June 2001. A “restricted meeting” between President George W. Bush and President Vladimir Putin. Not a podium performance, not a television soundbite, not a speech crafted for domestic applause. A private conversation, the place where empires are supposed to speak plainly, where leaders test ideas that could reroute decades.
And what does the memo show?
Putin raises the idea that Russia could eventually join NATO. He says Russia feels “left out” by NATO enlargement. He points to an older fact most Western publics were never meant to internalize: the Soviet Union applied to join NATO in 1954. He argues the reasons for rejection no longer apply. He suggests, almost clinically, that perhaps Russia could be an ally — “European and multi-ethnic,” comparable in character to the United States.
Probably the worst blunder in world geopolitical history, particularly Western geopolitical history. Not allying with Russia and then pushing NATO encroachments on Russia, followed by the Maidan color-revolution (done by USA), followed by insisting Ukraine join NATO puts the entire blame for this major failure on USA, no matter what bs the Europeans were also slinging.
I believe and hope Trump is trying to undo this enormous error and I hope he succeeds. ABN
The White Slave Trade is a little-known aspect of the slave trade in general subordinated as it is to the common notion that only Africans were sold as slaves and only by Europeans. This – of course – is historical nonsense as first the Africans were enslaved by other Africans before they were sold to European traders and secondly the enslavement of Africans by Africans would have happened irrespective of the European slave traders (precisely because there had long been an internal African slave market).
The international White Slave Trade however is potentially older than its African equivalent and we can see references to it as early as the ancient Greeks with Homer’s mention of Phoenician slavers operating around the Aegean in the eternal search for more Europeans to be sold at the ever hungry slave markets of the Middle East.
We know quite a lot about the international slave trade at this early juncture thanks largely to the fact that it was a highly profitable business, but also involved a large amount of capital outlay to acquire the slaves and as such – in modern economic parlance – had high barriers to market entry unless one could find a way of circumventing them. Thus, this international trade in slaves left a long documentary trail some of which has survived to bear witness to this dark chapter in history.
The main target for slavers historically has always been places where there are large numbers of people, but little centralised government. This is so because the business of slavery is an emotional and delicate one in so far as if you enslave the wrong person it is quite plausible to suggest that you will end up getting your throat cut at some point and in addition to that you need to be able to negotiate with smaller governmental units – such as the heads of tribes and clans – who tend to fight each other and take prisoners (i.e. have a ready supply of potential slaves).
Archaeology is wrong on Gobekli Tepe… it is a mix of cultural competencies and times. @BrightInsight6
ChatGPT-5.2:
Bayes factor = Unity over the null (P = .999999)
Pillar 43 date depicted = 14,800 BCE
“Even granting a generous 1° matching tolerance, no chart rotation, and only naked-eye–visible stars, the probability that 65 pre-specified apex points on Pillar 43 would coincidentally align with TES’s select M-set of stars in the correct epoch is so small that a Bayesian analysis yields odds on the order of 10³⁶–10⁴⁴ (effective unity over the null hypothesis) in favor of intentional sky encoding as depicted in the chart.
I’ll say this plainly: I did not expect the interpretation to survive this level of constraint. Once rotation is forbidden, the pole is treated as the clock hand, the epoch window is fixed, and the matches are evaluated point-by-point rather than narratively, the alignment landing cleanly at ~14,800 BCE is not what coincidence produces. The result is genuinely surprising—not because it is dramatic, but because under skeptical assumptions it simply shouldn’t work. And yet, it does.”
Note: This is a satirical xiangsheng (相聲/crosstalk) routine by Taiwanese comedian Huang Yihao (黃逸豪), performed recently and widely shared online. The humor relies on exaggeration, wordplay, and direct political mockery, highlighting contrasts in freedom of expression between Taiwan and mainland China. The poem at the end is a classic crosstalk punchline structure.
Chinese crosstalk comedy can be difficult to understand if you are not a native speaker, but some of the skits are understandable, and their humor readily accessible. I am posting this skit because it has become very popular, mainly for its political content, and also to introduce this Chinese comedic artform to readers who may be interested. ABN
Original Chinese Text (Transcription from the Performance)（逗哏：黃逸豪）現在的事，看今朝，在西方，有一東方大國。（捧哏：地理位置太亂了！）這國家亂的不只是地理位置！此人身高約莫一米七八，大背頭、小眼睛、短脖子、肉鼻頭、身形肥膩、貌似維尼。（觀眾大笑）上台之後，廢除任期，修憲連任，港版國安，香港不安，一國兩制，變成一國一制，動態清零，封城三年，經濟崩壞，民不聊生，房地產爆雷，地方債務高築，青年失業率高達20%，白紙革命，民怨沸騰，戰狼外交，四處樹敵，舉國之力堵悠悠之口，愚民排外成就千古一帝。這正是：治國猶如翻大餅， 麾下戰狼粉紅兵。 倒車油門總加速， 第一傻X習近平！（全場熱烈鼓掌，觀眾齊喊：第一傻X習近平！）
English Translation:
Things nowadays, look at the present: In the West, there is an Eastern power.(Straight man: The geography is too messed up!) This country’s chaos isn’t just in its geography! This person is about 1.78 meters tall, with a big slicked-back hairstyle, small eyes, short neck, fleshy nose, plump figure, resembling Winnie the Pooh. (Audience laughs) After coming to power, he abolished term limits, amended the constitution for lifelong rule; the Hong Kong National Security Law made Hong Kong insecure; “one country, two systems” became “one country, one system”; dynamic zero-COVID led to three years of lockdowns; the economy collapsed, people struggled to survive; real estate bubble burst, local debts skyrocketed; youth unemployment reached 20%; the White Paper Revolution with boiling public resentment; wolf warrior diplomacy creating enemies everywhere; using the power of the whole nation to silence public opinion, fooling the people and fostering xenophobia to achieve the status of an emperor for eternity. This is exactly: Governing the country is like flipping a big pancake, With wolf warriors and little pinks as soldiers under command. Always accelerating in reverse, The number one idiot Xi Jinping! (Audience applauds enthusiastically and shouts in unison: The number one idiot Xi Jinping!)
