The CIA created the crack cocaine epidemic in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The twofold purpose was to destroy black Americans, and to create a massive war chest free of Congressional oversight. Then they did it to white Americans 20 years later with the fentanyl epidemic and blamed China (and now recently Venezuela). People with their heads firmly lodged up their asses refer to this as a “conspiracy theory”, a term the CIA invented to shame people for paying attention.
ABigGuy4U
13d ago
Russians also use the terms “Fatherland” and “Motherland” interchangeably, but for some reason it’s almost always been translated as “Motherland”.
ABigGuy4U
13d ago
Unfortunately it seems like Real IRA has drunk Sinn Fein’s Flavor-Aid and they support infinity immigrants as much as any brunch-going liberal. UVA/UDF definitely doesn’t like immigration. Both parties are more concerned with selling crack than political issues at the moment. In practice Northern Ireland is 98 percent white, because if you wanted to live in a third world country filled with mad jihadists you could just stay in Syria.
ABigGuy4U
13d ago
Unfortunately in the meantime the CIA had decided they wanted to be their own independent nation state, and determined that the best way to do that was to flood a bunch of communities with cheap cocaine. So you had urban drug paramilitaries forming, and those areas started to become everyone’s problem.
ABigGuy4U
13d ago
Yet I've never once heard a conservative suggest that cities should direct more police resources toward patrolling wealthy communities and less towards poorer communities with higher crime rates.
That’s how it used to work, then civil rights groups spent twenty years bitching and moaning about how minority communities were under-policed. When it finally changed they spent the next thirty years bitching and moaning about how minority communities were overpoliced because it turns out policing involves arresting people, and most of the criminals in those communities were locals.
ABigGuy4U
14d ago
That’s definitely a good point, and if America was a country where most rapists and murderers got the death penalty I would have a much easier time accepting Santos’s sentence. But it isn’t, and so I have a hard time seeing him in prison for that long just because he had the temerity to say the quiet part out loud: that most congressmen are grifting con artists.
ABigGuy4U
14d ago
I notice that Obama has been more visible lately, and him and Trump are sniping at each other more than usual. I think it’s being considered as a back up plan in case this actually happens.
ABigGuy4U
15d ago
The Bianca Censori red carpet incident was a heavy blow, but this might just be the final nail in the coffin of the Theory of Nominative Determinism.
ABigGuy4U
15d ago
I really love the director's cut, but the combination of a miscast Orlando Bloom and overly on-the-nose War on Terror commentary makes it impossible for me to recommend it without reservations.
That’s actually something I love about historical epics. Over time it becomes a double period piece, for both the period it was set in and the period it was made.
ABigGuy4U
15d ago
What are chances of a sudden, catastrophic deterioration in the situation in Northern Ireland? I don’t have any actual reported facts to back me up, but I just get a bad insidious feeling about it.
ABigGuy4U
15d ago
I don’t like it that much either, but its always on the lists of best neo-noirs so I felt I had to mention it. Honestly I think it’s one of Washington’s weaker performances (it’s a bit hammy) and I think a lot of people were just reacting to the novelty value of him playing a villain, which he hardly ever does.
ABigGuy4U
15d ago
1919 was the year that Anton Drexler founded the German Worker’s Party, the predecessor organization to the NSDAP.
ABigGuy4U
16d ago
I have a hard time accepting 7 years as a just sentence for the level of fraud here. There are very serious violent crimes that ruin lives that don’t get that amount of time. There are some murders that don’t get that amount of time.
ABigGuy4U
17d ago
One hundred billion dollars sounds like a lot, but when you’re talking about funding the western military industrial complex it’s not as much as you would think. Ukraine has already gotten about 430 billion dollars worth of aid. So the impounded funds would be enough to sustain the current level of aid for about another year. And that’s putting aside @ArjinFerman’s very good point about transmuting money into actual tanks.
ABigGuy4U
18d ago
I would nominate Dark Blue and Street Kings two films penned by literary crime novelist James Ellroy. I think had a few things gone differently they could have been up there with LA Confidential and Training Day as some of the best neo-noir movies of last half century. As it stands they are still very underrated and well-made.
ABigGuy4U
19d ago
There aren’t a lot of good solutions for Ukraine. It’s like trying to give a mouse stuck in a glue trap helpful advice on how to get out. The only way for Ukraine to actually win would be to send half a million NATO troops to openly fight the Russians in Ukraine. That would be dicey for multiple reasons. Other than that, you can continue military aid and hope for the best. Trump doesn’t like Zelensky, and he’s annoyed by the EU’s cheapskate attitude toward military spending. But he’s always been more pro-Ukraine than is widely reported, he was the first president to start sending them weapons.
ABigGuy4U
19d ago
Sure, but if we are just talking about what percentage of the societal elite (doctors, lawyers, judges, finance, business, politicians, military officers) are women, all those places I listed are going have much lower percentages than America or Western Europe.
ABigGuy4U
20d ago
And so it stopped when the West won the Cold War, all sanctions on South Africa were ended?
Apartheid ended before the Soviet Union fell.
ABigGuy4U
20d ago
but there really aren't very many of those around these days.
China, Russia, the Muslim world, India, the Latin American world, Africa. Basically everywhere except Burgerland and Europe.
The right wing critique of Reagan would be that he was a Judas goat who created the strong appearance of rolling back Johnson’s Great Society program while actually solidifying and entrenching it. Another thing to keep in mind is that one of Reagan’s main conservative bonafides was winning the Cold War, and it is starting to feel more and more lately like America didn’t actually win the Cold War. China won the Cold War, while the USA and USSR both lost.
More options
Context Copy link