The United States(!) of A, by factotum - Weifang Die Cutting Machine Co.,Ltd

Septic Tanks are going to Septic Tank

Seems to be the case. A quick recap, from two years ago:

etarip "Tucker Carlson fired from Fox News? "Yep. Could only have come from the top. Nothing like a billion dollar payout and coming within a day of another personally humiliating Court appearance to get Rupert to start chopping off heads. Carslon's trail of messages damning Fox management and revealing his true thoughts about MAGA and Trump would also have helped, but this is also a sign that MAGA and Trump are on the decline in the US. Rupert may be 92 but unlike Lachlan, he's no fool. He's had a lifetime of reading the tea leaves and trying to get ahead of the curve. Hasn't always read them correctly, he misjudged the internet's rise and dominance, failed in social media (Myspace) but rarely gets electorates wrong. His side of politics may still lose, like our last election, but he saw what was happening in the US when he started Fox News and catered to its needs making it the most valuable cable network in history. Classic Murdoch.He's making moves like this again, trying to get ahead of things. My view is the Dominion case and the ones coming, Smartmatic and the shareholder class actions, spell the beginning of the end for Fox and Lachlan, Father Time will soon take care of Rupert. It also shows Rupert knows Trump can't win.When the story gets told about what is happening now behind the scenes it will make fascinating reading.

Is " parting ways " the new term for " fired " ? Interesting reading different news corporation's reporting on TC . Where will he pop up next ? He had a big audience and you would think he’ll show up somewhere .

word is that it was actually the discrimination lawsuit by Abby Grossberg, one his staffers that was the final nail in the coffin

Seems to be the case. A quick recap, from two years ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMGxxRRtmHc

Wow, knew he was a fuckwit, but that's next level....

Is RT offering Tucker a job ? https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-to-tucker-carlson-run-for-preside...

Fox Corporation sheds $930 million in market value after announcing Tucker Carlson is leaving the news network https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/fox-news-tucker-carlson-...

pretty funny, the supposed scandal barely affected share price

but tucker leaving...

Harry's getting in on the act before it's all gone .

🚨 MORE TROUBLE FOR RUPERT MURDOCHBREAKING: Lawyers for Prince Harry will take on Rupert Murdoch's News Group Newspapers (NGN)in a London court on Tuesday, in Harry's latest crusade against Britain's tabloid press. Prince Harry is suing over allegations of phone-hacking.… pic.twitter.com/DLurWggPTv

Harry's getting in on the act before it's all gone . https://twitter.com/calltoactivism/status/1650676995494146049?s=46&t=5Rc...

Good ... Could not happen to a nicer bloke!

Joe announces his run for a second term.

Sadly Hunter did not get the VP gig.

Never thought I’d write good news and murdoch in the same sentence but there ya go . This is getting rather expensive as more are lining up . https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-04-25/lachlan-rupert-murdoch-fox-news-f...

… the fox tucker box ;)

https://m.

it's almost like tucker ain't actually the bad guy...

"Joe announces his run for a second term."

unbelievable.. kind of...

unbelievable there isn't a better alternative

unbelievable the democrats lack the self awareness to think this is ok

unbelievable joe thinks this is ok... or maybe not...

95 % of americans don't want a biden v trump rematch

yet here we are, seemingly walking straight into it...

something is seriously broken

democracy under attack they cry!

DNC has already announced that it will not allow any debates in 2024 primary. Biden is not to be challenged. Everyone on the Democratic side must shut up and fall in line. Not having debates is undemocratic and ridiculous. No progressive should agree to this kind of power grab.

— Cenk Uygur (@cenkuygur) April 24, 2023

imagine being a highly competent subordinate in the democrat machine...

gonna be a challenge to keep dissenting ducks in a row and pull of a basement biden version 2 i reckon

especially if old boy wobbles

(which he does anyway)

imagine being a moderate conservative in the GOP?

I think many in middle America feel very uncomfortable in both parties these days and unsafe in a lot of cities.

I never thought that much of Tucker just very cliche over the top USA style presentation.

