I just had a good call with President Trump. Canada is implementing our $1.3 billion border plan — reinforcing the border with new choppers, technology and personnel, enhanced coordination with our American partners, and increased resources to stop the flow of fentanyl. Nearly…

— Justin Trudeau (@JustinTrudeau) February 3, 2025

The instability, the trumpflation - really not good for folks that enjoy the market.

"While many mohemmadians may have marvelous qualities the religion, on the whole, produces indolence and sloth."

-Jacob "Jack" Churchhill 1988, at the Peepee and Bull pub

I recently polled my people and this is what they wanted me to write about. Fortunately I can use declassified CIA documents for most of my research.

There were multiple huge crises in the Middle East in 1958 that seemed like they were going to lead the world into war. There was even a major deployment of US troops there. But you never hear about them. Why? Because there wasn't a war. I'm going to tell you some stories about what scared the heck out of everyone in the USA and the Middle East but they managed to get it under control. Think of it as the anti-Chernobyl.

Buddy Holly - Peggy Sue. Yeah, those were the days.

Syria

The first big crisis of the year, the one that got everything rolling, was Syria's admission to the United Arab Republic. Or to say it another way, Syria being annexed by Egypt. Every state in the region and the superpowers had been expecting something like this to happen eventually since World War II. Now it seemed that the balance of power had been overturned and all of the pent-up conflicts in the Middle East were about to blow up.

I'm guessing it wasn't really a 99.99% vote in favor of it because Nasser had grave misgivings about this and could barely be persuaded to.

Syria was the most failed "failed state" that you could imagine. It owes its existence to the French demand at the end of World War I that after all their sacrifices they deserved their own chunk of the Ottoman Empire. In 1946 it gained its independence but it didn't have much of a national identity other than being the land that France used to own. It was widely expected that it would soon be absorbed into a larger Arab state with Iraq and Jordan. But for extremely complicated reasons this didn't happen and little Syria survived.

Notice how everything he mentions being in "Syria" is in what we call "Lebanon" now.

Soon it wished it hadn't survived. After independence Syria had about one successful coup every two years and countless failed ones. By 1958 most of the factions had been purged from political life and it was Ba'athists who held a tenuous grip on power. They couldn't even trust their fellow Ba'athists, and worse, the Communists were becoming dangerously powerful. And nobody likes a commie. In order to make sure they didn't seize control, in January 1958 Syria's leaders came up with a creative strategy: Become part of Egypt.

One of the main factions that briefly held power there in the early 1950s was the batshit crazy SSNP. I heard the British were supporting them back then.

Egypt

This was pretty crazy but not as crazy as it sounds. There was a strong desire across the region to unite into one Arab nation. What is the heart of the Arab nation? Egypt. And its leader Nasser was the only one who could do this. Two years earlier in the Suez Crisis, Eisenhower ordered Britain and France back into their cucksheds and forbid them to invade other countries anymore. But Arabs saw this as a great victory where Nasser stood up to the colonial powers and defeated them, which at least had a kernel of truth to it. Many people across all the Arab world considered him to be their leader and were annoyed that their country hadn't joined him yet.

Some of the most extreme cope I've ever seen. British troops withdrawing in humiliation from Egypt under American orders, never to return.

The only problem is, how do you get Nasser onboard? He wants to to unify the Arabs, but he doesn't want to start out by being responsible for this basket case country that doesn't have its shit together. Eventually he agrees on a few conditions: The Syrian people have to vote for him. All political parties will be dissolved. The army will get out of politics.

The conservative monarchies are not about to take this lying down. The Saudis try to arrange a coup before unification can happen, but it is terribly inept. The King of Iraq, who kinda hoped he was gonna be the one to annex Syria and lead the Arab world, proposes merging with Jordan. It's another pro-British monarchy ruled by his brother so it makes sense in these dangerous times. The problem is, the Saudis are afraid of Nasser but they're also afraid of Iraq and Jordan getting too powerful, so they have trouble coordinating a response.

This is what the government of Iraq was like in the 1950s. I wonder what will happen to them...

The UAR

On February 22 Egypt and Syria join together as the United Arab Republic.

• The kings of Iraq and Jordan are worried that this will lead the many Nasserists among their own people to overthrow them.

• King of Saudi Arabia is too busy dealing with getting overthrown by his brother to do much.

• President Chamoun of Lebanon is extremely alarmed. The domestic situation is already really screwed up and the last thing he needs is Nasserists on 80% of the country's border.

• Israel doesn't really care since both Egypt and Syria are already hostile to them. Their only problem is if Iraq and Jordan merge because Iraq would be the senior partner and they are not fans of the whole Zionism thing.

• The British are desperate to keep alive the Arab monarchies they set up after WWI. Their whole imperial plan was to build these up and now they only have Iraq and Jordan left.

