[Attaroast in Ubon Ratchathani, 7/1/23] Walking into Attaroast, I was loudly greeted by two lovely baristas, so life is good, no? Not exactly. If it wasn’t painful to walk, still, I’d be somewhere else. Again, they’re playing some jazzy rhythm and blues, with just about every line of every song a horrible cliché. “We were so perfect together,” “you broke my heart when you left me,” “I just want to stay with you forever,” etc. For a foreigner, such idiotic lyrics are easier to pick out, so suit them fine.
I live in Columbus, Ohio, the oft described "gateway to the midwest", and can speak to the presence of people who are "not from around here". For the last 15 years or so there has been an ever-growing number of people whom I will call "refugees" from various places in East Africa. I always felt they were given passage to the US because of the US addiction to thoroughly mess around in other countries.
These immigrants make no attempt to assimilate. In fact, 9 times out of 10, I will not get so much as a sideways glance from them as the white male that I am. It is certainly bizarre and speaks to the "tribal" nature many humans possess.
I am not so proud and ignorant to say things like, "This is America! You should speak OUR language and learn OUR customs." What I will say is that the social cohesion continues to be reduced to purely transactional levels leaving many feeling like there is no "homebase". There are few acknowledged and shared "core values" anymore as so many people exist in the self-fulfilling echo-chamber of their own digital caricatures.
When the SHTF I imagine people will resort to the more instinctual levels identifying people by obvious differences, instead of perhaps the more transcendent "human" aspects we all share.
All the touchy feely "we are all one" shit sounds great until people are starving.
German Oliver Janich was 8 months in a prison in the Philippines on bogus charges of extremism. Berlin just invented "hate crimes" and sent an international arrest warrant, even though Janich lived on the other side of the world peacefully, with his girlfriend and a newborn. Gonzalo Lira was in Ukraine when the war broke out, thank God his family wasn't with him. He too was quickly charged with subversion of the state. These two cases only became public because these two individuals had accidently gotten 100,000 or so followers. I say "accidently" because it was big tech algorithms that computed them to click-fame. But I am telling you, there are 10,000 unlucky ones who got charged, deported, and sent to prison totally amorously, without anybody else noticing. The prisons in Europe are packed with political prisoners. Every dissident who is out there today is going to jail one day eventually, that final solution seems to be in the makings...
Thanks for remembering Gonzalo Lira and posting his video about that insane war pig at the state department, victoria nuland-kagan. To get a preview on the hell America is in for, see the Peter Myers review of the book "The Wolf of the Kremlin: The First Biography of Lazar .M. Kaganovich, the Soviet Union's Architect of Fear" (written by his American nephew, Stuart Kahan) at Mailstar.net
Many of Kaganovich's jewish cousins and co-religionists, as many as could, came pouring out of Russia to America at the onset of the "communist" "revolution" in the nineteen-teens, knowing the new totalitarian regime would bring hell on earth to Russians, Ukrainians, and all the other peoples of the vast Russian empire. Lazar Kaganovich is the secret to Stalin's rise to power: Kaganovich had been a rising party enforcer, along with his brothers. He submitted a paper he wrote, regurgitating communist party doctrine, to Trotsky for review, but Trotsky sneered at it and derisively dismissed Kaganovich, earning his enmity for life. Kaganovich looked around for other party members disgusted with Trotsky... and found another, senior rising star, Stalin, and became his toady, his right hand man. Together the two would write up lists of who was with Trotsky, and who was with them... these became purge lists, so Kaganovich became Stalin's head enforcer and chief bodyguard, hence "Architect of Terror" of the book's title.
