That is a simple accounting identity, a way to avoid double counting. Income (output, GDP, whichever term you choose) is just the flow of value, and it would be stupid not to include how much value went toward consumption. An economy produces x amount of value in a given year, and those are simply how the value is divvyed up. Some production goes to satisfying consumer demand, and some is held back to build more productive capacity. You're just off base not conflating your own personal semantics for what "production" should mean with a simple technical accounting identity.
Reinhart and Rogoff have certainly been warning of high debt levels, but it's wrong to give this study too much credit for what "austerity" there has been across Europe. Most cuts in places like Greece and Spain were fait accompli, once it was clear that the ECB was not going to budge on its inflation target to neither try and boost nominal growth nor to crudely relieve nominal debt levels.
I will grant that the 90% debt/gdp trigger is most likely non-existent, but the rest of their book does yeoman's work in cataloging financial crises. It's a useful antidote to the mass psychological amnesia that is perpetually recurring. "Our new investments our safe and returns will never fall" inevitably leads to "what perfidy caused this?" The cycle has been repeated in remarkably similar ways for nearly a millenium now. We should appreciate the detailed financial history they have created, and chide them for the dubious massaging of the data. Just don't overstate its political implications.
Immigration is good for everyone, though especially for immigrants. Immigrants experience massive wage gains just by stepping over an imaginary line. Nations that receive immigrants receive solid overall growth benefits.
H1-B visas never fail to bring out the nationalist grief on/.. There is a fallacy that there is a set amount of technology work to do, and if you increase the labor supply, that makes everyone worse off. The labor supply is actually endogenous to the demand for labor. More skilled labor allows people to be able to rely more on skilled labor. It's counterintuitive I know, but it absolutely is.
Population growth is also endogenous to technological advancement. Increasing the amount of people integrated in a society, increases the chance that we advance.
Endogenous growth theory, Paul Romer is going to win a Nobel prize for it one day. Learn it. Free movement of labor has been crucial to the advancement of humanity.
The Post Office has successfully paid this $5 billion bill every year since it was passed in 2005. I'd say their business model is still wildly successful. Their problem, as previously pointed out, is that since the Republicans in Congress saddled them with these payments, the Postal Service has been unable to invest in further modernization.
So, since they've been required to actually pay what they promised their employees, unlike a lot of other pensions these days, they now can't make money. Huh. That doesn't strike me as the model of success we should be pushing for.
It might be a good investment to allow/encourage the post office to create a network of state issued email addresses, or whatever other scheme of modernization we might come up with. That's the kind of risky change that large bureaucratic organizations with massive legacy labor costs typically aren't good at. I'm all for letting them experiment. I'm not for throwing money at or trying to force a revival an archaic model of 6-day-a-week service for fewer and fewer first class mail and more and more direct marketing.
Making money on junk mail! That's hardly the romantic vision of an efficient, broad reaching government agency that binds us all together that people weep over now that the Post Office is in trouble.
Sure, the post office could radically remake itself, as a poster downthread suggested. The old way of doing things 6 days a week, universal letter service, while employing hundreds of thousands of low skill workers is dead. We can save the brand, but not the old system.
It's true that the Post Office is required to pre-fund its pensions in a burdensome way. That doesn't change the fact that their current setup is not economic. First class mail is declining in usage, but direct marketing through the mail has consistently, and for a long time, increased as a source of revenue. Face it, letters have diminished in importance. People are weeping over a shell of a former institution. The Post Office is just chasing the advertising dollars like everyone else seems to be.
Yeah, probably not, at least not in any predictable way. There are a million things that popular opinion and unrest within China make more likely to be reformed: the Hukou system, land distribution, criminal justice, etc. Single party rule and stringent censorship just don't motivate the Chinese like westerners constantly tell them that it should. I'm of the opinion all of this is a tremendous waste, but I don't expect any majority of the Chinese public to agree with me any time soon.
Ratcheting up Internet restrictions is the norm during times like this. Expect VPN's in-country to also be strangely slower.
