She’s literally Israeli. I’d call it more than just a single issue for her.

This is the modern day equivalent of Western Expansion for genocidal Americans during the 19th century. You’re talking about a host of issues - Zionist white nationalism, Lebensraum, oil field development, and war time economics - bundled into a discrete set of buzzwords. There’s so much ideology and so much money packed into the idea of a Greater Israel spilling like bucket of spoiled milk across the Levant.

This is manifest destiny for neoconservatives. Its at the center of the Project for the New American Century. Israel is the beating heart of American Imperialism. Its the fulcrum by which Washington and Wall Street hope to turn the world.

By effectively ending the draft it removed many young people’s connection to world events.

I don’t buy that theory, as the broader global economic forces were a bigger influence on GenX / Millennial youth than any particular US military hot zone. And I loathe to think how the Bush/Obama admins would have responded to Afghanistan/Iraq if they thought they had unlimited free conscripts to throw at the problem forever, rather than a depleted reserve of voluntary enlistees and national guard troops to draw from.

If all those years of stop-losses and quadruple deployments had instead been years of drafting young people, a lot more people would have stood up the the Bush administration.

I don’t think Bush could have been meaningfully less popular with youth voters by 2004. His approval rating was already under 40% in the 18-24 demographic. Young people were regularly in the streets in protest all through 03-04. I was in college at the time, and there were parades of protesters running through the quad at the start of every term. But it was the Boomer voters who dictated the direction of the country, and their hatred of brown skinned foreigners was matched only slightly by their disgust towards Millennials.

The groundswell of opposition to Bush kept piling up until it fully materialized in the 2009 Dem super majority, but then… Obama didn’t get us out of Iraq. Hell, the reason he beat Hillary was because he came out as staunchly against Iraq while she waffled. The antiwar movement was widespread in 2008 and continued to truck on through 2012. But it wasn’t voluntary enlistment that strangled the war. It was a big wave of ostensibly antiwar Democrats taking office and then not ending it.

I’ve yet to see an American happy with the new foreign leader who replaces the old one.

Capitalists reviled Hu Jintao until he departed, and only afterwards fell in love with him.

Funny how none of the solutions to try and curb illegal immigration fall on the business owners who knowingly hire them.

They do… kinda. This problem peaked under COVID, when you had fruit rotting in fields thanks to our sudden crack down on migrant travel. We saw a similar sudden drop in available farm labor back in 2017, when Trump was ramping up border enforcement against seasonal laborers.

No coincidence that most of these business owners are Republican.

That’s more a correlation than causation. Blue collar business owners tend to skew Republican because Republicans cater to the anti-union and anti-poc proclivities of socially conservative white nationalist land barons. When Dems were the party of the apartheid-era South, they dominated this same voting block.

But the brutal treatment of migrant workers has had a socio-economic impact on Gulf Coast states. Florida’s orange production has dropped from 240M pounds in 2004 to 16M in 2024. Supplies of meat and dairy produce have sagged as ranchers from Nevada to Alabama to Iowa are running out of cheap exploitable laborers. More and more businesses are turning to the carceral state to provide field hands, but even that doesn’t work well in states where people aren’t having kids to lock up and the existing prisoner base is aging past the point of functional field labor.

Even with the most sadistic and malicious attitude towards your fellow humans, this isn’t a profitable economic policy. It is being driven largely be the outright terror wealthier white land owners have of the young Spanish speaking migrants that dominate their workforce.

Was that game any good? The mobile version had a Gacha mechanic that scared me off, but it otherwise looked like a really smooth SNES style JRPG.

They don’t want to give it to someone who may actually use it.

They do, at least to some degree. They would love to brag about Bill Gates entertaining an entire Lolita Express’s worth of business colleagues at one of their restaurants. And they would love for people to flock to a franchise location to catch a glimpse of Gates, in the same way nightclubs will pay a premium for models and movie stars to show up at their venues.

The publicity of McDs being associated with the Gates brand is worth far more than the number of burgers Gates could consume, even if he shut down a venue buying people hamburgers on their dime.

