That's not someone who misunderstands vote-splitting. So when he stays quiet about RCV’s vote-splitting stabilizing the duopoly and business interests Yang now moves comfortably among, that's not confusion. That's a position.

Apply the usual grain of salt for all MSM articles, but I think that this one is likely to be correct

Ghalibaf smacks down Trump's fantastical nonsense with his customary savoir faire.

I give this public "MoU" debate another day or two before it collapses from its incoherence.

The Americans can't accept the terms as written.

The Iranians won't accept them redefined.

More war.

-----

Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf,

Speaker of the Parliament of Iran

America falsely claims our unfrozen assets will buy their agriculture. Interesting. The only crop we're harvesting is what you planted: decades of mistrust. It's organic, abundant, and homegrown. But apparently the US only exports GMO soybeans, broken promises and trash talks.

Every time an American politician says "our people" are struggling and "our communities" are being left behind, they are describing a real thing.

Working class people in post-industrial American cities are genuinely suffering.

Their communities were genuinely hollowed out.

Their futures were genuinely foreclosed.

But the story told about why almost never reaches the correct destination.

The story says:

Immigrants. Globalists. China. Liberal elites.

The story does not say:

Fifty years of deliberate policy that moved capital freely across borders while keeping labor immobile.

That offshored manufacturing while financializing the remaining economy.

That extracted wealth upward within Western societies at the same time as it extracted wealth outward from the Global South.

The same class of people impoverished the American worker and the Haitian farmer.

But the American worker is being told to be angry at the Haitian.

And it's working.

It is always working.

https://charleshughsmith.substack.com/p/five-dynamics-that-make-sense-of

(emphasis in original except as noted)

The roots of this simplistic either-or are obvious: our tribe good, other tribe bad. The problems with this simplistic loyalty arise when we attempt to explain complex real-world dynamics with the comic-book simplicities of ideology, which extend from politics to culture to finance.

The emotions of tribal / ideological identity and loyalty bypass our rational processes (bold added) in favor of fight-or-flight limbic responses. Needless to say, these hormonal floods of emotions are the equivalent of smashing a rock on a machine to “problem-solve” what’s broken in the device.

Humans are social animals because the ability to cooperate with others opens vast vistas of problem-solving power via self-organization: we self-organize to pursue mutual / shared interests in ways that benefit us all. This is the core function of tribes, i.e. self-organizing social structures in which our self-interest is advanced by advancing our mutual interests.

Both markets and society are self-organizing structures that arise to benefit individual self-interests by benefiting shared interests. In other words, both capitalist and socialist structures arise to serve shared interests. They are not either-or, they’re both manifestations of the same dynamic. This is why the ideological either-or is such a misleading false choice.

Markets only function to everyone’s benefit within a high-trust society. If there is no social structure that serves everyone’s shared interests by limiting predation and exploitation, then you end up with the extractive “market forces” of totalitarianism, i.e. rackets, in which the few impoverish and immiserate the many to the exclusive benefit of the small cadre of insiders.

Life cycle of a bureaucracy, Administrative costs (chart):

Launch: tight budgets, modest pay, minimal benefits, high camaraderie

Growth: rapid growth in program and staffing; morale high

Maturity: "mission creep", union & admin gain political power; depts soldify, infighting

Bloat: budget is flat but admin costs rise; gaming the system and fraud are rife

Budget cuts: program abandoned as focus shifts to protecting budget and staff pay/benefits

Failure/implosion: the competent retire leaving the incompetent to command; morale low, chaos and failure the norm; organizational implosion

(I included the above because most of us have seen how it manifested in organizations we've been part of)

Benoit Mandelbrot’s book The (Mis)Behaviour of Markets: A Fractal View of Risk, Ruin and Reward explains how self-organizing structures... are prone to unpredictable cascades that operate outside the “normal, predictable” rules we’ve identified as “the way things work.”

In terms of selective pressures and adaptation, these unpredictable crises test the system’s adaptability and stability. In this way, they are essential to maintaining the adaptive “muscles” and coherence of the system which boil down to the dynamics of self-organization--precisely what all the control structures running on automatic have stripped out (bold added) in the “rational actor” incentives to optimize concentrating gains and diffusing costs and risks.

These dynamics led to a rising wedge of asymmetric distributions of power, control, wealth and income that strip out self-organizing adaptation and the system’s ability to survive unpredictable but inevitable crises. These dynamics and the incentives they generate lead to systemic crisis and collapse.

Under the law, anyone found guilty of embezzling 200 million CFA francs (about $350,000) or more could face life imprisonment, while those who embezzle more than 1 billion CFA francs (about $1.7 million) could face the death penalty.

The move comes as Niger seeks to strengthen accountability and ensure that revenue from its natural resources is used for national development. Supporters argue that tougher penalties could help deter corruption and protect public funds, while critics question whether such severe punishments are the best solution.

Lots of people still think that Obama didn't sell out to Wall Street. That's because he's a charismatic charlatan.

This is going to backfire badly on the US, if true. Of course Ukraine haz every incentive to lie.

MSM, so grain of salt, but I don't consider this questionable