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A bear.

If such a one were to have perfect contrition and express it to a priest he might go to Heaven He would leave his shell of evil behind and it would not affect Heaven.

It is likely that there was no direct involvement by the Organs. However think about the school shooters. Many have been shown to have had contact with federal agents in the previous couple of months. Find a crazy and urge him on with the right psychological techniques.

If the assassin was, indeed, Chinese that opens up a whole nother can o’ worms. Chinese Nationals who are first to third generation Americans are mostly compromised because they have relatives in China who will suffer if the Chinese derived persons in America don’t pass all information back to China or do what the Party wants them to do. And there are the battalions of Chinese could-be soldiers who are marching across the border to the beat of the Democrat drum.

Memories of a past war do not contaminate the land. Attitudes do.

It is definitely hotter this summer in Việt Nam but in 68-69 I remember that summer and most of the rest of the year saw temperatures above 100 degrees almost every day. It has been 90s most of the summer with some years no 100+ temps at all for the last 21 years anyway and cooler in the non-summer months- can’t say Sài Gòn ever has anything we can call winter, except on the calendar.

I cannot log into Yahoo from Việt Nam though I have no problems with my VPN in the USA even though I have my VPN set to Vietnam. With my VPN so set I get a lot of ads in Vietnamese so It would seem that it is not scamming me.

Actually I am Scots-Irish extraction with most branches going back to the Seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I enlisted in 66 because I was wasting my fathers money in college with no idea of what I wanted to do. I joined the AF because I was too skinny for the Army. My action in VN was all in the back end of a C-47 and I lived in Chợ Lơn. I lived with a Việt family for five months reporting to work three of four days a week to fly. The enemy was shooting at me just as much as at those fellows on the ground but for me it wasn’t personal. At eight thousand feet I couldn’t hear it or see it. We carried a box of M-16s but never opened it.
I learned Vietnamese, French- which I had got in grammar school- and some Dutch because I got to know a Dutch trading family who were still in Sài Gòn. I went back in 2003 with the old soldier syndrome to see how the country had fared since the war and an oath to stay out of bars and to NOT take a girlfriend, even for a “short time.” I knew some old soldiers who had gone back to see the country and saw nothing and learned nothing. They started off by being ushered into saloons and by getting too-willing girlfriends.They could have done that in Chicago or El Paso for less money. I fell in love with the country and the people, put a very bright fourteen year old through school at ̣Đại Học HCM to her MBA and several other people who had no futures are now successful business people or a college professor or business owner primarily because the American -Ông Mỹ- was many times in the right place at the right time and somehow said the right words to prevent a suicide, to bring a woman out of a physical and mental breakdown to where she is now a college professor, and more. I have long come to the conclusion that I was not alone, that God or an angel was moving me around. There have been way too many coincidences for more than a tiny part of them to have happened in the natural course of things. Some of those incidences were pretty bizarre. The fly in the ointment is that some of them are Buddhists and I am totally untalented at any sort of evangelism so they are still Buddhists. I have two proteges and a goddaughter in VN. I am 78 and still work because my little bit of social security won’t pay the air fare. I go back as often as I can which is running a tad more than once a year for a month because since COVID visas are only for one month and no extension.

The Vietnamese now don't even think about such things much any more but the people generally twenty years ago were Americophiles and believed that of all the invaders of the past, America was the one that did not have any designs on conquest and colonization. And after the Clinton handshake, many Vietnamese mothers hoped their daughters might find American husbands, Americans personally had acquired a unique reputation. A line of troops passing through a small town pass an old man who is stumbling under a load and two troops drop out of formation and give him a hand. In all other cultures one doesn't offer gratis help to people who are not related. American men who become interested in a woman who already has a child and marry her, any pre-existing progeny are included in the package. For all others no man will raise another man's child, Children have to go live with relatives. Mothers with young widowed daughters crave to get them hooked up with American men and that includes Party and Government people. I have watched an old Việt Nam war buddy who traveled back and forth as a business lawyer get trapped by a plot of a young widow's retired Party parents into marrying their daughter with her then six year old daughter. Best thing that ever happened to him. He died in Nha Trang a few years later and left his wife with half his Social Security which was enough for her to live very well on.

Most of the history of Việt Nam has been that of fighting free of Chinese domination and kicking and keeping China out.
From BC through the tenth century China conquered and reconquered Việt Nam but Việt Nam was too remote from the Capital and the satraps and occupying armies sent south tended to become Vietnamese and to fight for independence which was a number of times accomplished for short periods. The Vietnamese finally fought free and was reinvaded unsuccessfully several times.

Việt Nam has been pretty serious about business and free enterprise. There are some restrictions but in practice they donư’t restrict much at all. A Party member has to be on any corporation’s board of directors but he is mostly just collecting a paycheck. Việt Nam had a pretty sharp lesson in how Socialism works when their war ravaged economy was NOT recovering after the war. When Việt Nam went into Cambodia China cut off food supplies and after a bit ơ did a major border incursion in ‘79. The Party/government people realized that they themselves were getting short rations even as the population came to the edge of famine and there was real starvation in some places. That was when they began loosening up. By ‘84 and Đời Mới the farmers were producing without government “help” and were soon exporting rice in great quantities. Backing off controls on industry took a little longer while the bureaucracy absorbed the new policy but Việt Nam now is looking more and more like Korea twenty years ago and is catching up fast. Vietnamese are practical people, even the nominal Communists, and understand remaining outside of the Empire to the North requires wealth and socialism in practice does not offer any hope of that.

Visit. It is an inexpensive vacation and the Vietnamese love Americans, even those Vietnamese who lost family and fought on the other side. I know a man who was drafted in the far north and fought in the jungle for years before he found out the enemy was not China. He was one of the ones who. on entering Sài Gòn decided the wrong side had won.

I heard that phrase many times in Việt Nam a few; years ago.

We got into that war with some very bad policy decisions after Edward Lansdale had accomplished pretty much what he had already done in the Philippines with Ramon Magsaysay. We were in the Democracy building phase which we never have got out of. That is trying to build out idea of society in places with very different social organization. It does not work.

Việt Nam has a population that resembles South Koreans in that they seem to be born doing business. They are very entrepreneurial and the Vietnamese economic advance has been similar to the Korean “miracle” since the government got out from under the old guard and let this naturally entrepreneurial people do what they do best.

Russians are Russians. A few years ago I was in Nha Trang which had become a tourist mecca for Russians and saw many of them and interracted with a few. They seem to be generally unpleasant people all around. The walked about sneering at; the locals and being very impolite in a polite society. When I was walking on the beach with my friend’s wife and his little girl- my goddaughter- we got a lot of disapproving looks and bad English insults. Trang and I thought it amusing.

Việt Nam is not socially capable of a Western style Republic or of dangerous Democracy. The society is traditional and totally family/clan based. In an election as we envision it the ;people will vote for the candidates closes to their families regardless of ideology and policy. Can’t run a Republic like that. Related officeholders are expected to concentrate on getting the most possible for their families first and foremost. Regardless of the formal nomenclature and official structure, Việt Nam has as good a government now as it could expect.

So long as Trump is perceived to have a better than even chance of winning in November, VN will stay out of BRIC. If Trump does not replace the Democrat nihilists Việt Nam will enthusiastically join. It is a matter of economic self defense.

HCM wasn’t dumb though he declined mentally in the last years. Neither was Giáp.

Việt Nam doesn’t need the foreign aid and absolutely doesn’t want the Woke strings that come with it.