From Bloomberg:
Why NYC Apartment Buildings Are on Sale Now for 50% Off
Even in the crisp afternoon sunlight, the two-bedroom Manhattan apartment has a ghostly pallor, its cracked walls yellowing like an ancient black-and-white photograph. Paint chips are falling from the ceiling. A dead pigeon lies on the kitchen floor.
Its landlord, Douglas Peterson, is making a stop on a dispiriting tour of a 21-unit building he bought in 2018 for $4.8 million. Peterson’s City Skyline Realty Inc. specializes in a subgenre of real estateinvestment: properties subject to the New York City rent-regulation system, the oldest and biggest program in America. For this well-situated apartment on West 164th Street in Washington Heights, the quickly gentrifying Dominican enclave immortalized in a Lin-Manuel Miranda musical, he can charge no more than $650 a month, perhaps a quarter of the market rate.
For landlords the playbook had long been simple and lucrative. Buy run-down buildings that are, in New York lingo, rent-stabilized. Fix them up. Pass along the expense to tenants by raising rents, which was allowed under the regulations. Cash out. Repeat. Once rents approached $2,800 a month, owners could charge what the market would bear, and the apartments became a potential gold mine. “You just had to be patient,” Peterson says.
But his bet on raising rents has gone disastrously bad, as it has for landlords across the city. In 2019, alarmed about the decline in affordable housing, New York state lawmakers rewrote the rules. In one key change they sharply reduced how much landlords could raise rents after renovations. In an even more important shift, the apartments no longer leave the program when rents rise high enough.
Peterson—who’s bought more than 40 properties for $300 million over 20 years—is now in distress. He’s falling behind on his mortgages and scrambling to find money for repairs. In October, Fannie Mae, the government-backed home loan company, started foreclosure proceedings against a dozen of his properties, including the building on 164th Street. “My career is over,” Peterson says. “Now it’s just a question of: What’s my legacy going to be? Is it going to be that I abandoned the ship when it was sinking, or that I stayed and fought?”
Last year, New York buildings with at least one rent-stabilized apartment sold on average for $203,000 a unit, down 34% since 2019, according to Maverick Real Estate Partners, a New York investment manager. By contrast, the price of nonregulated apartments rose 23%. The value of rent-stabilized units declined by as much as $75 billion, Maverick found. In December the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. unloaded $15 billion in loans backed primarily by New York rent-stabilized apartments—at a 40% discount. Last week, amid concern over real estate exposure, shares of New York Community Bancorp Inc.—which holds about $37 billion in apartment loans, half backed by rent-regulated units—dropped 38% in a single day. “A lot of owners I’m speaking with want to walk away from buildings,” says Lazer Sternhell, chief executive officer of Cignature Realty Associates Inc. in the city.
First ….happy supper bowl
A lot of owners I’m speaking with want to walk away from buildings…
Friskies! Ba Ba Booey!
$835,000 for the “Staten Island” experience. What’s the Staten Island experience, you ask? It’s when the neighbor behind you on each side of you can hear your conversation when your on the phone while grilling. We’re approaching the million dollar cape at the Elmwood Park/Fair Lawn/Saddle Brook level.
https://www.trulia.com/home/229-homestead-rd-paramus-nj-07652-37994711
$848,000 for a small split on a busy double yellow road. And your property is basically in the school parking lot. Notice the beautiful view of the school from your yard when you entertain in this charmer! Your friend and family will be envious!
https://www.trulia.com/home/159-spring-valley-rd-paramus-nj-07652-37990563
$999,999. What the fuck did they do to the first floor? Is that two kitchens that crashed into each other? The whole thing is a mess!
https://www.trulia.com/home/565-otto-pl-paramus-nj-07652-37993282
The kids are fighting over the inheritance now that Mom has passed. One wants to lower the price and sell and one wants to grab as much as he can to go on that single’s cruise and buy a new car.
https://www.trulia.com/home/142-colonial-ave-saddle-brook-nj-07663-38028564
So, candidate #1 has a government document stating that he committed a crime but that he is so demented he doesn’t know he did it-currently in charge making decisions for the most powerful nation in America. That’s profound.
