[Brisbane, 6/16/24] Robert Hughes, “What demonic freaks, what affronts to normality, might the Southern Continent not produce? And what trials for the mariner? Waterspouts, hurricanes, clouds of darkness at midday, ship-eating whales, islands that swam and had tusks—this imagined country was perhaps infernal, its landscape that of Hell itself.”
Think about the traditional picture of a "mom" who pulls the kid inside after he's been out playing, scolds him for getting all dirty and messing up his clothes, then scrubs the skin off him until he's clean. She puts him in his "nice" clothes, then warns him not to go back outside and do any roughhousing that will mess up his spiffy duds.
That is what these creatures want to do to society. Julie Inman Grant is a perfect example. She recently ordered Twitter/X (can't quit calling it Twitter!) to censor something she found offensive, and Musk took it down in Australia in accordance with its law. But Grant came back and said X would have to take it down GLOBALLY. Musk took the Aussie government to court on that one and won. These people want to micromanage everyone's behavior down to the tiniest detail.
Even the ritual of meeting the boys for a plain old brewski at the corner pub seems to be an endangered species in these places. They don't have to ban everything outright--there are many ways to skin a cat. They can encumber things with endless rules to regulate them out of existence. They can manipulate markets to make your favorite "undesirable" habits too expensive for the common citizen. I like to try some of those weird ales on occasion, but it's hard to believe that so many people prefer $15 "fruit beer" to the ordinary $2 pint of lager that the latter has almost disappeared.
Perhaps you need to find your way into the Outback to find one of those good neighborhood bars, and pull up to a giant oil can of ice cold Foster's.
I was struck by "scrubs the skin off him" followed by "many ways to skin a cat." It's certainly a change of metaphor from gradually boiling a complacent frog, the more common interpretation of our ongoing disenfranchisement. Altho I like the implications of your first poetic, that we are aware of and resentful towards what's being done because of the abrasiveness of the aggression, I don't think the assault is recognized in the second. Do we ever think about the violence being done to the cat? Did it do something to deserve such treatment?
Actually tho, do we ever think about cliches? Is there a hidden truth? Maybe when we first hear them, they might sound a bit curious, but once they become repeated they sink into the collective unconscious. I like this deep dive because it attempts to address where the expression came from, even tho it doesn't supply a why it evolved. https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/32123/origin-of-the-phrase-theres-more-than-one-way-to-skin-a-cat
I recall reading somewhere that the phrase, "Don't let the cat out of the bag" was in reference to a seller of pork (in this case a live pig) who would sometimes exchange a worthless cat for the supposed pig that was thought to be in the buyer's bag. I guess "letting the cat out of the bag" told the buyer that he had been defrauded and that he wasn't going to have the pork dinner he had payed for and expected.
I've never read about the true origin of this phrase. But cats go nuts when you close them up in a bag, so my guess is that it refers to revealing some truth that causes everyone to go nuts.
Usually when people put a cat in a bag, it is so they can drown it. (I know, it sounds gruesome.) While on a temporary gig back in southern Maryland years ago, a guy I met at work, a true redneck originally hailing from Florida, came in one day with a story about how he had finally gotten rid of his cat. It was his wife's cat, but he himself always hated it.
He put up with it for a few years, but then the cat was diagnosed with diabetes during a routine visit to the vet, which meant it was going to need expensive regular insulin injections. He wanted it put to sleep, but it turned out that the guy's wife was also diabetic, and wouldn't hear of it. So one day while he was home and she was at work, he put it in a sack and took it out deep into the woods, drowned it in the creek, and disposed of it. When his wife came home and eventually noticed the cat was not to be found, he said it must have been on the losing end of a tangle with some wildlife.
Sorry, not buying that explanation. A live pig in a bag doesn't ring true. It would have to be a piglet to fit and a cat's yowls don't sound like a pig either.
Sorry I brought it up. Having said that perhaps the buyer thought he was buying a dead piglet and when he got home and opened the bag (or sack) found out it was a worthless dead cat? But I'm veering into worthless speculation.
