Well, they'll be singing a different tune should China get even by cutting off all those medicines they export to this country, or the key ingredients we need to make some of them. I think they'll really get pissed off when hospitals close, or their love ones die, because there are no antibiotics, and they'll die like their ancestors did, some because a tooth was infected.
I put this in WaPo this am in response to the claim this was proof of China’s expansionism.
My reply below.
Huh? Expansionists? You forgot the biggest expansionist of all. The US. Your 800 foreign military bases in 70 countries? How can you afford to keep these up? The answer is you can’t. You have those bases and your interminable saber rattling at the expense of domestic issues which are literally killing you.
What the hell is wrong ?Your priorities are only accessible via colonoscopy?
You have crap health care with Third World longevity, passed a couple of years ago by Cuba and this year by China. Your education is weak, and you rank 26th for high school attainment beaten by China by the same amount you beat Kazakhstan, and that was 5 y ago. It’ll be worse now. Count on it. Your teachers have been ringing the alarm bell for years. And you say you’re going to outcompete China. Fat chance of that at this rate.
You lead the world or Western world in pollution ( and have done in sum since the Industrial Revolution). And in poverty, esp. child poverty, divorce, obesity, rape ( neck and neck with the Australians), murder, mass shootings, mass murder, racial murder, guns, nukes, chemical weapons, incarceration, etc.
But have one balloon go off course and you have people reaching for muzzles and rabies shots. Get a grip. Talk to birdwatchers. They love it when Asian and Siberian birds get blown over to America. You’re the same menace that got you voted greatest threat to world peace, years ago. Maybe not as good.
After having Russia kick its ass in Ukraine, it is the height of stupidity to think it can turn to China and have a better Result.
Garland Nixon had a great bit of sarcasm today while he was reviewing China's options. "Don't make me call Putin -- boy!"
The American Oligarchy has been revealed for the stupid greedy bastards they are. Saudi Arabia is making nice with Iran as they both work on becoming members of the SCO and disentangling themselves from the USA.
It will be interesting to see the US Navy aircraft carriers destroyed in the first week of the coming war by hypersonic missiles built by Russia. There's little threat of the US being invaded by Russia or China, there's little here they covet. A disintegrating infrastructure, homelessness, drug addition and an illiterate society that can't do basic arithmetic.
American Hegemony is dead, and soon the world will no longer need the dollar as a reserve currency.
If you are an American this is a really huge deal. Britain has become a third-world nation, don't think it can't happen here. The American Oligarchy wants to impose their own neo-serfdom on you. Will you let them? Or will you fight back?
What is not being discussed in media (that I’ve seen) is that this is an extreme national air defense failure for both the U.S. and Canada.
What if this balloon had been from North Korea? My first thought when I heard about this was that if a high altitude helium balloon can penetrate into the U.S. without being intercepted, then that would be the perfect delivery device for an electromagnetic pulse weapon or any other type of nuclear weapon. Perhaps North Korea will now realize they don’t need high-tech intercontinental ballistic missiles, since the U.S. air defense system can’t even even successfully intercept a single IAB (International Attack Balloon).
Yes. And also during WWII the U.S. had a plan to strap tiny pyrotechnic devices onto bats and send them into Japanese cities. It was called Project X-Ray. Let's hope the Chinese don't combine these ideas and put a cauldron of coronavirus-infected bats on the next Intercontinental Attack Ballon.
The only thing China might want is our water, I think Russia probably has enough of their own but one of chinas rivers pretty much dried up last year. It wouldn’t be shocking if a future war was fought over water.
i think civilization collapse due to climate collapse is already occurring, but its hitting mostly third world countries for now. what is israel fighting about water wise? im unaware. or is it just a reference to the ongoing conflict with palestine, and if so has does water relate to that? thanks.
Any American juice can be had the old-fashioned, capitalist way: they buy it, with the dollars they have, without the pain of a war squeeze. Saudi Arabia imports American water via agricultural commodities. It's easier still for their administrators to move people around domestically, do small-scale weather control, and so on.
yeah, for now the market is doing its thing. but in the future? i dont know. i could see it happening. canada is probably at higher risk than the US though, and really only the eastern US would be at risk since the west is already in a long term drought.
