By “sky” he meant his huge belly.
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To explain away his fatness when most other people outside of Beijing were starving he claimed that he would swim several kilometers a day in the winter weather for his morning exercise.
These kinds of myth making and grandiose claims are boilerplate strongman bullshit to convince the average person they’re being lead by tough austere leader who wants nothing and needs nothing but to serve the country meanwhile they amass vast sums of the public coffers stealing everything they can lay their hands on. Vladimir Putin’s personal watch collection was said to be worth somewhere mutliple millions of US$ meanwhile the state propaganda paints him as preferring to live off the land in the coldest northern regions in a one man tent.
Trump cartoonishly attempted similar propaganda but he is such a soft fat weakling that he had to rely on vulgar displays like lying about his weight, height and physicians willing to tell the public that he had “superior genes”.
The fact that so many people went along with or excused such an obvious tell (among other things) has frankly fatally injured my respect for too many of my fellow countrymen.
As soon as my division of assets is finalized, I need to get out of Dodge for awhile. I’m going to liquidate everything (except the car) and see if the beaches in Greece, Spain and Portugal are as nice in real life as they look on the internet.
I’d say I’m sorry to hear you and the (almost former) missus broke up, however, sounds like you are not too heartbroken over it.
I just got out of marriage #2 a couple months ago, so, don’t listen to any relationship advice from me.
Take a good supply of condoms over there with ya!
I may jest to the contrary but those days are over. I wouldn’t foist this festering pile of scabs and gristle on a lady. That’s just disrespectful. I’ll settle for bottomless martinis and a nice view of the sea.
Wink Wink nod nod…nudge nudge…
To be fair, China has done a lot to remove a lot of barriers to foreign financial & insurance interests - scrapping of shareholding limits, removing some caps, and generally inviting foreign investment.
Some political commentators said that was a part of the reason why they’ve been more than happy to put the boots to Hong Kong, and bring it more in line with the mainland, as it’s apparently no longer critical for Hong Kong to be a financial hub.
On top of that, The Belt and Road Initiative itself is already paying China dividends in terms of money and land, so your assessment that they’re going to grab people by their coin purse makes perfect sense.
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Algarve is beautiful but there are way more commodities in Spain. Give a try to Zahara de los Atunes o Caños de Meca. If you want more urban areas Conil is awesome and has beautiful places, like Las Calas de Roche (a 5 min ride from there)
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Remember when it was just Disney(+) getting in trouble for this?
I don’t like calling it “the China problem”.
That calls back to dark days of discrimination.
Here’s the problem:
The average Chinese person does not believe the Chinese govt is doing anything to the Uighurs because their news media and most of their celebrities work for the Chinese ministry of propaganda. No, seriously, even their boy bands, their child actors, their popular fiction writers and all their celebrities say exactly what they are told to say by the media censors. They fake outrage over whatever the government tells them to fake and they are rewarded handsomely for doing so.
It’s a requirement for being allowed access to their job. Anyone who steps out of line will be ruined in the press. Possibly even imprisoned. There was a Chinese rock band in the 80s and 90s who wrote some songs that were critical of the government. They were clearly inspired by Bruce Springsteen. Their clothes, the guitar riffs, the musical content, etc. The Chinese government learned how to shut those guys down without lifting a finger. They sequestered them, kept them under house arrest for a while but rather than brutalize them, because word might get out and upset some young people who saw the songs as patriotic, they simply banned their albums and ruined their lives to the point they had to take up gigs in brothels and casinos in Macau to pay the bills… with the approved set-list of course. It’s not as brutal as Nazi Germany or the USSR but it doesn’t have to be to be extremely effective.
China is using access to it’s markets to force foreigners to remain silent and it’s forcing those civilians who hear enough to suspect they are lying to STFU or face the tender mercies of Xi Jianping. Xi has no tender mercies. He’s every bit as dishonest, cold hearted and ruthless as Mao, except he’s not as stupid as Mao. Mao was a bleating authoritarian warthog who played an educated saint, poet, super soldier and ultimate athletic fatass that swam 40 miles a day in cold of Beijing winters in front the camera and the unhinged totalitarian madman that we all know about behind the scenes.
They have been told that this is just an anti-terror campaign and that the ever present Chinese propaganda ministry’s favorite boogie man, the CIA, is having them smeared because the United States government is afraid of them.
Clearly none of that is true. If the US was afraid of China they’d actually do something effective to stop China from pursuing what is obviously a set up for expansionist military policy into the contested land with India as well as into Taiwan, Vietnam, Cambodia and Myanmar to set up puppet states.
China’s propaganda ministry is getting worse by the day. There is no aspect of Chinese society that they do not control and direct.
They have begun making overtures into places where the average American is completely fucking clueless. Shit that needs to be addressed.
One such example of the recent decade is the hot ticket item of fucking race theory; just as insidious way as the National Socialist Party of Germany did it, the Polish National revivalists were doing with their own crackdowns on non Pols and the white nationalist slavs are doing today in Russia with the hidden hand of the Kremlin straight up their asses.
I have a friend who is Uighur. Smart kid. Some of the things that he and his friends told me are not being talked about over here.
They’re not just pushing revisionist history and propaganda throughout all of their studies regarding literature, downplaying western contributions to every part of history and things like science. They are pushing into evolutionary biology and archeology with faked findings and fossils to support the idea that Chinese are the true master race and all of their problems are due to foreign invaders. The shit is going into the public school system with race propaganda subtly injected into National Geographic educational films, media and educational material for all age groups.