After their palace coup exiled Trotsky, the new (stalin) regime was teetering - after years of civil war and raiding farms, they couldn't feed the cities. So they allowed the farmers in Ukraine and elsewhere to PRIVATIZE - to grow and sell what they wanted, to make a profit. Boom harvests resulted in 1927, allowing the regime to consolidate its powers... until, in the horrific winter of 1931-32, stalin unleashed his top henchman Kaganovich upon Ukraine, to WIPE OUT WHOLE POPULATIONS by FOOD CONFISCATION and massacres. Kaganovich deputized 25,000 industrial workers as Commissars, gave them a gun, a badge, and license to loot, rape, murder, and plunder throughout Ukraine at will, the "holodomor." Any organized resistance was crushed by the militias backed by the red army. There was no "survivalist" escape - anyone who wasn't starving, or on a commune, was considered a "counter-revolutionary" and arrested and tortured, their farms or homes searched and plundered. And the regime simply rewarded snitches - the losers, the lowest people in the community - to tattle on those who were surviving well. It's hard to come up with the exact death toll, but since they were TRYING to destroy a population, the estimates of between 10 million and 14 million keep popping up. The blood-drenched "communist" regimes killed 30 million people before the Bavarian corporal even took power in 1933, but we aren't allowed to talk about their millions of victims.
See also the video "Stalin's Enslavement of Rural Russia
I don't know. Didn't Lira disappeared already once, then appeared again? However, this time he seems to be under arrest. I'd wait and see. I doubt they would kill him as they could use it as a bargaining chip. But who knows. Americans won't have much use for him, and I don't know if the Chilean Embassy is doing anything? This is a weird war. It's not even clear what Ukrainians are expecting at this point, besides the grift.
I recollect hearing that on that first occasion, he was arrested and held for about a week, and released but with some travel restrictions of some kind.
My opinion only, but - when a society or nation "loses" its women, the end is close. I refer to women who turn their back on their culture and, of course, race. That has been happening in the US for a couple of generations. Not even Robert E. Lee could save a people whose women are determined to NOT carry on the traditions and blood ties of their ancestors. Thus the East rises and the West recedes.
National borders are a weird thing to a naive (but old) American like me.
Always insular, locked-up in "my" country -- which I finally figured out, belatedly, didn't want or need me -- I started to explore the idea of going somewhere else. Only to find no one really wanted me. They (other countries) had their own problems with the unemployed and the people who couldn't find work and seeking welfare. Why take in some farang or gringo who can't make it in "his" own country?
Some people just aren't wanted (nor are they needed) anywhere.
When I was in school I got accolades for allegedly being a "good" writer; or at least that's what some of my professors said. But if you think about if for a minute, who needs "good" writers? No one. What most countries need are people, "just educated enough to do the increasingly sh*tty jobs, for the increasingly low pay and not be smart or educated enough to sit around the kitchen table and discuss how the system threw them overboard thirty [now forty] f*cking years ago" (George Carlin).
People -- human beings -- are neither needed nor wanted nowadays. They are sometimes tolerated because through their work they generate wealth for the wealthy, the greedy and the avaricious. Thus the working wealth generators are reluctantly tolerated by the wealthy.
Now perhaps, with AI, the wealthy will finally be able to do away with all the "useless eaters" as Jeff Rense and others used to say.
It sounds as if the stress of extensive traveling on a budget has caught up with you. (then there is the conspiracy side of me that wonders if you have been poisoned to shut you up.) Acupuncture has helped me in the past to recover my health. Enjoying your writings, I hope you get healthy. I live in a part of rural Virginia which is still in the good times. Rockbridge County was a great place to raise my two children. Even so, if I were younger I would be looking into another country to live in instead of just thinking about it now and then.
The Jews in the Ukraine are doing to a dissident goy, Lira, what US Jews like Garland want to do to every uppity goy in the US. (Home of the free indeed.)
I imagine that Lira has almost as little of a chance of being freed thanks to American pressure as does Assange.
I occasionally tuned in to Gonzalo Lira's videos. Although it was obvious that he favored Russia over Ukraine, he saved his most severe vituperation for the US. It doesn't surprise me that the US government shows no interest in busting him out, and perhaps they even slipped the word to the Ukrainian authorities to arrest him. As a Study Guide question for our current events class, we can discuss the difference between Gonzalo Lira and, say, Britney Griner. Both expressed contempt for the US government, but while one rots in a Ukrainian jail getting no help, the other was enthusiastically repatriated. Hmm...
