American government told the whole world that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. America used this as justification to invade Iraq and murder its people. It turns out there were no weapons of mass destruction after all.
This is why I don't trust any government trying to justify any warlike behavior. It's all a scam. There is no justification good enough for civilians and young men to suffer and die.
This is slightly extreme. Go tell Europeans in the late 30s and early 40s that there's no justification for going to war against Germany. There are always exceptions.
It’s worth going back to the 1980s to start pulling that thread though. The US and west have been messing around in Iraq since the Iran Iraq war. Probably Saddam’s greatest mistake was shaking hands with the devil.
I always thought poppy production in Afghanistan had something to do with it. In 2001 the Afghan government sucessfully eradicated poppies, and again recently after the American occupation ended.
I’m not a big fan of Whoopie Goldberg, but her way of telling (starts at 7min 53sec) about Iraq and WMD has always stuck with me. It’s worth a watch. It’s the perfect amount of funny mixed with reality.
P×dophiles are flocking to churches because they're unregulated by the government. They're becoming a safe haven for these sick fucks because they often attempt to handle conflict and scandals within their own walls. Also, due to a high need for childcare, often no background check is needed!
A "scandal" is bad for business attendance numbers, so they like to keep it quiet, if they can.
My family has gone to so many churches throughout the years, and at least 5 or 6 have had the sexual abuse of a child come to light within church leadership.
I am dead serious about this: KEEP YOUR KIDS OUT OF CHURCHES!!!!
Even when it does come out, church people often rush to support the perpetrators. They do the “I’ve had a beer with them and I like them so they couldn’t be a bad guy” thing that I do not understand at all about people.
It's true. There will be some volunteer that has inappropriate behavior with a minor that gets kicked out then just does the same at a different church. No one tells the police because of the intense sexual shaming and stigma. This is when you're lucky enough to be somewhere where the church doesn't outright protect the abuser and force the abused out.
The MOVE bombing. The fact that the Philadelphia police dropped not one but TWO explosive devices on the roof of their house via helicopter is still nuts to me. What made it even worse was the fact that the fire department showed up and let it continue to burn, destroying 61 evacuated neighboring homes and leaving 250 people homeless.
Any time I tell someone about it that hasn’t heard the story, they’re skeptical.
Another one is the time I learned that I was under local surveillance for being an activist that was part of a local non-violent black liberation org. The police would send a unit weekly to check my whereabouts and movements. I learned through a friend of a friend that didn’t even know who I was, but knew my name and that I was on a surveillance list. Pretty sure they were checking in on everyone involved.
Edit: if this comment has taught me anything, it's that you're better off not engaging with pointless nitpickers and police apologists. Fuck me for having an opinion.
I just looked up MOVE after reading this comment. Amazing power dynamics (from wikipedia):
In 1978, a standoff resulted in the death of one police officer and injuries to 16 officers and firefighters, as well as members of the MOVE organization. Nine members were convicted of killing the officer and each received prison sentences of 30 to 100 years.[2] In 1985, another firefight ended when a police helicopter dropped two bombs onto the roof of the MOVE compound, a townhouse located at 6221 Osage Avenue.[3][4] The resulting fire killed six MOVE members and five of their children, and destroyed 65 houses in the neighborhood.[5]
The "city" was found to have used excessive force, and compensation in these cases comes from taxpayer money.
The Philadelphia police wanted MOVE gone because they bucked the system and were at odds with the police over the ongoing murder of their people. That’s why they went to such lengths to eradicate them at their main row house. I remember reading about how it was essentially a shooting gallery for the police. As people tried to escape the building, police fired upon them.
It was an insanely careless plan borne out of hubris, hatred towards black liberation groups in a time of high racial tensions, and the police (again) thinking that they were above the law. I’m actually shocked there was even a lawsuit that stuck. That alone shows how fucked their whole plan was. Even the city and a federal judge couldn’t overlook this one.
Police and MOVE were still exchanging gunfire, so the firefighters were ordered to back away.
Also, to add some intent, the police plan was to make a hole in the roof through which they could shoot year gas and force MOVE members to evacuate. Witnesses did see officers on the adjoining buildings ready to go. It was a stupid plan.
The conspiracy part comes in, though, because we really only have the word of the police on all of this, since all but two of the MOVE people died, and one was a child
None of it would’ve taken place if the police weren’t so fucking stupid with their plan. I get why the fire dept. held back, but the police created that entire scenario.
Got cheap, no-name, unbranded LED bulbs off of eBay. Years later, not one of them had broken.
