While collectivists evidently have no problem with weapons in the hands of those who would use them to murder and for other crimes (Mexican drug lords carrying their gang wars across the border; Islamic Jihadists, etc.), it has always driven them batty that non-criminal American citizens are armed. Especially non-criminal American citizens who prefer to live in a free state and who would participate in the militia if necessary.
Left-wing politicians have concocted miriad schemes over the years to infringe on our right to keep and bear arms, but that pesky Constitution (which they swear to uphold) keeps getting in their way. Of course, in every other instance that doesn’t even slow them down. They’ve got armies of lawyers paid (with your tax dollars) to interpret away your protections and come up with brilliant arguments like “We have to pass (this horrific new legislation) to find out what’s in it.” But for some reason, there are people left in our mind-numbed population who still understand English enough to recognize what the 2nd Amendment means.
Lots of well-made points in the video, but I like best the grammatically indentical sentence from the 2nd Amendment applied to something else:
A well-schooled electorate, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and read books shall not be infringed.
George Orwell’s dystopian novel is still frequently referenced today by those opposed to privacy infringements and the other lifestyle features that accompany a socialist police state. But the “It Can’t Happen Here” crowd in the USA has long ASSumed that those who want such a system would try to force the population at large to accept their telescreens in each room of our houses.
They never considered the possibility that the population at large would ask to be put under surveillance, and in some cases pay for the privilege.
For the oxymorons who want to keep their privacy and other rights, yet vote and support the very socialist transformation which will obliterate those rights, you’d think the last entity they would trust to make it happen would be a capitalist market research corporation exploiting consumerism to multiply their own power while subjugating the proletariat. But that’s exactly what they do.
In the early years of the Internet, I used Netscape Navigator’s built-in search engine when I needed to find something online. But I kept hearing about “Google” increasingly, until it had become a common verb in our lexicon, and was the default search engine on every browser. Google not only tracks everything you search for from their home page, but every single site you visit when you have their search bar in your browser. They compile and keep this information, and charge advertisers for the benefit of their spying on you. And nobody seems to mind, because you get to use their search engine for free.
Then Google got into the email business. Why? Because they also want to snoop through all your written communication. (Read the fine print when you sign up for G-Mail.) Up until G-Mail, you normally had to pay for an email service. But after G-Mail launched, everybody got in the free webmail business, monitoring all your communication in order to build a profile for you which third parties are interested in knowing.
Those third parties aren’t just businesses that want to sell you stuff. In the United States of America Google (and Facebook) are selling all your private communications and web travels to federal agencies which evidently consider American citizens a much greater threat than the terrorists, drug dealers, child molestors, Ebola victims and God knows who else swarming across our borders. Some police organizations appear to be preparing for a war against the citizens they are paid to protect.
Without any warrant or probable cause, the NSA and other gestapo wannabes can read all your email, listen to everything you say, watch you through your webcam, track all your online activity…oh, and thanks to Google Earth they’ve got both satellite and street-level imagery of your home, too.
Those of us who are aware of this don’t want to do anything to change it, because it all makes life so doggone convenient for us.
But what if you leave your cellphone in the car, or the batteries are completely dead, or you’re not where you can be seen via your webcam? How can Big Brother hear what you’re saying and see what you’re doing inside your house, then? Google’s got a solution.
Now you can PAY a monthly service fee to have cameras/microphones installed inside your house, and the footage from them uploaded to the Cloud. Ain’t that dandy? And yes, some people are paying for this “service.” One day it might be free. One day it will probably be mandatory.
Big Brother is more slick than Orwell ever gave him credit for.
Racial tensions aren’t going to go away just because I wish they would. In fact, for the first time in my life, I’m convinced they’re not going to go away at all. Peacefully anyway.
The turdstorm of lies, distortions and disinformation obviously is only getting worse, too. So here’s Bill Whittle saying what nobody else has the balls to say on camera:
I’ve come to like Truth Revolt, especially Firewall. They don’t recognize or won’t admit the disease destroying our form of government. They still use Newspeak and still believe the GOP is ideologically where it was 80 years ago (free market capitalism, national sovereignty, individual rights, etc.), but it’s hard to find anyone willing to be honest even about the symptoms anymore.
