LOSING AFGHANISTAN, MY ASS

We never “had” Afghanistan in the first place. We spent 20 years there trying to control the population and install a stable government that was loyal to us, and 2442 American troops, 3,846 U.S. contractor employees, almost 50,000 Afghan civilians, and nearly 70,000 Afghan troops and police are dead, sacrificed in this effort.

What no one ever explains is, WHO are the Taliban and why can’t we defeat them? I’ll tell you. The Taliban are Muslims. Strict, orthodox Muslims who make up the majority of the Afghan population. The MAJORITY. That’s why we can’t defeat the Taliban, because we’d have to kill off the majority of Afghanis to succeed, and the world would shit all over us for committing genocide.

But why were we trying to conquer a nation that no one including a massive effort by Russia was ever able to conquer? In fact, let’s ask why Russia was trying to conquer them. An apparently dirt-poor nation full of ignorant, uneducated, dirty people who barely ever wash themselves and have sex with children, a vile people in a vile land. Why go to such trouble to conquer this rabble, and why does everyone keep failing?

Every last Afghani male is a guerilla fighter almost from birth. They don’t wear uniforms and they live in the villages all over Afghanistan. It’s a nation of trained sneak-attack warriors who rush out in the middle of the night, attack and kill, then run back to their mud brick homes and act like nothing ever happened. Then another village group does it, then another, then another, 50 of them, 500 of them, little village groups running out under cover of darkness, attacking and fading away.

You want to get rid of the Taliban? Easy. Just wipe out all the villages.

So. WHY are people fighting over Afghanistan? Because that land of rocks and dirt is immensely rich in minerals. Rare earths, precious metals, and WE WANTED IT. But guess what? By removing all our troops we’re opening the way for the Communist Chinese to move in as Friendly Merchants who only want to Peacefully Mine Out All The Wealth, sharing the profits with the Taliban and enabling them to buy really expensive toys that go BOOM and spread terrorism to the West on a truly grand scale.

And now a prediction: When the Taliban do start really sharing their violence with the West, that will provide the perfect excuse to go back to war with them again. We quit, really, because the terror attacks had stopped, but we didn’t really want to because if nothing else, there’s big profits in conducting wars as long as they’re in some other country besides our own. The Military-Industrial Complex just loves wars. So actually, this isn’t really over for us. We’re just taking a break.

We’re going to let the Taliban take over the government, let the Chinese mine the ores, buy the products from them, and then make more profits from war materials production. Everyone comes out on top except the children, who get to be raped a lot.

THAT’S NOT A PHOENIX RISING FROM THE ASHES, IT’S A VULTURE

In order to completely rebuild a society, you have to totally destroy the old one. As a somewhat recent example, when Cuba’s government became so corrupt that no one could be trusted anymore, Fidel Castro was able to organize enough people to overthrow it. In doing so, he sent hundreds to firing squads, thousands more to prisons, instituted a draconian Communist regime and shut Cuba off from the rest of the world, forcing the people into instant poverty and total dependency on the government.

I see that the Democrat/Communist political machine in California is about to pass a string of bills designed to further destroy what’s left of democratic society and moral standards, by promoting child trans-sexualism, inhibiting religious freedom, legalizing more drugs and other measures enabling social decay. Similar actions are happening in other state legislatures, have been happening for years now, and are steadily increasing in volume. Same with the Federal Government.

The obvious goal is to cause so much social havoc that we descend into chaos. The BLM and Antifa rioting proved to be inadequate for starting a citizen uprising that the government could quell viciously, so now we have mask and vaccine mandates to cripple our liberties and freedom of movement, along with massive government expenditures causing rapid, extreme inflation to impoverish us.

We are being crushed economically, through fear and by diseases, and we will be steadily forced to become dependent on government until we are all brought under control and the New Society has risen. This is happening now, all over the world, so don’t feel alone. The Middle Class is ending. Once the change is complete, there will be those who rule us, and us. Nothing in between.

The best way to protect yourself from the enforced poverty that’s coming is to become poor now if you have a well-off lifestyle, because soon everything is going to cost more than most people can afford, your wages will not be adequate to pay your mortgage and you’re going to find yourself grocery shopping at Food Outlet. If you divest yourself of a high-end lifestyle, buy a cheap home instead that you can pay for outright, and start living well below your means, you may have a good chance of survival.

