Opinion: 'Most U.S. banks are technically near insolvency,' Roubini says
From Apr 2023. A year on, this hasn't happened
Frog Morton on X - ""When I am criticizing you, you are My Tribe and I am engaging in the Hard Work of Prophetic Correction of My Tribe. When you are criticizing me, you are Not My Tribe and you are engaging in Ignoring Problems in Your Own Tribe.""
paige on X - "changing your mind in the direction of propaganda = “listening, learning, doing better” changing your mind away from propaganda = “radicalization, extremism, dangerous to democracy”"
Nancy Pelosi's son is investor in Chinese tech firm: report - "The son of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who quietly accompanied his mother on last week’s controversial trip to Taiwan where she called out China for its threatening moves toward the self-ruled island, holds a stake in a Chinese technology company... He traveled with his mother as she led a Democratic congressional delegation to Asia that included stops in South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Japan and Taiwan, but his name wasn’t included in the official list of officials on the trip released by the speaker’s office... “Per decades-old policy, spouses and adult children are allowed to travel on Congressional delegations for representational purposes at no expense to the taxpayer,” the spokesman said."
Thread by @TheBlackHorse65 on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "The rise and fall of the Sid Meier's Civilization franchise from 1991 to 2018 is both one of the great tragedies of the computer gaming industry, and a window into the massive change in psychology of the US ruling class. This thread will explore both. I have played every civilization game many times, but in preparation for this thread, I have replayed each civilization game at least once from beginning to end; with the exception of Civilization VI, which I refuse to dignify with my further attention.
Civilization I was a groundbreaking game in which the player acts a sort of archon spirit controlling a civilization from it's birth in 4000BC until either it's death by conquest, or it's conquest of the earth. The game was a genre-defining 4x. The game was implicitly based on both the 18th century view of international relations - that all nations are continuous competitors and that peace is only ever an interlude between wars, and the 20th century notion that the all states are total states. Civ 2 is essentially a straight remake of the game, but updated to reflect the then-current hardware constraints of the post window-95 world. The game retains the essential political and social perspective of the original game, but with a more elegant skin.
Civ III [2001] was an inflection point; introducing new game concepts which forever altered the telos of the game to reflect the changed underlying assumptions of the creators of the game. Strategic resources, ethnic citizens, stable diplomacy, culture, & non-conquest victory. The 18th century frame on international relations is gone, replaced with a post-war American anti-colonial frame.
- It's a net-drag to conquer more than ~25% of the globe
- Stable peaceful relations are possible
- resources are scarce and a key cause of war
- Nations form coalitions to resist domination against aggressive players, even if the aggressive player is not the human player.
- Nations consider whether they can win before declaring war.
- Most games end in cultural victory or world government by the UN.
Civ IV [2005] begins is another substantial change in the franchise, ending the "reign of quantity" as the basic principle by which the game is organized through the introduction of real penalties for scale and the concept of "great people". Civilization IV fundamentally disrupted the assumption of the three previous games that all great nations must control large territories in order to be able to control enough strategic resources and generate enough commerce to remain competitive. With the addition of religion and diplomatic pledges; Civ 4 game had well begun it's transition into a game of politics and international relations instead of a game of industrial scale and conquest. Civ 5 made two profound changes that ended the game as previously known forever. Cities defend themselves without the need to muster troops, and units cannot stack constraining dramatically the value of having a large army. Civ 5 also has the distinction of being the first genuinely bad game in the series. A game with a user interface that is way less information dense, and with a real dedication to a number of mechanics that are totally irrelevant to the outcome of the game (e.g. religion).
Civilization 6 is less an actual game than it is a propaganda art-form designed to express to it's use that the world is constrained by geography which necessitates planning and the voluntary choice not to pursue the 4 x's that were the foundation of the genre. An utter disgrace.
When looked at in totality, you can see the fingerprints of the change in culture of the designers. The men that created Civ I were unapologetically part of the Faustian Western tradition. Civ 6 was created by men who completely disconnected from that tradition."
