++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
A guy goes to the supermarket and notices a very attractive woman waving at him.
She says, 'Hello.'
He's rather taken aback because he can't place where he knows her from.
So he asks, 'Do you know me?'
To which she replies, 'I think you're the father of one of my kids.'
Now his mind travels back to the only time he has ever been unfaithful to his wife.
So he asks, 'Are you the stripper from the bachelor party that I made love to on the pool table, with all my buddies watching, while your partner whipped my butt with wet celery?'
She looks into his eyes and says calmly, 'No, I'm your son's teacher.'
+++++++++
From a very dear friend and a fellow memo reader:
"Excellent essay. I agree with you entirely.
Unfortunately the political class on both sides of the aisle sell their votes- and their souls- to the highest bidder. China is now the highest bidder for Dem votes. Can you imagine what Pelosi and Schumer would have said if it was revealed that a new Republican congressman had had an affair with a clandestine PRC agent? Or if a senior Republican Senator had hired a PRC plant as her driver and gofer for 20 years? Hardly a peep out of them regarding Swalwell and Feinstein. Just like all of the intelligence agencies, the ChiComs use honey pots, blackmail, bribery and extortion to advance their agenda and someday I pray that the full exposure of the Dems to this type of influence peddling will be known.
Your take on Trump is, in my estimation, accurate. He saw what a sordid mess DC was and tried to clean it up. He pulled no punches. He was often worse than annoying and unfortunately refused editing and fact-checking from wise souls around him but his spirit of pugnacious and rebellious patriotism was refreshing and will have a lasting effect. If Trump was a pit bull straining at his leash, Biden is the snake from the Garden of Eden…with dementia! It is harrowingly unbelievable that Trump was impeached twice on purely political grounds while Hunter Biden is publishing a book!!
The left espouses most of the values of the CCP:
- Little respect for individual rights or competing world views
- The embrace of wholesale abortion
- hatred of religion
- No respect for individual entrepreneurialism
- Control of individual thought via censorship and a lapdog media: the “cancel culture”.
- Centralized governmental control of as many human endeavors as possible: education, media, energy, manufacturing, etc.
We are in the political fight of our lives and it ain’t looking so good for us good guys
Dr. B--"
And:
Another response from another dear friend and fellow memo reader:
Breaking: Ted Cruz Tells Us Some Hilarious Questions That Could Have Been Asked During the Impeachment Trial
+++
This from a dear friend and fellow memo reader:
I think 60-80% could be true in 2 to 3 times the forecast period
...
Subject: Fwd: The future will be very interesting.
All of the following will become reality in the next 10-30 years. Many of us won't see the changes, but our kids and grandkids will.
1- Basic auto repair shops will disappear. Read on to know why.
2- A gas/diesel engine has 20,000 individual parts. An electrical motor has
only 20 parts. Electric cars are sold with lifetime guarantees and are repaired
only by dealers. It takes only 10 minutes to remove and replace an
electric motor.
3- Faulty electric motors are not repaired in the dealership but are sent to a
regional repair shop that repairs them with robots
4- Your electric motor malfunction light goes on, and so you drive up to what
looks like a car wash, and your car is towed through while you have a cup of
coffee and out comes your car with a new electric motor!
5- Gas pumps will go away.
6- Street corners will have meters that dispense electricity. Companies will
install electrical recharging stations; in fact, they've already started in the
developed world.
7- Smart major auto manufacturers have already designated money to start
building new plants that build only electric cars.
8-Coal industries will go away. Gasoline/oil companies will go away. Drilling
for oil will stop. Say goodbye to OPEC! The middle east is in trouble.
9- Homes will produce and store more electrical energy during the day than they
use, and will sell it back to the grid. The grid stores it and dispense it to
industries that are high electricity users. Has anybody seen the Tesla
roof?
10- A baby of today will see personal cars only in museums. The FUTURE is
approaching faster than most of us can handle.
11- In 1998, Kodak had 170,000 employees and sold 85% of all photo paper
worldwide. Within just a few years, their business model disappeared and they
went bankrupt. Who would have thought of that ever happening?
12- What happened to Kodak and Polaroid will happen in a lot of industries in
the next 5-10 years ... and most of us don't see it coming.
13- Did you think in 1998 that 3 years later you'd NEVER take pictures on film
again? With today's smartphones, who even has a camera these days?
14- Yet digital cameras were invented in 1975. The first ones only had 10,000
pixels, but followed Moore's law – that technological capacity will DOUBLE
every year. So as with all exponential technologies, it
was a disappointment for a time, before it became 'way superior' and
became mainstream in only a few short years.
15- It will now happen again (but much faster) with Artificial Intelligence
(AI), health, autonomous and electric cars, education, 3D printing,
agriculture and jobs.