Candidate #2, well, he is a true capitalist. Demanding bills be paid. This is a guy who didn’t pay his bills, using “Force Majeure” as an excuse to not pay. Incited a riot, and now has invited Russia to “attack” them.
900k splits on S/A, boomer Eddie being generous giving Chex Mix to the kiddies, and Putin looking more sane even though he was making up history.
And today the masses are going to pray to some non-existent man in the sky who ain’t gonna do shite for them other than numb their neurons. In the meantime, America is turning into an apple with brown spots, a rotten core, and teaming with worms.
It’s over folks. Enjoy the game. Taylor will. Happy Sunday!
Headline: Trump stokes WW3
Donald Trump has been widely condemned, including by Republicans and former staff, for claiming (left) he would encourage Russia to attack NATO members who didn’t ‘pay up’. ‘No, I would not protect you, in fact I would encourage them (Russia) to do whatever the hell they want, you gotta pay! You gotta pay your bills,’
“So sayeth the shepherd. So sayeth the flock.” Hehe. Oh, and the ol’ women make less than men. 20k a month, she ain’t hurting, she be fibbin’
Florida private Christian school brands OnlyFans mom a ‘SINNER’ who’ll face ‘the judgement of Christ’ after expelling her sons over her $20,000-a-month X-rated career
Fast
That Paramus house is awful. Like a parody of IKEA
Religion up to no good again. Opium for the masses. Be sure to donate and pretend how pious you are.
Mormon church couldn’t care less about sex abuse victims, claims son of pedophile bishop who was ‘shielded’ by religious leader now charged with covering up crimes
Pennsylvania police have charged a local Mormon president with failing to report allegations of sex abuse made against a former bishop under his wing
Shawn Gooden was jailed last year after pleading guilty to charges including forcible sodomy and aggravated sexual battery of a minor in Virginia
His son, Matthew, claims the church knew of abuse allegations for two years but ‘kept it secret’ from the community, allowing his father to attend religious events
Cheap Azz greedy boomer homes. How much evidence do you need? At some point you have to say a cat is a cat, a dog is a dog, and a Boomer is greedy.
Well, unless you are Joe Biden. Cause unless you have dementia, or are blind, you have no excuse.
Hold my beer says:
February 11, 2024 at 9:35 am
Fast
That Paramus house is awful. Like a parody of IKEA
That kitchen is a perfect example of why I hate Bergen County real estate.
What women judges think about during murder trials. Mine probably didn’t like my suit, or the way my hair was parted, or was mocking my attorney’s genitals. No surprises here. You wonder why your justice system is so screwed up?
Just last week a woman judge was hitting up a client from her courtroom in a sex app. You can’t make this shite up.
A hat tip to all the engineers who developed the cameras and technology that allow you to peer into the thought process of those who have the ability to destroy your life, those held in high regard, those in authority. Once again your hard work has culminated in exposing them one at a time.
As the murder trial for a man accused of beating a toddler to death began in June, the thoughts of the Oklahoma judge overseeing the case allegedly drifted to the appearance of the prosecutor: “Why does he have baby hands? … They are so weird looking,” she texted the bailiff, according to a court petition filed against her.
He is “sweating thru his coat,” then-district judge Traci Soderstrom allegedly wrote about the prosecutor while he addressed the jury. “They (jurors) are going to hate him.”
When the defense attorney spoke, the judge took a different tone, according to the petition: “She’s awesome,” Soderstrom wrote. “Can I clap for her?”
Soderstrom, who was accused of exchanging about 500 texts with her bailiff, including messages that mocked the prosecutor’s genitals, objectified witnesses and called evidence “boring,” resigned Friday.
I take it Corporations don’t like Jury trials?
Delaware is dangerous for corporate America’: CEO who battled state’s ‘archaic’ Chancery Court for a decade backs Elon Musk’s vow to leave and says ALL companies should move
Delaware’s Chancery Court long played a role in attracting businesses to the state, with the promise of speedy resolution for complex business disputes.
