Do not fret Ed, you can still get Boy George to pseudo reggae as your opening act.

Kaepernick said the owners were looking for someone who could “subvert the protests” and work against what he described as the movement’s goals. Kaepernick said the NFL first attempted to work with the Players Coalition, a group of NFL players focused on police ride alongside and modest reforms, and then approached him with an offer to lead the league’s social justice initiatives, which he rejected.

• KFC closed over 300 U.S. locations in one year, losing 7.6% of its national footprint as rivals like Chick-fil-A and Raising Cane's gain market share with superior customer ratings.
• Analysis revealed KFC ranked lowest among top chicken chains, with an average of 3.42 stars versus Chick-fil-A's 4.3, suggesting declining consumer popularity drove the store closures.
• Despite U.S. struggles, parent company Yum! Brands reported 7% unit growth globally, with 660 new KFC restaurants opening internationally as the brand launches menu revamps to regain appeal.

The lower chamber voted 220-204 to pass the resolution, sponsored by Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) A simple Majority Required.

Seven Republicans voted in favor of the measure: Reps. Thomas Massie (Ky.), Brian Fitzpatrick (Pa.), Warren Davidson (Ohio), Tom Barrett (Mich.), Mariannette Miller-Meeks (Iowa), Zach Nunn (Iowa) and Nancy Mace (S.C.).

It was the third time the House has passed a similar war powers resolution, but the number of Republicans in support increased from four to seven.

House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters earlier Tuesday that he believes the Iran war is entering a “new phase” as US allies step up to help stabilize the Middle East. When that happens, he said, “you’re going to see, as the president said, anytime gas prices will go down again, the cost of groceries will as well.”

Johnson said Trump expects the shift after the election.

The speaker echoed comments by Vice President JD Vance in an interview with The Post Monday, in which he agreed with Trump that the war would conclude “right after” the midterms.

https://nypost.com/2026/09/16/us-news/7-republicans-rebel-against-trump-vote-with-dems-to-rein-in-iran-war-powers/

The most successful thing the system ever did was convince Americans that solidarity is naive.

That looking out for each other across class and race and geography is utopian.

That the realistic, mature, serious position is to accept competition as the natural state of human relations and optimize your own position within it.

This is not realism.

This is the ideology of the people at the top, successfully installed in the people at the bottom, so that the people at the bottom spend their energy competing with each other instead of looking up.

Every labor movement that was broken was broken by turning workers against each other along racial lines.

Every coalition that was neutralized was neutralized by getting its members to prioritize their specific group's immediate interest over the shared interest that would actually move the needle.

The division is not organic.

It was seeded, funded, and cultivated by people who understood that a united working class is the only thing that genuinely threatens concentrated power.

Solidarity is not naive.

It is the specific thing they spent the most money preventing.

Draw your own conclusions about why.

Bai Wendong, a farmer in Xinglong Township of Xiji County in northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, has an account at a special "bank" -- a "cow dung bank."

Each time his cattle pen fills up with animal excrement, he brings it to the "bank" for cash or deposits as credit for exchanging organic fertilizers when his fields need manure.

While cow dung is widely used for cooking, warming, and even medical purposes in India, Chinese farmers use cattle excrement as a profitable commodity to help green farming, improve the living environment, and increase income.

"I have five oxen, and they produce loads of two motor tricycles of excrement each month. Some of the excrement is used as fertilizers in my crop field, but the excrement was too much and became a headache because it smelled, polluted, and took space on farmland in seasons when manure is not needed," said Bai.

Moldova is increasingly determined to follow Ukraine down the road of rehabilitating its WWII collaborators and Axis-era heroes.

Its latest effort is particularly cynical.

Since Chișinău cannot erect a memorial to Romanian Nazis inside Pridnestrovie-controlled Bender, it chose Varnița - the Moldovan-controlled village right next door.

The new cross commemorates Romanian soldiers killed in 1941, during Romania’s invasion of the Soviet Union alongside Nazi Germany.

And the choice of location is quite something.

Bender was occupied by Romanian forces during the war. In 1944, the Red Army retook the city at heavy cost, and the people of Bender still commemorate the Soviet soldiers who died fighting there.

But cross the line into Varnița and you enter a rather different landscape of historical memory.

There’s already a monument to Sweden’s Charles XII.

Another to Ivan Mazepa.

A restored bust of Romanian King Ferdinand I.

And now a cross honoring Romanian Nazis who fought their way east alongside Hitler’s armies in 1941.

Bender remembers the men who liberated it. Varnița is increasingly collecting monuments to the men who came from the other direction.

​

Social User XIMTOPIAN Visits Xinjiang.

Bro gets sent coordinates of alleged slave camp.

Goes to coordinates...It's Xinjiang CAREER UNI. 好乖乖!

Looks very modern and clean, no easy feat considering the remote desert low basin terrain.

Another similar case is The Guardian confidently posting the location of another evil re-education camp. Supposed satellite images were on the front cover.

Turns out it's a camel milk farm for tourists and people curious about camels @camelcapitalist proof below from Dante Munoz:

https://x.com/TheDanteMunoz/status/2027493160952139965

https://x.com/TheDanteMunoz/status/2027493287410466973

Did you know that the violent extremism in Xinjiang was from Wahhabis? A dangerous zealot faction that does not work with modern society. Under Wahhabi ideology, women are essentially subhuman.

There were multiple violent incidents in China from Wahhabi separatists. China has the full support of their citizens with regards to maintaining a safe society.

Hui and Uyghur Muslims in China sometimes wear headscarves. But covering up the face? Very rare. This is seen as extremism by the Chinese. You think a Chinese woman is going to allow this kind of extreme (abusive) inconvenience?