• The USA is ambivalent. Nasser is hard to deal with, but at least he kept the commies out of the region.

• The Soviets are probably as mad as Boris Badenov when one of his plots fails.

Epilogue

Nasser soon sends Egyptians to take over key government positions away from Syria. The Ba'athists are understandably butthurt as they're the ones who invited the Egyptians to come and now they're getting pushed out of power and having their newspapers shut down. The Egyptians probably figure that if these people are so incapable of running their own lives that they ask us to take over their country, they can't be trusted in leadership roles. There's also less obvious divisions, like business people being butthurt about how the Egyptians don't understand that their economy is different. These tensions were already obviously before the year was out. In 1961, a coup topples the Egyptians. Like so many others who tried to control Syria in this era, they lasted about two years.

Damascus, 1950s. According to some redditor.

!nooticers 6 million

GENEVA, Feb 7 (Reuters) - More than six million people could die from HIV and AIDS in the next four years if U.S. President Donald Trump's administration pulls its global funding for programmes, the United Nations AIDS agency said on Friday.

Although a waiver was placed on HIV/AIDS programmes in last month's U.S. foreign aid funding freeze, many concerns remained about the future of treatment programmes, the deputy executive director of UNAIDS told reporters in Geneva.

"There is a lot of confusion especially on the community level, how the waiver will be implemented. We're seeing a lot of disruption of delivery of treatment services", Christine Stegling said.

Trump put hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of foreign aid donations on hold for 90 days upon taking office on January 20. In the following days, the U.S. State Department issued a waiver on the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) - the world's leading HIV initiative - for life-saving humanitarian assistance.

While welcoming the waiver, Stegling stressed the situation remains chaotic.

Amid a broader decline of funding, Stegling warned there would be a 400% increase in AIDS deaths if PEPFAR financial support is not re-authorized between 2025 and 2029.

"That's 6.3 million people, 6.3 million AIDS-related deaths that will occur in future...Any penny, any cut, any pause, will matter for all of us" she said, urging U.N. member states to step in.

"In Ethiopia, we have 5,000 public health worker contracts that are funded by U.S. assistance. And all of these have been terminated," Stegling said.

She highlighted that community clinics were facing the biggest interruption as they are "entirely dependent" on U.S. government funding.

She expressed concern that some people may not come forward for treatment, which could in turn increase new HIV infections.

U.S. donations account for the majority of global funding for the U.N. programme that operates in 70 countries, leading global efforts to end AIDS as a public health threat by 2030.

Trump's administration says it is reviewing all foreign-aid programmes to see if they align with his "America First" policy.

apparently you can get an AI clone now! and attend smeeting from the bed or the pooper !

!codecels !wfhchads

https://getpickle.ai/

More demos on their YT channel. IMHO, it's interesting but still a bit uncanny. https://youtube.com/channel/UCTO1-XqHWXgZar7rtphMXjg

https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1igrqrg/this_guy_is_on_a_zoom_call_but_not_actually_in/

This subreddit used to be nice, now it's just constant sneeding at nitpicks about anything slightly republican (like the recent soying over the CEO of Proton being a chud).

MISINFORMATION!

ENCRYPTION FIXES THIS!

Literally any company can do this, that's why we need DIVERSITY (the good one) in emergency options. Redditors want to stay as cavemen because a chud made something nice. Currently satellite connectivity (provided by globalstar) requires a special chip + proper positioning + has limited data + is expensive to transfer over. Starlink will allow for LTE speeds anywhere in the world on any device without needing to point your phone towards the sky like an r-slur.

LOL

We finally get ONE rational redditor!

Elon is out to r*pe you. Hide NOW.

bottom text

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/08/viral-trend-sees-humans-simulating-bizarre-ai-video-glitches/

!asians !aichads !fellas !kino

"The networking and the network API is built with PHP. Each RaspberryPi generates this website using Jinja templating. We are running Apache servers.

We decided not to use any Javascript on the frontend of this website and so all of our visualizations are generated server-side using python libraries such as MatPlotLib. Where possible, the generation of the visual assets on this site are done on the server rather than in the browser. We adopted this as an approach that fosters accountability for our design decisions. We know that the computational cycles required to generate our imagery are powered by solar energy rather than potentially powered as fossil energy in the browser. This design approach also minimizes the energy consumption for the user."

!nonchuds

Can't breed

Here's a bunch of statistics I made up in my head why its always foids fault

You don't understand, I just CANNOT take a shower and maybe a nice haircut and not walk around in the smelliest most unfashionable pants in existence. It's LITERALLY everyone else who's wrong

Weird thing is some women will still go after the guy for financial stability and still cheat. We live in a world where majority of people want their cake and eat it too.

Foids bad m'kay

I had to fact-check the "no civilization if not MONOGAMOUS" thing.

Well... turns out he is correct for the most part.