Originally, New Jersey was known as America’s top corporate haven, thanks to laws in the state that limited the liability of officers and directors.
In the early 20th century, New Jersey repealed those protections, and companies fled to Delaware, which was one of the few other states at the time that allowed corporations to form without a special act of the legislature.
Ever since, Delaware has reigned supreme as the destination for incorporation, with two-thirds of the Fortune 500 filing there, in part due to the appeal of its specialized commercial litigation system.
Delaware’s Chancery Court does not use juries, and the judges who decide its cases, known as chancellors, have typically spent their entire careers in corporate litigation.
Few other states have a separate court system devoted specifically to equity law, meaning that complex shareholder lawsuits could end up in front of judges who hear all manner of cases, and be decided by juries of laypersons.
Great parents: Get out when you save 100k to buy a house. She does that, and thanks to Boomer, she is stuck in an apartment.
BOomer says ” no house for you. Eat Chex Mix.” Hehe. Buy 900K house in Staten Island.
Around 20 per cent of men and 12 percent of women between 25 and 34 years old lived at home last year, according to Census Bureau data.
This was the case with the Kaufman family’s daughter Ashley, who was told she would need to leave their Manhattan apartment once she had saved $100,000 for a down payment on a home.
She hit the goal at 25 but was still nervous to leave, worried she would miss out on time
with her siblings and the family’s pets. Her parents encouraged her to look for her own place anyway.
And just two short years later she is happily ensconced in her own apartment.
Have some humor this morning:
https://www.tiktok.com/@dailymail/video/7332145079097871658?q=apple%20vision%20pro&t=1707663714800
I can hear the outrage now…
Finland’s national airline carrier, Finnair, is asking its passengers to step on the scales along with their carry-on luggage to record their weights at the departure gate
Headline from the WaPo. So, using common sense, wouldn’t Left-wing judges do exactly the same?
Bring back Walter Cronkite. Please.
Right-wing judges flaunting their bias and conflicts threaten democracy
Fast: That house just looks cheap and tacky. I agree on the kitchen, it’s a mess. House house is just unappealing inside and out.
More lies. Nice job, Curtis. Hehe.
“Our guys have just taken down one of the migrant guys,” Mr. Sliwa told the host, Sean Hannity. The camera panned to show several Guardian Angels surrounding a man, then pulling him to the ground. Mr. Sliwa then accused the man of shoplifting — wrongly, according to the police.
“We gave him a little pain compliance,” Mr. Sliwa said. “His mother back in Venezuela felt the vibrations.”
The man, who has not been named, turned out to be a Bronx resident. The incident has set off fears of vigilantism against immigrants — or anyone who might be identified as one — in New York.
Time to arrest the “Guardian Angels” Hehe.
chi, from a few days ago…
Aswath Damodaran…funny you bring up his name. I’ve downsized substantially so what I have I’ve taken with intention. I have with me still the materials for his Valuation course at Stern from likely the early 90s, stamped with NYU bookstore logo and (cheap) purchase price.
High value.
If you recommend the video to anyone have them put it at 1.5x speed. Dude is slow talker.
Also, pretty funny to watch the Sunday morning liberal talk show hosts backpedal quickly from ‘a win for Biden’ to realizing what a hit job that Special Prosecutor’s report will be for Slow Joe come Sept-Nov….
Story about the NY Times putting sleepy Joe in the retirement home.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13071135/joe-biden-new-york-times-warning.html
The democrats have no hesitation when it comes to putting three bullets into the back of the head of one of their own. O’Biden is cooked but if they bypass Carmella and put that snake from California up front, their admitting she was a token and proving what we knew all along; that the democrats are all about symbols, gestures and gaining power, not serving the office.
Hehe. Now that’s funny.
‘The impression the president gives in public is not senility so much as extreme frailty, like a lightbulb that still burns so long as you keep it on a dimmer.’
Take out the rest of the trash now, like Glitchy McConnell and Naughty Nancy Pelosi.
