What?  Where’s the war?

“This is sad about Volkswagen. A sturdy affordable workhorse, used worldwide back in the day. An aunt drove the Beetle in 1970s in Africa, with engine in back. Father too, another model (Passat?). VW ain’t coming back. Dismantled to eugenicist delusion.. and for that matter, started by same impulse!”

Sad .. I remember them well. Jokes of an elephant stuck in the back in Africa days. Yes, Passat but it was not a beetle and we considered those as a not very good wannabe. My neighbor has an old one that he keeps improving and tinkers and fiddles with it from time to time. It’s a ‘cannot die’ machine that one can fix yourself. The Reich did well with this one.

And I think the hippy generation largely nullified the Reich vibe with Flower Power and make love not war. (Yes nothing was real but just perhaps the creator saw the intent).

But then sanctions came and overnight the Chevrolet’s and Volkswagons disappeared and we bought Italian weapons and French cars. Strange what I can remember from sanctions.

I don’t know which one I love more!

Lebanese sources: The American University of Beirut collected the pager devices of its employees a week ago under the pretext of repair.

Latest that I can see 3000 injured, 200 serious and 8 dead

They will all fight and lie to own the narrative now.

Open thread yeah .. here is my story for this day.

The day was funny and frustrating.  I had to go to the supermarket and I go in a little taxi – they make their motorcycles into taxis here, moto-taxi, with a body over the cycle and doors and everything.  I love ’em.  They’re cute, small, easy in the traffic and cheaper and quicker transportation one cannot get for small distances.  A few of those hang around and they take doña someone down the road to the butcher shop and so on.  I live in an area that is still old-fashioned with a butcher, a green-grocer, a small general store and so on.    I have a regular driver who picks me up when I call and he speaks a bit of English to practice and I keep to Spanish, so, it is quite funny already and everyone looks at us as we mangle the languages because he confuses me and I probably confuse him as well.

But today, what a funny thing .. he was short of time and wanted to hurry me up.  But of course, he cannot say so.  The next moment, he is next to me in the supermarket wanting to help.  So, while I was earnestly reading the ingredients of something, I had to say .. aah, go buy me 6 potatoes and he would hurry and come back with six potatoes and show em to me and we would put them in the cart and I would forget about the first thing because the sequence in my head was now messed up!  And so it went.  As I looked for this tomato sauce (a pure tomato sauce no funny ingredients) he wanted to know why I liked that one and not this bottle (full of ingredients I cannot spell).  Belly much nice than you one!  (Very much nicer than the one you want to buy).  So, another explanation – I use it for cooking and it has only pure tomato – no ingredientes malos (no bad ingredients).  You no use flesh tomato para cook?  (You don’t use fresh tomatoes for cooking?)  Yes, but this one saves me time and the fresh ones are for salad and tortas (a torta is anything that looks like a sandwich).

By that time, I had forgotten what I wanted.  So I ask him to go and look for 2 cans of tuna, the stuff in water and not the stuff with 30% soy in it.  And he stays away for a while and comes back looking confused babbling about this one is more expensive than the one with 30% soy.  So, by now I just lie and say it is for a special meal.  And I’m horribly frugal and fussy about what I buy otherwise we eat nanoparticles and then he shows me a special on Coca Cola and I must say thank-you and explain why I won’t take a peso out of my pocket for that poison.  Eventually, we get to the checkout and he chooses the auto checkout.  Soon I saw why, as each time I picked up a bag, he had left something in the bottom .. stealing his head off and madly signaling with his eyes, there is something in that bag .. just put it down on the other side!  And if they catch anyone, they will catch me I’m sure.

So eventually I got out of the store having forgotten half of what I needed to buy, not knowing how many stolen goods were in my bags, with the moto-taxi driver carrying my bags and being very confused about this ingredientes malos thing.  He had never heard of such a thing.  So now he is telling me earnestly where I should go and buy chicken and how good it is because he owns a share in the business.

Seriously he looks at me and says:  Puro pollo.  No ingredientes malos.  (Pure chicken, no bad ingredients).

I don’t know if he is friend or foe lol.

At the end of that video, he talks such shit about China.    Really, he should not talk about China.  Of course Russia is better at war because they’ve had a few – practice makes perfect eh.  China has not had one war, and it is a difference that should not be necessary to make.  I think that with the excellent and adult relationship between these two civilizational states it is truly bad form (and from the Chinese perspective extreeeeemely bad manners) to talk like that.   Now this is not a secret and I’ve made this critique before.

China cannot fight the West on its own.  Well, I have news.  Neither can Russia.  Depends how you define that fight.  What kind of fight?  So far China has won every trade war thrown at them.  Kinetic, well, I don’t see Australia or Japan trying anything and if they do, they run home needing psychological treatment.  We are in a war (and with Putin’s words today, we can count that war as between NATO/EU/US and Britain and Russia slowly slipping to a kinetic phase although we do not know how many proxies if any will turn up).  From China even in the streets there is only support shown for Russia and in the early days, they stuck X on their vehicles.

The issue rather is that the west cannot fight Russia, and it cannot fight China because for all the reasons that they cannot fight Russia, there are more reasons for China.  The two together?  Oh boy.

The Chinese military is bigger than the Russian military and man … they don’t stop!  They keep on coming.  Nobody can outproduce them.  And it is only Andrei that says that Russia produces everything it needs for its military in-house.  Well, let’s not talk any longer about that, except to say there is a land border between the two and some really nice railway lines and if more are needed, China builds them at a rate that is staggering.

And then it is worth while to wonder why China so stubbornly insists on its old traditional ownership of the South China Sea.  And then one starts with China’s military which dwarfs Russia’s military.  And then one thinks of China’s manufacturing capability.  And then one thinks that there is not one child in China that does not get military training, from little to college. This is real training.  There are very few military in China now without some degree.    Every Chinese is willing to fight.  And then one thinks of China’s claim that they have 500 nuclear warheads and delivery systems.  (I don’t believe them .. there is a reason why they are so insistent on not attending any nuclear disarmament summit).

Look at the map around that border.

Godfree Roberts started feeding Andrei with some weapons information but, he would not believe a word.   It did not end well but no more needs to be said there either.  Why is it that with all the content that I churn out to the China Writer’s Group, and the masses of information that they make available for me, there never is one word said?  Why is it that with all the masses of Chinese Blogs, Twitters and other information in English, there never is something said or a quote or video or link passed along?

This is a thing that I experienced first-hand.  I forget which theater command was assigned when Nancy Pelosi flew to Taiwan.  The instruction went out from the military to the whole of China to say nothing.  Do not report anything – Don’t even report if your traffic lights are out.  I searched my Chinese information sources at the time, and if anyone said something about a road being worked on, or they saw some planes fly over or anything that looked benign, a bunch of them just jumped up and shouted .. NOT ANOTHER WORD!  and reported that social media to be deleted tout de suite.  The social media is usually amiable, friendly.  For those few days not a bird flew over in China, the cats did not meow and there was not a dog barking and the kids baked cookies and drank milk.  It was ice-cold silence and total online hygiene.  I mean I asked how it is on the Chinese social media and if I received a reply, it was something about a recipe or something weird, nothing to do with the question.  According to the Chinese social media during that period there were no ships in the water, no planes flew over and no military vehicle convoys were noticed.  But the kids double marched in schools.

Those people are disciplined to an astonishing degree and they believe they are at war.  There are the Russian exceptionalists that diss China.

This makes me sad.