Felis_Catus_Domesticus

well said.

Trump ran into the same problem Dubya and his daddy did in Iraq & Afghanistan- sure we can topple the government and defeat their military. That’s easy-peasy. But after we do that, who’s gonna run the country? In all cases, the answer is “nobody who is acceptable to the US”, so the US ends up having to step in and run the place for a time so that it doesn’t immediately devolve into “new boss, same old bullshit”. Leave a political vacuum in that part of the world and it gets filled by Al Quaida, ISIS, Taliban, or other radical groups that battle it out among themselves for decades, creating another Lebanon. Or Iraq. Or Afghanistan.

Meh. States in the Arabian peninsula just need to enlarge the already existing pipelines that run north to Turkey, the Mediterranean, and the Caucuses and south to the Arabian Sea. Bypass the straight entirely. Existing pipelines demonstrate that someone has already had this idea long ago, but for whatever reason (logical efficiency…) existing infrastructure is sea based and passes through the straight. This is very easily corrected, and the states involved have the cash to do it, and demand for their product exists- strongly. Iran has played their very weak hand very well- for now. This round, they win. Next round, maybe not so likely. The Sunni states on the Arabian peninsula have no love for the Shia or for Iran. It’ll take a few years to reconfigure, but the days of Iran’s advantage here are numbered and finite.

We have blacks picking cotton for free in the prison-industrial complex of the deep south and parts of the midwest. As Americans we have this thing for slavery and subservience. The optics of things. I guess at some unconscious level we just want to see the rickshaw come back in some big, highly visible way.

and bicycles have ~ $0 registration overhead wherever they are operated.

This…