LOOK OUT, HUMAN RACE. IT’S DISEASE TIME.

Ebola keeps cropping up in different spots in Africa and making the occasional appearance in South America, but never spreads very far because it pretty much kills everyone who gets it, very quickly. Plus you have to have contact with the body fluids of an infected person, their blood, spit or semen, to become infected yourself. It doesn’t travel by air other than droplets from coughing. Of course, a simple mutation could fix that.

But Ebola is a minor concern compared to the new stuff that keeps being generated by the African jungles, and the latest is an Ebola-like disease called Marburg Virus. Described as a highly infectious virus that causes hemorrhagic fever, Marburg belongs to the same family as the Ebola virus which also causes hemorrhagic fever.

Another sweetheart virus is the Chapare Virus, also very much like Ebola, that kills by massive hemorrhaging. You start bleeding everywhere, in your intestines, your lungs, out your pores, your eyes, out your ass, everywhere. This is mostly what spreads the disease, because of all that infected blood. People tending to you touch it, and people touch their eyes, pick their noses, don’t wash their hands before eating and Presto! They’re now infected, too.

The Chapare Virus appears to have originated in Bolivia. At least, that’s where the only two known outbreaks have happened, and years apart, which means that the virus lives on in the jungle somewhere, probably in monkeys.

All these diseases are also spread by rodents, from their shit and piss mostly, but like Bubonic Plague, mice and rats have fleas that suck their infected blood and then bite people. Plus breathing the air of someone who’s coughing will do it.

The lab made Covid disease never started from monkeys or other animals and then mutated to infect humans. It was deliberately created to specifically target humans. As it turns out, and what the media never tells you, is that this virus is 5 times more infectious and fatal to Orientals than to Caucasians because of a difference in the receptors of the cells of the two races.

But like all viruses, it mutates and new forms of the Covid Disease are already springing up and spreading, just like the flu does every year. Every year there’s at least 2 and usually more new, predominant flu varieties going around, which is why getting the flu shot doesn’t always protect you. It may keep you from getting one or two types but if you catch a different type then the vaccine doesn’t work.

Same with Covid, only the problem is that Covid is SPECIAL. It’s made specifically to destroy human lung tissue. The flu does not. You can get lung infections from having the flu because it lowers your immunity and allows one or more of a variety of pneumonia viruses to infect you. Covid itself attacks the lungs, that’s what it’s built for and what it does best. A Covid infection in your lungs is not pneumonia, it’s COVID and it does very rapid and permanent destruction to lung tissue.

Covid is now a part of the Human Condition. Like the constantly mutating Influenza, it will never go away. There can never be a cure for it because it constantly changes to a different form, just like the flu. The best that Medicine can do is to try to keep up with the new mutations with new vaccines.

It would be stupid of us to think that the Chinese, Russians, us or any other nation that’s messing with the DNA of diseases will take a message from Covid and stop developing new forms of Germ Warfare, which Covid is. They’ll keep right on putting all life on the planet at risk in their efforts to create new diseases. The only thing that really works to wipe out old diseases is Time and Evolution. The dinosaurs had diseases and parasites that don’t exist today because they mutated and evolved along with everything else. Diseases that rapidly wipe out their hosts die out when their hosts do, which very possibly is what will happen to us as hosts.

When populations of any animal are thin, outbreaks of disease stay localized until they run their course but when populations are dense across a wide area, many more become sick and die because the disease spreads to all of them. This is one of the problems humanity faces now, with pandemics and plagues. There’s so very many of us now and we mingle all over the planet. Only isolated jungle and desert tribes might be spared from global pandemics. So if a truly lethal and contagious disease comes around, some really nasty Covid mutation maybe, it could wipe out 90% of humanity.

So let’s see. We have an imminent threat of global plague, there’s at least 5 places right now where conflict could expand into a world nuclear war, the entire human population is moving, intermixing, interbreeding, erasing national boundaries even as they posture aggressively against each other, populations are rising up against their governments and the arms race is hotter than ever.

What could possibly go wrong?

AMERICA HAS ALWAYS BEEN FASCIST

It has. Not as much as many other nations but it’s true, we have always been a Fascist nation because most of the very people who founded this country were born and raised in England under an utterly dictatorial, fascistic government that was strictly divided by class.

