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Hi everybody,

Speaking of safe NYC, National Guard troops are now deployed in its subways. After complaints about their M4 assault weapons, the governor has ordered these big boys to retract their big sticks. Perhaps the presence of soldiers will prevent citizens from being pushed onto the path of trains, beaten, stabbed or shot. Only alarmists think there's anything unusual in NYC.

Linh

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A guy named Metal Leo does regular videos on You Tube of all the closed stores in San Francisco. That was a wonderful city when I was young, but it had strong ethnic elements and vibrant neighborhoods. The stores were places that sold things that people needed. In the last 20 plus years, the city filled up with boomtown like silicon valley interests. Now Mark Zuckerberg, the primary thief of the 2020 election, is preparing to flee San Francisco for a hole in the ground that he is excavating in Hawaii. A perfect metaphor , I suppose, for the boomtown thuggery that has decimated the U.S.

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After my father "kicked the bucket" (that's slang lingo for an ignominious death; another term is "to die like a dog") my mother became a desperate lottery ticket player. I tried to tell her that the odds of winning the lottery big were somewhat worse than being struck by lightning. Nevertheless, for every 20 or 30 dollars she spent she would win a couple of dollars which kept her hopeful which is exactly how the state sanctioned con is supposed to work.

Some call the lottery a "tax on stupidity and the stupid poor." I didn't say that, that's just what I heard...

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"Putin will attack in two years!"-some German headline today.Waiting for Green party rallies with"Welcome,thermo-nuclear warheads!""Please kill me,I`m white!",placards.

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More German headlines from today":Putin has destroyed the dream of a peaceful Europe"."Germany must be able to wage war,anyone saying different,is ignoring reality",".Putin is making sinister announcement about WW3".

Reminds me of 2002,Iraq war build-up,Bush Jr. said weapons of mass destruction 750 times,before unleashing them himself on hapless Iraqis,who had not even ever heard of Osama.Same with Afghanistan.Or Germany,Japan,Korea,Vietnam.Then came Obama,clever.Everybody goes like,wait a minute,that sounds like that horrible terrorist,who outsmarted American air defenses with a 1981 Texas Instruments calculator.Well,He`s President now.Are we confused yet.

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Money is the source of all evil.Some Greeks,2400 yrs.ago had it all figured out already,and look what happened to Greece,they signed(were made to sign) to pay Goldman Sachs for all eternity.

Aristoteles:Money that grows without any doing,is unnatural.No shit,is that hard to understand?

Yet 95% of youmans get up in the morning unwillingly,because there are bills to pay.Like Johnny Guitar Watson sang:Its all about the dollar bill.The dollar bill.

Here in Switzerland,I go to a market chain,and there are now more Africans than in a Tarzan movie(a joke stolen from Sanford and Son)

Remember Sarkozy 2009,on video,saying,the plan is to mingle the races,and if they dont want,they will be forced.So that everybody will be the SAME.

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"More Africans than a Tarzan movie" - that had to be Fred. Speaking of Tarzan, in the 2003 Chappelle's Show "Racial Draft" segment, Dave Chappelle (with a grey wig and "whiteface" as the leader of the White delegation) yells "UNGAWA!" at rowdy blacks who heckle him. "Ungawa" was a term Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle, used to communicate with the jungle animals. Certainly Dave's use of that was no coincidence.

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The Lewis Mumford quote reminded me of all of the rotten woodwork, crumbling brick and rusty chain link fencing that I encounter on my walks. It was sturdy stuff and could have/would have/should have lasted generations with proper maintenance. Brownfields and ruins now. One was repurposed and planned as "Ignition Park" some years back and now houses the Catalyst 1 and Catalyst 2 modern Notre Dame supercomputer, so at least some big numbers are getting crunched as things grind down.

The rest of Ignition Park has failed to ignite and I'm able to catch some beautiful sunsets across it's expanse.

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America is in an odd place of decay and false growth. The engraving almost seems impossibly refined for a country that has descended into trannyphilia.

