Chaos Theory
FT's Ex, Kevin and Steve, and a tiny little bit of history. It's this week's news.
Hey Friends,
Good morning to everyone, except for anyone who is an antisemite, like, for example, Kanye West.
I often get reader feedback, and I welcome it. (You can use the comments section or email me directly). Today, I’ll share some reader feedback from last week‘s issue.
That one was like a turd in a punch bowl. Hope the punch outweighs the turd with the next edition.
As always, my focus is on telling you, and of course embellishing, the truth even when we don’t like it. Sometimes, the truth stinks.
I'll get to that in a minute...
But first, let's get to The News.
Hot Takes
Week 41 of 2023
It's Kevin and Steve, not Kevin and Eve.
Again, apologies for such a terrible headline. If you will, let's try to get past it and focus on what's important, which is that nothing happens in this country unless our Congress can make laws telling us what not to do and how to pay for it.
Let’s dive right in.
In the ongoing saga where the GOP tries to live up to the G in their name, they spent up to approximately 7 minutes total to take time off of impeaching the President for improperly treating his senior citizen's diaper rash (maybe?) and shift some time to elect a speaker.
The former Speaker, Kevin McCarthy, has expressed an openness to being considered for Speaker of the House again, which means that he would end up with two offices, the Former Speaker’s and the Current Future Former Speaker's office. With that said, in a closed-door meeting, the Republicans ended up nominating Steve Scalise, which means that the Future Former Speaker is now Just The Former Speaker. Anyway, Steve Scalise is battling blood cancer, which is unfortunate, but some say it has aged him much quicker, and that's what we look for in Congress anyway, so you're telling me there's a chance. But late last night, with weak support, Steve withdrew from the race, making him the Former Future Speaker, leaving the GOO without a leader and the house speakerless. (more)
FT's Ex
Sam Bankman Fried's trial has started, and his former girlfriend, Caroline Ellison, and CEO of sister company Alameda Research says that Sam directed her to steal money from FTX customers and use it to prop up the company’s balance sheet.
To funnel the funds, they used a "backdoor" which is a term used in the software business referring to an abstract data type for an arithmetic assignment operator in the standard template library, which would cause the stream exchange input to be obfuscated, resulting in a syntax error, and a protocol which forces the core .NET libraries to us a CoreRT to generate a run code on-the-fly and issue several stream manipulators.
…which ultimately explains why they just called it a backdoor.
Either way, Ellison pleaded guilty and testified against Bankman Fried. (more)
Sant O's
George Santos is now facing additional charges, including identity theft and using donors' credit cards to snap some money for himself. But if you look closely at the report, it seems like he is committing identity theft against a cereal box because he calls himself George Sant O's and claims to be a "cereal entrepreneur," which is crazy if true. If it's not true, what is true is that he is a serial liar, and my suggestion that he has infringed on Cheerios is as legitimate as his whole career. (more)
Robert Eff
Robert F. Kennedy, who is normally a Democrat, is shifting to run as an Independent so that he can lose his bid for President with more grandeur and take us down with him. We're thinking that if he can convince enough people that vaccines don't work and that he is also not anti-vaccine, then maybe he'll be able to cobble together enough voters to fill a whole local CVS waiting area. (more)
N.F.ill
Former NFL player Sergio Brown was taken into custody after disappearing for about a month. He was wanted for the murder of his mother, who was found in a creek behind her Maywood, IL home in September. We expect he’ll be playing a different kind of football from jail. (more)
That's it for the news. Now, here's this week's Feature.
Chaos Theory
Feature Story
I don't think about the fall of the Roman Empire every day, but I do think about it occasionally. I have more important things to think about, like, "What do they call Canadian bacon in Canada?" Or "How does Ron Desantis clean under his nails after a pudding break? – Or does he?" But there are yet even more important questions to ask and bigger thoughts to think right now, like "How much bacon is too much bacon, and also, is this pain in my chest normal?" and "Should I root for the Palestinians or the Israelis?" Also, "Am I racist for doing so?"
