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founding

That beach is so amazing, so refreshingly uncrowded and so fleeting. Maybe Australia will be the last place on earth that is not overcrowded. Australia enjoys the isolation of not sharing borders with overcrowded countries. What are the immigration policies of Australia? Enjoy! PS, I love Henry Lawson's poem, In the Days When the World was Wide.

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author

Lawson was a legend. Glad you enjoyed! More about Australia (including immigration) in future Notes. Cheers!

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The big money just can't wait to get into the Hippy sleepy towns wherever they are. All the con men and their money are looking for some simple truth laced with a little pot and naive local truth, seems so refreshing.

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May 12Liked by Joel Bowman

Hope that lamb roast was great! I thought some Shiraz would go great with it, using the Champagne with the appetizer course!

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author

Yep, Champagne just to toast the occasion… then Barossa Shiraz all the way!

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founding

I am possibly very stupid but got very little from your piece other than to learn that you are happy to be back with your family in the land of your birth Happy for you but dying to hear what you think about the nanny state of Australia and how the Milei endeavour is going I miss your Sunday sesh I forwarded a gift 1 month subscription to my son in Spain who appears to be a little underwhelmed Hoping you blow his socks off with next week’s piece

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It is time to write a narrative about dictatorship, and since I lived and worked in six dictator-led countries, including Russia, I feel qualified to discuss this issue.

Yes, we need another seven-million voter-advantage that mirrors Biden's lead in the 2020 election. However, this lead did not change Trump's lies, violence, and the insurrection. He did not accept the outcome of that election and he again will not accept or swallow the results in 2024 if he looses. Most of us already know this. His reaction is still unknown, but hold onto your seat.

Donald Trump is not capable of dealing with reality, and has a typical cult-like leadership mentality. Jim Jones, also thought of himself as God, and he amassed a following of about 900 individuals. He ordered them all to drink Kool Aid laced with poison and they all perished. Trump's followers, of which over 800 have been convicted of crimes and many are now in prison, have experienced the same level of coercive mind control as the people who followed Jim Jones. With his "us-versus-them" mentality most of the Trumpers are now in a state of blind loyalty. Speaking to them is pointless.

The dark and dangerous world of mind manipulation was first used in totalitarian countries about 100 years before - Germany, Austria, Italy, Russia, China, and so on. The Holocaust is the best-known example of brainwashing outcomes. Hitler converted an entire peaceful country into mass murderers using slogans of hatred toward others - just like Trump. Brainwashing is defined as telling lies over and over until it is perceived as the truth. (wikipedia) Once converted, a person has little or no independent thought. Over six million people were tortured and killed in Germany. In Russia, Stalin murdered over twenty million humans. Donald Trump's threatening behavior, disturbing words, and his duplication of Putin/Hitler's leadership methodologies echoes other treacherous historical crises and mass murders.

This is not a coincidence; it is learned behavior combined with a long list of personality disorders. He learned it from Putin who spent his spy years in East Germany. Trump is caught up in a complex web. He truly believes that "only he can fix America," without grasping the basic concepts/events that formed the United States. He talks about re-writing or scrapping our Constitution, but his many-sided destructiveness over-rides the true meaning of how a democratic country operates. The only option then is a dictatorship.

A dictatorship can be defined by a list of words: tsarism (Russia), despotism, autocracy, totalitarianism, oppression, Nazism (Germany), and domination. The word that jumps out to me is "oppression." Can you envision the United States having: (1) No public media. All sources of information are inhibited. (2) No independent and free enterprise. MicroSoft, Walgreens, Utilities and all other corporations are privately retained by the dictator who receives a large percentage of the profits. and (3) Security services are combined and will mimic the gestapo who reported on private citizens, arrested and imprisoned innocent people, murders were rampant, and fear was contagious. A vote for Donald Trump is a vote for a dictatorship. Trump has already amassed a group of people - gangsters - who threaten anyone (and their families) who opposes him. The askew aptitudes of the Supreme Court judges already has demonstrated proclivities and partialities toward Trump, and other judges have also succumbed to delivering asymmetric justice.

Trump sold his soul and our country to the Russians decades ago. He followed Putin's example in his role-out of a meticulously planned and savage PR campaign, similar to what happened in Moscow after the bombing of several apartment buildings - a maneuver to perpetuate apprehension and terror. It resulted in a national sense of emergency and instilled fear. The financial scandal surrounding Yeltsin was elbowed to the sidelines, and Putin was propelled to the front lines. Officially, the blame was assigned to the separatist rebels and Chechnya independence fighters, but the "unofficial" word on Moscow's street was these bombings were like the Stalin purges. Putin has been compared to Stalin and he appears to appreciate this assessment. "Could Putin's security men have bombed their own people - hundreds died in these bombings - in a cynical attempt to create a crisis that would ensure Putin took the Presidency?" (Putin's People, by Catherine Belton). This type of deception is widely known in Russia and other dictatorship countries. This is exactly why I questioned the mass shooting at the Crocus in Moscow as Putin-inspired, or even the container ship who lost power and rammed into a major bridge in Baltimore - the same waterway passage used by U.S. military transports and aid to Ukraine and Israel. The FBI is investigating, but my question is "who was working on the ship's engine right before that ship left it's dock?"

