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The MoA Week In Review – OT 2025-224
Note: This week’s review is incomplete. Typepad, the old system MoA was running on, is so far failing to export MoA post’s from September 6 to September 23. If that failure continues I will add those posts ‘by hand’. But the comments to those posts would be lost forever.
Last week’s posts on Moon of Alabama:
- Sep 24 – Welcome At The New Home Of Moon of Alabama
Related:
– There is still some background work ongoing to clean-up the appearance and functionality of MoA at its new home. Please bear with me for another week or so.
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Other issues:
Gaza:
Europe:
Empire:
U.S. Economy:
LLM Bubble:
Others:
Use as open (not related to the wars in Ukraine and Palestine) thread …
In the Declaration of Independence, our country’s founders excoriated the British king for prosecuting American colonists over “pretended offenses.” In time, the U.S. created a reliable system of justice which occasionally lapsed into kingly abuses, including during the Red Scare of the 1950s and the surveillance of civil rights leaders in the 1960s, when the DoJ targeted people for political reasons, but mainly, according to the nytimes Editorial Board, this was a system which functioned well.
Now, however, DJT has caused a breach in what the nytimes editorialists insist was an unassailably self-correcting uniquely American system: “By using the flimsiest pretexts to direct the prosecution of his perceived enemies, he is tearing at the basic notions of fairness that hold the country together.”
James Comey is one person on “an enemies list” which the nytimes claims DJT has compiled and nurtured for years. Comey led a criminal investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, and his role in the allegations that DJT had colluded w/ Moscow in order to defeat Rodham at the ballot box continued into the initial months of DJT’s first term as president. DJT’s assertion is that Comey helped illegally leak classified information about the Russiagate investigation to the nytimes and that he lied to Congress about doing so. Russiagate marked the covfefe stroganov era of American political life, and although we find ourselves 8 years removed from covfefe stroganov’s earliest manifestation, we’ve never been able to remove it completely from the menu.
When one side is in power, they lay into the side out of power. When the other side is in power, they do the same to those on the outside looking in. In America’s fondest ideals, a sturdy document like the Constitution and its raft of amendments will guard a republic like ours against such tinhorn abuses, and I’m not saying ultimately that it does not. It’s just that the political imagination is stuck in a rut of petty desperations, diverting whatever brainpower might exist among representatives away from sincerely engrossing issues of concern to the polity and funneling it instead toward small-minded retribution.
It’s not as if the court filings of DJT’s DoJ are so strange given political life in the U.S. since Rodham failed to win the presidential election in 2016. Joe’s Justice Department, for instance, set a new low bar for aggressively charging political rivals in criminal cases. What’s clear is that the nytimes editorialists prefer to believe that Joe’s DoJ was part of an honorable time-tested system of American-style justice which our founders saw back in 1776 as a remedy for kingly abuses.
Joe’s Justice Department moreover engaged in nakedly cynical lawfare prosecutions, two in NYC and one in Georgia, in order to remove any possibility of DJT’s ever regaining the White House. Joe’s DoJ indicted DJT for charges related to the J6 riot @ the Capitol and an attempt to overturn the 2020 election, along with the removal of sensitive documents from the White House, which DJT kept stored at Mar-a-Lago. Joe’s DoJ was scary as hell. The fact that two failed assassination attempts manifested when Joe’s lawfare failed to do the trick, only intensified the mendacity.
The nytimes editorialists may claim that targeting political opponents is indicative of “an authoritarian government in action,” but they uttered not a word when Joe’s DoJ went after political opponents similarly. We were no less living under “an authoritarian government in action” under Collective Biden than we are doing so now. In the cases involving DJT, the lawfare cases Joe’s DoJ brought against DJT, the nytimes editorialists now tell us, “there is no doubt that laws were broken, and there was significant evidence that Mr. Trump was a part of it.”
But in the case of Comey, coming on the heels of unredacted NSA information released by Tulsi Gabbard regarding the Russiagate-related manipulations as early as December 2016, the nytimes already knows that a criminal indictment against Comey is not credible: “No such evidence exists as yet” regarding the former FBI director’s actions, the editorialists crow.
If one side of political-Washington can weaponize justice, then every side can.
