Israel does not have a future after this.

If Germany and Japan could have a future after WW2 - a war they lost categorically - Israel will do just fine in the coming decades, after successfully executing a full ethnic cleanse of some of the more valuable real estate in the Mediterranean.

Israel isn’t a rogue state, it’s a cat’s paw. They’re doing the dirty work as a proxy for allies who have wanted to wipe Arabs off that corner of the map for decades. In the end, however, you’re going to see western states welcome Israelis back into the fold with open arms, just so long as they can pin this all on Netanyahu and pretend it wasn’t a national project with the full support of the Israeli public.

I would say the big distinction between Ukraine and Gaza is that in Ukraine there has been a meaningful (and enormously lucrative) project to arm locals in opposition to Russian invasion. It’s been of dubious success, given how much territory they still lost. But its difficult to say that the Biden Era government (or even Trump Term 1) wasn’t willing to shovel arms and mercenaries into Ukraine in an effort to cripple Russian advances.

In Gaza, the Israel blockade has gone virtually unchecked - outside of a few salvos from Yemen and some allegations of support from Iran and Hezbollah. Americans are supporting the genociders not the victims. There is no Gaza military left to repeal an invasion nor is there any appetite for a Hamas resistance to repeal IDF advances. At this point, it’s little more than a shooting gallery.

There’s a line of combat between Ukraine and Russia. There’s nothing in Gaza. Just Israelis and their private security contractors kettling and massacring neighborhood after neighborhood, then flagging bulldozers to knock down the houses when they’re done.

British Palestine (and other Mid-East / North Africa states) were notable in that they were far more accommodating to Jewish peoples than the European continent had been. They were colonial territories with large international trading hubs that were already pluralistic and accommodating to foreigners. And they weren’t carrying the baggage of a few centuries of Inquisitions and Pogroms.

Until the Shah was installed in '53, Iran had one of the largest Jewish populations in the world. Ethiopia and Sudan had hundreds of thousands of Jewish people living contentedly in its borders until the '70s, when civil war and famine ripped the country apart. And prior to the Holocaust, there was an enormous flight of Jewish residents to the Americas.

Now, primarily white militant European settler colonialists might have trouble setting up an intentional community of Zionist radicals anywhere. But there’s no reason to believe Argentina or Madagascar would have been materially worse for them than British Palestine.

Gaza is the latest in a long line of atrocities committed by countries ostensibly committed to a law of armed conflict.

Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria… hell the US interventions in Somalia and the former Yugoslavia were as horrifying as they were criminal. Sometimes we can find an exigent threat that gives us permission to use overwhelming force to brutalize the bad guys - as in Iraq '91 with the Kuwaiti invasion. Other times we just have to make some shit up, as with Grenada or Vietnam.

But this idea that we’ve had an international order for any of the last 77 years is more a reflection on the quantity of our propaganda than the quality of our international ethics. The total war Israel is conducting in Gaza, while the US hovers overhead threatening to flatten any Egyptian or Jordanian or Lebanese who attempts to intervene, has been historic in the degree to which far more cushy liberal rhetoric has been replaced with full-throated endorsement of ethnic cleansing.

But the policies themselves? We manufactured a famine in Afghanistan shortly after withdrawing the last US troops. We have repeatedly blocked countries with socialist governments from accessing international markets to obtain relief, such as Bangladesh in '74 and Ethiopia ten years later. Somalia has been under near constant assault by US Navy vessels “policing” the most lucrative fishing territories, driving up rates of piracy as a substitute for traditional subsistence farming. Then you’ve got the '91 famine in N. Korea and the '94 Cuban hunger crisis, both the consequence of US blockades.

Any one of these would be considered a modern-day Holodomor from the perspective of an objective outside observer. Unfortunately, Americans only get to hear about Gaza - and even then only in dribs and drabs on social media or alt-news publications - as they turn away from the traditional corporate-friendly press venues.

Trump: “I’m doing things my own way.”

CIA Section Chief: “Show him that Zapruder film again and make sure he doesn’t forget about it this time.”

The goal post keeps moving. It’s a chronic problem with fascism.

Elon naively trained his algorithm on generally available data, rather than constricting it entirely to Conservapedia and InfoWars. So now every time a news story drops that they haven’t sandbagged with specific responses, they’re forced to hear something they don’t like.

George Lucas is the perfect example what happens when you don’t do world building.

If you get into those coffee table books about the making of the first three movies, you find lots of world building.

All the bounty hunters on the deck of Vader’s Super Star Destroyer in Empire Strikes Back have canonical backstories, for instance. The cosmology of the galaxy - with Corusant at the center of the Empire and Tantoine way out in “Hutt Space” - was laid out by Lucas far in advance. “The Clone Wars” wasn’t just an off-handed reference, it was a thing Lucas had defined as the WW2 precursor to New Hope’s Vietnam. Hell, the fact that the first movie released was “Episode IV” should say it all.