A diner to buy comfort food? Good question. I guess what that conjures up for me is an old-fashioned country style cafe not smelling as you might think of apple pie etc but stale oil, chips, hamburgers, pies, for dessert vanilla slice and mostly definitely not Italian style coffee. Not somewhere that would be my first choice. There was a time when every town in Australia seemed to have a Chinese restaurant and then with time came the Greek milkbars ('The Parthenon Milkbar' at one time was a jokey song). The waves of emigres are coming so thick and fast it no lo almost entirelynger has detectable stratas. I visited the far north-west of Melbourne a few months ago and it seemed to be populated by almost entirely brown-skinned people living in large and beautiful new homes and had the most wonderful Indian and Pakistani restaurants that made my mouth water, but far too far me to think of travelling.
The social engineering for violent or abusive men seems odd indeed but it would be nice if it helped. We have a womans refuge near where I live and it is a serious problem.
As to the bars, I never understood the Ladies and Escorts signs. either in Canada or Australia, not being a drinker at home or abroad. It was finally explained that men's bars are just too rough, with lots of fighting. You don't see those signs anymore.
Sad that local diners are in short supply. The diner in my hometown of New Carlisle is called The Diner. A lot of retirees like my Dad in there on a first name basis. Hustle and sass from the waitresses, the most basic of American comfort fare. Mush on the menu. I had "The Stacker" this week: two sausage patties and two eggs over medium on top of hash browns and covered in sausage gravy. Bad for the belly, good for the soul.
> Brewed in Manly, Queensland, it’s frankly queer, “Hazy golden in appearance. Big fruity hop aromas of passionfruit, pineapple and pear are complemented by a smooth, dry, easy finish.”
Just one of many wry observations of a formerly white Euro culture gone-over the top, multi-culti. What price to pay for lowered domestic crime rates, smoke-free safe spaces, designer beers and exotic Asian food choices? What starts out as a plea for liberal tolerance progresses (under guidance) until it becomes a demand for totalitarian control. "We're creating heaven on earth. Don't get in the way."
Unless the design behind this progressive plan is recognized and resisted, the order of the day does indeed become long black and flat white. And unless the ethnic designer class is named, resistance will be ideologically one-sided and fall into a dialectical trap. Hail Trump, American Messiah!
Just to be clear, coffee has been embraced here as an Italian drink with all its phases, including a capuccino or a little drink of espresso with a good scoop of icecream. Nothing designer about it unless you mean Italian designers.
The Italians were responsible for an awful lot here in the way of food and drink. Greeks too. They transformed the food scene. The Asians came later, except for those Chinese restaurants.
Where in Australia are you, if I may inquire? Happy beginning of winter to you folk in the antipodes!
If you get the chance can you send up some snow? (I know you don't get much except in some of the mountains in the south-east; nevertheless we could use it.) What happened to all the ice-cellars we used to have here? It would be nice to have one to retreat to when the temp. tops 90 degrees F. ! I know, I know, the electric freezer came along; but back then people had to have the capacity to think six months ahead when gathering January ice for the future July. Too much to ask for now.
Hi Tom, I live in a little cottage in a country area which is close enough for a long commute into the suburbs of Melbourne in other word, at the foothills of the mountains of the south-east. I lived for many years further up in those mountains. As a child in the mountains of southern British Columbia where it is dreadfully hot in summer we could not afford an electric fridge so kept things cool with blocks of ice in an icebox or a walk to my grandmothers house. Sending you snow is not an option as there isn't any so far, and our version of cold is -3 degrees below centigrade zero which we have been getting for many nights in a row, to the point where I am sleeping on a couch next to the fire and closed off all other rooms. I know, I am an old sissy. This has been unusually cold for here and my wood supply is dwindling like the mist on the hill. We humans are never happy, are we?
Thank you Tom. I went back and read Lin's interview with you. Surely there must be some space be half-way place between where you are now and the Phillipines?
Thank you. In fact I may have found such a space. A state social worker has found an affordable (because it is subsidized by Housing and Urban Development, HUD) small apartment for me.
I would say that I am chagrined that I can't even afford to live in the state I was born in (Connecticut) nor can I afford to live in the state I spent 37 years of my life working in (California). But I'm not really chagrined; I am more angry and disgusted beyond words.