For some of these questions, the answers come easy. You will know if you are a racist because Alexandria Occasio Cortez will be sure to tell you. You won't, however, know if you have eaten too much bacon because it's racist to talk about bacon. If the questions we asked were so simple, we would only write 168-word articles, and email open rates would surpass 100%, if not higher.
According to Chaos Theory, we can expect everything to fall apart eventually. The arc of history bends toward entropy. But in the case of the Hamas attack on Israel this past weekend, the political world thirsts for justice and hungers for you and me to declare what side we are on.
Chaos Theory says that underlying patterns in the present determine the major events that happen in the future. As the metaphor explains, a butterfly can flap its wings in Peking, and then in Central Park, you get rain instead of sunshine. In the same way, Biden trips on a stage in Colorado Springs, causing the Republican Party to launch an impeachment inquiry against him in DC. On and on it goes.
It's Chaos that explains why Comcast has the worst customer service on earth or why people on airplanes bring pillows shaped like toilet seats. It's the tiny hairs and variations of the skin that determine whether a drop of water hitting your hand will flow left or right, and that drop is the beginning of what eventually creates a grand canyon on the ground where it lands below it, only to change the orbit of the earth by the distribution of weight, and everything that happens after that ever.
This is reaching, but such is political discourse.
For more than a year, Russia has been waging war in Ukraine, China is threatening us with balloons and microchips, India is embracing Hindu nationalist violence, and Iran is engaging in proxy wars by funding terrorists. To make matters worse, now a cardboard tycoon in Australia knows where all our nuclear submarines are. If that doesn't make you feel boxed in, I don't know what will.
Now, there is another war between Israel and the Hamas party in Palestine.
The Hamas attack in Israel has laid bare the realities of the past. What was once politics can no longer be covered up by the blood of Palestinians or Benjamin Netanyahu's combover. Now, it's a reality we have to face, and we're yearning to take a side. In complex systems, countless factors play a role in outcomes. Just as seats that barely recline give rise to the creation of the most embarrassing pillow there is, history and geopolitical conditions determine the initiation and outcome of wars. Should we blame the pillow users or the chairs?
Yes.
Because if you ask Palestinians, they've been subject to Apartheid and occupation since 1967. If you ask Jews, they basically invented the world anyway, back in year one (that’s 3760 BC for the Gentiles).
The Israeli occupation of Palestine ended in 2005, yet their conflict has continued ever since. Over the last 15 years, 300 Israelis have been killed, and over that same time, the number of Palestinians who have been killed is 6,400. In Gaza, due to a land, sea, and air blockade, people are prevented from leaving. Israel controls fuel, electricity, and water, and sanctions prevent the flow of supplies in general.
Israel's position is that this is for their security, and that is convincing after the act of terrorism that killed over 1200 people in Israel last week, with thousands more injured. It's convincing because they use their own as human shields to exploit the decency of their opponents. They parade the killing of innocents through towns and on social media. Hamas is guided by the doctrine that Jews should be wiped off the face of the earth.
The attack from Hamas, if it's anything, it's terrorism, but it's definitely not surprising. Chaos Theory would explain that we can not predict every possible outcome, but you don't have to be Jeff Goldblum to have predicted that those tiny little hairs on Nettenyahu's head could cause tiny variations that would have amounted to this eventually anyway. With his policies of Palestinian isolation, this outcome is what should have been expected. You don't have to disagree with his policies to predict that people who are trapped and starved will turn to chaos. And Chaos will turn toward Israel.
To put it bluntly, this outcome was all but guaranteed.
But I would conclude with this. It's simultaneously reasonable to say that Israel contributed to the conditions that led to this attack and, at the same time, that the actions of Hamas are an act of terrorism, evil, and grossly unjustified. Now, many innocent Palestinians will die because of it.
That's it for this week.
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Have a great weekend!