The eastern US has the Great Lakes to draw upon, for now. The next secession crisis could involve westbound pipelines from the Great Lakes and it would be nasty.
right, what i was saying was if a foreign power were to try and invade the US for its water, the western US would likely be spared as most of the water is on the eastern side of the US.
of course, if we were to have a civil war, depending on how the country came apart that would influence what kind of fighting we would see over major water reserves.
i personally dont see the country dividing up on clean geographic lines like the last civil war, i see it more like guerrilla style where its neighbor against neighbor, perhaps something like Rwanda, with hate radio fanning the flames and all.
One acre-foot of water equals 1233 cubic meters and supplies about three average Chinese people for a year. China's naval water tankers hold about half an acre-foot. It's not efficient to move potable water overseas, unless you are the Resnicks and you can sell it as $5/qt super premium bottled water, or you tow an iceberg home, or you have a very large, very strong plastic bag. All of which might work for little Arab emirates, but not so much for China.
In general it's much easier for China to move the people and factories that consume the water to a water-rich area, hopefully once, than to move water tankers back and forth forever. I'd expect a colonization play instead of a resource extraction play.
The Colorado River crisis has already begun and will come to a head in 2027, with California versus six other states. I agree some possibility of American Troubles happening before the water wars exists, but I wouldn't bet on it or against it.
Exactly. Thousands of spy satellites in the sky far more capable yet a highly visible balloon drifting aimlessly has everyone freaked out. Even Tucker Carlson had his panties in a twist. I can't get over how stupid people are. Hurry, time to start bombing somewhere or we're all going to die!
I see Carlson as a fellow traveler on some issues, but I bookmarked that clip on the balloon. He let his "China hawk" perspective get the better of good sense.
Come on. The US authorities and bigdeals panicking and freaking out about a weather balloon is priceless humor. It's beyond belief. Imagine an old-time military guy trying to work for these contemptible pantywaists.
(My only concern is that among these Thousands of Stooges bouncing and bopping off each other over a balloon, there is control of some serious instruments of death.)
Of the 4,852 active artificial satellites orbiting the Earth as of January 1, 2022, the greatest number that is 2,944, belong to the United States. This is by far the largest number of any single country. With the technical gear they have on board satellites, their capability when compared to the Chinese balloon is breathtaking.
"Ask an empire apologist to show you how China is aggressing against the US and they'll start babbling about TikTok and balloons."
This. If this most recent media warmongering doesn't convince the public that the US is whipping us into a war fury, I don't know what else will. William Randolph Hearst might have said, "You supply the photographs, I'll supply the war," in the 1890s, but nowadays it's the US government that is saying, "You supply a weather balloon and we'll supply the nuclear war."
Sigh. We really need to get those clowns out of office before they start playing touch football with the nuclear codes.
I seriously wonder exactly WHAT it will take, before the world's populations becomes FULLY AWARE of the stone cold fact, that the patently rogue United States of America [where Corporations are ’'Persons’' and Money is ’'Free Speech'’], HAS been, and CONTINUES TO BE - the greatest clear and present danger to ANY semblance of global peace and stability that has EVER existed, NUCLEAR HOLOCAUST??? . . . . 🙄
After being nauseated by what the left-leaning channels were saying tonight I switched to Faux News to see if they were any more sane.
Nope. One angry uninformed mad dog after another, screaming at the viewer that Biden was derelict in letting this “spy plane” collect data on precious U.S. secret silos and bases. And that it was manoeuvrable up there in the jet stream ( fat chance) . The ballon was 19 buses long but shrank to 3 buses to make it more believable, while watching.
However it was an opportunity to spew hatred. The viewer heard about that ridiculous canard about genocide (via the CIA-funded Uighurs) and concentration camps when the Uighur population has risen several times faster than the Han. The reeducation centers were emptied three yrs ago.
Spittle fortunately does travel with tv transmission signals.
I’ve seen mad animals with distemper having more control of themselves.
They want war, it’s pretty clear. They can’t deal with there being no war for so long. This ain’t gonna be Granada, however.
Dude, not even six months after the end of the forever war did the war in Ukraine start. They already got another likely endless war, and they’re still not satisfied?
Your description of the crazed lunatics driven even madder by this balloon reminds me of Kevin Williamson's writing over at National Review about the Ukraine war during its early days. As I read, I could just picture his face beat red, with spittle flying, as he pounded away on his keyboard about sending in the US military to annihilate Putin and the Russians.