In those days, the upper class could get away with anything and the lower classes were often starving, and if caught stealing something to eat would usually be hung to death or die rotting in some beastial prison. It was that Upper Class that founded the United States of America and carried on the British traditions of indentured servitude and slavery, and the only reason we ended up with a Constitution that promoted democratic government was because it was copied from the Indian tribes. Our founders wanted to escape British rule and try the old Roman form of democracy as a new nation, and the Iroquois Confederacy was very close to what they were looking for in a new form of government that offered more freedom and individual rights.

But they couldn’t escape their roots, which is why slavery continued for over 80 more years before a war was finally fought that ended it, but slavery isn’t why the war was fought, it was fought over states rights versus Federal power. The Southern states wanted to take over the Federal government and the Federal government fought back. Slavery was a minor issue in the war, but ending it crushed the South because their economy was built on it.

Freedom and individual rights have been political footballs ever since the Civil War ended, and there’s been constant lawsuits against the Federal Government all the way up to the Supreme Court in the effort to actually enforce our rights and freedoms as put forth in our Constitution, against Federal oppression.

It’s been a long battle, and the people have steadily lost, as those rights and freedoms have been steadily trampled into the mud by our government. Now that even our votes are worthless, the loss is complete and the American people are completely helpless before a government of tyrants.

Anyone could have seen this coming and many of us did. Surely you remember when Pres. George W. Bush screamed out “Stop shoving the Constitution in my face, it’s just a goddamned piece of paper!” What better clue could you ask for?

NUCLEAR WASTE

Nuclear waste is what China may end up as if they don’t wake up to reality. Right now, a few of the world’s largest navies are confronting the CCP over their attempt to claim all of the South China Sea as their own territory. Since this part of the ocean is vital to the world’s trade routes, and allowing the Chinese to block that shipping traffic would literally give them control of the global economy and therefor de facto control of the world, this is not going to be allowed to happen without a war.

China can muster an army/navy the size of our entire national population. The only other country that can do this is India, which lacks “only” 100,000 less people than China, but also lacks the massive resources of China to wage war.

The point being that in a conventional, or non-nuclear war, China can continue to pour soldiers into battle virtually non-stop and wipe out everyone else’s armies through sheer attrition. When the rest of us run out of people to send in to die, the Chinese will still have plenty more.

Which is why the only realistic answer to war with China is to nuke them before they can nuke us, which is undoubtedly why they’re building what appears to be a massive array of 600 nuclear silos as a deterrent to us and others to do that. The real question is, are these the equivalent of England’s cardboard and canvas tanks and airplanes, built to fool the Germans, or are these real, ready to go ICBM’s?

If they’re real, then what will be done, if anything, to deter China from taking over the South China Sea permanently, invading and “assimilating” Taiwan, and ultimately dominating the world?

I told you so. I did. Back when Richard Outhouse Nixon welcomed China in as a global trade partner, I told you. I said this would happen. Now look.

WHAT’S IN THE JAB?

This has become a very reasonable and IMPORTANT question, in light of the increasingly aggressive authoritarian push to force everyone to be injected with what’s called a vaccine against a manufactured disease.

Apparently, if the reports are honest. a lot of people have died from this fabricated virus, but not so many as to rival a severe influenza season and certainly not enough to shut down the world economy. Plainly, the purpose of infecting the planet is to move the Globalist agenda forward, but that purpose has been fulfilled now. Hasn’t it?

If it has, as it seems, then why create a No-Fly list of the unvaccinated? Why make threats that the unvaccinated will be imprisoned? Have their credit cards cancelled? Why say a national database is being formed that lists all the vaccinated and unvaccinated? Why is the demand increasing that we all have and carry Vaccination Cards? WHAT IS IN THAT PHONY VACCINE THAT MAKES IT SO IMPORTANT FOR EVERYONE TO HAVE IT?

One strong possibility is that it contains a tracker. Every injection has a different number that’s recorded along with the person’s name. The first effort at tracking us all was with our cell phones and smart phones, but those can be left behind and throwaway phones can be bought, and this defeats the effort to track us. But if we all have trackers inside our bodies, we can be found anywhere. Finding anyone, anywhere is part of the Globalist agenda.

