06-08-26 savo
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06-08-26 spal
Carib - it is mythology, as in the end is the entirety of our experience ... yours and mine.
Jewish Identity as Construct: "Born Jewish" is a post-birth consensus label (via matrilineal rule in Talmud Kiddushin 68b). It is not a biological fact. Acculturation comes later, shaping a cultural/ethnic-religious peoplehood. Jewishness isn't racial. It's a shared, imposed narrative.
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06-08-26 savo
carib... i understand the part that israelis want to defen their line... i do not equate jews with israelis though...
the part that i do not understand is when did it became accepted that israelis have the right to level a city because there are enemies of israel in that city... or flatten a building because there is a guy they do not like in that building. |
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06-08-26 spal
Because Jews share genetic background with their non-Jewish Middle Eastern neighbors, there is no distinct "Jewish race" at a DNA level.
Instead, there is a regional geographic pool. A DNA test can tell you your ancestors came from the Levant, but it cannot distinguish between an ancient Judean, a Phoenician, or a Nabataean. Therefore, using genetics to claim a completely unique, exclusive racial identity fails because the science points to a shared regional cousinhood. |
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06-08-26 spal
not by a pre-existing "Jewish gene"
A myth. |
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06-08-26 spal
Furthermore, genetic studies of Jewish populations show that while there are distinct maternal "founder lineages" (particularly among Ashkenazi Jews), many of those ancient maternal ancestors were local European or Mediterranean women who integrated into the community millennia ago. If a maternal line can begin with a non-Jewish woman who converted or integrated, then the line is defined by her acceptance into the narrative, not by a pre-existing "Jewish gene."
Jewishness IS just customs and mythology ... a shit ton of the latter. |
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06-08-26 spal
Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is passed entirely from mother to child, unchanged, for generations. This is in ALL humans.
It creates a direct maternal lineage.
Because every human on earth has a direct maternal lineage traceable via mtDNA, there is nothing biologically unique about a maternal line itself. An mtDNA sequence can tell you about deep ancestral migrations, but it cannot stamp a person with a legal or national identity. |
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06-08-26 carib
Spal: the point is judaism is not a creed, like catholicism or islam, but a "people". one can become a muslim just be reciting a formula, or become catholic by accepting baptism.. but one cannot "become a jew" as easily, unless one is born from a jewish mother.
Having lost their country, Judea 2020 years ago, and having been persecuted ever since, it is understandable they wanted to take it back, and preserve it.The arabs have many countries, the jews only one (besides New York City... ;-) |
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06-08-26 spal
| Zionism can be understood as a defensive particularism - in a flawed world. I understand this and clearly the flaws of this world are self evident ... not just to alien spacecraft. |
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06-08-26 carib
| Spal: I see your point, of course, but discussions on the issue tend to become toxic, because they end up with equating zionism to racism. |
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06-08-26 spal
I will now be referred to a Buddhist Schpal ... or Dalai Schpal should you prefer ...
;)) |
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06-08-26 spal
| Buy not claiming or insisting an an "identity", but keeping things always "contingent", fluid, temporary, approximate, uncertain this clearly admits ultimate impermanence certainly in our sublunary sphere. To insist on anything else is actually lunatic ... such as the quality of "eternal" jewishness. This is not scientific or logical ... but reeks of arrogance in fact. Of course it doesn't end with the jews - it is simply very sophisticated version. Man's capacity to believe and hope far exceeds his capacity to think. |
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06-08-26 spal
and that anyone who doesn’t like it can go to hell.
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Yeah sure guys. Take your religion and shove it. But clearly here the attitude. "They are exclusively right".
The guy just said it. |
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06-08-26 spal
This is exactly who we are: the Jews.
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Sounds very much like a search for an exclusive identity - as always a problem in the end. |
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06-08-26 Merlino
OK
Following an opinion. Not mine as I am just an outside observer, however likely accurate imho.