“Misusing the power to imprison people is uniquely chilling in a free society,” the nytimes editorialists sanctimoniously intone. “Our country has entered a grave new period of injustice,” they tell us, without noticing that we have been living in this “grave new period,” what I call covfefe, nonstop since at least 2016.
Posted by: steel_porcupine | Sep 28 2025 14:14 utc | 9
Maddie Block’s dad, New Mexico state senator Jay Block, traveled to Israel as part of the “50 States/One Israel” project, and returned spouting IDF talking points about how humanely Israel is prosecuting its war against Hamas, always carefully avoiding civilian areas, and about how no genocide is happening in Gaza: it’s just fake news-!
What’s cool is that 28-year old Maddie called her dad out publicly on TikTok for being a paid-for Bibi shill and questioning how it helps the constituents of New Mexico to have their elected state representative invest such political capital into Israel.
In her TikTok video, Maddie called her dad a “loser politician” and said: ‘I genuinely believe that Israel is, like, paying my dad now to peddle propaganda because he also posted this like super long tweet that’s like basically dissertation length, in which he tries to debunk what he calls false claims about the genocide in Gaza.” Maddie concluded her video by saying she thinks her dad “has sold his soul to the devil” and she wondered “How does meeting with Netanyahu help the local people of New Mexico?”
Apparently 250 other state-level representatives from all 50 states visited Israel during this same trip.
Since 7 October, Americans have had an eye-opening comprehension of the extent to which the Israel Lobby dominates not only national politics but even state & local politics.
Conceivably, that is to say, Americans have had this comprehension made available to them.
Should they care to probe, that is, what’s now lying out there, in full clarifying sunlight, for all to see.
Maddie Block, a Gen Z-er, exemplifies this. Plenty of others share her view. Though they may not have as a high-profile of a platform as she does, being the daughter of a New Mexico politician, they nonetheless constitute a growing population that is capable of parsing the hypocrisies, the sacrosanct orthodoxies and the actual reality on the ground.
Posted by: steel_porcupine | Sep 28 2025 15:22 utc | 14
Charlie Kirk. I was cutting up a pile of vegetables and listening to G. Galloway,
https://tinyurl.com/2cypfs6a ..
About Kirk, he mentions some movie that has a character called Charles Kirkland in it. Which prompted me to consider the symbolism.
Charles orginally means *da Man* a free man (not a serf, a servant), a powerful man, for ex. Charlemagne, King Charles, Carolus, etc.
CK’s T-shirt reads FREEDOM in white letters.
The ‘theatre’ where CK spoke is a clear, well thought out, template of the Hanukkah menorah, which has 9 branches.
The lines are straight, used to make a ‘theatre.’ The 7 branch menorah is well known, I had to look up the 9 branches one, 4 to the left, 4 to the right, with a middle branch that is either much lower of much higher than the others – It represents the light that is used to light up all the other branches.
CK’s podium ‘tent’, his chair, was set right at the center spot — he brings the Light …to other lights…
Some label the middle branch the second coming of Yeshua.
https://www.history.com/articles/8-things-you-should-know-about-hanukkah
https://uk.pinterest.com/pin/137570963612930871/
Jewish shop, https://tinyurl.com/yw2cphhk
A miasma of heavy Judeo-Christian iconography, symbols, signs, appeals, with CK a Super-Star, quasi-Jesus, figure.
The MEGA Memorial echoes this as well. Trump, Vance speaking, flags down to half-mast, etc. — Note, CK’s parents and sister did not attend.
To jump from the symbolic to the concrete, Erika made a big show of ‘forgiving you’, this was a clear message, signalling that she would never accuse anyone or seek revenge, her word. What else could she do?
Posted by: Noirette | Sep 28 2025 15:53 utc | 19
Not read comments yet.
I fell into the trap of having opinions, oh no I ruined my Sunday XD
Some criticism. I’m cutting it short because it got so insanely long but it is still long.
1. “Why Warm Countries Are Poorer” ( https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/mountains ) is interesting but it is still too superficial and discards both stark internal differences and large historical changes in favor of averages that do not truly signify what they are interpreted as.
As a brief example I’ve been told Norway used to be the poorest or second poorest country in Europe, something like that. Then there is Portugal and Spain…
Europe as an example has been plagued with immense poverty for much of its existence, poverty some of which was exported during colonialism. Then there’s the issue of the black death (pestilence) which killed a lot of people. People can fill in many other missing bits; revolutions, wars, religious hysteria,…
A lot of it isn’t that long ago. Most of it within the last five or six hundred years.