But viewed him a bit differently after seeing this video a while back, handled this situation perfectly, obviously at first a bit defensive expecting the worst, but then once realises he doesnt even know who he is, he lets his guard down, just cool he is fly fishing in the city lake thing and ties his own flies too

Going to be interesting to see what he does next, another media company? Join the Daily wire? Or do his own thing podcast/Youtube?

democracy under attack they cry!

— Cenk Uygur (@cenkuygur) April 24, 2023

imagine being a highly competent subordinate in the democrat machine...

gonna be a challenge to keep dissenting ducks in a row and pull of a basement biden version 2 i reckon

especially if old boy wobbles

(which he does anyway)

If there was ever an opportunity for trump this is the one. Biden is a terrible and vulnerable candidate. Even those who support him will really question his old age and sanity. Another 6 years in charge? Trump looks like a young man next to him.

bit ageist flollo. Personally, I'd prefer elders in ceremonial leadership roles than young megalomaniacs. Leaders have been getting younger globally in past decades, and the world isn't improving. The longer the track-record a leader has, the more of an idea we have of how they have responded in different political climates and situations.

… more tucker box ;)

https://m.

I agree, experience is critical. I’m not necessarily against specific age, I’m just not sure how healthy Biden truly is or will be during the next few years? Internet is full of him showing signs of very questionable health conditions. I know a lot of this is bullshit and propaganda but it will surely play on some people's mind.

"Joe announces his run for a second term."

unbelievable.. kind of...

unbelievable there isn't a better alternative

unbelievable the democrats lack the self awareness to think this is ok

unbelievable joe thinks this is ok... or maybe not...

95 % of americans don't want a biden v trump rematch

yet here we are, seemingly walking straight into it...

something is seriously broken

It's just mind boggling from both sides.

Democrats= An 80+ year old man with clear signs of ageing of the mind.

Republicans= The guy that lost last time and acted like a spoilt child when he lost.

You know what though while it seems crazy Trump could sneak a win. (not sure thats even a good thing)

1. The motivation for people to vote for Biden might not be there this time, seeing its not getting Trump out, but preventing him from getting back in, they might not think he has a chance and not bother voting.

2. Them continually going after Trump for anything and everything, might work in his favour.

But that said I dont know how even a lot of Democrats voters could vote for Trump after how he took the loss, to me it ruined any legacy he had.

If i was in the USA i would have voted for Trump the first time for the shake up factor, but i couldn't again not after how he acted when he lost.

I feel for Ron De Santis, it should be his turn Trump should be letting him have his time and supporting him, then Trump voters would vote for him and he has many fans himself and would also grab many fence sitters as ticks so many boxes, you would expect against Biden he would take it out easily.

If Trump runs i just hope De Santis can hang in there for next time and keep his popularity up.

Is it me but as much as Trumpy is the supreme Boofhead in Chief the world seemed to be more peaceful and economically seemed to be powering along when he was in. That's despite what the MSM would have you believe.

Since Biden economically the world seems to be tanking and it seems we're closer to war than we ever have been?

I think Biden for next win, if he's up to it. Of note is that he's basically continued Trumps foreign and trade policies as well as the military pivot (started Obama in 2013 I think) - so nothing has changed for the way the US ship of State has been turning. It's been a realisation of a growing threat, and that the kumbaya globalisation is receding.

They are also reindustrialising hard - the America COMPETES act, the discussions with Intel to get them back on Moore's law, the incentives for tech to set up and thrive there, relocating some TSMC plants (Hello Australia, are you even thinking of reindustrialising?). Separate supply chains and processing paths for rare earth and battery metals, hydrogen etc etc

But yeah, that 'Trump and the Risk of War' thread didn't age well...

Since Biden economically the world seems to be tanking and it seems we're closer to war than we ever have been?

That is part of his propaganda machine. There's a video of him talking about how he is the only president that didn't start a war in the 21st century. Is he wrong about it? Technically, no. Considering the times this actually feels appealing. Biden is clearly trigger-happy.

#Bootlickers United

https://jacobin.com/2023/05/elon-musk-bill-maher-interview

Top of the pops ;)

- musings of a concerned US citizen …

https://m.