"This reaffirms what I’ve been saying since March. Trump believed—and continues to believe—that he can do the same thing with Iran as he did with Venezuela: make a few moves following a brief military incident, issue threats, and then strike a deal with the same regime, only now running it in a neocolonial manner from the White House. He dreams of applying his business approach to the complex conflicts of the Middle East and cannot accept that his method won’t work. It shows he doesn’t understand what has been happening in Tehran since 1979 and why. Israel explains it to him, the Gulf states explain it to him, and the Iranian resistance in exile explains it to him, but it’s no use. With Iran, it’s the same as with Imperial Japan or Nazi Germany: it’s all or nothing; they won’t surrender without taking the bunker in Berlin or without Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Iran will not yield because the very political survival of Shiite Islam is at stake. In this Trumpist context, a 1938 Chamberlain-style model, only Israel benefits in the region and advances relentlessly with every new war proposed to it. The Arabs of the monarchy or emirate line are harmed—cowards useless for any service, militarily and morally incapable of defending themselves. The Iranian people, who were finally yearning for their liberation, are harmed. Trump himself is harmed, as he falls short of even an Obama or a Carter. Trump is a friend of Israel but fails to fully grasp that Jews, in the era of political Zionism from 1897 onward, have no choice but to defend themselves. When we Jews look at Iran, we automatically see the Amalekites, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Seleucid Greeks, the Romans of the first and second centuries, the Catholic Monarchs, the Russian tsars, the Nazis, Nasser, and Arafat. We don’t start from the here and now out of context, because we know the history and the deeper motives behind anti-Jewish action, and we swear they won’t exterminate us. We also make it clear that outsiders don’t matter, and that anyone who doesn’t like it can go to hell. Pure realpolitik, naturally—image doesn’t matter; all that matters is winning, always winning. This is exactly who we are: the Jews." |
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06-08-26 carib
Merlino.
one cop's survival is at stake, the other cop's is not. |
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06-08-26 Merlino
Israel responds to Iranian missiles despite US calls for restraint
.....................................
Good cop & bad cop roles? |
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06-08-26 carib
Russia’s security services shut parts of a special surveillance system protecting President Vladimir Putin and his closest aides in the wake of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s assassination in Tehran, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The system — which is separate from the nearly 300,000 cameras that surveil Moscow’s citizens — was only turned back on after engineers combed through it in an attempt to hermetically seal it off from the internet, said one of the people.
The extraordinary precautions were taken after Israeli intelligence harvested vast amounts of video footage from Iran’s traffic cameras to help pinpoint the exact location and timing of a February 28 meeting between Khamenei and his closest aides. Several top security officials were killed at the meeting in the opening salvo of the joint US-Israel war on the Islamic republic.
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06-08-26 carib
| Meanwhile.. Iran said it was halting its military operations against Israel on Monday after a cycle of retaliatory attacks between the two countries had threatened to jeopardise peace efforts in the Middle East. |
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06-08-26 carib
The impression is that Trump, emboldened by the success of the Venezuela Blitzkrieg, stepped into a hornet nest in Iran, without a clear plan of the endgame, and now is stuck.
Personally, I think the only viable solution is regime change in Tehran, performed by the iranians themselves with external help.
But I would not have started the war without a clear definition of the objective. |
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06-08-26 carib
The following is probably a good summary of the situation:
The current situation can be described as a “strategic cul-de-sac.”
Tehran increasingly calculates that time and endurance favor the regime’s survival, while Washington remains constrained by the political and economic costs of another prolonged Middle Eastern confrontation.
Neither side appears willing to fully escalate, yet neither side possesses the strategic flexibility necessary to resolve the underlying conflict itself.
As a result, the core disputes remain fundamentally unchanged. Iran’s nuclear ambitions, missile and drone capabilities, proxy networks, and the future security architecture of the Gulf remain unresolved questions rather than settled realities.
What is most likely to emerge is therefore not a comprehensive peace agreement, but a prolonged framework of managed confrontation designed less to end the conflict than to regulate its intensity and postpone its next phase. |
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06-08-26 carib
| Victor: define "agree with DT". he changes position every 30 seconds.. |
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06-08-26 spal
The boring stuff hasn't worked for a long time.