Even our betters in DC believe that every nation is its demographics, which is exactly why they are allowing our border to be overrun—it is necessary as part of imploding America as a concept, allowing them to get on with Stage 2 of the "Build Back Brandon"--oops, I mean "Build Back Better" plan. Recall that Brandon’s 2024 campaign slogan is “Let’s Finish The Job.” Indeed.
But isn’t it strange that the same “wise ones" who see demographics as the nation can simultaneously believe that they can impose a new structure on society from the top down? If such is indeed true, why the need for the wholesale dilution of the population? Simply impose it on the people who are already here—much simpler, no?
Linh, you say that you were once advised to avoid Rade neighborhoods. Here in the US, I can see how someone might get singled out by his appearance alone as "not belonging". But would you be recognized as a non-Rade, i.e., is it possible to distinguish Rades from native Vietnamese by sight? Or was the advice just based on some idea that bad things happen in those neighborhoods?
Rades don't look like Vietnamese, and Ea Kly (pop. 20,000) is pretty rural, with rice paddies and cows, pigs and chickens being raised. It has almost no tourists, not even Vietnamese ones. In such a setting, an outsider wandering down a side road is instantly picked out.
Until the late 80's, Rades still fought back with assault rifles against Vietnamese encroachment.
There are many long distance buses passing through a three-way intersection. Sitting at a roadside cafe, I once saw a young black man waiting for a bus or van. To kill time, he walked over to a cafe table where sat four or five Vietnamese men. Since everybody was smiling and animated, I thought the black man was working in the area.
After he hopped onto his van, I asked his buddies, "How's his Vietnamese?"
"He couldn't speak Vietnamese!"
"So how did you talk?"
"We don't even know the guy. He just came over to sit with us, so we talked to him."
the impression i have is that your health is improving a bit, but rather gradually - i hope it continues to do so - maybe you will find a practitioner able to assist you in your healing process
it was jesuit paleontologist pierre teilhard de chardin who said that 'human evolution is a way of the cross' - analogizing the human journey through time and space to the ordeal of jesus after his trial, when he was forced to walk to his place of execution, dragging the wood that he would be nailed to
as a christian, teilhard de chardin believed that after jesus breathed his last, there was a 'rest of the story' - the empty tomb, the resurrection, the ascension to heaven, the promised return
returning to the particulars of life in southeast asia, a place i've never been - the closest i've been is a year living in sasebo, kyushu, japan - i was seven - here is an interesting paragraph from wikipedia
"About 60 km south of Buôn Ma Thuột is Lak Lake. Overlooking the lake is the old summer residence of Emperor Bảo Đại which has been renovated into a hotel. Surrounding the lake is Jun Village, home of the Jun people. The villagers have a peculiar form of fishing where they attach metal rods to a car battery and run the rods through the water, zapping and stunning the fish, and then collecting them to keep in a tank at the village until they are needed."
last night i watched a video documentary about crop circles, made by an enthusiast, a member of the "crop circle community" - those who visit and speculate about these phenomena - certainly these are interesting works of art, requiring planning and effort - one wonders who does these, and why
i have recently been listening to lectures by ronald wright, on the topics of "a short history of progress" and "what is america?"
in terms of progress, spouse and self recently bought a car - made in hiroshima, japan - with radar cruise control - that is definitely progress, of a technological sort
and we bought it here in america - so one can say, "america is a place where you can buy japanese cars"
It sounds like your body is experiencing a major detox. Getting rid of the poisons any way it can. Sending you prayers and hugs.
Yes, Linh, sounds as though you are on the right track with your health. Best thoughts for your continued improvement.
Health is always a struggle. It takes thought and planning to get through any problems.
I live in Columbus, Ohio, the oft described "gateway to the midwest", and can speak to the presence of people who are "not from around here". For the last 15 years or so there has been an ever-growing number of people whom I will call "refugees" from various places in East Africa. I always felt they were given passage to the US because of the US addiction to thoroughly mess around in other countries.