To be poor in America is to be screwed and that's putting it mildly.
Increasingly, fewer and fewer people get payed a living wage; that is enough money to buy the necessities of life such as food, shelter and clothing. (The clothes for a lot of poor people in this country are obtained at Goodwill stores where the well-to-do discard their last season unfashionable, out of style old clothing.) While CEOs and the big shareholders of capitalist companies rake off more and more of the profits of their companies for themselves while paying their work force peanuts.
Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal (1933 to about 1980) mitigated the worst excesses of capitalism's ineluctable tendency to "immiserate" its work force. (Karl Marx foresaw and wrote about all of this in 1848 in his book "Das Kapital.")
FDR's New Deal has all but been repealed since Reagan's administration began in 1981. Now the only vestiges of the New Deal left are Social Security and Medicare. (And a 40 hour work week; and a minimum wage; but the min. wage, stuck at $7.25 an hour has become a slave wage; and companies like Walmart have found loop-holes around the 40 hour work week; getting their employees to sometimes be required to work more than 40 hours while only paying the employees for 40 hours; in other words skirting overtime laws.)
Social Security is my only source of income and survival now (I'm over 65) and every time I see some rich b*astard (I apologize for the crude language but sometimes there are no polite words that suffice) talking about how Social Security needs to be repealed and eliminated because it is going to bankrupt the government " ( as if our trillion dollar a year hand-over of tax-payer money to the military-industrial complex wasn't already doing that) I become enraged.
Ever since industrial capitalism really got going in this country after the Civil War there as been an unspoken class war between the capitalists (the 1%) and the workers.
Wages and salaries have largely stagnated for much of the working class since 1981 and rents have risen almost at an exponential rate because there is inadequate low-income housing for the poor. So landlords (often slumlords) can set rents almost as high as they want based upon the myth of "free markets"; when in fact free markets require parity bargaining power between both parties to a contract; which tenants, desperate to find housing, don't have.) In many ways this country is a disgrace.
Both Mexico and the Philippines provide low-income housing. Yes, they have other problems with corruption, etc. But if one keeps one's head down they are affordable. The problem for people like me is they (these overseas countries) have enough on their hands taking care of their own populations. They generally don't want foreigners coming in and taking scarce resources from the locals.
(Having said that, when I got back to Connecticut from the Philippines in early February of this year I was getting regular calls from women claiming to be from Philippine immigration asking me if I wanted to extend my Visa. They should have said something to me when I was there. I remember the day I arrived in the Philippines, the immigration agent at the airport in Manila stamped my passport and glowered at me barking, "You've got 30 days." The implication being, "when your time is up you'd better get the hell out! I feared overstaying my Visa by even one hour thinking the immigration authorities would put me in some windowless room and shake me down, not letting me go until my modest bank account was emptied into their pockets. "Crazy thinking!" one might say. Maybe. But I'm still alive. I'm not certain if it's still the case but they used to summarily execute drug smugglers or alleged drug smugglers in the Philippines (under president Dutarte). No Constitutional "right to a trial"; no Due Process; no Habeus Corpus; just a bullet to the head. I didn't want my last view of this world to be a dingy room in the Manila police department with a pistol held to my head...
Am I being hysterical? Maybe. Maybe not. I think I mentioned the armed guards at ALL the banks in Dumaguete. And these guys did not just have a pistol holster around their waist; they were carrying semi-automatic rifles with both hands on the rifle. That was about all I needed to see to want to get the hell out of there. That's not a civilized society for the benefit of its citizens. That's an authoritarian state predicated on threats and intimidation.
I had to remove my comment; it was too stupid. The heat hear in New England (southern Connecticut) is unprecedentedly bad. Last summer we had 15 days between my Birthday (July 10) and mid-August above 90 degrees F. With high humidity. That is unprecedented. When I was growing up here if it hit 90 F. once every five or six years that was about as bad as it got. Now it looks like 90 degree plus summer days are becoming more or less the norm.
It is astounding that the PTB have exercised so much Climate Geo-engineering at the same time as claiming "Anthropogenic Climate Change", and NOBODY has caught on.
