Far East Cynic

Short-sighted folks

I could not help observing during the visit of the Orange Monster to the mother country, how a certain segment of the American population is so blind to the realities of the world that was created in the wake of World War II. And I am talking specifically of that

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Throwback Thursday. The Maid’s Day Off.

Under the idea of changing things up a bit, I have decided to use Thursdays to re-post some of what I think are my better postings over the last 14 years. Plus hopefully, it will bring them to a new set of readers. This is one of my early posts

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Descent into darkness – Part II

In my life I have seen or known of 12 Presidents. For a good deal of that time I was a reliable Republican voter. That is until George W. Bush came to office and let loose the worst instincts of the party , starting a foolish war in Iraq, a

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Blind squirrels and acorns

Do sometimes get together. If you have been coming here for a decent interval you know that I hold both the National Review and the Weekly Standard in utter contempt. I read them to find out how the ill informed voter thinks and to find satire worthy materials. But every

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USS Liberty

As I have mentioned I travel to the land of milk and honey quite a bit. One of the messages I continually hear is about how Israel is surrounded and always under attack. And I don’t really dispute it-having been on the road twice when the sirens went off and

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TV worth watching.

It took the S.O. and I a long time to get Internet connectivity to the house, besides our cell phones and a stick for the computer. While I was away, it was installed-but our bandwidth is severely limited due to the lack of fiber (and cable) to our little village.

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More Berlin Pix

It is Saturday and doing errands today for the S.O. while she is out shopping for pottery. ( Like she really needs any more of it!). So a stop at the library seemed in order. The great internet drought may be ending next week, Vodafone is supposed to install a

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Going down a sinkhole…….

Is still a bad thing-no matter how many times you do it. The usual suspects have come out, and seized upon Robert Gates’ new book to criticize the effort to get the US out of the worthless hellhole that is Afghanistan, and to rewrite the history of the US fiasco in Iraq.  I

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Countdown to catastrophe-January 6th 1914

Stock brokerage firm of Merrill Lynch founded. After almost a 100 years of existence and avoiding the fate of Lehman brothers-the firm was merged into Bank of America in 2013. ( The evil empire wins again!) Arnold Richardson, composer was born. So too was, Danny Thomas-later of television fame in

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There was never a chance………..

Phib, in one of his repeated themes, bemoans the fact that we did not give ourselves a chance to “succeed” in Afghanistan. “All it required was about another four-five years of patience. Of course, that 4-5 from now is based on an alternative history where we did not announce our

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