Peekee @PeekeeDev

@414magyarbirds This is the way 🙏

@AlexBondODUA Not just in Moscow. My favorite: near Rostov on Don on the main road to occupied territories...

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@AunySillyMe Driving a camping car across Japan with 3 generations onboard without knowing a single word of Japanese...

I want to convince you to read a book with a scary cover. Everyone should read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, not because it is the last word on Nazis, but because it remains one of the most powerful demonstrations ever written of how civilization can fail while still believing itself to be civilized. That is the terrifying genius of Shirer’s book. It does not present the Third Reich as some meteor that struck Europe from outer space, nor does it comfort us with the childish notion that Germany was magically populated by millions of uniquely evil people. It shows something far more useful, and therefore far more disturbing: a modern, educated, technically sophisticated nation can be captured by lies, grievance, bureaucracy, fear, opportunism, and the small daily surrender of moral judgment. The machinery of barbarism does not require a population of monsters. It requires enough believers, enough cowards, enough careerists, enough cynics, and enough ordinary people who decide that keeping their heads down is safer than saying no. One argument I’ve heard is that all humans contain engrams that encode for certain group behaviors. When a local resource or abundance runs out, you invade a neighbor and take theirs. Or worse, you identify a group within your own population as the source of the problem and attack yourself, like an autoimmune disease. But it happens repeatedly throughout history. And the most important lesson is not that Hitler won Germany in a landslide. He did not. The Nazis became the largest party, but they never won a free majority mandate. In July 1932 they won 37.3% of the vote; in November 1932 they fell to 33.1%; and even in March 1933, after Hitler was already chancellor and political violence had warped the field, they reached 43.9%, still short of a majority. That is the chilling part. A country does not need 90% of its people to vote for madness in order for madness to govern it. It needs a militant minority, a fractured opposition, institutional weakness, elite miscalculation, and a public exhausted enough to mistake brutality for order. Shirer makes you understand that dictatorship doesn’t happen when people vote to abolish freedom. More often, it arrives wrapped in emergency powers, procedural legality, patriotic language, porous constitutions, and the promise that the unpleasant parts are “temporary”. People do not wake up one morning and decide to live in a police state. They accept one exception, then another. They tolerate one class of people being degraded because it is not yet them. They watch one newspaper silenced, one judge intimidated, one civil servant replaced, one neighbor denounced, and each time the mind performs its little act of self-preservation: surely this is not the REAL turning point; surely someone ELSE will stop it; surely it is better NOT to get involved. That is why the book is not merely history. It is a “systems manual” for democratic collapse. Shirer shows the inputs and outputs. Economic humiliation goes in. Conspiracy thinking comes out. Parliamentary paralysis goes in. The hunger for a strongman comes out. Propaganda goes in. Moral permission comes out. Career incentives go in. Obedience comes out. The horrifying thing is how much of it looks less like a thunderclap than like an old programming flowchart. Forms are stamped. Orders are routed. Promotions are granted. The trains run on time. Men like Asperger who would never personally murder a child learn to serve a system that does. And that is the second great reason to read it: it destroys the comfortable distance between “them” and “us.” Most people contain the engrams necessary to fall in line under the right pressure. That does not mean everyone is secretly a Nazi. It means human beings are exquisitely vulnerable to belonging, fear, status, obedience, resentment, and the narcotic-like relief of not having to think too hard when a leader offers a complete explanation for every pain or problem. Shirer forces the reader to confront evil not as a rare substance found only in supervillains, but as a set of ordinary human capacities intentionally reorganized by ideology and power. The book also matters because Shirer wrote with the eye of a witness. He was nor a historian, he was a journalist. As someone with ASD, I don’t fall prey to books like “A People’s History of the United States” because they are, at their core, emotional tracts. Shirer’s book is not. It’s journalism. It’s like reading a newspaper of events written by someone who was there and who had time to think about them. That’s because he had lived in Germany as a correspondent and watched the Nazi state harden around him. His great advantage is not academic distance but proximity. You feel the sequence of events as something unfolding in real time, not as a museum exhibit safely sealed behind glass. That gives the book its momentum. It reads less like a textbook than like a slow-motion systems crash, where every warning light is blinking and the operators keep insisting the reactor is fine. Yes, modern historians have refined, corrected, and complicated parts of Shirer’s interpretation. They should. No serious reader should stop with one book, especially one first published before I was even born. But that is not a reason to avoid it. It is a reason to start there and then keep going. Shirer gives the reader the great brutal architecture of the thing: the rise, the consolidation, the war, the crimes, the delusions, the collapse. Later scholarship can add wiring, plumbing, and better load-bearing analysis. Shirer gives you the building. And just when you start to feel comfortable there, he sets it on fire while you are still inside. What makes the book indispensable is that it turns “never again” from a slogan into a diagnostic skill. After reading it, you become less impressed by uniforms, slogans, rallies, and certainty. You become more suspicious of people who explain every problem by pointing at a hated internal enemy. You recognize the danger of elites who think they can harness extremists for their own purposes. You notice when law becomes a weapon instead of a restraint. You understand that institutions do not defend themselves; PEOPLE defend them, or they become scenery. And perhaps most importantly, you learn that moral catastrophe is usually incrementalbefore it is total. The abyss does not always announce itself. Sometimes it is approached by reasonable men making “practical compromises”, by citizens tired of chaos, by newspapers chasing access, by judges respecting technicalities, by businessmen preferring stability, by soldiers obeying oaths, and by neighbors deciding that silence is not approval exactly, just prudence. That’s the part that scared me the most – wondering where the “pragmatic me” would yield to the “moral me”, and just how sure I was that it would. That is why everyone should read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Not to congratulate themselves again for being unlike the people in it, but to understand how much like them we might become if the incentives, fears, and pressures were arranged badly enough. The book is essentially a warning against human weakness under industrialized conditions. It teaches that civilization is not a possession. It is a behavior. It must be renewed, defended, and practiced, especially when doing so is extremely inconvenient. And if a thousand pages of Shirer leaves you with anything, it is this: the machine is built by people, staffed by people, obeyed by people, and stopped, when it is stopped at all, by people who finally decide not to fall in line. One final “pragmatic” note – there’s a chapter or two on the elections that go through the returns in a lot of detail. That part is a bit of a slog – you have my permission to fast-forward. But the rest of it is incredible. PS: I would have just written this as an episode if YouTube were amenable to creators working outside of their channel's comfort zone, but alas... no. Amazon: amzn.to/3QU4mfF