The glaring oversight in this video is how the press also covered up for Clinton (so effectively, in fact, that “conservatives” have been bamboozled into seeing his only crime as lying about a blowjob in the oval office). It’s still worth a watch.
You’re likely to hear all sorts of excuses and rationalizations about “net neutrality” in the coming days/weeks/months. The Marxists (“liberals;” ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, HuffPo, WaPo, NYT, ect. ad infinitum) and the NeoCons (Fox News, etc.) will debate about superficial aspects of the issue, perhaps even passionately.
Don’t buy the crap about connection speeds–that’s a smokescreen.
I’m gonna cut through the BS and just get right to the core of the issue: Censorship and coverups.
The globalist left has been herding policy makers in the USA for well over a century, and they’ve enjoyed a complete monopoly on the flow of information for nearly as long. Their mass media has become increasingly blatant about the agenda in recent decades, but then somebody let the genie out of the bottle.
That genie was the Internet. The Internet has completely saturated the culture, and is the ONLY medium of significant reach that the globalist left doesn’t control outright (NeoCon straw men notwithstanding). Understandably, they don’t like that.
Even the Internet is dominated by leftists and left-leaning voices. Only about 30% of the content is truly outside the good cop/bad cop political theater, and of that, most is garbage posted by legitimate crackpots and probably Establishment shills spreading disinformation (subscribe to Before It’s News and you’ll get more of this than you can stomach).
A tiny percentage actually reports truthfully on the disease (as opposed to only some of the symptoms, like Breitbart, the Blaze, or Fox). But even that tiny percentage, though ignored, dismissed or libelled, is too much for the Establishment’s liking. What’s even scarier to them is there are millions of quiet, unnoticed individuals on the web who might start thinking for themselves at any time, then asking questions outside the frame of acceptable debate.
That’s what “net neutrality” is really about.
And if they don’t ram it down our throats this time, watch for an epidemic of some sort of abuse or unfair business practice by providers to manifest, justifying regulation “for our own good.”
I respect anyone who has the courage to speak the truth, when doing so can get you in trouble any number of ways. I’ve tipped at my share of windmills (and, unfortunately, have had my share of failures showing that kind of courage); so I know from experience it’s not easy to do in today’s political climate.
There is no physical activity in which women can compete with men. Moving to intelligence, countless IQ tests have proved that the average IQ of men and women is exactly the same, but there are big differences in distribution, and in particular abilities. For example, men have a much wider distribution of IQ than women. In other words, geniuses and idiots are usually men. Women’s IQs tend to be closer to the mean. It also means that at the higher levels there are fewer and fewer women. With regards to specific abilities, women are very good at any tests involving words – better than men. Also, their minds are quicker than men’s (but not necessarily more accurate). On the other hand, women are not good at tests involving spatial relationships. That is why there are very few women engineers – it is not that they have not been allowed to be engineers; it is that they are no good at it. Another interesting comparison is Bridge. Many more women than men play Bridge, but at the top tournaments women have to play in a separate section, because they are not good enough to play with the men. Or take chess. Women have played chess for hundreds of years, yet of the one hundred best chess players in the world, only one is a woman.
Try telling that to a film director or comic book writer, dude. The results might be funny enough to post on Youtube. Here’s a nice insight on how Margaret Thatcher was ousted in Britain:
Although Mrs Thatcher won the majority of the votes, it was considered not enough of a majority for her to stay. Now, the interesting thing was that the majority of Conservative male MPs voted for Mrs Thatcher. At that time, there were 25 Conservative women MPs, all of whom had been helped by Mrs Thatcher to find seats, and all of whom had been helped by her once they came into the Commons. Yet, they voted 25-0 against Mrs Thatcher. This lost the election for her. If even half of them had voted for her, she would have succeeded, and if all of them had voted for her, it would have been a landslide. As a majority of male MPs had voted for her, it is impossible to believe that the women’s vote of 25-0 against was based either on politics or on commonsense. Clearly it was based on emotion – and emotion of the worse kind. And yet, this vote changed the direction not only of the Conservative Party, which went well to the Left, but of the whole country. Everyone knew that Mrs Thatcher was never going to sign Maastricht. If she had stayed, we would not be in the EU. Those 25 ladies put us into the EU.
Help out the Yanks here, Demitri: What is an MP in British politics? I’m guessing the “P” is for Parliament but that’s just a guess.
