHILDREN, then the parents become natural "marks" for taking LOANS.

you can loan money to people who need/are told to want stuff for their kids. you can TRAP THEM INTO DEBT SLAVERY very easily by making the ownership of HOMES and CARS and EDUCATION priorities of the capitalistic construct. forget food, clean air and water. those debts will come after these other debts destroy the vast resources of air, water and food. the INTENTIONAL famine is being constructed so fast right now in the city with UBER EATS and AMAZON food delivery. perhaps you need to go back and read that little story in the bible where JOSEPH, while sleeping with the pharoah’s wife, tells the pharaoh that if he really wants to be a great pharaoh all he has to do is create the illusion of prosperity for seven years and then follow it with seven years of mayhem and famine. in this manner, the pharaoh could take over all of his lesser sub-servants’ territories through economic strangulation on the food and water.

but let’s be HONEST!!!!

GENDER ISN’T SEX. so these gender benders NEVER really represented the homosexual community anyway. nor did HARVEY MILK, though now there is a concentrated effort to make him the FACE OF THE "GAY MOVEMENT". ah, how fking sick are we?!?!? harvey milk was the ultimate HOMOPHOBE. just read his history!!!! he preyed on desperate young men, NYC lawyers thought he was scum (arrogant, haughty and a ditch) and we all know what scum 85% of NYC lawyers are… or just lawyers in general, i shouldn’t specifically lay into manhattan fks like our dumptruck fake president.

so back to the story — HOMOSEXUALITY is just SEX WITH MEN BETWEEN MEN. it’s not about relationshipping. that’s GAY stuff. gays are the men and women who are brave enough to simply NOT CARE about the societies in which they exist and choose to be open about their desire to RELATE with their own sex. and this makes a community of sorts. it brings like toward like and cretes "ghettos".

but remember this: BRAVERY is the one thing that almost all humans admire about our collectively shared spirit.

NONETHELESS, as a homosexual man, having a flaming flirtatious, narcissistic sht like HARVEY MILK representing the “gay community” is a fking farce. it’s the WORST example that could be chosen. but harvey milk belongs to the AD MACHINE in fake jewish hollywood. however, AGAIN!!!! if you read about his life ONLY a little bit, you will see what a loser he was and that he actually DID NOTHING while he was in political office (a mere ten months before an angry fellow employee iced him!!!).

in fact, all harvey milk did was get elected. is that HEROIC?

instead, he just pissed an irish catholic white man named dan white off and dan shot his sorry ass for fun, so kicking off the TWINKIE TRIALS where "sugar" was the culprit.

is that heroic? is that a hero? he literally was so shtty that he was shot incidentally. but don’t forget, he also aided and abetted in the suicide of one of his desperate young fk buddies that he preyed upon. the guy was a mess. he embezzled and used people like toilet paper. seriously, you can look this all up.

and if harvey isn’t enough of a reflection of this strange absurdity, we have HERCALES as our example of a greek hero. and what a silly life he lived! he ended up being killed with centaur blood because his wife just wanted him to be faithful. Νέσσος had the last laugh in the end because he knew his blood would kill heracles and that this was the joke — a dead hero can’t be faithless. get it?!!??

and for the record, i’m going to list the VERBS that are attached to each one of Heracles 12 feats (sometimes called labors), which oddly read like a new drinking party game called STEAL, CAPTURE, SLAY:

SLAY SLAY CAPTURE CAPTURE CLEAN SLAY CAPTURE STEAL OBTAIN OBTAIN STEAL CAPTURE cerberus "Heracles says that, although Eurystheus commanded him to bring back Cerberus, it was not from any desire to see Cerberus, but only because Eurystheus thought that the task was impossible." hahahaha, poor cerberus — a three-headed barking dog tooled to the end.

so let’s be real now, is this a “HERO” according to the histories that we keep. these are the actions and accomplishments of a "hero"?

HERACLES’ FEATS, which you can see by the verbs, are pretty straightforward — SLAY, CAPTURE, STEAL, OBTAIN and one menial labor of cleaning out horse stables…

well darn, so much for heroes. especially now when people refer to common soldiers as heroes instead of corporate thug-pawns protecting non-national oligarchical interests in faraway lands at the expense of actual HUMANS.

nothing new there, right? no wonder people made up a CHRIST to try to sort through the FK and KILL schemes of the human condition.

anyway, my point is that when you allow a BAD ROLE MODEL to represent an entire community, it allows bigger communities to PERSECUTE AND TERRORIZE the entire subset community.

AIDS for example was used to terrorize ALL homosexual men. its purpose was LITERALLY to free up the uranium 235 that gets converted “upwards” to uranium 238. so if the african people were enmeshed in a variety of health/life crises they wouldn’t be able to stand up to the western powers and take “control” of the “resource” that was under the land they lived on doing nothing for them.

so voila! — a disease starts in africa with ORAL VACCINES distributed by the JONAS SALK institute. this disease found its way into the gay community quickly due to the nature of sex practices or some other dastardly design — there is a patient O (as in OH, not ZERO). in this case it stood for "out of california, because the was no actual patient zero, AIDS broke out in several places simulatneously in the united states (and remember the first wave of AIDS had an incubation period where you could go over a decade without showing any symptoms.)

"Gaëtan Dugas (French: [ɡaetɑ̃ dyɡa]; February 20, 1953 – March 30, 1984), a Canadian flight attendant, was a relatively early HIV patient who once was widely regarded as "Patient Zero" or the primary case for AIDS in the United States. "

and we don’t need to argue about who it was at the institute who tainted the vaccines. they did. that’s all you need to know. it was intentional.

and recently, i brushed up against a worker who is in the WAR PROMOTION industry that keeps this nation fat and rich and over-medicated. i heard what i already know — there is a cone of information silence at every level as you ascend. the higher you rise, the dirtier you get. this man, for example, produced a working model for the exact point at which a toxic agent will collapse your breathing tissues in your throat. it is a bio-mechanical “model” which is now used to identify the amounts of any of these toxic agents you need to dump on a population to get the results you want. oddly, he doesn’t take any responsibility for this work or the way in which the work is used around the world now and SOLD to other governments and information societies.

so this CONE OF SILENCE methodology is exactly what allows 99.99999% of the good/stupid people to feel fine about the shtty things they are doing and creating while the .00000001% adds the TAINTED POISONS and TOXINS at the last second.

and, as i was saying earlier, that’s what this book THE PROTOCOLS of the LEARNED ELDERS of ZION is about — how to become the .000000001% and subdue the majority. and who cares whether russian anti-semites wrotes it? does that change the EDUCATIONAL VALUE of the CONTENT INFORMATION? or is that just there to keep people from reading it? ANYONE can use the information, for example, duh!!!! ANYONE.

i mean do people listen to pop songs sung by women about getting nasty and dirty and sexual and think, HEY, A MAN WROTE THAT!!!! they should. 99% of weird love songs from the seventies in the world of disco — which brought us cocaine, tight pants and a general hedonistic sense of ennui — are written and arranged by men.

songs like "so many men, so little time" which proudly make all manner of boisterous claims to female sexuality are just fkt up lies written by men hiding behind their human props. but people don’t think that, they think, "YO! that woman wants to be fkt!" but it was really IAN LEVINE.

so we need to ask ourselves, did this fear of anti-semitism, for example, stop WHITE WESTERN OLIGARCHS from benefitting from the strategies presented? and why wouldn’t ANYBODY in china also read this text to gain a superiority over their enemy? why wouldn’t anyone who was infected with the taint of USURY not find this effective?

people in the U.S. study the book THE ART OF WAR, which is hilarious, as there is no such “art”. art has no FKING PURPOSE that kills people. it is the EXACT OPPOSITE OF ART. it should be called the "FKERY OF WAR and how to win". that would be more direct.

but i don’t hear everyone getting all up in china’s business and calling the nation a bunch of euphemistic hate slurs about murder and warfare. and rightfully so, it’s just a book and most people don’t care about books.

so if i get all up in the business of the PEOPLE who are using the book to murder and squelch the human spirit around the world, please don’t call me anti-semitic. and if i write essays about how parents are the very worst thing about children, please don’t call me anti-breeder. oh, wait, no, please do!!! i’m definitely upset with the way you people breed and then abandon your children.

and a note to all of you who think cheating is only an issue between you and your husband or you and your wife, maybe you should wake up to the fact that you’re cheating on your children almost more than your spouse. worse, your cheating will alter the entire development of your children whether they know it or not. the SICKNESS of your dishonesty will fester its way into the very essence of their personalities. and this is the sin that is spoken of that passes from “father to child”.

when jesus did his showdown with the men who were about to murder a woman for fcking around with other men against her husband, we are told that jesus started drawing nasty pictures in the dirt of the men and the fkt up stuff that they had done. one by one as the pictures emerged, the men judged themselves on what they saw and left.

and here’s where christians FK the story up as usual. they claim that JESUS forgave the woman. but this is not true. JESUS did not forgive the woman. instead he said the very worst thing you could possibly say — literally the most deviant thing of all to commission a human with — he said GO AND SIN NO MORE.

and to this day, when people ask me to forgive them, and i’m feeling generous, that’s what i say.

GO AND SIN NO MORE!!!!

why do i care about your sins against me? i haven’t held onto them. i have no forgiveness for anyone. i am not a christian. i am not weak and pathetic. i do not need salvation and i am not a sinner.

i am a gnostic. we do our best to NEVER lie to ourselves or others. we do our best to NEVER do things we hate.

that’s it. we’re not complicated. we don’t have agendas. we’re not out to sucker-punch you. we want to see GOD emerging from you as you are!

we carry love and intelligence. we believe that the GOD is inside of you (not that you are the god!) your job is to the let the GOD out.

that’s it.

but apparently the whole lying and cheating thing is too much for everyone (cheating is when you support a lie through omission or design a lie to be directly misleading, etc.)

personally, i find it amazingly exciting not to be able to lie or scurry sideways. it’s so EASY to lie. and once you start, why stop?

which leads us to the real essay about a man who went to an entitled school and designed a very remedial app that was chosen by the invisible empire to collect information and behavioral patterns from weak people who need attention. also known as FACEBOOK.

***************************

look how far we’ve come & ""CONGRESS MAN, YES" & several of the reasons why USURER’S LOGIC makes FACEBOOK the future press darlings of 2018", scott richard image and painting from 2012 (original photo from 2010)

PRESS PLAY

i love you, i know yello (1983)

an essay that cites TONS of quotes and incidents from the recent congressional meeting regarding FACEBOOK taking over the world and why you should have invested when i told you to invest… i did. just so proof would equal pudding.

(FYI the stock went up to 208 from 164 two weeks after this essay was written. it’s back down to what it was at that time again. facebook is spreading its profits into subsids now, so it’s not on my BUY NOW list. but if you can smell out the little geniuses facebook intends to buy, you might be able to find some juicy investments. i still believe that tesla will produce some kind of design innovation that will be purchasable for worldwide distribution…)

"CONGRESS MAN, YES" & several of the reasons why USURER’S LOGIC makes FACEBOOK the future press darlings of 2018 and beyond based on the CONGRESSIONAL HEARINGS + transcript notes and observations by scott richard

usury sucks for everyone. even those who profit.

and we don’t FIGHT USURY.

we fk it until it destroys everything around us.

FB means fk buddy, literally, not facebook…

anyway, i know from great and long experience that americans graft their identity concepts from the products and services they use and abuse.

you can’t go broke betting on the fall.

to not buy FACEBOOK stock would be like turning down a 50% off willy wonka chocolate bar that ALSO comes with a free golden ticket to the chocolate factory.

so while i listened and periodically watched the 5 hours of boring and often JUVENILE hearings, i couldn’t help thinking how clever deception really is. FACEBOOK does soooo many things that you have no idea about.

where did you think all that FAKE money was going?

and it was sooooo touching when a couple of the congress people dared to ask when mark would stop selling OPIOID DRUGS off FACEBOOK. he conveniently said, never.

but don’t worry, the u.s. sent it’s least qualified people to talk to FACEBOOK about this, lol.

i mean, the vast majority of these congresspeople were like children who have no clue about adult concepts.

for example, not one congressperson asked if those "privacy settings" weren’t hackable — as in something so FKING SIMPLE like "well, a hacker can hack past those infantile settings." instead, they gave zuckerberg the legal opportunity to talk-stall his way out of their four minutes. it was EMBARRASSING to see how stupid most of these congresspeople really are and how unlearned about important tech philosophy. most of them had no idea even what "privacy settings" were, so many spent their four minutes being "schooled". fking waste. that’s like sending me to the olympics for weightlifting…

so the first problem is that congresspeople don’t really know a lot about anything. in general, they are "OUT OF THE GD LOOP" when it comes to understanding worldwide things like the fking INTERNET!!??! they know a little about a lot.

anyway, each congressperson was given four minutes to ask zuckerberg questions about what happened.

the LARGE majority wasted these minutes with grandstanding. only a handful seemed to have an inkling of what the real reach and danger and anti-American stance that FACEBOOK has against the united states.

so instead of gathering relevant testimony and commitment from FACEBOOK on super important legal issues regarding citizenship protection and unethical information exchange, they paraded themselves for THEIR fake american constituent’s votes. it was DISGUSTING. how fking shallow bipartisan azzhoes really are.

instead of REPRESENTING AMERICA, they represented their own careers.

and honestly, every single person on MEDZ or overeating or over drinking these days is acting like an ANTI-AMERICAN. supremacy is also a form of ANTI-AMERICANISM.

we’ve reached a point where our daily choices are becoming ANTI-AMERICAN and in violation of other citizens’ rights to be free. but i guess we don’t see it clearly, mostly.

in the city, it is much more obvious. especially a FAKE SANCTUARY city like san francisco, the sanctuary is REALLY being given to the monied and the foreign investors, not the locals. it’s a FAKE moniker for investors, not a representation of anything more. but most people are like these congresspeople — out to get more votes from their base. but that’s not AMERICAN. that’s just regional self-interest.

thankfully, there were a few exceptions and those ones were AWESOME to hear. they were incredibly revealing. and it is clear that their voices are being thrown out. so that’s a drag, but you can’t really stop FACEBOOK. they are not a social platform. they are the world’s largest company and they fund TONS of stuff around the globe.

for example, FACEBOOK is going to have the largest WORLDWIDE "counterterrorism" team. already there team is competitive with world powers. soon, they will be larger than any nation’s.

now, those of us who are in the know, well, we KNOW that the COUNTERTERRORISTS are the real terrorists.

if you listen to the 9/11 commission report you would know this, too. or, if you listened to anything the islamic world is saying you’d know this, too. but i already know you don’t listen to those people.

doesn’t change the truth — the COUNTERRERRORISTS are the real terrorists.

so now FACEBOOK will be the leading force in this deception.

already they have over 200 people working full time in 30 different languages in counterterrorism.

if you don’t get what this means, you should go read my facebook farewell that i wrote about two years ago when i stopped contributing to the largest surveillance system ever built and used against humanity.

i had written a similar program concept in the 90s. it was called CYBERBUDDY.

the idea was you would input your info into a program (we call them apps now) that tracked your emotional and physical world by remembering everything you input and being able to remind you of things — how you felt about others, what had happened and what others had done to you.

and, as all the social media programs do, it would have a backside that was constantly selling your information to buyers.

but the user never knew this.

anyway, that’s exactly what FACEBOOK did. and let’s be honest, FACEBOOK was CHOSEN.

it’s not that great.

there were way better platform possibilities. but the world cartels needed something legit, so they chose the HARVARD-based platform. and it worked. they inserted the most deviant and self-revealing and WORSE betraying platform known to humans.

this congressperson is holding up a chart. it shows FACEBOOK’s profits.

they are escalating exponentially. from 1 billion in 2006 to 26 billion in 2016 and then WATCH THE FKING LEAP!!!!