“Official reports”, which are probably packed with bullshit since our government is packed with liars, claim that the “vaccines” are 80% to 90% effective in preventing infection. This itself is miserable. Real vaccines are almost 100% effective, that’s why the Smallpox vaccine wiped out the disease ENTIRELY, IN THE WORLD. Then they tell us that even if you had the disease, you MUST get vaccinated anyway, when NO ONE who has acquired immunity from a disease gets that disease again. Once you’ve had a specific virus and gotten well you will NEVER be sick from it again. (Unfortunately there’s over 500 viruses that cause what’s called the Common Cold.)

There’s another major problem with The Jab. It kills people. Statistically, there are always a few deaths among the millions of people who receive vaccinations, just because some of us react violently to them. If some reports are true, tens of thousands of apparently healthy people, including children, have died within minutes to a few days of being injected.

There’s a much more sinister reason for making everyone get this injection, which is depopulation. The people behind the manufacturing of it, the Globalists, want a world with a lot less people in it. All farmland is to be owned and farmed by Globalist corporations, all suburban communities are to be depopulated and the residents made to live in cities where they can be more easily concentrated and controlled. This is part of the Globalist plan for humanity’s future and eminent virologists are claiming that this injection causes basic cellular changes that will end up killing off a huge number of people over time.

I personally have no false hopes that our media will report that the vaccinated are beginning to die off in unusual numbers from apparently unknown causes. If anything can be expected to be suppressed in the media, it’s this, so I’ll be keeping a close watch on the possibility and you should, too.

BRING OUT YOUR DEAD

Either BRING OUT YOUR DEAD OR SHUT THE FUCK UP! In a REAL pandemic, which used to be called a PLAGUE in centuries past, wheeled carts would travel the cobblestone streets while the driver would call out “Bring out your dead. Bring out your dead”. They used this method of collecting those who had died from whatever was the latest scourge, whether it be scarlet fever, bubonic plague, smallpox, typhus or a range of other diseases that spread rapidly and killed a lot of people.

Today, epidemics are prevented through advanced medicine and a vast network of hospitals and health clinics, and relatively few people actually die. An excellent example of this is the overblown “Covid 19” virus manufactured by a collaboration between Globalists in the USA and China and deliberately spread and over-hyped to enable the destruction of social norms and the freedoms democratically run nations have enjoyed for many decades now.

So few people have actually died from this artificial disease that influenza deaths, which normally run about 40,000 a year in the USA alone, have been reported as ZERO and all of them have been attributed to the Chinese Disease in order to inflate the numbers and elevate the fear level, all in an effort to convince the people that they need to obey draconian orders to wear masks, give up their right to congregate, keep a distance from each other and actually shut down their businesses and be prevented from making a livelihood, along with their employees, in order to not just destroy the entire social order but to bring all the people to their knees and force them to be utterly subservient to their governments.

It’s not just the ersatz disease. There’s a deliberate and very successful plan in action to stop the flow of international trade in consumer goods. It started with The Evergiven, a ship owned by Evergreen, that blocked the Suez Canal just long enough for most of the rest of the world’s container ships to be stuck in their ports in a massive logjam, waiting for the Suez Canal to open up again.

Many of them are still stuck in the logjam, countless tons of cargo deliveries worldwide are delayed by months, there are shortages of goods everywhere now and the natural result is that prices for these goods are rising, fueling inflation. Inflation increases poverty and makes people more dependent on government. At the same time, retail stores are selling less, making less profit and only the largest retail corporations are surviving, because they have priority over small outlets due to their massive buying power, and are first to receive new goods shipments. Part of the Globalist doctrine is that everyone buy only from the major corporations, because these corporations are all within the Globalist fold and are part of the new ruling government.

Put another way, all major corporations either are, or are becoming as a group, a branch of government. Small businesses are unwanted. What’s desired is that everyone work for some enterprise that is directly overseen and controlled by government.

The ultimate goal is the ending of nations and the wars they fight, and this will benefit humanity, ecology and the environmental health of Earth and it’s lifeforms. It will also result in the homogenizing of humanity, the ending of our cultural and racial differences and the re-structuring of us into an ant-like social order with an extremely oppressive, non-benevolent government. This is because power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely and we all want to increase our level of personal power. The world government won’t continue to control us through fear of a disease when it’s themselves they want us to fear and obey, but it may take generations before this finally comes to pass and in any case, it’s inevitable.

