Joe Biden: Were there not an Israel the USA would have to invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4962369/user-clip-joe-biden-israel-usa-invent-israel-protect-interest-region

His last wish:

“I want one of my inventions to finally do something good for the world!”

choking noises

Not only invented them, but poisoned the hell outta himself trying to prove they were safe.

And then when he was too bedridden to do anything, he invented an automated bed to help him move around and strangled himself to death in the ropes.

Truly an inspiration.

It’s a reference to this: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/27/palestine-and-israel-brief-history-maps-and-charts

See also: How Chiropractic Started as a Ghost Religion

loose an afternoon

That’s alright. A chiropractor can tighten up that afternoon for ya.

as megaprojects expert Bent Flyvbjerg explains in the following article, these grandiose projects operate by an iron law: over budget, over time, over and over again

Performance data for megaprojects speak their own language. Nine out of ten such projects have cost overruns. Overruns of up to 50 percent in real terms are common, over 50 percent not uncommon. Cost overrun for the Channel Tunnel, the longest underwater rail tunnel in Europe, connecting the UK and France, was 80 percent in real terms. For Boston’s Big Dig, 220 percent. The Sydney Opera House, 1,400 percent. Similarly, benefit shortfalls of up to 50 percent are also common, and above 50 percent not uncommon.

https://www.cato.org/policy-report/january/february-2017/megaprojects-over-budget-over-time-over-over

Futurama called it “Bachelor Chow”.

That’s two things.

That presumes I’m a fan of myself.

Did they seriously use the Dark Brandon avatar? A+ trolling

Some things to consider:

• Local elections and proposals…
  • …make a huge impact to people’s lives
  • …tend have quicker impacts
  • …are far more heavily influenced by a single vote
  • …can jump-start a leftist politician (or a policy position), getting them ready for state or national campaigns down the road
• Judges really friggin matter, and they aren’t categorized by party, so they’re a prime section for a well-informed voter to make a difference
• All elections cost money to win
  • Even in deeply red or deeply blue states
  • If the GOP lead shrinks from 20% to 15%, that will translate to more money the GOP has to spend next time around or else risk further slipping into single digits and making a new battleground state
  • Momentum really helps keep costs low. It doesn’t seem like slipping from 20% to 15% should make the GOP panic, but it would
  • Voter turnout is lower in more deeply red/blue states, meaning your vote actually counts more in closing the gap
• Getting your preferred candidate in office is not the only measure of electoral success
  • Even candidates that get absolutely destroyed on election day can still shift the local or national conversation
  • Candidates that perform better than pollsters expected can influence future candidates to pay more attention to the issues that brought out those extra voters
• There aren’t just voters staying home until there’s a candidate worth voting for – there are also good candidates who are staying home until there are enough voters to support them
• Milton Friedman, bastard that he was, was right about this:

  Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.

  • We want leftist ideas to already be lying around at the moment they are needed. We can’t wait until after the crisis has already occurred to start organizing and showing up. It’ll be too late.
  • The Patriot Act was 131 pages, signed into law 45 days after 9/11. That wasn’t a reaction to 9/11, starting from scratch. Someone had a wishlist already, and they had a PowerPoint deck ready to go on September 12th full of proposals that Congress had already seen 100 times but was never ready to vote on before.

I don’t think Biden has an ideological bone in his body. Supporting Israel is just good business. Simple as.

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/76908/trouble-star-trek-transporters

If the transporter takes all the atoms that make up a person, encodes them, beams them somewhere else, and then reassembles them, how can we know that the resulting “person” is the same person who went in?

Some things to consider:

• Check out some maps of Israel-Palestine over time and tell me whether fleeing Palestinians will ever get their homes back
• Gaza has no bomb shelters. The best they have are their own homes, and hospitals – which are already overrun with local populations, let alone migrant populations, and are being targeted by Israeli air strikes
• Israel is using white phosphorous against a territory which, if considered a country on its own, would be the third-most densely populated in the world
• Supplies of food, water, electricity, and fuel have been cut off, so people who leave their local support systems have no chance of acquiring vital supplies
• There is no exit. Sea has a permanent blockade. The only airport has been a crater since 2001. There are two ground crossings (Israel and Egypt), and the Egyptian one has been repeatedly closed due to Israeli missile strikes – after Israel advised civilians to go there.
• Israel is already targeting evacuating convoys
• Earlier this year, displacement from the war in Sudan was repeatedly called a “crisis” by relief orgs when it reached a displacement of 1 million people in a country of 45 million, one month after fighting began. We’re talking about 1 million in a territory of 2.3 million, in 24 hours

From the original source:

The use of white phosphorus in Gaza, one of the most densely populated areas in the world, magnifies the risk to civilians and violates the international humanitarian law prohibition on putting civilians at unnecessary risk.

Upon contact, white phosphorus can burn people, thermally and chemically, down to the bone as it is highly soluble in fat and therefore in human flesh. White phosphorus fragments can exacerbate wounds even after treatment and can enter the bloodstream and cause multiple organ failure. Already dressed wounds can reignite when dressings are removed and the wounds are re-exposed to oxygen. Even relatively minor burns are often fatal. For survivors, extensive scarring tightens muscle tissue and creates physical disabilities. The trauma of the attack, the painful treatment that follows, and appearance-changing scars lead to psychological harm and social exclusion.

Attacks using air-delivered incendiary weapons in civilian areas are prohibited under Protocol III of the Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW). While the protocol contains weaker restrictions for ground-launched incendiary weapons, all types of incendiary weapons produce horrific injuries. Protocol III applies only to weapons that are “primarily designed” to set fires or cause burns, and thus some countries believe it excludes certain multipurpose munitions with incendiary effects, notably those containing white phosphorus.

Human Rights Watch and many states have long called for closing these loopholes in Protocol III. Palestine joined Protocol III on January 5, 2015, and Lebanon on April 5, 2017, while Israel has not ratified it.

And for some context on exactly how fatal this might be in a place like Gaza…

We’re talking about place where urban areas are 4x as dense as Los Angeles. Where people are not in the most steady health to begin with, given that 90-95% of the water supply is unsuitable for consumption, over 75% are food-insecure, 50% suffering malnutrition, the median age is 18, and there is no electricity or fuel to power the hospitals and ambulances – not that it matters anyway, because even humanitarian aid facilities are being targeted by air strikes.

You could easily die from a small cut in Gaza. Anyone in the AoE here is totally fucked.

No joke, there are billionaires scouring the futurist community looking for a reassuring answer to that question.

Douglas Rushkoff wrote a whole book about it.

https://rushkoff.com/books/survival-of-the-richest-escape-fantasies-of-the-tech-billionaires/

And Starship Troopers got people really excited about space fascism.

They’re for programming.

I’ve got a safe 3 or a risky 9.