One thing I always laugh about is how the US officials, after sending murder robots to the foreign lands, start acting like nobody else in the world has a better understanding of international law than them. The #EmpireAtAllCosts cult has some of the most arrogant people in the world - they see a "vibrant democracy" in the US surrounding China militarily and a "breach of sovereignty" over a balloon.
I also have a newsletter which is focused at peeling away the illusions we live and develop our systems under.
It talks about the two biggest threats to humanity: climate change and nuclear war, animal cruelty, and the various propaganda tactics the elites use to prevent us from taking action against the above crises.
The most fundamental cause of our trajectory towards destruction is the human mind, or more specifically, the Ego. So, you will also see articles on transcending our ego.
A weather balloon gone off course makes a hell of a lot more sense than a “spy balloon”. What could a spy balloon do that a spy satellite could not? Surely the Chinese and every other major power especially the US have spy satellites orbiting around for decades.
The political media class are fucking idiots and a danger to our society with the constant beating of their war chests like methed up gorillas. Last night we had record breaking cold in the northeast, the real temp was something like -46.3F atop mount mansfield when I went to bed, with a top wind gust of 127MPH and sustained 100MPH winds with a possible record breaking windchill of -108F. Not only that, but for a brief period, the stratosphere dropped to around 4000ft elevation.
Extreme cold is nothing new in New England, but what’s odd is usually such cold temps are accompanied by light winds at most, not hurricane force winds. If I were a world superpower I too would have a weather balloon out there measuring what the hell was going on.
"American spies are having a much harder time conducting operations and recruiting assets in China than they used to because of measures the Chinese government has taken to thwart them,"
Gee, you think it could have anything to do with eliminating extreme poverty, providing universal health care, and free education? Maybe the Chinese are "happy"! /s
The UN rankings for poverty are instructive. The US leads the Western world for poverty, esp. child poverty with 18% of the population meeting UN criteria. China? 0.6%. They’ve lifted 850 million people out of poverty.
Don't let the balloon distraction keep you from checking out Project Veritas's videos showing you that Pfizer was aware that the vaccine negatively affects women's menstrual cycles and fertility.
Getting permanently poisoned by government-sanctioned chemicals should make you realize that they want you fat, sick, isolated, depressed, distracted, and afraid: the better to control you, extract your wealth, and then discard you when you are old.
And they'll claim they're doing it all for your health, and the environment.
project veritas has zero credibility. im not saying the premise of your argument is wrong, but your source is about as reliable as faux news or newsmax.
Flying balloons is what the US spends most of its time at, as in: "do you feel threatened by, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, South America Africa, Russia, Serbia , Libya, and, as Zizek would have it, "so on and so forth and so on ... " And if not, why not? And even when they flop over, these trial balloons, the US still insists these threats exist, and must and will be dealt with. "For their own good of course," as in a trial ballon re the Iraq threat to the West that had some support (Tony Blare?). Hope he's calmer these days.
He thinks he's so clever he can wrap us up in words. But then he forgets himself, and says things like,"The Nazis didn't go far enough". That's clear language.
The regime is doing everything it can to provoke a war with Russia and China.
The sad part is that most Americans don’t know anything about what their own government is doing around the world.
And when they learn most see nothing wrong with it as they consider themselves the Exceptional Ones.
Well, they'll be singing a different tune should China get even by cutting off all those medicines they export to this country, or the key ingredients we need to make some of them. I think they'll really get pissed off when hospitals close, or their love ones die, because there are no antibiotics, and they'll die like their ancestors did, some because a tooth was infected.
No the feds won't. They will blame China. That is the game.
Yep.
They already did provoke a war with Russia.
(They provoked an "unprovoked invasion".)
What do you call an American diplomat who freaks out over a Chinese balloon 🎈?
A Buffoon
I put this in WaPo this am in response to the claim this was proof of China’s expansionism.
My reply below.
Huh? Expansionists? You forgot the biggest expansionist of all. The US. Your 800 foreign military bases in 70 countries? How can you afford to keep these up? The answer is you can’t. You have those bases and your interminable saber rattling at the expense of domestic issues which are literally killing you.
What the hell is wrong ?Your priorities are only accessible via colonoscopy?
