OT: Cracking Speech by JDV!

Yes and with respect to US politics, that a Donald Trump, the classic archetype for the "limousine liberal" New York City elite, could successfully re-brand himself as a "man of the people" and working-class hero is an act of transmogrification that defies belief.

Even men becoming women and women becoming men is a less impressive feat, just goes to show that the only thing preventing Americans from accepting any kind of absurdity under the sun as entirely natural is lack of a sufficiently large advertising budget..

And a high school farmgirl with all X chromosomes can easily embarrass every high school boy she takes on:

"Fairness" is one of the more silly reasons to be opposed to trans people in sports. Sports have never really been "fair."

Some number of women are born with amazing genetics and as we've seen can dominate mediocre male athletes, good male athletes, and just about every woman out there, too, do we need to put them in their own arbitrary division or ban them entirely because it wouldn't be "fair" to everyone else?

That is a lie, You should stop listening to whoever told you that.

The Russian port of Valdivostock is also ice free year round.

They gave up their nukes in 1994, and peace was promised,

That didn't work.

They gave up Crimea in 2014, and peace was promised.

That didn't work.

I really don't think they want more of the same. no matter how many stupid people propose it.

Russian promises seem to be only slightly more reliable than Russian ultimatums.

Britain did declare war on Germany.

What!???

Germany invaded another countrywhich was protected by international agreements. It didn't have to do it and it knew that it would be at war if it did. The same thing happened in Ukraine, only we were too spineless to uphold the agreement this time; now we are reaping the reward.

By which he means that they should buy more US military equipment, rather than building more of their own

The international reaction, to some extent also driven by Trump's attempt to couple securing peace in Ukraine with him extorting loads of rare earth mineral from the Ukraine to cover the money that the US has so far spent on supporting the the Ukraine against Russia, does seem to be that the US under Trump has backed off from supporting it's allies and is going over to trying to extort all they can from them.

It's international relations as a protection racket, with Putin as Trump's enforcer.

The speech is starting to look more like a calculated exercise exercise in intimidation, and the appropriate response would probably have been defenestration.

Britain and France had guarantee the integrity of the borders of the Polish state on the 31st March 1939.

On September 1, 1939 Germany invaded Poland, initiating World War II in Europe.

On September 3, 1939 Honoring their guarantee of Poland’s borders, Great Britain and France declared war on Germany.

While Britain and France did declare war on Germany, Germany did start WW2 by invading Poland.

The Ukraine was not able to get any such guarantees against a Russian invasion - mainly because Russia had occupied the Crimean Pennisula in

Amazing how much confusion there is over this. The bald facts were that Germany invaded Poland. Britain gave Germany an ultimatum to withdraw, which Germany ignored. Chamberlain then announced that as a result of that failure, Britain was at war with Germany. You can dress it up however you like, but that *was* a formal declaration of war by Britain and John is quite correct.

On 3 September 1939. google it.

Preparing for war is great business. Actually doing it generally isn't.

I went to see the Epstein friends list. I assume all his videos have been destroyed.

But lying by omission.

Not losing a war is better for business than losing one. Not being subject to rapine and pillage is a distinct advantage. Trump seems to want to pillage the Ukraine, even if the US wasn't actually trying to invade it.

Why? His friends didn't have particularly good judgement, or they wouldn't have become his friends.

In article <voqh85$45vh$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me, Bill Sloman snipped-for-privacy@ieee.org wrote: <SNIP>

I'm following a course in Chinese. The language is sufficiently different that pin-yin doesn't really help, that means it cannot be a replacement for Chinese characters. There are too much homonyms. Say 80000 characters and about 100 pronunciations available. If you express "know" , you use "ren-shi" in speaking. Each of these halves mean "know", but each halve is only disambiguous in writing. The combination makes it more or less disambiguous in speaking.

Pin-yin can help. You type in "ma" and press function key 3. A computer looks up probable words with the 3th tone in order of plausibility. Plausibly words are presented in order of probability, so you arrive at the character for horse expeditiously.

A famous example is a poem that consist of a few dozen qi. It is a story about a man named qi who eats (qi) 9 (qi) lions (qi). You can bet that this is incomprehensible for a born Chinese, unless it is written.

The upside is probably that Chinese children are more challenged to master the Chinese language, so they become more intelligent. It helps that their government is pouring money in education, instead of abolishing the department of education.

Groetjes Albert

The cost of eggs is still up. That is the reason and some, that Trump will not have the support of the legislative soon. The USA-ans are wood headed, but bankrupting agriculture, grandma dying for lack of drugs, more inflation because of tariffs will hollow out MAGA.

Groetjes Albert

I don't type well, but I employ kids who type like machine guns, a whole line of code in a second or so.

We are so lucky to have a phoenetic character set. The early teletype machines used a 5-bit Baudot code. And how did the Chinese manage to use the telegraph?

I recently read a history of China, starting with the oldest bamboo documents. Literacy was certainly a rare and elite and difficult thing.

Tbe USA is almost 4 million square miles. 50 states. We invent most of the useful stuff on Earth and periodically stop World Wars that Europeans start. And the skiing is excellent.

Eggs are coming down in price too... there are lots around. Half the problem was buyer panic, which ends when people have a fridge full of

No wonder they're all learning English!

Nope. Trump knows *exactly* what he's doing. There are two pivotal strengths he has: 1. He's a businessman and 2. a hard bargainer. He'll get what he wants and there will be no on-going hardship for Americans. Warm, sun-dappled uplands await them.