History suggests that's exactly the moment it starts to.
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Bring it |
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06-08-26 spal
Amazon's free cash flow is projected to go NEGATIVE
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My heart bleeds ... not. FFS who cares. |
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06-08-26 spal
Sundar Pichai admitted the thing keeping him up at night is "compute capacity."
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This mofo should honestly just give it up. Imagine being such a pastsy that something as banal as compute capacity would keep you up at night. What a complete wanker. |
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06-08-26 victor
carib, so netanyahu doesn't care about dt?
making him look like a fool.
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Israel responds to Iranian missiles despite US calls for restraint |
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06-07-26 victor
carib, do you agree with dt?
//
Netanyahu will have ‘no choice’ but to accept deal: Trump
Trump has told The Financial Times that he calls “all the shots… he doesn’t call the shots”, referring to Netanyahu.
He added that Netanyahu will have “no choice” but to accept a deal.
The US president also said that Iran’s attacks on Israel had not changed his desire to reach an agreement.
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06-07-26 carib
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06-07-26 savo
Mike Levin
@MikeLevin
Follow the money on this one. It is rotten to the core.
The Pentagon just lent $620,000,000 to a tiny North Carolina startup called Vulcan Elements. The company is two years old.
It had fewer than 50 employees.
And three months before the deal was announced, Donald Trump Jr.’s venture firm quietly took a stake in it.
Here is the part the administration tried to bury.
Of the dozens of companies the Pentagon was weighing, Vulcan was the only deal initiated by a top White House aide. That aide was Peter Navarro, a close friend of Trump Jr. The order came down to move fast.
One official put it plainly: The call came from the White House. We have to get this done.
Staff worked late nights to push it through in weeks. Deals like this normally take many months of vetting. And when it closed, Vulcan’s valuation jumped from about 200 million dollars to roughly 2 billion.
A windfall for the investors, including the president’s son.
This is public money. Your money.
Routed through the Pentagon to enrich the president’s family and their friends. The Bush administration’s own chief ethics lawyer called it corruption we pay for.
And there is more coming.
A drone parts company Trump Jr. holds a stake in is also under Pentagon review.
This is not a one-off. It is a pattern. The president’s family is treating the federal Treasury like a private bank, and the bill lands on every taxpayer. |
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06-07-26 savo
Thierry from arvy 🇨🇭
@ThierryBorgeat
🚨 We may be looking at the rarest market setup in 50 years.
The S&P 500's four historic drawdowns since 1972:
– 1973 Inflation: -43%
– 1987 Liquidity: -30%
– 2000 Tech: -47%
– 2008 Credit: -55%
Each one was driven by ONE dominant risk.
Right now, all four are present at the same time.
1. INFLATION
A commodity supercycle. Energy, metals, agriculture all in multi-year base breakouts. The Fed's preferred inflation gauge has been above 2% for 18 of the last 24 months.
2. LIQUIDITY
The largest equity supply shock since 2000. SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic raising ~$275B combined. Google flipping from $60B/year buybacks to $80B net issuance. Over $1 trillion of IPO and lockup supply hitting the Russell 3000 in 2026.
3. TECH
Semiconductors trading 73% above their 200-day moving average – the largest stretch since March 2000. Climax run signals across the AI complex. Micron, Palantir, SMCI, the SOX index, all showing the textbook O'Neil sell pattern.
4. CREDIT
Apollo, KKR, BlackRock, Blue Owl, Cliffwater, Partners Group – all gating redemptions on their evergreen funds in the last 90 days. The private credit machine is freezing in real time.
Never in 50 years have all four risks been simultaneously present.
But here's the part nobody talks about
While the AI Big 10 has gone vertical, quality stocks have been left for dead.
– Berkshire Hathaway: trailing the S&P 500 by hundreds of basis points
– Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, Pepsi: trading at multi-year relative lows
– HEICO, Union Pacific, MSCI: making boring new highs while everyone watches Nvidia
– Healthcare vs. S&P 500: 25-year relative low
The last time this happened?