Weather mods have been going on for over 60 years.
Dana Wigington at Geoengineering Watch. (I may have misspelled the man's name. Apologies.)
I used to get emails from this man and his organization quite regularly. Recently they seem to have lapsed. All sorts of information about HAARP technology, chemtrails and world wide weather modification. I don't know what to believe.
It was very peculiar though, if you will recall back to to September 11, 2001 (hard for me to believe almost 23 years have passed) there was a major hurricane just south of New York City barreling toward Manhattan when it suddenly veered out to sea. Yes, I know hurricanes and tropical cyclones can follow eccentric paths; but they rarely if ever make abrupt turns. Was this hurricane manipulated by human technology so as not to (literally) rain on the horror parade of the events of 9-11? After all part of what made the 9-11 horror show so lurid and shocking was, as terrible as the events of the day were -- plans crashing into skyscrapers, people jumping to their deaths, buildings falling into their "foot prints" -- it was an otherwise beautiful, halcyon, autumn New York day.
If it had been pouring rain from a hurricane with low clouds obscuring the Twin Towers the grizzlyness of the show -- orchestrated to prime Americans for wars in the Middle East, or so it has been said by "conspiracy nuts" -- would have been obscured.
Does someone (DARPA, Israel?) have technology that can literally turn hurricanes around in their tracks? Just asking.
And, there is Dr. Judy Woods that shows what she claims to be evidence on Direct Energy Weapons on 9/11, Lahaina, Acapulco hurricane, spontanious forest fires in Quebec...
Thank you. I recall Dr. Judy Woods. Thank you for refreshing my memory. I need to go back and review her work now that I am in a more equitable state of mind.
Apparently the Aussies knew what was going on with the Bali 9 ahead of time and gave the info to the Indos instead of waiting to arrest them on their return. It's been referred to as 'outsourcing the death penalty'.
Think about the traditional picture of a "mom" who pulls the kid inside after he's been out playing, scolds him for getting all dirty and messing up his clothes, then scrubs the skin off him until he's clean. She puts him in his "nice" clothes, then warns him not to go back outside and do any roughhousing that will mess up his spiffy duds.
That is what these creatures want to do to society. Julie Inman Grant is a perfect example. She recently ordered Twitter/X (can't quit calling it Twitter!) to censor something she found offensive, and Musk took it down in Australia in accordance with its law. But Grant came back and said X would have to take it down GLOBALLY. Musk took the Aussie government to court on that one and won. These people want to micromanage everyone's behavior down to the tiniest detail.
Even the ritual of meeting the boys for a plain old brewski at the corner pub seems to be an endangered species in these places. They don't have to ban everything outright--there are many ways to skin a cat. They can encumber things with endless rules to regulate them out of existence. They can manipulate markets to make your favorite "undesirable" habits too expensive for the common citizen. I like to try some of those weird ales on occasion, but it's hard to believe that so many people prefer $15 "fruit beer" to the ordinary $2 pint of lager that the latter has almost disappeared.
Perhaps you need to find your way into the Outback to find one of those good neighborhood bars, and pull up to a giant oil can of ice cold Foster's.
I was struck by "scrubs the skin off him" followed by "many ways to skin a cat." It's certainly a change of metaphor from gradually boiling a complacent frog, the more common interpretation of our ongoing disenfranchisement. Altho I like the implications of your first poetic, that we are aware of and resentful towards what's being done because of the abrasiveness of the aggression, I don't think the assault is recognized in the second. Do we ever think about the violence being done to the cat? Did it do something to deserve such treatment?
Actually tho, do we ever think about cliches? Is there a hidden truth? Maybe when we first hear them, they might sound a bit curious, but once they become repeated they sink into the collective unconscious. I like this deep dive because it attempts to address where the expression came from, even tho it doesn't supply a why it evolved. https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/32123/origin-of-the-phrase-theres-more-than-one-way-to-skin-a-cat
I recall reading somewhere that the phrase, "Don't let the cat out of the bag" was in reference to a seller of pork (in this case a live pig) who would sometimes exchange a worthless cat for the supposed pig that was thought to be in the buyer's bag. I guess "letting the cat out of the bag" told the buyer that he had been defrauded and that he wasn't going to have the pork dinner he had payed for and expected.
