Jimmy Carter has died

And at that level of expense, having no insurance, bad regular insurance, and catastrophic insurance is not much different. However, if you get into a car accident, have diabetes, eat a burger with E. coli oh157 which destroys your kidneys and you need dialysis to stay alive, get appendicitis, get HIV, get cancer, or possibly get exposed to rabies and need human rabies immune globulin, having no insurance is very very very very very different. If you have bad insurance you haven’t used that year, it will cost you $500 or whatever your deductible is. More than that with catastrophic insurance. When my wife and I were exposed to rabies during a fantastic stay at a super clean and well-run air bnb and needed the shots, the insurance company portion of our bill was $38,000.

Wikipedia's neutrality has become a joke when it comes to Israel-related topics. For an obvious example, the first paragraph of the Zionism article says "Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible".

Here, you seem to be interpreting this somewhat misleading article as Israel (somehow, maybe indirectly) supporting Hamas' military. Really it was Qatari funding for various Gaza infrastructure and humanitarian projects. Do you think Israel should have blocked that aid?

Thanks for sharing. I guess I never thought of anti-Israel or being pro-Israel and also pro-two-state-solution. There are fewer and fewer who balance both positions.

Israel is hostile to Palestinians as Palestinians are to Israelis. The killing of many people during the march of return. The starvation plus diets. The treatment of the West Bank after the PA renounced violence as part of Oslo, there are numerous examples Palestinians will cite to show that Israel is hostile to them. You can trot out a long historical argument to justify all these, if you'd like. They can do the same for Oct. 7. Such narratives begin with the Nakba, probably include the fact that Palestinians have no military which can adequately protect them from Israel while Israel has missile deterrence systems, etc. But all these don't matter. At the end of the day, right now, both countries are materially and physically threatened by the other. And those threats materialize into violence often.

> Unfortunately, I disagree.

Your disagreement doesn't change the actual calculus on the ground, so it doesn't matter. Like I said, only deterrence actually can make peace between two actively hostile nations. It is also not true that the Palestinians did not accept any peace. They accepted Oslo, in which they conceded far more than Israel, and were rewarded for that with basically nothing. But again, it doesn't really matter now, that is long gone and dead, and if you see it differently, fine.

> The US has peace with the UK. It has peace with Zimbabwe. It has peace with Vietnam, despite a massive war with it. It has peace with Andorra.

The US and the UK fought many wars (American Independence, the WR of 1812, etc.) they achieved peace through deterrence because the American army could stand up against the British army at that time. That deterrence set up the allyship they have now.

America chooses to have peace with Zimbabwe, but these nations have never been hostile with each other. If America ever perceived Zimbabwe as hostile to it enough to be a serious threat, they would invade and decimate the country as they did Afghanistan and Iraq.

Our situation is not like those. Both countries rightly perceive the other as an active threat. In such a situation, when only one can deter the other, you'll have terrorism until some actual, tough, negotiated peace process occurs. Unlike with the IRA (a similar situation to this one), the closest peace process for both sides was sabotaged and ruined, and now we are in a territory not really historically analogous to any other in the modern era.

> But the Palestinians don't need firepower to change the calculus - that's the opposite of what they need. They need to stop using firepower to fight Israel

You could of course swap Palestine and Israel and have the American left-wing reading of the situation. You would balk at that saying "But the Palestinians are a security threat. Israel cannot be expected to allow that on its border. The US would never allow Mexico... Etc." and that is of course the same logic Palestine uses to justify its attacks on Israel. Palestine, being inferior by air, land, and sea militarily resorts to terrorism in its attacks, just as the IRA did with a similarly overmatched foe.

> [...] US look like Germany - expensive and inefficient PVs that are increasingly becoming a liability (though bless them and their utility customers for powering through and continuing to install new, more efficient equipment).

Well tried but factually wrong.

Thermal solar is a battle-proofed low-tech for water heating (or even residential heating) that does not require any expensive Gov subsidies or public money to be deployed at large scale.

It is currently common to find such panels in developing countries as a cheap way of providing hot showers to people without power grids. In countries where the notion of gov subsidies often does not even exist.

That has very little in common with the giant public money sink shitshow that is the German energiewende.

I think this kind of counterfactual is pretty impossible to do.

Do you mean that it would have been won without any US involvement? Or do you mean the US involvement would have proceeded similarly with a different president?