Fears of ‘rogue rewilding’ in Scottish Highlands after further lynx sightings Guardian (Kevin W)
News – DNA Study Rules Out Possible Identity for Burial at Jamestown Archaeology Magazine (Anthony L)
The scientist who believes he’s found the answer to permanent weight loss Telegraph. While I absolutely agree with the general premise, he ignores (or at least this article does) the trick of keto, which is that if you don’t eat enough carbs, your body goes into a ketogenic state to make blood sugar from fats and/or proteins, which is inefficient and results in needing more caloric intake to produce the needed blood sugar than if one ate enough carbs. The issue with keto is that you restrict the types of foods you eat, particularly fruits and veg. Those foods have a lot of micronutrients. So IMHO keto is a good device if you go on a keto diet for one month or maybe a bit more (or similarly, do keto intermittently to hit a target weight) But he’s right about long term sustainability.
Climate/Environment
Climate change’s hidden cost: Mental health crisis among Montana’s farmers and ranchers Bozeman Daily Chronicle
Early ‘Forever Chemicals’ Exposure Could Impact Economic Success in Adulthood, Study Says Guardian
Japan EV Sales Plummet 33% in 2024, First Decline in Four Years Nikkei
South Korean Battery Giants Face Steep Losses Amid Global EV Slowdown Korea Bizwire
China?
China to keep tapping coal to meet its energy security needs Mining Weekly
India
India’s Payments Push is Cutting Out Visa and Mastercard Techcrunch
Africa
Mozambique’s default risk rises as unrest persists Semafor
Zambia’s currency stuck at record low as drought persists Reuters
The Zambian Debt Default: A Structuralist Perspective Georgetown Journal of International Affairs
South of the Border
US announces $25m reward for arrest of Venezuela’s Maduro BBC (Kevin W)
A Sinkhole Is Threatening to Consume Ecuador’s Main Source of Power Bloomberg
European Disunion
Germany records highest company insolvencies since financial crisis Reuters
Progress in the trial against Ursula von der Leyen Cocominute (Micael T)
Working Class Front Lines 2025 Prolitarian [Sweden], via machine translation (Micael T)
Israel v. The Resistance
7 hours ago, the premies in Nasser hospital had no more oxygen. There has been no update on their situation since. https://t.co/5YgeHYWQoW
— Bedazzling Bearer of Bad News (@PixieOfDeath) January 10, 2025
Kevin W: “Must see video”:
Regular, everyday, peace-loving Israeli women were asked if they knew the number of children killed in Gaza. pic.twitter.com/VXQAk0pctM
— John P (@Johnpatrick500) January 2, 2025
Deaths from traumatic injury in Gaza ‘exceptionally high’ and under-reported Scimex (Dr. Kevin)
Will There Be a Gaza Deal Before Trump’s Inauguration? Drop Site (Robin K). Helps explain why Trump is fiercely criticizing Netanyahu, something that likely has blindside Netanyahu. Could not happen to a nicer guy.
Loss of Syria and financial stress preclude Iranian strike on Israel, generals say Iran International. Note this differs from what other experts have said. Disinfo? Internal debates?
New Not-So-Cold War
Olaf Scholz blocked €3B Ukraine aid proposal, German report says Politico
Russia Will Liberate The Donbas In 2025; The Ukraine War Ends At The Polish Border, more Mark Sleboda
🇫🇷🇺🇦 It turns out that the French did not train the Ukrainian Armed Forces for free, they took 7,000-10,000 dollars for training each soldier. This is the kind of help from the West.
But that is not the whole problem, the problem is that the training does not correspond to the… pic.twitter.com/6SNUx9wFSR
— Zlatti71 (@Zlatti_71) January 10, 2025
Exclusive: China’s Shandong Port, entry point for most sanctioned oil, bans US-designated vessels Reuters (guurst). From a few days ago, still germane.
European imports of liquefied natural gas from Russia at ‘record levels’ Guardian
US Treasury imposes ‘sweeping’ sanctions on Russian oil industry RT
Japan sanctions 11 individuals, 54 entities in Russia, some companies in 7 other countries TASS (guurst)
View from Britain: “It’s a proxy war with Russia in West Africa, whether we say so or not” International Affairs (Micael T)
Syraqistan
‘Separatist terrorists’ in Syria ‘increasingly cornered, looking for new patrons’: Turkish president Anadolu Agency
Big Brother is Watching You Watch
See the Thousands of Apps Hijacked To Spy On Your Location 404media
As the agricultural drone industry takes off, federal regulators struggle to keep up Investigate Midwest (Robin K)
Imperial Collapse Watch
Cost Of Navy’s Newest Arleigh Burke Destroyers Is Ballooning WarZone (guurst)
Crippling Conditions: The IMF and Global Inequality Harvard International Review
Defining the Deep State Larry Johnson. He sees outsourcing as seminal.
False-flagging surges as global conflicts stoke shipping fraud Tradewinds News
Trump 2.0
Trump sentencing: Judge gives Trump ‘unconditional discharge’ to respect presidency ABC. Lambert covered in Water Cooler…
Looting The ‘Allies’ Moon of Alabama (Kevin W)
Why does Trump want Greenland? Resource-rich country has a key place due to climate change EuroNews
The Great Elon Musk Pie-in-the-Face Fest Continues: When the empire gets bratty, the vassals get trampled Tarik Cyril Amar
What Happens in Greenland Need Not Stay in Greenland Tarik Cyril Amar (Micael T)
Biden
Key Republican claims Bob Woodward told him Biden was financially corrupt Guardian (Paul R)
Democrats kick off fight to protect ObamaCare subsidies in new Congress The Hill
California Burning
Supreme Court appears inclined to uphold TikTok ban in US Reuters (Kevin W)JUST IN: Los Angeles Fire Department chief Kristin Crowley turns on Los Angeles leadership, says they failed her.
Remarkable interview.
Crowley called out the city for having no water in the Santa Ynez Reservoir.
Reporter: "Did the city of Los Angeles fail you and your… pic.twitter.com/fUQPoW32QA
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) January 10, 2025
LAFD and Mayor’s office refutes speculation Chief Crowley was “dismissed” amid fires CBS
California bans insurance cancellation, non-renewals in LA areas affected by fires Fox
Home Losses From the LA Fires Hasten ‘An Uninsurable Future’ Time. We discussed this problem in general terms in a recent post; experts are even more blunt.
Here’s Everything You Still Can’t Say on “Free Speech” Meta Platforms Reclaim the Net (Micael T)
Zuckerberg says Biden officials would ‘scream,’ ‘curse’ at Meta team over COVID takedown requests The Hill (Kevin W)
What happens when someone subpoenas Cloudflare to unmask a blogger? This… The Register
Billionaires should not own media Julian Macfarlane (Micael T)
AI
Biden to further limit Nvidia AI chip exports in final push Bloomberg
Wall Street Job Losses May Top 200,000 as AI Replaces Roles Bloomberg
The Bezzle
DOJ Cleared To Sell $6.5 Billion In Bitcoin Seized From Silk Road Cryptobriefing
Guillotine Watch
Praising Pozzo Persuasion (Micael T)
Class Warfare
“All Our Future Money Is Gone”: The Impossible Task of Providing Child Care in Rural Illinois Propublica (Robin K)
Antidote du jour (via):
And a bonus:
A parrot plays peekaboo with a neighbor's cat. pic.twitter.com/FNlMC1QVx1
— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) January 9, 2025
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
I’ve been wanting to time travel recently…
I’ve been doing it recently, but haven’t managed much more than about 60 mins/hour. I can’t really recommend it.
I’ve been doing it in the future, and now i’m here.
I find it hard enough to travel to the here&now. Travel back and forth in time makes it even harder.
I’ll be the dystopian Pangloss chiming in. I’ll take now over any rose-colored Golden Age.
Though I understand if someone wants to time-machine back to 1991 to 99.
I want to back to 1972 and ride my Schwinn Sting-Ray again after receiving it for my 11th birthday…
Rosebud, and all that.
You’re my lucky older brother. I got a Typhoon.
I’m so sorry to hear that, my dad would often threaten me that he’d send me to military school or get me a Typhoon if I misbehaved.
Lol! To be fair, I was pretty jacked when I got it, although it wasn’t long before jealousy kicked in.
I looked up the price differential and a Sting-Ray was only $10 more than a Typhoon, back when a sawbuck meant something.
Just wait, we’re about 40 years from visiting the dark ages.
200,000 job losses on Wall Street?
I am finding it extremely difficult to feel the slightest sympathy.
Agreed. Boo effing hoo. Wahbulance is on standby if they need it.
Maybe they will jump now?
During the Occupy Wall Street days I asked the police where the best spot to watch the bankers jump. They told me that sadly nobody jumped. They were highly amused when asking them to say “jump mother%{#!+, jump” instead of “cheese” when taking a photo with them.
