The implication being that these now-unemployed women will enter into relationships with the blue-collar men to survive. The Epstein class certainly seems to be going all-in on traditional gender roles. Anything to get their human cattle breeding again, I suppose.

The Maori got there by sea in the first place. Time to start practicing with a sextant and charts.

I suspect the involvement of the CIA or some of their rogue assets, either mobsters or gusanos. He was allegedly warming towards Cuba, and I think that may have been part of the motivation. Blowback Season 2 made a pretty convincing argument for that scenario.

I hope whatever happens, there are enough of us left to fill their damn air vents with cement before we succumb to whatever world-ending catastrophe finally pushes them into the bunkers in the first place.

My “favorite war” is class war. 🙃

I recall reading in a separate study that true literacy, that is, being able to read, comprehend, and make inferences about a text, is at about 10% in the USA. Even those 10% are being mis-educated - taught various myths about history and economics. Without historical materialism, one really lacks the ability to comprehend the broader picture, even when one is ostensibly able to read and comprehend.

Of course, this is by design. Why would Capital want workers capable of understanding the world or their place in it? The brain drain will continue until the empire collapses under its own contradictions.

There are so many levels of racism here that I’m just aghast. Justification of child murder en masse, conflation of the burqa with all Muslim countries, and the sheer arrogance of an American calling Iran a “barbaric society.”

White chauvinism (of any stripe) may just be the stupidest ideology ever wrought upon this godsforsaken planet. The idea that a civilization that was producing works of art and science while this idiot’s ancestors were busy whacking each other over the head with swords and not bathing is the “barbaric” one is so easily disproven with even the most casual investigation.

Educate yourself, and question everything. No one is worth following blindly. If you don’t understand the “why” of something, keep digging until you do. Critically thinking is the most valuable skill you can have, so develop it as much as you can.

The problems go back further than that, but the centralization of news media over the last 50 years has certainly made it harder for the average Westerner to come across information that disputes the CIA narrative.

Americans have had every participatory inclination beaten out of them (metaphorically speaking). Their political parties have no participation beyond asking for money and their unions are the same. They’ve been fed a steady drip of 24/7 news designed to keep them afraid of everyone they don’t already know, and that’s by design. Things are going to have to get a lot worse for the average American before they’ll be willing to organize in any meaningful way. I hope this changes, don’t get me wrong, but I expect that it’ll have to get a lot worse before it gets better.

Working in elected office means dancing when your donors say dance. It selects for people willing to do anything for an extra buck. Anyone who actually had principles wouldn’t make it through the gauntlet that is campaigning in the US, and that’s by design. Why do you think neither party seems interested in campaign finance reform?

I think this depends upon your definition of success. I think it could be done now such that you could get to a live birth, but not without serious health complications for the clone, probably resulting in an imprinting disorder or maybe something akin to progeria. You’d wind up with a sick infant instead of a healthy adult. Producing a copy of a human being as they are, if that is the definition of success, is still a ways away, probably a decade or more. This is without even considering the ethical issues with human cloning.

I think there are a lot of great games out now, they just tend not to be AAA titles. Those kinds of graphics require a huge amount of manpower, which means a huge amount of investment seeking profit, which means people in business suits calling the shots. Frankly, I think the answer is that games devs need to unionize, both to push back against crunch and to protect their creative freedom. I think that might result in AAA games worth playing.

I’m inclined to agree, though I’d include the competing consoles of the era as well as the PC games available at the time. So roughly everything from 1990 to 2006.