“The USA no longer honors alliances. ” Yep, I would agree that Obama’s administration will drop Israel under its capacious bus.

It may not be so easy to do so, though: Israel holds a lot of valuable cards in this game. It has nukes…It has an economy that produces added value…

When Rome dithered too long and failed to honor the alliance with Saguntum, the people of Saguntum built a huge pyre and burned their treasure in view of the Carthagenians before killing themselves. Perhaps the people of Israel will build a different sort of pyre if America dishonors our alliance. It’s worth pointing out that the wave of revulsion Romans felt for themselves when they realized how they had failed to live up to their word swept them into the Second Punic war. Which led to the destruction of Carthage and the rise of Roman hegemony over the Mediterranean, but not before Rome itself was nearly destroyed. And the damage Hannibal did to the Roman yeomanry was probably ultimately responsible for the descent from Republic to Empire.

But it’s awfully exhausting to be a professional stereotype. It’s like wearing a uniform. Who can do it the whole day?…That makes me a little suspicious of people who always sound one note. Ding, ding, ding. I think life is more various than that. At least, I hope it is.

For some people it isn’t. We all know addicts. I think there are those who become addicted to a role they play. It becomes a hobby and the hobby becomes a vocation. In some cases, a decent paying one for the more audacious like Wardo. Or Barney Frank. And if the role is as a professional victim, or as one of the professionally offended, it offers so much opportunity to act out and so much psychic armor for failure.

Or, we could just be living in a constructed universe, an alien scientific experiement with a hundred or so real people and six billion simulated ones. The aliens didn’t have the budget for six billion unique simulations, so there are only a couple dozen different models with minior tweaks to hair and eye color between the copies.