The CIA near the height of the cold war was able through front companies to buy USSR titanium for their weapons programs such as the B2 and other high performance planes without the USSR detecting this.

Frankly if you're China and you don't control global monetary flows, don't have ins at every bank, every shipping company, every logistic company, don't have a global illegal wiretap network and do have a policy of openness and trade wherever possible there is just no way for them to totally stop this.

I mean the west hasn't been able to completely stop Russian imports of western products through intermediaries and they really want to and have a lot more visibility throughout the supply chain than China.

In the electronics space Macbooks tend to be pretty durable. The downsides are anything recent which is worth buying (M1-4 chips) has soldered on storage, ram, etc so they're not really user upgradeable and there's also the issue of needing an adapter for anything USB-A. I wouldn't buy new for value unless it's on clearance as an old model. But after at most a battery replacement they tend to be pretty solid machines even used as long as they weren't badly mistreated. Older Thinkpads (not E-series, mainly T and P) also tend to be pretty durable and you can buy them cheap used on ebay and are a lot more serviceable than Macbooks. Screens are not as great though, not the clearest or sharpest things but usable if you're not doing graphics work or using it as a high end, high quality media player. Macbooks win on the nice screen front hands down.

why is this so common?!?!

Bourgeois propaganda. They don't want their taxes raised nor those of their top servants (C-suite execs, etc). So they fear-monger that the moment you earn just a bit more money, bam you get hit with losing 50% of it which is horrifying to normal people who just want to make a bit more money and fear this will happen to them. Thus the people who have been indoctrinated with this oppose tax increases. If they understood the amount you need to live on (say $250k) was taxed at one lower rate and you only got hit with 50% tax on the amount over a million you earn they would be much more amenable to higher taxes on the higher brackets.

Not only that but it makes workers content with less. I've literally heard people say they didn't take a raise or a promotion because it would put them just a few thousand over into in a higher tax bracket. I mean this is the dream for the bourgeoisie. They get to blame it on government and convince their worker serfs that they want a lower paying job because of taxes.

So it's a gross simplification for the purposes of getting people to oppose all taxes by fear-mongering brackets as cliffs.

Reminder that DuckDuckGo is far from perfect. They censor and derank or hide Russian news sources since the SMO started as "disinformation" and have admitted as much. They likely censor and derank other anti-empire outlets and sources as well without admitting it. I actually think they may be worse than Google in this particular regard as they did it as a libbed up "ethics" stand as part of the whole Russia-gate nonsense.

Not to say continue using Google but I'd be wary of using DDG for anything anti-empire or politically contentious.

Sadly not practical most likely. They'd need to physically burrow into the FBI's basement and they have tremor sensors that would detect tunneling anywhere near there. Not like they're going to scan all this stuff and put it on the most hackable portion of pentagon dot mil or something. Those boxes have disappeared into a deep hole of the deep state bureaucracy. I'd guess just the threat of release will keep all the blackmailed pedos in-line so having quick access isn't even seen as a need.

I can hear this in his voice and it's hilarious.

True but also I think in a war with China those won't matter as much as some combination of drone production, missile production capacities, ability to get those through the enemy defenses (counter-jamming, electronic warfare, tactics, etc) AND/OR your ability to take down drones and missiles effectively and not too expensively (resource-wise not cost-wise). The US isn't going to fight a ground war against China in a conventional sense. It's going to be on the high seas, a world war probably across many island chains with naval logistic and control of the seas and air more important. But who knows.

So drones + fighters + other air assets + missiles + naval assets and the ability to leverage them, use electronic warfare, dirty tricks, secret weapons, combined arms, etc to overcome the enemy and strike deep and hard or maintain superiority.

Probably. On the other hand they do like radicalizing people so they can use them as an excuse to outlaw or further surveil or attack organizations so it's not impossible they were really hoping to paint MLK with the communist brush and if they had to literally turn people into communists around him to get that to work they were quite willing to do so. Hoover in particular was desperate for it so absolutely wouldn't have been beyond trying to create some communists if it meant giving him more ammo to take down the civil rights movement and MLK.

