The Biden White House has also maintained the tariffs on Chinese products worth $370 billion imposed by predecessor Donald Trump.

That’s a hell of a sentence :) I guess we can agree on some things… Tarrifs on china, truly bipartisan…

Hey, I threw a few humorous bits in there… ;)

Soviet Union was big, included many states. Socialist economy imploded, Soviet Union became Soviet non-union. States declared sovereignty as independent countries (mass brexits, kinda?).

Russia, who used to be able to socialize assets from all the smaller countries, wants to be able to socialize the assets again, and as a bonus, is salty because some of those countries are hooking up with NATO, which is by and large a union of capitalism…

Instead of trying to create a union again, and getting others to join via diplomacy or negotiation, Russia is just trying to press its neighbors into joining the reformed union via military occupation, and hit a slight snag with Ukraine, because all this shit is a little too recent for Ukraine to have forgotten how shitty a lada is.

Word of the drawdown came ahead of a visit by Secretary of State Antony Blinken to the region and after the Biden administration bypassed Congress for the second time this month to approve an emergency weapons sale to Israel.

That weapons sale was a few hundred mil worth of artillery shells… I sincerely hope that and the draw back of troops aren’t actually related and it’s just happenstance that it got mentioned here.

My opinion is that it’s investors.

Plenty of people out there buy houses for cash, spruce them up, and sell them for profit to extract some of the equity inherent in real property. Over time, they collectively push up the perceived value by force, and occasionally, the people who are the ultimate source of that equity, the ones looking to buy a permanent home, will stop buying.

There’s been a chunk of time recently, a decade or maybe more, where those permanent home seekers, the true source of the equity, haven’t been buying property. COVID exasperated the issue, because the flippers went fucking crazy for a couple years and inflated the amount of non-homes. Now they want their equity back out, but nobody who wants an actual home is looking to buy one because there isn’t enough value for them.

So prices have to come down before the actual source of equity starts buying again. The bubble has to deflate some.

Again, the entirety of this statement is simply my personal opinion, so grain of salt, but this is what pure logic and critical thinking suggests is the true mechanism :)

Right?

Israel has never been the abuser, and throughout their short lifetime as a state they have only abused.

I believe you need to edit that… Not in the context of you being “wrong/right” or anything opinion based like that, just that its contradictional… I don’t think it’s what you meant to actually say is all :)