i remember about 1995 or so, one of my dad's friends tried to tell a joke.

netscape and yahoo recently announced a merger to take place in israel. do you know what the company will be called?

i waited about 10 seconds for somebody else to get it, a lesson i'd been taught by my grade five teacher, who was pissed off that i answered all the questions, often sarcastically, and wanted me to shut the fuck up.

netanyahu, i said.

the guy looked at me, stunned. i was about 15.

that was thirty years ago, which is an unusual amount of time for anybody to stay active in politics, anywhere.

benjamin netanyahu needs a vacation, i think.

the difficult part about this is that netanyahu is essentially right.

however, he should tone it down. the bunker mentality has the potential for unintended consequences and verbally attacking people with anti-jewish biases doesn't help anything.

netanyahu is nearing the end of is career and potentially of his life. he will need to leave the job of reairing relations to his successor. he should focus on what's in front of him, and not concern himself with the perceptions of those in far off or far flung places.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/aug/20/australia-israel-relationship-albanese-netanyahu

keith richards will outlive everybody and one day be filmed throwing bottles of whiskey at people from his wheelchair.

are there enough living rolling stones left to do a protest concert?

the guy that wrote it is dead, i know that.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/noem-us-border-wall-black-paint-1.7613296

i'm not old enough to remember it, really. i remember the 1992 election. i remember george w. bush. i vaguely remember ronald reagan, but not really.

i remember getting the berlin wall and the wall by pink floyd confused. i thought they were the same thing, initially. the innocence of youth.

to adults that lived through it, the end of the cold war must have been a terrible disappointment. the whole world was waiting for the car crash to happen so they could see the carnage, and it didn't happen. everyone survived. what a downer.

what's next? 

do we get jobs and start families? i thought we were all going to die soon. this sucks.

it's like the most inverted form of existential dread imaginable. it must have been an incredibly depressing moment, to realize we're all going to live after all, and there's not going to be this catastrophic war.

then 2014 happened, and it must have all come rushing back in this deep flood of optimism that we can all die horrible deaths after all. fuck this bullshit. let's all finally kill each other. hooray!

how much of this is conscious and how much is subconscious, i don't know. i know that you can kind of see it in the eyes of these people, and it's a different thing then the old men. biden has to be the last dinosaur, and for him, he was settling scores, like it was always was in the 60s, the 70s, the 80s. this younger generation is different - they have a real death wish. the return of meaninglessness is of immeasurable value to them. they get giddy about it, as though their childhood fantasies are finally unfolding before their eyes.

take that ruskie. bang. boom. pow. shit, where's the bathroo...too late.

my heart is in gen x. really. but, it's sort of important that the broader western world realizes that star wars and rocky and rambo just irreversibly warped a generation of young men. we need generational overturn, and fast.

the truth is that starmer, macron, tusk and the crew are a bunch of cold war crazy uncles, themselves.

they grew up waiting their whole lives for the epic, final battle against the russians. if only david bowie were still alive.

come at them, bro.

the swedes keep themselves in recent centuries, but they'd be good at this. in no time at all, you'd have this mess collapse into the great northern bore.

that can't happen now, though, not with sweden in nato.

if finland and sweden hadn't joined nato, they'd be obvious choices to potentially provide security in ukrain, given that ukraine was initially built as a swedish colony. that said, i'm not sure how you actually make that work in a way that makes sense.

the necessity of ending this before it accidentally goes nuclear should be apparent to any sane person, and i have little doubt that trump was sincere. i think perhaps he didn't fully understand the issue. he seems to now.

the russians are doing what they have to do, which doesn't mean that putin isn't an asshole. he is. he's cynical, he's viciously logical and he's oppressively cruel when he needs to be. it's hard for anybody with ideals to walk away from putin without being a little crushed, and trum is hardly an idealist.

there's not going to be a meeting between putin and zelensky. everybody knows that.

if the war is inevitable, and your opponent is a cynical logic machine, the only thing left to do is profit. you can't blame the americans - the europeans want a war.