[The Federalist] This week, federal agents in New York arrested rapper and music mogul Sean "Diddy" Combs on charges of, among other things, alleged arson, bribery, kidnapping, forced labor, and sex trafficking. The federal indictment comes after Combs has faced months of civil lawsuits alleging sexual crimes, including trafficking, abuse, and rape.
Raids by federal agents on Combs’ homes in Los Angeles and Miami uncovered drugs, high-powered firearms, ammunition, and evidence supporting the claims made in civil lawsuits that Combs oversaw "Freak Offs," prolonged, allegedly coerced sexual exploits at his properties. Among other findings, the raids reportedly uncovered "more than 1,000 bottles of baby oil and lubricant."
According to The Independent, Combs’s lawyer described him as "an innocent man with nothing to hide." Attorney Marc Agnifilo told The Independent in an email, "We are disappointed with the decision to pursue what we believe is an unjust prosecution of Mr. Combs by the U.S. Attorney’s Office."
Combs, 54, rose to fame in the 1990s as a rapper and music producer. Formerly known as "Puff Daddy" or "P. Diddy," among other names, he is credited with launching the careers of some of the biggest names in music through his recording label, "Bad Boy Entertainment." He also launched a successful apparel line, Sean John.
#5
Yea, I mean we elected a man in 2016 who has been accused by 23 women of sexual assault and has been convicted of it by 1 in court, so yea, the USA culture is in the pits.
He even bragged on tape about sexual assault and everyone here but me thinks he's better than Jesus.
#6
Well, Fat Bob, it was guys doing lockerroom bragging talk, but being as you're a NPC cypher, you wouldn't know. They also changed the laws/rules so an unattractive attention whore bankrolled by Reid Hoffman (D-Wh0re) could bring ancient innuendo charges. Trump has better taste. Didn't happen. Not better than Jesus, just better than your ilk
Posted by: Frank G ||
09/26/2024 17:36 Comments ||
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#8
Where was all this when I was forced to watch "I Want to Work for Diddy?"
Where was it? I was on an island, feeling like I was the only one on sane pills, watching this trash yuck it up on a yacht, knowing what was what, and everyone like look how sophisticated?
Posted by: Super Hose ||
09/26/2024 20:57 Comments ||
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#10
Let me stretch a band,
There was a show about who could be the personal assistant to Sean Combs. "I Want to Work for Diddy." I guess we have an idea of what that job entails.
[TAC] On May 9, 1754 — just about a month before the Albany Congress was set to meet — Benjamin Franklin published his famous Join or Die political cartoon in The Pennsylvania Gazette, symbolizing his now long-forgotten call for a colonial union. Although it was rejected in the coming months, Franklin believed the plan could have radically changed the course of American history.
As he wrote in 1789, had his plan been accepted the Colonies would have been "sufficient to their own Defence," rendering "an Army from Britain," as "unnecessary." As a result, Franklin noted, there would have been no excuses for the Stamp Act and the many other revenue-raising internal taxes to follow either:
"The Pretences for framing the Stamp-Act would then not have existed, nor the other Projects for drawing a Revenue from America to Britain by Acts of Parliament, which were the Cause of the Breach, and attended with such terrible Expence of Blood and Treasure: so that the different Parts of the Empire might still have remained in Peace and Union"
In the decade following the 1740s, Indian tribes loosely allied with France attacked a number of colonial settlements, primarily in New England and western New York. At the same time, the British colonies had formed an alliance with the Six Nations — or the Iroquois Confederation — primarily centered in present-day upstate New York, but also extending further south and west.
By the early 1750s, however, the peace was tense, at best.
In 1751 Franklin wrote to James Parker, suggesting that "securing the Friendship of the Indians is of the greatest Consequence to these Colonies." He opined that a formal Union of the colonies was needed to get the job done, "so as to form a Strength that the Indians may depend on for Protection, in Case of a Rupture with the French; or apprehend great Danger from, if they should break with us."
He also lamented the possibility that "ten or a Dozen English Colonies" might reject such a plan, despite the fact that the six nations had formed a Union and "that it has subsisted Ages."...
[Townhall - Kurt Schlichter] So, I went out and visited America last week. Leaving California is always interesting, and it’s quite a culture clash when you go back to someplace like rural Pennsylvania, where my family came from. Last week, we went back for a quintessentially American kind of event. My grandfather was being inducted into the Chambersburg High School Athletics Hall of Fame. He was a coach and athletic director there for something like 40 years. My little trip out of my LA blue bubble was a welcome reminder that all of America isn’t a nightmarish hellscape like California is.
So, we landed at Dulles and headed out to Gettysburg after spending a night in DC. I’ve been to Gettysburg about a million times. I actually have a scar on my forehead from where I fell as a little kid on the Peace Memorial. The drive was interesting because I saw a lot of Trump signs. There were a few Harris signs but a lot more Trump ones. You get out of the cities, and it’s bright red. You need to understand that the old joke is true about Pennsylvania. It’s liberal Pittsburgh and Philadelphia and Kentucky in between. These places are where normal people live. There was no weirdness. It was neat, clean, and orderly. Drug zombies weren’t staggering and shouting. There wasn’t trash everywhere. No bizarre transvestites were walking around. It was all normal. Read it all; it gave me hope.
So, what’s the takeaway about this little slice of America? Perhaps that normal people are not obsessed with the same idiotic things that the regime media tries to make us believe they are obsessed with. Perhaps America isn’t a racist, sexist hellhole. Perhaps America is a patriotic place full of people who love their country and love their community and take care of each other. I’m not pretending Chambersburg, or the rest of non-blue-city America is perfect. That would be ridiculous. But I’ve lived and traveled around the world, and compared to most of it, Chambersburg was paradise. We ought to remember that before we let the left destroy our country in a selfish pursuit of power.
Posted by: Bobby ||
09/26/2024 00:00 ||
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Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Oleg Shevchenko
[REGNUM] Russian General Eduard Totleben, the author of the defensive fortification system of Sevastopol, a genius of military fortification and an innovator of sapper warfare, recalled: “While the English were approaching Balaklava, the commander of the Balaklava Greek infantry battalion, Colonel Manto, was holed up in the ancient ruins. With one company of his battalion, including 80 combatants and 30 retired soldiers. They had 4 copper half-pood mortars with them. <…> The enemy vanguard, approaching Balaklava, was unexpectedly met with fire from Greek riflemen.”
