So in folk tales from Eastern Europe or Germany I know, most “magic words” are either rhyming nonsense or just specific sentences in the same local language. Think “abracadabra”, ours in Hungary is “csiribú-csiribá”, you’d pronounce it like “chiribooh-chiribaah”.

The problem is that in this ultrafinancialised world, changes in expectations can have immediate consequences.

If we take that money and eg. Saudi or Chinese investments leave Belgium, that will have immediate consequences.

Not that I approve of any of this, and we should help Ukraine more, but capital runs the world.

He was? In the primaries?

Bloomberg made a run just to try to prevent him from winning. Then all establishment candidates stepped back at once to endorse Biden, and there was a smear thing coming from Warren…

Is my memory wrong over here?

Property is a social construct. It’s just a way for all of us to make sense of living with each other.

The kid owned that door through a consensus, just as you own your things, even as an adult. If that was an illusion, so is all your property.

Point is, don’t be a dick.

Really depends on the kind of paper. Used to habe to do technical drawings, and there is indeed a distinct smell to certain kinds of paper, but not your usual copy-grade sheets.

The candy shop guy where I grew up was apparently a Serbian specops deserter of the Yugoslavian war.

So yeah, probs.

I would rather guess colonialism. Germans living 150 km from each other not understanding each other is because their languages were organically evolving from some 1000 year old protolanguage with barely any communication in medieval times.

The reason the world speaks English is because a relatively small group of speakers from within England colonised the world and kept communications up with those past colonies to this date.

India or the US didn’t have as much time to diverge from old colonial English as Bayern had time to do so from proto-German. Add to it that a sizeable chunk of the colonies are still Commonwealth.

They are not “murky”, it’s completely merged and privatised to a centralised corporate entity.

I don’t see how Russia would agree to US-EU forces on its border. Isn’t this deal DOA?

That’s why for once, the press’ nuke metaphors are apt.

Everyone has the US by the balls, that’s what the USD being reserve currency means.

Everyone owns a lot of USD, both cash and securities, so when the US prints money, inflation hits all the world.

Dumping basically means saying “hey, I’ve got the entire US GDP here in cash USD, I’m selling it for 100 EUR”, and watching the US go hyperinflating.

The catch is that it would crash the world economy.

People are into sunk costs and book well in advance. A lot of that 30% is no-money-back cancellations.

Wait until you see next year.

You can’t use the think of the children line

Or having the members, the respective heads of states, on whose words the entire European and actually world press hangs, promote and politicise it.

Destroy state oversight of corporate oversight of media and communication.

The EC absolutely has the marketing budget to change that though.

Technically the Moskva was the Black Sea Fleet flagship, not the overall flagship of the Russian Navy.

That’s the aircraft carrier Kuznetsov, which can’t even move under its own power, and its air complement couldn’t be replenished since the 80s.

Why invade when they can colonise without invasion?

There is no point doing that as long as the Belt and Road takes over old Russian aligned states’ infrastructure and the kids of the Moscow elite start learning Mandarin, both of which is happening.

I expect when climate change melts the permafrost, the companies exploiting Siberia’s riches will be all Chinese. If Russia is luckier than most, they will at least employ Russians for the more menial jobs. As long as they can speak fluent Mandarin.

They were already importing arillery shells, and they are out of Soviet reserves.

They won’t collapse, but they will drift even more into the Chinese sphere of influence, while they have already lost their own.

Point is, the West and China can keep Ukrainians and Russians killing each other as long as they don’t stop funding either side, which will then collapse pretty much immediately.

In any case, Russia is pretty much done as a world power, and the only two questions is whether the US and the EU will become independent world players after Trump, and when the killing will actually stop.

It’s a purely political question, because both China and the EU can keep this up forever.

Collaboration and empathy raised us and made us dominant.

Sociopathy is a disease.