Non-marxist cultural studies
Twitter activist behind far-right 'Libs of TikTok' revealed to be US Orthodox Jew - "She’s also an Orthodox Jew, according to a Washington Post expose Tuesday that revealed Raichik to be behind the massively popular Twitter feed Libs of TikTok . That information was contained at one point in Raichik’s Twitter bio, where users often share elements of their identities, The Washington Post reported. The newspaper reported nothing else about Raichik’s Jewish identity... It also is renewing a conversation about how deeply some members of the Orthodox community are embedded in the American far-right... In the runup to the 2020 election, Orthodox Trump supporters rallied in the streets for him in Brooklyn and demonstrated against the pandemic restrictions he mocked; the son of a prominent Brooklyn judge who led a national Orthodox synagogue group was present among the rioters, while some Orthodox publications blamed leftists for the siege or downplayed the gravity of the Capitol mob’s actions... Poupko explained that any restrictions on women engaging on social media are less severe than for men, a function of the belief that women are better equipped than men to withstand temptation. “It’s more okay for a woman to see immodesty” on social media, he said."
The right wing anti-Semites continue to insist that all Jews are pushing liberal madness
American and Israeli Jews: Twin Portraits From Pew Research Center Surveys - "Like Jews in the United States, Jews in Israel are deeply divided over settlement construction in the West Bank, which Palestinians view as an obstacle to peace. Overall, however, Israeli Jews lean toward the position that settlements help Israel’s security, while a plurality of American Jews think settlements hurt Israel’s own security. Younger American Jews are especially likely to question whether Israel’s government is sincerely seeking peace and to say the United States gives “too much” support to Israel, leading some commentators to suggest that the two Jewish communities may be drifting apart... it’s interesting to note that on the Israeli political spectrum, most Jews place themselves in the center or on the right, while on the American spectrum, most Jews identify with the center or the political left. These broad ideological differences may be connected to the very different social contexts in which Israeli and U.S. Jews live. American Jews are a highly educated and, on the whole, warmly regarded religious minority in a very large, Christian-majority country. Jews represent about 2% of the U.S. adult population of roughly 300 million people. Only about one-third of American Jews say that either “all” (5%) or “most” (27%) of their close friends are Jewish. A substantial proportion (44%) of U.S. Jews who are married say their spouse is not Jewish – including a majority of those who have gotten married since 2000... "American Jewish critics of Israel, they’ll say, ‘That’s not … how could Israel have done this, that’s not Jewish?’ I’m thinking, ‘Well, not Jewish for who?’""
Weird. I thought all Jews unconditionally support Israel, and only mix with other Jews as they plot to control the world
Russian honeytraps pointless on French spies… their wives already know - "Honeytraps do not work on French spies because their wives are used to them having affairs, a television documentary about France’s equivalent of MI6 has revealed. Intelligence agents in the Directorate-General for External Security (DGSE) said that their Russian enemies came to realise that blackmail over taking lovers was ineffective... “Defectors from the Soviet Union used to talk about the ‘French paradox’, namely if you surprised a Frenchman with a mistress by telling him, we’ve caught you red-handed with a 22-year-old called Tatyana, work for us or we’ll tell your wife, it didn’t work. “That was because he generally said: ‘Go ahead, show her, she’ll understand,’ or ‘she already knows about it’.”... In one jab at “Anglo-Saxons”, the documentary cites agents who claim they provided photographic evidence that disproves American claims that the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was building missiles that could carry weapons of mass destruction. The agent said the Americans mixed up images of rolled-up carpets in a factory and petrol pipeline tubing with missiles. Anglo-Saxons also tended to “throw more money at seeking to make contacts”, while the French rely more heavily on ulterior motives... Agents explain how hard it is to keep their jobs from their families, with one saying they learn not to ask questions. One unnamed agent said: “Most secret agents of the DGSE are under diplomatic cover in embassies. It’s not James Bond. We don’t have a Walther PPK in our pocket. The odd vodka martini is possible. “In general, we rely more on subtleness and discretion and rigorous handling of communications means than an M4 or a Glock [both types of guns].” The documentary opens with members of the DGSE making a distinction between “secret agent” and “spy”, which is a narrower job title and only part of the activity of the agency. The secret agent’s role is to “gather information abroad to protect France”. However, this often happens from behind a desk."
Home Sweet Homer: The Strange Saga of the Real-Life Simpsons House in Nevada - "At first glance, the two-story stucco house located on Red Bark Lane in Henderson, Nevada, looks very much the same as the neighboring homes located in the South Valley Ranch community. Neutral exterior paint covers the sides and attached garage. A rock garden has been spread over the soil. A cement walkway leads from the driveway to the front door. Look closer and the irregularities begin to appear. The house has protruding bay windows and a rounded front entryway, which are both unusual for the prefabricated construction on the block. A chimney juts out from the roof, though Nevada residents are rarely in need of a wood-burning fire. Around the garage, some of the light-colored paint is flaking, revealing a cornea-scorching bright orange underneath. Once upon a time, the house on Red Bark Lane wasn’t just another address in a sprawling suburban development: It was originally built as a nearly exact three-dimensional replica of 742 Evergreen Terrace, the Springfield residence of Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie Simpson. Working on a short schedule, architects and builders de-fictionalized the home featured in The Simpsons for a 1997 giveaway that was intended to leave one lucky fan with the ultimate in cartoon memorabilia"
Keywords: Replica
Richard Hanania on X - "Across 9 studies from 5 different countries involving 12,000 twin pairs, genes explain about 40% of the variation in political ideology, with shared environment (parenting and neighborhood) just under 20%, and the rest unexplained."
