Should 5% appear to small, be thankful I mutate at all, because I'm the X-man!

South Africa’s Racist EFF Leader Vows to Take the Farmlands and Redistribute to “Our People”
February 10, 2024

Conservative Hungarian President Novak Resigns on Live TV
February 11, 2024

Listening to the first part of Putin's interview.  Don't know why I was thinking he could speak English.  Maybe he could back in his KGB days, but he's gotten through a few decades since, so he's probably forgotten most of what he knew.  Or he'll just keep it hidden until it's needed, whatever.  No clue if the interviewer remotely understands Russian so that must have been tricky.

I had the same reaction when I read War and Peace many years ago, old-time Russian translated to English and read by someone who speaks modern American and it was still one of the greatest written works I've ever experienced.  [Did Tolstoy write it in Russian?  I have some vague memory of hearing that he actually wrote in French, like Russian nobility used it for writing, but can't find any example or explanation.]

Anyway, Putin starts off the interview with a long explanation of the historical origins of the Russia/Ukraine thing.  It's interesting for what it is, starting out in the 800s, but the specific examples he used were less important to me than the agreements he was citing as the foundation for Russia as a nation, and by extension, Poland and Hungary.  The people form their respective nations over history and they aren't giving it up.  

This lines up with the opinion I've had for the last two years, that this isn't any of our business.  You can conquer them with war, eradicate them with nukes or accept that they are their own people with their own problems.  You're not going to change them, get over it.  If Ukraine is its own nation, they're not going to submit to Russia, which would explain the last several centuries.  Yet the Ukraine supporters line up with our tyrants and all insist that they can just make everything new.

Continued listening, mostly as background noise, but there's still a vast difference from what we're used to from our rulers.  Putin probably has almost as few people who disagree with him as Biden and has been in charge for a lot longer, so it's interesting to hear how he's responding to a standard American media figure.  Not used to being talked to this way, even when dealing with westerners, but he's trying to stay polite.  Your mileage may vary on if he succeeds, but he maintains a coherent, knowledgeable viewpoint throughout.

Your mileage may also vary on Trump, but at least he has to fill stadiums without special effects or a rock band.  Putin manages to stay rational and thoughtful for a couple hours.  Joe Biden is totally against that and that's the way our rulers want it.

Towards the end, there's a question about some event I haven't followed, Russia has had an American in prison for a year or so, who Putin says he was working for US special services and had somehow taken classified information.  News to me, I didn't even catch the guy's name, but classified information?  Really?  Even Russia has problems with this?

The reason this stuck out to me is because it's obviously relevant to the issues we're having.  There's Hillary's unsecure private server while she's dealing with Russia to get lies about Trump, there's Biden and Mike Pence keeping classified documents at home, there's the attack on Trump, there's Hunter Biden and those are just the ones we can name right now.

This also lines up with the people who've been jailed without trial since 1/6/2021.  Which people can you jail and why, at least according to "international law"?  Whatever the law is, does the US intend to follow it or not?  Or do they only expect others to do that?  Is this the sort of thing that's kept secret?

Biden Looks Like Doddering Old Man as He Shuffles Out of Clothing Store in Delaware
February 11, 2024

Vladimir Putin:  I would like to discuss the X-Men.

Tucker Carlson:  I liked it when Hugh Jackman played Wolverine in that movie.

Putin:  Well yes, but that's a minor aspect for a character created by Len Wein and Herb Trimpe for a storyline in Hulk.  Partially because the story was set in Canada so obviously Canada needs a superhero and partially because then-editor Roy Thomas liked the concept of a wolverine as a superhero name.

But no, I'm referring to the X-Men as a team in and of themselves and I'm primarily focused on the Chris Claremont era which is what made them the popular team that they still are to this day.  Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created the team as an excuse to not have to think of different origins for each character - I'm simplifying matters here - and both of them quickly left the title which was then handled by whichever writers and artists were available and looking for jobs, which coincidentally enough, included Roy Thomas and Len Wein.

Scheduling problems meant Wein had to choose between writing Hulk and writing X-Men and he liked the Hulk a lot more, so his assistant Chris Claremont took over.  To Claremont, it was just a summer job to bring in a little money while he was trying to get through acting school.  Marvel didn't pay royalties yet so even a successful title wouldn't make him rich, and X-Men under Claremont was not yet successful.  It did slowly become more popular but it was still a bi-monthly title when artist Dave Cockrum left.  He had similar reasons to Len Wein, he was doing too much work and had to drop a title.

Carlson:  You mentioned Len Wein, so he didn't create the X-Men?