What's interesting to me are the new unconventional methods of restraint China always seems to be a pioneer in. It seems protesters throwing leaflets out of taxi cabs is a growing fear, so taxis are restricted in being able to travel around Tiananmen and will their windows locked, with some having control handles removed altogether.
I was present in China during the Arab Spring, when it was feared protest would spread. Any mention of a meetup place for protesters would all of a sudden shoot up the priority list for construction repairs. Many areas were cordoned off with armadas of street sweet sweepers.
Paranoia is an extremely inefficient use of ingenuity.
The interesting thing about this whole episode is that, despite no obvious interventions by the state, the market itself failed to raise prices to clear the market.
In shortages like this, the logistics of gasoline make it difficult to really up capacity even by significant price raises. The gasoline market is highly segmented. It's not very easy to divert supplies from elsewhere and ship gasoline in the quantities needed, unlike with things like food and water.
What "price gouging" can do, however, is eliminate hoarding and frivolous use. $8.00 a gallon really makes you think twice whether you need that generator running 24 hours a day. That can help to calm down the shortage.
The puzzling thing is that gas stations seem to be much to afraid of being seen reaping a windfall profit by raising prices. So instead, we get lines miles long, essentially a gasoline lottery.
; but the chances of the poll averages being wrong in this case were incredibly small.
I'm not sure that's exactly knowable. Sure, the numbers are way better than contradictory pundit guts, but for instance, we had no way of knowing if a "Bradley Effect" would have been in play. Response rates for polling firms consistently came in below 10%. Polling is getting harder and harder in an age where fewer people have landlines and polling cell phones is restricted. As of now, state polls are good guides. They will be right up until they aren't, and then the science will change.
I'm not saying that the probability of systematic error is large, just unknowable. It was a perfectly reasonable and scientific position for a Republican to say "Romney's chances are equal to the probability of error in the polls, and I hope that probability is large."
Exactly. Neither Nate nor any of the many other poll aggregators (Sam Wang, Drew Linzer, etc.) have found any way to conquer the inherit unpredictability of political events far into the future. Read Daniel Kahnemann. Experts, no matter how "scientific" their methods are consistently wrong and worse at predicting politics far into the future than the proverbial dart throwing monkey.
We care about Nate Silver and people that do what he does for two reasons: 1) They definitively point out that most pundits are full of crap and unwilling to realize that polling, not their guts, describe what's happening in the short run in the most accurate way currently possible. 2) For partisan reasons. Democrats love Silver because his numbers provided a security blanket to liberals afraid for Obama. To be fair, had the election turned out different and Nate's numbers called it for Romney, Republicans would be lionizing him as well, and we'd all be mocking whatever the Democratic version of "Unskewed Polls" had been. That popular media figures skew left really helps Silver's celebrity this time around.
I'm no geologist, but I have learned a bit of stats.
In Oklahoma, the rate of M >= 3 events abruptly increased in 2009 from 1.2/year in the previous half-century to over 25/year. This rate increase is exclusive of the November 2011 M 5.6 earthquake and its aftershocks.
A twenty-five-fold increase, that excludes the largest outlying event, in the number of earthquakes would seem to be statistically significant of something.
Putting aside the possible implication that you think science should censor politically unsavory findings and renege on its mission, this won't be like other warnings from scientists. Climate is a big impersonal force that's hard to grasp. It unfolds slowly and is hard to really "experience" first hand. A tripling of the number of earthquakes in the midwest is, shall we say, slightly more visceral.
I'm generally in favor exploring geo-engineering. Since, does anyone really expect to get China and India(the greatest sources of future emissions) to postpone carbon intensive growth through treaties? Inducing earthquakes seems much more dangerous than any scheme that involves adding reflective particles to the atmosphere. Engineering the atmosphere, as tough and uncertain as that is, is made easier by the fact that gases introduced to the upper atmosphere will fade in effect on a reasonable time scale and the faucet can be turned at off at any time. Fracturing the crust is much more permanent. It could be earthquakes now, but magma popping up in the middle of Cleveland later. There's no way to put the rock back together.