Not meant to be at all antagonistic but I’m not exactly sure why anyone losing their job to AI is a good thing. For one thing, I’m sure this is not your top level people at risk but rather lower level workers trying to survive in an expensive city while paying off student debt in many cases. And secondly, with fewer workers to pay, profits go up and where does that money go if not into the hands of workers who would circulate that money around the city? I have a very suspicious feeling that the people behind AI, which admittedly I have a very shallow understanding of, do not overall have benevolent intentions.
This goes with my first reaction, which was this is only good if those 200,000 jobs were senior VPs and officers and above who all supported the development of AI to begin with. Let the mopes who do the grunt work on Wall Street and all the secretaries and assistants keep their jobs. It is a long shot either way, but those folks may be able to see that AI should die and gum up the works. Those at the top are too busy counting their ill gotten gains to fully realize how bad both they and AI are at doing anything worthwhile with so-called investing.
Now might be a very good time to evangelize for ‘new members’ for the “Confraternity of Saint Luigi the Adjuster.” Especially in the New York City metropolitan region.
To hell with wall Street and everyone on it.
If it gets only some of the smarter, math savvy kids to look at engineering instead of finance, it’s a good thing.
You’re thinking backwards. The smart engineering kids get their degrees and then go to Wall Street to be quants.
A lot of those who don’t stay in engineering related fields and become project managers. The rate of people graduating with technical degrees and remaining technical in the US is not good.
If half the jobs in Wall Street are replaced by automatons, the people who get laid off will no longer vote or make political contributions on the basis of their connection to the finance industry, which will reduce the power of Wall Street in the long term.
Back office, middle office and operations are likely to be most at risk,
This would include compliance, know your customer, and auditing, introducing more black boxes to hide unsightly behavior. Who needs live eyes here, lol.
These are the lower paying jobs in finance.
This can only further entrench the “old boys club” environment.
Who’s responsible when rules and regulations are not followed?
How efficient will Chat GDP be at cooking the books?
Anecdotally I can highly suggest that if such roles can be moved or relocated outside the country that has already happened. Thinking back to about 2010 during a protracted job search, I was living in the Dallas and Ft Worth metro when I interviewed for a contractor role at a large JP Morgan Chase office center for back office operations and the like near Addison, Texas. While I did not land a role then, several years later the company announced that most of those job functions were being moved overseas to India, I believe.
AI just may accelerate such corporate hiring trends but the tendency of Wall Street firms and the larger employers was already in place and in practice. Maybe the AI functions do serve to provide efficiencies in certain functions…. I would add as well, there is always some manner of Audit functions happening whether it’s internal or an external year end audit.
The H1B scam includes a lot of book keeping and accounting jobs which presumably fall into the back office category. Similar to transportation technology H1B jobs…..meaning truck drivers. We are bringing over people from Punjab and Calcutta that have never driven a car and putting them through a truck driver training program on the one hand and laying off US truck drivers with the other. Why spend millions on a computer system when you can get an H1B for cheap.
If those jobs were at risk, then employment in east Asia would suffer, not in Manhattan. Those moves are old news.
No, AI is being aimed higher on the food chain.
In the end, there can be only one. Hyperbolic Highlander reference but that does describe the trend.
We see your point, but thieves have children too.
They’ll be okay, there will be lots of openings in the agricultural, meat packing, construction, and restaurant sectors.
Perhaps 200,000 highly disgruntled former Wall Street employees could be a valuable social-insurgency resource if approached and handled correctly. I don’t know what that correct approaching and handling method would be, but I hope somebody considers working on it.
What they know about the Engine Rooms of Wall Street might help the rest of us to undermine Wall Street from the sides and below, if “we” figure out the right way to ask them to tell us what they know.
1/11/25 links.
Hey, if you can get the job done a day early and turn the work in, why not and take the day off?
About the most expensive real estate in LA, and the reservoir right smack dab in the middle of it all is empty, kind of similar to Hollywood emptying out and outsourcing most everything to computers.
Kismet met its match…
I guess that the city felt safe draining the Santa Ynez Reservoir as it was wintertime but you think that they could have given the Fire Department a heads up first. But even if full, I doubt that it would have stopped all those homes burning down as conditions were just too feral.
A few prescient homeowners saved their domiciles by using a gas powered water pump in draining out their swimming pools to fight the fire, and that’s around 30,000 gallons, the full reservoir would perhaps saved 100-200 homes, not much in the scheme of things unless one of those was yours.
And in the below link is a photo of none other than Richard Nixon working to save his Calif home in the 1961 Bel-Air fire.
https://la.curbed.com/2017/12/6/16742976/bel-air-fire-history-brentwood-nixon
Nixon is using a garden hose.
That makes Richard Nixon better than former Aussie PM Scott Morrison – aka Scotty from Marketing – who said during the ferocious fires here a few years ago ‘I don’t hold a hose, mate’ while explaining his secret holiday trip to Hawaii during the fires.
…they didn’t call Nixon ‘Drippy Dick’ for nothing, you know
Reports later surfaced that Nixon grew furious when the hose began to leak. He had to call in the plumbers.
No Nixon in the film, but informative:
LAFD: “Design For Disaster” – The Story of the Bel Air Conflagration | 1962
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxnC1WW95XE
Here is some footage from The Weather Channel showing some of the burndown destruction. The very first thing I noticed was that all the brick chimneys, concrete walls, etc. look like they are still standing up and not burned down at all. Could there be a lesson somewhere in that?
https://weather.com/news/video/altadena-california-wildfire-aftermath
Yeah, there’s a slight delay on masonry destruction, it’s scheduled for a 7.7 next week.
After WWII, Germans picked their rubbled cities brick by brick, cleaned them, and rebuilt. You cannot do that with burned dimensional lumber and pulverized dry wall…
You do realize there’s a reason there are precious few brick buildings in SoCal?
Third little piggy moved?
Same way as there isn’t any in west coast Canada, they where pushed out by lower cost lumber industry. At that time nobody had any idea of earhquakes in the Pacific coast.
Yes, the traditional brick would all come tumbling down in an earthquake.
Maybe California builders should work on using the same Ultra High Performance Concrete that the Iranians build their underground bunkers out of to withstand the very biggest bombs that anyone could drop.
https://theconstructor.org/concrete/ultra-high-performance-concrete/6384/
Maybe California builders could learn how and where to put movable joints in their UHPC buildings so the buildings could flex like arthropods at key-ly placed joints and hinges.
And etc.
Or Californians can keep right on building in the Chapparal Fire Ecosystem zone. Eventually without any insurance and without any Fire Disaster Relief once California and America are both too poor and bankrupt to give them any.
I do not see a single mention of how pressured towns are to permit building in places where they know are inappropriate. Yes, engineers can build anywhere, and that is a problem. But governments need to be resolute about this and not be cowed by claims of the need to relax building codes which stand in the way of progress
So, these well-to-do folks get the permit and then the taxpayers pay for ramping up to put the fires out.
Precisely.
If you don’t let anyone build anything anywhere they want, you’re a NIMBY. AKA the reason there is a housing crisis is because Henry Winkler can’t build another garage.
“we need to get rid of regulations!”
Well, you would have to purge and burn the real estate builders, hustlers and operators out of government before you could get government which would rule against the real estate builders, hustlers and operators.
The fire department battalion commander responsible for fighting the fire in Altadena said that if he’d had an engine parked at every house, with an endless supply of water, the homes would not have been saved. These aren’t the fires of old, where stray sparks land on neighboring homes. Homes were exploding in flames from extreme heat. During Winter, the “wet” season. Nice video this morning of a fire tornado.
Like property in coastal Florida, the long term solution is probably abandonment and migration. Not sure what long term means given that disasters are coming with increasing frequency. Maybe coastal Greenland will be nice in 10 years.
Fire departments are scaled to handle a few fires at a time.
These wildfires are of tremendous scale.
When I beat my hasty retreat from the Sonoma County Tubbs fire in 2017, the entire neighborhood was burning.
The fire and police were knocking on doors to tell people to get out as this was around 1AM.
The local fire department had a nearly new fire station burn down.
From my readings, Australia has been far more willing to push new construction to fire resistance.
The home builders in Calif are very comfortable with wood construction.
One can be concerned that the new construction is more resistant, but maybe still quite vulnerable.
>>The home builders in Calif are very comfortable with wood construction.
Wooden buildings are generally more earthquake resistant. IIRC, properly built rammed earth structures can be earthquake resistant and are fire resistant of course, plus its dirt, which is hard to run out of, but in California run into difficulties with local building codes.
If people are to remain in California, it will require a change in both building codes and practices, but will the people running the system allow it to happen? Cheap, mass produced, oversized, overpriced, ugly, and tacky, housing seems to be required in our current neoliberal order.
The old “Spanish style” adobe buildongs also look good and are also good at keeping heat out/in. Pity that we don’t use it more often…
Like say the Spanish missions in Cali that collapsed in earthquakes?