Genetic Influences on Political Ideologies: Twin Analyses of 19 Measures of Political Ideologies from Five Democracies and Genome-Wide Findings from Three Populations
Mike Bird on X - "A while ago a Singaporean taxi driver asked me what a UK hawker centre lunch might cost. I explained that there aren't any. He asked what office workers ate, and I explained the concept of Meal Deals. And he looked at me with such a powerful combination of pity and revulsion."
Meme - "KEEP CALM AND TRY ANAL"
"KEEP CALM AND TRY AN ALE"
"Sometimes it's all about the angle."
Meme - "I told him if anything happened to me, he should meet other women"
"So I did!"
"I meant if I died..Peter I was stuck in traffic"
Meme - Decimvs Ivnivs Ivvenalis @DJ_Juvenal: "plebs literally only want two things and it's fucking disgusting *bread* *circus*
2:48 PM - a.d. III Non. Apr.. 880 AUC"
Meme - Mark Lewis @marklewismd: "Honestly don't know how to earn that 5th star"
"Doctor Lewis saved my life! *4 stars*"
Nationalist Self-Hatred - "The populist Right may identify with Putin’s opposition to cancel culture and applaud when he declares that the woke Left is more authoritarian than the Soviet Union, but this can’t account for the enmity they display toward their own country, its democratic allies, and the threatened democracies (particularly Ukraine) that it supports. The infatuation with the culture war is just one aspect of this civic rot, which is becoming deeper and more widespread all the time... Trump has no ideology beyond his lust for personal power, but he realized that a commitment to nationalism is the best way to secure that power. Carlson’s ideology is similarly opportunistic. His self-conscious agitprop in Moscow was supposed to generate apoplectic headlines in the liberal media. He’s a right-wing ideologue, but he’s also a troll who knows how to ignite maximum controversy and attract attention. He’ll say whatever is necessary to remain relevant, no matter how disingenuous it might be. For example, he has spent years shilling for Trumpism, even though he regards Trump as “disgusting,” a “demonic force,” and a “destroyer.” Two days before the January 6 assault on the Capitol, he wrote to a staffer: “We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait. I hate him passionately.” (We know this thanks to the disclosure of Carlson’s text messages during the Fox-Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit, which resulted in a $785 million settlement paid by the network.)"
Hating your government isn't the same as hating your country
Unit 684 - Wikipedia - "209th Detachment, 2325th Group (Korean: 2325부대 209파견대), commonly known as Unit 684 (684부대), was a black operations unit of the Republic of Korea Air Force formed to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Il Sung in 1968, in retaliation for the Blue House raid. The unit consisted of 31 civilian recruits, mostly petty criminals and unemployed youths, and underwent three years of harsh training on the island of Silmido. The assassination mission was cancelled in 1971 and the unit mutinied, resulting in a firefight in Seoul in which most of the members of the unit were killed. The four survivors were sentenced to death by a military tribunal and executed."