These immigrants make no attempt to assimilate. In fact, 9 times out of 10, I will not get so much as a sideways glance from them as the white male that I am. It is certainly bizarre and speaks to the "tribal" nature many humans possess.
I am not so proud and ignorant to say things like, "This is America! You should speak OUR language and learn OUR customs." What I will say is that the social cohesion continues to be reduced to purely transactional levels leaving many feeling like there is no "homebase". There are few acknowledged and shared "core values" anymore as so many people exist in the self-fulfilling echo-chamber of their own digital caricatures.
When the SHTF I imagine people will resort to the more instinctual levels identifying people by obvious differences, instead of perhaps the more transcendent "human" aspects we all share.
All the touchy feely "we are all one" shit sounds great until people are starving.
German Oliver Janich was 8 months in a prison in the Philippines on bogus charges of extremism. Berlin just invented "hate crimes" and sent an international arrest warrant, even though Janich lived on the other side of the world peacefully, with his girlfriend and a newborn. Gonzalo Lira was in Ukraine when the war broke out, thank God his family wasn't with him. He too was quickly charged with subversion of the state. These two cases only became public because these two individuals had accidently gotten 100,000 or so followers. I say "accidently" because it was big tech algorithms that computed them to click-fame. But I am telling you, there are 10,000 unlucky ones who got charged, deported, and sent to prison totally amorously, without anybody else noticing. The prisons in Europe are packed with political prisoners. Every dissident who is out there today is going to jail one day eventually, that final solution seems to be in the makings...
Completely correct. (That is not a sentence, but we are casual here I believe.)
Thanks for remembering Gonzalo Lira and posting his video about that insane war pig at the state department, victoria nuland-kagan. To get a preview on the hell America is in for, see the Peter Myers review of the book "The Wolf of the Kremlin: The First Biography of Lazar .M. Kaganovich, the Soviet Union's Architect of Fear" (written by his American nephew, Stuart Kahan) at Mailstar.net
https://mailstar.net/kaganovich.html
Many of Kaganovich's jewish cousins and co-religionists, as many as could, came pouring out of Russia to America at the onset of the "communist" "revolution" in the nineteen-teens, knowing the new totalitarian regime would bring hell on earth to Russians, Ukrainians, and all the other peoples of the vast Russian empire. Lazar Kaganovich is the secret to Stalin's rise to power: Kaganovich had been a rising party enforcer, along with his brothers. He submitted a paper he wrote, regurgitating communist party doctrine, to Trotsky for review, but Trotsky sneered at it and derisively dismissed Kaganovich, earning his enmity for life. Kaganovich looked around for other party members disgusted with Trotsky... and found another, senior rising star, Stalin, and became his toady, his right hand man. Together the two would write up lists of who was with Trotsky, and who was with them... these became purge lists, so Kaganovich became Stalin's head enforcer and chief bodyguard, hence "Architect of Terror" of the book's title.
After their palace coup exiled Trotsky, the new (stalin) regime was teetering - after years of civil war and raiding farms, they couldn't feed the cities. So they allowed the farmers in Ukraine and elsewhere to PRIVATIZE - to grow and sell what they wanted, to make a profit. Boom harvests resulted in 1927, allowing the regime to consolidate its powers... until, in the horrific winter of 1931-32, stalin unleashed his top henchman Kaganovich upon Ukraine, to WIPE OUT WHOLE POPULATIONS by FOOD CONFISCATION and massacres. Kaganovich deputized 25,000 industrial workers as Commissars, gave them a gun, a badge, and license to loot, rape, murder, and plunder throughout Ukraine at will, the "holodomor." Any organized resistance was crushed by the militias backed by the red army. There was no "survivalist" escape - anyone who wasn't starving, or on a commune, was considered a "counter-revolutionary" and arrested and tortured, their farms or homes searched and plundered. And the regime simply rewarded snitches - the losers, the lowest people in the community - to tattle on those who were surviving well. It's hard to come up with the exact death toll, but since they were TRYING to destroy a population, the estimates of between 10 million and 14 million keep popping up. The blood-drenched "communist" regimes killed 30 million people before the Bavarian corporal even took power in 1933, but we aren't allowed to talk about their millions of victims.
