Wandering 🍥🇲🇾🇺🇸

Equities Hedge Fund Trader, NYC. در كتابخانه و زاويه. ازاد كشميري

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb]

يا مهابيل يا غفلة يا حمقى مسيحية لبنان

[Ryan Grim @ryangrim]

Think about what it means to order the killing of your own soldiers in order to prevent them from becoming part of a prisoner exchange.

It means that Israeli officials consider it a higher priority to keep detaining Palestinian men, women, and children without charge than to release some in exchange for those soldiers.

That logic is so obviously inhumane that Israel officially ended the Hannibal Directive policy on paper, yet obviously kept it in practice, because we now have many different reports of it being implemented on October 7. And we also know that the bombing campaign was organized through 2023 and 2024 in a way that many Israeli officials understood to be highly likely to kill captives Israelis in Gaza, as +972 has exposed.

[Kramerica Trading @KramericaT]

For those who don’t know Shapiro is referencing a problem in 1970s NYC when Hasidic landlords engaged in mass fire insurance fraud throughout the Bronx when they didn’t get the rent growth they wanted.

Such wonderful people.

[Shaiel Ben-Ephraim @academic_la]

Hezbollah is an armed force that was created to counter the Israeli invasion of 1982. It has since been fed by repeated Israeli invasions, incursions and meddling. The best thing Israel can do to weaken Hezbollah is leave Lebanon alone and make it irrelevant. Everyone in Israel know that. But their goal is not to weaken Hezbollah. Its to dominate Lebanon. Hezbollah is useful for that as a tool in a divide and conquer strategy. Just as Hamas is used against the Palestinians.

[Teortaxes▶️ (DeepSeek 推特🐋铁粉 2023 – ∞) @teortaxesTex]

Plaza Accord is a red herring, at best a catch-all term, for the prolonged and high-intensity American project of kneecapping their biggest "allied" competitor at the time. Japan didn't go into that good night solely because of "demographics" or "bubble". It was shoved there.

[Robert Capa on a 12 montucky bender 2.0 @shitTOGv2]

smokes anything Spielberg ever did or will ever do. fucking mind boggling.

[arctotherium @arctotherium42]

"Why was the denazification of West Germany so successful?" - trick question, it wasn't. Within a few years everyone in West Germany, including the Allies and ex-concentration camp inmates, realized it was a disaster and ~forgiving 99% of ex-Nazis was the way to go. This worked.

[FischerKing @FischerKing64]

Nixon is fine - but recall that Eisenhower got us out of the Korean War, deported millions of illegals, ran budget surpluses several years as POTUS - all while building the interstate highway system.

And Nixon was his VP.

[Wandering 🍥🇲🇾🇺🇸 @Traversinglost]

@MrExaminer @Jackbmeyer You’re an idiot.

[Shaiel Ben-Ephraim @academic_la]

I have been reading the new UN report about how Israel has been targeting children in Gaza. There are no words to describe how awful it is. Here are some of the worst examples:

1) Hind Rajab and family, Tel al-Hawa, Gaza City, 29 Jan 2024. Named. A family of seven plus two paramedics killed. Hind Rajab, 5 to 6, stayed on the phone with rescuers for hours, trapped in a car among her dead relatives. Her cousin Layan Hamadeh, 15, was killed mid-call. The rescue ambulance, dispatched with COGAT clearance, was shelled.

2) The 15-year-old with the white flag, Khan Younis, 24 Jan 2024. Anonymous. Shot in the foot during an ordered evacuation while holding a white cloth, then shot twice more in the back and neck as he tried to rise. His 20-year-old brother killed running to him; their mother shot signaling for an ambulance. Assessed as DAN .338 sniper fire from about 200m.

3) The 10-day-old baby, Nuseirat camp, 12 Apr 2024. Anonymous. Shot in the head by a quadcopter-mounted rifle while being breastfed inside a tent. Survived with brain damage and seizures.

4) The 14-year-old killed with fragmenting pellets, Aug 2024. Anonymous. Cube-shaped pellets that fragmented internally like cluster munitions, destroying multiple organs. The report flags the munition itself as a possible war crime.