Cut ’em off at 67. Pass a law.
Glitchy McConnell and Naughty Nancy
Glitchy Mitch and Naughty Nancy… is that a book or a movie?
Or both?
Trump: Pay up NATO or I’ll sic Vlad on you!
Such a New York move. Lol. He’s fucking nuts, we need him in office.
11:46 New York is about to ruin Trump financially effectively running his retarded ass out of town.
Eddie,
Your MoscowOrangeBoy will just cause everyone to get their own nukes not just in Europe, but in Asia. NATO has 2 jobs, keep Germany in check and Russians out of Europe.
If USA’s protection umbrella aka Pax Americana disappears. Expect a nasty worldwide war tech race at every level as each country will leverage what they are best at, like in Russia’s case of just throwing bodies until they win.
It will be very nasty. A taste of it is the emboldened Venenzuela with Cuban, Russian and Iranian help for its 200k+ Army va Guyana’s 3k.
NATO was not established to keep Germany in check.
3b,
One of NATO’s job was to keep West Germany involve as a stalwart and bulwark of NATO against the Warsaw Pact. It was the new “mission” to make sure it did not stray the third time around. There is a reason that Thatcher opposed reunification, one of her sayings was “ I like Germany so much that I prefer two of them”.
West Germany’s BND was birthed by the CIA to keep West Germany safe from East German Statsi (look up Chancellor Willy Brandt and the Guillaume affair) and older surviving fascist.
If you want a bit of old Cold War feel. Watch “Kleo” in Netflix. Also Deutschland ‘83, ‘86, ‘89 in Hulu. And the movie “Other people’s lives”. All are in German.
New York is about to ruin Trump financially effectively running his retarded ass out of town.
Is that before or after that Russian collusion report is released?
The Lives of Others is a great movie
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YsShZNHmpGE&pp=ygUab3RoZXIgcGVvcGxlJ3MgbGl2ZXMgbW92aWU%3D
I see the Dem duds have shown up to whine about mean Trump’s un-diplomatic way of telling our useless, limp-wristed ‘allies’ to either pay what they promised to pay to support NATO, or prepare to defend themselves. Boo hoo!
It’s especially funny to see ELRO fret about Trump potentially pulling back the USA’s protection umbrella. Meanwhile, no mention of the fact that under SlowJoe’s watch, that protection umbrella no longer even extends to it’s own southern border, and the military’s focus on recruiting trannies and drag queens — instead of focusing on readiness and capabilities — has made it such that the Navy can’t even successfully protect commercial ships from Houthi pea shooters. As for Pax Americana, Joe killed that as well — witness the wars that started under Joe’s watch in both Europe and the middle east.
Correction is “Lives of Others”
Small Con,
Blame W Bush for his war profiteering adventures and Paul Ryan that made benefits for enlisted career folks crappier and more expensive. At anytime roughly 30+% of enlisted personnel and their families qualify for food stamps.
Have you donated to the Army Relief Fund or any of the other services charities? Of course not you are what your name says. A dim witted, small minded, small handed and small package like your Orange draft dodging traitor.
Small con,
Show receipts of donations and I’ll take you more seriously.
https://www.militaryonesource.mil/resources/tools/military-relief-organizations-and-emergency-financial-help/
Caught this beauty behind Bloomberg’s paywall.
Opinion
Niall Ferguson,
Columnist
If You Think World War III Is Unimaginable, Read This
Novelists and filmmakers have long developed alternative histories of major conflicts that should serve as warnings for complacent Americans.
February 11, 2024 at 12:00 AM EST
By Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the author, most recently, of “Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe.”
Are we unable to imagine defeat?
You might have thought that, having so recently lost a small war, Americans would have no difficulty picturing the consequences of losing a large one. But the humiliating abandonment of Afghanistan in 2021 has been consigned with remarkable swiftness to the collective memory hole.