16- Forget the book, "Future Shock"; welcome to the 4th Industrial
Revolution.
17- Software has disrupted and will continue to disrupt most traditional
industries in the next 5-10 years.
18- UBER is just a software tool; it doesn't own any cars and is now the
biggest taxi company in the world! Ask any taxi drivers if they saw that
coming.
19- Airbnb is now the biggest hotel company in the world, although they don't
own any properties. Ask Hilton Hotels if they saw that coming.
20- Artificial Intelligence: Computers become exponentially better in
understanding the world. This year, a computer beat the best Go player in the
world, 10 years earlier than expected.
21- In the USA, young lawyers already don't get jobs Because of computers, you
can get legal advice (so far for right now, the basic stuff) within seconds,
with 90% accuracy – compared with 70% accuracy when done by humans. So, if you
study law, stop immediately. There will be 90% fewer lawyers in the future,
(what a thought!). Only omniscient specialists will remain.
22- Computer programs already help nurses diagnosing cancer, and the programs
are 4 times more accurate than human nurses.
23- Facebook now has pattern recognition software that can recognize faces
better than humans. In 2030, computers will become more intelligent than
humans...COMPUTERS CAN BE UNPLUGGED...OR SHOT!
24- Autonomous cars: In 2018 the first self-driving cars are already here. In
the next 2 years, the entire industry will start to be disrupted. You won't
WANT to own a car anymore as you will call a car with your phone; it will show
up at your location and drive you to your destination.
25- You will not need to park it. You will pay only for the driven distance and
you can be productive while driving. The very young children of today will
never get a driver's license and will never own a car.
26- This will change our cities because we will need 90-95% fewer cars. We can
transform former parking lots into green parks.
27- About 1.2 million people die each year in car accidents worldwide including
distracted or drunk driving. We now have one accident every 60,000 miles. With
autonomous driving that will drop to 1 accident in 6 million miles. That will
save more than a million lives worldwide each year.
28- Some traditional car companies will doubtless go bankrupt. They will try
the evolutionary approach and just build a better car, while tech companies
(Tesla, Apple, Google) will do the revolutionary approach and build a computer
on wheels.
29- Look at what Volvo is doing right now; no more internal combustion engines
in their vehicles starting this year – with the 2019 models using all-electric
or hybrid only, with the intent of phasing out the hybrid models.
30- Many engineers from Volkswagen and Audi are completely terrified of Tesla –
and they should be. Look at all the companies offering all-electric vehicles.
That was unheard of only a few years ago.
31- Insurance companies will have massive trouble because, without accidents,
the costs will become cheaper. Their auto insurance business model will
disappear.
32- Real estate will change. If you can work from home (or from literally anywhere),
people will abandon their towers to move far away to more beautiful affordable
locations.
33- Electric cars will become mainstream about 2030. Cities will be less noisy
because all new cars will run on electricity.
34- Cities will have much cleaner air as well.
35- Electricity will become incredibly cheap and clean.
36- Solar production has been on an exponential curve for 30 years, but you
can now see the burgeoning impact. And it's just getting ramped up.
37- Fossil energy companies are desperately trying to limit access to the grid
to prevent competition from home solar installations; but, that simply cannot
continue - technology will take care of that strategy.
38- Health: "Tricorder X" will be announced this year. There are
companies which will build a medical device (called the Tricorder from Star
Trek) that works with your phone – taking your retina scan, your blood sample,
and you breathe into it. It then analyses 54 biomarkers that will identify
nearly any disease. There are dozens of phone apps out right now for
health.
WELCOME
TO TOMORROW! – some of it actually arrived a few years ago.
And here's a few more:
·
Electric cars will use
pollution-free hydrogen to make electricity to double or triple the mileage
travelled.
·
Electric car battery
recharging will be available free and wirelessly from lines interconnected
solar tiles made from recycled waste plastics embedded in roadways.
·
Planes will be
hydrogen-electric and pollution-free. Our skies will be blue and clear again.
Clouds will produce clean rain. Fares will be cheaper.
·
Populations can reduce
because politicians won't have chase exponential GDP growth (and
cow-tow to media moguls and industry barons).
·
Politicians and media
moguls and industry barons will be held to account by stronger
anti-corruption laws. The legal system made more equitable to benefit
everyday man/women.
·
Climate change can be
turned around and reversed because fossil fuels are no longer an energy source,
and only used for lubrication and plastics products.
·
Religions will become
less popular or non-existent as people realise that, like politicians, they are
run to exploit the masses by the few who do little or nothing except for their
own benefit. Religious pedophilia can be eliminated.