I've never read about the true origin of this phrase. But cats go nuts when you close them up in a bag, so my guess is that it refers to revealing some truth that causes everyone to go nuts.
Usually when people put a cat in a bag, it is so they can drown it. (I know, it sounds gruesome.) While on a temporary gig back in southern Maryland years ago, a guy I met at work, a true redneck originally hailing from Florida, came in one day with a story about how he had finally gotten rid of his cat. It was his wife's cat, but he himself always hated it.
He put up with it for a few years, but then the cat was diagnosed with diabetes during a routine visit to the vet, which meant it was going to need expensive regular insulin injections. He wanted it put to sleep, but it turned out that the guy's wife was also diabetic, and wouldn't hear of it. So one day while he was home and she was at work, he put it in a sack and took it out deep into the woods, drowned it in the creek, and disposed of it. When his wife came home and eventually noticed the cat was not to be found, he said it must have been on the losing end of a tangle with some wildlife.
Sorry, not buying that explanation. A live pig in a bag doesn't ring true. It would have to be a piglet to fit and a cat's yowls don't sound like a pig either.
Sorry I brought it up. Having said that perhaps the buyer thought he was buying a dead piglet and when he got home and opened the bag (or sack) found out it was a worthless dead cat? But I'm veering into worthless speculation.
A diner to buy comfort food? Good question. I guess what that conjures up for me is an old-fashioned country style cafe not smelling as you might think of apple pie etc but stale oil, chips, hamburgers, pies, for dessert vanilla slice and mostly definitely not Italian style coffee. Not somewhere that would be my first choice. There was a time when every town in Australia seemed to have a Chinese restaurant and then with time came the Greek milkbars ('The Parthenon Milkbar' at one time was a jokey song). The waves of emigres are coming so thick and fast it no lo almost entirelynger has detectable stratas. I visited the far north-west of Melbourne a few months ago and it seemed to be populated by almost entirely brown-skinned people living in large and beautiful new homes and had the most wonderful Indian and Pakistani restaurants that made my mouth water, but far too far me to think of travelling.
The social engineering for violent or abusive men seems odd indeed but it would be nice if it helped. We have a womans refuge near where I live and it is a serious problem.
As to the bars, I never understood the Ladies and Escorts signs. either in Canada or Australia, not being a drinker at home or abroad. It was finally explained that men's bars are just too rough, with lots of fighting. You don't see those signs anymore.
Sad that local diners are in short supply. The diner in my hometown of New Carlisle is called The Diner. A lot of retirees like my Dad in there on a first name basis. Hustle and sass from the waitresses, the most basic of American comfort fare. Mush on the menu. I had "The Stacker" this week: two sausage patties and two eggs over medium on top of hash browns and covered in sausage gravy. Bad for the belly, good for the soul.
> Brewed in Manly, Queensland, it’s frankly queer, “Hazy golden in appearance. Big fruity hop aromas of passionfruit, pineapple and pear are complemented by a smooth, dry, easy finish.”
Just one of many wry observations of a formerly white Euro culture gone-over the top, multi-culti. What price to pay for lowered domestic crime rates, smoke-free safe spaces, designer beers and exotic Asian food choices? What starts out as a plea for liberal tolerance progresses (under guidance) until it becomes a demand for totalitarian control. "We're creating heaven on earth. Don't get in the way."
Unless the design behind this progressive plan is recognized and resisted, the order of the day does indeed become long black and flat white. And unless the ethnic designer class is named, resistance will be ideologically one-sided and fall into a dialectical trap. Hail Trump, American Messiah!
"We're creating heaven on earth. Don't get in the way." Perfect!
Brave New Australia.
Just to be clear, coffee has been embraced here as an Italian drink with all its phases, including a capuccino or a little drink of espresso with a good scoop of icecream. Nothing designer about it unless you mean Italian designers.
The Italians were responsible for an awful lot here in the way of food and drink. Greeks too. They transformed the food scene. The Asians came later, except for those Chinese restaurants.
Where in Australia are you, if I may inquire? Happy beginning of winter to you folk in the antipodes!