You have crap health care with Third World longevity, passed a couple of years ago by Cuba and this year by China. Your education is weak, and you rank 26th for high school attainment beaten by China by the same amount you beat Kazakhstan, and that was 5 y ago. It’ll be worse now. Count on it. Your teachers have been ringing the alarm bell for years. And you say you’re going to outcompete China. Fat chance of that at this rate.
You lead the world or Western world in pollution ( and have done in sum since the Industrial Revolution). And in poverty, esp. child poverty, divorce, obesity, rape ( neck and neck with the Australians), murder, mass shootings, mass murder, racial murder, guns, nukes, chemical weapons, incarceration, etc.
But have one balloon go off course and you have people reaching for muzzles and rabies shots. Get a grip. Talk to birdwatchers. They love it when Asian and Siberian birds get blown over to America. You’re the same menace that got you voted greatest threat to world peace, years ago. Maybe not as good.
How did it go over? WaPoo likes to shadowban. The colonoscopy dunk is brilliant.
Celine's First Law readeth thusly: "National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity."
Just as we have the dysfunctional Dept. of Homeland Insecurity and the Biden/Garland Injustice Dept.
After having Russia kick its ass in Ukraine, it is the height of stupidity to think it can turn to China and have a better Result.
Garland Nixon had a great bit of sarcasm today while he was reviewing China's options. "Don't make me call Putin -- boy!"
The American Oligarchy has been revealed for the stupid greedy bastards they are. Saudi Arabia is making nice with Iran as they both work on becoming members of the SCO and disentangling themselves from the USA.
It will be interesting to see the US Navy aircraft carriers destroyed in the first week of the coming war by hypersonic missiles built by Russia. There's little threat of the US being invaded by Russia or China, there's little here they covet. A disintegrating infrastructure, homelessness, drug addition and an illiterate society that can't do basic arithmetic.
American Hegemony is dead, and soon the world will no longer need the dollar as a reserve currency.
If you are an American this is a really huge deal. Britain has become a third-world nation, don't think it can't happen here. The American Oligarchy wants to impose their own neo-serfdom on you. Will you let them? Or will you fight back?
What is not being discussed in media (that I’ve seen) is that this is an extreme national air defense failure for both the U.S. and Canada.
What if this balloon had been from North Korea? My first thought when I heard about this was that if a high altitude helium balloon can penetrate into the U.S. without being intercepted, then that would be the perfect delivery device for an electromagnetic pulse weapon or any other type of nuclear weapon. Perhaps North Korea will now realize they don’t need high-tech intercontinental ballistic missiles, since the U.S. air defense system can’t even even successfully intercept a single IAB (International Attack Balloon).
The Japanese tried that during WWII. They had very limited success. A couple of small fires were started in NW US forests.
Yes. And also during WWII the U.S. had a plan to strap tiny pyrotechnic devices onto bats and send them into Japanese cities. It was called Project X-Ray. Let's hope the Chinese don't combine these ideas and put a cauldron of coronavirus-infected bats on the next Intercontinental Attack Ballon.
The only thing China might want is our water, I think Russia probably has enough of their own but one of chinas rivers pretty much dried up last year. It wouldn’t be shocking if a future war was fought over water.
Future ? Been going on in Israel…
*future specific to the united states.
i think civilization collapse due to climate collapse is already occurring, but its hitting mostly third world countries for now. what is israel fighting about water wise? im unaware. or is it just a reference to the ongoing conflict with palestine, and if so has does water relate to that? thanks.
Occupational territories by Israel is about grabbing land AND water resources.
so the ongoing conflict then.
Any American juice can be had the old-fashioned, capitalist way: they buy it, with the dollars they have, without the pain of a war squeeze. Saudi Arabia imports American water via agricultural commodities. It's easier still for their administrators to move people around domestically, do small-scale weather control, and so on.
yeah, for now the market is doing its thing. but in the future? i dont know. i could see it happening. canada is probably at higher risk than the US though, and really only the eastern US would be at risk since the west is already in a long term drought.
The eastern US has the Great Lakes to draw upon, for now. The next secession crisis could involve westbound pipelines from the Great Lakes and it would be nasty.
right, what i was saying was if a foreign power were to try and invade the US for its water, the western US would likely be spared as most of the water is on the eastern side of the US.
of course, if we were to have a civil war, depending on how the country came apart that would influence what kind of fighting we would see over major water reserves.
i personally dont see the country dividing up on clean geographic lines like the last civil war, i see it more like guerrilla style where its neighbor against neighbor, perhaps something like Rwanda, with hate radio fanning the flames and all.
