The only way to distract from all the turds he is trying to hide under the rug is a war.

China plans decades ahead, the United States plans six months ahead.

Biden won’t, but his handlers sure will

Trump for whatever perceived issues he may have brought to the table knew the American people would not accept any more overseas military endeavors, and he held the garbage politicians and the military complex in check. Trump again was strong and focused where Biden is neither of those things. Will this administration start a war with Russia? God I hope not because it would be devastating. Right now I think the odds are 50/50.

As was my concern with Obama, I am concerned that this moron will bumble into a world war without knowing it then go take a nap at Camp David.

When the shit hits the fan , watch your 401k drop like a rock . The stock market doesn't like that kind of stuff .

quote:

Originally posted by spunk639:
The more concerning thought is can we handle a two front war with China and Russia? Potatus hasn’t been making the best military choices and strategic plans.

No.

quote:

Originally posted by Tirod:
China is buying farmland in American as fast as they can and offering more than it's worth to get it. They have already purchased Smithfield IIRC.

The interesting part is that Americans who sell to them and who try to find more land with all the money they got, face skyrocketing real estate values - farmland has doubled in sale price.

As for Russia vs Ukraine, it's more noise in the news to cover up the deflating Covid story - with Omicron being a typical late variant the hospitals are back to reporting "with covid" when the reality is in some cases only 50% reported had that as the primary reason to go to the hospital at all. Vaccine reactions are taking up more and more of the beds now. Beating on the war drums with repeated stories over the "impending invasion" keeps the publics focus off that or China menacing Taiwan. And with the DOD forcing "diversity training" and mandated vaxxes we aren't getting stronger to respond to these issues.

One indicator is hearing "we will strongly respond" over and over. If you really can strongly respond, your opponent knows it and doesn't pull any shenanigans. Nope, that line is for public consumption and the point is to sell fearmongering over war to hide the real news.

This is most likely closest to the truth in my opinion.

Yep, Brandon & his doofus handlers may just do that. Good luck finding anyone to fight with/for them.

quote:

Originally posted by Jester814:

quote:

Originally posted by RoverSig:
If we appease him, we will have Peace in Our Time.

Is this an idiom? If so, what does it mean?

"Peace in Our Time" is what Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain claimed he had achieved when he signed the Munich Pact in 1938, which averted war with Germany by giving the Sudetenland (part of Czechoslovakia) to Hitler. There is a parallel here with Putin saying he only wants the Ukraine, not Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Finland, etc. Chamberlain thought he had appeased Hitler, and the demands would stop, but just a little later Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia, and in 1939 invaded Poland...
.

Don't think there has been a Democrat prez in my lifetime with a foreign policy. Just sayin'

Is Ukraine blackmailing Biden into a losing WW3?

Disaster for America will come, and quickly, unless Biden stops the hurtling war-train. Except Ukraine may have a hold on him. Op-ed.

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/320983

Everybody saw “The Video.” What video? The video of then-Vice President Biden bragging that he had threatened to withhold billions of dollars in free US aid money if Ukraine didn’t fire the Ukrainian prosecutor who just so happened to be investigating the Ukrainian company in which his son Hunter was involved. Hunter, it seems, was reaping over $3,000,000 in “pay-to-play” payola for doing nothing and having zero experience in the company’s business affairs.



Even though allegedly, Ukrainian officials likely held tons of documentary evidence that Hunter Biden and Joe Biden conspired to defraud the American government with Biden Senior’s threats, nothing ever really surfaced. In fact, that is because then-President Donald Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives for actually following and properly executing the law and trying to uncover Ukrainian evidence of Biden-Sr.’s crimes.

Had Ukraine revealed that anti-Biden alleged criminal evidence, which it is claimed existed and still exists today, we would not be in the grips of what looks like a possible World War III. Today, even though

1)Ukraine is not part of NATO,


Even though allegedly, Ukrainian officials likely held tons of documentary evidence that Hunter Biden and Joe Biden conspired to defraud the American government with Biden Senior’s threats, nothing ever really surfaced. In fact, that is because then-President Donald Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives for actually following and properly executing the law and trying to uncover Ukrainian evidence of Biden-Sr.’s crimes.

Had Ukraine revealed that anti-Biden alleged criminal evidence, which it is claimed existed and still exists today, we would not be in the grips of what looks like a possible World War III. Today, even though

1)Ukraine is not part of NATO,

2) holds absolutely zero strategic value to the United States, and

3) holds huge strategic value to Russia,

the now President Biden is constantly escalating the conflict with Putin’s Russia to push the US into its first ever direct war with Russia. Disaster for America will come, and quickly, unless President Biden pulls the hurtling war-train off its tracks.