Whilst the empire creates peace and goodwill across the globe, decay sets in within the homeland:

Retailers abandon downtown San Francisco

one store's example:-Workers routinely threatened with weapons.-568 emergency calls to store over the course of 13 months.-Chaotic scenes of fights, food throwing, and yelling.-Stores closes30% of offices vacant- workers tired of dodging poop on walk to work.- safer to work from home of move cities.

I found this contextualised California's strengths and problems well frog, same guy as VJ's Vail ski-town vid..

Jelly Flater that video is pretty representative of the Global South's psych and mindset on its relationships with the US vs with China. The US and West more generally has badly burnt most of its bridges in most of the Global South and Middle East (and parts of Asia) due to all the reasons and more mentioned in the video.

While I'm at it, for those interested, the below is what I think are some of the cleanest, clearest recent statements of what the US wants the world to believe when it comes to China, and what's driving geopolitics on this planet including AUKUS. It's from some of the most preeminent and influential think tanks.

In a nutshell, supposedly the West is facing the most serious and unprecedented existential threat to its very survival that it has ever faced, that the very founding values and principals of Western civilisation are at risk. Conservative US think tanks are particularly hellbent on it all since the most central, important and originally unifying founding tenet of Western civilisation - European Christendom - is of course supposedly directly at threat.

It seems to me to be completely insane pathological US-centric delusions of grandeur combined with a deranged US-glorifying fabrication of modern history and ignorance/misread of Chinese history combined with China-threat hyperventilation gone haywire combined with dollar signs ringing in the eyes of the US military-industrial-media-govt-thinktank ecosystem, etc, all within an Anglosphere thought bubble and groupthink that is being swallowed hook line and sinker by a gullible population and captured non-US governments unable to stand up to the US, but of course the reader can decide for themselves.

Winning the New Cold War: A Plan for Countering China

An information strategy for the United States

The President Can't Counter China on His Own

The opening statement of this last link (Hudson Institute):

"There is a growing bipartisan awareness in the United States that the totalitarian global ambitions of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) make it the most dangerous threat the free world has faced since the Cold War, and perhaps ever."

And from the Heritage Society material:

"The Chinese Communist Party is the most persistent and consequential threat facing the American people today. Our homeland is not secure, and the consequences for Americans will be severe if our country does not soon take action."

This is what we've signed up to with AUKUS.

I personally think "the most persistent and consequential threat facing the" Australian people today is being part of this madness. It frightens me.

Phew .... sort of unfixable (California's problems).

... although many issues would be fixable if a fraction of the effort, political energy and money spent on the military and meddling in other countries affairs and poorly conceived and clumsily executed wars was spent on sorting out such problems in the homeland.

i reckon frog. ...their relentless need to create an 'other' to unite themselves..

Quite the statistic:

"the average [US] taxpayer spends $1,087 per year on weapons contractors compared to $270 for K-12 education and just $6 for renewable energy"

For Pentagon contractors, Washington's ever more intense focus on the prospect of war with China has one overriding benefit: it's fabulous for business.https://t.co/irkjBBx7sF

I highly recommend the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and their magazine Responsible Statecraft. One of the very few reputable US think tanks not in full blown hardline pro-US pro-war mode.

The military-industrial complex (MIC) that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned Americans about more than 60 years ago is still alive and well. In fact, it's consuming many more tax dollars and feeding far larger weapons producers than when Ike raised the alarm about the "unwarranted influence" it wielded in his 1961 farewell address to the nation.

The statistics are stunning. This year's proposed budget for the Pentagon and nuclear weapons work at the Department of Energy is $886 billion — more than twice as much, adjusted for inflation, as at the time of Eisenhower's speech. The Pentagon now consumes more than half the federal discretionary budget, leaving priorities like public health, environmental protection, job training, and education to compete for what remains. In 2020, Lockheed Martin received $75 billion in Pentagon contracts, more than the entire budget of the State Department and the Agency for International Development combined.

This year's spending just for that company's overpriced, underperforming F-35 combat aircraft equals the full budget of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And as a new report from the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies revealed recently, the average taxpayer spends $1,087 per year on weapons contractors compared to $270 for K-12 education and just $6 for renewable energy.

The list goes on — and on and on. President Eisenhower characterized such tradeoffs in a lesser known speech, "The Chance for Peace," delivered in April 1953, early in his first term, this way: "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children…"

How sadly of this moment that is.

