https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked-choice_voting_in_the_United_States#Use_of_instant-runoff_voting_at_local_levels

In NYC? This is heavy (D) turf. Blue municipality. Blue state. Overwhelmingly Blue House Delegation. Two Blue Senators. Most of the legislature from the area is DSA, ffs.

Trump might make noise, but the tip of the spear is going to have to come from the establishment Democratic Party, at least until the election is over. If anything, Trump wants Zohran to win the general, so that he can pull the institutional Dems in next to him when he announces his plan to take over the city, like he’s done with LA.

It’s so funny to see institutional democrats turning on Zohran and institutional republicans turning on Silwa.

Democracy means absolutely nothing to these people.

I have been told to Vote Blue No Matter Who and I am a loyal democrat. Zohran has my vote.

You don’t get invited out to the Sonoma Valley Wine Cave by being mean to the Fossil Fuel industry.

Chinese Century, baby.

They’re doing everything IRL that Elon Musk is tweeting about in between Ketamine binges.

Thank goodness for the real nationalist icon Captain America The Punisher.

The story of Moses is of God’s Chosen People being insulated from bad events while the Pagans are made to suffer.

The moral of Exodus (and Kings and Judges) is that if you’re following God’s Will, nothing bad will ever happen to you.

Action Comics #900

The Man of Steel’s declaration, “I’m tired of having my actions construed as instruments of U.S. policy,” follows accusations that he caused an international incident in Tehran. Superman flew to the country during a huge protest, where he stood silent for one day, to show his support for the demonstrators. The 24 hours pass with a mix of appreciation (flowers and flags) and fear (hurled Molotov cocktails). But the government of Iran sees Superman as an agent of the United States and feels his action is an act of war. “Truth, justice and the American way – it’s not enough anymore,” Superman tells the president’s national security adviser. “The world’s too small. Too connected.” He then makes the decision to go before the United Nations and renounce his American citizenship.

Shame they did stick with a white actor. Imagine the chuds losing their minds over a Superman played by Pedro Pascal or Michael B. Jordan.

He’s in tight with O&G, his wife literally works for Goldman Sachs, and he’s jumped into Opus Dei. The man has more money and institutional support than any three other Senators you could name, despite being a turd in the Texas punch bowl the rest of the year.

Meanwhile, his most competent opponents have been the Skateboarding Take Your Guns guy chanting “demographics is destiny” to a bunch of conservative Latinos and the Linebacker in sheriff cosplay who ran on being tougher on the border than Republicans.

When your options are constantly Republican or Republican Lite, is there any surprise when the Republican wins?

This is important.

It’s the downstream consequence of decades of outsourcing, kicked off in earnest in the Reagan Administration. “Right to Repair” is just the tip of an enormous iceberg of military privatization.

Money that could be redirected into more important stuff, but alas our corrupt politicians will find other things to waste it on.

That’s the nut of it. This money is being wasted in the general sense. But it isn’t wasted in the eyes of crony legislators and bureaucrats who see themselves on the receiving end of the kickback stream.

This goes back to the BBB and its rampage through some of the most high efficiency Medicaid programs on offer, in order to shuttle somewhere between $175B and $541B (depending on who is counting) to a national security system that’s just legions of badged up bullies harassing locals for the entertainment of a few hooting chuds.

why can’t the military fix their own equipment or farmers fix tractors?

Because

and SaaS is how corporate industry has decided it will continue to grow its profits indefinitely.

Israel does not have a future after this.

If Germany and Japan could have a future after WW2 - a war they lost categorically - Israel will do just fine in the coming decades, after successfully executing a full ethnic cleanse of some of the more valuable real estate in the Mediterranean.

Israel isn’t a rogue state, it’s a cat’s paw. They’re doing the dirty work as a proxy for allies who have wanted to wipe Arabs off that corner of the map for decades. In the end, however, you’re going to see western states welcome Israelis back into the fold with open arms, just so long as they can pin this all on Netanyahu and pretend it wasn’t a national project with the full support of the Israeli public.