Rammed earth apparently can be built to withstand earthquakes, but it’s been too long since I have read up on just how aside from remembering the use of wood or rebar as re-enforcement. It’s also not adobe bricks. It is a single large structure and not multiple individual bricks. And yes, using brick especially without re-enforcement in earthquake country is A Bad Idea.
‘Zlatti71
@Zlatti_71
🇫🇷🇺🇦 It turns out that the French did not train the Ukrainian Armed Forces for free, they took 7,000-10,000 dollars for training each soldier. This is the kind of help from the West.
But that is not the whole problem, the problem is that the training does not correspond to the realities of modern warfare and these newly-minted fighters, according to speaker Denis Yaroslavsky, are trained a little better than the musketeers.
– FRWL’
This has got to be one of the most remarkable stories of this war. No, not the French charging the Ukrainians for that training so that they could get some of their money back but the type of training given. This war has been going on for nearly three years now. It was a once in a lifetime opportunity for NATO to entirely revamp their training to 21st century standards. Each Ukrainian formation sent back to the front could have been a test-bed for how well that training matched modern warfare conditions and the training regimes adjusted accordingly. If the French are typical, they have not changed their NATO doctrine at all and are still training for the Fulda gap scenario from the 80s with those Ukrainian formations. I suspect that the really good training was reserved for those Ukrainian formations specializing in sabotage assassination, etc. instead.
One aspect of this, which I think can be detected in the video, is the level of Ukrainian resentment towards the west and NATO. Recall the incident where Biden vented frustration that Zelensky was not at all grateful. We see the reason in this video, insofar as the depicted attitude might be typical.
I’m not an expert, but I think we can expect that as the Ukrainians lose, they’ll turn against the west. After all, it’s not just that they share Slavic history with their Russian brothers and sisters. Even the ukronazi worldview, despite a race supremacy which sees ethnic Russians as lower and inferior humans, if human at all, is still closer to ultranationalism of the likes of Alexander Dugin than it is to anything in the west, has more points of similarity than difference, more points of common cause. I think?
The west thought it was using the Ukrainians to push an agenda but it was the other way around. Now that western usefulness is nearly exhausted, what follows? How likely is the possibility the Ukrainians could return to the fold, become like the Chechans?
So in a sense, the west could come to rue the day where they thought they could use the Ukrainians, didn’t consider the consequences if they lost, this interview being a sneak preview of things to come.
The so-called Christian west didn’t heed the warning about living by the sword.
Yes, just as the Taliban turned against the west. But they’re our friends now. W’evah
Training for Fulda Gap might have been more relevant than training for fighting the uppity colonial subjects, I suspect.
NATO now has no doctrine, does not train and is not equipped for heavy-metal high-intensity land-air combat. Even if it could by some miracle revive the capability it had forty years ago, complete with massive armies and a huge defence industry, it never had an offensive military doctrine anyway, so the most NATO trainers could have done was to teach the Ukrainians the kind of defensive doctrine and tactics that were used in the Cold War. And those tactics are now completely out of date anyway, given technological advances.
But with the end of the Cold War in Europe, there was no point in retaining these capabilities, and even Iraq 2,0 is now twenty years ago. The West thus finds itself without a capability to do what the Russians can do, and since it hasn’t got it, it can’t teach it to anyone else. It can teach Ukrainians how to run a light mechanised brigade, which the French seem to have done quite well, but nothing more.
Forgive for merely quoting Martyanov – one big issue: if anything achieved at all with training AFU via NATO – it is just piecemeal, such as a light mechanised brigade trained properly.
In fact I do wonder why Western MSM never questioned NATO training AFU (where is the neo-anti-colonialism reflex? Or does that apply only when its about decommunization, ffs?) instead of the other way around – as AFU has much more real war fighting experience and their senior staff knows RU doctrine much more in detail. None of this made sense since day #1.
What Martyanov decries as incapability of modern continental land warfare by NATO/US seems truly to be a lack of culture and beyond anything Western “schools” and experience are able of. They would need decades to implement.
So even single successful training sessions mean nothing.
This lack of holistic understanding applies to all parts of Western war discourse, be it “pro” or anti-Russian.
I needed much time to understand how prejudice and racism affected and enabled this.
Pre-2022 I always argued with others saying just that, come on, 1945 is really long past, stop using the N-word. Well, I was wrong.
The ones who will infiltrate themselves all over NATO Europe to assassinate, destroy, sabotage in revenge for NATO Europe not having supported Ukraine “hard enough” during the war? ” Those” Ukrainian formations?
Gooooooood Moooooorning Fiatnam!
We were pinned down near Pacoima, the platoon that is. A firefight had broke out on the slopes positioned north of Ventura Blvd, Vanowen and the rest.
Nobody had expected the debt offensive to occur during the Slavic holiday period-normally a period of calm, but was then and this was now. We didn’t hesitate twice or think once in repositiong ourselves on the flanks of Magic Mountain.
Most enigmatic, Wuk. Not sure if you mean the amusement park or something more Mannish.
Ambiguity happens…
It just happened to be set in Davos, as luck would have it-
Somehow it figures that it would take Wuk to let us know that it was time to Mann up. Next up, the Steppenwolf of Wall Street? (With apologies to Whitley Strieber, aka. Witley the Grey. [I would love to read the correspondence between Tolkien and Jung.])
A dissertation on the theory that the Elves and Wizards from Numenor are archetypes of very early Terran human interactions with “Them” would be peak magical thinking and thus the epitome of Cognitive Deconstructionism. Defending such a dissertation would be a Master Class in freely associative ideation.
…we eat our Jung
I was going to ask if that was at the Tomorrowland Terrace, but I read that the Fane of Futurist Foods is now the Galactic Grill with “moderne” dishes like Wookenpfeffer, Tatooine Toast, and Jedi Jambalaya.
And so it goes, to pot.
Darest I comment on the John Milton poetry thing?
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45738/paradise-lost-book-2-1674-version
“HIgh on a Throne of Royal State, which far
Outshon the wealth of Ormus and of Ind,
Or where the gorgeous East with richest hand
Showrs on her Kings Barbaric Pearl and Gold,
Satan exalted sat, by merit rais’d
To that bad eminence; and from despair
Thus high uplifted beyond hope, aspires
Beyond thus high, insatiate to pursue
Vain Warr with Heav’n, and by success untaught
His proud imaginations thus displaid.”
adding:” And from dispair thus high uplifted beyond hope”
Somebody got too keen calling in the napalm strikes.
Re: Iran striking Israel
IMO Iran can’t strike Israel first, because in any war Israel will have full backing of West (and the Sunni Arab dictators wont be far behind), which will want to improve its self image after the Ukraine fiasco. So Iran will absolutely need support of China/Russia and of the Global South, and for that it has to be able to present itself as defender against Israeli aggression in unambiguous terms. I don’t think massively striking Israel as retaliation for something that happened months ago and what Iran downplayed as largely ineffective, fits the bill. Iran isn’t Russia and can’t go by Putin’s maxim “if there is going to be fight, it’s better you strike first”.
The best play for them is to supply Houtis with missiles to take pot shots at Israel and see if Netanyahu overreacts.
You appear not to be up to speed on this topic. Iran made a pre-negotiated retaliatory strike on Israel, with times and targets identified. Iran even put its launch of IIRC 300 slow-moving drones on TV so everyone, including the West, could see.
The drones were intended to and did draw fire.
The serious missiles got through and hit every target precisely. This included the most heavily defended spots in Israel.
The cost to Iran was estimated at $90 million. The cost to the West (here, Israel, US, UK, France all participated) of its failed defense has been reported at $2.35 billion.
Israel and the West cannot defend against Iran.
As for an attack on Iran, Israel tried that. Most of the air force reportedly stopped flying well short of Iran’s borders due to recognizing they’d been “seen” and were being locked on by Iran’s air defense systems. Despite press noise otherwise, experts have concluded very few missiles were launched and they did very little damage. And that damage may have been done entirely by the falling air defense missiles or deflected/fragmented Israel missiles and not the Israel missiles making a hit.
Russia reportedly has supplied Iran with more S-400 systems since then.
Where do you put the possibility of a nuclear response strike on Iran by Israel?
It’s always left out of the discussion.
Israel will have the full backing of tve US whether Irán strikes first, second, or never. People Who think otherwise are dilusional.
Israel could bomb nursery schools in Canada and still enjoy the full backing of the U.S. government.
Don’t give them any ideas.
The Israeli response was restrained too, if not by Israel then by USA, who openly signaled they don’t want to go to war over this. It would be unwise for Iran to assume that was the maximum of damage combined West can inflict on them in case of full scale war. And AFAIK full scale war is what Operation True Promise 3 is promised to be, quite logically since another demonstrative hit would look weak and if you want to cripple Israel’s air power, you better use your surprise saturation attack to maximum effect and not let anything laying untouched so it can be used to counter attack. Iran seems to have its own problems with infrastructure battered by years of sanctions even now and it’s anyone guess how many hits on power plants they can sustain before the power grid completely collapses.
