GOP has self-immolated - a large segment of MAGA feels betrayed by the Iran strikes and will defect. Also, there is an economic disaster in the works because low energy prices were one of the few things keeping inflation in check, and now they are going away. I suppose they got carried away by winning too much - this also happened to the Tories in the UK, and they went from total control to a disastrous collapse in a few years. It has been a long time since a major political party was destroyed (the GOP's predecessor party, the Whigs) in the USA but the GOP might manage it. Or they might get annexed by a new generation with a different agenda. Hard to say but there is no path forward for the current MIGA version of the GOP.

Iran's retaliatory strikes have now halted refineries in Qatar and Saudi Arabia - enjoy oil and gas prices shooting up. Meanwhile the Iranian people are rallying behind the Republican government, not rising up to overthrow it. I knew Trump was going to screw everything up, but this is next level stuff.

If even Erik Prince of Blackwater thinks this Iran thing is a bad idea....

I think inner city cores in Murka are effed. Commercial real estate is in a depression since 2022 because there is way too much of it. People are moving out of the biggest blue cities and down to the Sun Belt or even out of the country at record numbers. Also statistics show that despite attempts by corporations to force return to office, it is not working very well, with remote or hybrid work about as common as it was years ago. All of this means that the urban cores are getting a slow death of their tax base by 1000 cuts. There are some special cases where it will be propped up by various (communist) policies such as in NYC, Minneapolis, or Portland, but the general trend is very bad, and even in those cases it won't save the inner cores because they are crap heaps that no sane person would stay in.

I spent the last week dancemaxxing- I was out every night Monday through Friday and Saturday morning also. This has been an uncharacteristically extroverted period of time for me since early in the month. If I still cared about health and fitness as much as I did a few years ago, this should suffice to lose weight rapidly. But I picked up the bad habit of eating too much over the past year.

Thanks to my irl activities I do meet the youth but Gen Z is a strange breed and I don't claim to "get" them. Alpha is even weirder and we will be seeing and hearing a lot about them in about 5 years when the first of that cohort starts to enter uni and the job market in size. View quoted note →