New Rationales, New Weaponry

Now, don't be fooled. The current war machine isn't your grandfather's MIC, not by a country mile. It receives far more money and offers far different rationales. It has far more sophisticated tools of influence and significantly different technological aspirations.

Perhaps the first and foremost difference between Eisenhower's era and ours is the sheer size of the major weapons firms. Before the post-Cold War merger boom of the 1990s, there were dozens of significant defense contractors. Now, there are just five big (no, enormous!) players — Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon. With so few companies to produce aircraft, armored vehicles, missile systems, and nuclear weapons, the Pentagon has ever more limited leverage in keeping them from overcharging for products that don't perform as advertised. The Big Five alone routinely split more than $150 billion in Pentagon contracts annually, or nearly 20% of the total Pentagon budget. Altogether, more than half of the department's annual spending goes to contractors large and small.

In Eisenhower's day, the Soviet Union, then this country's major adversary, was used to justify an ever larger, ever more permanent arms establishment. Today's "pacing threat," as the Pentagon calls it, is China, a country with a far larger population, a far more robust economy, and a far more developed technical sector than the Soviet Union ever had. But unlike the USSR, China's primary challenge to the United States is economic, not military.

Yet, as Dan Grazier noted in a December 2022 report for the Project on Government Oversight, Washington's ever more intense focus on China has been accompanied by significant military threat inflation. While China hawks in Washington wring their hands about that country having more naval vessels than America, Grazier points out that our Navy has far more firepower. Similarly, the active American nuclear weapons stockpile is roughly nine times as large as China's and the Pentagon budget three times what Beijing spends on its military, according to the latest figures from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

But for Pentagon contractors, Washington's ever more intense focus on the prospect of war with China has one overriding benefit: it's fabulous for business. The threat of China's military, real or imagined, continues to be used to justify significant increases in military spending, especially on the next generation of high-tech systems ranging from hypersonic missiles to robotic weapons and artificial intelligence. The history of such potentially dysfunctional high-tech systems, from President Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars" missile defense system to the F-35, does not bode well, however, for the cost or performance of emerging military technologies.

No matter, count on one thing: tens, if not hundreds, of billions of dollars will undoubtedly go into developing them anyway. And remember that they are dangerous and not just to any enemy. As Michael Klare pointed out in an Arms Control Association report: "AI-enabled systems may fail in unpredictable ways, causing unintended human slaughter or an uncontrolled escalation crisis."

Arsenal of Influence

Despite a seemingly never–ending list of overpriced, underperforming weapons systems developed for a Pentagon that's the only federal agency never to pass an audit, the MIC has an arsenal of influence propelling it ever closer to a trillion-dollar annual budget. In short, it's bilking more money from taxpayers than ever before and just about everyone — from lobbyists galore to countless political campaigns, think tanks beyond number to Hollywood — is in on it.

And keep in mind that the dominance of a handful of mega-firms in weapons production means that each of the top players has more money to spread around in lobbying and campaign contributions. They also have more facilities and employees to point to, often in politically key states, when persuading members of Congress to vote for — Yes!– even more money for their weaponry of choice.

The arms industry as a whole has donated more than $83 million to political candidates in the past two election cycles, with Lockheed Martin leading the pack with $9.1 million in contributions, followed by Raytheon at $8 million, and Northrop Grumman at $7.7 million. Those funds, you won't be surprised to learn, are heavily concentrated among members of the House and Senate armed services committees and defense appropriations subcommittees. For example, as Taylor Giorno of OpenSecrets, a group that tracks campaign and lobbying expenditures, has found, "The 58 members of the House Armed Services Committee reported receiving an average of $79,588 from the defense sector during the 2022 election cycle, three times the average $26,213 other representatives reported through the same period."

Lobbying expenditures by all the denizens of the MIC are even higher — more than $247 million in the last two election cycles. Such funds are used to employ 820 lobbyists, or more than one for every member of Congress. And mind you, more than two-thirds of those lobbyists had swirled through Washington's infamous revolving door from jobs at the Pentagon or in Congress to lobby for the arms industry. Their contacts in government and knowledge of arcane acquisition procedures help ensure that the money keeps flowing for more guns, tanks, ships and missiles. Just last month, the office of Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) reported that nearly 700 former high-ranking government officials, including former generals and admirals, now work for defense contractors. While a few of them are corporate board members or highly paid executives, 91% of them became Pentagon lobbyists, according to the report.