This is not accurate with respect to what I wrote. Israel DID intend three large waves of attack toward Iran but executed only a blunted first wave. The idea that the response was “restrained” is contradicted by the mass of air power that Israel deployed. It was thwarted, not restrained.
As for a full scale war, I suggest you get a grip. The US is in no position to launch a ground invasion of Iran, which is three times the size of Iraq, with massive unassailable underground bunkers and 3000 to 6000 ballistic missiles. Our ground forces are a shadow of what they were at the time of Desert Storm and the Gulf War. The Houthis and Iran can easily destroy aircraft carriers, which would be a massive psychological and practicsl blow. Iran can take out Saudi oil fields and is widely rumored to have a dead hand set up to do just that in the event of a nuclear attack. The US will no go there.
YS is probably underestimating the problem of attacking Iran even if the US had forces far larger than those that invaded in Iraq. Where would those forces stage from? Iraq, Turkey, Afghanistan or launch a cross-Persian Gulf amphibious operation (you must be kidding). Add to that certain Russian military supply support.
The only way to “defeat” Iran is a color revolution and that has been tried a number of times and failed. Moreover, most countries are wise to that tactic.
I also recommend looking at the results of the millenium challenge war game where the “red” team wiped out the US force before it made it to shore and the rest of the exercise had to be scripted for “blue” to win
Hence, sanctions, sanctions, sanctions and the occasional toe in Israel’s backside. There is no avenue of approach to Iran by land or sea that does not hold out the probability of being attritted to impotence before reaching its borders. That leaves manned and unmanned air attack. This would inflict damage within Iran. It would also be resisted. The hesitation of US-Israel or Israel-US to attack is a measure of the calculation of damage inflicted to damage sustained. The Russia-Iran pact to be signed in six days makes formal that Russia has Iran’s back. More distantly and to exactly what extent so does China. Just because Bibi is fixated on Iran as the solution to all his troubles, a dubious proposition ab initio becoming more so by the day, does not mean, except in the fevered imaginings of crazed Zionists in Israel and in the US, that the US must go along with it. The measure of delusion and psychopathy in the DC Bubble can be taken by support awarded to it.
The geopolitical geniuses who believe West Asia can be rearranged to their satisfaction by ever more chaos may see what they believe is a short term gain. Since US-ians only think short term and with a degree of complexity suitable for Chinese Checkers, this passes for high strategy. The US and Israel and the Turks have spilled the beans or the can of worms, choose your metaphor. The re-canning to their individual satisfaction may prove messy and unrewarding. But we must never forget what Forest Gump said, “Stupid is as stupid does.”
We could release all of our paper tigers at once and scare them to death!
By full scale war I mean qualitative step up from current string of choreographed actions that aren’t mean to seriously hurt anybody lest things get out of hand and rockets start flying for real. Obviously West is not in position to invade and occupy Iran, nor I think they can win the war in the sense of stopping Iran from firing missiles to wherever it wants. But I also think West is capable of destroying Iran civilian infrastructure, especially when they decide to go all in for Israel, which will happen if Iran successfully cripples its air power. And I’m sure the Zionist crazies in US government are fully prepared to lose a few aircraft carriers before China hawks will be able to try to rein them in.
Did you miss what I wrote? They tried that in the most advantageous format possible, with dates and targets in Israel set in advance. Iran hit all targets precisely and at a fraction of what the US/Israel/UK/France barrage cost.
And wars are not won with air attacks alone, particularly with Iran, which has spent >20 years building deep underground facilities in its mountains and keeping weapons, command centers, and weapons controls there.
Israel is a small country. Iran can take out ALL of Israel’s civilian infrastructure, starting with desalination plants and power generation, in about an hour. Iran said BEFORE Israel tried its last ineffective strike that if Israel attacked Iran, civilian assets would be on the menu. Iran is overdue that retaliatory strike already. They seem to want to give Trump the opportunity to turn the temperature down before they do that. Trump criticizing Netanyahu could be a sign of that (Netanyanu has been determined to get the US embroiled in a war with Iran) but it is way way too soon to tell.
You are stuck in a fantasy and keep ignoring facts. You need to stop.
Iran may have been waiting to see what Trump brings, as well as the signing of its new agreement with Russia. I note commenters arguing that Trump reposting a video in which Sachs slammed Netanyahu is a signal that he has no intention of fighting a war against Iran.
Parrot antidote… peekaboo yes but the gaze from the cat speaks to very different and wild motive. “I’m a cat that kills birds and mice, if it weren’t for this glass I wouldn’t play nice…”
In other words the cat is channeling an infamous Mike Myers character, Fat Bastard. “I’m gonna eat ya, get in ma belly!”
Having been around a few parrots, they are smarter than you might think. I am pretty sure the parrot was both having fun AND taunting the cat while doing it.
Frankly anyone who allows their cat to roam freely off leash into the neighborhood or other yards is partially responsible for the deaths of millions of songbirds a year.
When my doberman rips your cat’s entrails out after chasing it down at 35mph in my 2 acre backyard don’t whine to me about how the thing is suddenly just a cuddly non predator.
Cats hunt for food. What is your excuse for bloodlust?
[have to be quiet as a mass murderer is innocently ensconced on my lap purring contentedly]
Einstein (brains of the outfit) eats everything but the entrails on his kills, and notified me early on that it’d be nice if I did stencils on his food bowl, in order to count coup.
Why is there no outrage regarding Pit Bulls, which killed 3 Americans last month?
Because that’s insane.
I must now regret not adding that crucial tag….for my sarcasm. In my defense it’s cold outside so lack of fresh air this morning is my best at a weak tea defense…
I don’t own any pets so I must slink back under the rock I crawled from….heh
Really. You are on thin ice around here with any suggestions of cat perfidy. However I believe even our esteemed host has said that pet cats should be indoor cats. Songbirds are declining.
I grew up having cats but switched to dogs when i realized they are really miniaturized humans with wagging tails. I doubt they kill many cats but some dogs do like to chase them.
Dogs have owners. Cats have staff. / ;)
adding: my doggie liked chasing cats until one stood its ground and shredded doggie’s nose with one quick swipe of its claws. After that doggie might make a run at a cat but if the cat stood its ground and arched its back and hissed doggie would skid to a halt, act like “cat? what cat? I don’t see a cat.”, and carefully walk past the cat giving it a wide birth. / ;)
typo: wide berth.
Elephants and whales have wide births. / heh.
Couple decades ago my first cat, Sparky Bomber the 1st was convinced he was a dog. He perished chasing and catching the city bus. This is 100% true.
From the look of it, that cat gets 2 squares a day of Fancy Feast. I doubt is is relying on it’s instinctive DNA to survive. It’s a jungle out there and I hope there are no coyotes roaming the neighborhood.
Why Does My Cat Bring Me Dead Mice
https://vetexplainspets.com/why-does-my-cat-bring-me-dead-mice/#
A good mouser or ratter in an abode with unwelcome mice or rats is worth its weight in Fancy Feast. / ;)
As for unfixed toms, trying keeping one indoors once it’s reached that certain age. Many will bolt for the outdoors at the first crack of an unguarded open door and stay away for years, returning eventually when they’re ready to ‘retire.’ / ;)
She wants to teach you to hunt.
If you scold a cat for bringing you a dead mouse, the story is that the cat will think that you’re dissatisfied with the size of the gift. So they will bring home something bigger next time.
Round here, the neighbour’s cat, whom I have renamed as Bruiser due to its gait and attitude, takes home dead rabbits.
One of our lot brought a rabbit back once. They ate most of it.
They don’t catch much for birds with the forest here loaded with rodents who are, to put plainly, slaughtered in numbers.
When we moved here 20 years ago there were a few wild turkeys in Tiny Town, but now there’s gobs.
Maybe around 1,500, about the same number of full time residents,
Our hair’m doesnt mess with them as they must look to be a dinosaur from their purview-
Lol, wild turkeys are great when they’re few. I had one cat, KT, who loved to stalk them. Coyotes here are big like small wolves. They keep the population down.
Frankly, bird feeders are just as to blame. Create a watering hole and the lions will come.
Your doberman sentence is, to put it politely, distasteful. Should your neighbors take a similar stance on your dog?
WTF?
Years ago the small town where I grew up had some problems with some people’s dogs getting into other people’s yards and going after their animals. The relatively new and overzealous town constable took the easy route and shot the dogs. Then what to do with constables with itchy trigger fingers? Maybe just put an old lady with a big appetite at the back end to take care of everything? Musical accompaniment ! ;)
Meanwhile my two indoor cats are waiting vigilantly as temperatures drop and snow starts flying in the hopes that small rodents may soon be driven indoors, causing a concomitant drop in said rodents’ already short life expectancies.
