IsabellaViendalmare 🍉

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb]

The Book is a Book, not Disembodied Information https://t.co/w9FhCcSQTK

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb]

That"s when it starts to accelerate, from adagio to allegetto. Then ...

Lapid: In the past three years, 268,509 Israelis have left Zionistan.

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb]

RISK MANAGEMENT DUJOUR

Zionism presents the exact Turkey problem: keep killing more and more pple, get increasingly more aggressive, thanks to the illusion of impunity, try to control more and more "allied" governments, until the eventual demise of the whole program.

[First Squawk @FirstSquawk]

GOLD OVERTAKES U.S. TREASURIES AS THE WORLD’S TOP CENTRAL-BANK RESERVE ASSET — GOLD NOW 26.3% VS TREASURIES 20.2%, FIRST TIME SINCE 1996.

[Mosab Abu Toha @MosabAbuToha]

Israeli settlers attack and burn Palestinian properties in an area called Mahjar in Masafer Yatta, south of Hebron.

[Clash Report @clashreport]

Israel Believes It Can Strike Turkish Forces Without Triggering NATO Article 5

Israeli planners have reportedly scrutinized NATO’s Article 5 mechanisms, concluding that collective defense treaties do not extend to Turkish forces operating in Syria.

https://t.co/xWnTZumyXb

[99% Johnny Graz @jvgraz]

I bet he thinks people hate him cuz he's Jewish.

[💧Mary Kostakidis @MaryKostakidis]

Furthermore, when a war crime is alleged, it’s just not good enough for the military to investigate itself. Self exoneration is just not the standard required.

https://t.co/KTJSbwo9fN

[James Surowiecki @JamesSurowiecki]

This is because Mark Ruffalo is a really good actor and Rob Schneider is not.

[James Surowiecki @JamesSurowiecki]

Natalie Harp - election denialist, former OAN anchor, and Trump obsessive - was the weirdest thing about Trump's 2024 campaign, and it's been the weirdest thing about his White House. Which is saying a lot.

The issue is not that Trump is sleeping with her (and Ossoff didn't say he was). The issue is that she is obsessively, bizarrely fixated on him. She wrote him strange, gushing letters: "I never want to bring you anything but joy. You are all that matters to me. I don't want to ever let you down." She follows him everywhere, carrying a mini-printer, giving her an inordinate influence over what pieces of paper he actually looks at.

In a White House full of sycophants, she is the uber-sycophant, and the fact that she's the kind of person Trump wants around him is a perfect expression of what's wrong with this presidency.

[Jeff @_Jeffery0]

Mehdi Hassan Presses Joe Walsh on Why Ukraine Is “Genocide” but Gaza Isn’t

Mehdi Hassan: You have been an outspoken opponent of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, going as far as to call it a genocide. But when it comes to Gaza, you've criticized people for calling Gaza a genocide.

Why is what's happening in Ukraine a genocide, but not what's happening in Gaza, when far more people have been killed and displaced in Gaza than in Ukraine?

Joe Walsh: I think it goes to motive and intent. I think Putin is trying to kill Ukrainian civilians. His intent is to kill civilians.

Mehdi Hassan: Even though Israeli government members have said far more genocidal stuff than Vladimir Putin has?

Joe Walsh: Completely. There are extreme members of Israel's government...

Mehdi Hassan: Not just extreme members, the President, the Prime Minister.

What I find fascinating is that you're happy to say genocide here, but if you say it there, you get mad. I don't get it.

Joe Walsh: I don't get mad. I just think Putin's intent is to eliminate the Ukrainian people...

Mehdi Hassan: Based on what?
Why are Israel's words and actions not the same?

Joe Walsh: Israel's actions and words, again, you can find some...

Mehdi Hassan: Some? We'd be here all day if I started reading out all the genocidal statements from Israeli cabinet ministers.

Just a few days ago, the Deputy Speaker of the Israeli Parliament said Palestinian civilians are “scum” and “subhuman,” and that the women and children should be separated so the men can all be killed.

I have not even heard Putin say that.

Joe Walsh: Well, I would condemn that statement...

Mehdi Hassan: That's a genocidal statement.

Joe Walsh: That is a genocidal statement. I'm saying, Mehdi, that is a very minority view overall in Israel.

Mehdi Hassan: But that is the Israeli government, Joe! They're the people killing the Palestinians right now!