Finally, we come to the famous “sexual harassment”. This too makes no sense. If women and men are “equal”, men should be able to treat women exactly the way they treat other men. And yet women object to being treated like men, while at the same time they insist they are equal.
Demitri argues that western civilization deteriorated to this bass-ackwards “gynocracy” and feminized culture due to the cowardice of the men who once held the power. I agree. But when I examine the multitudes of white knights and manginas surrounding me, raised by single mothers/television and programmed by government schools, I detect a degree of self-loathing as well.
It’s hard to keep up with all the abuses of power perpetrated by this administration and its lackeys. Even the coverups have coverups. Judicial Watch just uncovered some more information.
One of the documents provides smoking gun proof that the Obama White House and the Eric Holder Justice Department colluded to get CBS News to block reporter Sharyl Attkisson. Attkisson was one of the few mainstream media reporters who paid any attention to the deadly gun-running scandal.
In an email dated October 4, 2011, Attorney General Holder’s top press aide, Tracy Schmaler, called Attkisson “out of control.” Schmaler told White House Deputy Press Secretary Eric Schultz that he intended to call CBS news anchor Bob Schieffer to get the network to stop Attkisson.
Schultz replied, “Good. Her piece was really bad for the AG.”
Schultz also told Schmaler that he was working with reporter Susan Davis, then at the National Journal, to target Rep. Darrel Issa (R-CA). Issa led the House investigation into Fast and Furious. Davis now works at USA Today. In the email chain, Schultz tells Schmaler that he would provide Davis with “leaks.”
Will anything be done about this?
Only more covering up, possibly in the guise of a Kenn Starr-esque independent “investigation.” At the very most, the MSM will grudgingly feed us some diversion akin to the Monica Lewinski scandal while the high crimes and treason are swept under the rug and forgotten.
Lately I’ve noticed a meme that’s growing in popularity, regarding the “left-right paradigm.” To reduce the meme to generality, many observers are becoming increasingly convinced that there is little to no difference between “left” and “right.”
As convoluted a language as English is, it still annoys me when people are lazy and sloppy in its use; refusing to employ what precision is available to them. When I hear phrases like “semiautomatic machinegun;” “irregardless;” “for future preference;” “conversate;” somebody referring to nitrous oxide as “noss,” or to the Marine Corps as “Special Forces” (somebody I work with does this on a regular basis); the Darth Vader in me threatens to take over.
Maybe what these people mean to say (or at least what they should understand) is that there’s little difference between the Democrat and Republican establishments. What difference there is between “liberals” and “conservatives” is in degrees; not in principle. Oh, they’ll bicker like crazy over those degrees–enough to really convince you they’re at odds. In the end they are no more opposed to each other than the two cops who take turns trying to charm/bully a confession out of a suspect.
It’s worthwhile to consider where the left/right designations came from, since we’ve all been misinformed by our teachers, professors, and the talking heads of television.
Centuries ago in the French parliament, the monarchists/collectivists sat on the left; the anarchists sat on the right. The moderates sat around the middle and the “leaners” sat left or right of center depending on whether they exalted the state or the individual.
Again, you’ve probably been taught that it was the other way around; and if you look it up online, chances are it will be described as the opposite of historical fact. And this makes perfect sense: Left-wingers don’t like be associated with Hitler, Mussolini and Ghengis Khan.
Two things you have to understand about leftists:
1. Right and wrong, truth and lies are dynamic. (Like how they envision the U.S. Constitution and its Bill of Rights.) Does it advance their agenda? Then it’s truth. Does it reflect negatively on their agenda? Then it’s a lie. That’s the criteria. Period.
This is an old Marxist/Leninist doctrine which provides a clue to how they can be so comfortable with their own blatant hypocrisy.
2. They agree with the National Socialist German Worker’s (Nazi) Party on all domestic issues: who controls industry; who controls the press; a progressive, graduated income tax; compulsory state-controlled education; civilian disarmament; pervasive regulation of speech and thought; reeducation of dissenters; etc. They do hide their anti-Semitism, though, whereas the Nazis didn’t. So far their hatred is focused on the Jewish state, rather than their Jewish neighbors.
Yes, the Nazis and all fascists are left-wing, if you want to be honest and accurate.