@AunySillyMe Superb. "Pink is a lie" 👏 Just a bit too much shaking imho.

@aikisteve @Tesla Did you say "please" at least once? 😂

@MichaelVSmith3 @MykhailoRohoza Best sign this type of news hurts them hard. See how they try desperately to twist what is said in the original tweet and you know...

@Soaringeagle45 Fair 😂

1. אני לא בטוח שכולם מבינים עד כמה חמור המצב ברוסיה כרגע מבחינת מחסור בדלק לסוגיו. זה הולך ומחריף, ועלול להתפתח לאירוע עם השלכות יותר משמעותיות. אנשים ממתינים 12 שעות בתורים לדלק. וזה לא מאפיין רק מחוזות שקרובים לגבול האוקראיני. הסרטון המצורף למשל, שצילם נהג משאית אתמול בערב, הוא מהעיר צ׳יטה בעבר הבייקאל בסיביר, 5,000 ק״מ ממוסקבה, בערך 350 ק״מ מגבול מונגוליה וסין. הנהג מתוסכל, ואומר: "צ'יטה, צ'יטה. ה-26 ביוני, השעה 11 בלילה. איזה בלאגן, כוסאמק, פשוט בלאגן! אנשים מוכנים כבר לשלוף סכינים, פשוט ללכת מכות. מצלמים לי כל מיני תוכניות ריאליטי בטלוויזיה כמו 'איך לשרוד בסמרקנד', 'איך לשרוד פה ושם'... הנה, 'איך לשרוד במזרח הרחוק' – את זה צריך לצלם! בזבאיקליה, בצ'יטה! פשוט בלאגן, כוסאמק! הממשלה של הפדרציה הרוסית...אבל העיקר שבטלוויזיה מראים שהכל פאקינג מעולה אצלנו. מה, זה נראה לכם מעולה?! בשביל פאקינג 30 ליטר בנזין או 200 ליטר סולר, אתה פשוט צריך לעמוד שעות על גבי שעות בפקקים לתחנות דלק! זה פשוט הזוי, כוסאמק. לאן הכל פאקינג הולך? אני לא מאמין, איזה פקק, ינעל העולם. התחנה נמצאת שם... הנה, שם על הגבעה היא עומדת. (מישהו מדבר בקשר: 'נו, מה קורה, בחורים?') איזה דלק, בחייאת רבאק...פשוט זוועה, זוועה. קריסה טוטאלית. הכל אצלנו סבבה, התמונה בטלוויזיה מצוינת... הגענו רחוק, מה אני אגיד לכם."