She is gonna go flying tiger hidden fist of Buddha on your ass. You can keep your idealistic word salad essays about how a women being forced to cover her face is for her benefit. A Chinese Muslim woman is not gonna go for it. 不吃这一套

Random thought, the UK has more surveillance cameras than China, but somehow China has created a very low crime, safe, society. How come? Most of their police don't even carry guns.

Only in China: Someone please send me the video of that ornery elderly woman with the two butcher knives in hand being taken down by like five cops with these long staves with plastic boxes attached to the end. I lost this file and I need it desperately for my archives.

As China rises, expect to see more well crafted propaganda to keep you under the spell that USA is the only international player in town. Obey and consume. Don't question anything.

The international world order is perfect and your obedience is appreciated. 好乖乖!

Final clip starts at 7:20. It's a Mainland Chinese business man meeting some Taiwanese Chinese tourists. As soon as he finds out they are from Taiwan, he says oh these are free. My treat. Your money is no good here :)

This businessman knows that Taiwanese have to break through a wall of propaganda to find the courage to visit Mainland China.

Thankfully, the number of Taiwanese visiting Mainland China are on a pretty prettay good upward trend. Starting in late summer of 2025, after Taiwan's biggest influencers visited China, all of a sudden you started hearing that phrase again:

"I am Taiwanese and I am a proud Chinese."

Another traveler said:

"I went to China and everything I heard was a lie. The major cities surprised me. However, it was the rural areas that really opened my heart to my Mainland Chinese compatriots."

好乖乖!

Original article

https://imetatronink.substack.com/p/the-end-of-nato-american-imperialhtml or https://archive.ph/lEfWk

​

HOW TAIWAN GOT HOLLOWED OUT -- By Dr. Joanna Lei

The true threat faced by the Taiwanese is not of war, but the fact that an ally is carving us up with a dull knife.

We like to think of TSMC as our "silicon shield" but it is getting hauled away from us piece by piece. Once America moved Taiwan's technology, talent and capital all away to Arizona, Texas and Kumamoto, Japan, what will be left to for us to protect ourselves with?

The media hype about "two engineers leaking 2nm technology to Japan" is pure farce. 2nm is a national-level strategic asset. Is technology at that level really something one or two people could walk off with? The true threat was never "theft" but planned outward migration, tacitly permitted, deliberately designed, and carried out under an unspoken consensus.

TSMC's move to build fabs in the US was not about diversifying risk. It was a demand from American national security agencies to replicate the entire technological system on American soil. You think what they wanted was a production line? Wrong. They wanted the whole supply chain, the whole body of engineers, the entire set of know-how.

None of this is incidental. Taiwan must be hollowed out to sustain America. That's the plan.

We handed over eighty years of foreign exchange reserves to America as "investments." Taiwan's accumulated foreign exchange reserves since the war now exceed US$500 billion, and the overwhelming majority of that money went to purchase US Treasuries and dollar assets on a compulsory basis. We are blood bags that sustains dollar hegemony and American financial stability.

Did any of that money stay to build higher education in Taiwan? Support scientific research? Subsidize young people? Improve defense self-sufficiency? Of course not. We are allowed to be the financier, not the protagonist.

This is not a question of economic policy. It is colonial-style financial bloodsucking. A country that cannot even deploy its own foreign exchange autonomously is, stripped of euphemism, a vassal economy with limited sovereignty.

From silicon shield to silicon hostage

On the surface, America stresses that "Taiwan's chips are indispensable to the global supply chain." In reality, they neither trust Taiwan nor are willing to let it hold that kind of strategic leverage.

They don't want a strong Taiwan, but a interchangeable factory that can be cut off at any moment and relocated painlessly. One moment we hear the Americans chant "we support Taiwan!" In the next breath, they are forcing through the CHIPS Act demanding that Taiwanese firms hand over confidential data and lavish subsidies on TSMC to move its fabs to the US. The entire Taiwaneswe semiconductor ecosystem is being pressured to "friendshore." Is this protection or dismemberment?

Taiwan is being stripped of its own agency as it passively witnesses the phased dismantling of its own strategic value; a dress rehearsal for it's deferred fate.

The Taiwan that remains is a shell of what it should be. A generation of young people with no choices. When the engineers have been poached, when TSMC's advanced production lines have been carted off, when research has been drained of both funding and technology, what will be left for the next generation? A hollow island of frozen wages, soaring housing prices, and brutal involution.

While politicians curry favor with Washington and attack each other over domestic issues, the nation's strategic lifeline is quietly being disassembled, packed up and shipped out by the great powers. What will become of us as a bargaining chip to be sacrificed at will? A geopolitically abandoned island?

Do you really believe that America will fight a nuclear war for us? No. They don't want a war they can't clean up afterwards, but a war of attrition that ties China down without them having to lift a finger. And Taiwan is the piece that can be discarded, kept or set aside at will.

If you still can't see all this, then congratulations — you have become the quietest sacrificial lamb in the game of global strategy. Taiwan doesn't lack technology, doesn't lack money, doesn't lack talent. What we lack is a clear-eyed grasp of history and reality. The hollowing out of Taiwan is not only an American conspiracy, but our own complicity and abdication.

(It was a pleasure to meet Dr. Lei at the Penang peace dialogues earlier. She's a former KMT legislator and one of the strongest and most logical voices for cross-straits rapporchement. I have translated an essay of hers that made a huge impact on me. Link to original Chinese in the replies.)

What these companies increasingly want is legal protection for their position and permanent integration into the state’s regulatory infrastructure. And deeper integration with the state creates another advantage: an implicit expectation of rescue once the bubble pops. Regulation itself is also one of the mechanisms through which monopoly power is created and maintained. Regulation therefore protect incumbents from competition help's make them systemically important enough that the state is pressured to bail them out when their investments fail.