An honest look at one's problems is the first step of solving them. Attributing uncomfortable information to the enemy, however, and going la-la-I-can't-hear-you... First, it is a good example of the inability to think I described in my post. Second, since it preempts your ability to solve your problems, it ends up working in favour of the enemy. Since you post as AC, I'm sure you understand yourself that your approach is part of the problem, but not part of the solution.

To put it bluntly, everything in the US public debate is a PR show far removed from reality. There is not a singe word, concept, talking point, and line of thinking that has not been captured, hollowed out, and hijacked by being incessantly used to push some agenda or another. Among other things this has resulted in a general populace that is overwhelmingly unable to think and talk about politics without falling into, reproducing, and disseminating the government/party line. This line, as witnessed by the state of the union, is a very dead end indeed.

And politics, being financed by private interest, is completely captured by it, with zero chance of anything happening against it. Trying to get anything done in the country is picking a fight with everyone who has any power in the country. Anything that gets fielded against private interests gets massively lobbied, advertised, and propagandized against, and ultimately, won against. The only things that get passed successfully are things that make someone a lot of money, either at voter expense, or at government dime.

My call is that this system is beyond repair. Any attempt to change any corner of it will instantly meet the overwhelming opposition of the rest of it. To repair it one would need to replace all of the people, institutions, and legislation in the country, as all of it by now only knows how to serve private interest, and this system will not go down without a fight. Therefore the country can only collapse, blow up, or devolve into a repressive police state to try to keep the public under control. Possibly, all three. Ever since GWB, both parties have been speedrunning the surveillance state and arming the police with military gear, so we can have some idea what they are planning for. My call is, get out or get ready.

It rarely happens that the school curriculum is up to date. Back in the days of the New Deal, a lot of the politicians did indeed work for the voters, but...

When Clinton shipped the jobs overseas, I guess he was working for the voters. When Bush ushered in the surveillance and eternal war era, I guess he was working for the voters. When Obama saved the banks instead of the voters in the economic crisis, and went on a bombing spree, I guess he was working for the voters. When Trump gave the rich the biggest tax cut ever in his first term, I guess he was working for the voters. When Biden went full genocide mode, I guess he was working for the voters. And now that brownshirts are roaming the streets, I guess Trump is again working for the voters.

Or maybe /you/ are missing a central concept at work here. One that is not taught in schools, but one you should be able to spot if you can put two and two together.

Calling things memes is a meme, too. How many DC critters do we have that did not party with Epstein? And if we should find some that did not, have any of them taken a stand against any of it, or are they but mere enablers? Is it then a stretch to call them all pedophiles?

According to this study from Cambridge https://doi.org/10.1017/S15375... voter preference has no correlation with policy outcomes in the US. But money does. To rephrase it in the context of your post, politicians only care about the issues people with money have. And that's not really a surprise. The primary concern of getting power is getting financed to run your campaigns. The financing does not come from the voters. So your actual campaign is made to secure donor support, and you do that by promising, and having a track record of, working for their interests. Once you have the finances, you use them to create and advertise messaging you think will resonate with the voters. But as the study shows, that resonance of messaging does not translate into policy outcomes for the voters.

My call is that far from making voters powerless, admitting problems is the first step towards solving them. Thus, the most important empowering there is.

Seems to be the voters have become an universal excuse to not do the right thing.

"I don't want to sign this thing, but voters won't like me not signing it."

"Universal healthcare is a good idea, but voters don't like it."

Voters don't like minimum wage, student loan forgiveness, the social safety net, well, it seems, the voters maybe don't like the way the US is right now, but most importantly, supposedly, they decisevly and categorically reject any improvement to anything.

Or maybe the politicians do what they want, invent whatever half-plausible excuses to cover their asses, and if they can find a way to blame the voters for their own doing, well that would be the cherry on top.

Hey, look, a squirrel!

Western countries are run by people who like to rape children. Sometimes they also take time off to e.g. starve half a million Iraqi children to death, and call it "worth it" back in '96. These people belong behind bars. These people have no right to say anything about children anywhere, they have no right to concern themselves with children anywhere, and they have no right to exist in any other way but as the locked-up disgraced pedophiles they should be.

Because what kind of a new regime would the West even create when they succeed in getting rid of e.g. the Iranian one? One in their own image, of course. A child raping one. And this is not even a philosophical issue. The US-backed Afghanistan police was a child raping institution. All it did was shake down locals, sell drugs, and feast on that sweet sweet little boy butt. 20 years of that, and every other form of fucked-uppery imaginable going on in the country. Everything that went on under the US regime was so bad that leaving the country to Taliban was an actual non-controversial improvement.