This small but extremely important episode of the Crimean War bizarrely reflected the history of ancient Taurida. The enemy who invaded Crimea routed our field army in the battle on the Alma River - at the ancient Scythian fortress. But the Greeks - soldiers of the Russian army stopped the enemy's onslaught under the walls of the medieval Genoese fortress of Cembalo.
The famous first defense of Sevastopol began exactly 170 years ago, on September 25, 1854, with the feat of our one hundred and ten “Spartans” under the command of Colonel Ivan Manto.
The Russian infantry and artillerymen who fought off the first attacks by Fitzroy Raglan and Leroy de Saint-Arnaud certainly did not know that the siege would last 349 days and take the lives of more than two hundred thousand people. Historians still argue about the exact figures, easily adding and subtracting 10 thousand. Beautiful songs will be written about the war, hundreds of paintings will be created, masterpieces of prose will be born - starting with the "Sevastopol Tales" by artillery lieutenant Count Leo Tolstoy.
But that's not all.
The first large-scale use of the telegraph as a mass media tool, the first photographs as an element of ideological influence, the birth of the Red Cross and Sisters of Mercy service, the squadron of combat steamships - these are also the results of the siege of Sevastopol.
The only result that was not achieved was the goal of the Anglo-French-Turkish-Sardinian coalition that fought against us: to return Russia, so to speak, to the “borders of 1691” and block access to the Black Sea.
WHOSE KEYS?
In France, which in many ways "stirred up the mess", this war was called not the Crimean War, but the Eastern War. And this is more accurate, because military actions were conducted not only in the Crimea and the Black Sea, but also from Kronstadt to the Caucasus, and from Arkhangelsk to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky.
De jure, the reason for one of the wars, candidates for the “zero world wars,” was a quarrel over the keys: who, the Orthodox or the Catholics, would unlock the doors of the Church of the Nativity of Christ in Bethlehem.
They’re probably still quarreling over that today, while the PLO/PA de-Christianizes the city around them. They’re definitely quarreling about who gets to in some church in Old Jerusalem, but at least the Jewish government keeps them safe while they do so.
Napoleon III "played" on the side of the papal throne (trying to match his great uncle's level of ambition). The Russian Empire defended the rights of the Orthodox.
The Ottoman Empire, which ruled Palestine, handed over control of the Bethlehem shrine to the French, to the annoyance of Nicholas I.
Petersburg demanded that Sultan Abdul-Mejid I observe the treaty, according to which Russia had the right to protect the Orthodox in Turkey. The "Padishah of the Faithful" - to put it simply - refused, and demanded that Nicholas withdraw his troops from Wallachia and Moldova. This time it was the Tsar who refused, and on October 16, 1853, the Sublime Porte declared war on Russia.
Initially, it seemed that the war would be yet another, the tenth Russian-Turkish war. And in this "format" Russia would probably have easily defeated the Ottomans. This was confirmed by the Battle of Sinop, in which Vice-Admiral Pavel Nakhimov utterly defeated the Turkish fleet.
The campaign in the Caucasus was quite successful: we can recall the defeat of the Turks at Akhaltsikhe, the capture of Bayazet and other battles where Russian troops defeated a numerically superior enemy. For example, in the battle at Kyuryuk-Dara, 18,000 Russians under the command of Vasily Bebutov defeated the 60,000 strong army of Mustafa Zarif Pasha and his British curator Richard de Guyon.
But there was one important "but" in the Eastern War. Initially, the then collective West was involved in the conflict with Russia.
"THE BATTLE OF CIVILIZATION AGAINST BARBARISM"
The British Empire of Queen Victoria and the Second French Empire of Napoleon III were not satisfied with the order in Europe established after the defeat of Napoleon I, under which the Russian Empire remained one of the hegemons of the continent. And on March 27, 1854, England and France declared war on Russia.
Moreover, the British initially did not hesitate in either means or expressions.
One of the leaders of English foreign policy, the future Prime Minister Viscount Palmerston pointed out: as a result of the war, Crimea, Circassia and Georgia should be torn away from Russia. And go to Turkey, but, considering the British interest in the Caucasus, these lands should become London's sphere of influence.
Finland should be "returned" to the old English ally, Sweden. The restored Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, in Palmerston's opinion, was to become a buffer between Russia and the German states - the "anaconda strategy " was not invented in the 20th century.
The Baltics were promised to Prussia, and the future Romania to Austria. It is not surprising that both German powers, allies of Russia in the Napoleonic wars, remained neutral in the Crimean War. And in the case of Austria, the neutrality was not at all benevolent (this is how Emperor Nicholas came back to haunt him for saving the Habsburg dynasty during the Hungarian revolution of 1848).
The Kingdom of Sardinia, the foundation of the future Italy, also joined the Western alliance, just as in the 20th century the Italians would join Hitler’s adventure in the East.
Projects to “contain” and dismember Russia, as in the 21st century, were covered up by the struggle for the cause of progress.
On March 31, 1854, the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Lord Clarendon, declared from the rostrum of Parliament: Great Britain, they say, is not at all afraid of the Russian threat to the Indian colonies and does not need anything for trade, but only nobly and highly principledly wages “the battle of civilization against barbarism.”
On April 22, the "civilizers" subjected Odessa to a barbaric bombardment from the sea. On Holy Saturday, 28 allied ships approached the shore, burned the civilian ships in the port, and attempted to land troops. Fire from Russian shore batteries disrupted the landing, and the allied squadron retreated to the Crimea.
WHY SEVASTOPOL?
On July 26, the first battle took place between two dozen Anglo-French ships and the coastal fortifications of Sevastopol. But the Western alliance risked landing on land only almost two months later. On September 14, the 60,000-strong expeditionary corps began to be transported to the coast near Yevpatoria.
Having managed to defeat the Russian troops of Prince Menshikov at Alma, the corps of de Saint-Arnaud and Raglan rushed towards Sevastopol – and for good reason.
If we allegorically compare Russia to a palace, and Novorossiya from the Danube to the Don to a gate, then the Crimean peninsula plays the role of a castle, and the fortress city of Sevastopol plays the role of a keyhole.
