WayeeCool

Debtors prison is quite possibly the most unamerican practice one could instate. The US is more than a little unique with practices such as defaulting on debt being solely a civil matter and one with a 7 year statute of limitations. The US was founded on the idea that someone can repeatedly go bankrupt without any real consequences other than not being able to get future credit until debts are somehow settled or a decade has passed. It's extremely British to instate debtors prison, criminal liability for defaulting on debt, legal liability for debt being inherited by next of kin upon death, and psycho shit like denying a person burial/cremation until their debt is paid.

Abolishing that British practice of putting all liability on the barrower was one of the petite bourgeoisie goals of the US founders. A big change was all debts dying with the original debtors rather than being inherited by next of kin. One of the major revolutionary changes the US brought about was the idea that almost all liability is on the lender (unless the barrower knowingly commited fraud, ie lied while being evaluated for credit) because they should have been more responsible in gauging risk since extending credit is no different than any other form of gambling/speculation.

During and shortly after the revolution. They fkd around afterwards, father got locked up and family got sent to the rural countryside for reeducation. After serving the prison sentence, his father did eventually redeem himself but it left a mark. This experience in adolescence is supposedly what caused Xi to develop a hard-line reder-than-red Marxist-Leninist world view and aversion to corruption when others he grew up with fell down the liberal rabbit hole. This is at least what his CIA dossier outlined as family background and early life.

Lesson the US military eventually learned in Vietnam after camera and television technology had matured to the point the general public got to witness weapons of mass destruction in use. Until that point there was no real backlash whenever the US military fire bombed entire cities. In the WW2 Pacific theater the US killed over a hundred thousand civilians at a time fire bombing Japanese cities and no one gave a fk but when the public watched on their living room televisions the same tactics being used in Vietnam there was backlash.

I guess the lesson learned was that after the advent of video mass media you gotta only kill hundreds of civilians at a time and if you do shit like depoy a weapon that kills tens to hundreds of thousands at a time the public starts getting squeamish.

Last time US fighter pilots had to deal with people firing anti aircraft missiles at them in volume was during the opening days of the first gulf war.

Anyone remember the flight recorder video from an F16 over Baghdad being chased by six surface to air missiles? During the chase sustained an average of 3.6G with peak acceleration at points reaching 6.4G. Does seem like the stuff of nightmares.

https://youtu.be/2uh4yMAx2UA

Dick Cheney if he were anyone else would be dead but he has access to a rather unique combination of billionaire wealth, US govt executive branch VIP privileges, deep military industrial connections, and access to bleeding edge DARPA tech. Guy literally holds the world record for time spent living without a heart. Spent something like a year without one. The resources and expertise expended on keeping him alive have been ridiculous.

A Michelle Obama with VP Mark Wahlberg ticket? You know what... I think you're on to something. Michelle captures the run of the mill liberal voter while Wahlberg scoops up enough of the toxic young male and white racist vote to cross the finish line. All Biden was able to offer Obama was eulogizing famous segregationists while Wahlberg has been convicted of actually committing violent hate crimes.

VPN proliferation continues to grow despite my concerns with some of the providers,

All the major VPN providers are in some way tied to a national intelligence agency. Not much of a secret when the companies have "former" intelligence agents on their boards or somewhere in their C-suite. For example, PIA is Mossad. Or how Nord has relationships with the CIA and NSA via it's data broker sister company. Thing is, national intelligence agencies don't give a fuck about piracy and if anything it's encouraged because it gets more people to route their Internet connections through a service.

Sadly the Obama administration made it illegal for NASA to cooperate with or take any aid from China.

Putin obviously knows English and German from his posting in Germany during his KGB days

Yeah. He was a lieutenant colonel assigned to the East German stasi. Can find archive copies of his stasi identification floating around online.

And even old artillery is incredibly accurate if the team operating the gun has both modern targeting computer software and access to localized real-time meteorological data. When you throw in the use of aerial drone spotters, that old artillery performs almost as well as the highly integrated artillery systems NATO nations field.

It's funny because the actual gun isn't where any of a magic of modern artillery is but instead the targeting computer and data links. US defense contractors just upcharge to integrate all that tech into a single piece of equipment and disregard all the drawbacks involved.

I had this exact model of walkman when I was locked up. Iirc it could also play video files and display mobi format ebooks on its tiny screen.