But Philips LED bulbs? Those things don't last a year. In fact, none of the high-rated, "high quality," top-ten-list, LED light bulbs have ever outlasted an incandescent in my experience.
If you want your LEDs to last, buy the no-name bulbs, guys. The Phoebus Cartel is still out there.
I will say in regards to LEDs, it's a bit of a tricky thing. Philips in general are terrible, I don't know what they do, but they're also really pretty. Amazing for rarely-active mood lighting. For actual lighting, I use the white-tone-changeable Ikea bulbs, and they seem to last forever, hot as they get.
That's the weirdest thing: The Ikeas run hotter than the Philips, yet still last longer. I really get the feel that Philips optimizes purely for color, smoothness and softness. They know what people use their overly expensive stuff for since in some areas they got little competition. It's annoying, but for those purposes it also works really well.
Theres a huge network of private surveillance cameras, microphones, and other sensors constantly collecting everyone's information and selling it to whomever can pay, or just straight up giving the feds access to the data.
I was driving with a friend on in Louisiana about 3am one night in the late 90s. I thought I saw something ahead in the right lane so I moved into the left lane just in case.
As we got closer there was a giant shadow of some kind with only tiny reflectors at the edges. It was a HUGE matte black boat filling the lane on a matte black trailer with no plates. Closest comparison I can come up with would be one of those river patrol boats from the Vietnam war.
We were on cruise so it took a few seconds to pass them. The boat was being towed by a matte black F-550 (?) MDT with no plates and no lights other than headlights.
I did not look up at the driver when we passed. I have no idea if this was a drug thing, an intel thing, or what.
It could be many things, but I'd guess it's just someone who thinks it's cool to have matte black everything. I had a neighbor (who was a cop) who really liked matte black vehicles. It's not like it's illegal or anything. (Although, being a cop, he very well may have been a drug dealer also, so who knows?)
There is a huge amount of fake and bot accounts on social medias, probably as much as the population of many cities, made and used to manipulate the public opinion.
COINTELPRO. Since I learned about that the whole Ehrlichmann story about criminalizing drugs to oppress black communities and possibly even CIA involvement in the opoid and crack epidemics seem pretty plausible to me.
The people in charge in the U.S. want to eliminate transgender people so that they can have men and women in neat, separate boxes and continue to oppress women as they have been for centuries.
I personally think it's more about manufacturing an 'other' to blame everything on and unite people in hate.
There's little benefit to targeting women for oppression in the modern economy - they're just more undifferentiated labour to be exploited (though it remains possible to pay them less). I think this was meaningfully different when living off a single income was a realistic proposition.
There's no single unified group of "people in charge in the U.S.". There are various people with varying amounts of power. Some of them are religious nutters who interpret their religion as saying that anything other than traditional gender roles is satanic. Some of them are opportunists who see religious nutters as useful idiots, they rile them up over transgender issues in order to get their support for other things (i.e. tax cuts / loopholes for special interests, etc.). Some of them are somewhat liberal, but are still uncomfortable with transgender people and see their political opponents using transgender issues to rile up their base while they do really destructive things (tax cuts / loopholes for special interests, etc.), so they focus their efforts not on defending transgender people, but in trying to attack what they see as the real issues. A small minority of "people in charge in the U.S." are transgender, or very concerned with transgender issues, and are doing everything they can to fight for transgender rights.
Don't forget that the majority of the "people in charge in the U.S." are over 60 years old, and so even basic gay rights are a major departure from the world they were raised in.
Celestial Seasonings tea and Shen Yun both have ties to cults. With Celestial Seasonings the cult that founded it no longer own or profit off it thankfully, but their tea is shit so I still don't recommend buying it.
Shen Yun doesn't hide it. Their show is all about Falun Gong. Although they don't advertise it as such. Went to one of their shows with my wife and mother thinking it would just be about Chinese artistic culture and then BAM - Two hour long Falun Gong propaganda piece.
I've seen a UFO while I was truck driving. Most amazing thing I have seen to date.
Edit: On the night of the Dec 11th 2020 at 9:30ish I had stopped for the night to sleep whiledriving towards Colorado on I25 in New Mexico. I had stopped at a truck parking area maybe 10 miles away from Old Sunshine gas station and parking area. I was gazing at the stars and milkyway and enjoying the lack of light pollution when I witnessed it. Where the sky had previously been black and full of stars a blue light appeared for 10 or so seconds and then shot directly upward in an ice blue streak. At first I didn't think anything of it until it moved incredibly fast straight up. It was instantaneous. I used to be ing the Air Force so I have seen all kinds of Arial vehicles. Never seen anything like this.