Putin:  In a sense, yes.  This was the New X-Men and they were intended as race-based replacements for the old X-Men.  Wein and Cockrum added new characters, Nightcrawler, Storm, Thunderbird.  And Colossus whom I've always preferred for obvious reasons, go Russia!  They also added a few pre-existing characters, Wolverine, Banshee and Sunfire.  But Wein is probably best known as the creator of Swamp Thing for DC, which was also a popular title in his day.

Funny enough, Swamp Thing was rebooted in the 1980s with Wein as editor, and as the title failed, he hired a new writer, Alan Moore, who would go on to success after this.  So Wein can be seen as the creator of titles which he personally handed over to writers that were very big, very popular and very influential.

But this is getting off the point, I wanted to talk about the X-Men.

Joe Biden:  Man, why you gotta keep saying X-men?  There's women too!

Poll Shows Biden Border Policy Has Backfired With Latinos
February 11, 2024

Still going through scripture.  I'm not reading it line-by-line so I'm still not up-to-date on who's related to whom, but I've been looking at the end of Genesis and realized that it basically does meet all the requirements for an epic novel, taking place across generations.  It doesn't really have an overarching plot beyond that, but it comes surprisingly close in that regard.  No wonder it was so memorable for so many centuries.

The writing's not good and it can be incoherent in places, but that's the result of remembering such a long work over such a long time before writing it down in ancient Hebrew, Greek and Latin, then eventually translating it into 1600 English to be read by modern Americans.  My interest is in the way it covers individuals who begat others into families, and then into tribes and becoming cities and nations, and the text is covering all of this.

By the end, Joseph is the star.  He'll move the family to Egypt at the beginning of the sequel, but he's already been there as a slave.  His experience there must be where the Jewish stereotype comes from, failing upward.  He's brought in as a slave but does such a good job that he keeps being promoted.  The master's wife lusts after him but he refuses, so she lies about him and he's sent to prison.  In prison, he does such a good job that he's still getting promoted, and he's even able to read dreams, to the point where he's Pharaoh's second-in-command.  You can say God is looking after him, but this just comes off like the greatest swindle of all time, and he's the winner.

But the family members keep appearing.  The reason Joseph was captured as a slave was because his brothers hated him.  They threw him in a pit and were trying to attract some Ishmeelites to buy him, descended from Isaac's brother Ishmael.  But they were beaten to the punch by Mideonites, descended from Mideon, one of Abraham's later sons, whose only other mention was his birth and the fact that he'd been slain on the fields of Moab, named the son of Lot and Lot's daughter.

It gets a bit tricky to follow, because clearly locations are named after the men who owned the land.  'That's where [fill in name] lives.'  A few years later, it's where [fill in name's] family lives, then the tribe, then they've built a city and so on.  But this is what they're doing as part of the first appearance and origin of Israel the nation, which itself was the alternate name of Abraham's grandson Jacob.  It's all tied together, which is what makes this so enjoyable.

Jacob had a dozen sons, but Joseph was one of the only two he begat with Rachel, the woman he'd actually wanted to marry.  Probably wouldn't have stayed faithful to her, given Leah, Bilhah and Zilpah, but if you're expected to father a nation, a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do.  Just getting the girls was scheme against their father who swatted him down with a rational argument, that Jacob had stolen 'my daughters, my cattle, my jewelry.'  This is basically how the law should work for property rights.

Jacob met Rachel just after lying to his father about his brother Esau and arguing over birthrights.  It's stated that this was the birth of 'two nations' although I'm not sure that was ever defined.  This argument was the first big conflict after Abraham had died, the founder of this religion and everything else.  Abraham had already set up his son Isaac with a wife, Rebekah, also a close family member.  Her grandfather was Abraham's brother Nahor.  Must have been some fun family get-togethers.  You can see why Moses would be very vehement on forbidding people to see their family members naked, or their spouses.

Before Abraham had given Isaac a wife, he'd been ordered to sacrifice him on an altar.  Both of them were quite obedient, so fortunately they were stopped before going through with it.  But in-between those two events, Abraham's wife Sarah had died, so they needed to set up a gravesite for her which, face it, this is where Israel was born.  This is what I mean about this being a story that runs across generations.  We can see the connections even if we don't fully comprehend them.

I'm still trying to work out how the Caves of Sarah were set up because it was clearly a major economic achievement.  I'm sure family tombs already existed, but this is where their descendants would be buried and still remembered to this day.

