Cunigulus

That'd be a great place to stash some Israeli dissidents

I heard second-hand from one of his hookers that he likes to hire women for BDSM play with him as the top. Explains a lot really

Hopefully they make good user-friendly alternatives instead of letting their tech sector copy the worst rent-seeking practices of US firms.

Marijuana isn't even cool anymore

See this line makes no sense to me. A two state solution is would help preserve Israel long-term. Heightening tensions threaten to lead to collapse. It's not actually in Israel's interests to pursue this kind of conflict, it's happening due to a particular set of internal political contradictions. I also don't read US support for Israel as some Machiavellian imperial plot. It undermines imperial interests pretty heavily to be constantly pissing off the whole Arab world. It forces them to rely on illegitimate and therefore weak regimes and constantly engage directly in the region to stymie organized resistance. It's really just zionist ideology driving this whole endeavor.

I really disagree that support for Israel is just a straightforward extension of imperialist interests. It really is its own project that exerts outsized political influence even to the detriment of the imperialist project as a whole. The ambivalent attitude towards Israel by early post-war US governments demonstrates this. Truman and Eisenhower treated Israel on the basis of objective interests of the empire. US politicians in more recent times will sacrifice imperial interests to support Israel, and that is definitely due to their political influence and blackmail operations.

Peering deep into the TradCath rabbit hole and how they think Biden is some kind of satanist makes the secret Vatican agent Biden meme so much funnier.

IDK things just have this heavy inertia right now. It doesn't feel like history is breaking free just yet.

There's just no way. It would be the final strategic disaster. There'd be no strategic capacity left to deal with China. The US shied away from war 20 years ago when it might have been possible, now there's no way, they can't even deal with Yemen. The only move against Iran is to use Israel's nuclear arsenal, and the leadership might get desperate enough to do so.

They'll just do what Foxxcon did in Wisconsin, take the money, massively under-deliver (maybe ask for more money at that point), and then hope the failure will be too embarrassing for politicians to hold them accountable over it. At that point we're another five years down the road, and China's semiconductor industry has completely caught up or already absorbed TSMC along with the rest of Taiwan and the execs have other things to worry about.

Yes it's king, but it's also poisoning the competitiveness of US industrial firms along with all the structural maladies in the US that we can afford not to address because of the surplus extracted by our financial hegemony. The fact that we're at the point where fiscal expansion is causing inflation despite the strong global role of the dollar, points to a terminal phase of the particular kind of dutch disease the US suffers from. Attempts to fix US industrial competitiveness are just pissing into the wind in this environment. US industry won't revive until after its financial and monetary hegemony has collapsed. A smart US leadership would use its existing power to rebuild the foundations for competitiveness on a more level playing field, but US state capacity has atrophied. All they can do is funnel money to politically-connected oligarchs and placate industrial capital with half-measures. The current state of affairs suits China, and therefore BRICS quite well. They will continue to develop under current circumstances until they're ready to move decisively against US interests, or until the US preempts this by starting a war early. Either way the US will lose, the only question is how destructive the conflict will be.