Presumably a similar process would occur if at some future date the Ukrainian army, starved of ammunition, were overrun by its Russian adversaries. A year ago, US President Joe Biden traveled to Kyiv and told Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskiy: “You remind us that freedom is priceless; it’s worth fighting for as long as it takes. And that’s how long we’re going to be with you, Mr. President: for as long as it takes.” That turned out to mean, “For as long as it takes House Republicans to oust Speaker Kevin McCarthy and cut off aid to Ukraine.” (McCarthy was gone by early October.)
And how will we react if — say, later this year — we are informed that Iran has successfully built a nuclear weapon and has unleashed its proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah, to rain missiles down on Israel? Will we threaten to use our own nuclear weapons against Iran to save Israel from destruction, as we threatened to the Soviet Union in 1973, when it considered intervening on the Arab side in the Yom Kippur War? Or will Washington issue yet another of its warnings to Israel not to “escalate” the struggle for its own survival?
Or what if we hear news that Taiwan has been blockaded by the People’s Liberation Army and that the president has decided — after carefully reviewing the considerable risk of starting World War III — not to send a naval expeditionary force to enforce freedom of navigation and supply the Taiwanese people with weapons and essential supplies?
How much attention will we devote to the end of Taiwan’s democracy and the imposition of Chinese Communist Party rule on its people? More than we pay to the next Grammy awards ceremony or Super Bowl?
I fervently hope none of these grim scenarios comes to pass. However, especially when I recollect the fall of Kabul in 2021, I find it hard to dismiss the idea that we might acquiesce quite insouciantly in all three cases. And the only explanation I can find for this is that Americans, deep in their hearts, do not think that defeat applies to them.
I can see why. The costs of defeat in Vietnam in 1975 were borne not by Americans but by the citizens of South Vietnam, just as the costs of defeat in Afghanistan were mostly borne by the Afghan people. The men and women who served in America’s most recent wars were a tiny fraction of the population. Those who died were long ago buried; those who suffered severe physical or mental injury are out of sight and out of mind.
Under these circumstances, it is very difficult indeed to make the following argument stick: If the US allows Ukraine, Israel and/or Taiwan to be overrun by their adversaries, there will be dire consequences for Americans, too. And by “dire consequences,” I mean something considerably worse than another 9/11.
Re-reading Len Deighton’s novel SS-GB reminded me that, not so very long ago, Britons could readily imagine the consequences of defeat. Published in 1978, SS-GB vividly depicts life in the UK following a successful German invasion of England in 1940. The story unfolds less than a year after the British surrender. The King is a prisoner in the Tower of London. Winston Churchill is dead, having been tried and executed in Berlin. There is a puppet government, as in France, but power is really in the hands of the German “Military Commander GB.”
Born in London in 1929, Deighton had come close enough to disaster in the Battle of Britain and the Blitz to make his depiction of Nazi-occupied London entirely plausible. Moreover, he was writing at a time when life in Britain had more than a whiff of defeat about it. Dogged by stagflation, the UK economy in the 1970s was the sick man of Europe; West Germany, by contrast, was still the land of the economic miracle.
Deighton’s central character is not a hero of the Resistance, but a collaborator. Yet so sympathetically is Detective Superintendent Douglas Archer presented that the reader does not condemn him, but rather identifies with him. Archer’s wife has been killed and his home destroyed during the final defense of London. He lives with his young son in cramped and chilly lodgings. For young Douggie’s sake, life must go on and homicides must be investigated, even if that means reporting to an SS Gruppenführer: “Archer had not been a soldier. As long as the Germans let him get on with the job of catching murderers, he’d do his work as he’d always done it.”
By comparison with Robert Harris’s more ambitious Fatherland — published in 1992 and set long after a German victory — SS-GB is imbued with gritty realism. You can almost smell the soot and smog of a bombed-out, broken-down London. Deighton, who was no mean historian, convincingly depicts the interagency feuds that played out across Hitler’s Third Reich. He plausibly assumes that, with Britain vanquished, Hitler has no need to break the Nazi-Soviet Pact and invade the Soviet Union, while the US can remain neutral. And Deighton keeps the British Resistance so shadowy that its bombing of a “German-Soviet Friendship Week” ceremony at Highgate Cemetery (an inspired scene) strikes the reader as a terrorist outrage rather than an act of freedom-fighting heroism. When Archer is reluctantly drawn into the Resistance, his part in the attempt to liberate the King is a shabby fiasco.