5) Jadallah "Jad" Jadallah, Al-Far'a camp, Tubas, 16 Nov 2025. Named. Jadallah Jihad Jouma Jadallah, 14, shot at close range and left bleeding for roughly 45 minutes while about 14 soldiers stood around him. One kicked his cap back when he threw it for attention, one filmed him, one placed a stone beside him to stage a stone-throwing pretext. Soldiers fired at his approaching mother and blocked two ambulances. Body withheld.

6) Layla al-Khatib, Muthallath al-Shuhada, 25 Jan 2025. Named. Layla (Laila) Muhammad Ayman al-Khatib, 2, shot in the back of the head during dinner at home, four bullets fired through the living room window. Youngest West Bank child killed in the reporting period. B'Tselem found the only man in the building was her grandfather, contradicting the "wanted terrorist" claim.

7) Saddam Rajab, Tulkarem, shot 28 Jan 2025, died 7 Feb 2025. Named. Saddam (Sadam) Rajab, 10, shot during an incursion. A soldier told the father, "I am the one who shot your son. God willing, he will die." Medical care obstructed; the boy died of his wounds days later.

8) Walid Ahmad, Megiddo Prison, died 22 Mar 2025. Named. Walid Khalid Abdullah Ahmad, 17, from Silwad. Healthy at arrest in Sept 2024; dead six months later of starvation, muscle wasting, untreated colitis and scabies. First Palestinian minor to die in Israeli custody since Oct 2023. Family learned of his death from a news article; body withheld.

9) The Sde Teiman 15-year-old, detention. Anonymous. Held among 70 adults, shackled until his hands bled, dogs released on prone detainees; described as "the worst days of my life." A separate 15-year-old reported being electrocuted via a needle in his shoulder over 54 days.

10) The four newborns at Al-Nasr Pediatric Hospital, Nov 2023. Anonymous. Found decomposing, still attached to defunct life-support machines, after staff were forced to evacuate without being able to move them. Independently verified by the Commission, Washington Post, and CNN.

11) Newborn hypothermia deaths, Dec 2024 to Feb 2025. Anonymous. At least 15 newborns, including a one-day-old girl, died of cold linked to lack of shelter, fuel, and incubators. UNICEF called the deaths preventable.

12) Sexual violence in detention. Anonymous. Forced public stripping and filming of boys during mass arrests; two cousins aged 7 and 13 stripped at gunpoint in Jenin; new reports of boys raped in custody, one on multiple occasions.

The Commission documents at least 20,179 Palestinian children killed and 44,143 wounded in two years, 30 percent of all the dead in Gaza, alongside 213 more killed in the West Bank. Thirteen times the Commission asked Israel to respond, and thirteen times it heard nothing back. Israel doesn't care enough to even respond. It kills children as a matter of policy.

[Nawab @WDLD0712]

Pious Muslims would do well to understand that nationalism is not a divisive heresy.

Nationalism is an assabiya like all other assabiyas. However, its origin is currently foreign to the ummah because our cultures failed to organically produce the material conditions from which it arose. However, without the assabiya of nationalism, a nation cannot meaningfully compete and be sovereign in the industrial age. Every assabiya served its purpose for its age and context, and the ummah must understand this present age and its demands.

All people have an assabiya, and it is ultimately rooted in how a people produce and distribute resources. There is no assabiya without material incentive. The assabiya in a feudal agrarian society is the peasant’s relationship with his lord on whose land he subsists, and his lord’s relationship with the monarch who granted the lord his fiefdom. These hierarchical relationships bind all layers together for agrarian production and distribution to occur, and they coalesce for their collective defence against external enemies who want to take their agricultural land.

Nomadic pastoralism is a lateral society, wherein the means of production are democratised and walk around on four legs: i.e. livestock. The assabiya of a pastoralist is only to his kinsmen who unquestioningly fight to protect their own livestock, and daringly fight to seize the livestock of non-kin. Without kin assabiya, livestock cannot be protected and amassed; livestock, ever mobile, will be stolen.