By taking Sevastopol, the enemies would have "torn off the castle", would have gained access to the Black Sea region, which was critically important for Russia, and would have been ready to destroy the entire structure of the empire. In this case, Palmerston's plan to "decolonize" the recently developed lands of Novorossiya would not have looked so fantastic.
After all, it was not Zbigniew Brzezinski who was the first to guess that what makes Russia an empire is control over what is now Ukraine and access to the Black Sea, control over Crimea and Sevastopol.
When Admiral Vladimir Kornilov sank the Black Sea Fleet on the Sevastopol Bay line, he “broke the key in the well,” predetermining all the failures of the Europeans under the walls of the ancient stronghold.
On September 23, 1854, the beauty and pride of Russian shipbuilders, the sailing heroes of many naval battles - five battleships, "Uriil", "Tri Svyatelitelya", "Silistriya", "Selafail", "Varna", and two frigates, "Sizopol", "Flora" - were sunk at the entrance to Sevastopol Bay. Later, our sailors sank other ships. See here for an explication of that action.
Admiral Kornilov died on October 5 during the shelling of Malakhov Kurgan by the Anglo-French forces, but the deed was done, Sevastopol was protected from the sea.
"WE SHOOT WOMEN AND CHILDREN, DON'T BE SURPRISED"
Meanwhile, on land, the battle was ongoing. Attacks were followed by counterattacks. Enemy sappers dug underground tunnels to blow up fortifications, counter-drifts were dug towards them, designed to lay a mine under the enemy tunnels, and in response, the enemy tried to destroy the Russian sappers.
Around Sevastopol, a gigantic layered pie of battle unfolded underground: explosions, collapses, suffocation, terrible fights in the cramped underground passages... Thousands of tons of earth were dug by the hands of women and children and became defensive fortifications of a first-class field fortress, against which attacks were broken.
Thousands of cannonballs and bombs swept away the quarters of Sevastopol, destroyed the walls of the fortifications, and once again the whirlpool of battles on the ground, underground and the furious struggle of large-caliber artillery began.
The large-scale destruction of the city seemed to be a "reminder of the future" - of the coming wars. The second heroic defense of Sevastopol, in 1941-1942, is very similar to the first, both in the duration of resistance and in its tenacity. The Russian soldier demonstrated tenacity that will surprise our European enemies a hundred years later, and now.
Historian and writer Yuri Davydov, in his book about Nakhimov, cites a letter from a French soldier who took part in the siege of Sevastopol:
"Our major says that by all the rules of military science it is high time for them (the Russians) to capitulate. For every cannon they have, we have five cannons, for every soldier - ten. And you should have seen their guns! Probably our grandfathers who stormed the Bastille had better weapons.
They have no shells. Every morning their women and children go out into the open field between the fortifications and collect cannonballs in sacks.
We start shooting. Yes! We shoot at women and children. Don't be surprised. But the cannonballs they collect are meant for us! And they don't leave."
The same Frenchman spoke about what the “first Russian war correspondent” Leo Tolstoy wrote about on the other side – about “war in its true expression – in blood, in suffering, in death.”
Despite the hunger (the French know that in the city the siege norm is: “small pieces of bread are divided among five” ), our soldiers respond to each assault with a counterattack and force the Anglo-French to retreat behind the fortifications.
The same letter tells how a seriously wounded Russian sailor, who was captured, tried not only to escape, but to blow up barrels of gunpowder.
“It is hopeless to fight with such people,” wrote a French military man.
But the European press, which in the mid-19th century was already the “fourth estate”, presented the matter quite differently.
TsIPSO 1854
You can fight with fakes too. The first photomontage for propaganda purposes, the first fakes, staged shots also come from Sevastopol. Here is this photo.
The viewer was horrified. He thought that thousands of soldiers had died under such intense shelling. But this was a staged shot, and the cannonballs were laid with an artistic vision of the issue. And the title was impressive - "The Valley of the Shadow of Death".
Other photographs show beautiful rows of snow-white tents. Clean, confident, cheerful and brave soldiers. And the viewer believed. Of course! After all, this is not an artist-dreamer, this is a miracle of the nineteenth century - a photograph that records reality.
How much effort it took the photographer to present the knights of war in their ceremonial costumes, and how much effort was spent to hide all their problems! The same photographer, Roger Felton, wrote in his diary not at all about the beauty of the war near Sevastopol.
Here is what he, as a master of fakes, carefully ignored so as not to lose in the unfolding information war: "In the camp, all the animals that are fit for food are killed, they are butchered right next to the tents, the unnecessary parts are left to rot right there. On any trip, you are sure to come across horse corpses, even on a hill by the sea."
But thanks to photographs and correspondence of the right tone, the necessary opinion was formed in Europe - and not only among the loyal subjects of the British queen and the French emperor, but also among the radical revolutionaries.
Karl Marx criticized the Russians for the destruction of two English merchant ships during the Battle of Sinop and insisted that “the word ‘honor’ is absent from the Russian lexicon.” And Friedrich Engels, as a military expert, asserted: “Among the officers of the Russian army there are very good and very bad, but the former are infinitely small in comparison with the latter.” According to Engels, it is futile to expect a Russian soldier to “display the quick wit of a Frenchman or the simple common sense of a German.”
They were keen on such simplifications by national type in those days. Nowadays, too, though one no,onger commits such gaucheries in writing lest one be accused of bigotry
The leading Soviet specialist on the Crimean War, Academician Yevgeny Tarle, being an honest scholar, wrote : the founders “had to use the scanty and often false reports of English newspapers… because for a long time they had no other sources of factual information about the war in 1853–1856.”
THE WHOLE WORLD IS GOING TO WAR AGAINST US
Allegedly "clumsy" soldiers under the command of "very bad" officers pinned down the forces of two leading global powers and their allies near one Crimean city for almost a year.
At the same time, our troops repelled the enemy’s attempt to land at Nikolaev; at the same time, the empire was fighting in the Baltic, the North, and the Pacific Ocean.
And this despite the fact that there was a real lag in some types of weapons, which the new Emperor Alexander II, who took the throne at the last stage of the war, would have to correct.
The British-French-Turkish-Italian forces, which lost more than 150,000 men killed, managed to capture only the southern half of Sevastopol. The Russian army, which lost no less, continued to fight, but the forces to hold the fortifications were running out.