After software "upgrade", StarHub TV+ is slow and pushes unskippable ads - "To make things worse, StarHub has even introduced unskippable ads without telling paying customers beforehand... And it has the cheek to tell complaining customers that these ads do not interfere with the viewing experience because they do not appear during a video stream. Excuse me, you’re talking to paying customers. We are not using a free version of Netflix or Spotify here. Nor are we using a pirate Android box streaming illegal versions of the English Premier League, something StarHub is so keen on educating users against. The experience with the legitimate StarHub box, let’s be honest, makes you feel like you’ve just signed up for an illegal set-top box service. These unskippable ads are not just an annoyance – they make paying customers feel like they are freeloaders. If you’re NTUC Income, Ogawa and other advertisers whose ads are showing up repeatedly on StarHub TV+ boxes, please know that you are annoying people to bits. No, such irritating, disruptive ads don’t work; actually, they make people hate your brand... Clearly, this software “upgrade” is an own goal by the telecom operator, just as it seemed to be winning. When it rolled out its little white Android set-top boxes a few years ago, you’d think it had finally cast out its cable-TV legacy and moved up to the streaming TV future"
The NDP don't take themselves seriously, so why should we? - "What is the point of the federal New Democratic Party? It would appear that it’s not to win elections. That’s fine, as far as it goes. There are other purposes for political parties. Some are single or double-issue protest parties, like the Christian Heritage Party, but those tend to be very small, rarely if ever winning seats in Parliament. There are regional parties, like the Bloc Québécois, which runs candidates only in Quebec, advancing their narrow interests with some success. There have historically been splinter parties, like Alberta’s Wildrose Party or the Reform Party, each of which, by splitting historic voting coalitions, had influence over their movements’ reunifications, altering the makeup of the future United Conservative and federal Conservative parties forever. But none of these alternative strategic imperatives or political identities applies to the NDP, which despite meagre election results, both in the popular vote and seat count, continues to insist that we take it seriously as a mainstream party. But why should we? Since the so-called Orange Crush of 2011, when Jack Layton brought the federal NDP up to 103 seats in the House of Commons and official opposition status, the NDP has been on a steady political decline. They dropped down to 44 seats in 2015, 24 in 2019, and essentially held in 2021, gaining one seat. While the grand narrative of the last few elections has focused on Trudeau besting his primary opponents in Canada’s Conservatives, his utter dominance over the NDP, convincing progressive voters at every turn that to stop the right-wing bogeyman they’d have to vote Liberal, is an under-discussed dynamic. It also seems to be an under-examined phenomenon when it comes to the NDP’s own political strategy... three more veteran NDP Members of Parliament announced they wouldn’t be re-offering in the next election, causing analysts to rightly remark that it would likely be Conservatives, not Liberals, picking up some of the non-incumbent ridings in the next election. This is the challenge for the NDP in 2024. Despite the Liberal crash in popularity and the accessibility of previous Liberal voters, they have not been able to capitalize on converting them. Indeed, many from what would have traditionally been an NDP pool of supporters—working-class labour union members—make up Conservative leader Poilievre’s growing coalition. This should be all the more galling for NDP rank-and-file members when you consider that we’re in the middle of an affordability crisis. Canadians are lining up at food banks in record numbers. Isn’t this sort of supposed to be their party’s moment? And herein lies the problem. Canada’s NDP were supposed to have a purpose. The party emerged from the cooperation of western agrarians and national trade unions, bringing together rural, urban, western, and eastern working-class people. But almost from the beginning, they struggled to reconcile their materialist left-wing economic inclinations with the trendy left-wing social causes of the day. It’s been working-class populists versus champagne socialists since day one... The NDP should look at where Liberals are wedded to stakeholders that they are not (corporate Canada comes to mind) and contemplate policies that would wedge the government and set them apart, creating some appeal for working-class Canadians fed up with the status quo. Why not push for curtailing record-high immigration numbers? Make the argument that increasing labour supply suppresses wages, hurting Canadian paycheques and distorting the labour market. Why not push to protect more Canadian supply chains from trade exposure? Make the argument that unfettered free trade erodes onshore manufacturing employment and threatens the kind of good, high-paying union jobs our parents grew up with. Of course, we know why not. These arguments, while popular with working-class Canadians, are not on trend with our country’s urban elite. Unfortunately for the NDP, they’re what a party that wanted to win would consider talking about. This brings us back to the opening question. The point of the federal NDP seems neither to be to win or even to advance a narrow cause. It seems simply to exist for its own sake, occasionally finding comfort in passing party policy resolutions that read like half-baked social studies masters’ theses. Maybe they’re OK with that. But it doesn’t mean the rest of us have to take them seriously."
Meme - "DWAYNE 'THE ROCK' JOHNSON RELEASES A MEN'S SHAMPOO - DESPITE BEING BALD"
"I guide others to a treasure I cannot possess."