@sarobertson_ RuZZian trolls attack in replies like crazy mosquitoes in August in a Canadian forest,,good sign 🤣

@Beefeater_Fella If the authorities deny it, then it's true and time to leave too 🤣👍

@CharlyBLR Well written, I like it 👍

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LaylaStormy @StormyLayla

a week ago

@ZelenskyyUa WE LOVE FLAMINGOS ! 🦩🦩🦩🦩🦩

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To anyone who takes russia's side and says they are "liberating russian speakers" Look, just look, THIS is what russian liberation looks like, THIS is the ruskie mir (russian world) All they know is death.

@Osinttechnical #GloryToUkraine #UkrainianKineticSanctions

@Sulkhan 1/ totally agree with you 👌 2/ your post draw so much Vatniks/trolls it's a honey pot to find targets to mute/block 😜

Researchers once asked 909 women to write down how they felt during every part of their day. The commute came in dead last, below housework, below their actual jobs. The study came from Daniel Kahneman, the psychologist who won a Nobel Prize for studying how people make decisions, and later research using bigger groups keeps finding the commute near the bottom. The math behind it is strange. You take a longer commute to get something back: a bigger house, a better school district, a higher salary. In theory it should even out. Two economists at the University of Zurich tested that against nearly twenty years of German survey data, and it didn't. People with longer commutes were just less satisfied with their lives. When they ran the numbers, someone with a one-hour drive each way would need to earn about 40% more to be as happy as someone who walks to work. The raise that justified the move mostly fails to pay for the daily grind of getting there. The body keeps a tally too. A study of about 4,300 adults in Texas found that once a one-way drive passed 10 miles, blood pressure started creeping up, along with blood sugar and cholesterol. Past 15 miles, people exercised less and were more likely to be obese. Sitting in a car that long crowds out the walk or the gym you meant to fit in. Then there is the cost to relationships. A Swedish researcher tracked 2 million Swedes who were married or living with a partner, and found that when one of them commuted 45 minutes or more, the couple was about 40% more likely to break up. The risk peaked in the first few years, and it usually landed on the same setup: the man takes the far job, the woman takes a smaller one near home and does more of the childcare. None of this is rare. The average American commute runs about 27 minutes each way now, close to an hour round trip, and roughly one in eleven workers spends 60 minutes or more in each direction. Britain's statistics agency found that every extra minute of commuting pushes happiness and life satisfaction down and anxiety up, with the worst stretch being a commute of one to one-and-a-half hours each way. The part that keeps showing up in the data is that people sign up for the long commute anyway. The bigger house and the higher salary are easy to picture. The hour in traffic, every day, for years, is the part the brain quietly tunes out.

Pharaoh👳🏾‍♂️👑 @MrMekzy_

2 weeks ago

The distance between your house and your job really affects your quality of life.

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@EugeniaGurevich @Sulkhan Here is the 2003 border agreement between Russia and Ukraine, where Donbas and Crimea is Ukrainian, signed by Vladimir Putin.

@tak_ya_anna @GhostOfKyiv_ @JalopenoF1 @JohnLangleyDoe @jurgen_nauditt @secretsqrl123 @leonardkerk @JukkaPSeppl @Zsibo1 A new version of "Whack-a-mole" but here the looser one. Move AD to already destroyed refinery 😂 And in a way to ensure location is easily identified 😜 We're lucky they are so stupid 😇

@InsideLucysHead Good one, didn't see it coming 😂