I couldn't find a mile marker but the coordinates are "35.3965167, -105.4138241".
I drove by a house in my neighborhood. There was a pure white van, no windows, license was VAN 3. A man was walking towards the van dressed in white coveralls and gloves.
As I passed, I stared at him. He stared at me with cold murderers eyes. I've seen that look twice before and both guys turned out to be murderers.
Sounds like you passed a painter who works at a company with at least two other vans. I thought painters only wearing white was an old time movie thing, but the one we hired wore all white. His van AND trailer were white too. Normal eyes tho, didn't murder us.
I saw something weird like that in Portland once...
This was almost 10 years back, but it's still fairly vivid in my mind due to the apparent mysteriousness of the sighting.
It was a weekday morning, probably around 8, and I was driving home after my regular shift at the mortuary. There was a man walking on the sidewalk of a busy street in an upper-middle class neighborhood. He kinda stuck out because his outfit looked to be of high quality, expensive pieces, which kind of drew the eye, yet he also looked like a straight up Bond villain, with black pants, a black, leather, car coat type jacket, rolled-up stocking cap, and leather gloves, all topped off with Eastern European features on a serious looking face. He was also carrying full-size bolt cutters, which were tucked upwards under one arm, like he was trying to casually conceal them and hope no one noticed.
I obviously don't know why he was carrying bolt cutters down the street like that, but I figured parking sucks in PDX, and maybe he got stuck with a shitty spot around the block from where he was either delivering a much-need tool to a friend in a pinch or doing a B&E while hunting Jason Bourne.
I only saw him for about 10 seconds as I slowly passed by while driving and, ever since, he pops back up in my mind from time to time and frustrates my thoughts with a lack of closure as to what he was actually getting up to that morning.
If been in courses and workshops where people from the government party in my country teach people how to use twitter, specifically to boost the president and ministers posts. So they were training real people to act as bots and generate artificial engagement.
Also they are 100% using bots, and when bot accounts are removed they loose followers and claim that "imperialistic social media want to censor us".
I saw UFO's. I don't want to believe in aliens, but I witnessed it when I was with a pretty big group of friends and we all remember it and none of us have a better explanation. The people who saw it first were outside smoking pot, the rest of us didn't believe them until we went outside and saw it ourselves. I was sober that night fwiw. We tried recording it but no one's phone had good enough dark recording to pick up anything, and no one had a real camera on hand. The flight style didn't match any craft any of us knew of - it was an array of lights that moved together, and then separated into smaller groups, and eventually individually. They moved unnaturally, with near-instant acceleration, deceleration, and extreme direction changes. It was too high up to be likely to be drones or helicopters, and right above a major Canadian city, not near any military base. If this was, like, Nevada or something, I would assume it was a government test craft. The closest match I've ever heard was in an interview with a pilot who saw UFO's, and that scared the shit out of me. I'd love to find a non alien explanation, because I don't want to believe and also I know it sounds crazy. Like, I myself probably wouldn't believe someone else telling me this story.
It's not so much what I witnessed but what I didn't witness. For a short amount of time, I used to live in an area of the world that gets a lot of coverage for the absolute wrong reasons. What kind of stuff did I see there? Absolutely nothing of notoriety.
I was sleeping one night about 16/17 years ago and heard something that I could only describe as a UFO. I didn't get a chance to look out my window, but I heard this rapidly pulsating droning sound VERY close to the roof, as if it was tracking me. I heard it fly overhead where my bed was, and it paused for a few seconds, but the sound could still be heard.
Probably lasted for about 10 seconds before it rapidly flew off. I've never heard anything in my life that sounds anything like this; it gives me the chills just remembering what I heard that night!
Exploding head syndrome (EHS) is an abnormal sensory perception during sleep in which a person experiences auditory hallucinations that are loud and of short duration when falling asleep or waking up.[2][4] The noise may be frightening, typically occurs only occasionally, and is not a serious health concern.[2] People may also experience a flash of light.[5] Pain is typically absent.[2]
I have had this one time when I was very little. Around 6 or 7 years old or so, but I remember it very clearly. For me, it was like a gunshot went off right next to my head only a couple minutes after I fell asleep. I remember jolting awake and asking my brother and mother what it was, but they had no idea what I was talking about. Maybe some people have different experiences, but mine couldn't be mistaken for a UFO sound.
I was a bartender in Virginia when Andrew Youngkin was running for governor. He had a secret panel of businessmen gather together in a private room that I happen to be serving drinks in. A "circle of trust" as they called it where all the donors to his campaign told Youngkin what they demanded from him if he won.