December 1999. Barron's ran a cover titled "What's Wrong, Warren?" – mocking Buffett for being a dinosaur, for missing the internet, for refusing to pay for growth at any price.
Berkshire was down 19% in 1999 while the Nasdaq was up 85%.
What followed:
– Berkshire +29% over the next 24 months
– Nasdaq -78% over the next 30 months
The setup today
Four historic risks stacked simultaneously, while the boring, durable, cash-flowing businesses that always survive these regimes have been treated like dead money for years.
The math doesn't get more asymmetric than this.
Quality stocks aren't out of style.
They're being orphaned.
That's when generational positions are built.
The boring stuff hasn't worked for a long time.
History suggests that's exactly the moment it starts to. |
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06-07-26 savo
Ricardo
@Ric_RTP
Big Tech just ran out of money building AI and what they're doing to cover it up should be illegal.
Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta are spending a combined $700 BILLION this year on AI infrastructure.
This eats up 94% of their total operating cash flow.
The richest companies in human history are almost broke. And instead of slowing down, they're covering it up with the biggest financial engineering operation since 2008:
Google just sold $80 billion in stock to fund AI infrastructure. That was their first equity raise in 20 YEARS.
The last time Google needed to sell stock, YouTube didn't even exist. Sundar Pichai admitted the thing keeping him up at night is "compute capacity."
The company that prints $100 billion a year in ad revenue just told Wall Street it isn't enough anymore.
Amazon's free cash flow is projected to go NEGATIVE this year for the first time ever. Morgan Stanley estimates a $17 billion deficit and Bank of America says $28 billion.
The most profitable logistics machine on Earth is about to burn more cash than it generates, and they quietly filed with the SEC saying they may need to raise even more debt and equity to keep building.
All four hyperscalers are now borrowing hundreds of billions in bonds to keep the AI buildout alive. These were the most cash-rich companies in human history, and they're leveraging themselves to the teeth to build infrastructure that nobody has proven will generate enough revenue to pay for itself.
And the cracks are already starting to show:
Broadcom makes the custom AI chips that power Google, Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic. This week their AI revenue TRIPLED year over year, sales grew 48%, and profits smashed every Wall Street estimate.
The reward for all of that was $320 billion in value erased in a single trading session.
Their CEO Hock Tan went on the earnings call and exposed three things about the AI industry:
Google is already shopping for cheaper AI chip alternatives, broadcom abandoned its strategy of selling complete AI systems and is now retreating to selling bare chips at lower margins.
And despite supposedly "unprecedented demand," Tan refused to raise his full-year forecast, which tells you everything about what he's actually seeing behind the curtain.
Wall Street heard all three and hit the sell button so hard it dragged AMD, Intel, and the entire chip sector down with it.
When a company triples its AI revenue and gets punished because tripling isn't fast enough, the expectations have left the atmosphere entirely.
And here's the really scary part...
These companies ARE your retirement account. Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta, and Nvidia make up roughly 30% of the S&P 500. If you have a 401k or an index fund, you are already exposed to this bet whether you chose to be or not.
Every single one of these companies is telling you AI will generate trillions in revenue. But right now the math says they're spending trillions FIRST and hoping the revenue shows up later.
If the revenue catches up, this becomes the greatest infrastructure buildout in human history. Bigger than railroads and bigger than the internet.
If it doesn't, the companies that make up a third of the American stock market just leveraged their balance sheets into the largest write-down cycle since 2000.
And unlike the dot-com crash, this time the bubble companies aren't random startups with no revenue. They're the backbone of the entire global economy. |
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06-07-26 savo
spa... i understand your point... but i miss our old imperfect human debates full of spelling errors and misconceptions... going around them we usually come up with very interesting ideas.
I have the feeling AI is becoming a sort of intruder in our debates... |
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06-07-26 spal
Savo - assume my stuff is 100% AI that would be the best approach. You see in my case I assume most of what I read (particularly from "randos" on the internet to be inchoate droolings, largely emotive that people have essentially "pulled out of their asses" ... but I digress.