·
Recycling can be made
profitable by the wide use of cheap electricity generated from renewables.
There will be home appliances to recycle wastes into metals, plastics and
compost and fertilizers. The metals sold and plastics sold and collected for
reuse. The compost and fertilizers used at home or sold for agricultural use or
soil regeneration and reafforestation.
·
Water will be abundantly
available from cheap electricity desalination plants near the sea and piped
inland using the existing fossil fuel pipelines, or new pipelines built from
recycles and new plastics. The clean freshwater used for agriculture and human
consumption in remote areas, creating a dispersed populations density,
eliminating cramped cities and ugly high-rise apartment units.
·
Working from home will
become more commonplace, eliminating wasted travel time, creating greater human
efficiency and domestic harmony, reducing traffic and road construction needs.
The
world can be a better place as long as individual complacency is reduced and
the masses force sustainable practices on the politicians by realizing the
gains that each person can achieve and obtain by doing so.
+++++++++++++
If anyone thinks Biden will learn they are fooling themselves:
Biden Plays Softball
With Iran | Opinion
, Author and senior
columnist, Israel Hayom
In his interview
with CBS's Nora O'Donnell on Sunday,
President Joe Biden gave the
impression that he is playing hardball with Iran.
But Iran is openly breaching the limitations on its nuclear activities that it
agreed to under the 2015 nuclear deal it concluded with the Obama
administration and its European partners.
Hours before Biden's
interview with CBS, Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said the Islamic
Republic will only scale back its illicit nuclear activities after Biden
abrogates U.S. economic sanctions against the regime.
O'Donnell asked Biden if
he would comply with Khamenei's condition. Biden responded with a curt
"no," and then nodded after O'Donnell followed up by asking if
"they have to end uranium enrichment first?"
Back in the studio,
CBS's Margret Brennan concluded, "It appears there is a standoff."
But drama aside, there's
no standoff.
On Monday, Biden's
spokeswoman Jen Psaki made an effort to walk back Biden's remarks. "If we
were announcing a major policy change, we would do it in a different way than a
slight head nod," she said.
Even before Biden's
tough talk and head nod, Bloomberg News reported that Biden
and his team are looking to have things both ways. They want to help Iran
economically despite the fact that its intensive uranium enrichment and other
nuclear activities make clear that Iran's nuclear efforts are entirely
military-related. And they want to help Iran without having to defend their
policy in a bruising fight with Republicans over suspending sanctions.
According to the report, the administration is considering providing Iran with
U.S.-backed International Monetary Fund loans and other international
assistance, which Biden and his advisors could characterize as COVID-19 relief.
Searching for a way to
give money to Tehran isn't the only way that Biden and his advisors are
communicating that they are playing softball, not hardball, with the
ayatollahs.
Last week, the
administration facilitated Iran's Houthi proxy's continued control over a large
area of Yemen, from which it conducts missile and drone strikes against U.S.
ally Saudi Arabia.
One of the many
strategic weaknesses of the 2015 nuclear deal, otherwise known as the Joint
Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), was that it ignored Iran's non-nuclear
aggression—its proxy wars across Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Gaza and Lebanon, its
sponsorship of terror in the Middle East and worldwide, and its ballistic
missile programs.
While
then-President Barack Obama, then-Vice
President Biden and their advisors promoted the JCPOA as a non-proliferation
agreement, its effect was not to block Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
With its sunset clauses, the JCPOA guaranteed Iran's acquisition of nuclear
weapons within 10 to 13 years and facilitated Iran's hegemonic ambitions in the
Middle East.
Obama admitted this was
the case in an August 2015 interview with NPR. Upon the expiration of the
JCPOA's restrictions on Iran's nuclear activities, Obama said that its
"breakout times [to independent military nuclear capability] would have
shrunk almost down to zero."
By suspending UN
Security Council sanctions on Iran in exchange for the regime's agreement to
suspend some of its nuclear work for a limited period, the JCPOA enriched Iran
to the tune of $150 billion. As then-Secretary of State John Kerry candidly acknowledged, those funds provided the regime
with the financial means to advance its efforts to become the regional hegemon
through its proxies in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon.
To sum up then, the
JCPOA provided Iran with an open road to a nuclear arsenal. And the sanctions
relief Iran received provided the regime with the economic wherewithal to
expand its non-nuclear aggression via terrorism, proxy wars and ballistic
missile development throughout the region—and, indeed, throughout the world.
In a 2017 interview
with Reuters, a senior Iranian government source said that in
January 2017, then-Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force commander
Qassem Suleimani held a meeting with Houthi leaders in Tehran. "At this
meeting, [the Iranians] agreed to increase the amount of help [to the Houthis],
through training, arms and financial support. Yemen is where the real proxy war
is going on, and winning the battle in Yemen will help define the balance of
power in the Middle East," the source bragged.