And that feverishly spinning revolving door provides current members of Congress, their staff, and Pentagon personnel with a powerful incentive to play nice with those giant contractors while still in their government roles. After all, a lucrative lobbying career awaits once they leave government service.

Nor is it just K Street lobbying jobs those weapons-making corporations are offering. They’re also spreading jobs to nearly every Main Street in America. The poster child for such jobs as a selling point for an otherwise questionable weapons system is Lockheed Martin's F-35. It may never be fully ready for combat thanks to countless design flaws, including more than 800 unresolved defects detected by the Pentagon's independent testing office. But the company insists that its program produces no less than 298,000 jobs in 48 states, even if the actual total is less than half of that.

In reality — though you’d never know this in today's Washington — the weapons sector is a declining industry when it comes to job creation, even if it does absorb near-record levels of government funding. According to statistics gathered by the National Defense Industrial Association, there are currently one million direct jobs in arms manufacturing compared to 3.2 million in the 1980s.

Outsourcing, automation, and the production of fewer units of more complex systems have skewed the workforce toward better-paying engineering jobs and away from production work, a shift that has come at a high price. The vacuuming up of engineering and scientific talent by weapons makers means fewer skilled people are available to address urgent problems like public health and the climate crisis. Meanwhile, it's estimated that spending on education, green energy, health care, or infrastructure could produce 40% to 100% more jobs than Pentagon spending does.

Shaping the Elite Narrative: The Military-Industrial Complex and Think Tanks

One of the MIC's most powerful tools is its ability to shape elite discussions on national security issues by funding foreign policy think tanks, along with affiliated analysts who are all too often the experts of choice when it comes to media coverage on issues of war and peace. A forthcoming Quincy Institute brief reveals that more than 75% of the top foreign-policy think tanks in the United States are at least partially funded by defense contractors. Some, like the Center for a New American Security and the Center for Strategic and International Studies, receive millions of dollars every year from such contractors and then publish articles and reports that are largely supportive of defense-industry funding.

Some such think tanks even offer support for weapons made by their funders without disclosing those glaring conflicts of interest. For example, an American Enterprise Institute (AEI) scholar's critique of this year's near-historically high Pentagon budget request, which, she claimed, was "well below inflation," also included support for increased funding for a number of weapons systems like the Long Range Anti-Ship Missile, the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile, the B-21 bomber, and the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile.

What's not mentioned in the piece? The companies that build those weapons, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, have been AEI funders. Although that institute is a "dark money" think tank that doesn't publicly disclose its funders, at an event last year, a staffer let slip that the organization receives money from both of those contractors.

Unfortunately, mainstream media outlets disproportionately rely on commentary from experts at just such think tanks. That forthcoming Quincy Institute report, for example, found that they were more than four times as likely as those without MIC funding to be cited in New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal articles about the Ukraine War. In short, when you see a think-tank expert quoted on questions of war and peace, odds are his or her employer receives money from the war machine.

What's more, such think tanks have their own version of a feverishly spinning revolving door, earning them the moniker "holding tanks" for future government officials. The Center for a New American Security, for example, receives millions of dollars from defense contractors and the Pentagon every year and has boasted that a number of its experts and alumni joined the Biden administration, including high-ranking political appointees at the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency.

Shaping the Public Narrative: The Military-Entertainment Complex

Top Gun: Maverick was a certified blockbuster, wowing audiences that ultimately gave that action film an astounding 99% score on Rotten Tomatoes — and such popular acclaim helped earn the movie a Best Picture Oscar nomination. It was also a resounding success for the Pentagon, which worked closely with the filmmakers and provided, "equipment — including jets and aircraft carriers — personnel and technical expertise," and even had the opportunity to make script revisions, according to the Washington Post. Defense contractors were similarly a pivotal part of that movie's success. In fact, the CEO of Lockheed Martin boasted that his firm "partnered with Top Gun's producers to bring cutting-edge, future forward technology to the big screen."