Many consider the first human civilization to have been the Sumerians, in Mesopotamia, 4000-3500B.C.

Sumerian civilization had monogamous marriages, but if wife could not have children, you could take another spouse with 1st spouse remaining at higher rank.

Keeps fricking going for another 10 or 12ish wordswordswords

who ever downrated this is a morron and cant handle the truth

This is coming from a banker!

Burgers are completely fricked.

I’m wearing the Green Square to honour the National Day of Remembrance for the Québec City mosque attack and Day of Action against Islamophobia.

The remembrance of this terrible tragedy, this unprovoked attack on a place of worship, call on us to specifically condemn… pic.twitter.com/Ir4hrCeNE5

— Wab Kinew (@WabKinew) January 29, 2025

ITT hysteria over food shortages, mocking Americans wanting good wages and wanting the brown wage slaves back in the fields

Theres more in the thread

I'm not used to liberal spaces anymore its weird to see them all mocking Americans for wanting money, advocating for CA separating and valuing illegal immigrants so much.

Personally I only think there will be prices increases on specific crops for now, and if Trump doesn't pull back farmers will just purchase automated picking machines they only didn't before because mexicans were that cheap

hn

!g*mers @kaamrev

Lex Fridman: ''I gave Zelensky every single chance to say a kind word about Putin''

Who the fuck do you think you are dude https://t.co/N6bgSF2ea4

— Drew Pavlou 🇦🇺🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 (@DrewPavlou) January 19, 2025

https://old.reddit.com/r/JoeRogan/comments/1hueys4/lex_fridmans_3_hour_interview_with_zelenskyy_just/

Redditors wrote how the interview was based how cool it was for Zelenskyy to swear and telling he hates every Russian (to an Russian) and Russian language

Kellogg has cancelled his visit to Ukraine after this genius interview since Zelenskyy obviously did this interview not for burger not for Russian and not for most Ukrainian but for specific far right Ukrainians that are 30% of the population. Zelenskyy is betting on them. Huge chunk including Zelenskyy and his team are Russian speaking, lex even mentioned that before the interview Zelenskyy was speaking Russian.

This how Redditors were criticising lex

Please. Lex's conversation with Zelenskyy was such a bait. Zelenskyy would touch on so many interesting topics and lex would just ignore what he says and go back to peace and love, Trump loves his country, why do you admire Elon? Weak butt questions. You have a world leader in front of you who is at war, a very rare position, and the best question you can muster is love and peace?

He should had asked where are the f16, 500+ billions ? Why Ukraine launching stupid butt operation ? Why Ukraine didn't managed to liberate a single town since November 2022, despite getting absolutely everything they asked in 2022 ? Why in 2023 September he was saying Ukraine will liberate 2 cities by end of the year ?

@duck you see when I am saying something I can always back it up.

Why it took over a year to fire Reznikov when in 2022 burgers were saying he is corrupt please fire him.

Why he fired Zaluzhnyy by saying Zaluzhnyy wants lower the mobilisation age and Ukraine doesn't need it to after firing Zaluzhnyy he lowers the mobilisation age ?

There is like shit tons of questions that could be asked to Zelensky but I bet Redditors wouldn't like those questions.

Lex is a conservative, a Russian Jew.

I happen to believe in God, for which I have substantial personal evidence to support my belief, but it still requires faith. So I am a human, on earth and I get to do amazing things, all because of God, the creator of the universe and everything in it.

His quote.

What is important ti conservatives? Love for good and people then selfs are stupid and without God or other kind of authority guidance humans would just be animals so they have concept of moral.

Libs believe in freedom, individualism, rights, tolerance and rationalism. So if you give people freedom they then self will do good without need of God.

So you see, God is important to this guy and love your neighbor is very important concept in abramic religion.

So it wasn't smart for Zelenskyy to say frick the neighbor to such guy.

In regards to the "conservative podcasts" thing, though (firstly lol to identifying Lex's show as conservative), I think Lex is the goldmine in terms of being both passive and uninformed. The ideal conservative interlocutor for Zelensky should be someone exactly like that, and I think he could improve his rhetoric by making use of that weakness through pausing to let the other person answer his questions. I noticed multiple instances in the podcast where it would've benefitted Zelensky more to let Lex respond to something he asked, because the narrow scope of a question forces an uninformed opponent to expose their ideological weakness. When you do a broad ramble covering an array of topics it may be a strength if your goal is to obfuscate, but it's a weakness if it's your opponent's goal to obfuscate. Lex's bias in that conversation was clear but so was his inability to defend any points, so I almost wish Zelensky had shifted his expectations of Lex downwards so his questions, rather than being rhetorical with the implicit understanding that he and his audience are smart enough to agree with the answer, were real questions Lex had to vocally grapple with. In that sense I hope that if Zelensky does more combative media appearances, regardless of how far-right the interviewer is, they have a similar level of temperament to Lex Fridman. Thus ends my analysis.

