“ my solution would be every able bodied Jewish man and woman join the French (or Polish, Russian, British) army and fucking fight…”

I agree that’s the noble thing to do, but I can’t condemn the ones that choose to seek safety in numbers with Jewish Palestinians as exclusively invasion minded aggressors. My 6 million tag was maybe a bit sharp, but you also know that the Nazi’s took Paris and as much as it sucked to be French or European under Nazi occupation, you also know adding Jewish to that carried a lot of extra consequence and danger to your family.

My POV is agnostic of everything save Isreali people today having a right exist as a nation. Which at this point from my POV leaves 1947 as somewhat academic.

It’s your insistence that Jewish people, and the existence of Israel, have always fundamentally been invaders that I was objecting to as it is so intensely at odds with factual history.

You gave a brief nod on not being a scholar of Palestinian history, but then proceed to just count all Jewish refugees as good as Zionist aggressors from day 1(or close enough), and the local Arab population as nothing but pure, kind caring victims of these invaders.

I will state again, that is ahistorical propaganda and NOT what actually happened. And for my POV, its enough generations back as to be Academic, but for your POV it is fundamental because without being able to writeoff Israel as invaders from day 1, nuance enters the calculus and suddenly the conflict is flooded with shades of grey because lots of parties all contribute to the bloodshed, and many with reasonable motivations from both sides yet too.

Please find me any reputable sources to refute the reality of 1920-1940s Palestine:
-Mass Jewish immigration fleeing European oppression raised tensions between Jewish and Arab Palestinians.(as one must expect)
-Arab palestinians were already chaffing and resisting British colonial rule(as one must expect)
-These tensions led conflict, initially more ‘civil’ with the Arab majority trying to refuse all business, sales and trade with all Jews.
-Escalation followed throughout that time, but in drips and drops and NOT a ‘surprise the Zionist army has arrived’! style of aggression

The violent escalation was a fight here, a beating there. Little individual fights, escalating into deaths. Retaliations slowly grew, with each side exchanging small escalations.

-the culmination of this was eventually all out civil war, and the Jewish side immediately accepting a UN mandated 2 state solution

-this culmination coinciding with the end of WW2 and revelations of the true extent of the holocaust can’t be ignored, it certainly shaped the Jewish mindset in the conflict.

-Their mindset was pretty clearly not inaccurate either, as the immediate response of all neighbouring Arab nations was a declaration of war on the new ‘state’, with bold claims of how quickly the Jews would be swept into the sea. The confidence was so high, a call was sent it for ALL Arab palestinians to abandon and flee the entire region of Palestine to better enable the complete cleansing of the land.

The above is all pretty much inarguably factual, and I’d bargain you could get an Arabic and Israeli scholar together to more or less agree on those facts which is saying alot.

——
Propaganda from both sides would like to declare that the Arabs harboured deep Nazi sympathies, and thus Israel was pure and true in all it did. Or from the other side, more or less your narrative of Zionist bad guys launching invasion from day 1(ish).

Both though are just sprinklings of half truths, with anti-British resentment naturally breeding some leanings towards the axis, and even genuine Nazi cleanse the Jews believers. And absolutely Zionists featured prominently within the Jewish population. Neither of those partial truths though make the propaganda of either side true, but instead just an incomplete and intentionally biased picture.


Again, please find me sources demonstrating I’m terribly wrong on all that, but the only ones I can find are clearly biased and the accurate accounts paint the picture above, the propaganda very, very clearly copies the real story more or less with just deletions of inconvenient bits

See the link above…that alien offensive was in 08.

Chytridiomycosis. I think it was biological warfare by the giraffes…we were just about to seize the planet and increase humidity to 100% everywhere, and force the remaining humans to toil in the tubifex worm farms when suddenly we were all hit with Chytridiomycosis. Coincidence? We think not.

Especially egregious when you consider the accusations (grooming, molestation) and who/where they come from.
There is no organization or group on earth that is responsible for more child indoctrination/grooming or more child rape and molestation than organized Christian religion. Never has there been a more organized and well funded rape club.
Even NAMBLA couldn’t hold a candle to them for evil, numbers of rapes, parental/victim brain washing, kidnapping, payoffs, or coverups.

So….Bob belongs to the absolutely worst child rape group and accuses others of being groomers. 😂
The hypocrisy never ends with his ilk.

Edit: the first video suggested by YT this morning…a diocese trying to keep their records secret during a bishop’s rape trial to protect other rapists from exposure….coincidence?

Down 32% (not 20, not 30) no matter the excuse why, but if you track the drops the why is obvious, they don’t coincide with new policy, it went up most of 21 thanks to new policy, they coincide directly with Elon’s actions. He started talking about buying Twitter starting April, plummeted, he announced he was doing it April 14, plummeted again….but believe it’s all Biden’s rapidly growing economy and he’s going to destroy Tesla…then why is it a good buy?

Wait- there are actually real doppelgangers?

This is nuts.