All we can do now is watch the world change and do our best, each of us, to ensure our own survival for as well as, and as long as we can. This is how life is anyway, if you want to get philosophical about it. I’m just saying that the easy ride is over and we’re on another downswing. Keep your wits about you.

JOSEP MACRON

French President Macron issues six month prison decrees for entering a bar or restaurant without a vaccine passport. Proprietors who allow the unvaccinated into their establishments face a one year prison sentence and a €45,000 fine.

As a direct result of this the French people are in revolt. You will not hear about this in the MSM, who don’t want you to know that hundreds of thousands of French citizens are packing the streets, standing room only, for what appears to be miles.

This is the totalitarianism that’s being forced on the French in the name of a manufactured Chinese disease that is falsely claimed to be much more dangerous and fatal than it has proven to be. This “Covid 19” is only an excuse to destroy what democracy is left in Europe and turn the entire continent into a dictatorship, and not just Europe. The pressure is on here in the USA too, and the stripping away of our freedoms is in steady progress by the puppet Biden cabal.

Read “1984”. If you read it before, read it again and while you’re reading it, think of this:

Dr. Robert Malone, a pioneer in the field of mRNA vaccines, shared a viral Twitter thread on Friday which lays out a disturbing trend; the most-vaccinated countries in the world are experiencing  a surge in COVID-19 cases, while the least-vaccinated countries are not.

Dr. Robert Malone is the actual inventor of mRNA vaccine.

BLACK LIVES DON’T MATTER

This is in reference to American blacks only. Negro attitudes toward other races differ greatly in other nations.

Black lives don’t matter to black people. Statistically, 93% of blacks are killed by other blacks. Black lives shouldn’t matter to anyone else because, statistically, 56% of all murderers are black, and blacks are 8 times more likely be murderers than any other race.

Most blacks suck donkey cock as people. Their racism may only be exceeded by that of the Japanese, and it’s a contest, at that. The big difference between them is while the Japanese are total snobs about it, the Negroes are violent about it.

This is because most Negroes are stupid. It’s not just that they’re more volatile emotionally than most people and more prone to mindless violence, and they are, it’s also because blacks, as a race, have the lowest average IQ among humanity. The lowest among them are the African Pygmies and bushmen. The average IQ of pygmies is 55, 16 points below the African average of only 71. An IQ of 69 or below is legally retarded. 71 is Stupid. In point of fact, an IQ of 90 is pretty damn stupid, and the average IQ of American blacks is 85. 75% of blacks will score below white and other races. Low intelligence and genetically prone to pointless violence. No, black lives not only don’t matter, black lives are a detriment to humanity.

Most American blacks have the advantage of being multi-racial, with most of them being of mixed white and black ancestry. This has a tendency to raise their average intelligence but it’s hard to tell because the more intelligent ones tend to act as stupidly as their more moronic friends and relatives, probably because of a desire to fit in with the rest of them. Which is stupid, of course, but fitting in with the rest of society is called “acting White” and they give each other a very hard time for doing it and instead embrace the shitty world they call “Black Culture”.

The majority of intelligent, that is, having an IQ over 100, blacks do manage to make good lives for themselves, but even as they prosper because of being born into a mostly white social system, they continue to stupidly hate people for having lighter colored skins. Blacks seem to be less accepting of themselves than other races are of them, as well as being hostile toward themselves. Blacks constantly accuse whites of being racist while being more racist than anyone else.

Black life only matters to individual Negroes. The lives of the Negroes around them don’t matter to them. This is why they are constantly killing each other. They only act like it matters when a black person is killed by a white person, especially a white policeman, because this gives them an excuse to do what they love most, which is rioting. They love rioting because then they can get away with looting stores and then burning them down. They do this because they’re stupid and violent. That should be obvious to anyone with an intelligence greater than a rock.

Our Marxist/Globalist government has been actively promoting racial division and hatred for about a decade now while allowing black crime to surge unimpeded and unpunished. This has only encouraged more and more black violence. The purpose of this is to start a race war, and the purpose of the race war is to reduce the population. The purpose of reducing the population is part of the Globalist plan of forcing people to leave their villages and little towns and move into the cities (see footnote), and the purpose of this is to control us all more easily by concentrating us.