My own mind is very small and weak, but I do think my logic and reasoning capabilities to be largely intact.
AI is actually a great tool as instantly you can pool all considerations that largely would be forgotten or incorrectly recalled. thus refreshing and refrying is always my base line ... I prefer that to instant droolings and blurtings. |
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06-07-26 spal
| Savo it is mixed - some is not. Don't read (ignore) the bits you don't want. |
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06-07-26 carib
| Likewise.. the US can lower rates in front of inflation.. but there are consequences.. |
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06-07-26 carib
SPAL: I concur. Ultimately, Veny restructuring.. will be what Trump & c will decide it to be.
But the credibility of the US jurisdiction for issuing debt will be impacted by abuses, if any. |
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06-07-26 victor
dt: to keep it simple, i don't care about inflation!! :-))
//
Bloomberg) -- President Donald Trump said Federal Reserve policymakers would be wrong to raise interest rates after a blowout US jobs report, while insisting he doesn’t want to influence Kevin Warsh before he chairs his first Fed meeting.
“Nowadays when you have good reports, the market goes down because they think they’re going to raise interest rates,” Trump said in an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press airing Sunday. “There’s no reason to raise interest rates.”
Job growth in May topped all forecasts in Friday’s US employment report, prompting a selloff in Treasuries and leading traders to fully price in a quarter-point increase in the Fed’s benchmark rate by the end of the year.
Trump’s comment adds to the economic and political forces tugging at Warsh as he prepares to chair his first Federal Open Market Committee meeting on June 16–17. Raising the benchmark rate “is the wrong thing to do,” Trump said. “We should actually lower interest rates,” he said.
Trump nominated Warsh to head the Fed after a relentless public campaign for the central bank to cut borrowing costs, though he has since said he wants Warsh to “do your own thing.”
Yet the selloff in the bond market and recalibration of Fed wagers reflects growing confidence that the Fed under Warsh will need to raise borrowing costs to contain inflation that’s running above target.
“I’m living with Kevin,” Trump told NBC. “I have a lot of respect for him, but my feeling is that when a country is doing well, they shouldn’t be penalized by immediately raising interest rates.”
“You know, we have debt, we have other things,” he added, “We have things we want to take care of. I want to go bigger on the military.”
Rate-hike expectations were reinforced by the US labor-market readings on Friday as nonfarm payrolls increased 172,000 last month after upward revisions to the prior two months, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. The US unemployment rate held steady at 4.3%.
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06-07-26 savo
It is impossible to calculate what the Republic can pay without explicitly dictating what PDVSA will spend on capital expenditure to restore production.
Precisely... that is why pdvsa has to be restructured first...
in any case spal.. you are quoting too much AI... most of which is refried knowledge...would be good if you could introduce those posts that are AI by saying they are AI |
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06-07-26 spal
| Quod princeps vult, ius concedit |
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06-07-26 spal
No ... but if the U.S. government decides that a comprehensive settlement is in the foreign policy interest of the US, it can maintain these asset shields indefinitely for non-participating creditors.
Consequently, while an obligor change cannot retroactively erase a summary judgment, geopolitics can render that judgment permanently un-enforceable, functionally forcing holdouts to the negotiating table anyway. |
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06-07-26 carib
Spal: would future changes of corporate obligor have retro-active effects on creditors already holding summary judgements?
I doubt... |
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06-07-26 spal
| Emerging legal strategies propose utilizing the specific phrasing in PDVSA's pari passu clauses to explicitly subordinate non-exchanged debt. By passing domestic or structural regulations that mandate paying the newly restructured bonds ahead of defaulted legacy claims, holdouts face the prospect of never seeing cash flow, rendering holdout litigation economically unviable. |
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06-07-26 spal
Some PDVSA indentures contain an unusual clause explicitly permitting a change of the primary corporate obligor with a simple majority vote.
Advisors have noted that a restructured PDVSA could legally transfer the legacy debt to a hollow shell company while moving the operational oil assets to a "New-New PDVSA," leaving holdouts suing an empty entity. |
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06-07-26 spal
No satanists only only legal logic validating economic reality.