Cutting up a cake might not sound like an important problem but if you rephrase it as sharing resources or territory, then you can quickly see that it has lots of practical applications.
This seems like a pretty interesting game, fit for nerd parties and the like. Solving territorial or resource disputes? Not so much. You and your friends are basically equal. State actors, ethnic groups, etc. tend not to be perfectly equal. For example, I doubt the Sunni insurgency in Iraq would have submitted to such an auction. The same goes for the actors in the South China Sea, Israel Palestine, really any territorial dispute of note.
I could see something like this being useful for divvying things like mineral resources that crop in international waters, like all those manganese nodes on the ocean floor.
... despite the fact that in my grandfather's day only the rich paid federal income tax.
Your grandfather must have lived in the roaring twenties then. Through most of the middle of the 20th century that wasn't the case, but, surprisingly, income taxes are more generous to the bottom quintile. The income tax rate in America has gotten more and more progressive over the last few decades with the introduction of the EITC, as the bottom quintile receives more and more money
Would you care to share your theory of what constitutes a taxable event when trade occurs across the borders of nations that have banded together to form a free trade zone?
Well, if indeed it is legal, then there's nothing wrong with it.
The article says that the UK government is investigating, but if Amazon is found to owe these taxes, it would be a matter for the European courts to decide. I have a feeling this is sort of a novel issue. Obviously I'd have to defer to someone that had the relevant case law or EU regulation handy. Either way, this is not something the UK just gets to declare legal or not.
It would be really difficult to structure a tax with the incidence falling solely on setups like the one Amazon has here, especially since the UK is part of the single market. This is most likely an issue that would have to be solved in the European Courts rather than by the UK government. I doubt that a few hundred million pounds in lost tax revenue would persuade the courts to force a major restructuring of trade. I am not expert on European jurisprudence though.
This is a legitimately complex issue of tax avoidance. Most of the time when people howl about corporations paying low effective tax rates it's because they don't realize all of the exemptions for favored industries (green and bio tech, aerospace, etc.) and absorbing losses create that outcome. Here we have a government stretched thin on revenues up against the framework of European economic integration.
In places like Saudi Arabia, and increasingly in post-Arab Spring Egypt, power is legitimized through the approval of Islamist clerics. In most of the Gulf states, kings or emirs have the right to rule and don't constantly face "Islamic revolution" because of old agreements between the royal houses and the clerics. Your version of the dictator's calculus doesn't really work in states that blend in elements of theocracy.
Of course, I think the review should go through. Of course, I realize there is little chance this will exculpate Bales. I said as much. I was commenting on the politics of the situation. As evidenced by numerous posts in this very thread, it's very easy to read about this drug's role and immediately jump to conclusions about a conspiracy to allow these murders to go unpunished. If such a jump is so easy on slashdot, imagine what what conspiracies might spread in a more febrile environment like Afghanistan and how those conspiracies would further weaken Afghan belief in.
Still, it isn't an argument against doing the review and getting this drug away from soldiers. I merely mean to say that this is a rapidly deteriorating situation that threatens a complete breakdown of an already fragile trust between Kabul and the West.
Obviously it's pure speculation, but I have a hard time believing this would mitigate any punishment Bales receives. It would be a nightmare of the most extreme order for the military should Bales be exculpated, even in the most limited sense. The Afghans have been screaming for him to be tried under Afghan law. It would be hard enough to punishment short of the death penalty to the Afghan public, much less an outcome that ends with him in psychiatric care first. This is just one more massive headache in a case that can't be over for the Pentagon fast enough.
In the mean time, expect relations to continue to deteriorate between Afghan security forces and ISAF troops. There is real danger of this review fueling conspiracy theories and sparking further knife-in-the-back attacks on ISAF troops like we've already seen.
It increasingly seems that no one is winning from this war. Afghan civilians have had any sense that westerners provide safety shattered. Westerners trust their Afghan counterparts even less. And yet most of Afghan development depends on the industry that supports the international presence there, which a hasty pull-out would destroy. What's the least bad option here?