40 BILLION dollars in 2017.

buy now. you won’t be crying later.

anyway, zuckerberg intends to have more than 20,000 people working on counterterrorism within a year or so. they are also building an endless array of surveillance and algorithmic tools that will affect ALL world trade. they are also deeply involved in ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE development.

basically, if you wanted an anti christ of jewish origins, you are looking at the rise of the kingship. but if you’re not scared and don’t go that way right away, dip into OVERHEAD STUDIES to see just how amazingly controlling all of this is when you also have KILL DRONES and security enforcement.

already OVERHEAD STUDIES are being used against the u.s. population to imprison us.

anyway, for most people this will seem crazy and like a new gibberish. so be it.

i started to take notes about a third of the way into process when i started to get a feel for how the "hearings" work. it was new for me, but i’ll post the transcript of my notes which are a lot of actual transcriptting.

the republicans are all for it and that’s why you should bet on FACEBOOK. especially since the majority of FACEBOOK’s users are and will be NOT from america. so our "opinion" of this is just that.

FACEBOOK is bigger than the u.s. government and for the record, the whole counterterrorism surveillance team works from outside the u.s.

where there are different laws…

okay, so here’s the transcript which i LAUGHINGLY call:

CONGRESS MAN, YES

because this is the tactic zuckerberg and his lawyers realized was the WINNING COMBO.

who knew congresspeople were so fking stupid? especially from the stupid states. geez.

no wonder so many extra-foreigners are making a bid at stealing so much of the united states’ property.

it must be fking easy with so many dum fks.

and to those congress people who used this momentous occasion to further their careers instead of protecting the american public, FKU!!!!!

*********************************

PRESS PLAY

no stars

figures on a beach

the partial notes:

CONGRESSMAN, YES

i would love to be a congressperson, but to be one, i would have to not understand any of this. so why are they “representing” us??!?!?!

zuckerbergs tactics.

agree with the person.

deflect away from the topic by using their weakness and lack of knowledge.

obscure the truth. pretend you’re not a MASSIVE CONGLOMERATE but a calendar site for connecting people’s lives HALLMARK.

once zuckerberg figures out how to run the clock down, he takes over everytime.

some senators (usually republican) have long winded and meaningless monologues followed by easy to answer questions of no importance except to wind the four minute clock down.

20K employees for content control.

some senators (usually democratic) try to get him to answer YES OR NO questions. his tactic for stalling in this case is deflect back to their misunderstanding of the precise language or meaning. it makes them look dumb (a lot of the are and don’t understand why FACEBOOK is such a walking/talking front for a secret information and collection agency as well as worldwide product mouthpiece)

the best questions take all four minutes and then zuckerberg can deflect easily. fk that!!!

NOT A SINGLE CONGRESS PERSON (well, maybe one, but he petered out oddly) got through their questions. most had MANY left and were forced to “submit” them for consideration. BULLSHIT!!!!

SMASHFACE his “prank” site.

"we’re getting ready to overreact”

we do nothing or we overreact!

you need to save your ship?

diamond and silk. african american women.

what is unsafe about two women supporting donald trump?

mr. schrader from oregon.

do you delete and save.

yes.. all things saved.

document retention policy.

preserve mails/conversations

testified that you don’t sell information.

but others do. aren’t you complicit?

"complaint only” enforcement.

kennedy democrat

wasted the whole time trying to explain himself.

“i’m sorry, i don’t understand your question.”

targeting options are shared likes. shared by facebook.

ad ranking. meta data. behaviors. newsfeed. relevancy vs. GIVING to advertisers.

how do people then “own” their own data?

then gets lost in the process and time runs out.

part of the rub

second you focus the individual instead of societal impact… you’re out of time.

but news and media. blah blah blah

mr flores. texas

large oil company monopoly 1800s 1900s

telecom company monopoly in the70s

thanks for being good.

wasted the whole time with a bizarre lecture.

conservatives are mad about BIAS.

they can’t see past their stupidity.

policy responses.

ideological agnosticism regarding their users public facing activities

finally, some questions. do you believe FACEBOOK SHOULD BE IDEOLOGICALLY NEUTRAL?

i agree we should be a platform for all ideas. [cuts him off and moves to next question. bam! yeah!!

with respect to privacy we need a baseline when we talk about a virtual person, name address websites visited, picture, etc. ownership issue is the individual’s creation.

they own it.

do you agree.

yes.

use of data issue and full disclosure for unlimited time.

easy understand.

runs out of time.

california

mr cardenas

biggest business model and totally unregulated.

shows shareholder revenues table

2009 net revenue less than a billion dollars

26 billion for 2016

40 billion dollars for 2017

CEO of cambridge analytica stepped down during the meeting.

does that solve the issue around the controversy.

no, two issues. how were they able to buy data from a developer that people chose to share it with? but some of the info originated on facebook.

people had it on facebook and CHOSE to share their AND their friend’s information…

question:

buy information to add or augment to build around them their profile.

we just recently announced that we’ve stopped working with data brokers as part of the ad system.

yes, standard practice.

you did engage in it.

yes. until we announced we were shutting it did.

facebook threatened to sue the guardian if it revelaed the cambridge analytica story.

hey maybe you don’t want to do that.

“there may have been an specific factual inaccuracy.”

however they did go through with it regardless.

then ONLY then did facebook apologize for 89 million users info ending up in other people’s hands.

‘

it’s time that you FACEBOOK want to be a leader and american you can be a leader.

are you committed to being a leader. you can in fact do right by users of facebook.

time’s out. two second answer?

"i am definitely committed to taking a broader review of our responsibility. not so that we don’t just give people tools but so they are used for good.”

first five or ten minute , ten minute recess.

5;40

TWENTY FUCKING MINUTES LATER…

mre. brooks indiana

platform of facebook and other platforms help keep us safe from terrorists and recruitment of women and children to join terrorist organizations.

facebook didn’t exist before 9/11

isis and al acaida use these platforms.

terrorism recruitment.

now terrorists use social media.

then you talked about dangerous or objectionable content needing to be reported but what if they don’t? what if people just assume that someone else is reporting.

what is the leadership role of facebook, our role in stopping recruitment.

thank you for the question. there is no place for that in our network.

we’ve developed a number of tools so that 99% of isis and al acaida is flagged before we even see it.

we’re proud of it as a model for removing "harmful content".

as of march 29th there were ISIS videos, executions,

april 9th five pages of hezbollah content

what is the mechanism?

is it AI

2-0K people?

what are you using.

this is just within a week.

counter terrorism team at facebook with 200 people.

other content reviewers not in the 200.

NCTC produces analysis, maintains the authoritative database of known and suspected terrorists, shares information, and conducts strategic operational planning. NCTC is staffed by more than 1,000 personnel from across the IC, the Federal government, and Federal contractors. NCTC’s workforce represents approximately 20 different departments and agencies—a tribute to the recognition by the intelligence, homeland security, and law enforcement communities of NCTC’s role in protecting the Nation against terrorist threats.

just focused on counter terrorism.

30 languages.

AI tools in development

proactively flag content and sources

owns wassap? .

how are they helping the to stop the recruiting.

WOW BACK TO THE ORIGINAL POINTS : WHAT THE FUCK IS FACEBOOK?!?!?

cue WILD WILD COUNTRY

correction plea: whether web blogs would be able to download your info. they are not we only store them temporarily. we convert them into ad inter

Posted by torbakhopper on 2019-11-19 14:45:36

Tagged: , manhattan , 2004 , archive , scott , richard , torbakhopper , san , francisco , california , city , street , photographer , scottrichard , SF , scottrichardphotographer , SFMET , new york city , NYC , new york , taxi , taxis , bacardi , billboard

The post bacardi and cola with taxis, scott richard 2004 appeared first on Good Info.

[icepeak-blog]

chambers patriot RIDDICK, scott richard 2004

the beauty of old friends….

PRESS PLAY

faith ft. Mr. Probz galantis & dolly parton

and now an essay on why america needs to debunk itself from anti-american AMERICAN racist USURERS & "color coding" racism ….

***********************

recently i was laid into by an unsolicited critic. but you know me, i lap that stuff up like delicious poison!!!!

the most delighting part in all of this criticism was when the phrase LETHAL ACTIVISM was levied against me. as if i’ve ever harmed anyone or my intentions on here are to harm others!!!! i know it was levied unfairly because i know the critic. and the critic was hurt. so it was more of a personal attack designed to hurt me back for being honest.

but, for the record, my battle is against USURY. and the spirit of USURY is not a person.

this is a lifetime struggle against an invisible demon which has been infecting the human people since long before its earliest recordings/sightings/mentionings (it is first recognized and named in the INDIAN text the Mahabharata).

USURY is a destructive LIVING FORCE that infects humans just like AIDS did (yep, the lap dogs of USURY did that, too). Usury, as a spiritual force manifests as a mental disease that leads the victim of the disease to believe that they are better than other human and non-human life forms and can enact schemes of power and control over those other humans and other life forms in taking by force the CONTROL of their reproduction cycles and sexual habits.

it is the equivalent of BESTIALITY. and many people are so delusional that they think bestiality is people fking animals. this is simply NOT TRUE.

BESTIALITY is when you (as a human force) take over the reproduction and sex rights of other species and imprison them for practical purposes.

it is an ancient prohibition because of how it leads to social disorder by OBVIOUSLY favoring those who would abuse the spirit of life to gain sht. THINK RWANDA, duh!? it was a cow blood war started by belgian setups of economic disparity and favoritism. they used animal husbandry to divide the two populations.

and i call these sideline instigators the FOOD AND BEVERAGE cartels (F&B cartels). you’re welcome.

and BESTIALITY is a natural physical deformation of the spirit of USURY when it acquires henchmen like the F&B cartels. so is SLAVERY. and pharmaceutical drug addiction.

but back to LETHAL ACTIVISM…

as INACCURATE AND UNKIND as this attack on my personhood is — i am not this stream, i am not this essay, i have written over 1300 hundred essays and they are in the group THINK CLUB if you dare to want to know/piece together more of who you think i am. good luck keeping up, i have chased after the great spirits for decades without resting — and added to it that i practice GENTILITY and DISTANCE from other humans.

i will also protect other people’s children from harm. sometimes i will also protect others, but it might also look to some like i’m doing it as an attack against the aggressor, but those people with that view generally think more slowly AND do little in any time of REAL crisis.

they are flighters. the cowards among our species. ironically, these are the same cowards who later call us heroes for just doing the VERY ORDINARY THING. their award is just more shame on people who don’t run away.

so perhaps my critic was really expressing a fear of the nearness of LETHAL ACTIVISM in our societies? perhaps the HUMAN SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE has had enough of this INFECTION of USURY in the elites of human society?

perhaps my critic is realizing for themself that the spiritual world is once again calling upon ALL OF US through "fate and destiny" (geopolitical locationing) to rise up against the weight of this construct. but my critic doesn’t even realize time has weight!!??!? pity the sciences and maths which could leave something so basic off the menu!!!

perhaps this critic has identified a rising spirit and sees in me a harbinger of this ENERGY. fair play.

but if my words could KILL, i would say this to my critic,

"i hope you live forever!! i hope my love for you stays inside your heart and keeps you company throughout the ages!! i hope you weren’t lying about love like you are lying about most things in your life. I didn’t even want you to be free. I just wanted to have fun. WTF, playboy!!!!"

and perhaps my critic now knows that there is a greater magic than the feeble white man’s sciences of falsely identified and defined numbers, of falsely applied logics of math without philosophical support — sorry, kids, stories ALWAYS come before numbers. always have, always will. and science is just a wee little story based on astrology which converted into astronomy with the astrolabes of discovery, and then slowly headed into a collective concept that eventual gave birth to physics as the role of the "real" star interpreter took on precedence in the courts of europe. and china. and india. because there are many cultural responses to the idea of the sky and the idea of stars and the idea of rotational charting and map making. i know, it was all just for FUN right from the start [wink wink, glad the lore of the young and all the unknown lovers could chime in on all the personal criticism. ah, how disgusting and messy polyamory gets, it just never ends…].

but SERIOUSLY, it was just for fun. it still is!

the innocence of someone looking up in the sky and thinking, "there’s that ONE light again! and LOOK! the other!!!"

but this isn’t magic. it is correlation. it’s us seeing something and going, "hey, look at that!" and then agreeing, "I SEE IT, I SEE IT, WE SEE IT". and the WE is born of this endeavor.

obviously, real magic can take place when you conjoin these correlations.

in my life real magic is grafted directly from circumstance and variables and available energy. and it is directed through the voice or the imaginative voice of the spell caster. everyone sort of already knows this. we’ve been told all about it since we were children.

for example, how many "astronauts", the children of those early astrological wanderings, have actually "touched" the surface of anything NOT human made but out of the orbit? [he falls over laughing, but all the gold bars wasted and laundered through fake space programs have piled up so high above his head that he can only see glittering skyscrapers] www.flickr.com/photos/gazeronly/albums/72157650835706423

we are fking funny!!! and now, how much FAKE money has been dumped into the lavish lifestyles of those employed and funded by this expansive waste of money?

this is not magic.

so to my critic, perhaps there should be some gratitude that those like me who touch these powers are kind to our critics? perhaps it would behoove said critic to acknowledge that their narcissism is not the source of my inquiries and does not direct my willingness to accept answers. i am not magical in order to entertain narcissists. that’s what hollywood is for anyway. and "court magicians". that is SLEIGHT OF HAND, which is USURY, not magic.

so what do they know of love? they still use it like a back hoe and everyone who wants a job sucks dck to get it. if you have bad knees or they get tender fast from kneeling, buy knee pads, cckskr. [and that’s a compliment if you do it well. you’ll get the job cuz anyone can act.]

so please, let me state for ALL PUBLIC RECORD that i am not a LETHAL ACTIVIST. in fact, i’d never even heard of it before.

i am a cultural activist and i fight for the spirit of humanity and the preservation of those gifts which manifest themselves as forms in our lives — community, identity, stability.

i fight against usury and those who debt-enslave others, sell weapons to kill children and their parents, sell drugs to kill the caretakers of children, and those who traffic humans or fk kids (whether by economic coercion or actual action) — so BOO HOO HOO. sue me!

or educate yourself. but please, lethal activism??!! that’s just mean. and i can shrug that one off. i get it, you’re hurt.