Zionist entity sought to kill Khamenei according to a TV interview in the entity Source: Russia Today

Apparently they weren't able to because he went into serious hiding. He didn't contact or accept contact with any of the new people who replaced the assassinated IRGC generals. There was a report a day or so ago about there being problems reaching him for negotiations because he didn't have any comms where he was and it was difficult to get to him so I believe this and this also shows the lengths the entity will go to decapitate its enemies. If he'd been a little less serious about protecting himself and remained in operational command they'd have dropped a bunker buster on his head just like Nasrallah IMO. This also I think is a serious threat in the near future if Bibi gets another indictment dropped on his head or whatever and would likely lead to the war they desperately crave which would force a US intervention. They said they'd do it without US approval too. Iran needs air defense.

Trump: Prepares for war of aggression, talks aggressively of containing China, inherits island chain forward operations encirclement from decades of American policy of encircling and hemming in China with bases and partnerships including missile deployments and forward bombers and radar. Arms separatists on Taiwan, violates the basis of diplomatic relations, is president of incredibly war-mongering empire with long history of aggression including wars against three neighbors (Vietnam, Laos, Korea) in the past 75 years. Has think tanks openly plan wars of aggression against China and talk of how long they'll have military supremacy against them in a war.

Xi: Sees this stuff happening and prepares for purely DEFENSIVE war against this incredible and long-telegraphed aggression which he and previous administrations have done everything in their power to delay including taking economic hits and keeping their heads bowed to keep trade up between the powers. Talk is very diplomatic in tone, attempts to resolve tensions diplomatically, encourages trade and interconnectedness and globalization to decrease chances of conflict, talks of win-win cooperation, has exactly one foreign military base and its a tiny one in Africa next to a much larger US one.

Bourgeois propagandists: These are exactly the same, this is all coming down to aggression from BOTH sides (but really those sneaky Chinese who are forcing us to do this).

Very interesting they're letting him actually do this. I would think the bourgeoisie would not like this kind of hit. He still has time to do "incredible deals" whereby these countries agree to buy $100 of US goods and he drops the tarrifs while tooting his horn but things do kind of look like the bourgeoisie (those near levers of power anyways) are serious about forcibly decoupling and reshoring pronto to be able to fully enact the plan of isolating, blockading, sanctioning, and trying to turn up the pressure on and destroy China or at least prevent their rise and displacement of US power.

I mean it's either fail children running the show which I still can't buy because they'd love their enemies to think them more foolish and incapable than they are and we don't have that luxury OR the whole plan for drawing back, child labor, small yard, high fence, using the sword of empire to attempt to force the world to buy more US stuff to displace competitors OR they're on some sort of dark enlightenment trip and think capitalism is over and the only way to avoid socialism is turning the barbarism machine way up and trying to create some sort of techno-feudalism or something else at home.

Why does it matter? Well if they're just incompetent then indeed the fall of the US is in order in the near future but options 2 and 3 spell very, very, very dire times for those in the imperial core as it's a very orderly managed decline that's liable to be able to potentially draw it out many more decades into the future and inflict incredible amounts of suffering on those of us stuck here in the mean-time (beyond just treats being more expensive).

Just imagining it now: "I spent over a year as a guest of Hamas and all I got was this lousy t-shirt"

No, they're going to coach at least a few of them into making up stories about horrors and atrocities and put those obviously staged and coerced "stories" on blast in the western news media. And if they can't coach any into that they'll just make it up like theremoveds and the western media will keep repeating it and using it to bash pro-Palestinians over the head.

On a related note. Bets on whether this ceasefire results in the ICC/ICJ washing their hands of the whole thing or the US managing to lean on South Africa enough to drop the case? Because I just can't see the west not pulling out all the stops to brush this whole thing under a rug and say it's in the past.