See also the video "Stalin's Enslavement of Rural Russia
https://youtu.be/87KQfyLFhDU
and How Joseph Stalin Starved Millions in the Ukrainian Famine
https://www.history.com/news/ukrainian-famine-stalin
I don't know. Didn't Lira disappeared already once, then appeared again? However, this time he seems to be under arrest. I'd wait and see. I doubt they would kill him as they could use it as a bargaining chip. But who knows. Americans won't have much use for him, and I don't know if the Chilean Embassy is doing anything? This is a weird war. It's not even clear what Ukrainians are expecting at this point, besides the grift.
I recollect hearing that on that first occasion, he was arrested and held for about a week, and released but with some travel restrictions of some kind.
My opinion only, but - when a society or nation "loses" its women, the end is close. I refer to women who turn their back on their culture and, of course, race. That has been happening in the US for a couple of generations. Not even Robert E. Lee could save a people whose women are determined to NOT carry on the traditions and blood ties of their ancestors. Thus the East rises and the West recedes.
Linh. I am visiting Ubon from Australia.I am right now sitting in Attaroast drinking coffee. I would like to meet you if you are feeling sociable.
Hi Harpo,
By the time I managed to hobble to Attaroast, you were gone!
Here's my email, linhdinh99@yahoo.com
Linh
National borders are a weird thing to a naive (but old) American like me.
Always insular, locked-up in "my" country -- which I finally figured out, belatedly, didn't want or need me -- I started to explore the idea of going somewhere else. Only to find no one really wanted me. They (other countries) had their own problems with the unemployed and the people who couldn't find work and seeking welfare. Why take in some farang or gringo who can't make it in "his" own country?
Some people just aren't wanted (nor are they needed) anywhere.
When I was in school I got accolades for allegedly being a "good" writer; or at least that's what some of my professors said. But if you think about if for a minute, who needs "good" writers? No one. What most countries need are people, "just educated enough to do the increasingly sh*tty jobs, for the increasingly low pay and not be smart or educated enough to sit around the kitchen table and discuss how the system threw them overboard thirty [now forty] f*cking years ago" (George Carlin).
People -- human beings -- are neither needed nor wanted nowadays. They are sometimes tolerated because through their work they generate wealth for the wealthy, the greedy and the avaricious. Thus the working wealth generators are reluctantly tolerated by the wealthy.
Now perhaps, with AI, the wealthy will finally be able to do away with all the "useless eaters" as Jeff Rense and others used to say.
It sounds as if the stress of extensive traveling on a budget has caught up with you. (then there is the conspiracy side of me that wonders if you have been poisoned to shut you up.) Acupuncture has helped me in the past to recover my health. Enjoying your writings, I hope you get healthy. I live in a part of rural Virginia which is still in the good times. Rockbridge County was a great place to raise my two children. Even so, if I were younger I would be looking into another country to live in instead of just thinking about it now and then.
The Jews in the Ukraine are doing to a dissident goy, Lira, what US Jews like Garland want to do to every uppity goy in the US. (Home of the free indeed.)
I imagine that Lira has almost as little of a chance of being freed thanks to American pressure as does Assange.
So sorry to hear you are still so unwell, Linh.
Ms. Nuland hardly presents as well these days L.D.
As for the trajectory of The United States . . .
https://les7eb.substack.com/p/washingtons-ukraina-grandioznaya
Washington's Ukraina Grandioznaya Skhema.
The Graveyard of This Empire.
Okay.
I just went for a short recce of the neighbourhood. Im back here at attaroast now. Or if you are hobbling I will come to you.
Hi Harpo,
I'm at Grow Up for my one meal of the day. I'll be done in 20 minutes so will hobble over to Attaroast. I'll see you there around 10!
