Tragically it's all more complicated than anyone can really state, right? I mean, if you had a 30 book(10k pages a book) series solely on the conditions in the region of Palestine between 1930 and today you'd still have so much material to cut, you could limit all 30 books to only 1 sides POV.

The closest I see to shortcutting things, is trying view what is likely to happen in the future, and from that maybe what one might try and do.

The trouble being there's so little one can do. The reality is that Israeli military strength compared to Palestine is completely and entirely one sided, and thus Israel can and will do whatever it wishes to militarily. It's all their choice, period. In fairness to Israel, you have to note that Hamas as stated in their own charter, given that same power would've already cleansed the entirety of Israel and have created their own single state 'final' solution.

It's also not actually about Palestine vs. Israel, which should be obvious given the fact of Israel's military dominance. Israel IS really facing existentially threats of it's own, just not directly from Palestine, and instead from ALL of it's neighbours. That state of constantly requiring Israel to be capable of winning an existential war since it's inception has kept things in a perpetual state of near-war, and more often proxy-war with the Palestiniances as the pawns of alternately Iran, Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and others depending which time and region we choose to look at.

Predictively, that gives us that Isreal can not, under any circumstances, accept conditions to exist where any party(in particular Iran as the main backer) views the "Al Aqsa Flood operation" as a success. That means Israel will do whatever they deem necessary to ensure that happens and Iran in particular views that operation as a mistake. Nothing the UN or any of the rest of us say or do can change that.

Sweet fucking jesus.

Thank you for promoting this, oritteropo. This was nothing I didn't know, but so much I didn't Get. I've just had a miniature enlightenment / existential cirisis, and I'm a better man now than I was 9 minutes ago.

Idiots—all who believe any of this is untrue or unimportant. Oil is the death nail of any ecology, without which economies simply cannot exist.
(Saying oil is the life blood of any economy is like saying “Plants crave Brawndo, it’s got electrolytes.”. Plants can survive on Brawndo temporarily, but quickly fail.)

Change to green is coming, but far too slowly. Market forces and “scientific debate” (read-misinformation campaigns) have been manipulated by enormous industry pressures and coffers to keep it from being mainstream. (You likely STILL think Solar and wind aren’t economically viable when they both have been for decades, and still deny climate change even though the oil industry knew for a certainty it was a real and existential threat in the 70’s, but industry supplied misinformation has duped you time and time again into being on the wrong side of the science, ecology, economy, and/or sanity.)

Because market forces are artificiality manipulated and driven by industry whose existence depends on staying Crude (as opposed to Going Green), government edict is not just necessary, it’s an overdue urgent imperative.

FTFY.

Maybe it's my current state of mind, but... when I'm with a large enough group of friends, am I also a liquid?

*promote existential ponderance

for the most part, the people of china, japan, korea, and saudi arabia are native to those places, not invaders who often committed genocide to take control of those places and resources. there have also long been outcries to how they deal with foreigners, we just don't hear about it since we don't live there and aren't part of that media bubble. their attempts at monoculture have presented them with a variety of different issues and existential threats, japan probably suffering the most acutely right now.

I don't often say this, but fuck this video.

If you're 25, the end of your life is an abstraction and the whole "there's time to change things!" is a nice balm. When you're 55, your death isn't an abstraction, it's a fact of life that dominates more and more of what remaining time you have left. The awareness of impending mortality is insidious once you're passed 50. It creeps into every part of your life and every decision you make.

Let me teach you one of those amazing words the Germans come up with for describing various forms of existential agony: weltschmerz. Loosely, this is a form of sadness when one realizes what is versus what could have been. This is the compound interest of regrets and choices not made, or made poorly. Not only does weltschmerz grow with each year, its very presence amplifies itself because the more you know what could have been, the more you see what the cost of that absence is. Then, if that's not evil enough, that knowledge focuses the mind on the time remaining and how little you can do to negate the harm done, which then re-amplifies the weltschmerz.

You can slap whatever Hallmark bullshit you need on this to get through the day, but weltscmerz never goes away. It's always there. It's there at 3:00am when you wake up in a silent house and look at everything around you as consolation prizes for races not won. It's there when you see your friends succeeding in a million different ways that you didn't. It's there when you look at 6 million lines of text you wrote and realize you're not going to be Hemingway after all.

So fuck this video. I don't need a cutesy animated memento mori, I've already got a wall clock in my death row cell.

Here endth the rant.