Even this is another example of how the family is always involved.  The children of Heth help Abraham get the land.  Heth was the son of Canaan, which is why we name the land Canaan where much of scripture takes place.  Canaan also begat a lot of the tribes mentioned elsewhere, and was also the son of Ham, one of the few survivors of the flood.  Ham had seen his father Noah drunk and naked and had to report it to his brothers.  Noah's son Shem is the actual ancestor of the descendants who became famous, but it certainly looks like Ham, Canaan and Heth pushed them in this direction.

So as you can see, this scripture already has deep and meaningful connections across each chapter, even with very few details, and I haven't even included what we know about Lot's history.  There's also the fact that, before his name was changed, Abram had already started hanging out with the rich and powerful.  That included Pharaoh, probably not the same one we see later, but just imagine what that did for the family's reputation.  "Wow, your relative knows Pharaoh???"

We don't actually know very much about how ancient Egypt operated.  Very little written information has survived and this book is probably a large piece of that, but Egypt was clearly the world superpower at the time.  This was all several generations after the flood, we know even less what had come before.

But the narrative is well-shaped.  The first ten chapters build up to the birth of Abraham (by his earlier name.)  The next fifteen chapters cover his life.  The next twelve chapters cover his grandson Jacob, and the rest is about Joseph.  The connections and the hidden meanings have run very deeply into our lives for thousands of years.  This is why I continue to insist that the Jews are either the chosen people of God, or they are under a delusion so enormous that no mortal man can beat it, so it's effectively the same thing.

I've read the Koran before, but one of these days I need to look at it again, just to see what specific contradictions they include.  The only one I remember is that it says Ishmael, not Isaac, was the son Abraham was told to sacrifice and then was stopped just in time.  I think of that every time I see an appearance by one of his descendants, the Ishmeelites.  And why did the spelling of his name change?

I also want a chance to go through all the tribes/families mentioned here and there to work out who they're descended from.  Not sure how far to go though, there's a limited amount of time and I'm skeptical on how far to look past the five books of Moses.  Then there's the internal contradictions and pieces that were clearly edited in after-the-fact.

For instance, Exodus opens with a baby being thrown in the river.  It does state that the mother is from the House of Levi - one of Jacob's sons - but that seems a bit dubious anyway, and there's no reason to think that she's one of the tribe by blood-relation.  And he's found by Pharaoh's sister?  What a coincidence.  And then a few chapters later, he suddenly has a grown-up brother, Aaron.

There's 'God's will be done' and then there's inventing some reason to be connected to this family, which is identified all the way back to Adam and Eve.  I'll go along with the lineage because it's convenient, but this seems really iffy.  There's also a chance it's covered elsewhere in scripture and I'm just not paying enough attention.  And so it goes...

Pro-Palestine Agitators Occupy MoMA Museum in NYC, Hang Genocidal Message
February 10, 2024

Long-Serving Republican Washington Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers Will Not Seek Reelection
February 11, 2024

□ [“Media Hacks Receive Marching Orders – Trash Tucker Carlson"]

It was obvious that they would do this, if nothing else, they're paid to recite what they're told to say.  None of them get into any details about what, specifically he did wrong, or even what lies Putin had to say.  This means they certainly weren't going to look at whatever they're talking about and are projecting their own propaganda industry onto someone else.  The closest they get is mentioning that Putin hasn't been interviewed by an American since February 2022, which is a very short time in his long reign.

It's strange that they don't make the slightest effort to report on the interview, only to focus on the interviewer, who should be the least important thing to focus on.  Western media just takes it as a given that they know best and anything they ignore is unimportant.  Their audience must obey, and they never question why it's getting smaller every day.  Anyone who actually wants to learn something from this has to go elsewhere.

As with Biden humiliating himself, this might be a point where the media puppets might start questioning what they're actually doing.  There's a mentality that they don't care how small their audience gets so long as they retain complete power, but there's also basic human nature, some of them must see they're going in the wrong direction and getting closer and closer to a cliff.  That means they have to turn against each other which will cause even more dissent.

Hollywood Panics as Box Office Sales Plunge to ‘Alarming Lows’
February 10, 2024

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin Back in Hospital With Bladder Issue
February 11, 2024

□ [“Jill Biden Lashes Out at Special Counsel Robert Hur in Shameful Statement"]

The bright side is they're just going to keep making themselves look more and more foolish.  Another disaster will come along soon enough to distract the rest of us, but this isn't helping.  Jill now self-identifies as Beau Biden's mother and added in a fundraising pitch that "I can't imagine someone would use our son's death to score political points."