"Just because they will play ball with the chosen people..."
You don't really get the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict do you? "Playing ball" means not invading with an intent to destroy. I see tamping down revanchist regimes as a good idea. I don't know about you.
If you are of the persuasion that the US funding is the reason strongmen still rule many Arab states at the expense of peaceful democracies, I've got a few facts for you. Qaddafi's regime was under sanctions from the US for years. His son was killed by an American missile strike. During the Bush administration, in both Gaza and Lebanon, the White House pressed for inclusive elections, and Israel went along. Hamas and Hezbollah came to power. The shortcomings of both those parties being in power should be obvious. The reason the Egyptian military took no action against protesters, leaving Mubarrak to feebly attempt to crush them with private goons, is that firing on protesters would endanger the healthy military-to-military relationship with the US.The US has made its mistakes in the region sure, but it's either ignorant or dishonest to say that US policy is more often than not set forth in good faith.
You fault Israelis and pro-Israel people for being defensive, but the fact of the matter is that Israel is simultaneously under more pressure from external threats and more scrutiny from the international community. Combine that with the facts of the Shoah, that there is still quite a lot of real anti-Semitism floating around, and that most people have such a shallow understanding of the conflict to think that all the suffering has been one sided and you might begin to understand why there's such a defensiveness when it comes to the state of Israel. You can keep living in your feverish dream world where American religious zealots brutally repress Arabs and the Jews shape things with the all powerful anti-Semite card, but the real world is a lot more complicated.
It seems that there is no real connection between this group and Tehran. It's important to remember that when there is real discussion going on about conflict with Iran. That being said, this group does seem to be motivated by some sort of Iranian nationalism. It's just a further reminder of how small groups and individuals can inflame international imbroglios, leaving state actors in a bind. Think the Netanyahu and Obama administrations' paralysis over how to handle the settlers in the West Bank.
Slashdot Mirror
That is a simple accounting identity, a way to avoid double counting. Income (output, GDP, whichever term you choose) is just the flow of value, and it would be stupid not to include how much value went toward consumption. An economy produces x amount of value in a given year, and those are simply how the value is divvyed up. Some production goes to satisfying consumer demand, and some is held back to build more productive capacity. You're just off base not conflating your own personal semantics for what "production" should mean with a simple technical accounting identity.
Reinhart and Rogoff have certainly been warning of high debt levels, but it's wrong to give this study too much credit for what "austerity" there has been across Europe. Most cuts in places like Greece and Spain were fait accompli, once it was clear that the ECB was not going to budge on its inflation target to neither try and boost nominal growth nor to crudely relieve nominal debt levels.
I will grant that the 90% debt/gdp trigger is most likely non-existent, but the rest of their book does yeoman's work in cataloging financial crises. It's a useful antidote to the mass psychological amnesia that is perpetually recurring. "Our new investments our safe and returns will never fall" inevitably leads to "what perfidy caused this?" The cycle has been repeated in remarkably similar ways for nearly a millenium now. We should appreciate the detailed financial history they have created, and chide them for the dubious massaging of the data. Just don't overstate its political implications.
Immigration is good for everyone, though especially for immigrants. Immigrants experience massive wage gains just by stepping over an imaginary line. Nations that receive immigrants receive solid overall growth benefits.
/.. There is a fallacy that there is a set amount of technology work to do, and if you increase the labor supply, that makes everyone worse off. The labor supply is actually endogenous to the demand for labor. More skilled labor allows people to be able to rely more on skilled labor. It's counterintuitive I know, but it absolutely is.
H1-B visas never fail to bring out the nationalist grief on
Population growth is also endogenous to technological advancement. Increasing the amount of people integrated in a society, increases the chance that we advance.
Endogenous growth theory, Paul Romer is going to win a Nobel prize for it one day. Learn it. Free movement of labor has been crucial to the advancement of humanity.