It will be a lot easier to concentrate us if there’s less of us, and one way to achieve a reduction in our numbers is to start a slaughter between blacks and whites. Since there’s far more whites than blacks, the blacks will lose. That’s just a given, and proof that not even our government actually thinks that black lives matter a tinkers damn. To those running America now, black lives only matter as a tool for reducing the population and providing an excuse in the process to take away our guns. Because of all the gun violence that they promoted, of course.

There’s a lot of excellent reasons why black lives don’t matter at all. They certainly don’t matter to blacks.

Footnote: The Globalist plan to move outlying populations into the cities by simply making supplies and services less available and/or unavailable in urban areas. Credit cards and banks can be shut down, groceries, medical and other supplies scarce, while having them in abundant supply in the cities. For a much more detailed analysis of the Globalist agenda, click here.

THE LAUGH IS ON US

Juh Juh Juh Joe Buh Buh Buh Biden is the first President in United States history to be elected by a record 80 million dead people. No other person in our nation’s history has been elected to our highest office by so many deceased people, but it should be kept in mind that many of them, possibly most of them, never existed to begin with.

Actually this is all a joke, he isn’t really our President. So relax, we don’t actually have a senile Depends-wearing old man who can’t walk up a few steps without falling down, or add 4 and 12 together, as our President. No no, we don’t need to worry because we have a Junta running our country now. A cabal of Marxists, Globalists and powerful, greedy people run our country now, so be of good cheer while the store shelves empty out and food prices get so high that pet dogs become the sole property of wealthy people who live in barricaded enclaves. That may be an exaggeration, but that level of scarcity and poverty has happened here before and it can happen again.

Those laughing at this joke aren’t just the evil, malevolent bastards who perpetrated it, a lot of people in the EU, Russia and China are pretty happy about it too. The fact that you may suffer terribly because of it is beside the point.

So here’s a few pointers to at least help keep you fed, if nothing else. If you don’t have a freezer, buy one now and set it to at least 15 degrees below zero, Fahrenheit. Mine is set at 18 below, I’m still eating salmon I bought last summer. At that temperature your food will keep indefinitely without spoiling. Wrap it tightly to keep out air, it’s air that causes freezer burn.

White rice is an excellent source of starch and lasts forever if kept dry. White bleached flour lasts about 3 years. I’ve had it last years longer than that. All dry flour type products have weevils in them. Set your oven to 155 degrees and heat the bags for at least an hour depending on size. It kills the weevils and will make the product last much longer. Dry pastas also keep for years. Buy a pressure cooker and canning jars and learn how to use them because opportunities will arise to buy quantities of can-able food that you can preserve, and this includes most food items. Buy or make a meat smoker, like a Little or Big Chief Smoker, and learn to make jerky and smoked meat and fish, which can keep longer than unsmoked without refrigeration.

If you live in a home with a back yard, turn it into a garden. Get a soil test kit, they’re cheap, and read the instructions and use it to see what your soil needs. Then amend your soil with whatever it requires. Steer manure is the cheapest fertilizer you can buy. Make sure your soil has lots of organic content, learn to compost your garbage and weeds and so forth to add to your soil. Grow food.

One good laying hen will average an egg a day and will eat almost anything you feed it including every last speck of anything green it can reach along with every bug, and keep this up for at least 4 years during the warm months, spring to late fall. Chickens don’t lay in winter. Actually after 2 years laying declines but I have an 8 year old hen that still gives me all I need. I consider her a pet, not a good idea if it’s a matter of survival.

If you only have a front yard, and local regs prohibit you turning it into a garden, there’s lots of edible flowers you can plant to augment your diet that won’t upset the Rules Nazis. You can also set up a “flower bed” and plant potato eyes. You’ll get greenery that grows about 2 feet high and dies down in the fall, that no one will suspect is hiding a pile of potatoes, especially if you plant a few flowers in with them. Potatoes can be sliced or cut into french fries and frozen. A good trick is to set the eyes on top of the ground and pile an inch or two of straw or grass cuttings over them. Then the potatoes will grow on top of the ground instead of under it. Keep watered.

Other foods that keep for years if kept unopened are coconut oil, great for cooking, powdered milk , Nestle Nido is the best, they love it in Mexico where there’s often no refrigeration, powdered eggs, powdered butter, sugar, salt, molasses.

Be smart, prepare for the worst. As my grandmother would often cheerfully remark, “Always expect the worst out of life, you’ll never be disappointed.”