Its pretty much like, ok, so we run Gotham, but we decided to go all in on this Joker guy... and he just burned down our bales of cash we can't keep in any banks.
But we can't... acknowledge... that we invested all our funds into the obviously crazy person... otherwise we look stupid.
This is unironically Soviet levels of unnacountability and corruption.
We've got the purges going on as well, notably with Hegseth basically firing all the top military brass.
Washington is seeking to reduce its $295bn goods trade deficit with Beijing and persuade China to renounce what the US says is a mercantilist economic model and contribute more to global consumption. Beijing has pushed back against what it sees as external interference and wants Washington to lower tariffs and clarify what it wants China to buy more of.
What the US is doing is explicitly, unarguably, an idiotic 1800s style Mercantalist model.
(It is idiotic because we have basically no relevant or competetive domestic manufacturing, but we are acting as if ....we do.)
Not what the Chinese are doing.
This is literally not arguable, unless you have John Fetterman level brain damage, or know literally nothing about economics nor any relevant recent/current data about the economies of the US and China.
Trump needs to be fucking euthanized.
Time to ride off into that sunset, otherwise we are all gonna fucking starve.
... Shallow end of the pool with a goddamned diaper on...
Yep, tons of beautiful scenery along the Pacific Coast Highway, and environs!
Otherwise known as highway 101, from WA down to CA... though I think it becomes Highway 1 at some point in Cali.
I'd seen much of these and similar places in camping/roadtrips/fishing trips as a kid prior to playing Life is Strange though, so I guess it wasn't as impressive to me, having seen it irl before the games... though the psuedo impressionistic landscape art style is a neat way to depict it.
Either way, great pictures OP!
Ah! It seems you are... broadly correct on that one!
Though it gets complicated when you dive into the details... it appeara that exactly which name is being used by which language and people ... involves essentially some ... derogatory puns, slight manipulations of certain vowels/consonants to change the literal meaning of the name.
https://hermeneutics.stackexchange.com/questions/68544/is-asherah-related-to-ashtoreth#68545
As to books, reading?
I am doing my best (and must admit I am certainly oversimplifying to some extent, and may be making even more errors) ... to put together the totality of what I've absorbed from watching a large number of videos either by or involving Drs. Josh Bowman and Kipp Davis.
Dr. Bowman is digitalhammurabi on youtube, Dr. Kipp Davis is... I think just eponymous?
Both of them together, or each of them singly have often appeared on the MythVision yt channel, Paulogia, more recently Esoterica... and all of those channels also feature many other scholars relevant to near eastern history, religion, language, etc.
I am not sure if Drs. Bowman or Davis have books that outline exactly what I've tried to sum up, but I know they definitely do have scholarly publications and at least some books focused on other topics that end up describing different parts of my summary.
I am not an expert, just a very interested person who follows the experts best I can.
Zuckerberg has been doing this for over a decade.
https://mashable.com/article/mark-zuckerberg-webcam-cover
The answer is yes, obviously duh, yes.
Yeah, 'aerial battle' would have been the term I used, but hey since when are journalists supposed to know what words mean?
I suppose it is technically possible there could have been some actual close range dog fighting in this giant battle, lots of jets involved still have actual guns, as well as less long ranged and less accurate missiles...
On the other hand:
Holy fuck.
125 aircraft engaged in essentially one gigantic battle?
That is totally unprecedented in the modern era.
Derp, they covered this in the article
The only things I can think of that come close to that scale are uh... Desert Shield in the Gulf War, but that was massively one sided in the US's favor, we pretty much completely surprised the Iraqi Air Force and destroyed most of their aircraft while they were on the ground...
I can't think of any like... post jet aircraft era battle that involves more than 50 aircraft at the same time in the same battle.
Ok, had to look this up: 'Black Friday' in the Korean War, jets, but no missiles... the Battle of El Mansoura, Israel v Egypt 1973, involved around 200 total aircraft, Operation Mole Cricket B, Israel v Syria 1982, again about 200 total aircraft... and thats basically it.
So, uh, anyway... Pakistan and India both have nukes, and as best I can tell, both have threatened to use them is things escalate... so... uh... yeah...
Apparently there is a cease fire, apparently Trump is taking credit for it, apparently it has already been violated?
I am watching India Today's livestream and they are currently saying Pakistan has and is currently still violating the ceasefire, and I have little doubt the Indians are as well.
EDIT: Former Indian Secretary MEA is basically saying Trump's 'ceasefire' is complete bullshit, that India and Pakistan reached their own ceasefire, and though it seems like its falling apart, the other point here is that neither Pakistan nor India are paying any attention to Trump, they have no idea what he is talking about, they have not agreed to anything mediated by the US.
Just to give some context here:
US Dockworkers (Longshoremen) are not all in the same Union.
The West Coast and Hawaii are ILWU.
The Gulf and Atlantic Coasts are ILA.
The ILWU came out heavily against Trump before the election, endorsing Kamala.
The ILA on the other hand... basically decided to time their most recent strike with the latter stages of the 2024 campaign, snubbed Biden on multiple occasions, openly praised Trump on many occasions, both before and after he was elected...
... though I don't think they formally endorsed Trump, its fairly clear which horse they backed.