but more importantly, there was a startling book written and released in russia (allegedly) back at the turn of the 20th century. it’s a short handbook that describes in realistic and profoundly brutal terms the manner in which a TINY group of CLAIMED ELITES can take over and enslave the masses, which are LESS HUMAN than these elites.

and while it is TRUE that the book was purportedly foisted onto a group called the LEARNED ELDERS (the kingship of jews, actually, because apparently it’s more complicated than people want to believe…) who were apparently attempting to destabilize the governments/aristocracies/oligarchs of western europe. i mean, anti-semitism was a GD section in the book stores in russia and germany and other "nation states" of the day. and apparently it was a huge section. and if you know me, i’ve been trying my best to get people to understand that the UNITED STATES is literally MANUFACTURING its own breed of anti-semitism on television and streaming. shows like AMERICAN DAD, which have had top ratings for years, are disgustingly ladened with all manner of jokes and put-downs and weird sideways. (yes, i wrote an essay about that, too, seven years ago…)

www.flickr.com/photos/gazeronly/6931096786

this is often INVERSE DUMPING. if you watched the video you’ll know what i’m talking about, as MATT WEITZMAN’s role in all of this is totally suspect:

"Matt Weitzman was born to a Jewish family[2] in Los Angeles, California. His father is Lew Weitzman, a long time literary agent for over 40 years. Matt attended American University, where he became and brother of Alpha Epsilon Pi,[3] and graduated with a communications degree. Shortly after college, he pursued acting with some success, then later began writing for television sitcoms. As a child, Weitzman was an avid comic book collector and reader of fantasy and science fiction. This is what he has called "inspiration" for upcoming projects." wiki

if you read my work, you know that i know all about the super hero creation market and who started it and how it’s literally a LOSER’S spirit buried in skin tight homosexual man worship. but you can do some of your GD research about history because darnit, there’s so much of it to swallow. let’s just say that people who are genocided (this includes homosexuals) definitely dream of striking back against their "oppressors".

and super heroes are the capitalized/capitalistic version of the pantheon gods of the ancient world.

the primary difference is that super heroes work for the highest human agencies of government control so you can see how this fantasy framework immediately instigates conspiracy and dread-laced confectionaries of BETRAYAL, DECEPTION, LIES AND MURDER. super heroes are embedded in contemporary politics, whereas the ancient "gods" are fantastical and have been relegated to olive leaves and togas. i hope this makes sense. anyway, if you read the PROTOCOLS, again, you don’t need to hear the messenger!!!!

the comic book industry is insidious and mentally deformational on young people’s minds. it is a vulgarity and glamorized FAKE body types (historically) to gain market claims before becoming powerful enough to overtake alternate markets in foreign lands. after being blown to bits in wwii, manga took off like mad in japan: " Since the 1950s, manga has steadily become a major part of the Japanese publishing industry.[7] By 1995, the manga market in Japan was valued at ¥586.4 billion ($6–7 billion),[8] with annual sales of 1.9 billion manga books and manga magazines in Japan (equivalent to 15 issues per person).[9] Manga have also gained a significant worldwide audience.[10] In 2008, in the U.S. and Canada, the manga market was valued at $175 million. Manga represent 38% of the French comics market, which is equivalent to approximately ten times that of the United States.[11] In France, the manga market was valued at about €460 million ($569 million) in 2005.[12] In Europe and the Middle East, the market was valued at $250 million in 2012.[13]" wiki

we could talk a long time about the after effects of being holocausted or target hunted, but let’s get back to the PROTOCOLS!!!!

and again, who cares who wrote this book??!?!

it was written and it’s been around long enough to have been read by all humans who can read. so READ IT!!!! (then you can listen to the 27hours of information released by the u.s. governement on the four decade collusion that led to the manufacturing of 9/11. IT’S CALLED A COMMISSION REPORT in case one doesn’t already know that the U.S. released a very weird and disturbing BODY OF TEXT to the world. perhaps if YOU read it, you’d know more, too. at least you’d be able to see the amazing LIES that this nation’s government TELLS and gets CAUGHT telling and then TELLS more and gets CAUGHT telling and then TELLS more…)

anyway, who cares? i mean, let’s be liberal and BLAME all men, because FK it was a MAN who wrote the book after all. EVERYONE can agree that it was NOT written by a woman. that much is true!!!

but instead, "they" want you to believe and focus on the jewish part of authorship. and you will see this in the introduction of the book. because it’s old enough to be an antique, the book has acquired its own sense of history.

but AGAIN, i’m a gnostic. i don’t care if it is about to be written and released tomorrow for the first time ever, i think you should read it!!

it is the INFORMATION AND STRATEGIES inside the book that are so valuable.

just like every girl should STEAL the book THE GAME from somewhere and read it so she can know what SHTTY men are out there and also what shtty girlfriends do to each other.

and again, i am not the one on the cover of this SHTTY DATE RAPE HANDBOOK FOR MEN that is saying i’m of "jewish" descent. he does that himself, but again, i hope my FKING hating his book and the tricks he has gathered and compiled from america’s rich history of DATE RAPE ARTISTS doesn’t make me the bad guy. and i’m certainly not going to look at all the awesome people that i know of personally and throughout the world who call themselves jewish and think, hmmm, they’re all date rapists!!!! nope, just him. and harvey weinstein. and what do we call people who go to date rapes on purpose more than once? are they victimizing the date rapist? i get so confused when there is such a moral sexual breakdown in breeder semantics. if you have to give hed to get ahed, how many times do you have to give hed and STAY AHED?

like am i supposed to hate catholics because machiavelli wrote a political treatise on how the medici’s could do the same thing to their own people — fiscally date rape and murder their peers? rather, you should hate the catholic state for its actions and historical thuggery and it’s sexual violations against thousands and thousands of boys. that would make a lot more sense instead of putting it on the dupes who fall for such drivel. and i’m so distrustful i’m like, "what is the vatican hiding that they are willing to use PEDOPHILIA as a distraction?!?!" HLY FK!!!! how come we never go for real answers?!?!"

but isn’t that how REVERSE DUMPING works?

just ask MALCOM X!!!!! here’s a quote you can look at: ""the F.B.I. can feed information to the press that makes your neighbor think you are something subversive. the F.B.I. can do this very skillfully. they maneuver the press on a national scale and the C.I.A. maneuvers the press on an international scale" 1964

and let’s be honest, that was 55 fking years ago!!!! do you not think that the information societies that play nation states like checker pieces haven’t become paranormous?

when/if you get to the FACEBOOK essay down below, you’ll see this more clearly and you will understand how it’s a TRILLIONAIRE’s front who is using SCHOOLS and their products — including zuckerberg’s whole life (he’s being "hannah montana-ed©"!!!) — as fronts to generate dominant world control of new surveillance technology and ALL of its advancements.

so you do know malcom got reversed dumped, right!?!?! you DO at least know that, right? and you do know that whenever black men of power rise they are beaten down with the myriad temptations of the USURERs CLUB (drugs, sex, power, alcohol, attention). and if that doesn’t work, assassination.

that’s hardcore REVERSE DUMPING. whites usually don’t end up getting the bullet, poor Vincent foster…

but in our real world, in our daily lives, SOFTCORE reverse dumping happens when you tell someone honestly that they have a problem and then suddenly they try to reduce your world to ruins simply because you objected to THEIR DISHONESTY or TREACHERY or UNKINDNESS or ECONOMIC SLANDERING. suddenly, for saying, "hey!! you’re lying to me!!!" i am the LETHAL ACTIVIST? "hey! you’re giving people AIDS!! and i’m the LETHAL ACTIVIST? and worse, somehow giving people AIDS on purpose is better than FIGHTING BACK? better than letting them do it again to a new target group? really?

but it’s true. if you say anything about this book, you are probably going to be labeled anti-semitic.

but for me, that’s the LIE. i have hung out with way too many cool people that i admired and respected and adored and have also been HIGHLY influenced by to care about their JEWISHNESS. more often than not, i wasn’t even concerned with their "jewishness". if they wanted to share their ideas and what this "meant" to them, they would. not unlike gays who must constantly come out of the closet so that people don’t accidentally say something irrevocably hateful because they couldn’t tell the person was gay because they weren’t having sex in front of them and there were no other visual clues.

as a homo, i resent people who would take an entire ethnicity or culture or way of being and say EVERYONE in this "fake group" is

a: in agreement with each other b: the same c: so easily reducible

these are things STUPID (by choice) and IGNORANT (disengagement and self-interested) people share — judging LITERAL groups that have been intellectually arranged on very BARE and SEPARATIZING notions is PRIMARY BULLSHT. and the USURERS love this because it deflects from the FACT that they are a REAL GROUP in their "servitude" to the demonic forces of USURY. read plato if you need to understand some of things socrates was railing on against.

so USURY forces us to talk about these FAKE CLUSTERS or SHARDS as if they are real and have a genuine existence. they don’t, they’re just like everything else — they are proximity ideas that will die and pass away. there is a historylessness to most of us.

as a result these dynamics are all constructs of fate and birth. you happen to be colombian, you happen to be vietnamese, you happen to be [insert something here], cuz you’re just a gosh dern human at the beginning and the end.

they are all mutable and they all come with their own seeds of separation and distinction. they all create their own INTERIOR hierarchies where they enact the same

all that aside, the truth is that this book is FKNG amazing. and you’d know if you read it. it’s BRILLIANT and the game is on.

it is a playbook for raping the little people who don’t matter. it’s where the original idea of a MASTER CARD comes from, for fks sake!!!!! it is the birth of the credit system we fking use everywhere these days!!!!

but i guess most of you don’t realize that our dear president in the 1920s read this short work of political theory. that alone should give you cause to go and read it just to see how useful this information is and how much of it is CURRRENTLY IN USE and how easily it would be to dismantle this strangulation if more people would educate themselves instead of fking around indulging in their side lives of debauchery and social mayhem, lol. but those are the treats of the USURER!!

take more loans!! live beyond your means!!!!

and now that we are again in a period where ANTI-SEMETISM is being blatantly and openly promoted by ECONOMICALLY PRONGED SEMITES (why is it so cool to throw your own people in front of the bus for your cause? who told you that was legit politics? — seriously, look at the producers of almost any television show. you will immediately start to see a trend that is alarming — as if anyone is still even reading this essay. but if you are an american who was of asian descent you might notice the clear absence of your ethnicity on television and in television production roles. but china and japan and many other countries in those regions have their own ENTERTAINMENT CARTELS in full-swing, too. but in "america" you have to admit really fast that NPR and other outlets of alleged news are stocked and renewed with a fk lot of people who also identify with minority groups that have been historically punished throughout centuries for running USURY GAMES on the "humans" they deemed less worthy.

and you should be able to figure out that i’m not talking about homos. but you can do your research instead of lambasting me for referring to the idea that there are ACTUAL DATA POINTS worth noting. after all, isn’t the OLD TESTAMENT the most anti-semitic book ever written? i’ve read it. it’s a history of shtty people who never got along with anybody and it always ends in genocide and slavery. i’m fking literate!!!! i didn’t write that GD book!! i just read it. it’s fking anti-semitic.

so if you are curious instead of a KNEE-JERK, read the protocols and you will find out that i’m not SAYING ANYTHING, i’m just the messenger alerting LAZY FKRS that sht is going on and has been in process for over a century. it’s NOT new.

further, i’m just the guy who got jumped by the side of the road and there was no good samaritan to assist me.

but, i survived. and now, i know how to spot the robbers. i’ve been jumped endlessly since then. i learned from camille paglia that einstein was wrong.

repeating the same act over and over again actually does eventually lead to breakthrough depending on who is performing the experiment. WE are the magical element in science!!!! it’s OUR imagination that gives science life, not the other way around.

and, unlucky for me, my "self constructs" have been shattered so many times that i no longer perceive information the way i did when i could hide behind those constructs. i’ve been lied to and cheated on in every imaginable way. i scare the SHT out of people with how quickly i unravel all their hateful lies in person. people are scared to be around me because i can "see" their sins and write them in the sand — they become terrified of my experience.

alternately, only by accident, have i lied and cheated. and when i do, i grovel back and apologize and i take it on myself to acknowledge my awfulness. and i don’t PRETEND that i deserve forgiveness.

lucky for me, this is very rare and usually under strange and weirdly unimportant circumstantial moments when the character or nature of another being alters my balance. that is to say, i remember almost every lie i’ve ever told and how it hurt the person or aided me to my "advantage".

and i didn’t like myself as a liar. i have a good memory and i don’t practice denial. it is not the gnostic way. denial does not lead to KNOWING. i don’t want to be with a lover or a friend and know that i lie to them or told them a lie. i find that so uncomfortable and disgusting and faithless.

lying is humanity’s greatest toy. and people play with it constantly. and then they are old and feel stupid about how they spent their lives. yay!

research can lead you to a different outcome. and if you take the time to read this political tract, you won’t need me to explain anything to you.

instead you will read the words which are well over one hundred years old at this point. and who cares about its origin or anti-semitism?!??! study the ACTUAL CONTENT. it is like a book of magic spells (barely, magic is so much cooler). learn to see that to this fking day people use ANTI-SEMITISM to keep you from reading the book. they don’t want you to know about it. they want you to ignore this book. and THEY are white, yellow, blue, green and red, for all you COLOR CODED RACISTS who think people are GD colors!!!! THEY are the oligarchs and secret emperors who control the drug trade, the weapons disbursement programs and the natural resource allotments for "nation states" — the USURERS’ favorite little pet projects and "clients".

if you take time to read this tract (it’s only about 100 pages), the realizations will also help elucidate a lot of things about the history of HUMANS who have actively used these techniques to undermine cultures and societies wherever they go. they are information collectors and litigators. these are their tools to bind.

but first, to give you some boundaries on this, i will use myself as an example.

let’s make it personal for just one second…

as a HOMOSEXUAL who was tortured as a four year old child and had my penis raped with a steel object by a white male doctor in his thirties under the auspices of something medical — no one will tell me to this day what the reason was for doing this to two little boys, two pretty decent little twins — i have spent my life being degraded and humiliated by other people for not running away from the horror that overtook my life.

for example, even before i thought i was gay my father completely disowned me for "having a negative reaction" to being raped in the dck. he came home and found two crazy kids instead of the fun ones he’d maybe seen the day before. he told me very directly when i was 28 that he had come home one day when i was about four and i was a "cold, aloof and a distant prick." those were his exact words. and this was before i knew what had happened. and i said, that sounds like child abuse! he said, "i figured if you wanted to be that way, i could be that way, too." and he never talked to me or touched me again. and i mean LITERALLY. in speech he shifted over to using only the objective command form of language from then on. it was very isolating, but i was terrified of him anyway since he used corporal punishment in the same way male hookers in hollywood use cocaine — liberally when available!!!!

anyway, i didn’t find out till age seven that "fag" and "fairy" and "queer" somehow vaguely applied to me like a death sentence… san diego was very homophobic and murderous and one of the pilot cities where the idea of a "hate crime" was born to separate HUMAN HUNTERS from ordinary murderers…

so as a child i was terrified of going into a bath room with other men/males after this episode. and this meant ALL public bathrooms.