One acre-foot of water equals 1233 cubic meters and supplies about three average Chinese people for a year. China's naval water tankers hold about half an acre-foot. It's not efficient to move potable water overseas, unless you are the Resnicks and you can sell it as $5/qt super premium bottled water, or you tow an iceberg home, or you have a very large, very strong plastic bag. All of which might work for little Arab emirates, but not so much for China.
In general it's much easier for China to move the people and factories that consume the water to a water-rich area, hopefully once, than to move water tankers back and forth forever. I'd expect a colonization play instead of a resource extraction play.
The Colorado River crisis has already begun and will come to a head in 2027, with California versus six other states. I agree some possibility of American Troubles happening before the water wars exists, but I wouldn't bet on it or against it.
Exactly. Thousands of spy satellites in the sky far more capable yet a highly visible balloon drifting aimlessly has everyone freaked out. Even Tucker Carlson had his panties in a twist. I can't get over how stupid people are. Hurry, time to start bombing somewhere or we're all going to die!
I see Carlson as a fellow traveler on some issues, but I bookmarked that clip on the balloon. He let his "China hawk" perspective get the better of good sense.
Come on. The US authorities and bigdeals panicking and freaking out about a weather balloon is priceless humor. It's beyond belief. Imagine an old-time military guy trying to work for these contemptible pantywaists.
Oh, I agree. It's hilarious.
(My only concern is that among these Thousands of Stooges bouncing and bopping off each other over a balloon, there is control of some serious instruments of death.)
Of the 4,852 active artificial satellites orbiting the Earth as of January 1, 2022, the greatest number that is 2,944, belong to the United States. This is by far the largest number of any single country. With the technical gear they have on board satellites, their capability when compared to the Chinese balloon is breathtaking.
Now what are they doing up there?
Don't ask!
"Ask an empire apologist to show you how China is aggressing against the US and they'll start babbling about TikTok and balloons."
This. If this most recent media warmongering doesn't convince the public that the US is whipping us into a war fury, I don't know what else will. William Randolph Hearst might have said, "You supply the photographs, I'll supply the war," in the 1890s, but nowadays it's the US government that is saying, "You supply a weather balloon and we'll supply the nuclear war."
Sigh. We really need to get those clowns out of office before they start playing touch football with the nuclear codes.
I seriously wonder exactly WHAT it will take, before the world's populations becomes FULLY AWARE of the stone cold fact, that the patently rogue United States of America [where Corporations are ’'Persons’' and Money is ’'Free Speech'’], HAS been, and CONTINUES TO BE - the greatest clear and present danger to ANY semblance of global peace and stability that has EVER existed, NUCLEAR HOLOCAUST??? . . . . 🙄
After being nauseated by what the left-leaning channels were saying tonight I switched to Faux News to see if they were any more sane.
Nope. One angry uninformed mad dog after another, screaming at the viewer that Biden was derelict in letting this “spy plane” collect data on precious U.S. secret silos and bases. And that it was manoeuvrable up there in the jet stream ( fat chance) . The ballon was 19 buses long but shrank to 3 buses to make it more believable, while watching.
However it was an opportunity to spew hatred. The viewer heard about that ridiculous canard about genocide (via the CIA-funded Uighurs) and concentration camps when the Uighur population has risen several times faster than the Han. The reeducation centers were emptied three yrs ago.
Spittle fortunately does travel with tv transmission signals.
I’ve seen mad animals with distemper having more control of themselves.
They want war, it’s pretty clear. They can’t deal with there being no war for so long. This ain’t gonna be Granada, however.
Dude, not even six months after the end of the forever war did the war in Ukraine start. They already got another likely endless war, and they’re still not satisfied?
Well you could even argue it never stopped, given the farce that was Russiagate and the regime change in 2014.
Yeah but we weren’t sending major weapons till recently, and that’s what actually matters is enriching the military industrial complex.
You could say those were pretext and prologue but I take your point.
Your description of the crazed lunatics driven even madder by this balloon reminds me of Kevin Williamson's writing over at National Review about the Ukraine war during its early days. As I read, I could just picture his face beat red, with spittle flying, as he pounded away on his keyboard about sending in the US military to annihilate Putin and the Russians.