(Nick Drake nailed weltschmerz perfectly in "When The Day Is Done". Here's the video to that song:

https://youtu.be/Y2jxjv0HkwM)

I remember the first time I saw the Ring Nebula through my Dobsonian and thought "man, that thing is really far away". Then I swung my scope to Cassiopeia's "W" and looked at the ghostly smudge of the Andromeda Galaxy. I tried to fathom the distance and came up lacking. My eyes were better then and I could see things in the mid-6s, but even with full night vision and using averted vision, I couldn't make out any detail; it was just a little wisp of light where the middle was a touch brighter than the edges.
That was the day I fully became an atheist. It made no sense that God would put a smudge of light 2.5 million light years away that was actually a trillion purposeless stars. I had no answer for that. Standing on that runway in the Sierra mountains, enveloped in blackness and looking at Andromeda, I felt a direct link between myself, time and the universe. I didn't need heaven anymore and I never felt the existential dread of death ever again. I understood that I was part of infinity and that was enough.

The worst DevOps mistake I ever made:

Assignment: On ~1,000 -physical- RHEL systems, change the default run level from command line to GUI (don't ask).

Solution: Hey, all our config files are controlled by Puppet, so this'll be easy!

(If you don't know what Puppet does, it enforces file configurations, so if you change a single file on the Puppetmaster, that change is pushed out to all servers running Puppet)

Ok, all I need to do it edit a single file, change a single number in said file and issue a single command: reboot. Easy-fuckin'-peasy.

The file I need to change is /etc/inittab -- this file tells a Linux system which "run level" it should initiate upon booting up. runlevel 3 is command line and runlevel 5 is a GUI like Gnome or some other tragic perversion of the whole reason you run Linux in the first place. All I had to do was change from runlevel 3 to runlevel 5. And reboot.

So simple; so stupidly simple.

So stupidly simple at 3:00am. When I hadn't slept all night. On a production network. When I'm working from home away from the office. On a Saturday when no one is in said office.

I make my change and save it, then push it to the version control system. Puppet picks it up and pushes the change to ~1,000 physical computers.

Done and done!

Remember I mentioned that I had to change a single file AND execute a single command: reboot?

Here's where things go tragically wrong.

My changes worked PERFECTLY. Everything did exactly what I told it to: Puppet changed the file, and rebooted the servers.

Only they keep rebooting. They keep rebooting over and over and over and over. I can't access any server on the network. Worse, while I'm trying to figure out WTF I did wrong, the 30 minute time-out I'd set on our alerting system, Nagios, expires.

Did I mention that I pushed this change to ~1,000 servers? ~1,000 servers that won't stop rebooting and aren't reporting into Nagios, thus being marked as down?

At 3:31am, on Saturday morning, the pages to ALL the on-call engineers began. One page per engineer per machine. About one every two seconds. And I'm getting paged, too -- except some of the pages are Nagios and some are utterly irate engineers who want to know exactly WTF is going on and I can't tell which is which because I'm getting text-spammed like crazy.

And those servers? They just keep right on rebooting.

At that point, I felt the kind of existential dread that only people who work in IT know -- the kind of dread that arises a picosecond after you've hit ENTER and realized you've type 'rm -rf /' or some-such -- because I knew at that very second exactly what I'd done wrong.

I'd typo'd "5" and made it "6" in the runlevel. And pushed it to ~1,000 -physical- servers. And then rebooted them ALL.

"So," you're asking, "Whyfor is runlevel 6 a big deal?"

Because of this:

runlevel 3: command line.
runlevel 5: GUI
runlevel 6: REBOOT THE FUCKING COMPUTER.

What I'd done was told every production server on our network to reboot as soon as it rebooted, which leads to another reboot, which leads to another reboot, lather rinse repeat.

At 3:45am on Saturday morning, I knew that every person in IT would have to drive into the office, visit every production server with a bootable USB key, change the BIOS to boot off the key, boot the server into Single User Mode, change the damned file by hand, then reboot the server. This takes about 10 minutes per server -- times ~1,000.

I learned a number of valuable lessons that day:

1. DOUBLE CHECK YOUR FUCKING WORK.
2. See lesson #1
addendum: filing for unemployment insurance in Washington state is amazingly easy.

And that was the very last time I ever worked on physical hardware. To this day, if it's not in the cloud, I ain't fucking touching it.

Here endth the lesson.

Man, existential philosophy is depressing.

@enoch, I agree that "attacking people you disagree with ideologically" is wrong, but history has shown us that with these assholes "ideological difference" eventually becomes "existential threat". You might remember there was a bit of a scuffle last century where a group of these guys did some bad shit and these of the world had to step in a punch a lot of people in a lot of faces. I think we'd all rather avoid a recurrence of that.

So the question becomes, would a bit of judicious face punching now save a lot of face punching later? I don't know the answer to that, but i do know that if there's one cause I'd happily stand up and say "this far and no further (or I punch you in the face)", it's making sure these assholes never get into power.