i was literally terrified that i would be brutalized again. every time i had to urinate and was out in the world, i became desperately afraid that if i went into the bathroom and couldn’t lock everyone out, i would be raped again. that’s how four year olds perceive the world. once raped, ten times shy.

and the horror of this was with me constantly. weirdly, i had no memories of the incident. it had shattered my mind, my being, everything about me.

i only "know" it happened because I demanded to know at least the dates when it became clear that it had actually happened (there were two follow up visits to the damage). my twin brother never forgot it. somehow, his mind stayed in tact during the episode. during my childhood he would frequently bring up the event but he was just four years old as well. all he could actually remember was the book he was reading in the waiting room before it happened. and weirdly, i, too, remember the entire book that i was reading.

and sadly, he hated me for not remembering. all i remember is that he kept saying something about a farm bird ( a red rooster) over and over again asking me if i remembered. but i had no idea what it meant. finally, when i was 38 he actually told me. he had no idea that i had no memories and he thought i was colluding against him all these years.

his book was about a red rooster. my book was about a little red hen, which is also the title of the book. the little red hen wants to make bread but also wants company during the process and seeks that instead of making bread. finally, in desperation, the little animal gives up and goes out to do ALL the tasks to make bread. then, the bitter pill at the end, the smell of the baking bread brings ALL the other animals that were asked for help. they all want baked bread!!!! heheheh.

then the doctor stuck a sounding device (metal rod) up our dicks. i don’t remember that part.

so yes, scott has shame!!!! i can’t remember. it sits on top of me like a desperate crime committed by someone else.

forgive me if i want to make sure that this stuff doesn’t happen to other children while their mother is in the waiting room. forgive me if i don’t trust doctors and lawyers and mortgage brokers and bankers. forgive me if i know their dark side.

i guess that’s why i am a "living sign" of this shame. so be it. i will be brave. i can withstand the shame of others. besides, it is PERSONAL shame that i have no room for in my life — the shame one lavishes up for oneself — a shame that has come from within instead of from without. a shame that sickens the GOD within and ails its arrival. this is the shame of INTENTIONAL DECEPTION and TRICKERY.

at least my shame has been given to me by society.

it’s not mine, which is why i can use it in magic. and it’s surprisingly powerful. and most people know this, because there is so much shame in these essays i write. it’s almost unbearable, which is why so few readers make it to the end of any of them. again, this is intentional.

i don’t want all of you to suffer. just those of you who have the courage to stare into the horror without flinching. just those of you who are actually brave enough to become REALIZED.

so my magic of shame erodes and undermines everyone who reads these essays all the way through to the end. and these few readers are the only audience i care about. because they are agents of change. they can taste the poison and find the cure. it is our task!!! and they know it, too.

like me, they have made it their goal to make sure that people who think this kind of behavior is “okay” are taken out of positions of power. and i use these essays that i write to plant seeds and to allow others to see their voice in another, because i KNOW i’m not alone.

when PHILOMEL’s tongue was ripped from her throat, the gods made a new bird that could sing that shameful crime of the king who raped her and then tried to silence her by stealing her voice.

i don’t write these essays because i think ANYONE reads them and goes, “right on!! i’m hitting the fave button!!!"

i write these essays and do the research so that those whose voices are being ripped away can use their new wings to be more than a bird song. so few, these birds who will now fly and sing!

in fact, i don’t imagine most people make it to the end of any of these “essays”. it’s a MACHINE GUN MASSACRE form of writing that INTENTIONALLY only speaks to one or two people who WILL make changes. the INFORMATION will change them — it will not be me, it will not be my personality and it will not be my writing “style”. it will be the idea of the truths that reach into their hearts. and the truth hurts all the time. but even if it doesn’t set you free, it liberates you from LYING!!!! and the lying must stop.

so, as an open HOMOSEXUAL (though it could be easily argued that sexual abuse caused a major deviation), i’ve been clustered grouped my whole life with a stunning array of MEN who are also drawn into the actions of sex with other men. and even in our tiny percentage of ABNORMALITY, there are stand-outs. and these stands out are traditionally distinguished separately.

these stand-outs were called FAGS and TRANNIES and LADY MEN and QUEENS. these are the homosexuals who have serious disagreements with normalized “GENDER ISSUES”.

they are also the most ANTI-MALE of the homosexual community and often dipped/drenched in STEALTH AND TRICKERY AND DECEPTION as a means of counter-balancing the wretchedness of interior feelings and the way the outside society has responded/treated/abused them as people.

they are notably, an attention-deficient group of people who are deeply damaged and wounded from an early age for being different and expressing that difference. the negative treatment reiterates the behavior and more often than not practicers of this type of homosexuality are drawn to the whoredom of the female sexual personae — they end up enacting the slutty side of female sex behavior.

this in turns creates a repulsion in the normalized community — holy sht, a man-woman slut that is parading full-speed and lecherously commanding the attention of everyone or anyone around them.

but isn’t this just the succubus? this isn’t really a homosexual thing as much as it is a social deviation away from the norms that repress and punish homosexuality. the desire to be butterfly attractive is a REACTIONARY stance. it’s not generative and creative. it’s a deviation and a lash-back. it’s a way of vamping. and this same horror is being practiced in the emerging "trans" community. using THEY and THEM to separately disassociate from those who came before is a sign of grammatical desperation. US and WE would be the right choice and the trans community, by allowing the MEDIA to take THEMS over, are being used in the exact same way homos were used — to POLARIZE the majority which makes it easier for banks to weasel into people’s lives with cheap loans and get people to vote for gigantic tax breaks for corporations. but i get it, most of you are TREE PEOPLE and you don’t know you live in a forest. well, not until there’s a fire or the tree cutters show up…

so let’s be serous, having DRAG QUEENS and limp-wristed female copyists representing a community of men who are mostly MARRIED FATHERS is pretty fkt up. right?

because how does that seem like a mature or realized way of embracing the circumstances — that we aren’t allowed to be who we are.

it’s a "DRAG up". it’s dressing like royalty when you’re a pauper. it’s a halloween night that everyone wants to forget later.

in the meantime, the vast majority of homosexuals remain invisible out of fear of being lumped together with the strange HARVEY MILK FREAKS that keep getting chosen to reflect the community.

and the media has been using this polarizing effect to control voting in the united states for the past ten years. the fake front that controls the media now pits homosexuals against others. it pits cops against fking crazy criminals. it promotes car crashes as news. it tracks weather mods and pretends that it’s actually REAL weather instead of manipulated fkery (to this day it is so strange to me that there aren’t classes being taught about this stuff). and it ALWAYS supports tourism unless the intended country is being sanctioned by the invisible front. then they run bad ads.

and i don’t know why all of you don’t know this already. malcom x was pretty clear about it and was even killed for being so clear about it: that is, and I QUOTE

and our human society is super pissed off at the idea of a polygendered society. this is not the USURER’s dream. polygenderism does not put bi-polar gender PARENTING at the forefront of all life. and this would devastate the USURERS. because if PARENTS are the focus of CHILDREN, then the parents become natural "marks" for taking LOANS.

you can loan money to people who need/are told to want stuff for their kids. you can TRAP THEM INTO DEBT SLAVERY very easily by making the ownership of HOMES and CARS and EDUCATION priorities of the capitalistic construct. forget food, clean air and water. those debts will come after these other debts destroy the vast resources of air, water and food. the INTENTIONAL famine is being constructed so fast right now in the city with UBER EATS and AMAZON food delivery. perhaps you need to go back and read that little story in the bible where JOSEPH, while sleeping with the pharoah’s wife, tells the pharaoh that if he really wants to be a great pharaoh all he has to do is create the illusion of prosperity for seven years and then follow it with seven years of mayhem and famine. in this manner, the pharaoh could take over all of his lesser sub-servants’ territories through economic strangulation on the food and water.

but let’s be HONEST!!!!

GENDER ISN’T SEX. so these gender benders NEVER really represented the homosexual community anyway. nor did HARVEY MILK, though now there is a concentrated effort to make him the FACE OF THE "GAY MOVEMENT". ah, how fking sick are we?!?!? harvey milk was the ultimate HOMOPHOBE. just read his history!!!! he preyed on desperate young men, NYC lawyers thought he was scum (arrogant, haughty and a ditch) and we all know what scum 85% of NYC lawyers are… or just lawyers in general, i shouldn’t specifically lay into manhattan fks like our dumptruck fake president.

so back to the story — HOMOSEXUALITY is just SEX WITH MEN BETWEEN MEN. it’s not about relationshipping. that’s GAY stuff. gays are the men and women who are brave enough to simply NOT CARE about the societies in which they exist and choose to be open about their desire to RELATE with their own sex. and this makes a community of sorts. it brings like toward like and cretes "ghettos".

but remember this: BRAVERY is the one thing that almost all humans admire about our collectively shared spirit.

NONETHELESS, as a homosexual man, having a flaming flirtatious, narcissistic sht like HARVEY MILK representing the “gay community” is a fking farce. it’s the WORST example that could be chosen. but harvey milk belongs to the AD MACHINE in fake jewish hollywood. however, AGAIN!!!! if you read about his life ONLY a little bit, you will see what a loser he was and that he actually DID NOTHING while he was in political office (a mere ten months before an angry fellow employee iced him!!!).

in fact, all harvey milk did was get elected. is that HEROIC?

instead, he just pissed an irish catholic white man named dan white off and dan shot his sorry ass for fun, so kicking off the TWINKIE TRIALS where "sugar" was the culprit.

is that heroic? is that a hero? he literally was so shtty that he was shot incidentally. but don’t forget, he also aided and abetted in the suicide of one of his desperate young fk buddies that he preyed upon. the guy was a mess. he embezzled and used people like toilet paper. seriously, you can look this all up.

and if harvey isn’t enough of a reflection of this strange absurdity, we have HERCALES as our example of a greek hero. and what a silly life he lived! he ended up being killed with centaur blood because his wife just wanted him to be faithful. Νέσσος had the last laugh in the end because he knew his blood would kill heracles and that this was the joke — a dead hero can’t be faithless. get it?!!??

and for the record, i’m going to list the VERBS that are attached to each one of Heracles 12 feats (sometimes called labors), which oddly read like a new drinking party game called STEAL, CAPTURE, SLAY:

SLAY SLAY CAPTURE CAPTURE CLEAN SLAY CAPTURE STEAL OBTAIN OBTAIN STEAL CAPTURE cerberus "Heracles says that, although Eurystheus commanded him to bring back Cerberus, it was not from any desire to see Cerberus, but only because Eurystheus thought that the task was impossible." hahahaha, poor cerberus — a three-headed barking dog tooled to the end.

so let’s be real now, is this a “HERO” according to the histories that we keep. these are the actions and accomplishments of a "hero"?

HERACLES’ FEATS, which you can see by the verbs, are pretty straightforward — SLAY, CAPTURE, STEAL, OBTAIN and one menial labor of cleaning out horse stables…

well darn, so much for heroes. especially now when people refer to common soldiers as heroes instead of corporate thug-pawns protecting non-national oligarchical interests in faraway lands at the expense of actual HUMANS.

nothing new there, right? no wonder people made up a CHRIST to try to sort through the FK and KILL schemes of the human condition.

anyway, my point is that when you allow a BAD ROLE MODEL to represent an entire community, it allows bigger communities to PERSECUTE AND TERRORIZE the entire subset community.

AIDS for example was used to terrorize ALL homosexual men. its purpose was LITERALLY to free up the uranium 235 that gets converted “upwards” to uranium 238. so if the african people were enmeshed in a variety of health/life crises they wouldn’t be able to stand up to the western powers and take “control” of the “resource” that was under the land they lived on doing nothing for them.

so voila! — a disease starts in africa with ORAL VACCINES distributed by the JONAS SALK institute. this disease found its way into the gay community quickly due to the nature of sex practices or some other dastardly design — there is a patient O (as in OH, not ZERO). in this case it stood for "out of california, because the was no actual patient zero, AIDS broke out in several places simulatneously in the united states (and remember the first wave of AIDS had an incubation period where you could go over a decade without showing any symptoms.)

"Gaëtan Dugas (French: [ɡaetɑ̃ dyɡa]; February 20, 1953 – March 30, 1984), a Canadian flight attendant, was a relatively early HIV patient who once was widely regarded as "Patient Zero" or the primary case for AIDS in the United States. "

and we don’t need to argue about who it was at the institute who tainted the vaccines. they did. that’s all you need to know. it was intentional.

and recently, i brushed up against a worker who is in the WAR PROMOTION industry that keeps this nation fat and rich and over-medicated. i heard what i already know — there is a cone of information silence at every level as you ascend. the higher you rise, the dirtier you get. this man, for example, produced a working model for the exact point at which a toxic agent will collapse your breathing tissues in your throat. it is a bio-mechanical “model” which is now used to identify the amounts of any of these toxic agents you need to dump on a population to get the results you want. oddly, he doesn’t take any responsibility for this work or the way in which the work is used around the world now and SOLD to other governments and information societies.

so this CONE OF SILENCE methodology is exactly what allows 99.99999% of the good/stupid people to feel fine about the shtty things they are doing and creating while the .00000001% adds the TAINTED POISONS and TOXINS at the last second.

and, as i was saying earlier, that’s what this book THE PROTOCOLS of the LEARNED ELDERS of ZION is about — how to become the .000000001% and subdue the majority. and who cares whether russian anti-semites wrotes it? does that change the EDUCATIONAL VALUE of the CONTENT INFORMATION? or is that just there to keep people from reading it? ANYONE can use the information, for example, duh!!!! ANYONE.

i mean do people listen to pop songs sung by women about getting nasty and dirty and sexual and think, HEY, A MAN WROTE THAT!!!! they should. 99% of weird love songs from the seventies in the world of disco — which brought us cocaine, tight pants and a general hedonistic sense of ennui — are written and arranged by men.

songs like "so many men, so little time" which proudly make all manner of boisterous claims to female sexuality are just fkt up lies written by men hiding behind their human props. but people don’t think that, they think, "YO! that woman wants to be fkt!" but it was really IAN LEVINE.

so we need to ask ourselves, did this fear of anti-semitism, for example, stop WHITE WESTERN OLIGARCHS from benefitting from the strategies presented? and why wouldn’t ANYBODY in china also read this text to gain a superiority over their enemy? why wouldn’t anyone who was infected with the taint of USURY not find this effective?

people in the U.S. study the book THE ART OF WAR, which is hilarious, as there is no such “art”. art has no FKING PURPOSE that kills people. it is the EXACT OPPOSITE OF ART. it should be called the "FKERY OF WAR and how to win". that would be more direct.

but i don’t hear everyone getting all up in china’s business and calling the nation a bunch of euphemistic hate slurs about murder and warfare. and rightfully so, it’s just a book and most people don’t care about books.

so if i get all up in the business of the PEOPLE who are using the book to murder and squelch the human spirit around the world, please don’t call me anti-semitic. and if i write essays about how parents are the very worst thing about children, please don’t call me anti-breeder. oh, wait, no, please do!!! i’m definitely upset with the way you people breed and then abandon your children.

and a note to all of you who think cheating is only an issue between you and your husband or you and your wife, maybe you should wake up to the fact that you’re cheating on your children almost more than your spouse. worse, your cheating will alter the entire development of your children whether they know it or not. the SICKNESS of your dishonesty will fester its way into the very essence of their personalities. and this is the sin that is spoken of that passes from “father to child”.

when jesus did his showdown with the men who were about to murder a woman for fcking around with other men against her husband, we are told that jesus started drawing nasty pictures in the dirt of the men and the fkt up stuff that they had done. one by one as the pictures emerged, the men judged themselves on what they saw and left.

and here’s where christians FK the story up as usual. they claim that JESUS forgave the woman. but this is not true. JESUS did not forgive the woman. instead he said the very worst thing you could possibly say — literally the most deviant thing of all to commission a human with — he said GO AND SIN NO MORE.

and to this day, when people ask me to forgive them, and i’m feeling generous, that’s what i say.