The treacherous blow was dealt by "neutral" Austria. On March 2, 1855, Kaiser Franz Joseph I presented Alexander II with a list of demands: Russia's renunciation of the mouth of the Danube, a ban on keeping the Russian fleet in the Black Sea, etc. In the event of non-compliance, Austria threatened to join the Western alliance and move the troops already concentrated in Galicia.
Another of our “ally”, the Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm IV, “advised” the tsar to accept the Austrian conditions.
Russia could no longer fight against the entire collective West of that time, and on March 30, 1856, a peace treaty was signed in Paris.
THE WEST'S VICTORY TURNED INTO ITS DEFEAT
In comparison with the "Palmerston Plan", the losses of the Russian Empire were minimal. The most painful was the loss of the Black Sea Fleet. According to the Paris Peace, the Black Sea was declared neutral, and both Russia and the Ottoman Empire were prohibited from having military fleets.
The Russian borders were moved several miles away from the Danube - the extreme south of Bessarabia was given to the Moldavian Principality, and the Danube delta to the Turks. Occupied Sevastopol and Balaklava were returned to Russia in exchange for the Transcaucasian fortresses of Kars, Bayazet and others recently occupied by our troops.
And this entire Parisian world order was reset literally a decade later. All that was left of it was the demilitarized status of the Aland Islands in the Baltic. Incidentally, it can only be revised now, with Finland's entry into NATO. Russia more than compensated for the remaining losses - somewhere through diplomacy, and somewhere by force of arms, after the victorious Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78.
In 1856, many European politicians smiled mockingly when the head of our Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Prince Alexander Gorchakov, answered a question about the enslavement of the Paris Peace Treaty: "They say that Russia is angry. Russia is not angry, Russia is concentrating." Ten years later, no one smiled, Russia took everything with interest.
In 1888, in correspondence with the German ambassador in Vienna concerning a possible "preventive war" against Russia, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck wrote : "It is not so easy. Victory over Russia is not a rout, but the acquisition of a neighbor in the east who is seeking revenge."
Another statement by Bismarck, recorded in the archives, sounds like a prophecy about post-Soviet and current times:
"Even the most favorable outcome of the war will never lead to the disintegration of Russia, which is supported by millions of Russian believers of the Greek confession. These latter, even if they are subsequently separated by international treaties, will reunite with each other as quickly as separated drops of mercury find their way to each other."
These conclusions, drawn in part from the experience of the Crimean War, which was “victorious” for Europe, have now apparently been forgotten in the West.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
09/26/2024 11:15 Comments ||
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#2
That Russia, the biggest and most aggressive empire on earth, calls others aggressive is a little ironic, Ukraine is unfortunate in having to deal with feckless allies, in Europe and the US alike, who give it the minimum necessary to lose slowly but steadily to Russia. Ultimately, the gain of Ukraine will give Russia the resources it needs to rebuild the old Russian empire - first the traditional tsarist lands, then the postwar Eastern European states. And the US will again be embroiled in a cataclysmic war in Europe to deny the Russian army its bid to wash its collective bid to wash its feel in the Mediterranean.
#4
Excellent argument, as long as you ignore the US's role in the coup which ovethrew an elected government in Ukraine in 2014.
Otherwise, it is your argument that is "ironic."
You've ignored the Russian role in the coup that attempted to make Russia's puppet, Yanukovich, a dictator. He ran on a platform of joining the EU, then not only moved away from that, but attempted to annex Ukraine to Russia. In most places, they call that high treason. Ukraine elected a president, not a king. After his men shot the Maidan protestors and it became clear, from the popular reaction, that his future as an elected official was not only dim, but chances are he stood to be impeached, then indicted for abuse of power and murder, he ran to his master in Moscow. He could have stayed, fought the charges, run for re-election. But he ran.
Russophiles like to call Yanukovich's departure for Moscow a coup. Real coups are followed by dictatorships. Whereas when it became clear Yanukovich's departure was permanent，Ukraine promptly held new elections. Poroshenko won one term, then lost to Zelensky.
Regardless of the whys and wherefores of domestic Ukrainian politics, it is not in the US interest for the Russian empire to be reconstituted, whether to the Tsarist or Soviet boundaries. As is, Russia is the size of the next 2 largest countries on earth combined, and 4x the size of European NATO combined. We don't need Russia getting any bigger.
Today, Germany, Italy and Japan are not just our military allies, but also our friends. Would we stand for them rebuilding their old empires? In a word, no. Russia is not a military ally and definitely not a friend. There's no reason to acquiesce in this latest land grabs. We wouldn't stand for it even from our closest allies, Britain and France. Russia doesn't get a free shot.
#6
Thank you for admitting the US's role in fomenting the civil war in Ukraine.
There was no civil war. Russia's puppet attempted to make himself king, hand the country over to Russia. When the Ukrainian security services stopped obeying his orders to kill as many of the opposition as necessary to keep him in power, he fled to his master in Moscow.
Then, in 2014, Russian troops invaded Ukraine with regular troops, claimed they were locals who wanted to secede. They stopped because they met more resistance than expected.
The 2022 invasion was just a continuation of Russia's 2014 land grab. In that interval, the Russian military attempted to remedy the defects that resulted in serious difficulties for Russian invasion forces. In fact, the only relative progress Russia made since 2014 was in suborning Ukrainian officials. While incomplete, it was responsible for almost all of Russia's early gains, which it has retained through extensive fortification.
While Ukrainian accounts tend to downplay Russia's efforts to buy Ukrainian officials, it was a smashing success. In one fell swoop, 20% of Ukraine crumbled before Russia. Incomplete, but excellent bang for the buck, however many billions were spent.
#7
Most portfolios in the Ukrainian government post coup were occupied by EU bureaucrats, which set, as policy, privately recruited groups against Russian speakers. They enforced enforced policies of eliminating Russian language as one of the languages used by the government.
I can't think of many things which could enrage a populace more than being cut from their formerly legitimately elected government, not even a post coup amalgam of EU politicians.
If I am the president of Russia and I see a coup fomented by the US and Eu governments, I want to protect my aircraft carrier, and I especially don't want Crimea to be used by a hostile actor against Russians on either side of the border.
You've offered arguments justifying on what the Russians might do, but the only thing that we have is what the Russians have done and will continue to do until there is a settlement, which includes Russian security requirements.
