Trick or Treat!

¿Por qué no los dos?

“I am a very real woman who is talking to you on the internet and I am sincerely interested in sending you naked pictures with no plan for catfishing or upselling”

Seems legit.

Debunking three myths about the end of presidential term limits in China

using the justice system against any and all rivals!

It’s always dizzying to see western liberals insist the Chinese state is riddled with corruption, then blow their tops the moment anyone in China is identified and prosecuted for corruption.

I keep coming back to Guo Wengui, an outspoken Chinese billionaire ex-pat who claimed he was being persecuted for his liberal politics and not involved in a string of high profile scams. Six years after his arrival, he was up on charges in New York for the exact same set of fraud charges he’d fled Beijing to avoid. And - almost on reflex - Guo went back to the same playbook, insisting that SDNY prosecutors were pursuing him for his political views and not his defrauding of clients. Changpeng Zhao has a near identical story.

This is a tale as old as time in western politics. From Fulgencio Batista to María Corina Machado and Reza Pahlavi to Wernher von Braun, y’all vacuum up the trash. The US, the UK, and France absorb foreign crooks under the auspices of political refugee status. And then these slimeballs go right back to defrauding people in their new host nation.

I wonder how many more Chinese dissidents Keir Starmer and Donald Trump will rescue after this latest purge.

I mean, imagine a Chinese publication leaping to the defense of Henry Cuellar, Bob Menendez, Eric Adams, and George Santos.

So much of the US news really does boil down to a handful of senior editors having this burning hatred for the sitting Chinese President.

It’s been sliding all month.

It’s slid 8% over the last month. But at a 282 p/e, it could lose 90% and still be overvalued.

presidents for life

He’s been in office for 13 years. Angela Merkel served for longer as PM of Germany. Narendra Modi has been in office nearly as long, as President of India. FDR served for longer. Calm down.

Unrelated, but I have a bridge to sell someone as wise and discerning as yourself!

The thing about your type is that you only know how to bomb bridges. You’ve forgotten how to build them.

Imagine a president who found corruption in his administration and decided “corrupt officials aren’t useful, they should be removed”.

Damn, setting aside the China Bad hysteria, this is pretty big news

China expels second-highest ranking general, 8 others over corruption

According to the ministry, the Central Military Commission (CMC) Discipline Inspection Commission, the PLA’s top anti-corruption body, investigated the officers and found they had violated Party rules and were suspected of serious crimes involving large financial misconduct. The offences were described as having an “extremely serious nature and egregious impact.”

Imagine living in a country where top officials actually get investigated and removed for wrongdoing.

Must be nice.

Tiktok’s user base is quite large

875 million to over 950 million daily active users (DAU) globally as of Jan 2026.

It is a shame people don’t choose better alternatives though.

TikTok was the better alternative. That’s half the joke. As soon as it caught on, the plutocrats stepped in and seized control

Not unlike how Facebook bought out and gutted Instagram or JP Morgan took over Reddit and cleaned out all the lefties before taking it public.

That’s before you get into the marketing budget that social media needs to build the kind of massive userbase you’re asking for.

How about we abandon ragebait shortform slop/garbage aggregators entirely

In my day, we listened to AM Talk Radio! 16 hours a day, to and from work! None of this prissy little short form phone slop, no sir. It was three hour long shifts of Rush Limbaugh, Don Imus, Doug “The Greaseman” Tracht, and Sean Hannity. I earned my hate honestly, by fiddling with a little dial on my walkman and getting five commercials about cigars and dick pills every eight minutes. I got to hear bad riff tracks about how Japan was taking over our economy produced on a AKAI S900 that had been dropped down a flight of stairs. I didn’t know these people even had faces until Limbaugh showed up as a talking head for the NFL for a few months.

The very fucking idea that these stupid petulant spoiled woke lib fuck-around find-out kids are getting their news from a five minute long vertical visual display? OOOOOOOOoh it makes me SO MAD! I hate 'dem kids. I hate’m!!!

Finally going to separate Utah and Arizona with a hard border.

Not sure how I feel about Nevada 2, though.

Also, the gold standard was based on trust too. You trusted that the government would honour your request to exchange dollars for gold.

You also trusted that the supply of gold would not suddenly increase and devalue gold as a commodity. Or that demand for the specie doesn’t collapse because… let’s say, hypothetically, the world’s largest economy stops keeping it as a reserve currency.

The former happened in the second half of the 16th century, in an event known as the Price Revolution.

The latter was part of the Nixon Shock, following the unilateral cancellation of the direct international convertibility of the United States dollar to gold.

Incidentally, Nixon exiting the Gold Standard could more rightly be pinned on Charles DeGaulle.

In February 1965, French president Charles de Gaulle announced his intention to redeem U.S. dollar reserves for gold at the official exchange rate. By 1966, non-U.S. central banks held $14 billion in U.S. dollars, while the United States had only $13.2 billion in gold reserves, of which only $3.2 billion was available to cover foreign holdings.

In March 1968, the London Gold Pool collapsed.

In May 1971, West Germany left the Bretton Woods system, unwilling to sell further Deutschmarks for U.S. dollars.[10] In the following three months, the U.S. dollar dropped 7.5% against the Deutschmark, and other nations began to demand redemption of their U.S. dollars for gold.[10] On August 5, 1971, the United States Congress released a report recommending devaluation of the dollar in an effort to protect their currency against “foreign price-gougers”.[10] Also in August, French president Georges Pompidou sent a battleship to New York City to retrieve French gold deposits.[11] On August 9, 1971, as the dollar dropped in value against European currencies, Switzerland left the Bretton Woods system.[10] Pressure intensified on the United States to leave the Bretton Woods system. On August 11, Britain requested $3 billion in gold be moved from Fort Knox to the Federal Reserve in New York.[11] As Paul Volcker, then Undersecretary of the United States Department of the Treasury for Monetary Affairs, later put it:

Will they be sued out of existence after their meat substitute mushroom burger left in the sun for too long comes alive an eats 9 customers and and a minivan?

Idk if I’m going to pick a fight with a restaurant chain that can harness that kind of firepower.

It’s not the same principle because it’s always one Big Mac.

Big Macs used to sell for $.50 and now they sell for $8. So one could argue the coins are actually a hedge against inflation.

Incidentally, US Forever Stamps serve a similar purpose.

our money has no value anymore since it was taken off the gold standard

Our money has value because it can be redeemed to pay down US-based debts, particularly tax debts. This is - and has always been - the real value of any currency. Go ask David Graeber for the details. But the TL;DR; is that we use coinage as a form of extortion. “You need to give us stuff to get coins which you can then pay us to avoid the threat of state violence.” Roman soldiers working overseas were paid in coins, while they were charged with collecting these coins as a tax, in order to integrate conquered economies into the Roman Empire. You had to provide goods/services to the soldiers so they could take them off you every taxation period.

Literally, money is a protection racket.

Also, who the fuck wants to eat a Big Mac? That shit’s disgusting.

-13°C weather won’t stop me. I actually like the cold.

Turns out that hardboiled detective was the woman’s son this whole time.

do you have any idea how fucking cold hot is is outside right now?