GO AND SIN NO MORE!!!!

why do i care about your sins against me? i haven’t held onto them. i have no forgiveness for anyone. i am not a christian. i am not weak and pathetic. i do not need salvation and i am not a sinner.

i am a gnostic. we do our best to NEVER lie to ourselves or others. we do our best to NEVER do things we hate.

that’s it. we’re not complicated. we don’t have agendas. we’re not out to sucker-punch you. we want to see GOD emerging from you as you are!

we carry love and intelligence. we believe that the GOD is inside of you (not that you are the god!) your job is to the let the GOD out.

that’s it.

but apparently the whole lying and cheating thing is too much for everyone (cheating is when you support a lie through omission or design a lie to be directly misleading, etc.)

personally, i find it amazingly exciting not to be able to lie or scurry sideways. it’s so EASY to lie. and once you start, why stop?

which leads us to the real essay about a man who went to an entitled school and designed a very remedial app that was chosen by the invisible empire to collect information and behavioral patterns from weak people who need attention. also known as FACEBOOK.

***************************

look how far we’ve come & ""CONGRESS MAN, YES" & several of the reasons why USURER’S LOGIC makes FACEBOOK the future press darlings of 2018", scott richard image and painting from 2012 (original photo from 2010)

PRESS PLAY

i love you, i know yello (1983)

an essay that cites TONS of quotes and incidents from the recent congressional meeting regarding FACEBOOK taking over the world and why you should have invested when i told you to invest… i did. just so proof would equal pudding.

(FYI the stock went up to 208 from 164 two weeks after this essay was written. it’s back down to what it was at that time again. facebook is spreading its profits into subsids now, so it’s not on my BUY NOW list. but if you can smell out the little geniuses facebook intends to buy, you might be able to find some juicy investments. i still believe that tesla will produce some kind of design innovation that will be purchasable for worldwide distribution…)

"CONGRESS MAN, YES" & several of the reasons why USURER’S LOGIC makes FACEBOOK the future press darlings of 2018 and beyond based on the CONGRESSIONAL HEARINGS + transcript notes and observations by scott richard

usury sucks for everyone. even those who profit.

and we don’t FIGHT USURY.

we fk it until it destroys everything around us.

FB means fk buddy, literally, not facebook…

anyway, i know from great and long experience that americans graft their identity concepts from the products and services they use and abuse.

you can’t go broke betting on the fall.

to not buy FACEBOOK stock would be like turning down a 50% off willy wonka chocolate bar that ALSO comes with a free golden ticket to the chocolate factory.

so while i listened and periodically watched the 5 hours of boring and often JUVENILE hearings, i couldn’t help thinking how clever deception really is. FACEBOOK does soooo many things that you have no idea about.

where did you think all that FAKE money was going?

and it was sooooo touching when a couple of the congress people dared to ask when mark would stop selling OPIOID DRUGS off FACEBOOK. he conveniently said, never.

but don’t worry, the u.s. sent it’s least qualified people to talk to FACEBOOK about this, lol.

i mean, the vast majority of these congresspeople were like children who have no clue about adult concepts.

for example, not one congressperson asked if those "privacy settings" weren’t hackable — as in something so FKING SIMPLE like "well, a hacker can hack past those infantile settings." instead, they gave zuckerberg the legal opportunity to talk-stall his way out of their four minutes. it was EMBARRASSING to see how stupid most of these congresspeople really are and how unlearned about important tech philosophy. most of them had no idea even what "privacy settings" were, so many spent their four minutes being "schooled". fking waste. that’s like sending me to the olympics for weightlifting…

so the first problem is that congresspeople don’t really know a lot about anything. in general, they are "OUT OF THE GD LOOP" when it comes to understanding worldwide things like the fking INTERNET!!??! they know a little about a lot.

anyway, each congressperson was given four minutes to ask zuckerberg questions about what happened.

the LARGE majority wasted these minutes with grandstanding. only a handful seemed to have an inkling of what the real reach and danger and anti-American stance that FACEBOOK has against the united states.

so instead of gathering relevant testimony and commitment from FACEBOOK on super important legal issues regarding citizenship protection and unethical information exchange, they paraded themselves for THEIR fake american constituent’s votes. it was DISGUSTING. how fking shallow bipartisan azzhoes really are.

instead of REPRESENTING AMERICA, they represented their own careers.

and honestly, every single person on MEDZ or overeating or over drinking these days is acting like an ANTI-AMERICAN. supremacy is also a form of ANTI-AMERICANISM.

we’ve reached a point where our daily choices are becoming ANTI-AMERICAN and in violation of other citizens’ rights to be free. but i guess we don’t see it clearly, mostly.

in the city, it is much more obvious. especially a FAKE SANCTUARY city like san francisco, the sanctuary is REALLY being given to the monied and the foreign investors, not the locals. it’s a FAKE moniker for investors, not a representation of anything more. but most people are like these congresspeople — out to get more votes from their base. but that’s not AMERICAN. that’s just regional self-interest.

thankfully, there were a few exceptions and those ones were AWESOME to hear. they were incredibly revealing. and it is clear that their voices are being thrown out. so that’s a drag, but you can’t really stop FACEBOOK. they are not a social platform. they are the world’s largest company and they fund TONS of stuff around the globe.

for example, FACEBOOK is going to have the largest WORLDWIDE "counterterrorism" team. already there team is competitive with world powers. soon, they will be larger than any nation’s.

now, those of us who are in the know, well, we KNOW that the COUNTERTERRORISTS are the real terrorists.

if you listen to the 9/11 commission report you would know this, too. or, if you listened to anything the islamic world is saying you’d know this, too. but i already know you don’t listen to those people.

doesn’t change the truth — the COUNTERRERRORISTS are the real terrorists.

so now FACEBOOK will be the leading force in this deception.

already they have over 200 people working full time in 30 different languages in counterterrorism.

if you don’t get what this means, you should go read my facebook farewell that i wrote about two years ago when i stopped contributing to the largest surveillance system ever built and used against humanity.

i had written a similar program concept in the 90s. it was called CYBERBUDDY.

the idea was you would input your info into a program (we call them apps now) that tracked your emotional and physical world by remembering everything you input and being able to remind you of things — how you felt about others, what had happened and what others had done to you.

and, as all the social media programs do, it would have a backside that was constantly selling your information to buyers.

but the user never knew this.

anyway, that’s exactly what FACEBOOK did. and let’s be honest, FACEBOOK was CHOSEN.

it’s not that great.

there were way better platform possibilities. but the world cartels needed something legit, so they chose the HARVARD-based platform. and it worked. they inserted the most deviant and self-revealing and WORSE betraying platform known to humans.

this congressperson is holding up a chart. it shows FACEBOOK’s profits.

they are escalating exponentially. from 1 billion in 2006 to 26 billion in 2016 and then WATCH THE FKING LEAP!!!!

40 BILLION dollars in 2017.

buy now. you won’t be crying later.

anyway, zuckerberg intends to have more than 20,000 people working on counterterrorism within a year or so. they are also building an endless array of surveillance and algorithmic tools that will affect ALL world trade. they are also deeply involved in ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE development.

basically, if you wanted an anti christ of jewish origins, you are looking at the rise of the kingship. but if you’re not scared and don’t go that way right away, dip into OVERHEAD STUDIES to see just how amazingly controlling all of this is when you also have KILL DRONES and security enforcement.

already OVERHEAD STUDIES are being used against the u.s. population to imprison us.

anyway, for most people this will seem crazy and like a new gibberish. so be it.

i started to take notes about a third of the way into process when i started to get a feel for how the "hearings" work. it was new for me, but i’ll post the transcript of my notes which are a lot of actual transcriptting.

the republicans are all for it and that’s why you should bet on FACEBOOK. especially since the majority of FACEBOOK’s users are and will be NOT from america. so our "opinion" of this is just that.

FACEBOOK is bigger than the u.s. government and for the record, the whole counterterrorism surveillance team works from outside the u.s.

where there are different laws…

okay, so here’s the transcript which i LAUGHINGLY call:

CONGRESS MAN, YES

because this is the tactic zuckerberg and his lawyers realized was the WINNING COMBO.

who knew congresspeople were so fking stupid? especially from the stupid states. geez.

no wonder so many extra-foreigners are making a bid at stealing so much of the united states’ property.

it must be fking easy with so many dum fks.

and to those congress people who used this momentous occasion to further their careers instead of protecting the american public, FKU!!!!!

*********************************

PRESS PLAY

no stars

figures on a beach

the partial notes:

CONGRESSMAN, YES

i would love to be a congressperson, but to be one, i would have to not understand any of this. so why are they “representing” us??!?!?!

zuckerbergs tactics.

agree with the person.

deflect away from the topic by using their weakness and lack of knowledge.

obscure the truth. pretend you’re not a MASSIVE CONGLOMERATE but a calendar site for connecting people’s lives HALLMARK.

once zuckerberg figures out how to run the clock down, he takes over everytime.

some senators (usually republican) have long winded and meaningless monologues followed by easy to answer questions of no importance except to wind the four minute clock down.

20K employees for content control.

some senators (usually democratic) try to get him to answer YES OR NO questions. his tactic for stalling in this case is deflect back to their misunderstanding of the precise language or meaning. it makes them look dumb (a lot of the are and don’t understand why FACEBOOK is such a walking/talking front for a secret information and collection agency as well as worldwide product mouthpiece)

the best questions take all four minutes and then zuckerberg can deflect easily. fk that!!!

NOT A SINGLE CONGRESS PERSON (well, maybe one, but he petered out oddly) got through their questions. most had MANY left and were forced to “submit” them for consideration. BULLSHIT!!!!

SMASHFACE his “prank” site.

"we’re getting ready to overreact”

we do nothing or we overreact!

you need to save your ship?

diamond and silk. african american women.

what is unsafe about two women supporting donald trump?

mr. schrader from oregon.

do you delete and save.

yes.. all things saved.

document retention policy.

preserve mails/conversations

testified that you don’t sell information.

but others do. aren’t you complicit?

"complaint only” enforcement.

kennedy democrat

wasted the whole time trying to explain himself.

“i’m sorry, i don’t understand your question.”

targeting options are shared likes. shared by facebook.

ad ranking. meta data. behaviors. newsfeed. relevancy vs. GIVING to advertisers.

how do people then “own” their own data?

then gets lost in the process and time runs out.

part of the rub

second you focus the individual instead of societal impact… you’re out of time.

but news and media. blah blah blah

mr flores. texas

large oil company monopoly 1800s 1900s

telecom company monopoly in the70s

thanks for being good.

wasted the whole time with a bizarre lecture.

conservatives are mad about BIAS.

they can’t see past their stupidity.

policy responses.

ideological agnosticism regarding their users public facing activities

finally, some questions. do you believe FACEBOOK SHOULD BE IDEOLOGICALLY NEUTRAL?

i agree we should be a platform for all ideas. [cuts him off and moves to next question. bam! yeah!!

with respect to privacy we need a baseline when we talk about a virtual person, name address websites visited, picture, etc. ownership issue is the individual’s creation.

they own it.

do you agree.

yes.

use of data issue and full disclosure for unlimited time.

easy understand.

runs out of time.

california

mr cardenas

biggest business model and totally unregulated.

shows shareholder revenues table

2009 net revenue less than a billion dollars

26 billion for 2016

40 billion dollars for 2017

CEO of cambridge analytica stepped down during the meeting.

does that solve the issue around the controversy.

no, two issues. how were they able to buy data from a developer that people chose to share it with? but some of the info originated on facebook.

people had it on facebook and CHOSE to share their AND their friend’s information…

question:

buy information to add or augment to build around them their profile.

we just recently announced that we’ve stopped working with data brokers as part of the ad system.

yes, standard practice.

you did engage in it.

yes. until we announced we were shutting it did.

facebook threatened to sue the guardian if it revelaed the cambridge analytica story.

hey maybe you don’t want to do that.

“there may have been an specific factual inaccuracy.”

however they did go through with it regardless.

then ONLY then did facebook apologize for 89 million users info ending up in other people’s hands.

‘

it’s time that you FACEBOOK want to be a leader and american you can be a leader.

are you committed to being a leader. you can in fact do right by users of facebook.

time’s out. two second answer?

"i am definitely committed to taking a broader review of our responsibility. not so that we don’t just give people tools but so they are used for good.”

first five or ten minute , ten minute recess.

5;40

TWENTY FUCKING MINUTES LATER…

mre. brooks indiana

platform of facebook and other platforms help keep us safe from terrorists and recruitment of women and children to join terrorist organizations.

facebook didn’t exist before 9/11

isis and al acaida use these platforms.

terrorism recruitment.

now terrorists use social media.

then you talked about dangerous or objectionable content needing to be reported but what if they don’t? what if people just assume that someone else is reporting.

what is the leadership role of facebook, our role in stopping recruitment.

thank you for the question. there is no place for that in our network.

we’ve developed a number of tools so that 99% of isis and al acaida is flagged before we even see it.

we’re proud of it as a model for removing "harmful content".

as of march 29th there were ISIS videos, executions,

april 9th five pages of hezbollah content

what is the mechanism?

is it AI

2-0K people?

what are you using.

this is just within a week.

counter terrorism team at facebook with 200 people.

other content reviewers not in the 200.

NCTC produces analysis, maintains the authoritative database of known and suspected terrorists, shares information, and conducts strategic operational planning. NCTC is staffed by more than 1,000 personnel from across the IC, the Federal government, and Federal contractors. NCTC’s workforce represents approximately 20 different departments and agencies—a tribute to the recognition by the intelligence, homeland security, and law enforcement communities of NCTC’s role in protecting the Nation against terrorist threats.

just focused on counter terrorism.

30 languages.

AI tools in development

proactively flag content and sources

owns wassap? .

how are they helping the to stop the recruiting.

WOW BACK TO THE ORIGINAL POINTS : WHAT THE FUCK IS FACEBOOK?!?!?

cue WILD WILD COUNTRY

correction plea: whether web blogs would be able to download your info. they are not we only store them temporarily. we convert them into ad inter

Posted by torbakhopper on 2019-11-12 14:45:35

Tagged: , manhattan , 2004 , archive , scott , richard , torbakhopper , san , francisco , california , city , street , photographer , scottrichard , SF , scottrichardphotographer , SFMET , new york city , NYC , new york

The post chambers patriot RIDDICK, scott richard 2004 appeared first on Good Info.

