We have certainly gotten off to quite a start in 2026. With the straight-up deposition and kidnapping of President Maduro of Venezuela, the God-Emperor has essentially declared that America is, in fact, a piratical empire that thinks it can do whatever the hell it wants, and can get away with it.
And the sad truth is… he’s sort of right.
The American Empire has been precisely that for the better part of 200 years. The tattered remnants of its Republican origins are scarcely to be seen. America IS an empire, and has been an empire for a very long time.
But it is a colossus with feet of clay. If you actually examine the details of what happened in Venezuela, it becomes pretty clear that the US basically staged a kidnapping with minimal risk to itself of any kind of blowback, with the specific purpose of creating a Hollywood-ready narrative that did not actually put its own troops in any danger.
The reality is that the FUSA is not capable of conducting serious kinetic actions against enemies that can actually resist. It is not capable of fighting real wars. And it is absolutely incapable of taking on a real enemy like Russia or China in an actual shooting war for any length of time.
These performances – and that is what they are – make Drumpf’s ego feel good. They pump up the war bros in the Five-Sidede Wind Tunnel. But they cannot disguise the decay and rot at the heart of the American Empire.
That Empire is collapsing. The corpse of the American Republic is exactly that. It is dead and gone, and the Empire that replaced it is falling apart on top of it. Precisely how long it will last, remains to be seen, but the Iron Law of Empires remains unbroken.
That law is simple: empires ruin nations. The corollary to that law is that empires fall back apart into individual, much weaker, nations, and that is precisely what we see happening in slow motion right now. The FUSA is, and has been for quite a while, in a state of low-grade and very nasty fratricidal civil war. It will not be much longer before that war erupts into something spanning the entire American landmass.
What happens after that, is anyone’s guess, really.
Anyway, enough of that for one day. Let us get on to the important stuff.
This week’s lovely lady is Dumitrita Pruteanu, age 28 from Moldova – or possibly from the breakaway Russian-majority region of Transnistria, given that she seems to write and speak fluent Russian. One cannot say much else about her – there is nothing particularly outstanding about her assets, so to speak – but she does bring a certain amount of class and style to proceedings.
2 Comments
Off-topic, but I keep seeing nonsense from fitness bros on Twitter about how barbell squats are pointless and dangerous, and that you can get the same kind of power from various machines like pendulum squats, without any of the risk.
I assume this is from older dudes who are afraid they’ll hurt themselves, but I just turned 43 with an occasionally bad right knee and I can knock out a 5×5 at 315 no problem.
What are your thoughts? I would assume that all of the usual arguments against machines (don’t learn proper form and technique, don’t get the full range of motion) still apply.
Yes, that is nonsense. When performed CORRECTLY, SKWAATS are perhaps the second-best all-body strength and conditioning exercise. (Deadlifts being the best, in my opinion – but my body is built well for deadlifts, not so much for squats.)
The real problem with axially-loaded barbell squats is that they are an extremely technically demanding exercise. Precisely because they are a complex compound movement, they require a great deal of attention and care with respect to form. Most people fail to use correct form and turn the squat into a hamstring- or glute-dominant exercise, which then puts quite a bit of shearing force on the lower back and the knees. The other big mistake, of course, is failing to go down to parallel – the shearing stresses on the knees are the worst at the angles between 45 and 90 degrees, and that is what a lot of people fail to check or fix.
By contrast, when one keeps the squat quad-dominant, with a tight core, breaking at the hips AND the knees simultaneously, and the bar tracking in a straight vertical line passing from it through to the midpoint of the foot, and a relatively upright torso, squatting all the way down to at least parallel… then it is a phenomenal exercise that works out every major muscle group in the body.
My personal view is that as long as you are very careful with your form, and have the right gear – a proper belt, flat shoes (with or without an elevated heel), and high-quality compression sleeves for the knees – then you will be fine.
Machines do not require you to balance the bar and control it on your back, and therefore rob you of the benefits of the exercise. They have their place – hack squats and leg presses can and do work out the legs – but they do not engage the entire posterior chain the way squats do. I simply do not see the point of machines unless you have such a severe injury that you cannot tolerate squats.
For perspective, every single disc in my lower back bulges out. I have constant lower back pain during the day. I have to stretch out my back every morning. On top of that, my left knee has problems, and my left hip has a deep-tissue thing with the labrum that goes back over 10 years. And I still am able to squat with good form and without injuring myself, because I am careful and conscious of form.