Also funny coincidence: just today I was thinking about the movie Dave, where an ordinary guy became the stand-in for the president because he happened to look exactly the same.

And I was thinking, "Nah, that's way too far-fetched."

Then I come onto The Sift and see this video?!

🤯

*promote

Wow, I'd never heard of that film and its Mario & Luigi coincidence.

This was a great episode and got me and my boys heavy into watching the Gaming Historian channel. This needs to have many more votes! *promote

Complete coincidence: this Monday I met a guy who has one of these (an early 20th century version) in his basement and he explained how it worked. I had never seen one or heard of this. The things they dont teach you in school.

Technically correct: the Constitution does not provide specific details of how Supreme Court appointments are to be made. The fine details have been left up to the Senate and Executive (to a lesser degree, I believe). The executive branch has the right to nominate someone to the court, the Senate then has a duty to serve as a check on that. Technically there's nothing in the Constitution stating you're not allowed to advance a SC nominee weeks before an election.

It IS however, a naked partisan power grab. In 2016 one party argued, 8-9 months prior to the election, that their political opponents should not be able to have their SC nominee even get a hearing prior to the election. There was no actual precedent for this, but they insisted that the will of the electorate must be respected, and that we therefore must await the results of the election. So we did. Now 4 years later, the same party that insisted on respecting the will of the electorate in 2016 is taking precisely the opposite stance. Because last time they could potentially gain from the delay, and this time they almost certainly won't.

The CNN guy was correct: it is NOT unconstitutional to ram through a SC appointment. The authors of the Constitution didn't see fit to include that level of granularity in how the process would work. There is a process to clear this all up though: let's amend the Constitution! That's a super American thing to do! Let's establish, once and for all, the specific rules of the process. Then there won't be any back-and-forth like this about when a nominee can move ahead and when they can't. Nice and tidy.

The question then becomes: at what point in a President's term do they no longer get to nominate a replacement to the Supreme Court, when an election is pending? Should there in fact be no limit (like prior precedent, or lack thereof), and you believe that Merrick Garland should have been allowed hearings, and by extension the Amy Barrett hearings now are legit? Personally, I say we establish a cut-off to spare the political arguments in the future. Let's make it 100 days prior to the election: it's nice round number, bit over 3 months (so time for meaningful hearings and background checks), and should be after or at the end of primary season most cycles. That would of course invalidate both the 2016 and 2020 schemes by the Republicans, but I'm sure that's just a coincidence.

What's your take, Bob? How should this be handled? You posted the video, so I assume you have a stance on the issue?

I use snail mail infrequently, but a first class letter that used to take 2 business days now takes 5 to get delivered. Something is going on lately... about the same amount of time since DeJoy took over as Postmaster General.

could totally be coincidence, but given many precedents Trump set for political 'tricks' I'd say it's plausible.

Whoa one of those weird cosmic coincidences - as I just finished sending ^that comment about "If you could read my mind" my Spotify on random just started playing "Read My Mind" by The Killers.

🤷

Could it be a coincidence that every city over a half million people is run by a Democrat?

Newt,

This is in response to your comment on my statement about Biden needing to lose in '20.

I recently wrote this as a reply to one of my readers (I write under a number of different names in other places).:

Dear <name>,

>I took some time to absorb what you wrote. It's a lot to juggle. The Atlantic has an article in the July-August issue on the worst and best case scenario in CLO defaults. I'll read more.

I read the article you mentioned, and while it's certainly good, it also misses a very important point that explains the mess we're in: the collapse of Lehman and Bear-Stearns, while catastrophic in their own ways, were not the nightmare that caused the Fed to freak out in 2008 -- AIG was. Had AIG gone under and the counterparty default contracts triggered, we'd be on the barter system right now. We came within hours of not having an economy in the western world. The $700b ($.7t) the Fed coughed up to stop this from happening calmed the panic, but did nothing to resolve the underlying issues. These issues continued to compound during the 2011-2020 stock run-up and now we're at the point where the Fed is throwing trillions of dollars at every piece of bad debt they can find just to keep the whole thing from imploding into an economic black hole. It is important to note that in September '19, the credit markets started freezing because of the debt that was already on the books then, -before- CV-19 started rolling, and it took $3t just to get them unlocked again. Absolutely nothing has gotten better since then, and I would argue things have gotten dangerously worse.

In an odd coincidence, the NYT ran an article today about the looming bankruptcy crisis. They're calling for 30-60 days before things start imploding, but I'll stick to my estimate of ~90 days. There's some talk about extending the $600 benefits (we'll see) and chatter about another stimulus check, but that's kicking the can as well as telegraphing how bad things really are. When the Republicans are getting behind free money, you know we're in some uncharted territory. For all intents and purposes, Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) -- the reason the Fed is backstopping debt and printing money like crazy -- is the hill the US economy will live or die on. Should the US dollar come unpegged as the world's de facto currency or should inflation begin (and there's already worrying signs this is happening), that's game over.