It’s so subtle that even the school teachers don’t realize what’s happening because previously when the CCP wanted to make something up, they just executed the first few scientists or engineers to contradict them publicly and the rest shut the fuck up. Now that shit is creeping into everything because they learned that being hamfisted gives the game away prematurely.
Mao, like Stalin, didn’t have any patience and did not see the utility of being subtle. Their opinion was like Trump’s. The constant lies weren’t just to trick credulous people, it was also a way to train followers to never contradict them even when they say something wrong and a loyalty test to identify who needed to be silenced. That was one of Mao’s favorite tactic. He baited people into disagreeing with him publicly or joining public discussion forums hosted by the CCP who were only there to look for any sign of dissent or disagreement on anything. That was the whole purpose of the lie. They knew who the loyalists were who would go along with anything because those were the people who stayed silent when the CCP said something that was obviously not true. Then had them murdered, imprisoned, sent off to re-education camps wholesale across the country at every level, including putting young pioneers (children) up to lynching school teachers. I heard about that shit directly from a friend’s dad. He came to school and there were 15 and 16 year olds standing under a beloved school teacher’s body who they reported for “hooliganism”. The young pioneer leaders who complained were selected to be sent to dangerous labor camps. During the worst of Mao’s crackdown, shit like this happened every day. The places were the famine hit the hardest were the places were Mao’s thugs had the least power. They may not control their minds but they fucking controlled where the all the food went.
The average Chinese citizen has been trained from birth to believe their government is infallible. They used to be really bad at that before social media, but now they’re fucking experts and the CCP is getting hungry for foreign soil and foreign resources.
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Sad fact is consumers in the Western Democracies care more for cheap manufactured goods than the human rights of Chinese people
We are hypocritical ass holes, proudly displaying our freedoms at the expense of others
Lies are like stars, they always come out.
Write less. Post more. Jesus, I’ll bet nobody read your whole post but me.
Slow down; your mind is GABA deficient.
China’s military effectively controls the entire Asian continent with the exception of the nuclear powers there. IF China wanted to take over Vietnam right now, it could do it in a day.
Be afraid of any and all future land wars in Asia, my friend.
Especially Qigong clubs. Mao just had these folks black-bagged, today they get the Enquirer treatment.
Yeah, like meditation and exercise, which are great for the body and mind and really shitty for Communist overlords trying to keep the pegs in line.
This part
Rabbit,
You’re as bad as any MAGA fanatic. You will cover any lie and defend any obvious falsehood while blindly slandering anyone who disagrees with you.
Fools who cannot listen to reason based on their own emotional frailty are America’s worst problem, indeed mankind’s worst foil and that’s you for as long as you want to be that way. I genuinely do not care what you have to say about anything I hope you get your pschological disorder squared away.
My opinions on Falun Gong are informed by my own eyes and ears. I know a fucking cult when I see one, that one couldn’t be more obvious.
The enemy of my enemy is not my friend.
The friend of my enemy is not my friend.
The friend of my friend is not my friend.
People who ignore evidence to defend any unreasonable position because they are emotionally invested in reinforcing false realities are the worst plague on planet earth. That’s you and you’re maybe the worst case I’ve seen in a long time. I don’t believe you can be helped sans medication and I don’t believe you have any intention of fixing yourself. It sounds like you resent your doctors’ orders and maybe one day you’ll get medicated and be able to contribute to a conversation without shitting the bed and making the whole place stink.
Until that day, I see no utility in talking to you.
Dude
You have zero introspection
I don’t remember getting to vote about having many of the essential things in the market being made in China.
I try to avoid cheap Chinese goods if I can, but many things have Chinese parts in them. Even when there assembled else where. The average person had little say on large companies choosing Chinese manufacturing.
Before I get the typical responses I will state I am of the opinion that few people have the economic security to morally consider country of origin in every purchase they make.
True, which is why we should incentivize trade with as many friendly Democratic regimes as possible through favorable trade deals. Stop shopping the 3rd world just for raw goods and actually pay for processed goods. South America is much more stable than it was 3 years ago. Africa is making long strides. Not just China but a ridiculously high percentage of all US drugs are manufactured in India. India is a long term partner but it’s just not strategically safe to put all our eggs in one basket. One bad natural disaster could kill a lot of medication dependent Americans on very specially drugs. That’s something a lot of poorer state NATO partner countries could do with enough supplemental investment. It’s something we could do in the US as well when people finally start waking up to the national security problem of our chief manufacturing trade partner being a hostile regime that has been propping a host of hostile nations including North Korea, Russia, Cuba and Iran up for decades and the new CCP’s leadership is no longer trepid about displaying open hostility and contempt for America and democracy itself.
If we don’t vote for the leadership we want in China with our dollars soon, we’ll be voting with weapons. Broad spectrum tarrifs were bad idea. We should have saved ourselves some money with trade incentives to NATO friendly countries.
The mother fuckers like Sanders and Trump who pitched a dumbshit fit about the Pacific trade agreeement in 2016 made me suspicious as fuck from the very beginning. Moscow and China both didn’t want us to have anything to do with that and the reasons those two dipshits gave for opposing smelled like pure high turd content bullshit.
I would posit that the average person doesn’t really care either
Are we not average representative of average people?
Sure
I’m as hypocritical as the next man!
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