If you get the chance can you send up some snow? (I know you don't get much except in some of the mountains in the south-east; nevertheless we could use it.) What happened to all the ice-cellars we used to have here? It would be nice to have one to retreat to when the temp. tops 90 degrees F. ! I know, I know, the electric freezer came along; but back then people had to have the capacity to think six months ahead when gathering January ice for the future July. Too much to ask for now.
Hi Tom, I live in a little cottage in a country area which is close enough for a long commute into the suburbs of Melbourne in other word, at the foothills of the mountains of the south-east. I lived for many years further up in those mountains. As a child in the mountains of southern British Columbia where it is dreadfully hot in summer we could not afford an electric fridge so kept things cool with blocks of ice in an icebox or a walk to my grandmothers house. Sending you snow is not an option as there isn't any so far, and our version of cold is -3 degrees below centigrade zero which we have been getting for many nights in a row, to the point where I am sleeping on a couch next to the fire and closed off all other rooms. I know, I am an old sissy. This has been unusually cold for here and my wood supply is dwindling like the mist on the hill. We humans are never happy, are we?
Thank you so much for your comment. I am so grateful that Mr. Dinh allows far flung people like us to connect. Very best regards to you!
Thank you Tom. I went back and read Lin's interview with you. Surely there must be some space be half-way place between where you are now and the Phillipines?
Thank you. In fact I may have found such a space. A state social worker has found an affordable (because it is subsidized by Housing and Urban Development, HUD) small apartment for me.
I would say that I am chagrined that I can't even afford to live in the state I was born in (Connecticut) nor can I afford to live in the state I spent 37 years of my life working in (California). But I'm not really chagrined; I am more angry and disgusted beyond words.
To be poor in America is to be screwed and that's putting it mildly.
Increasingly, fewer and fewer people get payed a living wage; that is enough money to buy the necessities of life such as food, shelter and clothing. (The clothes for a lot of poor people in this country are obtained at Goodwill stores where the well-to-do discard their last season unfashionable, out of style old clothing.) While CEOs and the big shareholders of capitalist companies rake off more and more of the profits of their companies for themselves while paying their work force peanuts.
Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal (1933 to about 1980) mitigated the worst excesses of capitalism's ineluctable tendency to "immiserate" its work force. (Karl Marx foresaw and wrote about all of this in 1848 in his book "Das Kapital.")
FDR's New Deal has all but been repealed since Reagan's administration began in 1981. Now the only vestiges of the New Deal left are Social Security and Medicare. (And a 40 hour work week; and a minimum wage; but the min. wage, stuck at $7.25 an hour has become a slave wage; and companies like Walmart have found loop-holes around the 40 hour work week; getting their employees to sometimes be required to work more than 40 hours while only paying the employees for 40 hours; in other words skirting overtime laws.)
Social Security is my only source of income and survival now (I'm over 65) and every time I see some rich b*astard (I apologize for the crude language but sometimes there are no polite words that suffice) talking about how Social Security needs to be repealed and eliminated because it is going to bankrupt the government " ( as if our trillion dollar a year hand-over of tax-payer money to the military-industrial complex wasn't already doing that) I become enraged.
Ever since industrial capitalism really got going in this country after the Civil War there as been an unspoken class war between the capitalists (the 1%) and the workers.
Wages and salaries have largely stagnated for much of the working class since 1981 and rents have risen almost at an exponential rate because there is inadequate low-income housing for the poor. So landlords (often slumlords) can set rents almost as high as they want based upon the myth of "free markets"; when in fact free markets require parity bargaining power between both parties to a contract; which tenants, desperate to find housing, don't have.) In many ways this country is a disgrace.
Both Mexico and the Philippines provide low-income housing. Yes, they have other problems with corruption, etc. But if one keeps one's head down they are affordable. The problem for people like me is they (these overseas countries) have enough on their hands taking care of their own populations. They generally don't want foreigners coming in and taking scarce resources from the locals.