In 2024, Trump is still saying that the 2020 election was stolen. He used these words after the 2016 election and said "Clinton stole the popular vote from him." (www.npr.org) How many times can he twist the same lie? Trump began traveling to Russia in 1987. He became entangled with Russian business men who were all later found to be KGB operatives. This is a period when Trump was buried in debt and at the same time, the KGB was searching for new ways to transfer black cash into the U.S. instead of just through bank transfers. Bayrock Group, founded with all KGB men (who report to Putin) as a real estate firm, was housed in a Trump-owned building, one floor below the Trump Organization at 725 Fifth Avenue in New York. They offered Trump multi-million dollar real estate deals and bailed him out of another bankruptcy. He was hooked. Both Trump elder sons have confirmed that the Trump Organization has received about $100M from Russian banks. (www.businessinsider.com, www.vanietyfair.com). Russian banks are 100% controlled by the KGB/FSB and give funds to foreigners to either filter black cash into another nation's economy or to entrap the foreigner to work for Russia. Russian banks also gave more than nine million dollars to Marie LePen who is the foremost presidential opposition leader in France so she could overthrow the French government. (www.washingtonpost.com)

Republican voters across the U.S. think they are supporting their political party - the same party as Abraham Lincoln. Instead, they are voting to instill a man who has been compromised by Russian KGB/FSB and who will turn our nation into a Putin-owned and operated dictatorship. Also in Putin's People, Belton states: "Even as Trump ramped up his bid for the presidency, the same Russian network stepped up its courtship of him... In a letter to Michael Cohen, Sater (Bayrock) boasted that they would build a tower in Moscow that would be Europe's tallest building and would bring Trump a $100M licensing deal. Sater promised to leverage all of his Kremlin connections to get it done. The letter said he would get Putin on this program, and we will get you (Trump) elected." (ibid) The rest is history, except the role of William Barr in squashing the Mueller Report - a two-year $32 million dollar (www.cnn.com) investigation into the 2016 Russian interference of our election and Trump's relationship to Russia. Why did Barr preempt the publication of that report with false conclusions? Twelve Russians were arrested, but nothing changed and Trump was elected to the presidency with enormous Russian "behind the scenes" support, cyber attacks, hacking, propaganda, and misinformation fed to the American public. The Russians have openly said that U.S. election interference will continue. Believe them. Will this Russian election interference win the election again for Trump?

Since 1993, I have been saying to anyone who would listen that the Cold War did not die. In Putin's People, (Revenge of the KGB, page 479) Catherine states: "Putin's security men reveled in Trump's victory. To many, it seemed like revenge for the Soviet collapse (which Russians blame on the U.S.) 'While the West was playing James Bond . . .we turned our attention to gaining respect... When the West thought the Cold War competition was over, they lost respect for their opponent (Russia). Now they are waking up to this again."

This upcoming election is critical. If Trump wins, we all loose.

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I want to make sure I understand what you're saying - is this the same Donald trump that refused a retaliatory bombing of Iran because 3 or 4 Iranian people might die? And, if he is such a dictator, how could he lose the 2020 election? Dictators don't lose elections.

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Wow! Fortunately for you, Trump Derangement Syndrome is not a recognized psychological diagnosis! With all his many faults, at least Trump makes his decisions himself. Unlike Biden, he does not have a pool of nouveau White House Marxists controlling his actions. Strangely missing from your above novella are the words "border," "immigrant," "budget", "deficit," "inflation," and even "policy." While Trump's policies are not perfect, they are immeasurably more beneficial to the American people than Bidens. Anyone reading your post should realize the reality of this old saying, "Anyone proposing harmful actions toward the public from their political enemies are simply proposing what they themselves will do when in power."

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Reading comments like this one help make me grateful for our freedom of speech. It allows me to get a glimpse into other minds and see how their thought processes work. Then I can use my own common sense and my own mind to decide what seems closest to the truth. For me, Donald Trump, just doesn’t pass the sniff test of being a dictator.

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May 12Liked by Joel Bowman

Oh, and this comment has absolutely nothing to do with Joel Bowman's enjoyable piece about life on a beach in Australia.

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Elizabeth, at least my vote will cancel yours!

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I will be pleased to hear of your heart attack upon Trump's reelection.

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But your support came from articles from in CNN, NPR, Washington Post, Vanity Fair and Business Insider. Have you ever heard of the mainstream news? Recent reports have come out that these companies supported experimental vaccines for covid and they are rumored to have produced no negative comments about their employers.

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