While Top Gun: Maverick might have been the most successful recent product of the military-entertainment complex, it's just the latest installment in a long history of Hollywood spreading military propaganda. "The Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency have exercised direct editorial control over more than 2,500 films and television shows," according to Professor Roger Stahl, who researches propaganda and state violence at the University of Georgia.

"The result is an entertainment culture rigged to produce relatively few antiwar movies and dozens of blockbusters that glorify the military," explained journalist David Sirota, who has repeatedly called attention to the perils of the military-entertainment complex. "And save for filmmakers’ obligatory thank you to the Pentagon in the credits," argued Sirota, "audiences are rarely aware that they may be watching government-subsidized propaganda."

What Next for the MIC?

More than 60 years after Eisenhower identified the problem and gave it a name, the military-industrial complex continues to use its unprecedented influence to corrupt budget and policy processes, starve funding for non-military solutions to security problems, and ensure that war is the ever more likely "solution" to this country's problems. The question is: What can be done to reduce its power over our lives, our livelihoods, and ultimately, the future of the planet?

Countering the modern-day military-industrial complex would mean dislodging each of the major pillars undergirding its power and influence. That would involve campaign-finance reform; curbing the revolving door between the weapons industry and government; shedding more light on its funding of political campaigns, think tanks, and Hollywood; and prioritizing investments in the jobs of the future in green technology and public health instead of piling up ever more weapons systems. Most important of all, perhaps, a broad-based public education campaign is needed to promote more realistic views of the challenge posed by China and to counter the current climate of fear that serves the interests of the Pentagon and the giant weapons contractors at the expense of the safety and security of the rest of us.

That, of course, would be no small undertaking, but the alternative — an ever-spiraling arms race that could spark a world-ending conflict or prevent us from addressing existential threats like climate change and pandemics — is simply unacceptable.

"Countering the modern-day military-industrial complex would mean dislodging each of the major pillars undergirding its power and influence. That would involve campaign-finance reform; curbing the revolving door between the weapons industry and government; shedding more light on its funding of political campaigns, think tanks, and Hollywood; and prioritizing investments in the jobs of the future in green technology and public health instead of piling up ever more weapons systems. Most important of all, perhaps, a broad-based public education campaign is needed to promote more realistic views of the challenge posed by China and to counter the current climate of fear that serves the interests of the Pentagon and the giant weapons contractors at the expense of the safety and security of the rest of us."

There's a glimmer of hope there, and deffo "no small undertaking".But I don't have much faith in anything changing anytime soon.I mean us Australians must be inwardly cheering as we look forward to spending of $300b plus on some submarines...I reckon old Ike Eisenhower would be rolling in his grave.

‘War is a racket’.

- General Smedley Butler, 1935…

Nothing too much has changed… the soundtrack maybe more so ;);)

https://m.

NATO, the US and neocons .... Champions of peace, truth and justice or a hammer looking for a nail?

http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2023/may/08/nato-...

Ukraine's is getting boring and awkward for the heroic Think Tankers so China is next ....

A sad track record over decades. Nothing like a Top Gun movie. But somehow they plough on regardless.

T42 Home Brew > 10,000/day comin' thru...2022 ~ 2.76m US illegals breaking record by 1m11 May 2023 ~ 27,000 in custody reserved for several thousand max.11-13,000 daily with 150,000 on their way.Joe's Polls dropping to 36%...(Say Hello to the crew Zombie Prez)

The White House this morning: President Biden didn't take any questions from reporters. pic.twitter.com/qasvfagnHU

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/mess-americans-grade-biden-poll-shows-d...https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/migrant-border-crossings-fi...GI Joe failed to stall T42 reopen so had WHO call an end to legitimise his failed open date.Joe wanted to buy a further 2 weeks to get his shit together...(Has plenty of time for other shit!)Joe is pushin' for Court to buy [L] style transient 1st cross border > 3rd Country Asylum

Stone Garden or Joe's Stoner Garden( Joe can now align all his border patrol at just 130m apart across whole US.)Yep! They could see & hear each other...Joe has officially assembled a Human US Border Wall.Joe's Stoner Garden Human wall is fast approaching 100,000 foot soldiers.Joe's US Border : 60,000 Staff / 20,000 Agents / 10,000 National Guard /1,500 Troops / 1,120 Policehttps://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/texas-border-agents-title-42/

Rudy Giuliani hit with bombshell rape lawsuit; ex-staffer says he demanded oral sex while he took calls from Trump https://www.businessinsider.com/giuliani-demanded-staffer-oral-sex-durin.... https://www.businessinsider.com/rudy-giuliani-took-viagra-constantly-dem...