Years ago one of my co-workers came to work and was bragging about how his dogs had killed his neighbor’s cat.
Hilarity ensued after I put up posters with his name and phone number in his neighborhood with a description of the stray cat he found.
I’ve owned Dobermans as well as pit bulls. I am not aware of any of them ever killing cats or anything else. Cat should not roam free. It’s a big bad world and they are defenseless against most predators, as in coyotes. Our neighborhood had numerous people that refused to bring their cats inside. So yes, they kill birds, but there are all kinds of reasons they shouldn’t be outside. These people averaged a cat a year. Before a coyote killed them. My cats live quite happily inside. Where they belong.
I’ve got no quarrel with Pitties or Dobermans, and cats make good indoor pets. Saying they shouldn’t be allowed outside seems over brushed. No mention to the benefit of the vast quantities of rodents they kill. Are we talking urban, rural, or the berbs? What of farm cats and the farmers that rely on them?
There’s a dominion angle to this, and, right or wrong, it seems to be coloring opinions to one degree or another.
>What of farm cats and the farmers that rely on them?
Welp, the kids had a 2 cats that would pretty much team up like a pack of dogs when it came to taking down the rats around the farm. They were awesome, sometimes gone for a day or so at a time but always coming back to “check in”. Unfortunately one did not come in and that’s sadly just the life of an outdoor cat. The remaining one still gets out and about but certainly not for the amount of time as before. Still doing his job though.
Mentioning outdoor cats also brings back memories of working in a dairy farm in high school and on occasion people would abandon their cat at the place. They only stayed in the barn and were given some milk morning and night in a bowl and maybe some Friskies dry food but other than that they had to fend for themselves. As much as we would like to,at so me point you can’t get too attached to them. They are the prey as well when wandering through fields and forest.
Thank you. Having dog or cat pets is a relatively recent cultural phenomenon for working and middle class families. Earlier, dogs and cats were working animals for the working and middle classes. In the case of cats, keeping the rodent – mouse and rat – population down. ‘Fluffy’ had a job to do. A rat infestation in a farm’s or bakery’s granary would spell disaster.
Fido had a job to to. Rat Terriers got their name for a reason. Animal had to earned their keep.
The pet-i-fication of cats and dogs by the so-called lower classes, the working and middle classes, is both a sign that these classes have (or had) enough extra income to expend on “not working animals” and a recognition of the elevation of these class’s financial resources. (Which is now being reversed, imo.)
Does this sound brutally materialistic? Of course it does. Yet, this is life. No woo here. / imo
adding: once’t upon a time, ‘pet’ animals – that is entirely non-working animals – kept for companionship only, were the luxury of the upper class and the aristocracy. See, for example, Mrs. Pumphrey and her lap dog in the PBS series All Creatures Great and Small.
This was not all that long ago, maybe only 2 or 3 generations ago.
i have one official cat…no balls..boys picked him off side of road as tiny kitten, 15 years ago, and i fed him milk, then milk and kibble, then kibble.
but i live in the wilderness…and through no fault of my own, am suddenly(as of last fall) overrun with cats.
cost $40 a pop to have em fixed out here…if i could catch them without getting beaten up.
they are entirely wild…so i shoot them, on occasion…esp the big males.
i understand how most at NC seem to not like this method…but i reckon that, as top predator, i have a responsibility to maintain the balance.
of note, perhaps, i am also over run with songbirds…the winter crew is in all the cedar elms right now…and very loud.
out of the maybe 30 wild cats still hanging around, undispatched, ive seen 2 with a little bird.
and only seen 2 other piles of little feathers.
so i figger the cats are providing the srvice they are supposed to provide, as well…thinning out the slow and stupid.
regardless…balance will eventually be restored.
one can maybe dispatch 2 cats in a 48 hour period…because the rest vanish.
and, to be clear, this chore is prolly my least favorite of them all…even more than dispatching sheep or geese or chickens. at least with them, im eating them.
hell, i like changing out the bano barrel on the composting toilet more than i like thinning the cat herd.
I don’t envy you this task. I get it.
Cats exist only for domestication? Sounds like how patricians view plebes.
Throw me in with the domesticated cats should not roam freely crowd. Somewhat for the birds, but mostly because it almost certainly guarantees that you have shortened their own live span. Between exposure to other predators, cars and to diseases they might encounter, well let me put it this way my strictly indoor cats have lived extremely long lives versus most of the cats I know who got to wander freely.
I will also admit that it is also for me, I worry too much about them to open that door.
Sounds like you’ve done a very, very poor job of training your doberman.
Not something I would be bragging about in the comments.
“DNA Study Rules Out Possible Identity for Burial at Jamestown”
Looks like we have a challenging mystery here. They know that it was a 40 year-old guy who must have been well off as he did not experience heavy manual labour in his life. They even know what he looked like. I have no doubt that buried somewhere in the archives – probably in the UK – is mention of a guy that hopped a boat to the Jamestown colony. And the beauty is that if they get a name, then perhaps that will be able to confirm it using DNA analysis of modern descendants. But you would think that the guy would have married and left a wife in the colonies – unless he was fresh off the boat. That is the thing about the Jamestown archaeological site. It is the gift that keeps on giving-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamestown_Rediscovery
I have read that a fair number of the “colonists” at Jamestown were single men out to find riches in the New World. They were not there to colonize but to exploit. For many of them, “feminine companionship” was a recreational pastime. The serious business for them was looking for gold.
The mortality from all causes was near catastrophic during the first 15 years of the Jamestown colony. The gentleman’s DNA may well not reside in any present day persons.
One of the reasons the Powahatan attempted to destroy Jamestown was that they got sick of all the rapes committed by the nearly all male settlers.
Jimson Weed is one of the nicknames for Datura, and it derives from an incident at Jamestown where after ingesting it, colonists went a bit batty.
The article on Africa does not say the proxy war takes place there, the proxy war refers to Ukraine.
Not that Africa is not a theater of the war currently.
I do not understand your point. We did not locate the article under the “Africa” heading but under “New Not-So-Cold War”.
This is a Links section, so we do not change headlines provided by the publication, which is what you seem to want us to have done.
Did not want you to do anything, Yves, just pointing out the error.
It is not an error. It is a rhetorical point made by the author in the headline. This is in the article:
Thanks, useful to know.
Climate and weather, news alert for those of us in southern and Southeast US. Ice is never friendly and driving abilities can definitely relapse into panic steering or braking when it’s encountered on major highways but especially on those secondary roads that are less likely to be treated.
Snowfall here in South Carolina was measured in mere micro amounts, nearby we clocked at under 1″ but then overnight the precipitation changed to rain and sleet….which can make for a hellish mixture. Glad I don’t fly in these winter months!
Added, a warm serving of grits* is sounding tasty this cold morning but I will settle on plain oatmeal instead. Some chatter yesterday about CA fire adjacent refugees fleeing over to these southern states and perhaps learning to embrace the iconic southern breakfast staple.
Be careful walking outside as well. It’s going to be slick, be wary of falling.
Maybe some of those Californian fire refugees can introduce their coffee culture to the South-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqqXCiPJTXE (18 secs)
So iconic I have a lifelong dislike of grits. Could be the name.
As Joe Pesci says to the waitress in My Cousin Vinnie:”What’s a grit?”
Polenta? (I think I’m stealing a line from Alton Brown…)
I’m proposing to call goings on in the City of Angels:
‘Januaryember’, but is it catchy enough?
Januember would be a little snappier, IMHO.
neither of the grocery stores i go to have had grits in 3 years.(i mean real grits, not the instant microwave kind…they have that,lol)
ive asked(know the manager in the local one), and they say 1. they cant hardly get them, and 2. theres little demand anymore.
i learned grits from a creole woman in new iberia.
boil em in water and salt, then boil em again in milk/cream/buttermilk…real butter, pepper, and bacon and fried eggs on top.
w a lil hot sauce.
better than menudo for sunday mornin comin down purposes.
(rich natural fats plus lotsa niacin, etc.)
My mom only showed enough interest to make instant grits which may have contributed to my dislike. She made great biscuits though. These made up for the grits.
when i have a hair…and someone to cook for… i make biscuits like my grampa did, off the label recipe of clabber girl.
but i do it in a dutch oven over a fire,
and make the gravy from bacon grease over that fire.
my youngest sez, “dude! yer so old school about everything!”
lol.
but he licks his plate, nevertheless.
That sounds like a more delicious way to cook and serve them. I am guessing I grew up eating more of the fast cook variety ( instant grits*, etc…butter flavoring…) so I don’t keep with necessarily the tight bond that an erstwhile southern male would have. I do miss out on truly fresh made biscuits by hands who have prepared them for decades. On occasion I’ll order a side of grits at the Waffle House.
