USA. A hibachi restaurant. My American friends brought me here to enjoy the cuisine of my homeland, and I witnessed a ritual I have never seen in eight hundred years of being Japanese.
The chef stacked onion rings into a tower. He filled it with oil. And he set it on fire.
"THE VOLCANO!" my friends cheered. They knew the ritual. They had seen it many times. In Japan, I have eaten ten thousand meals. No one has ever built me a volcano.
I said nothing. A guest does not question the ceremony.
"Is this how they do it back home?" my friend asked, glowing with joy.
"...The technique is flawless," I said. A samurai may retreat. He may not lie. He may, however, aim the truth very carefully.
Then the chef flicked a shrimp through the air at my face.
"Catch it!" the table roared.
In my land, food is set before you with two hands and an apology for the wait. Here, the shrimp attacks. I caught it. With my mouth. The table erupted. The chef saluted me with his spatula.
I have received medals with less pride.
"You're a natural," the chef said.
"My family has trained for this for generations," I said. It was not technically a lie. We trained. Just not for this.
My friends drove me home, full and happy, honored to have shown me my own country.
A man does not question the volcano. He catches the shrimp.
Whatever this cuisine is, wherever it was truly born — the fire is real, the joy is real, and I caught what was thrown at me.
That is Japanese enough.
USA. A Mexican restaurant. We had not yet ordered anything, and the food was already arriving.
Chips. Salsa. Unrequested. Free.
I stopped the waiter. "We have not earned these."
"They just come with the table, man."
They come with the TABLE. In my land, hospitality is a debt. Every gift creates an obligation, weighed carefully, returned in the proper season with interest of feeling. Here, the gift arrives before you have even proven you can pay for dinner.
This is not an appetizer. This is a declaration: we trust you. Eat.
I ate with the gravity the moment deserved. And then — I must report this calmly — the basket emptied, and a new one appeared.
"Did we…?"
"Refill," the waiter said. "It's bottomless."
Bottomless. They have wells of salsa. The supply lines of this nation are beyond anything my ancestors imagined.
My friend warned me. "Don't fill up on chips, dude."
Too late. I had accepted three baskets. Honor demanded each one be finished — an unfinished gift is an insult. By the time my actual food arrived, I was a ruined man.
I was not hungry. I was not comfortable. I had been defeated by a courtesy.
Generosity that arrives before the request cannot be repaid. It can only be survived.
I know the rule now. I have made my peace with the basket. One basket. Two at the most.
Who am I deceiving. There is no number of baskets I would refuse. The trust of a nation is in that salsa, and I intend to honor all of it.
Earlier this week, the @DeptofWar — in full collaboration with Venezuelan security forces — conducted a kinetic strike on a Tren de Aragua (TdA) compound in Venezuela. TdA founder & leader Hector Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, aka “Niño Guerrero,” was confirmed killed during the strike.
The operation underscores the shared U.S. and Venezuelan commitment to take the fight to narco-terrorists and deny them any safe haven in our hemisphere. We will continue to work closely with security partners, like Venezuela — and counties in the Americas Counter Cartel Coalition (A3C) partners — to take the fight to our enemies.
Communists can never quite grasp that if you make Musk poorer, you make millions of others poorer in the process because unlike them, he actually creates value for others in society.
It's deranged.
I see the Left-wing/Ukrainian bots got their talking points.
They went from “the labs don’t exist”, to “okay the labs exist but they were doing defensive research”.
“Defensive research” is a lie. In the process of defensive research, you create a bioweapon. I’ll explain.
Defensive zoonotic research, is when scientists intentionally make animal viruses transmissible in humans, so they can study the virus and proactively develop vaccines, just in case these animal viruses naturally mutate and jump to humans. This way, we have the vaccines already on hand if something were to happen.
In theory, it sounds like a good idea, but in the process of creating these vaccines, you must first modify a deadly zoonotic disease, and give it the ability to jump to humans. That’s a biological weapon. If it gets out of the lab, it can now infect the world, and in the case of C19, a man-made bat coronavirus, it did infect the world, and killed millions of people.
Why was it so contagious? Because scientists artificially gave it the ability to be transmissible in humans, thus the term “gain of function”. What is the function these zoonotic diseases are gaining? The ability to jump to, and kill, humans.
So when anyone says “it’s just defensive research”, they have no idea what they are talking about, and are either running cover or repeating talking points. Defensive research/gain of function, is just a way to circumvent the Geneva Convention and develop biological weapons under the guise of “defense”.
Russian MIL alleged that elements within the US, specifically the Democrat Party, in coordination with nefarious NGO’s and Big Pharma, have been using “defensive research” in an offensive capacity, to manufacture global biological crises, to impose global control.
Dear Hunter,
Coming clean and sharing your recovery story is deeply moving.
You will feel even more relieved by also coming clean about Biden family corruption in Ukraine, biolabs, Burisma improprieties, and “10% for the big guy.”
Please do.
X — and the world — are waiting.