Teamsters, on the other hand, represent... road maintenance workers, truck drivers, train operators, railway maintenance workers, construction workers, newspaper workers, police, warehouse workers... after over a century of union mergers, their represented industries are much more broad.
And they didn't formally endorse anyone, but uh yeah, similar to the ILA, its very, very clear that leadership prefers Trump.
At least some of the plauges approximating some of what is described in the Torah were real things.
Locusts were certainly a common problem.
Sometimes, you would get an absurd amount of frogs birthing all at the same time from a particularly severe natural climate cycle ... the entitety of the history of Egypt very much involves figuring out how to handle the Nile's flooding seasons.
A red algae bloom could possibly have turned the Nile red, and made it basically toxic.
... But the part where the historicity falls apart is the supposed timing of the Exodus event, and the number of Hebrews involved.
...
Long story short: Traditional religious dating of when Exodus occured basically puts it occuring before the time Yahweh even existed as a monotheistic God, in Israel/Judah/Canaan.
At this point in time, the Levant was largely still a bunch of varying cults/clans based around the polytheistic Caananite pantheon.
Yahweh did not develop into, or emerge, as the singular monotheistic God of peoples in the Levant... untill hundreds of years later, after they had been held captive in Babylon/Persia for many decades, where they absorbed much of thr dualistic framework of the Zoroastrian Ahura-Mazda as the great good God, vs Angra-Mainyu as the great evil God... and then were allowed to resettle in their homeland by Cyrus.
Roughly what I just described is inline with the actual existing and properly dated texts and artefacts from the relevant regions.
When Exodus is tradtionally supposed to have occured... Caananites were still worshipping El, Ba'al, Ashera, Astarte, Anat, Dagon.
El and his son Ba'al more or less merged into Yahweh over time, and gained many attributes of other members of the Pantheon... this is why Yahweh is a jealous god who does not suffer any idol worship, worship of his progenitors.
...
The other huge problem with the Exodus story is the numbers of Hebrews involved.
The Torah is very explicit at a few points about how many men there were... and what you end up with is something like 2 to 3 million people leaving Egypt, spending 40 years lost in Sinai or possibly Arabia... all while leaving literally no archaeological evidence of such a huge movement of people.
2 to 3 million people leaving Egypt is utterly absurd. Its comparable to the estimated entire popation of Lower (Northern) Egypt at the time of the traditional religious dating.
There is nothing in any Egyptian records to indicate anything like that number of people up and leaving.
What there is, is a good number of mentions that small numbers, as in hundreds, maybe thousands, of Caananites ... well if Caanan was having a bad drought, or had just had some kind of city state conflict... Egypt would fairly routinely allow some refugees to basically graze their herds in Egypt, or even a few of them would settle into being farmers, or do trading caravans.
There is no evidence whatsoever that millions of Hebrews, or people who would in the future become Hebrews... ever lived in Egypt as a slave class, and then all left at the same time.
To me, the actual main problem with the interactions between Moses (as a proxy for Yahweh) and Pharaoh...
... Is that for the majority of ultimatums that God instructs Moses to give to Pharoah... God also 'hardens his/Pharoah's heart', which compels Pharoah to not comply.
Like, outside or above the scale of things threatened... God literally mind controls Pharoah, manipulates his emotions, and forces him into saying no, not acquiescing or truly negotiating.
This happens multiple times.
So now... God isn't just an asshole threatening insane plaugues and death... God is just puppeting Pharoah at these key moments, so basically God is orchestrating this entire chain of events... he was in total control the whole time... God is thus just punishing the Egyptians, while also doing a kabuki theatre, a false flag, whatever, to make it look like they actually had choices and chances to avoid this, to make it look like they willingly defied his will... when this was not the case.
This takes God from a belligerent asshole into now also being a sociopathic, deceptive manipulator.
Its abuser mentality.
What are you talking about? That's not what happened.
If that is what happened, it wasn't that bad.
If it was that bad, you deserved it.
Pretty much, yep.
The only 'domestic manufacturing' we really have left, that has any real export appeal ... is...
Military equipment and commercial jet aircraft.
... And both of those are now far, far less appealing as imports, when combined with Boeing's last decade of fuckups, Trump's absurd belligerence against former allies, and oh right, all of those are absurdly complex supply chains that are definitely reliant on imports from people we've just pissed off at at least critical point.
We... could have done the Green New Deal and tried to kickstart a massive solar and wind and such backed mfg boom, that could have had some export potential.
We could have done CHIPS and tried to bring at least a good amount of domestic chip fab to our own shores... probably not as great export potential, but it is a legitimate national security concern NOW, as well as just generally a reasonable plan due to how many things are 'smart' now...
But nope, none of that.
Nope we've got our auto industry, which is a fucking dumpster fire... and pharmaceuticals... which is a turbomega dumpster fire because 'who could have thought health care could be so complicated.'
... Like, I am no fan of neoliberal capitalism, but Trump and his fucking idiot troupe are apparently actually so stupid they don't even know what 'neoliberal capitalism' even is, what those words mean.
... It is literally impossible for any remaining small farmers at this point, and even the corpo ones ... you can't just fucking unplant a field, grow everything everywhere... so much of our farming exports were feedstock exports to other countries that now all hate us... food is gonna like triple in price within 6 months.
This is gonna be an American Holodomor if someone doesn't strangle everyone in this administration.