A quarter of a century has passed since I persuaded Andrew Roberts to write a chapter of the book Virtual History devoted to the historical plausibility of Deighton’s scenario. I vividly recall the cold sweat his first draft induced, with its detailed quotations from the documents in which the Germans had meticulously set out their plans for invading, defeating and occupying England. Even to us children of the 1960s, it all still seemed horribly immanent, especially the list of names of people to be arrested.
Under certain circumstances, imagining defeat can sap your morale. But it can also focus the mind on the burning imperative not to lose. Ukrainians have no difficulty imagining what defeat would mean today. They have seen the bodies strewn in the streets of Bucha after the Russian execution spree of September 2022. They know the horrors of which Putin’s colonial army is capable. Likewise, most Israelis understand only too well that victory for Hamas and its backers would be the prelude to a second Holocaust. They will never forget the hideous atrocities perpetrated last Oct. 7.
But few if any Americans think this way. It is now exactly 40 years since the release of Red Dawn, one of the few commercially successful attempts to envision a Soviet invasion of the US. Patrick Swayze plays Jed Eckert, one of a group of high school heroes who take to the hills of Colorado to fight the invaders in a succession of Rambo-esque battles. It is hard to imagine such a movie getting made today. The closest thing is Leave the World Behind, which vividly depicts the chaos into which this country would descend if all our technology — from our iPhones to our Teslas — simultaneously stopped working. Cleverly, or perhaps evasively, the film does not specify who or what is behind the cataclysmic outage.
Yet the American relationship to disaster movies has always struck me as rather different from the British one. Fans of Doctor Who, Britain’s longest-running science fiction series, regularly see disaster befall London. No matter how bizarre the alien invaders, there is always some allusion to the Blitz, to remind viewers that terror can indeed descend from the skies above the nation’s capital. But when Americans watched Contagion (2011), few appear to have imagined a real pandemic sweeping the land. When one arrived in the early months of 2020, I still remember the deep-seated reluctance of even well-educated people to believe that Covid-19 was something a lot more serious than seasonal influenza.
When Americans switch on their flat-screen TVs, they seriously want to Leave the World Behind. Rather than contemplate dystopian futures, they prefer to immerse themselves in the Taylor Swift cult — a form of mass escapism that recalls the mania for screen goddesses in the isolationist 1930s.
Here, then, is the movie nobody is going to make. Sometime this year, the Chinese blockade Taiwan — or maybe it’s the Philippines. Or maybe North Korea launches missile against South Korea. But let’s go with Taiwan.
The first thing that would come up in the White House Situation Room would be a request from the Taiwanese government for a US naval force to lift the blockade and restore freedom of navigation. That would need to consist of at least two aircraft carrier strike groups and a significant number of attack submarines.
Now that would be possible even if it had to happen tomorrow. Only one carrier is in the Red Sea right now, the Eisenhower. The Carl Vinson and the Theodore Roosevelt are off the Philippines. The Ronald Reagan is in Japanese waters.
But before those ships could even set off for the Taiwan Strait, Wall Street would be in panic mode. Stocks would be down 20%. Apple would be down 50% (because so much of its hardware is still made in China); Nvidia too (because so many of its chips are made in Taiwan). The dollar would rally on international markets, as you would expect in any crisis, but there might well be a general bank run at home, with people lining up at the ATMs.
As in the financial crisis and the Covid pandemic, such a dash for liquidity might prompt calls for yet another round of quantitative easing and rate cuts, though Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell might fret about the inflationary risks to his cherished 2% inflation target.
Matters would not get easier if China were able to attack the US carrier groups with either missiles or drone swarms. The president would also have to make a quick decision on whether to approve Japanese attacks on Chinese missile and air bases (assuming, that is, the Japanese were game). He would be reminded by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that, in the case of a shooting war, the US would run out of certain key weapons, notably long-range anti-ship missiles, within a week.