You seem to like the notion of preemptive action, but the only thing NATO et al have managed to do is to poke the bear, with no good strategic cause other than what the Russians might do.
Keep poking the bear. Win or lose, Russia will win in Ukraine. And the only legacy NATO et al will have to show is the mounds of dead Ukrainians and mercenaries who died for a cause based on a flawed strategic assumption.
#8
You seem to like the notion of preemptive action, but the only thing NATO et al have managed to do is to poke the bear, with no good strategic cause other than what the Russians might do.
Keep poking the bear. Win or lose, Russia will win in Ukraine. And the only legacy NATO et al will have to show is the mounds of dead Ukrainians and mercenaries who died for a cause based on a flawed strategic assumption.
There was no pre-emptive action. Russia, not the US, invaded Ukraine in 2014, and again in 2022. The US jockeyed for influence with Russia in Ukraine as all countries do.
So long as Europe and the US continue to throttle military equipment shipments, Ukraine will slowly lose ground. Only a Trump administration offers hope for Ukrainian victory, through unfettered shipments of somewhat current hardware in quantities large enough to make a difference. At minimum, Biden's endless obstruction of transfers of mothballed US-made equipment from other countries will end.
#9
Regardless of the whys and wherefores of domestic Ukrainian politics, it is not in the US interest for the Russian empire to be reconstituted, whether to the Tsarist or Soviet boundaries. As is, Russia is the size of the next 2 largest countries on earth combined, and 4x the size of European NATO combined. We don't need Russia getting any bigger.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Marina Akhmedova
Editor in Chief of regnum.ru
Egor Borisovich Prokhorchuk is a Russian geneticist, Doctor of Biological Sciences, and Dean of the Medical and Biological Faculty of the N. I. Pirogov Russian National Research Medical University. Prokhorchuk is also a member of the Synodal Commission on Bioethics of the Russian Orthodox Church.
In a conversation with the editor-in-chief of the Regnum news agency, Marina Akhmedova, Yegor Borisovich spoke about the interaction of science and religion, the possibility of eternal life, and the difficult ethical questions that new technologies pose to humanity.
- Egor Borisovich, what qualities should a person retain in himself so that he can live interestingly until old age?
- Be like children, then life will be interesting. The main thing is curiosity, spontaneity, sincerity and a pure heart.
- How can you do that? I see people entering middle age losing interest in life because they've seen it all.
- They take themselves very seriously. You have to be like children. Look for something new, new people and even new adventures in one place.
- Where can I find these adventures?
— The Lord will not abandon you, he will give you adventures. You need to listen to your intuition and treat people with care, as you would yourself. If your brain, arms and legs work, you can be interested in life until old age. And then your life will be very interesting until old age.
— Have you ever tried to stimulate your interest in life without it being connected to shocks?
— Everything is relative. I am 53 years old, I still feel an interest in life. In addition to what I do, I am interested in how the world works. I am interested in building houses, I am interested in people — not as objects, but as subjects. Every single person is interesting to me. At this age, I even unexpectedly make friends. These are the gifts life gives me.
— A question for you as a geneticist. I read a text in your Telegram channel where you wrote that at this stage, life extension does not seem possible.
— Compared to how people lived 300 years ago, our active life is certainly extended. But personally, I am simply not interested in consciously extending it.
- Why? You wouldn't want to live a very long time?
— As God wills. I don’t want it to be like in the book “Professor Dowell’s Head,” where the head lives separately from the person. And I don’t want it to be like in the TV series “Black Mirror,” where you can order a complete biological copy of a person who still has memories if they were shared on the Internet.
You can live long and meaninglessly, or you can live short and brightly. It doesn't depend on us.
Here is my grandfather, born in 1914. He died in 2012, when he was 98 years old. And he told me every time: "If only I could live another year." That is, you don't want to die equally, whether you're 40, 60, or 100.
But it still seems to me that we must do everything that is destined for us, and a certain period of time is given for this. The end will be the same for everyone, no matter how long you live.
Thank God, humanity today cannot decide questions of life and death. Because this would create new social inequality. Eternal life will be granted later. But not according to our reason, but by the grace of God.
— I finished reading a volume of Chekhov’s letters. I remember how he once wrote to his publisher: “I finished one thing, and the thought immediately starts to turn over in me like a heavy core: ‘You must write! You must write!’ But to whom must I write? Why must I write?” And then I thought that he had written little for me. Chekhov died at 44. But if he had lived at least another ten years, he would have managed to write much more.
— I also read some of Chekhov’s letters: “I’m sitting, drinking, talking a lot, the weather is beautiful, I don’t feel like working.” So everything is relative.
Other people wrote what Chekhov did not write. At least, that's how science works. Don't think that if Einstein hadn't existed, his laws wouldn't have been discovered.
In science, there is always a certain vector of development. You can't do anything perpendicular. There are always prerequisites and previous works. Yes, there are people who seem geniuses to us. But if they weren't there, discoveries would have been made anyway, just a little later.
Science is a completely collaborative endeavor. There is this giant pool of data that gets converted into hypotheses and probabilities, and all of this determines the massive movement of science. You can't get out of it perpendicularly.
Yes, in painting there was Giotto, who introduced perspective. But the entire development of Western European painting assumed that it would be introduced sooner or later. In Eastern painting (icon painting) there is a certain tradition that is observed. That is, before Giotto, painters approached perspective, and he made a leap. In science, it is the same.
— And now in science, can something be discovered perpendicularly?
— Imagine that you are now in the times of Yaroslav the Wise with a working mobile phone. For the people of that time, this would have been a perpendicular direction, but for us, it is no longer. We understand how semiconductors work. We remember how telephone communication developed. But it took a thousand years to go this way.
So life will still be more interesting than what I came up with. I have one hypothesis, I start looking at it, and it turns out that everything is not so, but even more interesting.
— What is the meaning of your life now?
— The meaning of life is a kind of banality. Life itself is a complex tangle of emotional and psychophysical interactions. Creativity, knowledge, communication with people, observation of nature — this is already a value. If we are not talking about its religious understanding.
— Are you a religious person?
— Every person is on a certain path to God. Remember what happened to the apostle Peter? "Before the first rooster crows, you will deny Me three times." But Peter was clearly a believer. As a member of the Synodal Commission on Bioethics, I can talk about this one way or another. But I am sure that the moment will come when every person will have to say whether he is a believer or an unbeliever. If he is an unbeliever, go for a walk. If he is a believer, throw him up against the wall.