Nationalism is the assabiya of the urban middle class, who produce and thrive through co-operation and civitas. They are a people who broke free from the parasitism of raiding pastoralists and extractive feudals, united in their survival against parasitism. Through work, they keep entropy towards the above at bay. In nationalism, all men of the nation are equal. The nation-state is their sovereign representation, for defence of which men and resources of the nation are marshalled.

For quirks of history and anthropology I will not elaborate for brevity’s sake, much of the Muslim world never developed a strong middle class, and therefore few Muslim nations today have true nationalisms upon which their production and security are dependent. Most urban Muslim populations today are newly urbanised peasantry who work unproductive lives as taxi drivers, menial labourers, and stall sellers, sustained by the age-old grain dole paid for by the oppressed productive classes whose surpluses sustain the rest of the realm.

In these modern false nations, parasitic elites of old feudal and pastoralist stock donned the suit of nationalism and employ demagoguery to oppress the productive classes and extract the needful for themselves (the lion’s share) and (scraps) for their neo-serfs . Many of them dallied with industrial production, but found themselves incapable of good-faith market competition and national cooperation. Inevitably they captured the organs of state to enrich their industrial fiefs, to the detriment of their countrymen.

Few Islamicate nations like Iran and Turkey have produced middle classes and forged true nationalisms, with leaders who see themselves as equals among their fellow men. But these middle classes arose from lands fertilised by the decaying corpses of the old order. This is the necessary price that must be paid to compete as a strong sovereign nation in the industrial age.

[Wandering 🍥🇲🇾🇺🇸 @Traversinglost]

@MrExaminer @Jackbmeyer What caused them? That's the point of the book

[OSINTdefender @sentdefender]

The American pilot of a U.S. Air Force F-15E Strike Eagle that was shot down over Iran in April, requiring a high-risk rescue mission by special forces, described a shocking sight before ejecting from his aircraft: multiple Iranian drones hovering in the air, moving as one, in a formation that resembled a jellyfish, four sources familiar with the matter have told CNN.

“Multiple drones interconnected and moving as one with smaller drones below the bigger drones like legs,” one of the sources familiar with the pilot’s witness account told CNN. “Real alien sh*t.” Another source said that the pilot described witnessing a “minefield of drones” in the air prior to being downed over Iran. The pilot’s account immediately set off a firestorm of debate that has yet to be resolved within the U.S. Intelligence Community.

[Wenli Xu 许文立 @Wenddy58126515]

Your Econometrics Has a Blind Spot: It Forgot About the Human https://t.co/HzPaOPvRZc

[Shaiel Ben-Ephraim @academic_la]

I don't believe in violence or terrorism and grew up in Israel where I was taught that Hamas and Hezbollah are pure evil. But there is no question that the horrific conduct of Israel has made me understand these organizations far more. When your homeland is being invaded and your people destroyed, of course you will take up arms to fight.

[MenchOsint @MenchOsint]

Day 115 of Trump's 'regime change' war in Iran

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

I often like Ray Dalio's takes on China but he gets quite a lot demonstrably wrong in this FT article on the "tribute system."

China's ancient tribute system - called 朝贡 (cháogòng) in Chinese - is typically very misunderstood in the West: we typically think it involved tributary states paying some form of "tribute" to China in exchange for protection - the way medieval vassals would pay fealty to a lord in Europe.

In reality, it had little to do with that. In fact, it was almost the opposite: in the Chaogong system, it was actually China paying the "tributary states."

The system was basically a quid-pro-quo where China would get "得名" (dé míng, literally "getting name/prestige") while tributary states would get "得实" (dé shí, literally "getting substance/material benefit") in exchange. It was about China paying huge amounts of money and other material benefits for the recognition of its centrality.

That's what makes it so alien to the Western framework, where tributary states are paying UP to the center, and security is enforced through military presence. The Chaogong system was almost exactly the inverse on both counts: China was paying DOWN and regional order was maintained not through the military but through generosity.

The core guiding principle of the system was established by the Hongwu emperor, the founding emperor of the Ming dynasty (incidentally one of the most interesting emperors in Chinese history since he is the only founder of a major dynasty who started off in life as a wandering beggar).

The principle he set in place was 厚往薄来 (hòu wǎng bó lái) - literally "generous outflow, modest inflow": giving out much more than you take in. This wasn't a byproduct of the system - it WAS the system. The entire architecture of Chaogong was built on this principle of asymmetric generosity.