And all this would be going on — if it happened this year — in the middle of an election, with most-likely Republican candidate Donald Trump berating Biden for either starting another “forever war” or for showing weakness by doing the opposite, while Chinese-owned TikTok would be busy persuading young Americans of the moral necessity of Taiwan’s “reunification” with the mainland.
Any successful Chinese disruption of the country’s telecommunications infrastructure — as imagined in Leave the World Behind — would with high probability unleash chaos in major cities.
Now all you have to imagine — after communications were restored— is Vice President Kamala Harris announcing the new policy of “Asianization” (by analogy with Vietnamization in 1969), which would mean bringing all those American troops back home. This would be followed by live coverage of President Xi Jinping’s arrival in Taipei. Finally, a week later, the foreign ministers of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea would meet in Beijing to announce the formation of the Greater Eurasian Co-prosperity Sphere.
All this may strike you as whimsical or fantastical. But it is not a great deal more outlandish than the extraordinary global upheaval that began at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. And we must remember that, for contemporaries, it was far from clear — until the success of the D-Day landings two and a half years later — that the Allies would ultimately win the war.
The interesting thing is to imagine daily life in CCP-US. At first, quite normal, aside from a lot of burnt-out inner cities and an influx of newly demobilized soldiers and sailors. Taylor Swift would probably keep singing and the Kansas City Chiefs keep playing. Only gradually would our friends from Beijing start to make their presence felt.
Only after a few months would you start to worry seriously about what you might have said in your phone calls and emails and old columns. And then you would start to delete things. And then you would have to worry that deletion didn’t really get rid of those offending words because they were backed up on the big-tech servers regardless.
Some would collaborate. Some would resist. Most would acquiesce. This is how Len Deighton sets the scene in SS-GB:
Some said there had not been even one clear week of sunshine since the cease-fire. It was easy to believe. Today the air was damp, and the colourless sun only just visible through the grey clouds, like an empty plate on a dirty tablecloth. And yet even a born and bred Londoner, such as Douglas Archer, could walk down Curzon Street, and with eyes half-closed, see little or no change from the previous year. The Soldatenkino sign outside the Curzon cinema was small and discreet, and only if you tried to enter the Mirabelle restaurant did a top-hatted doorman whisper that it was now used exclusively by Staff Officers from Air Fleet 8 Headquarters, across the road in the old Ministry of Education offices. And if your eyes remained half-closed you missed the signs that said “Jewish Undertaking” and effectively kept all but the boldest customers out. And in September of that year 1941, Douglas Archer, in common with most of his compatriots, was keeping his eyes half-closed.
Speaking for myself, I would loathe nothing more than to walk around New York or San Francisco with my eyes half-closed, to avoid noticing the telltale signs of CCP surveillance.
But if you don’t open your eyes — and open them wide — to the plausible scenario of defeat right now, then you run the risk of one day having to do precisely that.
Ferguson is also the founder of Greenmantle, an advisory firm, FourWinds Research, Hunting Tower, a venture capital partnership, and the filmmaker Chimerica Media.
“NATO has 2 jobs, keep Germany in check….”
In what fucking decade are you living?
If you’re going to post shit this stupid, at least use your real handle. Or are even you so embarrassed you don’t want it associated with you?
From throwaway-handle’s screed post of Niall Ferguson….
“Will we threaten to use our own nuclear weapons against Iran to save Israel from destruction, as we threatened to the Soviet Union in 1973…”
Uh, no. The Israelis have had nukes now for decades and they actually have the balls and therefore respect of their adversaries in international affairs unlike the current eunuchs in the White House…
“The costs of defeat in Vietnam in 1975 were borne not by Americans…”
Yeah, tell it to these parents, asshole…
https://worldstrides.com/blog/2014/12/vietnam-veterans-memorial/
And better, for your dumb-ass leftward leanings…Niall who? I know well of this douchebag…not worth your time. From wiki…
“Ferguson was an advisor to John McCain’s U.S. presidential campaign in 2008, supported Mitt Romney in his 2012 campaign, and was a vocal critic of Barack Obama.”