— Have you ever had situations in your life when you had to check what choice you would make?
— Every day. When you are driving and someone cuts you off, what choice should you make regarding the driver: pray for him, just watch him go, or curse him? A person makes this decision every second. Like on a ship: you turn the steering wheel half a degree, it seems to you that nothing happened, and a day later it is already sailing in the other direction.
— How do you react when you are cut off?
- Of course, I try to react in a Christian way. But sometimes my humility is lacking.
— The average person has an opinion that science and faith are incompatible. But the great sociologist Pitirim Sorokin said: when faith and science interact, then the time of harmony will come. Doesn't your scientific activity contradict your faith?
— These are completely different concepts. Imagine again that you find yourself in the Middle Ages with a working mobile phone. How will people of that time perceive you?
— Will they kill you right away?
- No, you won't. You will be a god for them, descended from heaven, because you do amazing things. You can talk to a person who is a thousand kilometers away from you. And if you descend to them in a helicopter... They will not be able to comprehend this phenomenon, which goes beyond their world.
Science doesn't operate with that kind of distance. In my field, I can imagine what will happen in a year by going to conferences and reading papers and watching trends. But I can't imagine what will happen in ten years, much less in a hundred.
Look through the collections of scientific journals from the early 19th century - it's just ridiculous and sinful what they dreamed about. Almost none of it came true.
— I had a conversation about bioethics, in particular about IVF, with the Chairman of the Synodal Department for Church-Society and Mass Media Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate Vladimir Legoida. The Church does not welcome this procedure because it is believed that God does not participate when an egg is fertilized by a sperm. I had my own opinion on this matter. What do you think?
— My role in the Synodal Commission on Bioethics is very modest. I must share my scientific knowledge with people who can see something with their spiritual vision, and they could then, based on their spiritual experience, which I do not possess, give recommendations.
The scientific method of cognition has long been a part of our lives. Without the invention of electricity, we would not have even recorded our interview. Denying scientific facts would be madness for the church, because the church works with people. People live in a world that is structured according to certain laws, and denying these laws would be strange.
I gave birth to three children without IVF. We can talk about this procedure separately, but in general I answered your question about science and religion: my opinion as a scientist and my opinion as a child of the Russian Orthodox Church may differ.
Life for a scientist and life for God are as different concepts as "red" and "salty". Science cannot be approached from the point of view of faith. Science is about your experiment being able to be repeated in Moscow, Antarctica and Africa, regardless of the psycho-emotional state of the researcher.
Let's say an academic comes to me and says: "Believe me, my hypothesis is correct." I won't believe it. Where is your evidence? But in religion, it's the opposite. I will unconditionally trust the spiritual experience of the elder fathers. Because here I have no authority.
— And what the elders, wise with spiritual experience, say, cannot contradict scientific facts?
- It can. If you want specifics, let's look at it using IVF as an example. In this discussion, we were talking about what moment to consider the origin of life.
The egg itself is not a future person. It needs a sperm, which is also meaningless on its own. The sperm penetrates the egg and a complex combination is formed: before your egg was created, it mixed with chromosomes from your mom and dad. This is necessary for variability, for evolution.
A population is strong not because it has outstanding representatives, but because it can change and adapt to new conditions, which can change at any moment - it was cold, it became warm.
For example, it's February 2022. Conditions change. And the qualities that were needed before February are not very useful in the world after 2022. And if your population has those who live in both warmth and cold, you will have those who survive. And if everyone dies, then the population dies. It will deteriorate as a species.
Thank God, there were people left in the country who were able to live after February 2022 - and they actually saved the situation. Otherwise, the whole country would have perished.
So, these two altered genomes met. And the genetic material in this cell is the same as in the first approximation. That is, this DNA will be the same throughout your entire life.
— Does this mean that DNA defines a person? Is DNA a person or not?
— I believe that a person is much more than DNA.
There are twins. There are fraternal twins, there are identical twins. Fraternal twins are when two eggs are fertilized by two different spermatozoa, they are a brother and a sister. Identical twins are when an egg is fertilized by a spermatozoa, divides once, and from these two cells two people come from. That is, they have the same DNA, but they are completely different people.
- So, this is the soul?
— You reason like a journalist, and I reason like a scientist.
External factors greatly influence the genome. For example, one embryo was closer to the mother's heart, so the heartbeat was transmitted to one embryo more than to another. The same genome can function differently, depending on external conditions.
There are things that are in DNA. DNA determines the properties of a person as a physical object, but it does not determine his personality. Personality is determined by upbringing and life experiences.
— You have just listed the facts as a scientist. And what would you, as a believer, add to the definition “A person is something more than DNA”?
— I have consciousness and an internal mystical experience that says something. But these are very intimate things. I am not a preacher, I do not talk about these things. But I know that a person has a soul. Just like animals. It is just that a person has an immortal soul, and animals have a mortal soul. Animals do not need to be saved after death. Probably, for God they represent an auxiliary function in relation to people, rather than an intrinsic value.
— Is the auxiliary function that we eat them? Or that we love them?
— That we enjoy the beauty and complexity of the world. When you project something from a multidimensional object onto a plane, you see something, but it is very difficult for you to imagine the prototype. But these projections are so beautiful. Perhaps the prototype is even better.
— Returning to our mobile phones: I thought that we are so firmly entrenched in them that we no longer see these projections and cannot create prototypes.
- Well, you're not a Luddite (Luddites were people who destroyed machine tools in the early 17th century. - Ed.). You enjoy the benefits of civilization. And then they'll produce something else.
The conscious history of mankind is five thousand years old. Mankind has had many temptations to use useful objects for harm. Television can be used for education, or for stupefaction. An atomic bomb can be used to kill people, or it can be used to obtain heat and warm homes.
“And I’m still trying to connect you in my mind—I don’t want to separate you into a scientist and a believer.”
- No need. Let's go back to IVF.
Now, most people who make decisions in the church about the possibility or impossibility of assisted reproductive technologies proceed from the fact that human life begins at the moment of the fusion of sperm and egg. And the IVF procedure is associated with the fact that you fertilize not one egg, but dozens.