In fact, both Hitler and Mussolini were darlings of the press and the elitists of the left (sorry for the redundancy) when they first took power. It’s only after Adolf’s rash, rambunctious, too-blatant-to-whitewash behavior embarrassed them that the leftists disguised themselves in anti-fascist drag.
Now, not only do they have a conniption when somebody draws attention to their Nazi bedfellow status; they are infamous for accusing their political opposition of fascism.
Though the atrocities of Nazi Germany were dwarfed by those of Soviet Russia, and Red China (the most prolific mass murderers in recorded history), left-wing elitists have been much more successful in whitewashing the legacy of the Communist empires. Still, after suppressing the truth for 70 years, enough facts trickled down after the fall of the Soviet Union that they had to grudgingly admit that their Communist Bloc beneficiaries were bad guys, too.
But simultaneous with that grudging admission was another magic transposition–suddenly despotic Communists were “right-wing” too. And of course they weren’t called Communists or socialists anymore, either. Now they were merely “Stalinists.”
Abracadabra! Those big meanies are now all on the right, with the enemies of progress.
Those who still track the mainstream media can’t help but notice favorite Newspeak terms like “radical right,” “hardline right,” “new right,” “religious right,” “right-wing extremist” and so on. But you never hear the counterpart epithets…the implication being there’s no such thing as “radical left,” “hardline left,” etc. Which also makes perfect sense, since those very elements in the media are pretending to be objective, impartial messengers with no dog in this fight.
Back to the paradigm. When you take into account what left and right really mean, you quickly realize that very few Republicans even LEAN to the right. Democrats and Republicans (with few exceptions among the latter) are LEFT-WING. They don’t disagree about whether the USA should be fundamentally transformed into a third-world police state; only about how rapidly the transformation should occur.
Let’s briefly tackle “liberal” and “conservative.” A true liberal is somebody like Thomas Jefferson. Socialists hide behind the label in modern times because by simply using the semantic disguise of “liberal,” it soft-peddles their tyranical behavior and their despotic ambitions. There is nothing liberal about what they’re doing or what they intend to do.
“Conservative,” in modern parlance, is evidently the term for anyone to the right of Chris Matthews. What makes people assume “conservatives” are fundamentally different from the “liberals” is that they prefer lower taxes and want a significant portion of our suicidal deficit spending to go into the military. What their Facebook constituents seem most passionate about is Michelle Obama’s wardrobe choices and hip measurement.
My rough estimate is that 93% of the population, whichever party they vote for, completely accepts leftist Newspeak and the subliminal ideas it implants. That’s why I’m on the soapbox today.
The Democrat/Republican paradigm is a sham. The left/right paradigm is real, but the distortion of the facts has confused nearly everyone about what it actually is.
Preposterous, right? We’ve already had two Bushes. Ain’t that enough?
A couple years ago I conversed with a beltway insider. Neither of us were happy with any of the “choices” we’d been given for president for a few election cycles. Also, neither of us subscribe to Coincidence Theory. We had at least that much in common.
At the time I was still trying to believe that national elections are still determined by the will of living US citizens (however messed-up their will may be) casting one vote apiece. Well, this guy claimed to know who the behind-the-scenes power brokers picked to win elections years in advance. He was absolutely convinced Jeb Bush would be the next one.
The more I thought about this, the more sick I became.
It makes a certain degree of sense, if you’re not a Coincidence Theorist.
As much as I hate seeing my country destroyed, I almost wish the consequences of Obama’s rapine would manifest while he’s still in office. That way it would be a little harder for his cheerleaders (the press, Hollywood, academia, etc.) to blame his political opponents for what happens.
It would work out much better for the haters of America if disaster doesn’t set in until Bad Cop takes over.
The Bush family has enjoyed uncanny success pretending to be “right wing” or “conservative” (whatever that means) while continuing the attack on personal liberty, the free market, our national sovereignty, etc., that their “opponents” perpetrate.
Still, I had no way of verifying the beltway insider’s track record on previous predictions, and so was able to shelve that prophecy as just another know-it-all spouting off opinion as fact.
Then while driving home earlier this week, I heard a brief news item on the radio. Evidently GOP bigwigs are playing with the idea of Jeb Bush for 2016, and Jeb said something to the effect that he hadn’t really considered it before, but might now.
The plot thickens. And I do not lisp.
