Decapitation Strikes Don’t Win Wars: Israel’s Self-Destructive Invasion of Lebanon
Decapitation Strikes Don’t Win Wars: Israel’s Self-Destructive Invasion of Lebanon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdeXzP-o-ag
Champion of Truth
Decapitation Strikes Don’t Win Wars: Israel’s Self-Destructive Invasion of Lebanon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdeXzP-o-ag
China is providing Russia the ability to build more weapons to invade Ukraine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-piWFsohFo
No One Should Think the War Will Be Short By Commander Justin Cobb, U.S. Navy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ka0s44y7kkw
Economist explains why Europeans are getting poorer… and happier
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YAaeOonFRI
Sam Goes OFF On “Crime Wave” BS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doNilzUEbnc
We need to build more housing to keep the cost of housing down. Localities prevent building because they don’t like it for a variety of reasons. The states and the country need to get localities to allow building so there is enough housing for the country. Or else, too many localities refuse to build for the narrow local interest of some of their current residents.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bajyEFHK0M
“By sending unconditional monthly checks of up to $300 per child to the nation’s poorest families — including those with little to no income who had typically been excluded from such programs — the “child allowance” lifted 2.1 million children out of poverty who would’ve otherwise been left behind.
Arguments against such programs that give unconditional cash usually assert that it’ll drive low-income people to quit their jobs, ultimately harming the economy. But research found little to no drop in employment rates as a result of the expanded CTC. Yet despite a flurry of support from prominent economists and recipients alike, politicians failed to reach an agreement to make the temporary expansion permanent, and Congress let it expire at the end of 2021.”
…
“a new working paper from Elizabeth Ananat and Irwin Garfinkel, two economists at Columbia University. Expanding on work they first published in 2022, their research surveys long-run cash and quasi-cash transfer programs (like food stamps) in the US in an effort to predict the overall effects of a child allowance over the very long run. Instead of the grim and jobless future forecast by expanded CTC critics, they find that a future shaped by a permanent child allowance is well worth the investment.
Ananat and Garfinkel found that the total long-run benefits to society of making a child allowance permanent outweigh the costs by nearly 10 to 1.”
…
“Their promise of a 10 to 1 return is, frankly, massive. For every $100 or so billion the child allowance would cost the government each year, society would reap additional long-term benefits of about $929 billion. Those dollars represent benefits like improved child and parent health and longevity, higher future earnings for children, and reduced crime and health care costs. There would be an effect from the small dip in employment that their calculations predict, and a resulting decrease in tax revenue — but it would amount to just $2.4 billion. That’s a drop in a bucket overflowing with almost a trillion dollars in benefits.
But the nuances of such long-term returns can be difficult to convey. “A little bit shows up in the first few years in the form of reduced [child abuse and neglect], reduced hospitalizations, and those sorts of things,” said Ananat. “But most of it doesn’t show up until the kids grow up. So that requires a very patient type of investor.””
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/371858/child-tax-credit-poverty-economics-future-benefits
“The idea that Haitians in Springfield are abducting people’s pets and eating them is not just a normal lie, the way that Trump has long accused migrants of selling drugs and committing street crimes. The idea of barbecuing a neighbor’s beloved pet is such a violation, so alien in nature, that it renders the alleged targets outside the scope of what we recognize as human behavior. It is an attack on Haitians not only as individuals, but as an entire group. It is a kind of dehumanization that has historically led to deadly violence against the targeted group — often by design.
Two New York Times columnists, Lydia Polgreen and Jamelle Bouie, have labeled the animal eating rhetoric a “blood libel” for this reason.
The term originates in medieval Europe, specifically to describe the lie that Jews were abducting Christian children and using their blood to bake matzah (an unleavened bread we eat during the Passover holiday). The calumny, which persisted through the Nazi era, was designed explicitly to cast Jews beyond the pale of acceptable society — to link Judaism as a religion and identity to barbarism and brutality. It was, as Bouie notes, frequently employed to whip up violence against the Jewish community.
You don’t need to be a historian to see the obvious connections between accusing Jews of eating children and Haitians of eating pets. And since the Haitian Revolution, Americans have often treated Haitians as the embodiment of the terrifying racial “other” in the same way that Europeans displaced their fears and resentments onto Jews. The crank presidential candidate Marianne Williamson helpfully made the subtext the text in a tweet, saying that Democrats dismiss Trump’s lies at their peril because “Haitian voodoo is in fact real.”
The same is true with another Vance lie about Springfield: that Haitians are responsible for a surge in communicable diseases, including HIV/AIDS. I say it’s a lie because there’s no public evidence supporting it, and authorities on the ground contradict it.
“A common myth that I’ve heard is that we’ve seen all of our communicable diseases skyrocket and go through the roof. And really, when you look at the data, that’s not supported,” Chris Coon, a county health commissioner, told the local ABC affiliate.
Once again, this lie has a deeply troubling history. Immigrants have long been falsely accused of bringing disease to keep them out; Nazis did the same to Jews.
Specifically, Nazi propaganda would regularly accuse Jews of spreading typhus, a lice-borne disease that killed millions in early 20th century Europe. Much like HIV, typhus was a stigmatized ailment stereotypically associated with the moral defectiveness or dirtiness of the afflicted. Nazi doctors wrote pseudo-scientific papers accusing Jews of spreading typhus due to our alleged “low cultural level” and “uncleanliness,” part of the justification for cramming Jews in Polish ghettos before shipping my ancestors and their co-religionists to death camps.
In the past, attention to these kinds of glaringly obvious Nazi parallels might have seemed like enough to shame the Trump campaign into at least toning down its rhetoric. But now, those normative guardrails no longer hold.
On the right today, there is a pervasive sense that any allegation of fascism, authoritarianism, or racism is a bad-faith smear designed to delegitimize conservative policies and politicians. It is a tactic used by American defenders of Viktor Orbán’s regime in Hungary, but one most often used to excuse bad behavior at home. It can be used even to whitewash the flirtations with open fascism that are common among young rightists nowadays, like the inclusion of a Nazi symbol in a video pushed out by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s primary campaign.
I’m sure it’s frustrating to be constantly accused of backing a fascist for president when you genuinely don’t see yourself in that light. But at the same time, it gives the green light to ignore an awful lot of extremely dangerous behavior.”
https://www.vox.com/politics/372364/trumps-haitians-springfield-ohio-nazi
“Arthropods, a group that includes insects, spiders, and crustaceans, make up roughly half of all animals on Earth, by biomass. There are, for example, an estimated 20 quadrillion ants. And because insects are superabundant and everywhere — in streams and lakes, deserts and mountaintops — they are essential parts to every ecosystem.
Scientists estimate that about 90 percent of flowering plants are pollinated by animals, most of which are insects. More than a third of our food crops depend on pollinators, including almonds, chocolate, and coffee.
Insects also make up a huge part of the diet of many animals. Nearly all terrestrial birds in North America feed their young invertebrates. “If you like birds, you should thank an insect,” Black said.
Many fish eat insects, too, including salmon, he said. “They would not make it to the ocean without feeding on insects,” Black said. “This goes all the way up the food chain. Think of grizzly bears. They eat salmon, which rely on insects. And their other main food source is berries, which are insect-pollinated. So bears almost exclusively eat a diet that comes from insects.”
Also worth mentioning: Insects, like dung beetles, clean up animal feces that might otherwise smother the ground and fill the air with a foul stench.”
https://www.vox.com/explain-it-to-me/371434/insect-apocalypse-bees-decline-loss
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_hyoF2ZMhQ