I have a lot of nostalgia for good old-fashioned goldbug grifters.

The least realistic thing here is Trump running.

Thanks. “Clean Coal” is the biggest con since ethanol. “NG is a transition fuel” is also a con but not on the same level.

He’s a “free-breathing absolutist.” He thinks everyone should have a supply of oxygen except the people he personally doesn’t like.

I quite frankly flat out do not understand why people on the left are so against space exploration suddenly

Ever heard the song “whitey on the moon?”

Setting that aside, exploring space is not the same thing as building a company town for the world’s least mentally stable pregnancy fetishist oligarch in an unworldly cold desert where everyone is sure to die.

Problem is they’re not protesting for an end to west bank settlements, or a meaningful negotiation with Palestine that creates a viable Palestinian state with right to return, or an end to the Gaza embargo, or even a curbing of settler violence, house demolition or the like.

All these things are not part of the discussion in Israel.

Mostly they’re protesting against the utter and complete disregard Netenyahu has for the lives and well-being of the hostages.

supporting Israel being an easy and surface-level way to alleviate that guilt.

No doubt reinforced by enormous amounts of hasbara.

Almost as if they’re overcompensating for something. 🤔

This is the result explicit, aggressive and longstanding propaganda by the State of Israel and its foreign agents like AIPAC.

They want there to be no conceptual space between the State of Israel, the Jewish religion, and the Jewish people around the world, so they can turn any criticism of Israel into antisemitism and therefore a hate crime.

Not secret

Tactical nukes aren’t real. They start an escalation ladder that gets you to global thermonuclear war in a few hours. Using a “tactical nuke” is just laying naked your intent to have things go nuclear while giving your opponent a chance to respond.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis Kennedy wanted to nuke Cuba. The joint chiefs told him that if he wanted to do that he would also have to nuke Russia in a massive fully committed first strike.

The way this has worked is that the Japanese economy has bifurcated with the graduation-to-retirement employment being available to a ever smaller group of white collar workers called salary-men. To become a salary-man you have to go to college and get hired the year you graduate through campus recruiting. If you miss your “window” then you can’t become a salary-man and will be stuck in contingent work for the rest of your life.

The people quitting in this case are not salary-men (a salary-man quitting would be pretty unthinkable) but their bosses probably are, hence the cultural divide.

Sometimes salary-men do lose their jobs due to bankruptcy of the organization for instance. Typically the solution if that happens is to jump in front of a train.

My understanding is that the employer side of this contract quit getting honored religiously during the lost decade and employment in Japan is increasingly contingent and precarious.

It’s just a suggestion.

Quebec is also where I learned the phrase “No cop, no stop.”

But I think they were arrested for not saying arrêt.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iHr0Hytrls

The article is rank propaganda. Coming from a supposed middle eastern journal it’s pretty shameful that it didn’t even mention what China is doing to Muslims in Xinjiang. Besides that, China is in taking aggressive actions against many of its neighbors, not just Taiwan but also the Philippines, Malaysia, Japan, etc. Plus the wolf warrior stuff against Australia, South Korea and the like. Not to mention the illegal armed fishing fleet operations in the territorial waters of smaller nations around the world.

In comparison, the USA illegally invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, has meddled in the internal affairs of many Latin American countries, and supports Israel.

One could certainly argue that America’s crimes are worse on the margin, but the idea that one supports a rules-based order and the other does not is laughable. Both violate international rules and laws continuously whenever it suits them and they can get away with it.

I’m not even mad at Elon. He came up with a clownishly absurd idea and the media bought it. He literally described it as “an air hockey table in a vacuum tube” while laughing, and the media just went ahead and ate his ass anyway.

Union Pacific’s profits over the last 20 years would have paid for a high speed rail line from Chicago to Los Angeles

The existence of that entity as a private owner of critical American infrastructure, which uses it to extract rents from the American economy, has cost us at least one trans-continental high speed rail line worth of value.

He’s made his bed with the Silicon Valley elite and now he has to do their unpopular things. All that money comes with strings.

It’s enjoyable watching it happen to somebody I don’t like for once.