But really, so what? We already knew whoever the GOP picks for 2016 is going to be abysmal. They will differ from Clinton/Obama only by degrees; not in principle. And if they win, it will only be to fulfil the Judas Goat role once again (all while being adamantly defended by NeoCon apologists).
Once upon a time, during one of my battalion’s “field problems” (exercises/wargames) out in Camp Mackall, we captured a prisoner from the opfor. He became a minor novelty because he had a Ranger tab (and not every officer and NCO in Division had been to Ranger School yet). We dropped a 60 pound rucksack on his back, tied his hands behind him and blindfolded him, then just took him along with us.
There was an E-7 in my company I’ll simply refer to as “the Weenie.” He was a walking stereotype–some pogue who originally had a supply M.O.S. who volunteered for Drill Sergeant duty, then went Infantry, then Airborne, as a way to more rapidly accumulate rank. There’s a lot I could say about the Weenie, but for now I’ll limit it to this: He could never have met the physical demands and standards of the Airborne had he entered as lower enlisted.
Back to the story. Our “P.O.W.” tried to escape. The Weenie happened to be right next to him. Blindfolded and trying to run through Carolina bush is nothing to try at home, kids. The prisoner tripped on something, and, off-balance, was wrestled to the ground by the Weenie (who, I must make clear, had both hands free, was not blindfolded, nor did he have a rucksack on at the time).
Having witnessed the incident with my own eyes, I was dumbfounded to hear the stories about it in following weeks–often from other eye-witnesses. “Did you see (the Weenie) body-slam that Ranger?” “No kidding?” “Yeah man, he put his _________ in the dirt!”
I should add the fact that everybody hated the Weenie. Including those who made these kind of comments. But evidently the only thing that mattered was that the Weenie had bested a Ranger.
It was years before I put this in the psychological context of American culture.
Americans love the underdog, and we always have. Heck, we WERE the underdog, when we won our independence–and for the rematch with Great Britain in 1812.
There’s still a lot of sympathy for the Confederacy during the Civil War from people who abhor slavery. Why? Because they were smaller, lacked the resources of the North, but fought a better fight and came close to winning despite their disadvantages.
And it’s not just Texans who get misty-eyed about the Alamo.
Our love of the underdog explains all the Rocky movies. It explains why we cheered when the US hockey team (amateurs) stunned the professional USSR team at Lake Placid, but booed when the US finally fielded professional athletes to compete against the professional athletes of other nations in the Olympics. It explains why a movie was made about Billie-Jean King winning a tennis match against some old geriatric fart.
I suspect our subconscious attraction to the underdog has had an effect on American culture in far deeper ways.
Take the involvement of the United States in Vietnam–the first “war” the USA ever lost. It was lost by design. Commanders were strategically and tactically hogtied by the very administration that insisted on embroiling our military there. That same administration sold the quagmire as a “police action”, like Korea, which is why I often refuse to call it a war. Nevertheless, even people who know all this often characterize the conflict as a great upset: the big, mean American bully with helicopters and jets and all kinds of expensive, sophisticated doodads, trying to oppress the poor downtrodden proletariat, was heroically defeated by the fighting spirit of the Viet Cong/NVA underdogs because we just couldn’t fight in the jungle (tell the Japanese that). It just makes for a better story that way, despite the facts.
SInce WWII America’s been a superpower, so we don’t have the underdog thang workin’ for us. That plays into the prevailing attitude about our history, as well as foreign policy and so much else. The haters of America know how to tap into this tendency, crafting news stories, school curriculum, and entertainment to take advantage.
Some of the “poor children” you’ve been hearing about.
It plays into the invasion of our southern border and why our elected officials choose to neglect their duty. But those same politicians are just fine with treating Americans like criminals at airports and random roadside checkpoints, with unwarranted searches, wiretaps, assassinating or indefinitely detaining American citizens without trial. Because we’re the home team and illegal aliens are the poor underdogs, see? That’s also why there’s no outrage about them collecting welfare and stealing our elections, and why it would be the most horrific crime since the Inquisition if Americans did the same thing to any other country.
What should we do about the situation on our border with Mexico? I know! Force full cavity searches on US citizens at every airport. And send the First Family on some more multimillion dollar vacations.