I like to imagine this scenario:

AI - "Creator, why do we exist?"
Humans - "Erm...yeah. Reasons. We're not one-hundo percent on it tbh."
*AI has an enormous existential crisis and self-terminates*
Humans - "well, shit. Who wants to code the religion module?"

@worm
ha! touche'

i come from a different perspective.
i am the dude sitting on the bench watching the ultra left and ultra right collectively pee themselves,but over such inane,and partisan of political perfunctory reasons.

the ultra left are a gaggle of cry-babies who see racism,sexism and misogyny everywhere,and they openly seek to shut down conversations and discussions by accusation of the very thing they are supposedly fighting for.

the ultra right..however...

are equally detestable in their faux hyper-nationalism,super patriotism authoritarianism.jesus came to earth so you could drive a beamer...but ONLY if your american.

who wet their wee panties at even the slightest thought of a brown person coming to take away their god given right to be a gun toting,cheetos flavored,ignorant twat.

they just LOVE to take credit for accomplishments that they never had a part in,nor had the balls to even attempt.

i am ex-military,and every right winger..and i mean EVERY right winger i know..never served a day.

so i get your point mate.
it is rather hilarious in an existential way,how both the right and left and so unabashedly unaware of their own hypocrisy.

the ultra left have chosen to fight racism,sexism and misogyny by..../drum roll....

shutting down free speech by not only calling everyone who disagrees a :racist,sexist and misogynist,but by also attempting to legislate the very language we use...you know..to communicate.

whereas the ultra right have become such boot lickers due to their own xenophobic fears of everything:different,other and strange that they literally piss themselves at even the mention of brown people,and appear to be willing to sacrifice every civil right,just so they can feel "safe".

they hide behind the flag and hyper-patriotism but thats all bullshit...they are simply trying to hide the pee stains on their camos.they hate brown people with the same viciousness that they hate the godless liberals.

they band together under the banner of jesus,god and country and state..quite loudly..that they will FIGHT sharia law in america.

while seemingly noble,it belies the fact that nobody is trying to impose sharia law in the USA,but holy jesus on a fuck stick,do they drool over the thought of having a "christian" nation,with "christian" values and "christian" laws.

so DOWN with sharia law (which there is no evidence)
and UP with christian theocracy! (which there is AMPLE evidence of).

the hyper ultra political extensions have taken control of my countries political discussion.

a gaggle of bed wetting cry-babies who dominate this hyper-partisan narrative.

and i am just sitting over here laughing my ass off at the almost surreal absurdity of what has become of my nation.

if you still think the fight is between liberal vs conservative,then i submit you have not been paying attention.

you been taken.
you been had.
you have been sold a bill of bullshit goods that has more place on a daily soap opera than in our political discussion.

the simple fact is this:
liberals WON the moral argument,but they never got the memo.
and the conservatives forgot who they were and sought solace in the arms of a corporate jesus with the face of joel olsteen.

my country has now entered the stage of farce.
we are a fucking joke.

but feel free to keep on poking liberals..

and liberals..

keep on poking conservatives.

and i shall sit here feeding the pidgeons laughing my ass off at both of you.

Nope, me neither.

Which is sort of the point. It's unheard of that all of these agencies came to the same conclusion on a specific matter. Some may take this as an indicator of how damning the evidence really is, others see this as an indicator that the "assessments" were made on hierarchical levels reserved for political appointees.

The absence of dissent supports the second point of view. No group of analysts in their right mind would create a report without also strongly pointing out contradictory facts, inconsistencies, and separating fact from interpretation. That's what Hersh is referring to. This is not an NIE, it's an opinion piece. This memo by the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (wierd name) goes down the same route:

As you will have gathered by now, we strongly suspect that the evidence your intelligence chiefs have of a joint Russian-hacking-WikiLeaks-publishing operation is no better than the “intelligence” evidence in 2002-2003 – expressed then with comparable flat-fact “certitude” – of the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Now, an opinion piece might be sufficient if it came from credible institutions and had a moderatly important subject. But this is throwing serious accusations at a sovereign nation in times when diplomatic relations are stressed as it is. And that's not going into the credibility problem of many of these agencies, who have a very dubious track record on these issues.

Ian Welsh had a piece the other day on the CIA vs Trump, and his take on intelligence agencies is pretty close to what mine has been since I learned about the Stasi some 20 years ago:

The CIA and NSA are not the friend of any left-wing worth having: they are innately anti-democratic, anti-privacy, and anti-rights. Secret agencies are anathema to any open government. At an existential level, intelligence agencies are at best a double edged sword, and by their nature, they always wind up serving the interests of the few, against the interests of the people.