Gyroscopic Investing

But we did leap in to help the U.K. in another war. Didn't we?

Reub wrote: I wonder about the phrase "fanatical support of Israel".

Funny, I've never heard the phrase "fanatical support of Great Britain". Or "fanatical support of Australia".
Or France. Or South Korea. Or Poland. Or Japan. Or Haiti.

Its probably because we're all blood-stained with the illegal occupation of Palestine known as Israel.   The bigger a lie, the more people need to believe in it fanatically as if doing so would absolve themselves of the guilt complex.

Machine Ghost, what in your opinion would be the "proper" policy towards Israel/Palestine? To me it is a desperately hard issue. I do think history is relevant. The UK, USA, Canada etc did make it nigh on impossible for would-be-refugees trying to escape the holocaust (£20000 visa cost to the UK in 1939- not much help if you have had everything confiscated by the Nazis). The Allies expressly refused to bomb to railway tracks to Auschwitz despite petitions begging for that to be done etc etc. Against that background it is easy to understand how Israel developed a hard nosed attitude. Of course its the Palestinians who suffer and they have absolutely nothing to do with the holocust.

Might it help ease things a little if as many countries as possible (eg EU, USA, Saudi, Egypt, Canada, Russia, anyone else) signed up to allowing imigration of any Palestinian of Israeli citizen. That might take some pressure off. Ugandan Asians were "unjustly" expelled from Uganda and lost everything and yet they went on to do very well in the UK (the UK gave them all citizenship).
I've actually heard almost exactly the opposite suggestion -that it would help if countries didn't allow joint citizenship between Israel and the UK/USA /Russia etc. The argument was that people have a less pragmatic and less reasonable approach to trying to make peace if they know they have a bolt hole to go to if they push things to far and it all blows up.
It is a desperately hard issue.

stone wrote: Machine Ghost, what in your opinion would be the "proper" policy towards Israel/Palestine? To me it is a desperately hard issue. I do think history is relevant. The UK, USA, Canada etc did make it nigh on impossible for would-be-refugees trying to escape the holocaust (£20000 visa cost to the UK in 1939- not much help if you have had everything confiscated by the Nazis). The Allies expressly refused to bomb to railway tracks to Auschwitz despite petitions begging for that to be done etc etc. Against that background it is easy to understand how Israel developed a hard nosed attitude. Of course its the Palestinians who suffer and they have absolutely nothing to do with the holocust.

Might it help ease things a little if as many countries as possible (eg EU, USA, Saudi, Egypt, Canada, Russia, anyone else) signed up to allowing imigration of any Palestinian of Israeli citizen. That might take some pressure off. Ugandan Asians were "unjustly" expelled from Uganda and lost everything and yet they went on to do very well in the UK (the UK gave them all citizenship).
I've actually heard almost exactly the opposite suggestion -that it would help if countries didn't allow joint citizenship between Israel and the UK/USA /Russia etc. The argument was that people have a less pragmatic and less reasonable approach to trying to make peace if they know they have a bolt hole to go to if they push things to far and it all blows up.
It is a desperately hard issue.

It seems to me to only be a "hard issue" akin to those upholding slavery who were scared to face the consequences of their actions.  The Palestinians got fucked just as the Jews did.  We all need to accept that, bring both into council and go for a two-state solution.  There needs to be a healthy respect given to both sides as human beings.  If both sides are willing to swallow their pride and fear, then a compromise can be reached.  It's not that difficult in concept, but people rather conflate and obsess over the endless B.S. in their minds than actually deal with creating a peaceful and prosperous reality.  At some point, the path of least resistance from the endless violence and oppression (and Americanization of the world upping living standards) will force the issue upon everyone.  Already, there hundreds of thousands of Palestinians that are Israeli citizens.  Its not like terrorism is particular to any ethnicity or nationality.  It'll always be a crime.