*I will not put shame on my late mother, it was a big family and she also taught. Breakfast from a young age was, well there are bowls and cereal to fill them with.
Loss of Syria and financial stress preclude Iranian strike on Israel, generals say – Iran International
He also criticized Assad’s military leadership, saying, “His army commanders were corrupt and accepted bribes from everyone.” Esbati further accused Russia of betrayal, saying, “Russia betrayed both Assad and Iran.” He added that “after Iran’s first retaliation against Israeli attacks, Russia was aligned with Israel.”
There has been much discussion about the a new comprehensive and defense cooperation agreement between Russia and Iran. But, NGL, I’ve also not been certain about where Russia would stand in a no punches pulled Iran vs Israel situation.
They have already been there. When Israel/US launched that massive attack against Iran a few months ago it was probably those Russian radars that lit up those stealth F-35s like a Christmas tree forcing that attack to be mostly aborted. In the coming days a treaty will be signed between Russia and Iran that will have military provisions at the heart of it. So Iran will probably get more radars and anti-air missiles along with the training for the Iranian pilots to use modern Russian fighters that are being delivered. And for the US and Israel, that will make Iran be a much harder nut to crack and may make the price of doing so to be prohibitive.
Will the treaty with Russia leave Iran like Hezbollah? I mean that in the sense of having to adhere to agreements that Israel doesn’t have to respect. Like that particular ceasefire.
Quite bluntly, I’m wondering: Is Russia’s agreement with Iran only on the condition of tempered and telegraphed responses against Israel?
There is no doubt that Israel and the US want to set Iran on fire and preferably balkanize it like was done with Syria. Of course if this happened the entire Middle east would be completely destabilized for years to come which I guess is the plan. Russia could not stop Syria collapsing so it was not a red line for them but I think that Iran is because of the blowback that could result from this which would also involve Russian security interests. in addition, I think that both countries have a lot to offer each other.
I think China might be a better economic fit to Iran, than Russia if only because both Iran and Russia are oil/gas rich and are competitors on some level. But military wise, yes Russia. I actually suggested Russia extend her nuclear umbrella over Iran a while back and was ridiculed and perhaps righly so, but on the other hand Russia seems to be taking less dramatic steps towards helping Iran defend herself against Western colonial aggression. And I am concerned Iran may be vulnerable to following in the foot steps of Syria (no Vietnam dommino is not comprable) due Western sanctions and Russia and China would be wisely proactive to help Iran on this front.
I agree with you that Russian expansion of its nuclear umbrella is likely to be the best solution, but only in case direct nuclear attacks on Iran. It could offer similar coverage to the GCC states to prevent them from going nuclear individually.
But Russia and China are very reluctant to make moves to openly antagonize the US. The question is whether it’s because they’re fools who believe they can make a durable settlement with the US, or they’re bidding their time. With all the US provocations, the latter seems more likely, but then Russia (less so China) have foolishly believed American good will before.
I’m thinking the relationship between Russia and Israel is not totally defined by Iran’s relationship with Israel.
i agree. dont remember the numbers, but theres a lot of russian jews in israel…and russia takes russians seriously, it would seem.
also, i note that the materiel that russia sent iran was all defensive systems…isr, ad, etc.
not like they be offloading old tsar bombas on tehran.
…well at least not yet….
give the musk/trump administration time, i suppose, to muck things up(havent heard a word about vance, btw)
I am not sure that those genocidal Russian Israelis will be holding much sway in Russia in the future…
In my opinion, Russia will ditch Israel sooner or later. US/NATO is the enemy and it’s clear which side Israel is on WRT Ukraine/Syria/Iran. There’s this constant emphasis that there are 1.5 million Russian Jews in Israel. Well 10 percent of Russia are Muslims and they’re not the rats who fled to Israel after the start of the SMO.
Putin’s backers undoubtedly includes people with Israeli passports, but so do many enemies and traitors to the Russian state. Russia lives next to Iran and hundreds of millions of Arabs. It’s one thing to keep it on the down low in order to use the Israelis as a back channel to the Americans and avoid direct conflict, but they’re not going to turn themselves into America to support that nasty little genocide state. Russian deference to Israeli and Turkish desires lost them Syria and I assume they will not forgive these betrayals in the future.
I wonder if America really wants to attack Iran. They’ve been talking about it since 9/11, 23 years. It’s never been feasible. Iran is too large, too mountainous, too well trained, too well dug in, and America has been getting weaker all the time. Air attacks are one thing. They can do a lot of damage, and kill some people, but Israel hasn’t conquered Gaza yet. In fact air power has always been much over-rated. If they can’t put boots on the ground, they can’t conquer the territory.
I think your skepticism is well warranted. We shouldn’t assume too much about this upcoming agreement between Russia & Iran. It’s not a military alliance by all accounts. And what’s been provided so far–a few Su-35’s–is a drop in the bucket compared to what Iran needs to defend itself from combined US-Israel strikes.
If Iran starts getting enough support from Russia to properly defend itself, it will be impossible to hide and we’ll see evidence of it–i.e. lots of SAM & EW equipment rolling in, massive testing and training programs that will last years. And given Russia’s diffidence (or whatever it is) in dealing with Israel, I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Huh? Israel turned tail on its last attempt to attack Iran when Iran air defenses locked on Israeli jets. And Iran’s missiles and command centers are deep underground, beyond the reach of any bomb, potentially even nukes, the West can deploy.
I agree the Russia-Iran deal is overhyped but you are going to far in the other direction. Russia had already sent Iran some more S-400s when things were getting uglier with Israel. The belief is that Russia will integrate Iran into Russia’s air defense systems, importantly, the satellite/monitoring part.
I often wondered if Israel is the next target for Russian diplomacy and vice versa. Kinda longshot, but the estrangement between the Likud and the American Liberal Establishment has been growing for a long time. While changes like that seem much less likely now than a decade or so ago, I would not have expected Erdogan’s Turkey to be still on decent terms with Russia after all the stuff he pulled off in the past decade either.
idk.
given putins rhetoric and philosophical stance, since the munich speech/quincanera, i dont see russia getting to overtly cozy with a buncha zionazis killing babies and nailing children to walls. he sells his whole thing as a Moral thing, after all.
with that kind of steadfastness, it would be hard to justify…a la the transactional west…openly supporting such a obviously criminal and rogue pseudonation.
rather, theyll avoid getting more than a toe in…like the syria thing…and maybe a whole foot, as per iran.
any opengov type stuff about an aipac-like creature in russia?
or, barring that, hasbara, etc?
does mossad have history with gru,fsb,kgb, et al?
It would be very foolish to be seen openly allying with a genocidal ethic state that specializes in stealing other people’s land and corrupting other people’s governments.
And exactly do they get in return? Unlike the US, Russia’s strategic interest is not in maintaining a little Ulster in a sea of Arabs.
exactly.
its the polar opposite from the russian stance on foreign policy, state morality, etc.
their zeitgeist, as it were.
theyll stay frosty.
not stir up shit…because israel is an american project.
ergo, intervening to stop genocide means world war 3.
shining city on a hill…yeah…thats us…
BTW – Iran International funding.
https://x.com/Tracking_Power/status/1878442857981161944
Somewhat gobsmacked by Martin Pengally giving Bob Woodward a lap dance [Key Republican claims Bob Woodward told him Biden was financially corrupt].
Woodward served in Naval Intelligence under the Admiral who would later be in charge of Nixon White House security.
Nonpartisan? I guess if you think the CIA is nonpartisan…but wait — there’s more!
When the early Deep State/Blob told Senators which parts of Woodward’s “reporting” to focus on, they were just highlighting material they had given Woodward. I was 21 when Nixon resigned. I will die never knowing what really happened despite having read over 100 books on Nixon and Watergate. I think the only possibility of my ever learning the full truth would be if I outlive Bob Woodward but I suspect he’s on the same health regimen as Henry Kissinger, and will be with us for seemingly forever.
EV sales. All the information I read says ev sales world wide are up lead by Chinas car companies. Batteries for storage and EV’s also lead by China companies.
Here is just one example as of November 2024.
In short:
World sales up 22%. China up 35%
China is making by far the most cars and they have a huge manufacturing capacity surplus ready to expand.
https://www.warpnews.org/green-tech/ev-sales-increase-while-gas-car-sales-continue-to-decline-2/#:~:text=The%20global%20electric%20vehicle%20market,shows%20growth%20of%2025%20percent.
That could still mean world sales ex China are down.
the numbers I’m seeing generally agree that Europe is down, US is up, the rest of the world is up.
After the fire, the insurance battles: LA victims’ ordeal may just be beginning, Well worth a read.
Some numbers;
“…estimates of the economic damage from the fires now reaching $52bn-$57bn,”
“According to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, US insurers made record profits of $87.6bn in 2023 from their property and casualty business alone. In 2024, they were on pace to shatter that record again, making about $130bn in net income in those sectors in the first three quarters.”