As a preliminary query, why does Biden - or America - care about the borders or “territorial integrity” of Crimea, or Eastern Ukraine for that matter? Biden certainly doesn’t care about the borders or “territorial integrity” of the United States of America. Shouldn’t defense, not only charity, begin at home? If President Biden and the Democrats don’t care a whit about the American border, I don’t care a farthing about anybody else’s border.

Historically, Britain and France fought what I believe is the most stupid war in the history of mankind when, in the 1800’s, they fought the Crimean War (aka “World War Zero”) defending Christian countries against the then-Islamic Ottoman Empire, prisoners of the now anacronistic theory of “keeping Imperial Tsarist Russia out of the Mediterranean Sea.” In retrospect, wouldn’t it be great if Russia was our partner in defending us from an Islamic Middle East?

Currently, President Biden:

has actively erased America’s sovereign southern border with Mexico, and invited and paid for millions of illegal immigrants who came into the county because borders are “racist.”

With no Southern border, China is pouring fentanyl into the country, murdering a hundred thousand Americans a year.
We’ve just catastrophically lost a 20-year war against the ‘backward’ Taliban in Afghanistan by picking up and leaving.
We are in the process of losing (if we have not already lost) the war we started in Iraq to the Iranians who are suctioning up Iraq and Syria one village at a time.
A nuclear armed North Korean is threatening 30,000 American soldiers in Korea.
Iran, the world’s greatest terrorist nation is on the cusp of nuclear weapons.
America is in the middle of a pandemic where American soldiers are being axed because they are Republicans or haven’t been injected with an experimental vaccine..

60% of Americans are against any war with Russia, and 0.01% of Americans might be able to find Ukraine on the world map. Oh, and by the way, we are idiotically pushing Russia into the welcoming arms of Communist China who is playing both Russia and America for the total idiots they are. Communist China is laughing all the way to the bank, and to control of the world, by letting the two other superpowers fight between themselves.

So, one would think America has enough problems inside its own country for America to recall and follow President George Washington’s sage admonition of “Beware of foreign entanglements.” But no, President Biden and his puppet-masters are intent on pushing America into an actual direct America v. Russia war.

Throughout its entire history, America has never fought a war against Russia. In fact, just the opposite. The Soviet Union and America defeated the greatest world threat ever (excluding the current Communist Chinese Regime), Adolf Hitler and his Nazi war machine. The war in North Korea of the 1950’s was only a proxy war with Russia, where it was an actual direct war with Communist China’s Mao Zedong, not the Soviet Union’s Stalin. Chairman Mao, not Stalin, sent over 1,500,000 Communist Chinese troops across the Yalu River into Korea to kill tens of thousands of American GIs in Korea.

There exists no rational overt reason to defend a bunch of Nazi-loving, Nazi-saluting Ukrainians who helped and participated in co-murdering millions of Jews in World War 2 with the Nazis. What logical overt reason does America have to start a war thousands of miles away with a Russia armed with hyper-sonic missiles, a home-game military advantage, short supply lines and a quasi-legitimate reason to keep NATO from encroaching onto its borders? What difference does it make if Ukraine joins NATO?None, except echo-chamber hyperbole mouthed by no-nothing media talking-heads, and a couple of Republicans who think warmongering with Russia helps their chances to be nominated for the 2024 Presidential race.

So, if there is no overt logical reason, we have to look for other covert “logical” reasons. And, the biggest most likely covert, very logical, but criminal, reason is that Ukraine may hold some extremely incriminating documentary evidence of criminal conduct in Biden’s pushing for the Ukrainian prosecutor, evidence that allegedly would land President Biden in jail.

Instead of impeaching President Trump for the Ukrainian “Perfect Call” where President Trump was digging into then Vice President Biden’s Ukrainian malfeasance, President Trump should have been given a medal. More importantly, had President Trump uncovered real evidence of Biden’s criminal actions, America wouldn’t now be facing a possible unnecessary war with Russia where America stands to lose hundreds, if not, thousands of American soldiers.

It will be the ultimate tragedy for America if the Democrats, in their blind partisan hate of Republicans and quest for absolute power, impeached President Trump for trying to uncover high-level corruption that would have simultaneously rooted out the real highest-level corruption, and avoided America losing World War 3 with a nuclear superpower.

quote:

Originally posted by apprentice:
China is buying farmland in American as fast as they can and offering more than it's worth to get it. They have already purchased Smithfield IIRC.