(Having said that, when I got back to Connecticut from the Philippines in early February of this year I was getting regular calls from women claiming to be from Philippine immigration asking me if I wanted to extend my Visa. They should have said something to me when I was there. I remember the day I arrived in the Philippines, the immigration agent at the airport in Manila stamped my passport and glowered at me barking, "You've got 30 days." The implication being, "when your time is up you'd better get the hell out! I feared overstaying my Visa by even one hour thinking the immigration authorities would put me in some windowless room and shake me down, not letting me go until my modest bank account was emptied into their pockets. "Crazy thinking!" one might say. Maybe. But I'm still alive. I'm not certain if it's still the case but they used to summarily execute drug smugglers or alleged drug smugglers in the Philippines (under president Dutarte). No Constitutional "right to a trial"; no Due Process; no Habeus Corpus; just a bullet to the head. I didn't want my last view of this world to be a dingy room in the Manila police department with a pistol held to my head...
Am I being hysterical? Maybe. Maybe not. I think I mentioned the armed guards at ALL the banks in Dumaguete. And these guys did not just have a pistol holster around their waist; they were carrying semi-automatic rifles with both hands on the rifle. That was about all I needed to see to want to get the hell out of there. That's not a civilized society for the benefit of its citizens. That's an authoritarian state predicated on threats and intimidation.
Dude! Just "chill", dude. Have you thought about getting a frontal lobotomy to control your anger???
Yes, I lived in California and the idiots there really do talk this way. "Like, that's not cool, dude! You need to chill out..."
No wonder this country is falling apart. It's putative citizens are idiots (at least some of them).
Yes! Italian boilermakers were geniuses!
How to make a coffee on the job!
The espresso machine is Italy's greatest invention.
I had to remove my comment; it was too stupid. The heat hear in New England (southern Connecticut) is unprecedentedly bad. Last summer we had 15 days between my Birthday (July 10) and mid-August above 90 degrees F. With high humidity. That is unprecedented. When I was growing up here if it hit 90 F. once every five or six years that was about as bad as it got. Now it looks like 90 degree plus summer days are becoming more or less the norm.
It is astounding that the PTB have exercised so much Climate Geo-engineering at the same time as claiming "Anthropogenic Climate Change", and NOBODY has caught on.
Weather mods have been going on for over 60 years.
Dana Wigington at Geoengineering Watch. (I may have misspelled the man's name. Apologies.)
I used to get emails from this man and his organization quite regularly. Recently they seem to have lapsed. All sorts of information about HAARP technology, chemtrails and world wide weather modification. I don't know what to believe.
It was very peculiar though, if you will recall back to to September 11, 2001 (hard for me to believe almost 23 years have passed) there was a major hurricane just south of New York City barreling toward Manhattan when it suddenly veered out to sea. Yes, I know hurricanes and tropical cyclones can follow eccentric paths; but they rarely if ever make abrupt turns. Was this hurricane manipulated by human technology so as not to (literally) rain on the horror parade of the events of 9-11? After all part of what made the 9-11 horror show so lurid and shocking was, as terrible as the events of the day were -- plans crashing into skyscrapers, people jumping to their deaths, buildings falling into their "foot prints" -- it was an otherwise beautiful, halcyon, autumn New York day.
If it had been pouring rain from a hurricane with low clouds obscuring the Twin Towers the grizzlyness of the show -- orchestrated to prime Americans for wars in the Middle East, or so it has been said by "conspiracy nuts" -- would have been obscured.
Does someone (DARPA, Israel?) have technology that can literally turn hurricanes around in their tracks? Just asking.
There is a book out, that was prominent in our library ~1998-2001:
"Angels Don't Play This HAARP".
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/636826.Angels_Don_t_Play_This_HAARP
And, there is Dr. Judy Woods that shows what she claims to be evidence on Direct Energy Weapons on 9/11, Lahaina, Acapulco hurricane, spontanious forest fires in Quebec...
Thank you. I recall Dr. Judy Woods. Thank you for refreshing my memory. I need to go back and review her work now that I am in a more equitable state of mind.
Apparently the Aussies knew what was going on with the Bali 9 ahead of time and gave the info to the Indos instead of waiting to arrest them on their return. It's been referred to as 'outsourcing the death penalty'.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAnAustralian/s/VnXwuddq1O