[iwishiwereabeautifullittlefool]

CODE SWITCH Pretty Hurts January 30, 20192:45 AM ET

GENE DEMBY, HOST:

Shereen, who's the most beautiful person that you can think of?

SHEREEN MARISOL MERAJI, HOST:

My mommy.

DEMBY: Aw.

MERAJI: And my Titi Wanda.

DEMBY: Aw.

MERAJI: They are very beautiful. There's Instagram proof. What about you, GD?

DEMBY: My fiancee, obviously.

MERAJI: Obviously. Yes.

DEMBY: (Laughter).

MERAJI: Good answer.

DEMBY: I'm not trying to get in trouble. It's true. It happens to be true. But also, I'm not trying to get...

MERAJI: She is very beautiful.

DEMBY: But also, I mean, Teyonah Parris is, like...

MERAJI: (Laughter). Why are you doing that to yourself?

DEMBY: Yeah. I know. This is - that's going to be conversation later. Anyway...

MERAJI: It is.

DEMBY: So for thousands of years, people have been trying to figure out, to wrap their minds around, what constitutes beauty. Is it symmetry? Is it the golden ratio - health, goodness, youth?

MERAJI: Is anything objectively beautiful?

DEMBY: Good question.

MERAJI: Or is beauty, as people love to say, in the eyes of the beholder?

DEMBY: Was beauty really her name, like Sisqo (laughter) alleged?

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BEAUTY")

DRU HILL: (Singing) And beauty is her name.

MERAJI: I thought that was Dru Hill.

DEMBY: Sisqo, he was singing the hook, though.

MERAJI: OK.

DEMBY: (Singing) Beauty is her name.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BEAUTY")

DRU HILL: (Singing) Steals your heart.

MERAJI: You know the global cosmetics industry was valued at more than a half a trillion dollars in 2017, speaking of beauty?

DEMBY: Is that for real? What?

MERAJI: That's for real.

DEMBY: Oh, my God. That's a lot of Fenty. (Laughter).

MERAJI: It is.

DEMBY: And that's what we're talking about today. Today is all about beauty. Although, every episode with Shereen is about beauty. All right?

MERAJI: (Laughter). Yes. I am so beautiful.

DEMBY: This week, we're talking about beauty and power and politics and culture.

MERAJI: Yep. And we did a call-out a few weeks ago asking for your questions about race and beauty. And we got a ton of great ones. We're going to look into some of those in a minute.

DEMBY: But first we're going to spend a little bit of time talking about what exactly it is we mean when we talk about beauty.

HEIJIN LEE: It's the feeling that people get right when they look at another person and there is a kind of pleasure, right, in the looking.

MERAJI: That's Heijin Lee. She's a professor of social and cultural analysis at NYU.

LEE: But not just pleasure. There's an aspiration. I think the kind of beauty that I'm thinking about when I teach my course or when I'm writing my book is the way we want to look.

MERAJI: That course, it's called The Geopolitics of Beauty. And that book is about South Korea's plastic surgery industry. She says she's trying to get her students to think about beauty as something beyond just what we like and what we don't like.

LEE: I think we tend to think about beauty as related to taste, right? And we think about taste as something deeply personal, something that is organic, something that comes out of the self. In my class, I try to get my students to think about beauty and taste as something that is also very much constructed by and influenced by larger forces - nationalist projects, international relations, geopolitics.

DEMBY: Heijin says that we also tend to think of beauty culture as being really static, as stuck in place, especially in places with a lot of brown people. So people love to talk about ancient African beauty secrets or South Asian eye coal traditions. But actually, beauty norms everywhere are constantly in flux. They're always changing. Take, for instance, 19th-century Japan.

LEE: At that time in Japan, one symbol or marker of beauty was to black-in one's teeth. And this was a sign of utmost beauty.

MERAJI: A sign of beauty until the beginning of the 20th century. That's when the West was becoming an economic superpower, and one of the things Japan did was ban teeth blackening as a way to try and keep up.

LEE: And so, you know, that's a way in which a beauty practice shifts from being something that symbolizes beauty, luxury, maybe an elite symbol of beauty, right, and it becomes coded as something perhaps antiquated or something not to be done, right, because the entire country is undertaking this project of modernization.

MERAJI: And like we said, race is a huge factor in how we create beauty norms that are tied to national identity. Heijin brought up the example of Miss America. There were no African-American Miss America contestants until 1970. There was a rule that stipulated that all the contestants had to be, quote, "of good health and of the white race."

LEE: And that might seem trivial. But what is happening there, right, is it's really teaching the American public about ideal American beauty, which, as we know, then becomes shaped as sort of white, feminine beauty becomes the ideal American beauty.

MERAJI: Heijin says it's no coincidence that one of the slogans of the Black Power movement in the '60s and '70s was Black Is Beautiful.

DEMBY: She pointed to another, more recent, example of this transformation happening with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. So AOC, as everyone calls her, she got this huge response when she wore red lipstick and gold hoop earrings to her swearing-in ceremony for Congress.

LEE: And it was just this beautiful, beautiful, beautiful moment where, you know, so many black and brown women were, you know, tweeting, you know, I see you, I see myself reflected in you.

MERAJI: So things can change. And on a national scale, here's another example. Heijin says that about a hundred years ago in South Korea, it was considered taboo to alter anything on your body that was a gift from your ancestors. Many women wouldn't even cut their hair.

LEE: Fast-forward a century later, and South Korea has, you know, the highest rates of plastic surgery per capita globally.

DEMBY: All of this gets back to power and politics and the economy. If you go back to 1997, Asia was experiencing the Asian financial crisis.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Stocks in Hong Kong fell about 4 percent today, and the sell off immediately reverberated across exchanges in Japan and Europe.

DEMBY: For people who don't remember, it was this huge mess that started in Thailand, and then it hit Indonesia and then South Korea got hit really hard.

MERAJI: The region's economy is in danger of collapse. People are struggling to get the few jobs that are available. But in the wake of all this, there's a spike in plastic surgeries.

LEE: In South Korea, photos are required on resumes. And so in the U.S., we tend to think of plastic surgery as something about vanity, luxury. Particularly, the way it's packaged on reality TV, I think we think of it as the domain of the really rich celebrities. In South Korea, we see an example of plastic surgery becoming a kind of economic necessity. If you are competing for a job with many other people and the economy is hard hit then you have to sort of do all the things that you can to get a leg up on that competition.

DEMBY: OK. But let's take it back even further. So Heijin said that when people think of plastic surgery in Korea, they often think about the double eyelid surgery, which is where people get a stitch in their eyelids to make their eyes have an extra fold. I know we've talked about that on the podcast before.

MERAJI: We have.

DEMBY: That surgery actually traces back to the end of the Korean War. She said that the U.S. military was launching this big public relations campaign where they're giving out candy and Spam to everyone in Korea. And then U.S. military doctors are also performing surgery on Koreans injured and wounded in the war.

LEE: Well, one of these military doctors, surgeons, was, you know, doing reconstructive surgery on Korean war victims but also decided to start performing the double eyelid procedure on Koreans, as well. And so his first patient was his own translator, who, you know, he said he was trying to alleviate his "suspicious-looking eyes," quote-unquote.

MERAJI: This American doctor, Ralph Millard, wrote in 1964 that the absence of the eye fold produces, quote, "a passive expression, which seems to epitomize the stoical and unemotional manner of the Oriental," unquote.

LEE: And that's really the first time that the double eyelid surgery becomes available to the masses in South Korea. And when you read and look at his sort of surgical notes, you really see the language of race pervading his logic as to why this is necessary and important and why he's really performing this kind of humanitarian service.

DEMBY: OK. So that's disgusting.

MERAJI: Yeah. It's awful. But Heijin says that even this procedure has this really janky history, the beauty and cosmetic surgery industry in South Korea has taken on a life of its own. Sure, lots of Americans talk about double eyelid surgery as East Asians trying to look more white...

DEMBY: Right.

MERAJI: ...But in Asia, this look is coded as very Korean.

LEE: So, you know, that's very clearly this moment where beauty is affected by war, by empire, by a kind of colonizer-colonized relationship. I think what's important in thinking about that, though, is to also hold that moment in relationship to the current moment, where South Korea has a $12 billion cosmetics and beauty industry.

MERAJI: And that right there brings us right to our first listener question.

DEMBY: OK. Let's hear it. Let's hear it.

(SOUNDBITE OF HARP MUSIC)

MERAJI: It came from a tweet from Claire Roth (ph) in Columbus, Ohio. And she says, (reading) I'd be interested to hear how Korean skin care came to the West and became the paragon of routines.

(SOUNDBITE OF HARP MUSIC)

MERAJI: And it really has become the paragon. And Heijin says that's a big change.

LEE: If you were to ask someone of my parents' generation, if you were to ask my mom, right, - she's 70-something - who makes the best skin care products? I think she would still probably say, right, like, the French. You know, this kind of association of elite and luxury beauty products with Europe or the West. But if you were to ask one of my 20-something college students, they would say Nature Republic or The Face Shop. They would talk about Soko Glam.

MERAJI: And the 10-Step Korean Skincare Routine.

(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO)

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Now I'm going to go into sheet masking. So now that the weather's getting colder...

MERAJI: The person credited with bringing those steps to the West is a woman named Charlotte Cho, who founded Soko Glam with her husband in 2012. It's one of the most popular vendors of K-beauty, which is an umbrella term for Korean skin care products that have gained massive popularity across the world.

LEE: And this is really an astonishing shift, not because we're talking about the actual production of beauty products, but because what we're really talking about is who is seen as a producer of style.

MERAJI: And for more on K-beauty, I talked to NPR correspondent Elise Hu, who works out here with me at NPR West.

ELISE HU, BYLINE: Hey, hey.

MERAJI: I'm really excited to be doing something with you because the last time we did something together, it was on Korean hiking culture. And I was in Los Angeles, and you did it from Seoul, South Korea.

HU: Which is where I was posted for 3 1/2 years, but now I'm back here with you in Culver City.

MERAJI: And that's actually why we brought you here, to talk about - and I'm going to throw you something right now. So you're going to have to...

HU: All right. Let's see what this is.

MERAJI: ...Describe it to the listeners after I throw it to you.

HU: K.

MERAJI: We're going to talk about this. (Laughter).

HU: OK. It just hit me in the face, but that's actually not the wrong place for it to hit me because this is a face mask. This is a Korean sheet mask, which is in a flat, thin container. And what it is is essentially, like, a baby wipe that's cut out into the shape of a face with eye cutouts, a nose and a lip cutout. And you just put it straight on your face and leave it there for 20 to 30 minutes. And it's supposed to be hydrating or cleansing or brightening, depending on what you're looking for.

MERAJI: And they're pretty popular right now.

HU: It's gotten huge in the West just within the last few years. I went to Korea. I moved to Korea in 2015. And just in those years - so since 2015 to now, where we're at - it's really exploded, this whole notion of K-beauty. And when we talk about K-beauty, it's an extension of Korean cool - this whole Korean wave phenomenon that includes Korean pop culture. So we're talking about K-dramas, which we're now seeing more on Netflix. We're talking about K-pop. Right now, BTS, that boy band, is one of the most popular boy bands and touring acts in the world, including the West.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DNA")

BTS: (Singing in Korean).

HU: And so as Korean pop culture has gotten big, so has Korean lifestyle. And what's part of the Korean lifestyle is the Korean look.

MERAJI: So beyond these masks, what else is there out there?

HU: All sorts of things to make sure your skin is as radiant and youthful-looking as possible. So when we talk about Korean skin care, it includes multisteps, like a nighttime routine and a wake-up routine that might be 12 different products - at least three different products. And so not only do you have your cleanser and your toner and your moisturizer, there's also products called emulsion or essence and then sprays to make sure that you've stayed moisturized and dewy all day.

So when we're talking about the Korean look, we're talking about a very youthful look and this dewiness. So in the U.S., for instance, we use powder, but that's kind of verboten in Korea because that takes away that youthful look of moisture on your skin. It is kind of a different beauty standard. And Kim Suk-Young, this professor at UCLA, she talks a little bit about that.

KIM SUK-YOUNG: With the rise of K-beauty, I think it's doing some corrective to that notion of abject Asian-American bodies that - you know, beauty standards could be shifting from this very white bodily phenotype to something else.

MERAJI: All right. So we talked about how K-pop is really popular, and this has kind of pushed some of the Korean beauty standards and Korean beauty products here into the United States. But is there anything else at play? Is there any other reason why Korean beauty products are so popular?

HU: Yeah. That's a good question because the large context is really important, and this is all a vestige of Korea's modern history. So Korea is an exporting country. So in economic terms, what that simply means is that it exports a lot more than it consumes. It considers itself a shrimp between whales because it has Japan on one side and China on the other, and it has had to compete globally. And it's done very well. Think about - we drive Hyundai cars.

MERAJI: Yes, Kia, as well.

HU: Hyundai and Kia cars - we have Samsung and LG televisions, Samsung phones, Samsung washer-dryers. All of those are Korean exports. And that came out of Korea's industry and government being very tightly linked in deciding, hey, this is what we're going to manufacture and package and really put a public relations effort behind and export. And Korean pop and Korean cool - all of that is part of it.

And so now, as skin care becomes big, it's also a product of that same general idea, that, hey, private industry is going to get rich by really packaging and promoting these products. They're going to target kind of younger audiences because when we talk about these masks - you know, tweens can use them. It's not like it's a bunch of punk rock makeup or a bunch of mascara that parents might not like.

MERAJI: And they're really cheap. They're pretty affordable.

HU: The price point is really important, Shereen. I'm glad you brought that up because, you know, they've targeted a market where you can just get kind of lip balms and makeup at lower price points. And so when you see sections for K-beauty now in Sephora or CVS, a lot of those products are much cheaper than if you were to buy a Benefit product or a Bobbi Brown product.

(SOUNDBITE OF BTS SONG, "MIC DROP FEAT. DESIIGNER (STEVE AOKI REMIX)")

MERAJI: Elise Hu, thank you so much.

HU: You're welcome.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MIC DROP FEAT. DESIIGNER (STEVE AOKI REMIX)")

DESIIGNER: (Rapping) Bentley basketball, we playin' that a lot, I'ma just get to the chicken, whip it, then I flip it, then trap it all, I got to get to the dollar - on the haters and back them off, smokin' on gas a lot, ready to whack them all, whack them all...

DEMBY: All right. So homie - I know, Shereen, you are an aficionado of these K-beauty products.

MERAJI: I have never done the 10-step routine, but I love the masks. And they have these patches that you put under your eyes to make them less puffy that are made out of snail slime.

DEMBY: (Laughter) Snail slime? Really?

MERAJI: Yes. And I don't know if they're working. I feel like they're working.

DEMBY: I was going to ask, like, do they work? But...

MERAJI: They work for me in that they force me to stop talking and to sit still for 10 to 15 minutes and chill. And relaxation is good. It's good for every part of your body. So in that way, I think they work very well.

DEMBY: Well, you certainly glow.