Estimate for losses in North Carolina from Helene is $53bn.
Estimate for LA will only get larger.
Make of this what you will. Doesn’t look sustainable to me.
Then there is this:
Many top insurers, citing the destabilising effects of the climate crisis, have been refusing coverage to property owners in areas deemed high risk for wildfires and other natural disasters – areas including Pacific Palisades and Altadena..
Knowing how many houses were uninsured would be useful color, confirming how they came to be uninsured useful as well.
In Pacific Palisades, for example, State Farm dropped 70% of its homeowner business last summer, affecting 1,600 property owners,
To add insult to injury, the Rams-Vikings game will be held at State Farm Stadium in Arizona.
One more reason stock buybacks should be illegal. Throwing billions in cash at the mirror, then having no funds to cover the disasters people pay to be insured against.
https://www.insurancebusinessmag.com/us/news/breaking-news/allstate-capital-levels-facing-potential-crisis-438257.aspx
Maybe understanding stock buy backs as an untaxable dividend might yield a little more understanding. If the money was dispersed as a dividend it would still not be available for disasters. In any case the problem is in not taxing corporations, a major plank in the Trump agenda. Also corporations were dissuaded from pursuing community service by Milton Friedman. These Libertarian ideals are the problem not corporate governance.
Another problem is even though the government insures in the case of disasters and of course against wall street crashes and too big to fail business, the insurance business like healthcare is private. These are utilities and more important to national security then empire building.
There is smart socialism and stupid socialism but people don’t seem to know the difference. Regulating corporate buybacks instead of nationalizing healthcare and insurance is not the answer.
Didn’t say this would solve the problem of healthcare or insurance, but buybacks seem to be a big factor in our capital markets and the bad direction they are going.
In the case of insurers: if your business is insuring against disasters, then you need to hold large reserves in safe places, so that you can be ready for bad seasons, not disperse your earnings constantly to shareholders, and then panic and cancel policies when disasters hit.
Most of our more prosperous companies never issue dividends, there is no need to issue them. I would venture that more investors avoid dividend-issuing companies than are searching for them. Berkshire Hathaway has never needed to pay dividends.
Let me make this simple. If insurance and healthcare were not for profit businesses there would be no distributions. The direction of capital markets is making profits and corporations are owned by stockholders. Berkshire owns value stocks that pay dividends. The companies that need to pay dividends are cash cows without growth potential. There are numerous books available that explain how the market works. I don’t know a better teacher of human nature, failings and advancement then active involvement in the market. I have been a small business man all my adult life. I know how to construct a spread sheet for whatever purpose and I know how to deal with bankers and lawyers but I didn’t really have the big picture until studied the market and started accumulating equities.
Forgot to supply the link, from the Guardian.
my cousin’s main squeeze has been an insurance agent with either state farm, or all state(i can never remember) forever.
and he tells me she says that they aint writing policies for texas within some 200 miles of the coast.
havent been for years.
and that they drag their feet paying out on existing policies, by word from on high.
cousin’s a construction guy…the big boss over all the subcontractors.
he’s been having headaches getting paid for hurricane remediation since at least Hugo.
squeeze says whatever insurance co she works for is “pulling out of” the whole gulf coast…whatever that means.
ive made cursory searches, but have found no confirmation…but insurancespeak gives me hives.
There was a real estate super salesman to the CA stars talking on TV yesterday (sorry no link but it was on CNN) who stated he knows of one individual who he sold a house to who pays $100,000 per year in home insurance and another who pays $400,000. So it is possible to still get insurance in fire prone areas.
On the “Deep State,” Larry Johnson only goes back to Bill Clinton, but I’d peg it at Truman’s secret executive order in 1952 creating the NSA. That agency was invisible for 25 years until the Church Committee outed it in the 1970s. And, then it was revealed that the agency had been reading Senator Church’s mail and tapping his phone. Should have killed it then.
Tufts University Professor Michael J. Glennon’s book, “National Security and Double Government,” provides a much better model for the anonymous cruds who run the country.
The NSA was created with the National Security Act of 1947.
Perhaps you were thinking of Truman’s NSC 68 of 1950:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSC_68
You are correct. But Glennon references it for 1952.
Re: What Happens in Greenland
Tarik Cyril Amar pulls no punches. A bracing read.
Greenland’s opportunity to become Puerto Rico.
So is Tarik Cyril Amar’s other piece: The Great Elon Musk Pie in the Face, or the Vassals Get Trampled.
Witty, tart, insightful: The great leaders of the Western Democracies have been so busy deferring and résumé-building that they forgot (deliberately) that they have the task of protecting the populace.
Now they are all highly offended, having honed their professional offendedocity.
Musk is having gab fests with Alice Weidel in which they agree that Hitler was a commie, and none of these great leaders of Western Democracy have a political program that will appeal to their own bases, let alone build coalitions.
On the other hand, live by the twiXt, die by the twiXt. It is time to call out Musk for what he is: A gas bag. A Foghorn Leghorn with none of Mr. Leghorn’s poultryish charm.
Also recommending Praising Pozzo by Shalom Auslander.
Auslander does a good tour of human servility.
Dip your toe in the comments section to his article: Laughable offendedocity. Are Americans truly that prissy?
Coincidentally, my wife and I watched ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ for the first time last night. Of course I knew of the film, had read about it, and was familiar with the praise and criticism of it, but I’d never actually watched it myself. I found it very disturbing. Not necessarily because of the actions of the protagonist, but because of something I couldn’t put my finger on at first. Then I used the same phrase to my wife that is used in this essay: its lack of a “moral compass.” Yes, at one level it was a funny and entertaining film, well made (which is why most critics liked it). But unlike, say, the film ‘Wall Street’ from the 1980s, this film glorified the pathological behavior discussed by Auslander here. It led the viewer to identify vicariously with the main character, and minimized the actual damage done to victims in the real-life story on which it was based. This completely debauched sociopath was basically depicted as some kind of a hero at the end. I was pulled in myself at the emotional level. I was quite struck by the effect. For whom was this movie made?
Auslander provides an answer at the end of his piece: “… I can easily imagine a time in the not-too-distant future, should our Pozzo Republic continue along its CEO deification path, when children will be taught that Pozzo is the hero of the play and starving, battered, bloody Lucky is the evil, lazy, paid-sick-day demanding villain who brings down the noble captain of industry.”
The reaction to the Thompson murder demonstrates that we are not there yet. But after reading your comment I did go back and read the comments to this piece. “Laughable offendedocity” indeed! Many of these struck me as the same kind of people as the “humanitarian liberals” who weep over the brutalities of an Assad or Putin, giving cover to our own psychopathic foreign policies. We need this conversation badly, before it’s really too late.
i think its already too late,pjay.
This has already happened. Check out Ayn Rand. I believe she is much admired by Libertarians. I think she is also held in such esteem by some conservative members of Congress that she is required reading for members of their staff.
Praising Pozzo is a fun read, and on your suggestion I plowed through the comments. Yes, there are lots of humorless drones over there in the USA…..but many comments had merit.
The author cites the (in)famous 2018 Goldman Sachs report about biotech (“Is Curing Patients a Sustainable Business Model?”) as being somehow evil or crazy. But Goldman was raising a valid question, even if it makes us squirm with discomfort:
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/11/goldman-asks-is-curing-patients-a-sustainable-business-model.html
There is scant incentive for a profit-seeking enterprise to make a one-shot cure-all medication, even if it is technically feasible. The Wegovy/Ozempic medicine-for-life model is far more lucrative. So how should modern society remedy this? Nationalize the pharma and biotech sector? Place the government in charge of basic research in pharma? Regulate it globally via the UN/WHO? Put Musk and Thiel in charge? (Last one was a joke…..I hope).
As for CEOs being overpaid psychopaths; well, they are products of a dysfunctional system, and one commenter pointed out correctly that every CEO started out his/her career as an ordinary worker. I don’t see that giving one or two CEOs the Luigi treatment is going to change anything; on the contrary, the likeliest response to Brian Thompson’s murder will be a massive increase in security for CEOs (making them even more isolated from society at large).
I heard early trials of Owezempic have been fruitful in helping people shed Pounds & Dollars…
I don’t believe that every CEO started as an ordinary worker. I took an entry level job at Washington Mutual years ago, thinking that I might eventually work my way up. maybe pass the Series 7 or something. I learned the hard way that this isn’t how it works when people much younger than me went through special training programs where they worked for a few weeks in various jobs, and quickly leapfrogged me without every getting a deep understanding of what ordinary workers do.
The corporate world has its ROTC programs to fast track those deemed “officers” from the get-go.