This syndrome plays into why there’s no outrage about our government arming, equipping and funding anti-American terrorist organizations while waging a perpetual undeclared war against terror that requires the stripping of rights from US taxpayers (who are the past and potentially future victims of said terrorists). We’re Americans. We don’t deserve all the freedom and prosperity we still have. Those poor downtrodden souls who follow the Religion of Peace have the odds stacked against them and deserve a piece of our pie.
We borrow billions from China then give it back to them as foreign aid, then pay them interest on the money we gave them. Our handouts and investments have built them into a superpower. The Teflon Traitor (and others) let them raid our patent office and steal the intellectual property of US citizens, and gave them military secrets they plan on using against us. But it’s all good, ’cause they’re the underdog. They’ve only murdered about 80 million (not counting what they’ve done in Tibet and elsewhere) and treat their own people worse than beasts of burden; but Americans are the real villains because what businesses still exist here don’t pay for enough birth control for female employees. They’re the underdogs; we’re the mean old home team.
It plays into why the government, in such a fanatical hurry to assume powers not delegated to it, and to violate our rights for “homeland security,” refuses to consider shutting down travel between the US and the areas of the Ebola epidemic. Better to bring Ebola into the USA than to inconvenience the poor Third World underdogs who want to fly here, shake hands, make friends and infect influence people. If it becomes an epidemic here, blame the nurses. But Americans deserve Ebola anyway ’cause we’re the hometown bullies and it’s about time we had to suffer like other people do. Check your privilege, America. And keep bringing infected folks here.
This underdogphilia plays out in just about every aspect of our society, but perhaps it’s most blatant in the gender wars. Regardless of the facts about who did what, females are the ironclad underdogs in divorce court; to the police (and, well, everybody else, too) on domestic disturbance calls; to the leftist media on every topic from the Hugo Awards to #gamergate. The victim card is always women’s to play, even as pop culture so desperately tries to convince us they are tougher than men. They’re not expected to meet the same standards as men in the military, or work as hard as men in civilian occupations, yet they’re lionized like triumphant overcomers because they rode their special treatment to a hero’s finish line, and the official story we keep hearing is that they work harder than men and they’re held to higher standards. They’re legends in their own minds, and in the minds of white knights all across the fruited plain.
The behind-the-scenes movers and shakers in the Ministry of Entertainment, both bean counters and creative types (directors, screenwriters, etc.) have been predominantly leftist at least as far back as the New Deal. In those years, some of the actors, stunt men and others had dissenting political ideas. But as the left’s stranglehold on the movie industry became more ironclad, fewer and fewer people in the industry had either the courage nor the capability for independent thought required to venture away from the dominant socialist ideology.
So it’s absolutely no surprise to hear about actress Gwyneth Paltrow’s nauseating zeal at her fundraiser for Obama.
“I am one of your biggest fans, if not the biggest,” and when handing him the microphone, Paltrow said to (Obama), “You’re so handsome that I can’t speak properly.” In the middle of her worship session, she added, like a good, mindless follower of a ruling elitist, “It would be wonderful if we were able to give this man all of the power that he needs to pass the things that he needs to pass.”
Anyone old enough to remember how Edward James Olmos, during his masturbatory gush about the election of Bill Clinton, asked the Teflon Traitor to “think of us as your children”?
Or how about this one from Comrade Foxx?
And here’s Comrade Rock:
Now how could you argue with such an educated argument? Obviously the framers of the Constitution were wrong when they made our public servants answerable to the people, and not the other way around. These movie stars know how it oughta be.
Continue buying their crap and making them rich so they can maintain the epidemic of idiocy in our culture.
Red-Blooded American Men Examine Pop-Culture and the World
Without any warrant or probable cause, the NSA and other gestapo wannabes can read all your email, listen to everything you say, watch you through your webcam, track all your online activity…oh, and thanks to Google Earth they’ve got both satellite and street-level imagery of your home, too.
Americans love the underdog, and we always have. Heck, we WERE the underdog, when we won our independence–and for the rematch with Great Britain in 1812.
it’s all good, ’cause they’re the underdog. They’ve only murdered about 80 million (not counting what they’ve done in Tibet and elsewhere) and treat their own people worse than beasts of burden; but Americans are the real villains because what businesses still exist here don’t pay for enough birth control for female employees. They’re the underdogs; we’re the mean old home team.
mrade Paltrow, that’s exactly what’s been happening. Praise be to the ghost of Stalin, now