MERAJI: (Laughter) Thank you.

DEMBY: We're going to take a few moments to get our snail slime on - our gels and serums.

MERAJI: And when we come back, we'll talk about how hard it is to be slim thick. And we ask, is it possible to say [expletive] all this and decolonize our beauty routines?

DEMBY: Stay with us.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

DEMBY: Gene.

MERAJI: Shereen.

DEMBY: CODE SWITCH. All right, Shereen. So you're going to answer our next listener question about beauty.

MARIA FERNANDA: Hi. My name is Maria Fernanda (ph), and I live in Ann Arbor, Mich. When I was in undergrad, I remember talking to my Latina friends about my experience with an eating disorder and hearing, didn't we all go through that phase? - which is so sad. I guess what I'm really interested in is how this issue of eating disorders in the U.S. affects Latinas specifically. How do American beauty standards affect what Latinas are hearing from their friends and family about what we should look like?

MERAJI: To help me answer her question, I asked the Center for the Advancement of Women at Mount Saint Mary's University here in LA to help me organize a roundtable of Latinas who were willing to talk openly about eating disorders and body pressure. The Mount, as the students call it, is an HSI - a Hispanic serving institution - and a majority of the students are women POCs like Brianna Tetch (ph). Brianna's 21 and a sociology major.

BRIANNA TECH: You hear about Latinas usually having voluptuous bodies. And I feel like we're very subjected to only that type of body. And if you don't fit into that stereotype, I like to call it, then it's like, oh, you're not a desirable Latina.

FLOR CARPIO: I feel like there's also this, like, standard to be, like, thin. But then, like she was saying, we also have to have curves. So it's like, you just have to be, like, really curvy but also really tiny waist.

ANGELICA CRISPIN: And so you have people that look like J.Lo and Sofia Vergara. And that's who everybody aspires to be. I see it online. It's a phrase I see often. They want some - everybody wants to see a girl that's slim-thick. Everybody wants to aspire to be that.

MERAJI: You also heard there from Flor Carpio (ph) - she's a senior psych major - and Angelica Crispin (ph), who is a second year. Angelica is the one who introduced me to the term slim-thick. I had never heard that term before. So these women are talking about the pressure they feel to not only be thin, but curvy at the same time.

And while they said they're happy that there's Latina representation in the media - what little of it there is - most of those stars have very similar body types. Flor says the type, slim-thick or skinny-curvy, feels impossible to achieve naturally. And she thinks it's even harder than being straight-up skinny.

CARPIO: How do you do that without, you know, going to get stuff done? Like, I don't know.

MERAJI: Desiree Mejia (ph) is a 23-year-old senior and psych major. She says she likes wearing baggy clothes and sneakers but feels constant pressure to wear tight, revealing outfits.

DESIREE MEJIA: It's the question I always ask myself. Like, why do I need to show my body all the time? Which - still trying to figure out the answer to that.

MERAJI: Where does that pressure come from for you? Where do you hear it most?

MEJIA: I don't really hear it from friends. But I hear it from family, like, you know, when we're going out and we got to present ourselves to people. So it's like, look your best. Make sure you're wearing tight clothes so you can show your body. I think I've been hearing that since I was in middle school or something, which is kind of weird because why do you need to be telling a kid in middle school to be doing that?

MERAJI: I can identify with all of this - the societal pressure to be the slim-thick, sexy Latina and the family pressure to always look presentable and pretty in public. It is exhausting. These women told me their families are constantly commenting on their looks and their weight. It's often the first thing they hear about when they walk into a family party or when they see someone after a long time.

A friend who I mentioned this story to told me that whenever she goes to visit her nina - her godmother - the very first thing she hears when she walks in the door is almost always a version of this question.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: (Speaking Spanish).

MERAJI: Are you fatter, or are you skinnier? Yes. It's the most maddening way of showing affection. And I do believe that's what it is, that it comes from a good place. Our families want the best for us, and they know that American society rewards thin people in all kinds of ways. Now, here's the thing. They also show us love by cooking for us and encouraging us to eat and have second helpings and to be sure to eat everything on our plate.

So there's a lot of mixed messaging going on, and it's something that Jeannine Cicco Barker, a licensed psychologist, hears her clients talk about a lot. She identifies as Latina herself and leads the eating concerns team at the University of Pennsylvania, where she specializes in supporting students of color.

JEANNINE CICCO BARKER: So I think about what's said in our families' comments on weight all of the time - you know, so-and-so looks like they lost weight; so-and-so has gained weight. If you are a child of immigrants or, you know, you're second-generation, first-generation in this country and you're also dealing with the acculturation pressures, to hear that you are fat, even though it can be meant as a term of endearment - it could be devastating.

MERAJI: But she also says that's just one piece of what's causing Latinas stress, anxiety and depression - all of which, by the way, are risk factors for eating disorders.

BARKER: One of the things that I really would love to see is just education to communities of color, low-income communities who are grappling with so much that if they are struggling with depression, anxiety, eating disorders, it's not because there's something wrong with them. It's because there's something wrong with the world. I think a huge piece that often gets missed in treatment and in research is - are systems of oppression. In this case, you know, we're talking about the Latinx community and the ways in which we are devalued and deemed not worthy.

You know, I think about the history of colonization and - in our countries of origin and to indigenous peoples when they were deemed not worthy and not good enough. Their food was not worthy. Their clothes were not worthy. You know, everything about our being, in many ways - we're given the message that we're not good enough. It's everywhere. It's in our schools. It's in the communities we live in. It's high rates of poverty in our communities. It's sexism. It's racism. It really trickles into everything.

MERAJI: All these stressors stacked on top of each other put Latinas at greater risk for eating disorders. But they also make it super difficult for Latinas, like Desiree, Flor and Angelica, to admit to themselves or to their families that they may be struggling with eating problems.

MEJIA: It's always hidden or just not discussed about because we don't want to make it worse for our community. We're already seen as not important, you know? And it's like, why are we going to bring up eating disorders and make it worse for ourselves and the society?

CARPIO: Coming from, like, a low-income family, like, it was always about the bills. It was always about, like, are we going to be able to pay the water on time? Like, do we even have enough money to put food on the table? I never felt that what I was going through was enough to kind of bring up because there were so many other problems we were having.

CRISPIN: So for a lot of people, eating disorders are for people who have everything. And they're just looking for something to complain about at that point. And that can't be applied to us because we already have other things going on.

MERAJI: The stereotype of a person with an eating disorder is a thin, middle- to upper-class, straight, white teenage girl or woman, AKA women who seem like they have everything, which brings me back to something our listener Maria Fernanda said in her question.

FERNANDA: I remember talking to my Latina friends about my experience with an eating disorder and hearing, didn't we all go through that phase? - which is so sad.

MERAJI: Jeannine Cicco Barker told me studies show that Latinas suffer from bulimia and binge-eating disorders at the same rates...

BARKER: And in some studies, even higher rates than white, cis women. And research is also showing that Latinas are, in some cases, at greater risk for bulimia and binge-eating disorder.

MERAJI: A vast majority of eating disorder research and treatment, however, is focused on white women who are very thin. It's something that Mae Lynn Reyes-Rodriguez has been trying to address since she was a graduate student at the University of Puerto Rico in the '90s. All these years later, she says things haven't changed that much. The studies are still done, for the most part, by white researchers on white women.

MAE LYNN REYES-RODRIGUEZ: When we see clinical trials only include Caucasian populations, sometimes with a small sample size of African-American or more acculturated Latinas because they have to speak English and to do everything in English, we are not responding to the current demographic reality of the U.S.

MERAJI: Mae Lynn works at the Center for Excellence and Eating Disorders (ph) at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill now, where her clients are mostly Latinas who don't speak English. She told me there's so much we still don't know about how disordered eating affects the Latinx community. And she's not even sure the tools she's using to diagnose her clients are working as well as they could be because they were developed and adapted for white women. And they definitely don't take into account the differences between Latinx folks. We're talking about class differences and cultural differences depending on our countries of origin.

REYES-RODRIGUEZ: I need to learn. I need to know more about the Mexican culture, Central America culture, knowing that it's not the same like Puerto Rico.

MERAJI: One difference she's already noticed in her work stems from the trauma of immigration. She told me some of her clients who didn't have enough to eat on their journey from Central America or Mexico to the U.S., they've developed binge-eating disorder. Now that they have access to food, she says, they're unable to control how much they eat. The trauma and the anxiety from being without food for so long triggered the eating disorder.

Another trigger that we already talked about are those comments about our weight that we often get from our families. You know, you're looking chubby. You're looking too skinny. Your butt disappeared. You know, you have chunky arms like your mom. It's really too bad you can't move that tummy fat up higher. Why aren't you eating? You don't like what I made you. There are starving people in the world. You better eat everything on your plate - those kind of comments. Mae Lynn says she's working on ways to fix that by incorporating family members into her clients' treatment.

REYES-RODRIGUEZ: What we did was to educate the patient and the family how to change that kind of dynamic, identifying triggers, what kind of comment was not helpful for the patient. And in that sense, the family - they were very responsive.

MERAJI: The Latina students I spoke with at Mount Saint Mary's University told me what's been helping them is really limiting the barrage of online messaging they get about fitness and dieting, especially at the beginning of the year. Desiree Mejia says she was following a lot of women on Instagram who were workout-obsessed and always posting selfies.

MEJIA: Constantly exercising, constantly posting what are they eating in order to maintain their weight. And then I realized, like, it was just worsening the feelings I had towards myself. It's like, why am I not having this body? Like, I'm not working out as much as them, therefore, I'm not - like, I'm not acceptable. I can't accept myself. I'm not eating what they're eating. I can't accept myself. So what I had to do was, like, I had to actually go through my list of, like, who I was following and unfollow all of that.

MERAJI: This is actually something that psychologist Jeannine Cicco Barker also encourages her clients to do. And she sometimes suggests Instagram handles that they may want to follow instead, like @thebodyisnotanapology or @bodyposipanda, @recipesforselflove, @latinxtherapy, @transfolxfightingeds - that's folx, and ED stands for eating disorders - and @nalgonapositivitypride, which is an Instagram handle run by Gloria Lucas.

GLORIA LUCAS: All right. I'm just pulling over.

MERAJI: OK.

LUCAS: I'm in the middle of the desert, and I just found a neighborhood to drive in to.

MERAJI: I caught her on her cell. She's based in LA but was in Arizona leading eating disorder awareness talks and meetups for Latinx and Indigenous folks there.

LUCAS: I run Nalgona Positivity Pride, which is a Xicana-brown-Indigenous body-positive project. And I identify as an eating disorder survivor and public speaker.

MERAJI: Gloria started this because of how hard it was for her to come to terms with the fact that she had an eating disorder.

LUCAS: Well, I'm not white. I'm not middle-class. And I don't have anorexia, and I'm not thin. So why did I develop an eating disorder?

MERAJI: After doing a ton of research on her own, she knew her bingeing and purging was a real issue, and one that was hurting her work, her family, her relationships - everything. And she knew she needed help, but she couldn't afford treatment. So Gloria went about trying to fix things alone.

LUCAS: Accompanied by, like, Overeaters Anonymous, which was the only free resource for me at that time. And I was always either the youngest or the only person of color. I don't recommend that to anybody because it's extremely hard.

MERAJI: She refused to, as she puts it, wait for the medical-industrial complex to get its diversity training to do something to help people of color with eating disorders. So she started a free monthly online support group called Sage and Spoon.

LUCAS: You know, I'm a firm believer that in order to heal, we have to connect. We need to start saying our own stories and supporting one another in our own ways. Food is not something that we could just eradicate from our lives, maybe like drugs or alcohol. We don't need those to live, but we do need food, right?

Food is always around, and diet culture's always around. Racism is always around. And then on top of that, there's not even language to talk about food in our own homes in a healthy way. So we have to look at recovery as an ongoing process, such as healing.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

DEMBY: All right, Shereen. So we've talked about how beauty was one way that nations projected their power out into the world. We've talked about the ways in which we metabolize these ideas around beauty, sometimes, as we just heard, with life-threatening consequences. And that brings us to our last listener question.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

CECILIA FERNANDEZ: Hello. My name is Cecilia Fernandez (ph). And my question is, besides the natural hair movement, what ways do people have of decolonizing their beauty routine?

MERAJI: Great question. And I can't wait to hear the answer and start the decolonization process.

DEMBY: Decolonizing your beauty routine - like, what does that even mean?

MERAJI: Leah Donnella, one of our editors here on CODE SWITCH, has the answer.

LEAH DONNELLA, BYLINE: OK. So first off, it is recognizing the fact that a lot of our Western beauty standards are celebrating whiteness, not some objective, biological, evolutionary, perfect-ratio thing, but literally just being a white person.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

DONNELLA: In fact, if you go back and look at the work of some early racial theorists, people like Christoph Meiners and Johann Blumenbach, when they were first defining the category of whiteness, they described it as the most beautiful race.

NELL IRVIN PAINTER: So it was important for them to be superior in all areas.

DONNELLA: That's Nell Irvin Painter. She's an artist and historian who taught classes at Princeton about race and beauty. She also wrote a book called "The History Of White People." And she told me that those early scientists and intellectuals were white supremacists, not in a cross-burning, KKK sense, but in that they conceived of white people as better.

PAINTER: So they not only wanted the people they called their women to be the most beautiful and their men to be the most virile, they wanted their countries to have the best politics. So they wanted to have everything better, and that included beauty.

DONNELLA: So if you want to decolonize your beauty routine, you're going to have to find a way to decenter these ideals that are based on whiteness. And throughout history, there are a bunch of ways that people have tried to do this.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

DONNELLA: Our listener Cecilia brought up the natural hair movement, which comes out of the broader Black is Beautiful movement.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED PEOPLE: (Singing) Black is beautiful.

DONNELLA: That started in the U.S. in the 1960s in the midst of the civil rights movement, and it was about affirming aspects of blackness that were considered ugly by these white, colonial standards. Nell Painter says this movement had a huge effect on her family.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

PAINTER: My mother was very beautiful, but my mother was dark-skinned, so she never thought of herself as beautiful.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

DONNELLA: Her mom was born in 1917, way before the Black is Beautiful movement. In the '60s and '70s, organizers of the movement started to embrace the political power behind the idea that all aspects of blackness are beautiful - dark-brown skin, natural hair, noses, lips, bodies, fashion.

PAINTER: For black people, the idea of black as beautiful - that was a real breakthrough. And so my mother emerged as a beautiful person, and people told her she was beautiful. And it took her a long time to accept it.

DONNELLA: Dr. Painter actually told me that her mom wound up writing a book called "I Hope I Look That Good When I'm That Old" because that's what people started telling her all the time.

By the way, the natural hair movement didn't just affect women. Malcolm X famously talked about his very-colonized hair routine, where he would use lye, which can be pretty painful, to chemically straighten his hair. And that got depicted in the 1992 movie "Malcolm X."

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "MALCOLM X")

ALBERT HALL: (As Baines) That's what the white man wants you to do. Look at you, putting all that poison in your hair.