Leftie,
What’s wrong? Did the judge told you to pay more alimony?
Are you an investor in City Skyline Realty? Is it your Canned Pancake Investment?
Are you that desperate to be OrangeTraitor bottom bitch? Did you apply for his diaper changer position?
FBW….no.
But I’m transparent.
Who are you, coward?
Taylor, save the Chiefs!! For the love of God, save the Chiefs!!
Women walking into churches with a kid and a gun. Looks like feminism is making women more like men everyday as America devolves from the inside.
And if Slow no brain Joe is not mentally running the country, the question is, exactly who is?
A boy was critically injured on Sunday afternoon after a woman opened fire at a Christian megachurch in Houston led by Joel Osteen, the televangelist and pastor, the authorities said.
At just before 2 p.m., the woman, holding a rifle, wearing a trench coat and carrying a backpack, entered Lakewood Church, among the largest congregations in the United States. She came with a boy of about 4 or 5 years old, Chief Troy Finner of the Houston Police Department said at a news conference on Sunday.
Horrendous play calls by Chiefs inside 10. Two runs by WR? Made no sense.
3:34 This report confirms that President Donald Trump colluded with Russia during the 2016 election. It confirms the worst suspicions about Trump’s relationship with Russia, filling in the holes left in the report from former special counsel Robert Mueller. As Trump excuses Russian President Vladimir Putin placing bounties on U.S. troops and Russia continues to interfere in our democracy to aid Trump’s reelection, this report makes clear that there is no such thing as a coincidence with Trump and Russia.
The report from the Republican-led panel details close political coordination among the Trump campaign, Wikileaks, and Russian intelligence and operatives in 2016. At the most pivotal moment of that campaign, when the Access Hollywood tape revealing President Trump’s confession of a lifetime of sexual assault, Trump’s confidante Roger Stone successfully requested that Russia’s illegally hacked materials be released immediately.
IIIINNNNNNN-SSSUUURRRRR -EEEE-RRRRRR-ECHCHCHCHCUNNNNN!
DUH-MA-CRAAAAZZZZEEEEEEE IS DY-IIIINNNGGGGG!
RUUUUUUUUSSSSSSHHHHHH-AAAAAAAHHHHH (he says as he relieves himself…)
Whats with all the phony names???
People afraid to expose themselves when they send out bull.
Grim why don’t you expose them? Chickens hiding behind the screen names.
Was that halftime show some sort of call to arms?
Or some type of insur-erection?
It might be one person using multiple screen names.
Taylor is having fun.
Maybe she will write a happiness song for a change.
Heheheh
You said penis
The penis mightier
Interested in fact based espionage and ungentlemanly officers and spies? Try reading Beyond Enkription. It is an enthralling unadulterated fact based autobiographical spy thriller and a super read as long as you don’t expect John le Carré’s delicate diction, sophisticated syntax and placid plots.
What is interesting is that this book is apparently mandatory reading in some countries’ intelligence agencies’ induction programs. Why? Maybe because the book has been heralded by those who should know as “being up there with My Silent War by Kim Philby and No Other Choice by George Blake”. Maybe because Bill Fairclough (the author) deviously dissects unusual topics, for example, by using real situations relating to how much agents are kept in the dark by their spy-masters and (surprisingly) vice versa.
The action is set in 1974 about a real British accountant who worked in Coopers & Lybrand (now PwC) in London, Nassau, Miami and Port au Prince. Simultaneously he unwittingly worked for MI6. In later books (when employed by Citicorp and Barclays) he knowingly worked for not only British Intelligence but also the CIA.
It’s a must read for espionage cognoscenti but do read some of the latest news articles in TheBurlingtonFiles website before plunging into Beyond Enkription. You’ll soon be immersed in a whole new world which you won’t want to exit.
See https://theburlingtonfiles.org/news_2023_06.07.php and https://theburlingtonfiles.org/news_2022.10.31.php.