The Post Office has successfully paid this $5 billion bill every year since it was passed in 2005. I'd say their business model is still wildly successful. Their problem, as previously pointed out, is that since the Republicans in Congress saddled them with these payments, the Postal Service has been unable to invest in further modernization.
So, since they've been required to actually pay what they promised their employees, unlike a lot of other pensions these days, they now can't make money. Huh. That doesn't strike me as the model of success we should be pushing for.
It might be a good investment to allow/encourage the post office to create a network of state issued email addresses, or whatever other scheme of modernization we might come up with. That's the kind of risky change that large bureaucratic organizations with massive legacy labor costs typically aren't good at. I'm all for letting them experiment. I'm not for throwing money at or trying to force a revival an archaic model of 6-day-a-week service for fewer and fewer first class mail and more and more direct marketing.
Making money on junk mail! That's hardly the romantic vision of an efficient, broad reaching government agency that binds us all together that people weep over now that the Post Office is in trouble. Sure, the post office could radically remake itself, as a poster downthread suggested. The old way of doing things 6 days a week, universal letter service, while employing hundreds of thousands of low skill workers is dead. We can save the brand, but not the old system.
It's true that the Post Office is required to pre-fund its pensions in a burdensome way. That doesn't change the fact that their current setup is not economic. First class mail is declining in usage, but direct marketing through the mail has consistently, and for a long time, increased as a source of revenue. Face it, letters have diminished in importance. People are weeping over a shell of a former institution. The Post Office is just chasing the advertising dollars like everyone else seems to be.
Yeah, probably not, at least not in any predictable way. There are a million things that popular opinion and unrest within China make more likely to be reformed: the Hukou system, land distribution, criminal justice, etc. Single party rule and stringent censorship just don't motivate the Chinese like westerners constantly tell them that it should. I'm of the opinion all of this is a tremendous waste, but I don't expect any majority of the Chinese public to agree with me any time soon.
Ratcheting up Internet restrictions is the norm during times like this. Expect VPN's in-country to also be strangely slower.
What's interesting to me are the new unconventional methods of restraint China always seems to be a pioneer in. It seems protesters throwing leaflets out of taxi cabs is a growing fear, so taxis are restricted in being able to travel around Tiananmen and will their windows locked, with some having control handles removed altogether.
I was present in China during the Arab Spring, when it was feared protest would spread. Any mention of a meetup place for protesters would all of a sudden shoot up the priority list for construction repairs. Many areas were cordoned off with armadas of street sweet sweepers.
Paranoia is an extremely inefficient use of ingenuity.
The interesting thing about this whole episode is that, despite no obvious interventions by the state, the market itself failed to raise prices to clear the market.
In shortages like this, the logistics of gasoline make it difficult to really up capacity even by significant price raises. The gasoline market is highly segmented. It's not very easy to divert supplies from elsewhere and ship gasoline in the quantities needed, unlike with things like food and water.
What "price gouging" can do, however, is eliminate hoarding and frivolous use. $8.00 a gallon really makes you think twice whether you need that generator running 24 hours a day. That can help to calm down the shortage.
The puzzling thing is that gas stations seem to be much to afraid of being seen reaping a windfall profit by raising prices. So instead, we get lines miles long, essentially a gasoline lottery.
; but the chances of the poll averages being wrong in this case were incredibly small.
I'm not sure that's exactly knowable. Sure, the numbers are way better than contradictory pundit guts, but for instance, we had no way of knowing if a "Bradley Effect" would have been in play. Response rates for polling firms consistently came in below 10%. Polling is getting harder and harder in an age where fewer people have landlines and polling cell phones is restricted. As of now, state polls are good guides. They will be right up until they aren't, and then the science will change.
I'm not saying that the probability of systematic error is large, just unknowable. It was a perfectly reasonable and scientific position for a Republican to say "Romney's chances are equal to the probability of error in the polls, and I hope that probability is large."
Romney's own internal numbers had Obama up by 5 in Ohio the weekend before the election even.