(Williamson has since moved on from NR.)
You are right, Caitlin.
One thing I always laugh about is how the US officials, after sending murder robots to the foreign lands, start acting like nobody else in the world has a better understanding of international law than them. The #EmpireAtAllCosts cult has some of the most arrogant people in the world - they see a "vibrant democracy" in the US surrounding China militarily and a "breach of sovereignty" over a balloon.
I also have a newsletter which is focused at peeling away the illusions we live and develop our systems under.
It talks about the two biggest threats to humanity: climate change and nuclear war, animal cruelty, and the various propaganda tactics the elites use to prevent us from taking action against the above crises.
The most fundamental cause of our trajectory towards destruction is the human mind, or more specifically, the Ego. So, you will also see articles on transcending our ego.
https://awakes.substack.com
It's about time somebody trolled the US the way it's been trolling the world for decades.
A weather balloon gone off course makes a hell of a lot more sense than a “spy balloon”. What could a spy balloon do that a spy satellite could not? Surely the Chinese and every other major power especially the US have spy satellites orbiting around for decades.
The political media class are fucking idiots and a danger to our society with the constant beating of their war chests like methed up gorillas. Last night we had record breaking cold in the northeast, the real temp was something like -46.3F atop mount mansfield when I went to bed, with a top wind gust of 127MPH and sustained 100MPH winds with a possible record breaking windchill of -108F. Not only that, but for a brief period, the stratosphere dropped to around 4000ft elevation.
Extreme cold is nothing new in New England, but what’s odd is usually such cold temps are accompanied by light winds at most, not hurricane force winds. If I were a world superpower I too would have a weather balloon out there measuring what the hell was going on.
"fucking idiots" is a great description of US political main stream media. Our country is neurotically bound to unchecked corporatism and militarism.
Sounds like my kind of weather.
A warm fire and good book.
"American spies are having a much harder time conducting operations and recruiting assets in China than they used to because of measures the Chinese government has taken to thwart them,"
Gee, you think it could have anything to do with eliminating extreme poverty, providing universal health care, and free education? Maybe the Chinese are "happy"! /s
The UN rankings for poverty are instructive. The US leads the Western world for poverty, esp. child poverty with 18% of the population meeting UN criteria. China? 0.6%. They’ve lifted 850 million people out of poverty.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/poverty-rate-by-country
Don't let the balloon distraction keep you from checking out Project Veritas's videos showing you that Pfizer was aware that the vaccine negatively affects women's menstrual cycles and fertility.
Getting permanently poisoned by government-sanctioned chemicals should make you realize that they want you fat, sick, isolated, depressed, distracted, and afraid: the better to control you, extract your wealth, and then discard you when you are old.
And they'll claim they're doing it all for your health, and the environment.
project veritas has zero credibility. im not saying the premise of your argument is wrong, but your source is about as reliable as faux news or newsmax.
"Ninety-nine red balloons
Floating in the summer sky
Panic bells, it′s red alert
There's something here from somewhere else"
That song was written, IIRC, in response to the Pershing missile crisis in West Germany.
You seriously know your stuff!
"Koty wiedzą wszystko!" - Kot Filemon.
"Cats know everything!" Filemon the Cat, from a Polish children's TV show.
Yes, cats observe. There are different kinds of knowing.
Flying balloons is what the US spends most of its time at, as in: "do you feel threatened by, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, South America Africa, Russia, Serbia , Libya, and, as Zizek would have it, "so on and so forth and so on ... " And if not, why not? And even when they flop over, these trial balloons, the US still insists these threats exist, and must and will be dealt with. "For their own good of course," as in a trial ballon re the Iraq threat to the West that had some support (Tony Blare?). Hope he's calmer these days.
The irony being that Zizek is a reliable cheerleader for Empire.
He thinks he's so clever he can wrap us up in words. But then he forgets himself, and says things like,"The Nazis didn't go far enough". That's clear language.
The Slovenian Squealer.
The people we like to call "intellectuals" these days don't have a consistent and rational thought in their heads. It's become a pejorative.
We confuse insight with glib symbol manipulation.
Cats don't really do or respond to symbol manipulation.
*unsheathes laser pointer*