Since 2014, the Houthis
have controlled around 30 percent of Yemen, including the areas where 80
percent of the population lives. Like Iran, the Houthis are committed to the
destruction of the U.S. and Israel. Since 2014, they have used their border
with Saudi Arabia to attack Saudi oil platforms, cities and ships with
Iranian-supplied missiles and drones.
Trump began reinstating
U.S. economic sanctions on Iran in 2018. By 2019, the sanctions had reportedly
compelled Iran to significantly scale back its support for
its various proxies, including the Houthis.
Houthi rebels in Yemen Mohammed Hamoud/Getty Images
In late November, the
Houthis attacked Jeddah with a long-range missile that a Houthi spokesman said was
initially developed to attack Israel. Two months later, in one of its final
acts, the Trump administration formally designated the
Houthis a foreign terror group.
Secretary of State Tony
Blinken said at his first press conference that the first Trump administration
policy the new administration intended to reverse was the
Houthis' terrorist designation and the Trump administration's related overall
position on Yemen. And in Biden's speech at the State
Department last week, he announced that the U.S. was indeed reversing course.
In a departure from the policies of both the Trump and Obama administrations,
Biden said his administration was ending U.S. support for Saudi military
operations in Yemen and canceling "relevant arms sales" to the
Saudis.
The following day, the
State Department announced that the
administration was revoking the Trump administration's designation of the
Houthis as a terror group, thus ending the previous administration's sanctions
on the Iranian proxy. This happened just after that the Houthis opened up a new
volley of drone and missile strikes against Saudi Arabia.
By siding with the
Houthis against Saudi Arabia, Biden helped Iran assert its control of Yemen
through the Houthis and at the expense of Saudi Arabia. And he did this without
receiving anything in return from Iran. Not only has Iran not scaled back any
of its prohibited nuclear activities, but it is expected to block UN nuclear
inspectors from conducting intrusive inspections of its nuclear sites beginning
February 21. Just last weekend, The Wall Street Journal reported
that UN inspectors found evidence of illicit nuclear activities at a site Iran
had barred the inspectors from entering for seven months.
Biden's moves to empower
Iran and its Houthi proxy against the U.S.'s Arab Gulf allies will be very
costly to the region and to the U.S. They make regional war more likely. They
diminish U.S. regional influence, and they open the door for China and Russia
to replace the U.S. as the region's superpowers.
Biden's policy raises
the prospect of war because he is emboldening Iran to expand its aggression,
thus simultaneously convincing spurned U.S. allies that they have no choice but
to take action against Iran and its nuclear program before it is truly too late.
Biden is diminishing
U.S. influence by telling Iran it has no reason to fear the U.S., which is
rewarding the regime even as it sprints toward the nuclear finish line and
wages proxy wars against American allies. And he is also diminishing U.S.
influence by kicking American allies to the curb.
This then brings us to
Russia and China. Both powers saw the opportunity to expand their presence in
the region at the U.S.'s expense during the Obama administration. Beginning in
2014, as Obama and his team realigned U.S. foreign policy toward Iran in the
Persian Gulf and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Russia began negotiating
major arms sales to Egypt for the first time since the 1970s. Since then, Egypt
has purchased Russian SU-35 fighter jets, MiG-29M/M2 Fulcrums, Ka-52 attack
helicopters and the S-300 air defense missile systems.
Saudi Arabia purchased
Russia's far more advanced S-400 air defense missile system and Chinese
ballistic missiles and drones. The United Arab Emirates has also purchased
Chinese drones.
Although Trump worked
hard to rebuild U.S. credibility with the Sunni Gulf states and Egypt,
congressional hostility toward Saudi Arabia and U.S. political instability more
generally made it impossible for Trump and his advisors to convince these allies
to reverse course. Now Biden is making clear that they were right not to keep
all their eggs in America's basket.
Biden's tough talk on
Iran last weekend was a thin veneer covering a policy of profound weakness
toward Iran. The policy is doubly bizarre since, thanks in large part to U.S.
economic sanctions, Iran is on the brink of collapse. But in their keenness to
undo everything that Trump did, the Biden administration is throwing away
leverage and giving Khamenei the upper hand. In the process, the administration
is increasing the chance of war, losing America's Arab allies and empowering
China and Russia at America's expense.
Caroline B. Glick is a
senior columnist at Israel
Hayom and the author of The Israeli Solution: A One-State
Plan for Peace in the Middle East, (Crown Forum, 2014). From 1994
to 1996, she served as a core member of Israel's negotiating team with the
Palestine Liberation Organization.
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