Exactly. Neither Nate nor any of the many other poll aggregators (Sam Wang, Drew Linzer, etc.) have found any way to conquer the inherit unpredictability of political events far into the future. Read Daniel Kahnemann. Experts, no matter how "scientific" their methods are consistently wrong and worse at predicting politics far into the future than the proverbial dart throwing monkey.
We care about Nate Silver and people that do what he does for two reasons: 1) They definitively point out that most pundits are full of crap and unwilling to realize that polling, not their guts, describe what's happening in the short run in the most accurate way currently possible. 2) For partisan reasons. Democrats love Silver because his numbers provided a security blanket to liberals afraid for Obama. To be fair, had the election turned out different and Nate's numbers called it for Romney, Republicans would be lionizing him as well, and we'd all be mocking whatever the Democratic version of "Unskewed Polls" had been. That popular media figures skew left really helps Silver's celebrity this time around.
In Oklahoma, the rate of M >= 3 events abruptly increased in 2009 from 1.2/year in the previous half-century to over 25/year. This rate increase is exclusive of the November 2011 M 5.6 earthquake and its aftershocks.
A twenty-five-fold increase, that excludes the largest outlying event, in the number of earthquakes would seem to be statistically significant of something.
Putting aside the possible implication that you think science should censor politically unsavory findings and renege on its mission, this won't be like other warnings from scientists. Climate is a big impersonal force that's hard to grasp. It unfolds slowly and is hard to really "experience" first hand. A tripling of the number of earthquakes in the midwest is, shall we say, slightly more visceral.
I'm generally in favor exploring geo-engineering. Since, does anyone really expect to get China and India(the greatest sources of future emissions) to postpone carbon intensive growth through treaties? Inducing earthquakes seems much more dangerous than any scheme that involves adding reflective particles to the atmosphere. Engineering the atmosphere, as tough and uncertain as that is, is made easier by the fact that gases introduced to the upper atmosphere will fade in effect on a reasonable time scale and the faucet can be turned at off at any time. Fracturing the crust is much more permanent. It could be earthquakes now, but magma popping up in the middle of Cleveland later. There's no way to put the rock back together.
Cutting up a cake might not sound like an important problem but if you rephrase it as sharing resources or territory, then you can quickly see that it has lots of practical applications.
This seems like a pretty interesting game, fit for nerd parties and the like. Solving territorial or resource disputes? Not so much. You and your friends are basically equal. State actors, ethnic groups, etc. tend not to be perfectly equal. For example, I doubt the Sunni insurgency in Iraq would have submitted to such an auction. The same goes for the actors in the South China Sea, Israel Palestine, really any territorial dispute of note.
I could see something like this being useful for divvying things like mineral resources that crop in international waters, like all those manganese nodes on the ocean floor.
... despite the fact that in my grandfather's day only the rich paid federal income tax.
Your grandfather must have lived in the roaring twenties then. Through most of the middle of the 20th century that wasn't the case, but, surprisingly, income taxes are more generous to the bottom quintile. The income tax rate in America has gotten more and more progressive over the last few decades with the introduction of the EITC, as the bottom quintile receives more and more money
Would you care to share your theory of what constitutes a taxable event when trade occurs across the borders of nations that have banded together to form a free trade zone?
Well, if indeed it is legal, then there's nothing wrong with it.
The article says that the UK government is investigating, but if Amazon is found to owe these taxes, it would be a matter for the European courts to decide. I have a feeling this is sort of a novel issue. Obviously I'd have to defer to someone that had the relevant case law or EU regulation handy. Either way, this is not something the UK just gets to declare legal or not.
It would be really difficult to structure a tax with the incidence falling solely on setups like the one Amazon has here, especially since the UK is part of the single market. This is most likely an issue that would have to be solved in the European Courts rather than by the UK government. I doubt that a few hundred million pounds in lost tax revenue would persuade the courts to force a major restructuring of trade. I am not expert on European jurisprudence though.