Her husband brings up his son's death constantly to score political points but she's not complaining about that, and claiming to be Beau's mother Neilia Hunter Biden in her place.  That place is St. Joseph on the Brandywine Cemetery where she's been for over 51 years.  Just think, someday Jill will be in a place like that and some other woman can self-identify as Beau's mother.

But what else can they do?  They can claim he's still in great shape for his age, but anyone with working eyes can see that's a lie.  Most of us have known a number of old people over the years and can tell which ones have or haven't lost a large amount of ability.  Jill gets an excuse because she's known him for so long that she can't see any change, but that doesn't work for anyone else.  Those who know Biden less than she does can see the decrease, and those who don't know Biden at all can see something's wrong with him.

US Senate Advances $95 Billion Aid Package to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan in Rare Super Bowl Sunday Vote
February 11, 2024

□ [“Hillary Clinton Says Biden’s Age ‘Legitimate Issue,’ People in White House Talk About It Behind the Scenes"]

It happens once or twice a decade, Hillary Clinton is actually saying the right thing.  It must be just a coincidence, no other reason for that, but still, credit where it's due.  They have to figure out what to do about this and anything other than stealing the election just makes it worse.  No qualified replacement, just a bunch of low-ranking unlikable people and a Veep who was only picked for skin color and blowjobs.

As I write this, I have no clue if the Super Bowl has happened yet or not - I was born and raised in Nebraska where we have better things to think about than football [wait, what?] - so I don't know if Trump got to make an appearance or not.  But either way, you'd really think Biden supporters would be thrilled if he just showed up or called in or something, just to show his ability to think quickly and spontaneously.  Let's see Trump try to live up to that.

Otherwise, it just shows that Biden's own people don't have enough confidence in him to take initiative.  If the election wasn't already stolen, that would be something to worry about.  Couldn't he have appointed better people?  Oh wait, people like that wouldn't have wanted him in the first place, same reason they don't have anybody to replace him with.

DC Council Appoints Paroled Murderer To Sentencing Commission
February 11, 2024

□ [“Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin Transfers Power Hours After Return to Hospital"]

This time it only took hours instead of days.  I guess that's a step-up, like someone in the vicinity realized that they needed to show a bit more responsibility in doing their jobs.  So now the troops in the field - and we are sending them, like it or not, it's always being done without public knowledge - only had to go hours without leadership.  What an improvement.

I've always denied it, but there is some truth to the saying that large institutions move slowly.  We can see this with the Biden appointees who are finally realizing that they look bad and if they want to avoid being blamed for everything, they need to actually show some ability at what they're doing.  Which means imposing tyranny and "population reduction" but that's still something.

□ [“DHS Secretary Mayorkas: 'We Don’t Bear Responsibility' for Open US Border and 11 Million Invaders"]

But not everybody can live up to that.  I'm sure he's proud of all the DEI appointments he's made and forcing all the employees to get poison-vaccine shots, but he has nothing to do with "homeland security."  That's not his job.

The internet isn't letting me play the video for some reason, so I'll just have to guess that he blames Trump and Congress for not giving him all the money and power he demands. That's about the only ploy leftists have.  Even if they caved in, he'd still find another reason to avoid responsibility for homeland security.

Michelle Obama Not Running for President in 2024, Claims Ex-Obama Senior Advisor
February 11, 2024

It was just a spontaneous joke I made up several hours ago, but I've been thinking about the rhetoric about the "X-Men" needing their name changed to account for all the dozens of brand-new genders.  I didn't make it up, but googling it shows that it's been going on for longer than I had expected, 2019 through 2023 based on the first page of search results.

Still trying to figure out how they even get to this position.  Just from a company standpoint, they have to throw out the corporate intellectual property that was created over 60 years ago because *now* the name is offensive.  That's what "cancel culture" is, people who look for any excuse they can find to censor anything based on the beliefs they woke up with this morning.  You can't run a company that way, or publish art work or create anything, but "cancel culture" has no interest in that.

Then there's the whole point of going *woke* which shows that they aren't remotely capable of long-range planning, or any kind of rational thought whatsoever.  For over 50 years, the X-Men have been as *woke* as possible, so naturally they're an immediate target for their own kind.  Hard as it is to believe, that really shows that leftists aren't as dangerous as they want to be, because attacking each other is much easier than anything else and they're all about keeping it easy.

I think it's the focus on image that gives them whatever credibility they have.  They get so offended, so whatever they're offended by is to blame.  Most people aren't remotely interested in fighting them so they can just keep expanding their power.  They're not more dedicated to their beliefs, they're just more willing to fake it, and they have a lot of experience there.

Former Dutch Prime Minister and Wife Die in Double Euthanasia
February 11, 2024