DENZEL WASHINGTON: (As Malcolm X) I think you've been in prison too long, my man, because everybody on the outside conks.

HALL: (As Baines) Why? Why does everybody on the outside conk?

WASHINGTON: (As Malcolm X) They don't want to walk around with a nappy head, looking like...

HALL: (As Baines) Looking like what? Like me? Like a nigger? Why don't you want to look like what you are? What makes you ashamed of being black?

DONNELLA: There are other movements that have tried to address beauty as a political force. There was the Indigenous movement in Mexico. So maybe one of the most famous icons of that was Frida Kahlo. In her self-portraits, she's dressed in pre-Columbian clothes and hairstyles, and she paints herself with visible facial hair and hair between her eyebrows. Many people have described her work as being a radical rejection of colonial beauty standards.

These days, a lot of women push back on the idea that they should remove facial hair, underarm hair, body hair - all of that - in order to be considered beautiful or hygienic or professional. And here's a little hidden history for you.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Singing) Are you ready?

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Start with Gillette for women and be ready for anything.

DONNELLA: Hair removal goes back, like, thousands of years to the Stone Ages. But a bunch of people have written about the fact that a big part of why women started shaving their legs and armpits in the U.S. was probably just so Gillette could sell more razors.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Gillette for women. Are you ready?

DONNELLA: Another recent example of people decolonizing their beauty routine is the body positivity movement. So it's the idea that disabled bodies can be beautiful, old bodies can be beautiful, fat bodies can be beautiful. And that movement grew out of the fat acceptance movement.

The fat acceptance movement differs from the body positivity movement in that it's not trying to broaden the definition of who is beautiful, but rather say that people should be treated with respect and autonomy whether or not they're considered beautiful.

All of these things involve collective political organizing. It's not just about buying products that were designed by women of color or fashion from Indigenous designers. Again, it involves fundamentally reorienting yourself to what is beautiful and why.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

NOLIWE ROOKS: I was walking by a bus stop, and there were two older black women there. And I heard one say to the other, like, oh, my God, what has happened to her hair?

DONNELLA: Noliwe Rooks is a professor at Cornell who teaches classes on beauty. And she wrote a book called "Hair Raising: Beauty, Culture And African-American Women." She had just started to lock her hair. She says it was still in the kind of awkward stage when these women decided to comment.

ROOKS: I felt this kind of racial shame. I felt gender shame. Like, I felt this racial shame because, you know, as black people who could say, oh, you are appearing in the world in some way that will make the rest of us look bad or that will give white people generally some view of who we are that's not comfortable, that's not settled, that's not attractive.

How we appear out in the world as women, as people that identify as women, you know, really matters in places you - in different kinds of categories.

DONNELLA: Rooks gave a few examples. So there's been research done that says that fat women are graded more harshly in school than thin women. Lots of people have written about the way that older women become irrelevant and ignored. Markers of queerness get scrutinized in all sorts of ways.

So there are consequences to decolonizing your beauty routine. And Rooks says those consequences won't just be coming from racist white people. Hampton University is an example. It's an HBCU, and its business school has a policy that you can't have dreadlocks. They say it's unprofessional.

ROOKS: And so the choice that you make then, if you're someone who feels like - for body positivity and self-affirmation and adornment, and - you know, this is what I'm going to do. I want dreadlocks. Well, your choice is - yes, you can do that. You can decolonize that look in the way that you feel is important to you.

You can't go to that school. You know, like, it - they're clear. Until recently, you couldn't serve in the military. There's all manner of corporate jobs that, if you're decolonizing your body, you can't have.

DONNELLA: Rooks brought up a theorist named Susan Bordo, who wrote about the fact that beauty can be a playground - something fun and light. Are you hanging out with your friends, choosing between bubble gum pink lipstick and candy apple red?

ROOKS: Or is it a battlefield, where all these other things are going to come into play? And it's rarely gray for very long.

DONNELLA: When we're talking about personal beauty, having a beauty routine at all means that you are consciously or unconsciously accepting the idea that you need to change. The way your hair falls or the shininess of your skin or the curl of your eyelashes - it will all be more beautiful if you spend time and money to make it different.

And that's not just a matter of vanity. It's also a matter of survival and social mobility, especially for people who aren't thin and cis and white.

ROOKS: Yes, you - we can live in a world where we try to battle with those overarching narratives that tell us all that beauty is only skin-deep, and be a good person and, you know, if you love yourself, everyone will love you. We can do that. But the forces pushing back against it in many parts of the world - it's quite a headwind that you're moving against. And I think the more that we recognize it - instead of, you know, preparing girls to - if I love myself, everyone will love me - well, this is just not true.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

DONNELLA: Rooks says she gets why people want to say that. She teaches young people. And she would love for the world to work that way.

ROOKS: But it's literally not true. And so I don't think that - I think having people - young women, young girls, men, all of us - really understand the forces that are arrayed against us when we talk about beauty, to understand beauty as politics, to understand intersectionality, like, you know, yes, this can mean this for you over here, but when you go over here, maybe it won't - like, to have a more complex engagement with these questions than just, I can do whatever I want to, and that will make it all right.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

DONNELLA: Any way you go about it, the process of decolonizing your beauty routine is probably going to result in a lot of people being uncomfortable with your appearance. But that's also the only way things have a chance of changing. So you got to know your politics. What are you trying to say with your beauty routine? And what are you willing to deal with?

Now, I think there's another big question to be asked here, which is, if beauty is reinforcing all these racist, sexist, classist ideas about who matters, should we really be striving to be more beautiful at all? I mean, Nell Irvin Painter, who we heard from earlier, said the easiest ways to be beautiful are to be young, well-rested, healthy and not poor. She literally said, do not be poor. And that made me pretty uncomfortable. So I asked her, if you need money to be beautiful, can you ever actually decolonize your routine?

PAINTER: So when I talk about don't be poor in terms of your beauty routine, I mean, I'm almost being ironic because it's so much larger than how you look. You know, it has to do with the ethics of our society, the ethics of our politics, the ethics of our political economy. But we are talking about appearance. And to my mind, the great destroyer of nice appearance is poverty.

DONNELLA: And so if trying to have a nice appearance is predicated on not being poor, then is beauty a kind of fundamentally unjust concept to be striving for?

PAINTER: In that sense, absolutely, yes. Just to talk about teeth, how many ways do we take care of our teeth or change our teeth? I'm thinking about braces or teeth-whitening and all that. And it all costs a lot of money.

If you start, as we have started, from the question of beauty, then we go from beauty to poverty. If we were talking generally about what I would like to see in our culture, I would say for people not to be poor. And I wouldn't go directly to beauty there. I would go to health or to education or to personal safety. But since we're talking about beauty, it comes back in.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

DONNELLA: So back to the question at hand. You could argue that a profound way to decolonize your beauty routine is to have none, is to say, my body and my face are valuable and beautiful without modification. That will obviously have deeper consequences for people who are already marginalized and, therefore, more likely to be considered not beautiful to begin with.

The other really radical thing, I think, would be to try and reject personal beauty as a measure of worth. That's something that a lot of people in the fat acceptance movement in particular have done a lot of work towards, not just broadening beauty ideals, but saying, we should respect people regardless of whether they're considered beautiful.

And I think ultimately, beauty is a facet of power. So you can play into our current beauty norms, or you can try to change those norms, as people in a lot of these different movements have done, or you can decide you're going to opt out of the whole process. But from a social standpoint, even if you decide not to play the game, the game is still being played, and you're still stuck on the field.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

DEMBY: That's our show. Please follow us on Twitter, y'all. We're @nprcodeswitch. We want to hear from you. Our email is codeswitch@npr.org. You can always send us burning questions about race that are befuddling you with the subject line, Ask Code Switch. Sign up for our newsletter at npr.org/newsletter/codeswitch. Subscribe to the podcast on NPR One or wherever you get your podcasts.

MERAJI: This episode was produced by Kumari Devarajan, Leah Donnella, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sami Yenigun and me. It was edited by Sami Yenigun and Leah Donnella.

DEMBY: Shoutout to the rest of the CODE SWITCH fam, Walter Ray Watson, Karen Grigsby Bates, Adrian Florido, Steve Drummond and Kat Chow. Our intern is Tiara Jenkins. I'm Gene Demby.

MERAJI: And I'm Shereen Marisol Meraji.

DEMBY: Be easy, y'all.

MERAJI: Peace.

Copyright © 2019 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.orgfor further information.

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What Central Banks Bought Gold In 2018?

Here is a article about what Central Banks bought Gold this year. If you want to read the original article you can find a link at the bottom of this post.

Central banks are not only purchasing more gold than in recent years, but a number of new buyers have entered the fray.

This includes Poland and Hungary, the first European Union nations to buy gold since the start of the century, said Junlu Liang, senior analyst with the consultancy Metals Focus. In the case of Hungary, the central bank not only bought its first gold in 32 years, but also increased total holdings by 10-fold.

“Central-bank buying has accelerated sharply,” said Natalie Dempster, managing director for central banks and public policy with the World Gold Council. “It has also become geographically more diverse, with several new countries adding gold for the first time in decades.”

In fact, she added, 16 different central banks have increased their gold reserves since the start of 2017. In its quarterly report on demand trends released this week, the World Gold Council reported that central banks collectively made net purchases of 148.4 tonnes in the third quarter, the most since 2015.

Metals Focus is looking for global central-bank net gold purchases of up to 450 tonnes this year, which would top 390 and 375 the last two years, Liang said. If so, this would reverse a four-year gradual decline in net bullion buying since 2014, with last year’s total down by 42% from the multi-decade high of 646 tonnes in 2013, the consultancy said.

Different organizations compile the data slightly differently. For instance, some use figures as they are released monthly by the International Monetary Fund. This tends to have a two-month lag, thus does not include some of the recent purchases, such as those from Hungary. Other firms add up the figures even when they are announced ahead of the IMF data.

From the start of the year through the end of August, central banks added 260 tonnes, said Dempster, who compiles data for the World Gold Council. This excludes the data from Hungary. Still, this is a 50% increase from the same period last year.

CPM Group’s data shows 11.4 million ounces of net purchases have already occurred, thereby already exceeding the 10.9 million from all of last year, said Rohit Savant, director of research.

Bloomberg reported that central banks now collectively hold more than 33,000 tonnes of the metal. The news organization said this is roughly one-fifth of all the gold ever mined.

Who Are The Central-Bank Buyers?

From 2016 to the first half of 2018, most purchases were by a handful of central banks, including Russia, Kazakhstan and Turkey, Liang reported. The People’s Bank of China, meanwhile, has been conspicuous by its absence since 2016.

“What has been interesting over the summer is we have seen new countries start to buy gold,” Liang continued.

Poland became the first, adding nearly 14 tonnes in the third quarter, Liang said. Then came the news that Hungary increased its gold reserves by 10 times. The Hungarian central bank announced this increase this month, and the data has not yet shown up in the monthly statistics from the IMF.

The central bank issued a statement saying that it hiked its gold reserves from 3.1 tonnes to 31.5 tonnes, all in October, its first purchases since 1986. Further, metal was transferred to Hungary. The ratio of gold in its reserves jumped from less than 1% to 4.4%, which the bank said is the average of non-euro area Central and Eastern European countries.

“Holding precious metal within the country is consistent with international trends, enhances financial stability and may strengthen market confidence in the Hungarian economy,” the bank said in its statement. “Preserving its historical role, gold continues to be one of the safest assets in the world, which enhances stability and confidence even under normal market circumstances.”

Meanwhile, India also has been slowly increasing its reserves, adding 21.8 tonnes so far this year, with more than half in the third quarter, Liang said. This was the country’s first major increase since purchasing 200 tonnes off market from the International Monetary Fund in 2009.

“Part of this increase was related to the gold monetization program. But part could also be a reflection of portfolio diversification,” Liang explained.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg has reported that Mongolia bought 12 tonnes this year, although Liang added that the country itself has not confirmed this.

Meanwhile, Liang said, Russia has continued to buy gold along the lines of 50 to 60 tonnes per quarter, with 159.8 tonnes for the year to date. The country has slightly bought above 200 tonnes annually over the last three years, she said. Kazakhstan has been buying 30 to 40 tonnes a year, and the consultancy expects this to continue, with the central bank already purchasing 34.1 tonnes.

Turkey has bought 54.7 tonnes so far in 2018, including 18 in the third quarter, Liang added.

“Their currency is obviously in trouble. They have been having a lot of economic problems,” Savant said.

Why Has Central-Bank Gold Buying Picked Up?

Analysts list a number of reasons why central banks have been buying gold, from geopolitical concerns to diversification of reserves.

Further, many of these purchases occurred at a time when gold prices were relatively low, especially compared to early this decade when they briefly topped $1,900 an ounce, Savant explained. Spot gold dropped to a three-month low of $1,160.75 in mid-August after trading as high as $1,364 in mid-April.

Further, Savant continued, many central banks have much of their reserves in the U.S. dollar, but the greenback may not remain as strong as it has been. When the dollar falls, gold tends to rise, and vice-versa. “They just keep looking for ways to diversify,” Savant said.

In the case of Russia, officials simply want to move away from the U.S. dollar, Dempster explained.

“Russia has bought a huge amount of gold over the past decade,” she said, adding that this now stands around 2,000 tonnes, a 10-fold fold increase over the past decade. “At the same time, Russia has recently sold the majority of its holdings of U.S. Treasuries, and the Bank of Russia said it will continue the policy of de-dollarization.

“In other countries, it’s probably re-balancing related, driven by a combination of rising foreign-exchange reserves and a lower gold price, meaning the share of gold in total reserves has fallen and they are re-balancing back to their preferred strategic level. A lot of central banks do manage their gold portfolios in this way.”

The desire for diversification may also be driven by a deteriorating view of other reserve assets, Dempster continued. Gold mainly competes with bonds from advanced-economy countries in a reserve portfolio, but budget woes in the U.S. and Europe and “Brexit” in the U.K. have increased the long-term risks associated with these currencies.

“It is also worth noting that the new buying has been concentrated in countries that have especially low allocations to gold,” she added.

A shift in other currency allocations also may be driving some of the demand. Some nations are now holding China’s currency in their reserves, reflective of growing trade links with China. Allocations into the Chinese currency can be expected to grow over time, giving rise to a shift to a more multi-currency system rather than one principally in the U.S. dollar, Dempster said.

“But any such shift could be de-stabilizing, and some central banks might be buying gold as a hedge in anticipation,” she added.

Purchases Expected To Continue

Liang looks for the usual buyers — Russia, Kazakhstan and Turkey – to continue purchasing gold.

“Hungary is more likely to be a one-off [buyer] given that they have already increased their holdings by 10-fold,” she said. “It will be interesting to see whether Poland will continue, giving that they have been made steady purchases over the last three months.”

Dempster sees central banks collectively remaining net buyers.

“I think we may be seeing the beginning of a structural change here and we could see significantly higher purchases from central banks going forward, coupled with a further broadening in demand,” she said.

We found this great article at https://www.kitco.com/news/2018-11-02/What-Central-Banks-Bought-Gold-In-2018.html By: Allen Sykora

from What Central Banks Bought Gold In 2018?