I know this is wishful thinking but it would be amazing if Biden's decision to not join the quad meeting here was symbolic of a major turning point in the history of human civilisation, at which the US decides to step back from the precipice of war and changes course to look inwards at its own problems:

Instead of continuing to go down the path of rallying as many countries and military blocs that it can in support of it going to war with China, the US instead decides to look at itself in the mirror and focus on fixing the long and growing list of internal political, economic and social etc problems it is facing.

I think the world would be much better off that way and 90% of the planet's population and countries would breath a massive sigh of relief that they don't have to choose between the wrath of an angry USA hellbent on punishing and destroying the economies and toppling the governments of all those who defy it, vs, joining the US in going to war with China (actually more like fighting China for the US).

Biden's absence is more likely the fact the dude is in bad shape - being unable to string a sentence together is one thing, but travelling on a schedule taking you to the other side of the world is something obviously getting well beyond him.

I hope the wishful thinking is correct ;)… the summary is spot on.

- as long as we remain a US /UK vassal state, though, then there is no real reason for brandon to visit anyway…

It's all propaganda and tokenism - yet it wasn't too long ago he referred to our then pm as ‘that fella down under’ (which was an unintentional but accurate assessment of the public acknowledgment sco mo deserved) …and our new bloke is probly just ‘that other fella down under’.

Anyway… whoever is our pm is down under the desk and following orders ;)

- but, you never know, US leaders are often busy chasing a free feed ;)And the white house is prone to putting on quite the banquet…

https://m.

Albo : "D' Prez will be exhuming tbb's sarcophagus to liven up the Kama Sutra Harbour Cruise!"MSM : "Unearthed Sarcophagus Rental Crisis!"Experts : "Dig yerself a deeper hole!"tbb : "Core Meltdown!"

2016 Vice Prez Joe's Oz Quad wranglehttps://media.gettyimages.com/id/577555654/photo/united-states-vice-pres...Joe : "Travelling 17,000 miles as Vice Prez & I know that as a fact!"https://media.gettyimages.com/id/576817646/photo/united-states-vice-pres...Waving to some random Fellow from Down Under!https://media.gettyimages.com/id/576816770/photo/united-states-vice-pres...Some loser ALP Leader out polled Albo to pull punches with Joe...Bugger!https://media.gettyimages.com/id/577296564/photo/australia-us-diplomacy....Oz Parliament Sacred Gift Ceremony (Ouch!) > Prez sues AFL for Historic Head Concussion.https://media.gettyimages.com/id/576686454/photo/united-states-vice-pres...Girls Gone Wild Harbour Cruise "Happy Birthday Mr President!"https://media.gettyimages.com/id/577567860/photo/australia-us-diplomacy....Narrow escape from another Oz Chaser terrorist incident.https://media.gettyimages.com/id/576703942/photo/united-states-vice-pres...Must visit here again one day...where are we?https://media.gettyimages.com/id/576852510/photo/united-states-vice-pres...

Biden won't be there as he has a small fire to put out in the how to fund government department...

Say you are about to run out of money, but you can magically create a new limit of money to have; only if you get everyone to agree but they love being disagreeable and you need to sort them out - what do you do?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/may/16/us-and-micronesia-to-renew...

Totally aside from the topic, but it really irks me how The Guardian turns acronyms into proper nouns. They write NASA as Nasa, AUKUS as Aukus, and in this instance COFA - the Compact of Free Association, note the capitals - as Cofa.

Terrible habit. Bad enough to stop me from subscribing.

You’re not on your Pat Malone Stu.It's an even worse habit than taking away hyphens and ending up with messes of words like "coexist" or "cooperate".