One reason you got so many derivative works following Return of the Jedi is that Lucas dumped his director’s notes to the public as merch when production initially stalled on the Prequels.

Well, I’m glad Mamdani won in NYC and zionist liberals can finally put to rest the need to vote straight ticket Democrat.

It’s a hundred pages of diatribes, some misogyny, a story beat, another fifty pages raving about bureaucracy, a story beat, and 100 pages about brainwashing and how socialism fucking sucks.

The joke of 1984 is that Orwell neatly described the modern capitalist British State virtually to a T. Hell, it wasn’t all that far off from the contemporary British State, given the conditions of paranoia and economic decline the island suffered during the postwar aftermath.

In the era it was written, a lot of the diatribes about the nefarious villains of socialist politics felt like a guy throwing on a big spooky ghost custom with a light under the chin. But in the modern moment… fuck it if cops busting down my door because my elementary-school son was tricked into accusing me of ThoughtCrime during a mandatory Two-Minute Hate doesn’t feel like a thing that could really happen.

Then the most half-baked “how do I tie this bad essay together?” ending.

The execution was a forced ending. But the psychology at the end - this desperate liberalist clinging to an individualized, compartmentalized psychic resistance - absolutely strikes a cord. I know plenty of people (hell, I regularly indict myself) over the reflexive meekness draped atop rebellious fantasy. This growling whipped-dog sentiment, where liberals will say everything in a loud whisper, but duck their heads in terror at the first whiff of authority or consequence… as we move further and further towards fascism. I see it everywhere.

Orwell very neatly diagnoses the failure of the liberal opposition in the personage of Winston Smith and his peers. And it is even further pronounced in the meta-textual narrative, as Orwell himself is an embodiment of Winston. A man who has rewritten history at the behest of his imperialist paymasters (after a career as a fucking Burmese cop and nark, ffs) goes to his grave subsuming the revulsion of his own country with a fear and antipathy towards a distant foreign land.

As a coming-of-age book, particularly for American teenagers, “Catcher in the Rye” resonates for a reason. It does an excellent job of capturing the moment from a sympathetic point of view. And then you read it ten years later, thinking to yourself “Holy shit was I really like this?” only to realize you absolutely were.

$37T and counting. But nobody seems to want to ask who is on the receiving end of that pile of notes.

• $15.16 trillion (42 percent) is held by US private investors and entities, mostly in the form of savings bonds, mutual funds and pension funds.
• $7.36 trillion (20 percent) is held by intra-governmental US agencies and trusts.
• $4.63 trillion (13 percent) is held by the Federal Reserve.

Among individuals, Warren Buffett, through his company Berkshire Hathaway, is the single largest non-government holder of US Treasury bills, valued at $314bn.

Just something to think about when we hear how we’ve got “too much” debt and people start worrying about who will get paid back first.

Warren Buffet and Bill Gates did this joke already.

Write an Op-Ed about how they aren’t taxed heavily enough. Then spending millions to prop up conservative political campaigns dedicated to cutting taxes.

Quit buying this horseshit. You’ll know a millionaire is lying when their lips are moving.

Inflation, in absolute terms, is a larger benefit to people with higher interest rates.

Fair enough. I’m more thinking in a discrete sense… “saving money” versus “owing money”… rather than implicitly how much less are you paying.

That’s a historically unusual artifact of the financialized housing market in a country where the population outpaces new available housing units while the economy continues to grow.

Go to Italy or - God forbid - Iraq or Ukraine or Myanmar, and you’ll find record inflation combined with falling real estate values. Buying a home in Lebanon or El Salvador or Bulgaria in 1975 wasn’t a good move. You had to be a certain proximity near the US/EU money printing machines and a distance from the US/Russia bomb dropping machines to get that arbitrage to work.

Damn, if you posted this six months ago, people would have tried to ban you for it.

they’ve also read 1984 and thought all “adult” books are gonna be this fucking dreadful and boring

I gotta say, 1984 has a lot wrong with it. But it’s pretty short and punchy as books go. Espionage, sex, torture, murder. Orwell was Tom Clancy before Tom Clancy was cool.

If you’re looking for something that’s endless, dreadful, and boring, you might want a copy of Atlas Shrugged.

I swear Americans have never read a book that wasn’t Harry Potter in their lives.

Nonsense. Some of them have read The Bible.

They’re lining back up behind Eric Adams, which is functionally the same thing.

Feeling more and more like Ukraine/Russia’s future.

inflation is good if you borrow money

at below the rate of inflation

Inflation going to 2% to 6% when you’ve got a credit card with a 30% APY is of very marginal benefit.