The Most Underrated Scene in The Lord of the Rings - YouTube - "'We, we didn't want to put any of our own, certainly in terms of the thematic material, we didn't want to put any of our own baggage. I mean we had no interest in putting our messages into, into this movie. But we thought that we should honor Tolkien by putting his messages into it. He, he cared passionately about certain issues. And we thought what we should do to honor him is to make sure that that that his what he cared about ends up in the movie'... Gandalf telling Pippin you'll go to Valinor when you die is inaccurate in the lore of Middle Earth as we've established, but if we loosen our interpretation of those words to be not quite so strict, we can imagine that Gandalf is not telling Pippin literally what will happen but instead is simply imparting a message of hope. In this Jackson gets Tolkien perfectly, beautifully right. The temptation to despair is a central theme throughout this story... yet time after time our heroes reject that temptation... almost every every notable character in the story faces a crucial moment in which they must choose between despair and hope. And with the exception of Denethor they all choose the latter"
Meme - "If James Cameron's Titanic was made in 2024
Nothing on earth could come between them
Harry Styles & Lizzo
TITANIC"
Meme - "When your kids refuse to eat their lunch and say they aren't hungry."
Yoda: "You will be. You will be."
Meme - AI: "COLLECTING DATA. ANALYZING PREFERENCES. GENERATING OBJECT OF YOUR DEEPEST DESIRE. INNOCENT> NUBILE. VIRGIN. REDHEAD"
*My Little Pony-esque figure*
Ashley St. Clair on X - "Well well well… Mr. Beast deleted a pretty tame + nonpartisan post critiquing Nancy Pelosi’s suspiciously excellent trading record Guess where Nancy Pelosi’s nephew Andrew is a talent manager? Mr. Beast’s agency! Did someone get in trouble for criticizing Aunt Nancy? I’m sure it’s just “better for the brand” to “stay out of politics”"
Al Jazeera The Intercept journalist Mehdi Hasan calls Non-muslims are Kaffars who live like animals - "Qatar's state-owned media network Al Jazeera and eBay owner Pierre Omidyar owned media "The Intercept" currently employs Mehdi Raza Hasan, a journalist who is a darling of western left media. He frequently write stories in almost all major mainstream media targeting India/Hinduism and his posts almost always anti-Indian and pro-Pakistani sentiment. In an explosive leaked video comprising his statements from different occasions, journalist Mehdi Hasan shared his views on Kaffars (Non Muslims)... In Islam, the ends do not justify the means. This idea is totally alien to Islam. In Islam, what halaal is halaal; what is haraam is haraam. We do not bend our law, or morality, for short-term aims. Never. And we never lose the moral high-ground. ... We know that keeping the moral high-ground is key. Once we lose moral high-ground we are no different from the rest, of the non-Muslims; from the rest of those human beings who LIVE THEIR LIVES AS ANIMALS. bending any rule to fulfill any desire. ... In islam, to believe is to know; to disbelieve is not to know. That is what it fundamentally comes down to; it (to disbelieve) is to remain ignorant; to cover up knowledge. After all, what is 'kaffar'? Kaffar comes from the root, word which means to cover up, to conceal. A kaffar is one who covers up that knowledge which is clear. The French orientalist scholar Larnens (?), he once wrote that the "Quran is not far from considering unbelief, disbelief as an infirmity, as an illness, as a disease of the human mind". subhanallah. Non-Muslims point this out to us. ... 'The kaffar, the disbelievers, the atheists who remain deaf and stubborn to islam, the rational message of the Quran, they are described in the Quran as, quote, "a people of no intelligence", Allah describes them as; not of no morality, not as people of no belief, people of no intellegence. because they're incapable of the intellectual effort it requires to shake off those blind prejudices, to shake off those easy assumptions about this world, about the existence of God.In this respect, the Quran describes the atheists as "CATTLE", as CATTLE of those who grow the crops and do not stop and wonder about this world. ... All of these Ulama (a body of Muslim scholars recognized as having specialist knowledge of Islamic sacred law and theology) unamimously agree that, at the very minimum, if Yazid was not a kaafir then - at the very minimum - he was a fasiq, a transgressor, a breaker of islamic laws, a corrupt individual, a tyrant, a killer, a drunkard, a dog-lover, a music-lover, a...a homosexual, a pedophile, a sexual deviant... someone who slept with his own mother! These are their views, these Ulama, in their books Not mine, not imam Hussein's view, not Ali al-Sisrani view. This is their view of Yazid, all there in black and white. Yet Allah should be pleased with him? Allah should be pleased with him? Indeed, the fact is that Yazid was not simply a fasiq, he was out and out kaffir!'"
Meghan McCain on X
Mark Humphrys on X - "What a burn. 🔥 I love the fact that Mehdi Hasan cannot escape his own videos, which I have saved here: https://t.co/oOpcm0KIa6 Just like Umar Al-Qadri cannot escape his own videos, which I have saved here: https://t.co/pRRvcl6VUG"
Islamophobia!