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"Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance."

-Kurt Vonnegut

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Thanks so much for taking me away for a few moments. Crazy as fuck here in the good ol usa. But, beautiful spring weather. Clear blue sky. Time to plant the garden. So good to hear from you!

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I'd seen your name before, but today it started me reminiscing. Yesterday there'd been a trivial joke made to some old email acquaintances who'd disappeared then come back suddenly. "Always tho't you were regular human beans!" Yuk, yuk. But maybe that lit today's memory fuse. Haven't I heard that name before? Possibly it was the queen of southern gospel music who I discovered had recently passed away, Peggy McKamey Bean. But I didn't think so. Don't think she would have crossed my rock and roll radar. So I pressed the muse on. Was it Mr Bean, the character by that English comic, the redoubtable Rowan Atkinson? No, I felt it was someone American, some guy further back in my memory bank. Yes, Orson Bean, perennial panelist on game shows and general tv gadabout. His name it turns out was invented, Orson, as in Wells, for grandeur and Bean for common touch humor. He remarked it got a pop w/ live audiences. It apparently worked for me decades later. Best to you, Peggy.

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"And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars." Macron now says he's sending French troops to the Ukraine war. It makes no sense, except if the plan is to depopulate from young men, not just the Ukraine, but all of Europe. Kill kill kill kill kill kill kill.

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I agree.If I had roughly a hundred times more money than Elon,I would start to find populations bothersome.

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wonderful story about real people

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Thanks for alerting me to Petrarch - who I'd never heard of, despite him evidently forming an important part of European culture. One of this well travelled man's quotes was apparently "We look about us for what is to be found only within". How true. Happiness (and every other emotion of course) will only ever be found within.

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Thank you for the excellent photographs, and for your details about Vietnam's language, and the nation's long history of warfare. It puts into perspective the ignominious American defeat there, after a decade of waging warfare so far away.

It hurts to think about the brutality and waste. Waste: American soldiers 'got wasted' on drugs in Vietnam, 'wasted' soldiers and civilians, sometimes in wanton massacres, and were wasted themselves, tens of thousands of them. That idiom has fallen out of common usage, but stays in the minds of those who heard such phrases so often in years gone by.

Reading about centuries of Vietnam's fighting against other nations makes me wonder how sanity in everyday life seems so normal where you are. Surely many Vietnamese are still traumatized. Many Americans from that era struggle with psychological trauma even though the violence was, for them, geographically speaking, so far away.

Some American war-related suffering is, of course, delusional and dishonest. Perhaps the worst manifestation is in the atrociously dishonest description of the WTC 2001 crime scene as 'ground zero,' a term formerly used exclusively to describe the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear war crimes.

Americans and others need more of the kind of writing you do. Stay safe and well, and please consider dropping 'jewjabbed.' In my opinion, that slur is wrongheaded, and unworthy of your talent.

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founding

Re waste: criminal waste, the use of agent orange to destroy forests and cause horrible sickness to the Vietnamese people, as well as shorten the lives of U.S. soldiers.

My neighbor across the street died a few years ago. He was a Vietnam Vet. A really nice guy. I guess he most likely was drafted. He was not warlike.

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How right you are. And how little most Americans care to know about Agent Orange. The suffering still ongoing in Vietnam is horrendous. Probably Linh Dinh knows more than he has ever written.

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Mar 18·edited Mar 18

Just reading Shrinking Oases for Useless Eaters.

Your writing works very well in the longer pieces in that book. It would be great if you wrote a longer piece really delving into Vung Tau since you feel so at home there

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founding

I saw that hunched over lottery ticket vendor in VT quite a few times last month. Certainly puts things in perspective.

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By way Linh, Tom has moved from Preixan and now lives in Spain.

,

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Any backstory to Biden's visit to Hanoi where he kissed the statue of >McCain in a parachute? After trampling into the bushes? How did that go down in Chinatown?

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crazy as shit war hysteria here in the West.

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