Whenever a conflict goes on for too long, you can be assured there are vested interests in maintaining the status quo for purposes of power and profit.  In this case, I blame the war hawk NeoCons and the war hawk terrorists (oops, I meant "freedom fighters").  They will simply not know what to do with themselves with their security blanket rendered irrelevant.  Fear of the unknown is a great motivator to continue what has always been done, whether or not it is actually productive.  Resolving this conflict would also help nullfiy the influence of the Iranian mullahs and let the younger generation get their democratic reforms.  Continual relevance is what keeps war hawks in power and they are not passive about that.

I might come across as impatient on this issue and in ways I am.  But I suspect it's a luxury of living in the relative safe and stabe West where I've had the opportunity to extensively grow my thinking skills and help push humanity in a post-modern direction.  I'm not struggling for food and to avoid being shot everyday!  It is no more realistic to expect the Palestinians to help themselves anymore than it is to expect those in Chicago's South Side.  There's a point where expecting individualism and self-responsibility as a savior simply stops working.

Machine Ghost, I guess the Israel/Palestine situation is very much like the Northern Ireland situation or Bosnia or Rwanda etc. Whenever you have sectarian divisions between peoples who both claim that a given land belongs exclusively to them you get the same kind of mess.
Where would you set the borders for your two state solution? Would Palestine be an incredibly densely populated city state like Singapore? Would you expel lots of settlers from the West Bank? What about water rights?

Reub, in your opinion what would be the optimal way to deal with the issue? Should the Palestinians just man up and accept that they are destined to tough it out in refugee camps for eternity?

The Israel/Palstinian topic has been one we have struggled with at times here.

Can we get back to news sources or maybe get off topic in some other direction?

From The Smithsonian: Why Fire Makes Us Human
Some of you may remember the 2010 book mentioned in the essay.

I believe that almost all of the U.S. news sites are biased way left. Fox is the only one that is fair.

You're kidding, right?

By the way, Im exhausted with this right and left crap! If you would only take the time to understand your human flaws and biases you could see through this nonsense.

Unfortunately this Men's health article is the best one I can find at the moment: http://www.menshealth.com/health/angry-men

"Get a bunch of guys together in an art museum and tell half of them, 'Oh, you like Kandinsky,' and the other half, 'You like Klee,' and 10 minutes later, you'll have a fight going. It doesn't matter that none of them ever heard of Kandinsky or Klee. Forming coalitions is an intrinsic part of male psychology."

McDermott explains that once the battle lines have been drawn and the anger ignites, group members become increasingly convinced of their own side's rectitude—and the other side's moral bankruptcy. The more emotionally charged the topic—think gun control or abortion—the more difficult it becomes to see any value in the other side's perspective.

This blindness, it turns out, is no fluke.

"We all think we are right," says University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt, Ph.D., a researcher on the evolutionary psychology of morality. "Our righteous minds are designed by evolution to unite us into teams, divide us against other teams, and blind us to the truth."

hoost wrote: I get the daily digest from The Daily Capitalist.  I guess it's probably not a "news source", but has a lot of posts and commentary on various topics from an Austrian perspective.

When I go there, I get a message saying that they are out of business:

'I have decided to shut the Daily Capitalist down and this is our last post. I have been publishing this blog for 5 years and, as they say, it’s fun until it isn’t. Think of a blog like a newspaper where readers expect new content every day. That takes quite a bit of time and it has squeezed a lot of things out of my life. Now it’s time to get them back. While readership is good and there is lots to say, I need to move on.'

Libertarian666 wrote:

hoost wrote: I get the daily digest from The Daily Capitalist.  I guess it's probably not a "news source", but has a lot of posts and commentary on various topics from an Austrian perspective.

When I go there, I get a message saying that they are out of business:

'I have decided to shut the Daily Capitalist down and this is our last post. I have been publishing this blog for 5 years and, as they say, it’s fun until it isn’t. Think of a blog like a newspaper where readers expect new content every day. That takes quite a bit of time and it has squeezed a lot of things out of my life. Now it’s time to get them back. While readership is good and there is lots to say, I need to move on.'

Yes, unfortunately he shut it down a while back.  It was good while it lasted.

