https://mobile.twitter.com/AASchapiro/status/1214019284738949120
Iâm not sure who needs to hear this, but:
Mike Pompeo is a fraudulent tub of shit and an insult to humanity who deserves to spend the rest of his miserable life in jail.
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Iraqi Prime Minister said the US lured Soleimani to Iraq by offering negotiations. I actually doubt that; the PMâs statement is more interesting as a sign of Iraqâs displeasure with the US for killing one of its allies and Iraqi citizens.
Our guys at the top were never that smart unfortunately. One of the things that goes wrong when youâve been the biggest power in the world for a long time is that the people at the top are just echoes of the people who built the structure. Your military leaders look and sound a lot like the generals of 20-30 years ago who themselves looked and sounded a lot like Eisenhower⌠which each successive generation the institutions ideas of what a good leader looks like mutates a little bit and finds new things to fixate on that arenât effectiveness, which is how we selected the leaders who got us to the top in the first place (even though a lot of that was, as it always is, good luck).
Leaders generally pick successors who look and sound like them. Then those people in turn do the same. It starts to be about how you look and sound rather than about the results you generate. Even the results that get measured tend to be the things that the previous generation of âsuccessfulâ leaders excelled at without any analysis or understanding of why those metrics matter and in what context. This leads to situations where people are much better than necessary at some stuff and complete garbage at things that are suddenly very important.
These dynamics donât get disrupted until something goes very wrong and people are forced to reassess.
Never assume that there are super intelligent adults at the top running things well. They usually arenât that smart, and they usually arenât that deep. At best they are specialists in a few specific things that they know extremely well, while they are totally blind to the wisdom of several other disciplines that they likely look down on.
I first started cobbling this together when the financial crisis hit. Iâd been assuming that the guys running the economy were smarter than me and the loans I saw everyone making/taking actually must make sense in a macroeconomic context. Nope, they were just stuffing their faces and waiting for the music to stop.
The US military is headed by careerists who are mostly thinking about how they can get ahead personally. They are going to keep doing what has worked for them in the past until the music stops, at which point theyâll all say that everyone was doing it so they canât be blamed. Maybe Iran will be the immovable object our military industrial complex finally breaks itself on⌠maybe it wonât be. The only thing Iâm certain of is that weâre going to keep doing the same stuff until it stops paying off for the brass.
The best way to avoid massive military budget cuts is to stay at war. As long as we have this big powerful military hammer our politicians are going to see nails absolutely everywhere.
I think the Russians are in the same boat of course. They probably have the best espionage operation in the world, embedded in every country in the world because of organized crime, which theyâve managed to integrate into their espionage services. The thing is probably close to cash flow positive, extremely powerful, and can be used to make things happen. Thatâs their hammer and Iâm sure a lot of stuff looks like nails to them. Eventually theyâll hammer the wrong nail and cause a really big problem, but until that happens theyâll keep on hammering away.
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If you can believe the Washington Post, theyâre reporting that this is all Pompeo who has been pushing for it for quite some time.
A reminder that a private jet owned by VTB Bank made an extremely unordinary stop less than an hour from the shithole tRUmp was staying at a few days ago.
That this is widely considered centrist and not right wing is part of the problem and a testament to the effectiveness of repeating the same lie (Liberal media) for 50 years.
A much better âimminent threatâ would probably be Kim Jong-un who the US is at war with, who has nukes, and whoâs threatened the US with using them.
He writes Trump nice letters though so heâs cool.
I wonder if Ayatollah Khamenei wrote Trump a beautiful letter praising his business acumen if that would solve this while situation, maybe Trump agrees to hand Pompeo over to Iran to execute or something.
Iran recently announced to have discovered around 50 billion barrels of oil, Iâm sure that has nothing to do with the calculus.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2019/11/10/world/middleeast/iran-oil-field.amp.html
A huge part of it is preserving existing social trends to give the impression of positive change though. Thatâs why we constantly hear about all the progress weâre making in making things better for minorities of various sorts and women. Only some changes get resisted from the center.
I do find it interesting that most of the promoted changes seem to cause maximum division in the lower classes though. Iâm sure itâs just a coincidence that the media and celebrities in general love to talk about it.
The ONLY reason I can find that climate change is suddenly getting as much coverage as itâs getting is that the center doesnât particularly want to boil alive either⌠and because itâs becoming harder and harder to hide.
The system prioritizes stability for the people currently benefiting above all else basically.
https://twitter.com/EamonJavers/status/1214231622268149763?s=20
Narrator: The Senate never issued the subpoena.
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Tariffs are causing a lot of losses in China. They canât move factories to Vietnam and Indonesia fast enough. I donât know if the Chinese government cares about that though.
These are about US FP in the 1900-1966 yearsâŚ
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Yeah Iâm well aware of the history lol. Our adventures in places not Europe have basically never been defensible.
How funny would it be if Israel was called to war by us and refused to come in: https://twitter.com/axios/status/1214262859481460738?s=20
https://www.lawenforcementtoday.com/you-said-youd-never-forget-september-11-you-lied/
Posted on FB by a low-info right-winger who doesnât post much. The propaganda push to tie this to 9/11 is well under way.
Probably a 100000000:1 chance of dying in an Iranian terrorist attack, compared to just driving to your nearest McDs.
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Indeed. Itâs literally right out of Hitlerâs playbook.
iâm listening
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Itâs whatâs been happening in Yemen by KSA bombs⌠Theâve destroyed most of the countries artifacts⌠