Redditors legit thought it was good interview

https://old.reddit.com/r/Destiny/comments/1hvsfnr/destiny_shot_his_shot_at_a_chance_of_interviewing/

I would much rather have Zelensky on Rogan than Destiny tbh. People need to remember conservatives only care about what Trump thinks on an issue, but getting the psuedo-intellectual tech centrist audiences that people like Rogan,Williamson, Bilyeu and even Piers has would be way more impactful.

Rogan rejected it because it's now worth it could lead to some unnecessary drama. He did suggested he could talk to Putin because in such case they will spend most time talking about mma without random swearing and emotional pitches.

Like can you name another leader in las 30 years that was swearing in interviews ?

Syrian new leader is more professional than Zelenskyy for frick sake.

This idiot justifies Putin!!! on video Zaporizhzhia city Ukraine in 2025 pic.twitter.com/6edUlFcsLd

— Andrew (@kyivukraine2024) January 20, 2025

jfl imagine showing an industrial area getting hit

He sat there for the first 20 minutes telling Zelensky to speak Russian...the language of the country that is killing his people....Pretty clear Lex is a Russian asset

— Jenny 🇨🇦 (@shindig101) January 20, 2025

Somehow absolutely vast majority of local Ukrainian refugees speaking Russian

Elon prob encouraged him to push this narrative in an attempt to "character assinate" Zelensky in the public eye — after what was a successful interview for Zelensky. This method of personal attack is a classic Elon tactic.

— Michael Hickin (@hickinmichael) January 20, 2025

So Elon set a trap to Zelenskyy and Zelenskyy wildly opened his bussy for it ?

If someone killed someone close to Lex Fridman, I'm curious how Fridman would use his chances?

— Igor Skalik (@igor_skalik) January 20, 2025

Literally nobody got killed in Ukrainian elite circle

Klitchko sons that are 25+ are chilling in Germany getting ready to lead later Ukrainian gov

Oh there is an extended edit

The full 4 min of this diatribe is even worse. Lex is preparing the ground for his Putin interview release. https://t.co/SvJNR3JrFH

— Oleg Kostour 🇺🇦🇨🇦🇺🇸 (@OlegKostour) January 20, 2025

Dude, stop calling Ukrainians bots @lexfridman.

Millions of us dislike you for what you’ve said.

We don’t want to hear hogwash Kremlin propaganda in English.

Anyone who goes to the Kremlin on friendly terms is a traitor to America.

Stop the charade and admit you love Russia. https://t.co/BZcPeRs5xz pic.twitter.com/fuI7akJ7xR

— Oleg Kostour 🇺🇦🇨🇦🇺🇸 (@OlegKostour) January 19, 2025

Nooo you can't attack the greatest leader of all the time

TLDR: it's bad etiquette for politicians of that calibre to swear

The following 4 years will be a great teaching opportunity for those who will be self-aware enough to swim out of the conspiracy whirlpool, and actually realize that the prices of everything will double because of their own credulity that made them vote for a scam artist, who promised to stop inflation by implementing one of the origins of inflation, namely tarrifs. They will have to endure through many inconvieniences, like when they step into the human feces on the street that the saar who just took their job shat there, the same saar that was just invited in by Trump, when our dumbass with the shitty boots thought he was voting for the orange saviour who promised to get rid of all the undesirable aliens, and not bring even more in. And when our hero won't even have to worry about which game franchise's new entry he won't buy that the blue haired DEI pronoun lady ruined, because he will have to scour the garbage cans for food, because even food he won't be able to afford. It all will be a struggle and hard confrontation with your past guilible self, I hope you will be capable of it.

So I make breastmilk and memorial jewelry and there's a big company in China that manufactures the jewelry. There's actually even a really big well known brand that's I've seen that uses their jewelry and lots of smaller businesses do too. I've looked and looked and LOOKED to find something else but there's nothing like them.

My husband is a Trump guy even though he says he doesn't like him. We've had discussions about the tariffs and he's saying that it's corrective to bring jobs back to the US.

Well I was just talking to the owner that manufactures the jewelry and he told me that they might have to shut down because they basically sell at wholesale and barely make a profit and DHL and UPS are charging more for the headache of the tariffs. He's not sure if they will have to pay or the buyers will have to. I'm hoping a praying that it's us as the buyer.

So I told my husband this and he was like, "well, it's just the market correcting itself." I was like, "you're not even a little mad that my business might be affected?!" Idk what he said but he was laughing and I blew up in his face.

I told him that he doesn't care enough about anyone but himself. He doesn't care about women's rights, lgbtq+ rights, immigrants, not my business, nothing.

Now I locked myself in my bathroom and I'm crying. He keeps trying to talk to me but I won't talk to him. Talk me down man.