I would say the big distinction between Ukraine and Gaza is that in Ukraine there has been a meaningful (and enormously lucrative) project to arm locals in opposition to Russian invasion. It’s been of dubious success, given how much territory they still lost. But its difficult to say that the Biden Era government (or even Trump Term 1) wasn’t willing to shovel arms and mercenaries into Ukraine in an effort to cripple Russian advances.

In Gaza, the Israel blockade has gone virtually unchecked - outside of a few salvos from Yemen and some allegations of support from Iran and Hezbollah. Americans are supporting the genociders not the victims. There is no Gaza military left to repeal an invasion nor is there any appetite for a Hamas resistance to repeal IDF advances. At this point, it’s little more than a shooting gallery.

There’s a line of combat between Ukraine and Russia. There’s nothing in Gaza. Just Israelis and their private security contractors kettling and massacring neighborhood after neighborhood, then flagging bulldozers to knock down the houses when they’re done.

British Palestine (and other Mid-East / North Africa states) were notable in that they were far more accommodating to Jewish peoples than the European continent had been. They were colonial territories with large international trading hubs that were already pluralistic and accommodating to foreigners. And they weren’t carrying the baggage of a few centuries of Inquisitions and Pogroms.

Until the Shah was installed in '53, Iran had one of the largest Jewish populations in the world. Ethiopia and Sudan had hundreds of thousands of Jewish people living contentedly in its borders until the '70s, when civil war and famine ripped the country apart. And prior to the Holocaust, there was an enormous flight of Jewish residents to the Americas.

Now, primarily white militant European settler colonialists might have trouble setting up an intentional community of Zionist radicals anywhere. But there’s no reason to believe Argentina or Madagascar would have been materially worse for them than British Palestine.

Gaza is the latest in a long line of atrocities committed by countries ostensibly committed to a law of armed conflict.

Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria… hell the US interventions in Somalia and the former Yugoslavia were as horrifying as they were criminal. Sometimes we can find an exigent threat that gives us permission to use overwhelming force to brutalize the bad guys - as in Iraq '91 with the Kuwaiti invasion. Other times we just have to make some shit up, as with Grenada or Vietnam.

But this idea that we’ve had an international order for any of the last 77 years is more a reflection on the quantity of our propaganda than the quality of our international ethics. The total war Israel is conducting in Gaza, while the US hovers overhead threatening to flatten any Egyptian or Jordanian or Lebanese who attempts to intervene, has been historic in the degree to which far more cushy liberal rhetoric has been replaced with full-throated endorsement of ethnic cleansing.

But the policies themselves? We manufactured a famine in Afghanistan shortly after withdrawing the last US troops. We have repeatedly blocked countries with socialist governments from accessing international markets to obtain relief, such as Bangladesh in '74 and Ethiopia ten years later. Somalia has been under near constant assault by US Navy vessels “policing” the most lucrative fishing territories, driving up rates of piracy as a substitute for traditional subsistence farming. Then you’ve got the '91 famine in N. Korea and the '94 Cuban hunger crisis, both the consequence of US blockades.

Any one of these would be considered a modern-day Holodomor from the perspective of an objective outside observer. Unfortunately, Americans only get to hear about Gaza - and even then only in dribs and drabs on social media or alt-news publications - as they turn away from the traditional corporate-friendly press venues.

Trump: “I’m doing things my own way.”

CIA Section Chief: “Show him that Zapruder film again and make sure he doesn’t forget about it this time.”

The department is administered and governed by the police commissioner, who is appointed by the mayor to what is, nominally, a five year term.

Can Zohran fire the existing commissioner and replace him? Idk what the bureaucracy around that looks like. Entrenched power structures have a way of slow rolling executives thru don’t like and ignoring rules they don’t want to follow.

A lot of levers of power that worked for a Guliani or an Adams might suddenly stop working assuming Zohran can make it all the way through the general and into office.

“I smell weed” has been a classic for decades.

A long while back, I was harassed by the cops for “acting suspicious” while waiting for some friends at the mall. This quickly escalated to “suspected terrorist activity” for absolutely no reason I could discern or anyone afterwards could explain.

Cops just say shit. The best you can do is say you need to speak to a lawyer and clam up after that.

An easy thing to say if you’ve never been shot at