Please don't take anything I say as the Word of God; please do your own research and come to your own conclusions. Everything I've said is an opinion based on my education, experience and way of thinking. Your mileage may vary.

Here is the article I mentioned: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/18/business/corporate-bankruptcy-coronavirus.html -- might be paywalled, but clear your cookies for the NYT and you should be able to read it.


>Frankly, it's the physical danger in my area of the States that concerns me. There are the guns and bullying. During some BLM demonstrations in the Midwest, locals were standing around with semi-automatics. I drive a Prius for the fuel efficiency. Pick up trucks enjoy tailgating, trying to intimidate me. This behavior isn't going to change with a change of President but will get worse is we don't change. This ideological push to takeover the country instead of ruling by compromise started around the same time we came to the US in 1981, Reagan's first year. I was so shocked when I heard talk radio for the first time; this wasn't the country I had left in the 1970s.


And now we come to the giant pile of sweaty dynamite that's just waiting for the right shock to set it off. I could give you a prolonged lecture about how this all started in 1978 with California's Proposition 13, or how David Stockman's tragically prescient warnings were blatantly ignored, but Haynes Johnson does a far better job at this than I ever could in his 1991 book "Sleepwalking Through History", as does Kevin Phillips in 2006's "American Theocracy". Honestly, at this point, the prelude is academic. The reality of the situation is that a large swath of adult Americans are appalling ill-educated, innumerate and devoid of even the most basic critical-thinking skills. These people are now locked out of the Information Economy. They lack the most basic skills required to compete in the 21st century job market and thus will watch their standard of living sink into the abyss. These people are not blind to this fact because they're living with the reality of their situation every single day. They're totally without hope, cut off from all avenues of control over their own lives and they feel utterly abandoned by the very people who're supposed to be helping them. The reason you're seeing bullying and behavior like that is because these same people are totally removed from any avenues of recourse and the only people they can take their anger out on are people like you and me. Their anger is being stoked on a daily basis. FOX News and the GOP are experts at this and have a host of boogeymen to keep the anger from being pointed their way: ANTIFA, BLM (black Americans have always made a perfect target), "coastal elites" and, of course, Liberals.

Trump's election was a warning, not an outlier. Trump was the primal scream of these people and Liberals and the Democrats as a whole chose not to listen because they found the sound so abhorrent. The rage will only get worse and the number of people enveloped by this rage will only grow as economic conditions worsen. At this point, it no longer matters who wins in '20. Winning the election will be like winning the deed to the World Trade Center one second after the first jet hit. The damage has already been done and no steps are being taken to repair it; if anything, people are actively making it worse either through ideological blindness, deliberate malfeasance or outright stupidity. It took almost 50 years to get to this point and the endemic issues will not be undone in a single generation, much less a single election. Until the people who voted for Trump feel a sense of real hope, a sense of control over their lives and a genuine expectation of recourse for their grievances, they will keep right on voting for Trump, or people like him.

My unfortunate suspicion is that this country will rip itself to shreds long before those reforms are enacted.

Side note: the fundamental difference between the United States and Europe is that European history has forced the nations of Europe to live with the consequences of their actions. Not so the United States. Europe has suffered for her sins. Not so the United States. The two bloodiest wars in human history were fought on European soil. Not so the United States. The United States has never faced true suffering, nor has it ever had to live with the ramifications of its own actions. Both these facts are about to change and a nation whose character is built on a mythology of individual action and violence is going to have to face reality. The people of this nation are not prepared for this and they will not like it.

Second side note: many people are erroneously comparing the current situation to the Wiemar Republic. This is a lack of historical understanding. A more apt comparison would be to Spain in late 1935.


>As for re-opening, we could have gotten some control if the "leader" had simply donned a mask and used realistic thinking. People could go back to work more safely, wash hands, stay a certain distance. But his hubris led the way, so now we'll have a roller coaster for months and years that will affect the economy even more. France is a good comparison because they were unprepared also, having slashed the public healthcare budget for the last twenty years. But when they laid down the rules, troops patrolled the streets to be sure they were followed. So far, they've flattened the curve (for now), and used different economic incentives, such as paying part of employees' salaries to keep them employed.

At this point, the pace of re-opening is a difference between very bad and much worse. Had $3t been used to pay the yearly salary of every American, we could have saved lives and the economy, but we didn't. The history of 2020 will be littered with "what-ifs". However, the first thing you learn when studying history is that what-ifs are useless because things are what they are and you can't change that. It's already obvious we're going into a second wave. If previous pandemics are any indication of what's to come, this second wave will be many times worse than the first. The wait for a vaccine is indeterminate, but if we're going for herd immunity, ~70% of Americans will need to catch the virus. To date, ~1.5% have. If the US population is ~330 million, ~230 million will need to catch the virus. Call the mortality rate 2%, that means ~4.6 million Americans will die. That's a lot of dead Americans and grieving families.

Take care,

(my actual name)

What a coincidence. Just found this which was posted today on a channel I subscribe to.