More urban versus suburban. The suburbs are an enormous money sink that require tons of subsidy and infrastructure expansion to persist. A bunch of our municipal, state, and national policy revolves around keeping life in the suburbs artificially cheap and expanding the housing stock.

Rural communities don’t have anywhere near the kind of political influence as the suburbs, as they lack a wealthy professional workforce or a large enfranchised voter base to command elected offices. While you definitely see rural politics show up in suburban races, they tend to revolve around cultural icons (driving a big truck versus riding the bus, having a big yard versus living in a town home, proximity to colleges and communities of color, taste in clothing or music) rather than actual rural political issues (water rights, agricultural labor issues, affordable education and health care).

Rural communities get steamrolled as regularly as urban communities. We’re seeing that now in Texas, where the governor is turning a blind eye to another big drought and unleashing his police force on migrant farm workers as he gets ready to axe all the public schools out in the tiny towns and force people into low-budget charters. Urban centers are louder in their opposition, but the rural neighborhoods are getting fucked just as hard.

Given Jones’s audience, there’s a good chance some of them would be the police. Austin suburbs are packed to the gills with Joe Rogan / Alex Jones fellow travelers.

There may be procedural and legal issues before we just have bulldozers run over people.

Tell it to the Vogons

Alex Jones Production - 1011 Meredith Dr, Austin, Texas

Gotta say, I’m underwhelmed. This is way out in the exurbs of Austin, practically down in Kyle TX. For a guy who was halfway to being a billionaire a year or two ago, its kinda depressing to see that this is where the magic is supposed to happen.

Rush Limbaugh’s studio was a thousand times swanker.

He’s not going to give Trump a prison term. He said as much during Trump’s tenth contempt citation. This is Senators grandstanding so that they can go home and tell their constituents “I fought for your President and I won!” when the outcome was a foregone conclusion. Its all kabuki.

God damn, I wish we had a governor as cool as Tony Evers.

To see 130m2 “too small for the family” is really weird

The unit was a two story with a big chunk of the real estate eaten up by a stairwell. For one kid, it was a squeeze but manageable. But when they were expecting twins, plus juggling a little boy, they decided to upgrade to a house with a full kitchen, a backyard, and a third bedroom.

I’m sure people have gotten by on less. But when you can get a 275m^2 home for $250k out in the 'burbs and you’re a two-income family of engineers, the only thing holding you back is the commute.

Dude’s entire appeal boiled down to Islamophobia. Now that the economy is stalling out and they’re caught between cheap Russian gas and angry US diplomats on the world stage, the only card he has left to play is “Let’s see how pissed off I can make 15% of my native population and all of my neighbors”.

For anyone who isn’t a die-hard Hinduvista, this fails to deliver much appeal.

Careful. You’ll get labeled a Wumao for saying stuff like this too loudly.

Good bread like at home really only exists at home.

Or at a quality bakery. But those aren’t nearly as profitable as fast food joints.

It’s selection bias. Folks who resist get stomped on. The folks that remain are increasingly docile.

Repeat this process over and over again - from the Palmer Raids to the Blacklists to the crushing of the Civil Rights / Antiwar movements to the Drug Wars and Terror Wars - until your culture is properly domesticated and you can do whatever you want to them.

We’re immune to the most rabid varieties of fascism

Doubt.jpeg

Just balkanize already

Got a fixed rate 30 year mortgage and I’m paying less today for twice the space than I was paying 15 years ago when I first bought my home. I have a friend who got a relatively tiny 1400 sqft row house for $80k back in 2006 and paid less than $1k/mo in rent + utilities for nearly a decade, until she got married and needed extra space for kids.

If you’re confident you won’t be moving for the next five years, a house or condo at a fixed rate is consistently a way better deal than chasing apartment teaser rates every 12 months. But landing that kind of space means a steady income in a professional career. Its not something folks in the service sector - with irregular hours and changes in location and depressed wages - can reliably count on.

In the end, this is far more a problem of shitty unreliable working conditions than best-practices for picking a residence.