Some of them develop, some don't. If you have five, it's hard to choose just one. And before, five were always implanted, so that at least one would take root. And if four took root, then the remaining three children were aborted, because it's hard for a woman to carry five children at once. They were simply killed by abortion.
Now the technology has advanced. You can estimate the embryos' chances of development. If they have equal chances, by law you can leave a maximum of two. But three remain. What should be done with them?
- This is a big ethical question.
- Yes. Formally, they are frozen, but we understand what their fate will be - they will be thrown into the trash.
From a biological point of view, these are not people. On the 14th-15th day after implantation in the uterus, this is already considered a more or less composed person, and before that, it is not considered as such. That is, what is frozen is not a person.
And here, in addition to the theological and technical aspect, there is also a legal aspect - and it is the key one. Let's say there was a rich man. He died. He left behind children who inherited his fortune. Everything was divided, everything was fine. And then a notary comes and says: "You know, he has a dozen more frozen little people lying there. We need to share with them."
And then there's another question. If these are people, they may have genetic abnormalities. Then you're legally obliged to treat them. You have to edit their genome. And that's not safe. So this is not a question for scientists, but for those who consider embryos to be people.
Perinatal surgery is very developed in Moscow, when the child undergoes the most complex heart operations in the womb. He is not yet a born person, but he is already receiving help.
— It seems to me that in this case it is already clear that the child will live. But when we are talking about a two-day embryo that is in a test tube, it is not a fact that it will survive.
— An abortion up to 12 weeks can be done without indications. We understand that abortion is murder. Although we do not see this murder at all. This is dangerous logic.
— Do you advocate a ban on abortions? There is talk that abortions should be excluded from the compulsory medical insurance.
— I believe that we should not force a woman to have an abortion and should not create conditions that abortion is a norm of life. If a woman comes and asks for an abortion, she should be taken to a psychologist so that he can explain that the child should be saved. How do we treat a woman in general: as a mother or as an employee? This is a state issue.
Of course, women are involved in the economic life of the country. If all women went home to look after their children, our interview would not have taken place. Our economy would have collapsed. Even if a woman gives birth, she still goes to work afterwards.
A friend of mine died at the front. He was a priest. Unarmed. A Hymars came and killed him. He left behind six children. His wife did not work. Her job was to look after the children. But, I repeat, diversity is important in the population. A woman with one child brings a lot of benefit to the workforce.
Yes, we want our families to have at least three children. Two is only reproduction, but three is already a step forward. This issue cannot be resolved by prohibitions or permissions. It is a whole complex of scientific, economic and cultural problems.
— A question about parents. Is it possible to look at their genotypes and identify a predisposition to having healthy children?
- Predisposition is like fortune telling with Tarot cards.
Each of us is a carrier of thousands of genetic diseases. But we do not get sick because we have two chromosomes from mom and dad. If there is a mutation in one of the genes, the second chromosome compensates for it. This is a recessive trait of inheritance. But if your husband or partner carries a mutation in the same gene, then there is a high probability that a sick child will be born, because he will receive one and the second copy of the mutant one. A very high probability - 25%.
That's why consanguineous marriages are not allowed because we carry the same mutations. You also carry about a dozen of these mutations. But these diseases are very rare. For example, cystic fibrosis. Every 50th person on the planet is a carrier of this disease, and children are born 1 in 10 thousand. Why? If every 50th person is a carrier, then the probability that you will form a couple will be 50 times 50 - one in two and a half thousand marriages.
25% of children are born sick. 25,000 multiplied by 4, we get 10,000. Here is one in 10,000 - the frequency of birth of children with cystic fibrosis. But every 50th person is its carrier. And there are many such diseases.
Let's say your risk of asthma is 11% higher than the population average. What does that mean for you other than a disorder? Nothing. No medical recommendations can be given to you based on the results. Exercise, go outside, drink grapefruit juice. But here the situation is completely different. Here the disease will definitely occur when you know before marriage that you are a carrier.
This is a very big ethical problem.
— I helped a deeply religious family whose first child was born with spinal muscular atrophy. He was a wonderful baby. But in the third month, his mother began to notice that life was fading in him. His arms and legs were weak.
— What happened next?
— I helped them raise almost 30 million for Spinraza. When the baby was given his first injection, he died. It was an incredible tragedy. The parents love each other, but they are afraid that their next child could repeat his fate.
- Can I ask you some questions now?
- Let's.
— You collected 30 million, but the child died. Let's say you saved him. But do you know that in Kargopol (Arkhangelsk region) there is a very bad situation with children's clinics. There are 10,000 people there, quite a few children. For 28 million you could provide for the life of 1,500 children in this city in the near future. And how would you resolve this ethical problem?
— I have no choice in this situation. I am ready to help everyone. The boy was already born, a beautiful baby. He was already, how can you say that I will not help him? What choice do you have? If the situation with polyclinics in Kargopol is so bad, I am ready to give part of my salary to them and to the baby.
— When in ancient times a woman had to choose who to save during war or famine, she saved a man, not a child. Because children can be born again.
Of course, every family that faces such a situation will want to help their child. And society must train the muscle of compassion to help such children. If everyone is born healthy and happy, then the muscles of compassion will atrophy. But to pay huge amounts of money for an injection for the sake of one child?
— This is not a question for parents, but for the manufacturers of the drug.
— Do you know why the drug is so expensive?
- Yes, I know. I was interested in this.
— There are just few such children. And to make a drug, you need very expensive science. Drugs for cancer, which hundreds of millions of people suffer from, are a source of money for pharmaceutical companies and are cheaper. But when you have 10 people in the world who are sick, these investments will not pay off. This is capitalism. Everyone needs profit. That is why Spinraza is so expensive.
But let's continue. What does the family you were talking about want now? To have a healthy child?
- I don't know what they want. I left them in complete confusion. They were heartbroken and afraid of the future. They didn't know what to do.
— Let's say they knew before marriage that they could have a child and die. Not because they are bad, but because of a genetic lottery. Or because God gave them such qualities. And then everything depends on how ready they are to accept and fight it.
Judging by my pride, you might think that I am ready to put up with everything. But the statistics are that in Russia, 90% of mothers of children with Down syndrome abandon them. This is reality, not an illusion, as it should be, but reality.