Very concretely the way it worked is that tributary states would pay largely symbolic tribute to China (like local specialties and curiosities, the system codified that tribute should be "easy to obtain and not costly", 必易得而不贵) and they would in exchange receive 3 layers of economic benefits:
1) Immediate payback in the form of money and expensive goods (silk, brocade, porcelain, tea, silver, etc.), which value was typically dozens of times the value of the tribute received by the emperor
2) The right to trade during their tribute visit: the envoys' entourage could trade with specially licensed Chinese merchants at the Huitongguan (the official guesthouse in the capital)
3) Most importantly, and that's where the real money was, they would be granted the right to trade at Chinese ports. Under the Ming maritime prohibition, tributary status was the only legal entry point into the Chinese economy

China being China, this gave rise to some pretty funny hustles. The deal was so good that people started inventing entirely fictitious countries just to get in on it. There are several documented cases of people fabricating countries and showing up as "envoys" at the imperial court just to claim the privileges (https://t.co/nlJB8yWblv).

Another funny one is that there are several cases of Fujian merchants who would sail to Southeast Asia, get themselves appointed as minor officials by local rulers, then sail right back to China as "foreign envoys" - carrying huge commercial cargoes. In 1438, three members of Java's tribute delegation turned out to be guys from Fujian (https://t.co/QBES0IVprC).

The scam got so widespread that the Ming had to invent a credential system (勘合, kānhé) specifically to verify that tribute envoys were who they claimed to be and that the countries they came from were real.

More seriously though, the Chaogong system also led to big domestic tensions in some of China's neighboring countries, notably Japan which was permitted only one tribute mission per decade. The stakes were so high that the 2 most powerful feudal clans at the time (the Ōuchi and the Hosokawa) fought a shadow war over who controlled the trade license.

This culminated in the Ningbo Incident of 1523 (https://t.co/TgKtlc7zlO): two Japanese delegations from both rival clans arrived at the port of Ningbo and got into a dispute over whose credentials were legitimate, which ended up in a pitched battle on Chinese soil. They ended up rampaging through the city, killing Ming military officers, and altogether terrorizing the local population - all over who got to trade with China.

The aftermath of the Ningbo Incident led to the total breakdown of Japan-China trade. If that sounds familiar, it should...

Which brings back to today and Ray Dalio's description of China's tribute system, as well as his claim that we're facing some sort of modern revival of it in Asia.

First of all, some parts of his article are correct: there is indeed a significant power shift happening in Asia, with countries hedging by building closer ties with Beijing, and the US progressively withdrawing and altogether losing ground.

He is also completely right that Chinese strategic culture genuinely differs from Western strategic culture: as he writes they indeed play Go (WeiQi) and not chess.

He is however wrong to describe the tribute system as one based on pressure and intimidation. As we've just seen, it was pretty much the opposite: the basic idea was to be so generous that everyone wants in (to the extent that countries would literally fight to be tributaries), not so threatening that nobody dares leave.

He also - weirdly - seems to conflate the tribute system with the Art of War, treating them as two faces of the same Chinese playbook, when they've got strictly nothing to do with each others. They're not even from the same school of thought: the Chaogong system is fundamentally Confucian (以德服人, "winning people through virtue") whereas Sun Tzu is from an entirely different Chinese intellectual tradition - the Strategist school (兵家) - which is about as far removed from Confucian thinking as Machiavelli is from the Bible.

Mashing them together reads like someone who has picked up a handful of Chinese cliché references and treats them as interchangeable ingredients in a single "Chinese strategic culture" soup.

All in all, he makes the error WAY too many Western commentators do with Chinese concepts: he uses them as exotic wrapping paper for a fundamentally Western analysis. Strip away the Chinese terminology and his argument is actually pure Western thinking: what he is claiming is that China, as a rising power, is using its growing economic and military weight to reshape the regional order, weaker states are bandwagoning, and the declining hegemon can't stop it.

He is essentially taking Graham Allison's "Thucydides Trap," awkwardly draping it in misunderstood Chinese concepts, and presenting it as if it were Chinese thinking.

That being said, he is ironically correct - I think - that there is some form of revival of a tribute-like system but not in the way he understands it: China will (and does) use trade - its "generosity" - as a gravitational force to pull countries into its orbit. Not by threatening to cut them off, but by making the relationship too valuable to walk away from. THAT is much closer to how the actual Chaogong system worked.

It doesn't mean that the system is purely benevolent. The flipside of generosity is the absence of it: in the original tribute system, you could be cut off the way Japan was after the Ningbo Incident in the 16th century. And it's also what's happening - to some extent - to Japan today: after PM Takaichi declared that Japan would go to war with China over Taiwan, China has systematically restricted trade with Japan. Same story with what happened, for instance, to Australia in 2020 over PM Morrison's declarations on Covid.

The pattern is the same: the reward for participation is trade, and the punishment for hostility is its withdrawal. Essentially in the tribute system there is no stick, just a carrot: the stick is taking the carrot away.

Which, incidentally, is why you can be extremely confident that China will go to enormous lengths to develop its internal market, and why the current situation where China runs huge trade surpluses is facing mounting pressure to change from within China itself. If countries don't feel they're benefiting enough from trade with China, the entire logic collapses. That's why developing domestic demand isn't some target China sets itself to assuage Western demands, as some claim: it's genuinely a strategic imperative.

It's also why it's ironic that the West is so keen on pushing China to boost domestic consumption: in effect, it means we're already in a de-facto Chaogong-like system and they're asking that the carrot be bigger.

-----

I also wrote a Substack version of this post, which you can find here: https://t.co/jBUIVbDT9C

[Mehdi (e/λ) @BetterCallMedhi]

y'a un truc que j'ai mis des années à vraiment comprendre, parler plusieurs langues c'est le plus gros cheat code que la vie peut t'offrir

partout où tu vas le même mur tombe au même endroit, tant que tu parles anglais les gens restent polis te gardent à distance et te collent le profil de touriste et le jour où tu leur réponds dans leur langue quelque chose s'ouvre d'un coup, le regard s'adoucit le sourire devient vrai on t'invite à table, t'es passé de l'autre côté

j’arrive aujourd’hui à maîtriser 7 langues différentes etavec le temps j’ai compris que chaque langue porte bien plus que des mots, ça porte la façon dont un peuple pense, rigole, se vexe et se fait confiance et quand tu la parles t'arrêtes de regarder leur monde derrière une vitre tu rentres littéralement dedans

d’ailleurs je pense que c'est là que tout se joue, tu accèdes enfin à ce qui se dit une fois que t'as quitté la pièce, les vraies conversations, les vrais conseils, les vraie opportunités business et in fine les portes que personne n'ouvrira jamais à un simple étranger, la confiance qui circule entre eux finit aussi par t'envelopper

bref le meilleur conseil que j’ai à vous donner reste vraiment d’apprendre plusisurs langues, vous repartirez avec bien + que des mots, vous repartirez avec avec des amis, une culture, des visions du monde totalement différentes…et sachez que chaque nouvelle langue que vous parlez c'est un monde entier qui s'ouvre et qui vous transforme un peu +

[𝕻𝖆𝖓𝖓𝖘𝖙𝖎𝖌𝖆𝖙𝖔𝖗 @hippyresident]

In 1953 the "Rosenbergs" were executed for stealing American Nuclear Secrets and giving them to the "Russians"

Oddly enough Russia already had the Nuclear bomb - but Israel didn't, until very shortly after their espionage…

[Michael Weiss @michaeldweiss]

He’s so incompetent, he can’t even make the point he’s trying to make. The U.S. relationship with the UK is closer than any other bilateral relationship and far beyond the U.S. relationship with Israel. It isn’t a partnership, it is a sacrosanct alliance in which almost all intelligence is shared (or was before Trump) and trust is implicit. It’s why chief of London Station is the coveted pre-retirement assignment for CIA officers. We spy on Israel and they spy on us. They are not in Five Eyes and won’t be. Vance just elevated Israel to a level they’ve never attained by way of trying to diminish them. He has no idea what he’s talking about.