Yep, Smithfield was purchased by Shuanghui Group back in 2013.

China is the largest consumer of pork products in the world by a huge margin (2x more annually than all of the EU together, and 4x more than the US), most of which comes from imported pork. And Smithfield is the largest pork producer in the world.

Pork serves as a primary component of China's consumer price index/inflation gauge, and the Chinese government keeps tight control over pork prices, with generous subsidies to the pork industry and even the establishment of the world's only strategic pork reserve for price stabilization purposes.

All Chinese companies are controlled by the Chinese government to one extent or another. So by controlling the largest pork producer in the world, they have greater control over pork prices, and therefore greater control over their inflation rate and economic stability.

They're playing pork chess, not pork checkers.

quote:

Originally posted by selogic:
When the shit hits the fan , watch your 401k drop like a rock . The stock market doesn't like that kind of stuff .

Seeing what the stock market has done over the last three weeks, it may have already started.

quote:

Originally posted by reloader-1:

quote:

Originally posted by Lefty Sig:
^^^ Yes because China doesn't depend on imports except for luxury goods. They can make most of whatever they need.

And because the Chinese people cannot vote the CCP out of office, they pretty much have to go along with whatever happens. Great Depression and WWII level austerity here means the party in power will be thrown out of office.

Lefty, China is absolutely dependent on energy and food imports. They literally cannot feed themselves without imports…

Yes I know. I've spent a lot of time in China. But a lot of the reason for that is the 1B peasants that still farm using archaic methods. China's only hope for the future is to mechanize and industrialize farming like we have in the US to significantly increase yields, while freeing up labor to move to the cities and work in the factories as the population declines due to 40 years of the "one child" rule.

The US could halt food exports to China only to face the "you are making people starve" criticism in the media, which will result in us continuing "humanitarian" food exports to China. Because we can't make the people suffer because of a government disagreement.

China's belt and roads initiative has a lot to do with securing control over energy and food producers. Again, the long game.

quote:

Originally posted by Tirod:
China is buying farmland in American as fast as they can and offering more than it's worth to get it. They have already purchased Smithfield IIRC.

Japan. New York City. Belt And Road.

In the medium to long term, this is not something to worry about.

^^^NOT something to worry about...Please explain.

They can't pick it up and take it to China. In essence, buying land overseas makes a government hostage to the government that has jurisdiction over the land.

At the same time, buying land makes them subject to a local market they almost certainly have not researched and properly understood.

Finally, the combination of being 'foreign' landowners in rural America and the ChiCom's demonstrated ineptitude at person-on-person diplomacy means that they're not developing or picking up a constituency in America's heartland - no one's looking out for them, which is a bad position to be in if you're out in the country.

Japanese investors had pretty much the same problem when they bought up New York City in the 80's and 90's. One extended tough market period wiped almost all of them out and made their expensive holdings available to Americans at bargain prices.

The ChiComs have blown relationships with every other country that's participated in the Belt And Road Initiative at the same time that they've proven relatively inept at exploiting mines, farmland, factories and other similar properties. The way they run ports sucks too, but they buy ports to control access to shipping and provide themselves with nests from which to spy on other countries' air forces and navies.

We've all seen bad markets for farmland before - what tirod is referring to is simply one extreme in the pendulum's swing.

Sooner or later we'll take the ChiComs to the cleaners on all that farmland - and I think it'll begin when domestic pot growers start competing for farmland in more states. I say that because the pot growers have blown markets bigger in 'legal' states, and markets that have been blown bigger almost inevitably collapse - after all the "geniuses" have sunk their cash reserves into land already.

Oh, and wait 'til all those counties start demanding property taxes. The ChiComs think government involvement makes the companies buying farmland 'sovereign entities'. Under US law, it does not - which means that counties can seize property for non-payment of taxes and there isn't squat that Beijing can do about it unless Beijing actually pays the taxes.

quote:

Originally posted by WaterburyBob:

quote:

Originally posted by selogic:
When the shit hits the fan , watch your 401k drop like a rock . The stock market doesn't like that kind of stuff .

Seeing what the stock market has done over the last three weeks, it may have already started.

It may have, but the hit you'll take will depend upon how you're invested. Being retired, we're mostly invested conservatively. So, while we took a hit over the last week, it's only been about 3%. In the two weeks prior we saw little change. Were even up, once or twice.

Nonetheless: Loss is loss. Thus I'm rethinking some plans for the upcoming year. My thinking now is to sharply cut back on discretionary spending. If the trend continues we'll eliminate such spending entirely.