During the beginning of the COVID pandemic the USDA calculated what it would cost to give every American citizen with food insecurity a full nutritious diet, it came out to $190 billion a year if utilizing the current SNAP infrastructure or $100 billion if organized and distributed via US National Guard at the state level.
I’ve heard the theory that Trump 45 was mostly Ivanka and Jared Kushner while Mitch McConnell playing as the attempted puppet master (and in many cases succeeding). But now (for various reasons) they’re out of the picture, I think Trump 47, literally has no true plan nor ideology, he just wants to do whatever allows him to score victories.
He’s a “conservative” only by virtue of being both a billionaire and a sexist bigot, but he isn’t ideologically invested. He just wants to feed his legendary ego, that’s it.
That’s the ironic part, ByteDance was developing a clone of Vine as they saw that was the future, they had developed a killer algorithm and bought another Vine clone Music.ly for cheap to rebrand as Douyin (or TikTok internationally).
Mind you, Vine made money, it’s just that Twitter refused to pay content creators, they saw people posted for free on Twitter and were looking for ways to convince people to make profit without paying. On numerous instances, groups of creators demanded to be compensated on Vine and even Periscope, or they’ll leave and Twitter told them to go fuck themselves.
Reminds me of how they shut down the incredibly successful Vine (short form video) because they figured they’d make more money with Periscope (very long form video). Despite literally nobody wanting it.
These tech bros live in a deluded bubble with no understanding on what average people want.
I went out with an Indian lady for years and still have Indian friends (in India) via our relationship with her, and this is of course totally anecdotal, but I was told that the government had hoped for a nationalist response but most people are terrified of ACTUALLY going to war with Pakistan, and men are seriously discussing fleeing to Europe/North America (for the wealthy) or neighboring nations (for the average poor). This isn’t what the Modi regime had hoped for.
I agree. I know millionaires who call themselves middle class because they can’t afford everything they want and still do “commoner things” like watching basketball.
Lol, like “British Honduras”, now Belize.
And that’s that Russia hasn’t called a general mobilization nor switched to a war economy.
If Trump dismantles NATO, he might, ironically enough, be the best US president ever.
I’m honestly surprised it has gone on as long as it has, isn’t Ukraine struggling to conscript anyone under 25?
Angela Merkel basically admitted it in 2014 when she called for proactive security measures against Russia for invading? Crimea, she was asked, “Why didn’t Germany call for sanctions on the US for invading Iraq?” and she said something like “We know the US is bad on foreign policy but at least they never attack their allies”.
Liberals act like it’s irrational behavior, it’s not, more like desperate behavior. The PRC flimflammed the US in a spectacular move, forcing the US to make a critical, possibly terminal mistake. China took on market changes to build up its productive powers. It’s in line with Orthodox Marxism that a nation has to go from primitive communism -> feudalism -> mercantilism (early-style capitalism) -> (mid-stage) capitalism -> neoliberalism (late-stage capitalism)-> socialism -> communism But China was intelligent enough to always have the Party in charge, unlike other times when the US ruined communist projects by having them adopt capitalism which led to the corporate oligarchy of liberalism…
So now some people in the US want to attempt to reindustrialize to compete with China at a break-neck speed, even if that means hurting American citizens and breaking ties with key allies.
The Europeans (at least in the Schengen/EU area) that think they have the ability to stand up to the US is so cute… sweaty, your power comes from the US. Just like with the Iraq War, you’re allowed to kick up dust and go into empty platitudes but you aren’t allowed to actually change anything.
The worst part is that masculine/feminine energy are actually concepts from Taoism (but it’s WAY different from this weird alfalfa male stuff), and now Western liberals assume you’re one of these weirdos when you talk about the energies.
For example the Taoist concept of it says that nobody could live a happy life with only one energy (for example a father has to have feminine energy to properly show love to their children) and everyone needs to be introspective to feel what balance is best for them.
As much as we’d like China to be principled like the USSR, they aren’t. At least not yet, the PRC continues to pursue a realpolitik strategy as they feel they can position themselves as necessary for the West. They are arming themselves quickly but are not yet in a position to face the US militarily. China has learned from the “mistakes” made from socialism’s first experiments. The weakness of capitalism is that it cannot go to war with a nation so crucial to its economy. Even if the war hawks want war with China, even a proper full blown Cold War, the business elites will intervene. China has realized with Climate Change that the business elites that control the nation will feed in the through of profits even at the risk of their own annihilation.
This means China can avoid an unfair advantage that capitalists broadly and the US specifically had at expanding Empire, that war is profitable to capitalist nations therefore the expansion of military goals served a dual purpose. However socialist nations have no use for war after they industrialize, it’s just a waste of labor and resources that could go elsewhere. As long as China maintains the balancing act where the US begrudgingly has to keep China as an ally of sorts, then China can have time needed to become richer and stronger. The USSR for example had to become stronger while poor in its infancy, it was able to still get ahead from the early days of the Union, but who knows how much wealthier they could’ve been if they weren’t bogged so much down in war?
The US is looking at India, Vietnam or Brazil or whatever for possible ways to allow the US to decouple from the PRC, but they know that even in the best case scenarios that would take decades as China quite literally sells the US rope to hang themselves. China set up a master plan and the US fell for it with Deng and the following leaders as the US was licking its lips hoping to see China become a capitalist nation and fed it its manufacturing out of greed and allowed China to grow its high-tech modernity and Global competitiveness as the US knows its growing China’s productive forces but can’t stop it.
China needs to hold this pattern, whether we’d like to see them reacting a different way, if it hinders the larger plan, it would be all for naught. The US is in a very precarious position, even small in dips in quality of life enrages a population that has little actual patriotism, asking the population to engage in an “arduous march” to cut off China right now is laughable. So they’re stuck.
I think the DPRK is seeing an increasingly weakening and also desperate Empire that might make even more extreme moves to maintain world power. I don’t think it’s unwise to have your soldiers deployed to a theater of war to see NATO tactics and weaponry up close, especially since it has been over 70 years since their military has seen combat. The likelihood of the US using one of its goons to strike the only legitimate government in Korea in the near future is reasonably high, I would say such actions, if they are occurring are prudent. Especially since we can see in the case of Ukraine, that the US is not worried about exposing the world to possible nuclear annihilation as long as it’s via a proxy. I can easily see the US willing to fight the DPRK to the last “South Korean”.
However, I admit I’m just a fucking moron making informed guesses, I wish Western media would have this level of self-awareness.
“By ‘we’, I meant ‘you’, so long losers!”
Russia only had intended to occupy East Ukraine… but I fear that they’re going to have to occupy the entire nation at this point.
I legitimately think Russia might be forced to drop the bomb, even if it’s just a tactical one on some unoccupied field somewhere in Northern Ukraine.
It’s clear Israel is deadset on the war. Iran might as well get on with it.