Benjamin Netanyahu said, “They are Amalek.” What is Amalek, Joe? In the Bible, Amalek is “kill everybody ,men, women, children, even the donkeys.”
I didn't hear Putin say that.

Joe Walsh: Mehdi, again, I can find extreme things that members of Israel's government have said.

If Israel wanted to exterminate the Palestinian people, they could have done it in three months.

Mehdi Hassan: That's the worst argument you've ever made in all the time I've known you.

Vladimir Putin could have erased everyone in Ukraine with a nuke.

So your argument is Israel is not genocidal because they haven't killed everyone in Gaza and they could.

According to Joe Walsh's logic, Vladimir Putin is not genocidal either.

And by the way, the definition of genocide is not to kill everyone in a place.

Joe Walsh: I know that.

Mehdi Hassan: But what they've done meets many of the criteria of genocide, which is why they're in front of the ICJ, and why leading genocide scholars are saying it's a genocide.

Omer Bartov, Amos Goldberg, Daniel Blatman they all say it's genocide.
Joe Walsh: I respect those opinions, but I don't think that's the majority view.

Mehdi Hassan: Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch say genocide.
Human rights groups, Israeli Holocaust historians, Joe Walsh.

With respect, what do you know that they don't know?

[Samira Mohyeddin سمیرا @SMohyeddin]

“The convoy lacked clear markings.”

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

These camps do exist 👇, in several versions (not only farming but also military, for instance): I personally know several families who sent their kids to one.

They actually answer a uniquely Chinese phenomenon: the parents and grandparents' generation that built modern China grew up in incredible poverty and hardship. As they see it - which is probably correct - they worked their way to prosperity precisely because of this, because hardship gave them grit and made them tough.

However, they now face the paradox of their own success: the comfortable lives they worked so hard to give their children might be the very thing that destroys that very success - the kids being too soft and weak to sustain it.

There was a very popular movie in China around this 2 years ago called Successor (抓娃娃, Zhua Wawa). The story is about a billionaire couple - who themselves grew up poor - who go to absurd lengths to raise their son in manufactured poverty, convinced that only hardship can forge a worthy successor.

It became a massive hit precisely because many Chinese parents recognized the anxiety behind the joke.

Same story for China's political class. If the cultural revolution had one silver lining, it's that it produced leaders hardened by genuine suffering. Xi Jinping himself spent years literally living in a cave as a sent-down youth, working as a farmer.

He can relate to China's poorest and did so much against poverty precisely because he understands intimately what poverty is.

I'm pretty certain that a question that haunts the Party is the same one that haunts those parents: can leaders who never knew hardship hold this thing together? How can we make sure that people who rise to the top - in the Chinese vernacular expression - ate sufficient bitterness (吃苦, chī kǔ)?

In a way, it's also what happened to the West. The so-called "greatest generation" - the De Gaulles, Churchills, Adenauers - were forged by the hardship of 2 world wars and the Great Depression.

We're now, in Europe, two generations of leaders after them and let's just say you can tell. Macron, Starmer (or Burnham) and Merz are mere managers of decline, and that's being generous.

De Gaulle had this wonderful expression about weak men: he would say "c'est du thé" ("it's tea" - as in weak, flavorless, watered down). No doubt that's how he'd call every single one of them.

This counterexample might actually be the biggest present we unknowingly give China: a cautionary tale that their anxiety is justified.

I wouldn't be surprised if every time Xi meets a Macron or a Starmer it gives him cold sweats about what China's future leaders might turn into and he secretly calls a politburo meeting to order a review of whether rising cadres are eating enough bitterness.

[Keith Edwards @keithedwards]

Ossoff got Melania back to work 😭

[meow @_3Leopardspots]

@RonFilipkowski But then

mawhahahah

https://t.co/joECtGCLpV

[Bobby Keith @PartisanVan]

@RonFilipkowski Melania after

[Fly Sistah 🪷 @Fly_Sistah]

@RonFilipkowski She definitely negotiated an extra fee to hold his hand

[Ron Filipkowski @RonFilipkowski]

We all knew this photo op was coming this week after Sunday.

[sarah @sahouraxo]

BREAKING:

Israel is intensely bombing South Lebanon right now.

In the middle of the night as families are asleep.

This is happening during a so-called “ceasefire.”

[Alice Yin @byaliceyin]

the Mesopotamian student whose math homework is being clowned 4,000 years later at the UChicago Ancient Cultures Museum is my spirit animal: