Sadly, Iran has not been “tolerable to the media” in recent times.

(Example: a few months ago, their courts were discussing whether to sentence a rapper named Tataloo to death for “corruption on earth” - singing about the wrong things.)

Since they are now in war, media freedom in Iran is probably under the table.

Opinion:

Politically, the ayatollah can’t be toppled by foreseeable events, except if an Israeli strike should kill him. His successor in that case is unlikely to be milder. Netanyahu is also firmly in power due to special circumstances, and probably pretty safe from any Iranian attempts.

Militarily, Iran has taken bigger losses, and has probably lost expensive and important parts of its nuclear programme - but not its stocks of highly enriched uranium, or its ability to launch ballistic missiles. From that perspective, if the Israeli strikes were meant to disarm Iran - they didn’t.

Prognosis: they will trade more strikes and neither will achieve breakthrough success. Iran will lose more in the process.

it was also unclear he has in fact paid any taxes to the Russian government

Seems like a Captain Obvious moment. You work somewhere, your employer pays taxes to the government without even asking if you like it. I’m fully certain that even hardcore anarchist partisans who burn shit at night, pay taxes to the RF government on their day job - to look more like a normal citizen.

Perhaps more importantly, Netanyahu also exchanged the director of Shin Bet, as if anticipating that some day, that guy might get a warrant to arrest a certain person accused of war crimes.

To make it short and get to the point, Israel is also risking their constitutional order by letting Netanyahu run wild. He might decide not to leave at some point.

1.8.1 is sufficiently infectious and will attempt to self-install on you, functionality however is the same, it does the same stuff as Omicron did

Saudi Arabia needs to run out of money and get into an “all hands needed” situation to change (at which point they will surely discover that half of hands belong to women).

The king needs to lose his ability to bribe people to shut up.

Everyone can help this a little by transitioning off oil, gas and other petrochemical products, not letting this country acquire advanced technology, and generally not cooperating with them.

How to make Saudia Arabia a normal society?

• deny it income
• deny it access to advanced technology
• deny it legitimacy and cooperation

Most importantly: stop using oil and natural gas sooner rather than later.

Reasoning: the king stays in power by paying cops, security officials and prison guards - and paying people to shut up and tolerate the regime. Once the system runs low on money, things may change.

Note: women in Europe made rapid progress at getting civil rights at a time when they were needed to run ammunition factories.

It doesn’t have to be a world war - any development that makes it economically unavoidable that women start going to work outside their home, will change the role of women in society.

They should. Some minimal physical protection may be needed to meet, consider, decide and publish a decision (nothing more) if things get really bad.

If they can modify the US Marshals service get independence from the DoJ, that seems reasonable.

Let’s not pretend Israel was ever anything other than a settler colonialist project whose most ardent supporters were antisemites.

I’m a bit poorly informed about public and private discourse on the subject, in the late 1940-ties. Can you point me to any evidence which would substantiate that claim?

Don’t let the facts slow you down, eh.

Attributing the existence of a country to an agency the country built, is a bit on the fast side, I think. The agency was born 1 year after Israel and built from scratch.

Israel exists because millions of people didn’t have a place they could call their home country.

Sadly, what has become of that country is not cheerful. Its war in Gaza seems to intend making life impossible in the sector (making a population’s life impossible in their homeland has a definition: genocide) and prime minister Netanyahu is grabbing for more power, likely with thoughts about “staying a bit longer”.

Mossad (role: foreign intelligence) is an agency directly subordinated to the prime minister of Israel (unlike some others, e.g. Shin Bet (role: internal security and counterintelligence), which recently had its chief fired because he wouldn’t swear personal allegiance to Netanyahu). So, in the current political situation, there is credible suspicion that Netanyahu is creating a precedent and subordinating all intelligence agencies to his person - if not directly then indirectly.

Mossad’s cooperation with foreign agencies has been punctuated by episodes of non-cooperation.

I can point out several moments in history where the interests of Mossad contradicted, for example, the interests of the CIA. Threats were made, negotiations were held, some Mossad guys got caught and were imprisoned in the US.

However, during less tense periods, agencies have also been trading tips. Mossad has built a highly successful “business” of assassinating people. It logically follows that if agency A knows that person X is on Mossad’s “hit list”, and they find out where X lives, then A won’t need to send a killer, but tips off Mossad. Intelligence agencies may sometimes (not cheerfully) share part of their technical networks with each other, but human networks - almost never. It can get their own agents killed or imprisoned, if another agency is careless.

I think they earned their award. The original story, now 11 months old, is perhaps worth re-reading.

Summary: anticipating ICC conclusions about the war in Gaza, Netanyahu (from whom Mossad takes commands) sent the agency to collect compromising material about the ICC prosecutor. The head of the agency threatened her, but she disclosed the contacts to other ICC officials and proceeded with the investigation.

According to accounts shared with ICC officials, he is alleged to have told her: “You should help us and let us take care of you. You don’t want to be getting into things that could compromise your security or that of your family.”

If he does that, the prices that rise most in the US will be medical products, medicines and motor vehicles.

The EU does have a trade surplus in goods with the US. The US has a nearly comparable surplus in trade of services.

If the EU were to respond by taxing US services harshly, we’d experience more expensive licenses and advertising costs. Year of the Linux desktop? Year of the dark red Google?

Harvard says the administration’s move is unlawful.

And most likely, it is.

However, for a foreign student to enter the US currently to study (presumably for several years) does kind of feel like jumping onto a hovercraft crewed by eels.

It is.

Who’s gonna stop them?

The first line (diplomacy):

Several factions in the Libyan government have warm relations with Turkey. Turkey has so far antagonized with Israel over the matter of Gaza. It’s not hard to predict that factions in the Libyan government, upon Trump’s likely blackmail (he can do little else) to accept the deportation of million ethnically cleansed Palestinians, would receive a phone call from their Turkish, Quatari, Algerian and Pakistani backers, telling them to “stop discussing that nonsense” and asking them to reject Trump. So, most likely the Libyan government will fail to reach a consensus.

The second line (politics):

The Libyan parliament will not support it. Parliament may remove the government if it’s doing something unpalatable

The third line (war):

Libyan people will not support it. Various factions may rebel again and restart the civil war if they see the government acting seriously against their wishes.

Since their sovereign wealth fund is emptying, they will implode anyway. War is an incredibly expensive thing.

The key requirements for Russia’s implosion:

• no change in military situation
• China not keeping Russia afloat
• EU keeping Ukraine afloat
• the US doing a bit more than comical relief

Pharmaceutical companies will demand higher prices from countries with socialized healthcare. Those higher costs will be passed on to the citizens of those countries.

I’ve tried to analyze whether this can happen.

Maybe. Countries with socialized health care typically have disproportionately great bargaining power relative to their size. A pharamaceutical company may not be inclined to demand higher prices from a customer who buys great quantities.

Countries may also enter international alliances to obtain cheaper access to some product, like the EU did in case of COVID vaccines. Currently, companies have contracts they cannot back out from. Countries with single payer systems also have laws which regulate the purchase of pharamaceuticals, and those won’t be changing soon.

Basically, it seems that the only thing Trump can do to immediately alter prices, is to start a trade war. Which would raise prices for US consumers and lead to unreliable access to certain drugs, putting people’s lives in direct danger.

Finally, even if we suppose that one category of customers agree to pay higher prices (likely not for long, foreign competitors would quickly step in and offer alternatives) - there’s no guarantee that savings obtained in such a way will be passed down to another category of customers (who have lower bargaining power) without legislation to ensure that. But legislation comes from the Congress…

Diagnosis:

The US system for financing medicine has middlemen who increase prices. The consumer / patient has poor representation and low bargaining power. In European countries, there typically exists a central health insurance authority that’s not interested in making a profit, but is interested in everyone’s health and access to medicines (at low cost if possible).

Subsequently, a president arrives who doesn’t understand a thing. He’s been told that his ratings are dropping and he should “do something the people like”. He tries to solve drug prices with customs tariffs instead of implementing single payer health care in the US.

Prognosis:

The result will be a free market clusterf*ck and some people will die as a result.

Yes. These guys have a vested interest in their client selling F-35 parts, so they will try to paint white as black.

The interesting part will be whether the court accepts their reasoning.

Considering that he hurt the US economy considerably in the process of getting tootled by China, I don’t think he has credit to spare for repeating the same process with the EU.