Linh
I occasionally tuned in to Gonzalo Lira's videos. Although it was obvious that he favored Russia over Ukraine, he saved his most severe vituperation for the US. It doesn't surprise me that the US government shows no interest in busting him out, and perhaps they even slipped the word to the Ukrainian authorities to arrest him. As a Study Guide question for our current events class, we can discuss the difference between Gonzalo Lira and, say, Britney Griner. Both expressed contempt for the US government, but while one rots in a Ukrainian jail getting no help, the other was enthusiastically repatriated. Hmm...
Even our betters in DC believe that every nation is its demographics, which is exactly why they are allowing our border to be overrun—it is necessary as part of imploding America as a concept, allowing them to get on with Stage 2 of the "Build Back Brandon"--oops, I mean "Build Back Better" plan. Recall that Brandon’s 2024 campaign slogan is “Let’s Finish The Job.” Indeed.
But isn’t it strange that the same “wise ones" who see demographics as the nation can simultaneously believe that they can impose a new structure on society from the top down? If such is indeed true, why the need for the wholesale dilution of the population? Simply impose it on the people who are already here—much simpler, no?
Linh, you say that you were once advised to avoid Rade neighborhoods. Here in the US, I can see how someone might get singled out by his appearance alone as "not belonging". But would you be recognized as a non-Rade, i.e., is it possible to distinguish Rades from native Vietnamese by sight? Or was the advice just based on some idea that bad things happen in those neighborhoods?
Hi JustPlainBill,
Rades don't look like Vietnamese, and Ea Kly (pop. 20,000) is pretty rural, with rice paddies and cows, pigs and chickens being raised. It has almost no tourists, not even Vietnamese ones. In such a setting, an outsider wandering down a side road is instantly picked out.
Until the late 80's, Rades still fought back with assault rifles against Vietnamese encroachment.
There are many long distance buses passing through a three-way intersection. Sitting at a roadside cafe, I once saw a young black man waiting for a bus or van. To kill time, he walked over to a cafe table where sat four or five Vietnamese men. Since everybody was smiling and animated, I thought the black man was working in the area.
After he hopped onto his van, I asked his buddies, "How's his Vietnamese?"
"He couldn't speak Vietnamese!"
"So how did you talk?"
"We don't even know the guy. He just came over to sit with us, so we talked to him."
Linh
this ethnic group - both in place and having emigrated to america - is discussed in https://www.peoplesoftheworld.org/text?people=Ede
the impression i have is that your health is improving a bit, but rather gradually - i hope it continues to do so - maybe you will find a practitioner able to assist you in your healing process
it was jesuit paleontologist pierre teilhard de chardin who said that 'human evolution is a way of the cross' - analogizing the human journey through time and space to the ordeal of jesus after his trial, when he was forced to walk to his place of execution, dragging the wood that he would be nailed to
as a christian, teilhard de chardin believed that after jesus breathed his last, there was a 'rest of the story' - the empty tomb, the resurrection, the ascension to heaven, the promised return
returning to the particulars of life in southeast asia, a place i've never been - the closest i've been is a year living in sasebo, kyushu, japan - i was seven - here is an interesting paragraph from wikipedia
"About 60 km south of Buôn Ma Thuột is Lak Lake. Overlooking the lake is the old summer residence of Emperor Bảo Đại which has been renovated into a hotel. Surrounding the lake is Jun Village, home of the Jun people. The villagers have a peculiar form of fishing where they attach metal rods to a car battery and run the rods through the water, zapping and stunning the fish, and then collecting them to keep in a tank at the village until they are needed."
last night i watched a video documentary about crop circles, made by an enthusiast, a member of the "crop circle community" - those who visit and speculate about these phenomena - certainly these are interesting works of art, requiring planning and effort - one wonders who does these, and why
i have recently been listening to lectures by ronald wright, on the topics of "a short history of progress" and "what is america?"
in terms of progress, spouse and self recently bought a car - made in hiroshima, japan - with radar cruise control - that is definitely progress, of a technological sort
and we bought it here in america - so one can say, "america is a place where you can buy japanese cars"