World War Two ruined a lot of Europe. Look at the 1950ies both in the UK and on the continent, or 60ies and 70ies too. Much stretched well into the 1980ies too, traces even today.
So no easy answers to whatever the lucky or unlucky outcome is or may be.
2. “In the valley of the vampires – Epizode Zero” ( https://www.nefariousrussians.com/p/in-the-valley-of-the-vampires ) may have several valid points or at least valid topics for discussion but reads as a polemic on a narrow view of the current status rather than anything else.
Ah yes “the Spectacle”. I have watched the movie (irony overload!) based on the book and decided not to ever read that book. It perhaps succeeds in being everything opposite to what it criticizes, or maybe not? It tried to be a(n) (anti)spectacle but failed? It confused itself into oblivion but gained a cult following? Life is too short.
Whoever it may concern needs to go for a walk, leaving any device at home. Spend half an hour in a park at least. Look at the sky no matter the weather. Watch a bird, a squirrel, a fly, grass, a human, anything alive.
It’s not “the Internet”, it’s a specific fad (“social” media), like roller skates and walkmans, it’s just a little bit more stubborn than most, has a few more iterations than most. Anyone remember diskman? Mp3 players? How about in the other direction: ghettoblasters? That’s at least twenty maybe thirty years of a mutating fad right there, same thing, and very useful in some cases unless you stopped paying any attention to traffic around you and got yourself run over and maybe killed.
Or stopped seeing the world right in front of you.
For those truly interested the topic of “the Internet” including its technical underpinnings and detail; it and many subtopics are established topics for academic study in both media science and information science, perhaps also in sociology.
DARPA not Pentagon, RFCs not mysterious political forces, the at times very slow and painful nuts and bolts of interconnecting networks (that is what “internet” means; the commonly capitalized “the Internet” is the glorified hyperbole of that), the strong subcultures that still (at least a little bit) influence for both better and worse, all of that looks like it is missing and is not something that can be plucked out of thin air nor ignored (it’s minute and detailed history since the 1950ies documented in (academic) book form as well as in other forms of media, mostly written resources), it has to be studied and understood even if one lived it oneself because the subject matter is really that huge.
I’m cutting the rest (far too much, including how large it all the details are) because I start talking about the internet in more detail and the author of the article clearly isn’t talking about or interested in that, none of it, only about “the kids” (at any age) and what they’re doing.
Posted by: Sunny Runny Burger | Sep 28 2025 17:26 utc | 30
Posted by: Peter AU1 | Sep 28 2025 15:28 utc | 16
RE: The official numbers coming out of one of the most densely populated places on earth are meaningless. ”
Little changed since the first few months.”
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"Urgently addressing Gaza's plight is the right thing to do morally and is in the strategic interest of the U.S.," the WaPo editorial board told us on 18 October 2023, right before Joe went to Tel Aviv and embraced Bibi and 10 days after Israel commenced its Dresdenization of Gaza.
Amazingly, it was as if the U.S. MSM believed absolutely that world opinion was aligned w/ Israel to such an extent that the world would turn its eyes from the indiscriminate bombing of civilian neighborhoods in Gaza.
The U.S., itself a stenographer for Antony B's State Department system, thought the world would be so outraged by Hamas's cross-border attack on 7 October that it would give Israel in effect a hall pass for unmitigated rage-filled genocide.
Nope.
Curiously, though, where the MSM and Collective Biden's admin had shrieked since 7 October 2023 that Israel has a right to defend itself, the WaPo editorial board revised this slightly on 18 October 2023: “Israel has every right to respond militarily.”
In other words, the WaPo board conflated Israel’s national defense with its military response.
A goal of Joe’s first trip to Tel Aviv was “to help Israel see its moral and strategic interests clearly.”
Well, we know how that turned out.
Joe hugged Bibi.
He promising unwavering support.
The 2000-lb bunker buster bombs have not stopped dropping since.
“Outside the city are the dogs, the sorcerers, the sexually immoral, the murderers, the idol worshippers, and all weho love to live a lie” — Revelations-22:15
Posted by: steel_porcupine | Sep 28 2025 18:20 utc | 39
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