This is a legitimately complex issue of tax avoidance. Most of the time when people howl about corporations paying low effective tax rates it's because they don't realize all of the exemptions for favored industries (green and bio tech, aerospace, etc.) and absorbing losses create that outcome. Here we have a government stretched thin on revenues up against the framework of European economic integration.
In places like Saudi Arabia, and increasingly in post-Arab Spring Egypt, power is legitimized through the approval of Islamist clerics. In most of the Gulf states, kings or emirs have the right to rule and don't constantly face "Islamic revolution" because of old agreements between the royal houses and the clerics. Your version of the dictator's calculus doesn't really work in states that blend in elements of theocracy.
Of course, I think the review should go through. Of course, I realize there is little chance this will exculpate Bales. I said as much. I was commenting on the politics of the situation. As evidenced by numerous posts in this very thread, it's very easy to read about this drug's role and immediately jump to conclusions about a conspiracy to allow these murders to go unpunished. If such a jump is so easy on slashdot, imagine what what conspiracies might spread in a more febrile environment like Afghanistan and how those conspiracies would further weaken Afghan belief in.
Still, it isn't an argument against doing the review and getting this drug away from soldiers. I merely mean to say that this is a rapidly deteriorating situation that threatens a complete breakdown of an already fragile trust between Kabul and the West.
Obviously it's pure speculation, but I have a hard time believing this would mitigate any punishment Bales receives. It would be a nightmare of the most extreme order for the military should Bales be exculpated, even in the most limited sense. The Afghans have been screaming for him to be tried under Afghan law. It would be hard enough to punishment short of the death penalty to the Afghan public, much less an outcome that ends with him in psychiatric care first. This is just one more massive headache in a case that can't be over for the Pentagon fast enough.
In the mean time, expect relations to continue to deteriorate between Afghan security forces and ISAF troops. There is real danger of this review fueling conspiracy theories and sparking further knife-in-the-back attacks on ISAF troops like we've already seen.
It increasingly seems that no one is winning from this war. Afghan civilians have had any sense that westerners provide safety shattered. Westerners trust their Afghan counterparts even less. And yet most of Afghan development depends on the industry that supports the international presence there, which a hasty pull-out would destroy. What's the least bad option here?
"Just because they will play ball with the chosen people..."
You don't really get the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict do you? "Playing ball" means not invading with an intent to destroy. I see tamping down revanchist regimes as a good idea. I don't know about you.
If you are of the persuasion that the US funding is the reason strongmen still rule many Arab states at the expense of peaceful democracies, I've got a few facts for you. Qaddafi's regime was under sanctions from the US for years. His son was killed by an American missile strike. During the Bush administration, in both Gaza and Lebanon, the White House pressed for inclusive elections, and Israel went along. Hamas and Hezbollah came to power. The shortcomings of both those parties being in power should be obvious. The reason the Egyptian military took no action against protesters, leaving Mubarrak to feebly attempt to crush them with private goons, is that firing on protesters would endanger the healthy military-to-military relationship with the US.The US has made its mistakes in the region sure, but it's either ignorant or dishonest to say that US policy is more often than not set forth in good faith.
You fault Israelis and pro-Israel people for being defensive, but the fact of the matter is that Israel is simultaneously under more pressure from external threats and more scrutiny from the international community. Combine that with the facts of the Shoah, that there is still quite a lot of real anti-Semitism floating around, and that most people have such a shallow understanding of the conflict to think that all the suffering has been one sided and you might begin to understand why there's such a defensiveness when it comes to the state of Israel. You can keep living in your feverish dream world where American religious zealots brutally repress Arabs and the Jews shape things with the all powerful anti-Semite card, but the real world is a lot more complicated.
It seems that there is no real connection between this group and Tehran. It's important to remember that when there is real discussion going on about conflict with Iran. That being said, this group does seem to be motivated by some sort of Iranian nationalism. It's just a further reminder of how small groups and individuals can inflame international imbroglios, leaving state actors in a bind. Think the Netanyahu and Obama administrations' paralysis over how to handle the settlers in the West Bank.