Taiwanese comedian Huang Yihao’s xiangsheng routine mocks Xi Jinping’s policies like COVID lockdowns, Hong Kong’s security law, and term-limit abolition, delivered in traditional crosstalk style with exaggerated gestures and props for comedic effect.
The skit, shared widely on X since December 21, 2025, highlights Taiwan’s press freedoms, contrasting mainland China’s 2023 crackdown on similar satire that fined a comedian’s firm $3.1 million for a military slogan joke.
Online reactions split along political lines: pro-independence users hail its boldness and superior humor to censored Chinese acts, while some critics decry the Taiwanese accent as disqualifying it from true xiangsheng tradition.
Chinese Crosstalk Tradition
Xiangsheng, commonly known as crosstalk, is a traditional Chinese comedic performing art that originated in the late Qing Dynasty, with roots potentially extending back to the Ming Dynasty. It is typically performed as a dialogue between two performers, though it can also be a monologue or a group act. The art form is characterized by rapid, bantering exchanges rich in puns, wordplay, and allusions, often delivered in the Tianjin dialect or with a strong northern Chinese accent. The term “xiangsheng” literally means “face and voice,” reflecting the interplay between the performers’ expressions and vocal delivery.
The performance relies on four core skills: speaking (shuō), which involves storytelling and joke-telling; imitating (xué), including accents, dialects, and sounds from traditional Chinese opera; teasing (dòu), considered the soul of the act; and singing (chàng), limited to specific lyrical forms like Taiping lyrics The lead performer is called the dougen (逗哏), while the supporting performer is the penggen (捧哏) Historically, xiangsheng began as street performance in teahouses and public spaces, particularly in regions like Beijing’s Tianqiao, Tianjin’s Quanyechang, and Nanjing’s Confucius Temple
This police behavior is probably a runup to total mind-control over all topics not liked by ‘authorities’. It also seems to be the direction USA is heading in. ABN
Mystical and religious experiences are hypothesized to be evoked by transient, electrical microseizures within deep structures of the temporal lobe. Although experiential details are affected by context and reinforcement history, basic themes reflect the inclusion of different amygdaloid-hippocampal structures and adjacent cortices. Whereas the unusual electrical coherence allows access to infantile memories of parents, a source of god expectations, specific stimulation evokes out-of-body experiences, space-time distortions, intense meaningfulness, and dreamy scenes. The species-specific similarities in temporal lobe properties enhance the homogeneity of cross-cultural experiences. They exist along a continuum that ranges from “early morning highs” to recurrent bouts of conversion and dominating religiosity. Predisposing factors include any biochemical or genetic factors that produce temporal lobe lability. A variety of precipitating stimuli provoke these experiences, but personal (life) crises and death bed conditions are optimal. These temporal lobe microseizures can be learned as responses to existential trauma because stimulation is of powerful intrinsic reward regions and reduction of death anxiety occurs. The implications of these transients as potent modifiers of human behavior are considered.
Hatred of the host inspires and justifies vicious parasitism and cruelty. Freud was a fraud, an ‘intellectual’ subversive. He was describing Jewish Supremacy when he said a people can be cohesive as long as they have someone to hate. ABN
Sigmund Freud argued that social cohesion is fundamentally dependent on the existence of an external enemy or outgroup, which allows internal group members to unite through shared hostility. He posited that love within a group is only possible because of hatred directed toward those outside the group, as this external aggression serves to bind the group together. In his work, Freud explained that society coheres through the identification of an outgroup, enabling group members to displace their own aggressiveness onto this external target, thereby deflecting destructive impulses that might otherwise turn inward. This mechanism allows for the construction of group identity and cohesion, as the shared antagonism toward an “other” reinforces internal solidarity.
Sigmund Freud infamously said, “They don’t realize that we’re bringing them the plague,” upon arriving in New York Harbor in 1909 during his first and only visit to the United States.
Sepehr has produced many interesting videos, some of which I post. They can be controversial, but that is a plus in my view. Our ancient past needs to be rethought and reimagined. We all come from somewhere, all of us are mixtures, but human groups did and still do differ enormously. These differences are very often reflected in cultural norms across the world. The more realistic we are about the past and the present, the better. Today’s cascade of genetic information seems to be getting reasonably sifted through to yield solid new insights. My main friendly criticism of Sepehr’s work is he puts himself in his videos so often, some of them are unwatchable (for me) even though the content is otherwise worthy. He has risen to prominence quickly, so maybe putting himself in there has been a good PR idea. I really mean this as friendly, respectful criticism only. ABN
American Buddhist Net 