Of course PDVSA holders will talk their book ... some even scream it.
Under Crystallex litigation U.S. federal courts ruled that PDVSA is effectively the "alter ego" of the Venezuelan state.
In credit rating architecture, an SOE almost never commands a rating higher than its sovereign parent. This is because the state holds the ultimate intervention power—it can alter royalty rates, divert export revenues, or expropriate corporate cash at will. PDVSA cannot be creditworthy if the Republic is insolvent.
Venezuela's entire macroeconomic framework and debt sustainability analysis (DSA) depend on oil.
It is impossible to calculate what the Republic can pay without explicitly dictating what PDVSA will spend on capital expenditure to restore production.
This is the reality ... blurtings and protests aside.
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06-07-26 savo
| and the looters continue looting... |
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06-07-26 savo
i do not think that is a problem.... governments can do many things that they do not do... but in order for people to believe that the company has to be run as an autonomous entity...
pbr was 100% state owned and now it isn't |
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06-07-26 carib
“Treasury will utilise all tools available to allow Iranian assets to be made available to our Gulf allies to support rebuilding and repairs for any future damage caused by Iran,” a senior Trump administration official told the FT on Saturday.
The official added that Bessent had “directed his team to assess conditions among our Gulf allies and request comprehensive estimates of the costs associated with repairing damage Iran has inflicted since the start of the conflict”.
“Treasury will further consider whether Iranian assets could be used to support repairs for past damages,” said the official.
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06-07-26 carib
Savo: I think PDVsa shares and dividends are a "commercial asset".
Problem is if Sov creditors can attach it.. |
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06-07-26 savo
carib.. i thought you were saying it is saudi american today...
reinforces the point.. if veni is a protectorate its oil company should not require a haircut of debt... just a re-profiling given that most bonds have already matured or are close to mature.
Something very odd is happening here.. Veni should never put the rep and pdvsa in the same sentence...it gives ammunition to alter ego.
I still feel that this will be corrected.
Delcy could perfectly well restructure pdvsa debt. Nobody in the opposition will complain if that helps increase oil production. But the rep should be a matter left for the next elected government.
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06-07-26 Merlino
In 1944, CASOC was renamed the Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco). To manage massive capital investments
...............................
1944, that is before the end of WWII in 1945. Of course by 1944 that region was secured for USA/UK/French interests....I sense some analogies with current Veni situation and her pre transition/pro USA gov |
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06-07-26 carib
History of ArAmco:
The U.S. Consortium Era (1944–1980):
In 1944, CASOC was renamed the Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco). To manage massive capital investments, SOCAL brought in Texaco, the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey (Exxon), and Socony-Vacuum (Mobil) as co-owners. For decades, this American consortium operated and expanded Aramco’s footprint across Saudi Arabia.
Nationalization (1973–1980):
In the 1970s, the Saudi Arabian government began gradually acquiring ownership of the company. A 25% interest was acquired in 1973, which expanded to 60% in 1974, and finally 100% control by 1980.
Renaming (1988): Eight years after full Saudi ownership, the company was officially renamed the Saudi Arabian Oil Company (Saudi Aramco), reflecting its binational history and its role as the national oil company.
Given Veny is now an american protectorate, as Saudi de facto was after WW2... |
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06-07-26 savo
irresective of the ownership of aramco... the big question is who recommended veni to bundle together pdvsa and the rep?
it is pure nonsense... the corp has to be restructured so that the sov can then run a sustainability analysis to know what they can and can not pay depending on the dividends and taxes it can obtain from pdvsa.
I can only think of the satanist who spread the fantasy of Pdvsa II and paid lawyers to write about it. |
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06-07-26 savo
carib.. i do not know if this is up to date
The primary ownership stakes are split as follows:
~82%: Owned directly by the Government of Saudi Arabia
~16%: Held by the Public Investment Fund (PIF), which is Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund
~2%: Publicly traded on the Saudi Exchange (Tadawul)
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