Whatever our elites do and say in desperation to draw attention away from the fact, do not allow yourself to be distracted. Western countries are run by people who like to rape children. Let that sink in. And then understand that you need to fix your own country before you have any hopes of fixing another.

Think of the children! Well, as we know from the Epstein files, each and every one in our leadership does think about children a lot. I'm not sure we should trust ours to them, though, legislatively, or literally for that matter.

Death by GPS being a thing proves that while people should, they won't.

Even if we should believe that, experience tells us that whatever the US touches turns from shit into a clusterfuck. Just fucking don't.

The hotels I've heard of were reportedly hosting CIA and military personnel. The attacks done by drones, not missiles, that is, with limited collateral, seems to support the claims.

And here we thought PIzzagate was bad...

One of the best questions about the this clusterfuck that all of this is. Maybe Trump though he'd get some cheap PR out of it like when Obama did Osama in.

Khomeini was at home doing his regular routine. He could have chosen to get in the bunkers, but he did not do so. It would appear he wanted to be martyred. He was also old, accomplished, and possibly outdated. And by staying alive he would have probably had to live through Israel bombing his family members instead.

What is important for what follows is that Khomeini was a dove that refused to get nukes despite decades of obvious evidence confirming the fact that Iran does, in fact, need nukes. Now he's dead his fatwa about that does not need to be kept around, and it's very likely his replacement will be much more a hawk. So now it is just about certain that Iran will be starting their nuke program again, and finishing it, too.

The intersts of the people in most countries do not align with US interests for the simple fact that the interests of US is to loot them and own them, and to use them as proxies to do so to even more countries, and to use them as battle ground for their imperial wars.

Venezuela has oil, but does not think it's purpose should be to benefit foreign companies. Iran has oil, but also does not think it's purpose should be to benefit foreign companies. Saddam had started to sell his oil in euros, instead of dollars, and was being a bad example to Iran and Venezuela, who were thinking of doing the same. But selling freshly printed dollars for use in international trade is a huge pillar of the US economy, so Saddam had to be made into a different kind of example. Assad rejected the US plan for a pipeline to get sunni oil to the Med, and to add insult to injury, conjured up hist own plan for a pipeline of shia oil instead. Gaddafi wanted to create an African central bank with a pan-African currency, which would have preempted the colonial tool that IMF is there, weakening the main instrument the US uses to keep Africa from industrializing, stuck as a source of cheap natural resources. Gaddafi also got stuck in between the French political gears, having financed Sarkozy's election campaign, something not really unusual in the Francafrique neocolonial framework, but it hit the fan and that was not a good look.

It does indeed not take a lot to not be on the US shitlist. Just bend over and take it, and you might even get a towel to clean yourself up after the fact.

What exactly did Iran do to provoke the US? US intelligence has no doubt Iran canned their nuclear program already back in 2003. All Iran does is sit there minding it's own business. But they will not join the Borg, and insist on running their country on their own, so they must be destroyed.

Democracy or a suppressiver regime is no indication of sanctions. Pretty much every Gulf country is a fundamentalist suppressive regime much worse than Iran in every way, yet they are valued allies of the US. If the regime argument should want to be sincere, there's a lot of more important work to be done before getting to Iran there.

The moral of the story is, what is offered to us is by the war drums just a rethoric used to sell policy, as usual. But there is not a single idiot in the world who goes and spends trillions just to get rid of some pesky dictator. Enemies are make, and wars waged, because of hard real politics reasons, and most of the time, those reasons are either about getting even more trillions, or just about spending those trillions in your cronies weapons market. Caveat emptor.

The war was decided long before Berlin, it was decided in Stalingrad. That was where the punch hit the heaviest, and was stopped, and was turned around. In no way was it a walk in a park to get to Berlin from there, far from it, but that was where the tides got turned. A million soviets died in Stalingrad with barely any equipment, it's no secret the Soviet Union had not been ready for the war and needed every bit of assistance they could get, but they managed to hold ground until they got the war production in full swing behind the Urals and the tanks started rolling in.

It was still a full year and a half of bloody fighting with the retreating German forces after that, until US joined the party. By that time, the Russians were already half way to Berlin.

Why did the US forces allow the Soviets to take Berlin? Because taking the capital of the enemy is the single highest symbolic act of a war, and the honour of that goes to whoever has best claim to it. The very fact that US gave that to the Soviets bears witness to the fact that the US had no qualms about who did the heavy lifting.

And when you ask it, are you sure, I suppose it will give a similarily convincing argument in support of nukes...