By the way, in Denmark, where complex biomedical tests can be done before birth, the abortion rate for children with Down syndrome is the same as the refusal rate in Russia. Although Denmark has an amazing program to help such families: tax breaks, inclusive schools, help with socialization. That is, it is not about money or the environment. It is just that the human psyche is not ready for such difficulties.
— Do people abandon such children because they don’t want to face difficulties? Or because they don’t want their child to grow up unhappy?
- It doesn't matter. You can explain it any way you want, but you're either abandoning the child or killing it.
— I just now, excuse my conceit, imagined that I was accepted to the bioethics council. You say that abortion is murder. But is abandoning a child better than murder? How will a woman who abandons a child feel?
— We shouldn’t overestimate the importance of our minds and our words. To abandon a child, afraid of suffering, is a biological property of the human psyche. Anyone can get scared here. Even me. There was a big risk that my third child would be born with Down syndrome. I really didn’t want to find myself in such a situation.
Now, under one program, all women are tested. Research has shown that if 100 women are given this risk, one child can be born with Down syndrome. That's a lot. Research can lead to a lot of abortions.
There are pros and cons to this. But the cons are that you know for sure that it is so. You have no choice, you make a decision. Now I would not want to be in such a situation.
Thank God, everything went well. A wonderful girl was born. But I wavered at some point. I started thinking about what I would have done.
— And yet, when you have the opportunity to find out in advance about a child’s serious illnesses, is it good or bad?
— We talked about SMA and Down syndrome. Down syndrome cannot be predicted in advance. It can only be found out after the fact. But SMA could be predicted. If this family had known in advance that they were carriers of such a disease, would they have agreed to marry?
— What about love?
- And love is blind.
When you get married, you go to that person's house. You look at their family album. You smell them. You subconsciously evaluate their family, their appearance, their ethnic background. Genetics must be one of those factors.
You must decide: are you ready for the fact that the child may suffer, and you will suffer from the choice of what to do with him if he dies in your arms. Maybe you feel the strength to fight, you are a supporter.
And what options does the couple have? The first is to run away. Let's say the couple knows that they are SMA carriers. Run away. Life will take its toll anyway, you will find another person.
- It sounds very pragmatic.
— The second option: say that you don’t care. “I don’t believe in all this, as God wills, so it will be.” You get married, have a child, everything is wonderful. But if he is healthy, that’s one situation. If he is sick, you bear it as a cross. If he dies, that’s also your cross.
The state has two strategies on this matter. First: it warned you that you could give birth to a sick child. The state says: "Since we warned you, we will not help you." Second: "We warned you, but by giving birth to such a child you performed a feat, so we will help you." Both of these strategies can be considered.
The next story is when you use assisted reproductive technologies. You fertilize 4 eggs, 3 of which will not carry the disease. You say, "I'm not implanting this one, I'm throwing it out." The question arises: do we kill it or not?
It turns out that you are going against the Church. Although the Church does not forbid anything to anyone. It simply says that this is according to God's law, and this is not.
— Before this technology, a woman couldn't choose, she just gave birth. She didn't know that a child with Down syndrome could be born. She didn't commit murder, she wasn't guilty before God.
— We live in a world where diagnostics exist. We can detect cancer at an early stage. You can resign yourself to it: well, God gave us cancer, why fight it? But no, we go and do CT, MRI… And this applies not only to cancer, but also to other diseases — heart disease, for example.
Healthcare is moving forward. Medicines prolong our lives in a miraculous way. And returning to our question: the fact that a woman learned earlier does not make her more or less guilty. But what to do with this knowledge is a big ethical problem.
- That's what I'm talking about.
- But let's take cancer again. It was detected, it's a gift from God. What should we do, go against God? Let's not treat it.
- I disagree. When a person treats cancer, he does not kill anyone. But when he decides to have an abortion, he kills a child.
- Okay. And when a woman finds out that she is a carrier of SMA, her child has already died. What should she do?
- It's a monstrous choice. I'm trying to understand: if God gave people these technologies, then that's what he wanted.
- In that case, nuclear explosion technologies are also from God. The question is how to use them. Any technology can be used for good or for harm. That's how the world works.
— All these biotechnologies put people before a new choice.
- Any technology puts a person before a choice. Previously, a hundred peasants fed one landowner. Then the tractor arrived, the peasants became unnecessary. A revolution occurred because people needed to move to the city. They needed a change in the social system and economic formation.
And now artificial intelligence is coming. Most creative people will be unnecessary, texts are already being written for them.
In agriculture, they came up with GMOs. The point is not that you will grow a scorpion's tail. The point is that you can keep even fewer people on the land. You raise the productivity of agriculture so much that one person on the land will feed a thousand city dwellers. This is a political problem.
I recently drove through the Tver region and saw that people are leaving because there is no point in living there. Agriculture in the Tver region is incomparable to agriculture in Kuban. There is no point in raising cows there - milk is more expensive there. And if you want to increase the efficiency of agriculture, the territories will be devastated.
The question is how a person with a sincere attitude towards life can accept these technologies.
- And how?
— The Patriarch says: we have encountered a challenge where we cannot draw on patristic guidance. These questions have never been illuminated, there is nowhere to draw on. These are complex questions. And we ourselves must find answers to them.
And for this you need what we talked about at the beginning: you need to have the ability to learn about the world, communicate with people and engage in education. If you study something deeply, you can foresee a lot and use this knowledge to plan the life of the country.
Here's my conversation with @VivekGRamaswamy about Trump vs Harris, government efficiency, immigration, education, war in Ukraine, and the future of conservatism in America.
We disagree a bunch of times in this conversation and the resulting back-and-forth is honest, nuanced,... pic.twitter.com/JfUuaLMRzN
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
So, we landed at Dulles and headed out to Gettysburg after spending a night in DC. I’ve been to Gettysburg about a million times. I actually have a scar on my forehead from where I fell as a little kid on the Peace Memorial. The drive was interesting because I saw a lot of Trump signs. There were a few Harris signs but a lot more Trump ones. You get out of the cities, and it’s bright red. You need to understand that the old joke is true about Pennsylvania. It’s liberal Pittsburgh and Philadelphia and Kentucky in between. These places are where normal people live. There was no weirdness. It was neat, clean, and orderly. Drug zombies weren’t staggering and shouting. There wasn’t trash everywhere. No bizarre transvestites were walking around. It was all normal.
