That’s a billion dollar scratch that could have made a huge difference in thousands of lives.
Okay, sure. But consider that they didn’t earn those billions of dollars by sucking up to the right assortment of Wall Street financiers, rich family members, and ego-driven Presidential nominees.
The British Government considers being Arab as synonymous with being a terrorist. Not, incidentally, any differently than how Israelis see them.
Of course, the Brits were a colonial power that spent centuries quelling domestic revolts in order to extract natural resources and exploiting cheap labor. Also, not that different from their Israeli peers.
they apply the exact same argument to Jews as they use for pretty much every other minority
I think the glaring note is how they consider “Jew” a minority, despite largely being white.
Who does and doesn’t qualify as white is a constantly moving goalpost, depending on the attitudes of the current regime.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zionist_antisemitism
Zionist antisemitism or antisemitic Zionism refers to a phenomenon in which antisemites express support for Zionism and the State of Israel. In some cases, this support may be promoted for explicitly antisemitic reasons. Historically, this type of antisemitism has been most notable among Christian Zionists, who may perpetrate religious antisemitism while being outspoken in their support for Jewish sovereignty in Israel due to their interpretation of Christian eschatology. Similarly, people who identify with the political far-right, particularly in Europe and the United States, may support the Zionist movement because they seek to expel Jews from their countries and see Zionism as the least complicated method (vis-à-vis ethnic cleansing or genocide) of achieving this goal and satisfying their racial antisemitism.
…
The French-Jewish journalist Alain Gresh noted that the antisemitic right-wing politician and Nazi collaborator Xavier Vallat said that "Jews would never integrate into France and that they had to go to Israel.
…
The historian David N. Myers wrote that “Leading white nationalists such as Richard Spencer and Jared Taylor liken their movement to Zionism, seeing it as a model for the kind of monoethnic purity they favor in [the United States].” Myers states that the “combination of pro-Israel and antisemitic sensibilities” is common within American politics due to the combined influences of the “Christian evangelical Right with its end-game theology”, “archly conservative” Catholics, and the political ideology of Donald Trump.
From my perspective Ukrainian strikes are carried out in self defense
And that’s the problem. Any amount of bloodletting is permissible if you stick “I think they’re defending themselves” in front of it.
So long as you’re aligned with the US of course.
I’ve heard Americans say the same about Middle Eastern casualties weighed against Israelis.
Certain people’s lives simply don’t matter.
the oil industry.
I guess it’s cool to kill civilians when they’re roughnecks?
It’s not that I didn’t know any of these
Strange that you would pretend ignorance up front
Can you elaborate on Ukrainian salvos please?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attacks_in_Russia_during_the_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine
And also - on Russian peace proposals too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_negotiations_in_the_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine
they didn’t inherit their immense wealth
Except even that doesn’t hold up under close scrutiny. A big component of the market cap of any Fortune 100 company stems from equity and debt held by the generationally wealthy, typically through family funds managed by private equity groups. Amazon and Tesla aren’t worth $1T without the Vanderbilts and the Carnegies and the Adelsons and the Waltons bidding up asset prices. Microsoft doesn’t exist today without Bill Gates’s mom sitting on the IBM board of directors and handing her son the contracts for their 1980s OS. Hell, Berkshire Hathaway is owned by the sons of a Congressman and a federal judge, respectively.
What’s more, the biggest source of market capital is inevitably government contracts. You can’t tell me that Michael Dell is “independently wealthy” when the bulk of his fortune came via the Texas public school system buying all his company’s computers. Particularly when the governors, legislators, and board members making these decisions are (a) big shareholders of the Dell corporation and (b) legacy scions of wealthy Texas families.
It’s been open war for the last three years. Idk if you can blame the latest salvo on Russians being extra mean during Constitution Day any more than you can blame the next Ukrainian salvo on Russians deserving a double-plus bombing on Lenin’s birthday or whenever.
Every proposal for a peace plan gets flattened with a media barrage of “They’re inhuman monsters who are incapable of peace and all deserve to be exterminated!” So until the two countries can get past that (or one/both finally collapse - which I’ve been told will happen very shortly, continuously for the last three years) we’re going to continue to see new records set in the number of atrocities committed into the foreseeable future.
Unfortunately, that’s not how Imperial Presidencies work.
Mike Lee floats a lot of turds, even in excess of what the standard put out. He’s been agitating against NATO membership practically since his first day in the Senate, along with his close friend Rand Paul.
This bill won’t even make it out of committee, unless Lee can get a bug in Trump’s ear over it.
I’m sorry, I didn’t see Undertale anywhere on the box art.
There’s always the five finger discount
Easy to forget that Italy was with the Allies group in WW1. But also that WW1 ended with private sector creditors knocking at the door of winners and losers alike. The old aristocracy had leveraged itself to the hilt in order to finance a pointless, needless, catastrophic war between regional powers. And now the new aristocracy of capital was trying to strip the copper out of the walls of the proles in order to pay back what was owed.
This lead to a groundswell of socialist organization and radicalism in the wake of the Great War. One which threatened aristocrats old and new. The only response Italians (and Germans… and Brits and Americans to boot) could conceive of was a fascist heel-stomp on the necks of the rising organizations of labor.
TRAITORS OF THE WORLD!
Hardly traitors. Fascism was pioneered to preserve the aristocracy and the capitalists alike, by turning worker against worker along ethnic and national lines.
It was the socialists who were the traitors. They sought to end the old world and bring about a new one. And they nearly did it.
Damn, you’re right. I wouldn’t want to vacation anywhere that has a long history of atrocious civil rights abuses.
Books tickets to Florida
I think its worth noting that currency forgery is a business that operates on scale. Forging one $100 note is an enormous amount of work for not much payoff. The goal is to forge 1000s+ of $100 notes.
But at that point, you run in the question “Where do you spend it?” Unless your forgeries are exceptional, you can’t just drop them off at the bank, precisely because banks will become suspicious if you show up with a duffle bag of 50 year old notes.
Fortunately, we have a number of methods for laundering currency - either by spending it where people don’t look to hard or by mixing it with more modern notes so the 1000 notes you just printed don’t stand out in a pile of 100,000s of such notes. Strip clubs, casinos (this was the original plot of Rush Hour), liquor stores, and other cash-heavy businesses do a great job of co-mingling fake and real notes. Black market trafficking is also a popular venue for disposing of dirty cash, as drug runners and smugglers are notoriously unsophisticated in detecting forgeries.
So, old bills can and do work as counterfeits in the right venues. And eventually, you’ll see them vacuumed up and disposed of at the Federal Reserve right alongside the legit older currency. It’s just a lot more work to do correctly.
Maybe. Microsoft’s biggest revenue stream has historically been government contracts. I don’t see that failing them anytime in the next decade.
But retail consumer spending? That’s something that could seriously take a few hits in the next big downturn. I can see a company putting its finger to the wind and betting a '08 style recession will kill the market for console gaming in another two or three years.