* Opting out at Google: http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/12/opt-out-google-ads/

*  Schneier on security: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/ ... _gaps.html

* The Reincarnation Machine (metal shredder):  http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/ ... on-machine

* "blood avocados" - a story from an interesting site called vocativ.

http://www.vocativ.com/underworld/crime/avocado/

* Kenny G is now a stock picker (No, not a satirical piece!)
http://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtop ... st=2189707

Just wanted to say that the error page at theweek is quite amusing. I had an article loaded when I accidentally unplugged my computer enough to shut it off. When I came back online, it said, something like, uh oh, someone broke the page you're looking for. Below it was an illustrated image of childlike versions of Obama and Boehner pointing at each other beneath a broken window, a bat and baseballs at their feet. Of course Boehner also had tears.

Well, a picture's worth a thousand words. Just go to http://theweek.com/ with something weird appended to that rightmost slash.

TennPaGa wrote: http://theweek.com/dualstow

It *is* pretty good.

Heheh, I'm honored! 

On the topic of the OP, a friend turned me on to The Skimm.  It's a daily email with commentary on the day's news, delivered on weekday mornings.  It's directed toward women, from what I can tell, but I find it to be quite good.

TennPaGa wrote: It's not really a news source, but a blog with a mix of things, but I recently re-discovered (thanks to PS's Ad-slapping Neo-reactionaryism thread):

http://slatestarcodex.com/

The guy posts on lots of interesting subjects.

http://slatestarcodex.com/about/ wrote:Topics on Slate Star Codex tend to center vaguely around this meta-philosophical idea of how people evaluate arguments for their beliefs, and especially whether this process is spectacularly broken in a way that may or may not doom us all. In between there’s a lot of cognitive science, psychology, history, politics, medicine, religion, statistics, transhumanism, corny puns, and applied eschatology.

I've ran out of time in the day (all day) to read anything more!  We're all turning into SVOL's just to process all this damn information!

Reub wrote: I believe that almost all of the U.S. news sites are biased way left. Fox is the only one that is fair.

Ahh, it's a satirical account.  Reub, I understand you at last!

National Enquirer; the only source used by the Men in Black.  At least NatEnq is honest as to what they are selling and you are getting. 

... Mountaineer

HitchBOT Was A Literal Pile Of Trash And Got What It Deserved
http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/hitchb ... 1721850503

An opinion piece. 

MachineGhost wrote:

TennPaGa wrote: It's not really a news source, but a blog with a mix of things, but I recently re-discovered (thanks to PS's Ad-slapping Neo-reactionaryism thread):

http://slatestarcodex.com/

The guy posts on lots of interesting subjects.

http://slatestarcodex.com/about/ wrote:Topics on Slate Star Codex tend to center vaguely around this meta-philosophical idea of how people evaluate arguments for their beliefs, and especially whether this process is spectacularly broken in a way that may or may not doom us all. In between there’s a lot of cognitive science, psychology, history, politics, medicine, religion, statistics, transhumanism, corny puns, and applied eschatology.

I've ran out of time in the day (all day) to read anything more!  We're all turning into SVOL's just to process all this damn information!

SVOL? I tried looking it up but wasn't finding anything in 45 seconds.

Regarding the thread title, The Intercept... Namely anything by Glenn Greenwald.

TennPaGa wrote:

Greg wrote:

MachineGhost wrote: I've ran out of time in the day (all day) to read anything more!  We're all turning into SVOL's just to process all this damn information!

SVOL? I tried looking it up but wasn't finding anything in 45 seconds.

That's because you forgot to use the forum's search function.

SVOL = Sedentary Vat Of Lard

It is a completely unserious term I coined last December in a response to Desert and modain a thread about intermittent fasting.  MG must have liked it because he started using it like it was a real thing.

Gotcha thanks for the info. I work for the military so everything is in acronyms, even though most of us don't know what the acronyms stand for. I could certainly see the U.S. at least continuing to lead towards SVOLs for everyone.

24 million watched the FoxNews debate last night! I think that they spoiled Jon Stewart's farewell event on the Comedy Network.