The US sure is rhyming with the Roman Empire these days. Zuckerberg fancies himself an Augustus, while critics paint the Trumpians as the “bad” emperors who ruined the Republic. Many have compared Trump to Julius Caesar, but I don’t think its an apt one. The Roman republic was gone long before Caesar came along and had been ruled by oligarchs already for quite some time, much like how “our democracy” had already succumbed to oligarchy well before Trump.
What was the difference between Augustus and one of the “bad” emperors like Domitian (the real Trump analog if you ask me)? Augustus allowed the Senate to continue to pretend they had some say in things, even as he murdered opponents, confiscated property, plundered foreigners, etc. Domitian didn’t see why he still needed to pretend, and told the Senate where they could stick it, which is why he was murdered while Augustus lived to a ripe old age, even though they ruled similarly in many ways.
Domitian was killed with no heir, which left the Roman elites with a succession problem. They decided to install a placeholder while they figured out what to do. They settled on Nerva, an old man with no children who had been an apparatchik in Roman government for decades. He was a placeholder until they could figure out what to do – the ancient Biden analog.
That’s where the historical rhyming stops temporarily. The Antonines came after Nerva, an the Empire entered what was considered a golden age. After Biden, we get Trump again, the id of the empire.
Trump is Caligula, Germanicus if you’d like.
Trump may yet turn out to be Claudius.
Harris as Messalina?
Madame Clinton turned out to be a wannabe Livia, although, considering the amoral rake she is married to, perhaps Milonia. (An unfortunate onomatopoeia.)
The problematic one is Musk. A Sejanus in waiting?
Lol, what then of the wives of the senate?
I think the more relevant comparison is France in the late 17th century and 18th century. There is a reason Mr Trump’s internal apartments look like the Palace of Versailles, he is the Sun King with Louis the Beloved still to come. Mr Musk will find that this time Mr Trump has no use for a Cardinal Mazarin.
The problems facing the US are much the same as they faced in France in those days trying to rule Europe, the scale of the modern world makes comparisons confusing. Reading up on those days it was striking to me that much of the financial orthodoxy of state finance is still stuck in the ideas of the infamous John Law.
The Deep State now is using the same ideas the French then used as the finances of their Empire became constrained to prolong the time of their external influence. With all the dodgy brothers along for the ride with Mr Trump this Greenland business has all the hallmarks of a new Mississippi Scheme.
Trump is a would-be Diocletian, buy I don’t think he’s going to succeed.
Military advantage being a prime argument, Hawaii would be a more apt comparison.
A cabal of pro-annexation U.S. politicians and businessmen regime-changed and steam-rollered the Hawaiian people and in 1898 eventually got their way, despite initially being stopped by the opposition of president Grover Cleveland in the year of their putsch against the Hawaiian monarchy, 1893.
https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/december-18-1893-message-regarding-hawaiian-annexation
I was thinking the same, since the cost of industrializing Greenland while making it competitive is something the US cannot realistically do.
Real estate and developer Trump has no idea what it involves to build power plants, airports, ports, develop mines, processing and concentrating and refining facilities.
Everything would need to be brought in. In Greenland! With the US having only one semi-functional ice breaker…
Never mind patrolling the high Arctic. The Russian rescue phones would run hot with desperate, crying American sailors…
Early ‘Forever Chemicals’ Exposure Could Impact Economic Success in Adulthood, Study Says
“Economic Success”? There I was worried about my immune system, cancer and heart disease.
We’ve known PFA’s and their ilk are all shades of bad for a long time now. Attempting to measure its effect on future economic success seems unnecessary. If you’re laid up or dead, that’s pretty easy to measure.
Please file under “Studies that should not have received funding.
«The data also showed declines in birth weight starting in the late 1970s, with an average birth weight decrease of nearly eight grams by the 1980s.»
But that’s not what the Guardian thought was important…
>Defining the Deep State-Larry Johnson.
I place the birth of the Deep State in the early 1990s, during the Presidency of Bill Clinton.
I stopped reading on this sentence on the second paragraph of the article.
I was looking forward to analysis that would tie into the recent Twitter/X clip that has gone viral on Obama and Trump at Jimmy Carter’s funeral where both are seen smiling at each other and in an apparent affable repartee. The Deep State as I’ve been researching goes much much farther back and has symbolic elements, cultural artifacts, and technological tools in addition to economic entanglements. Yes there are the 3 letter agencies and Weber’s iron law of bureaucracy at work, and it is always informative reading what Larry Johnson says, but a comprehensive update of Peter Dale Scott’s notion of “parapolitics,” or something along those lines, that speaks to a wider, more comprehensive social/political theroy has yet to be written, or it has and I’ve not yet got a hold of it.
I don’t know if you’ve read Aaron Good’s book ‘American Exception’ yet, but I think it provides a pretty good start to such a project. He’s worked with Scott and incorporates much of the best earlier work on this subject.
It pretty much goes back to the early Roman empire. As Hudson shows, the end of debt cancellation. The rise of a rentier class. The rise of Christianity. WW I ended the famillie’s control of the world and Corporations took their place (Krupps’ cannons). WW II we (Mafia and the early CIA/OSS) had to stop the east coast dock strikes. The newly formed CIA staffed by Nazi immigrants…… the rest is history.
yeah…Phillip K Dick’s Black Iron Prison…the empire never ended…and all our “betters” suffer from Empire Disease.
also see Bertram Gross’ ‘ friendly fascism'( dude was not a writer, per say,lol)…and Sheldon Wolin’s ‘inverted totalitarianism’…as well as the latters like 3 hour interview with chris hedges.
that and the whole canon of people like C Wright Mills, and his successor’s name i always forget,lol….Quigley, frelling Gibbon,lol.
Livy.
add it all up, along with the myriad datapoints we save in our brains, and one ends up with a usable narrative framework for “whats going on, really”
“Exclusive: China’s Shandong Port, entry point for most sanctioned oil, bans US-designated vessels”
The root cause of this is Biden trying to make things as difficult for Trump as he can in the days remaining. That new raft of Biden sanctions probably triggered this but there will be blowback from it. Biden himself said ‘It is probable that gas prices could increase by as much as three or four cents a gallon, but the sanctions will have a more significant impact on Russia’s ability to continue its actions in the conduct of war’ but I bet that it will be a lot more than just 3 or 4 cents a gallon. But Biden won’t care as any gas price increases will be something that Trump will have to deal with and in any case it is all the fault of Americans for not voting his party back in. A final gift from Biden.
A question about the sanctions. These are not law voted on by Congress but more just what Biden/harris has done.
If that’s right, can’t Trump just reverse them?
Like what he did with the JCPOA?
Maybe I don’t understand but it doesn’t seem like it’s trying trumps hands.
“China’s Shandong Port…”
There is no reason yet to think this is correct, since the Chinese foreign ministry claims no knowledge of a closing of the port. China has never hidden any such policy change. So, I would be cautious.
Re Greenland story–this link (Bloomberg via Yahoo) suggests that Greenland might not be opposed to switching patrons if we can best Denmark’s 600 million Euro subsidy.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/greenland-eyes-benefits-trump-proposed-050000243.html
Denmark’s claim goes back to Viking times and of course the Vikings never seized anything.
Greenlanders might use this to achieve independence but they would see no reason to swap Danish masters for American ones. Doing so means that they accept American healthcare, the American education system and all the other joys of modern American life – but while losing the right to vote like other US territories. And as Trump is opposed to anything but ‘Drill, baby, drill’, that would mean that Greenland would be strip-mined of all its resources with the Greenlanders getting only cents on the dollar for shipping all those resources to the US and leaving an environmental catastrophe behind for the locals to deal with. And of course the island would be militarized like Okinawa and you would have nuclear-tipped missiles in the north making Greenland a nuclear target as well as naval bases and air strips throughout the island. You might even find that tourist will be restricted in visiting Greenland as well because of ‘security.’ In short, the place would become a dump.
The story says there were actual negotiations about this in the last Trump reign and the proposal was joint US/Denmark control with a 50/50 split of the profits from new mining operations.
Greenland has 60k people so less than some towns in South Carolina. If they could get a better deal from the US why wouldn’t they take it? It seems some there are unhappy with Denmark.
Of course none of this is in the all snark RT reprint up in Links. Trump bashing…so easy, so old.
See the Rev Kev’s comments. Not that I know, just an opinion, but I think most indigenous Greenlanders would prefer things remain as they are. A good question to ask is how do Indigenous Greenlanders compare to their Alaskan indigenous compatriots.
Ask Puerto Rico how being a non-state possession has been working out lately. Assuming their electricity has been restored and the can communicate.
Our Spanish-American war spoils didn’t work out all that great, but without Puerto Rico, West Side Story never gets made.
The DC Bubble never learned not to treat others, in this case Puerto Rico, like s–t. Who and what benefits from the immiseration of Puerto Rico? Even Congress does not make life unbearable for the fun of it
Two reflections from my side to add to the above comments:
Greenland has 2 members of the Danish Parliament, so I would hope they would know to get a better deal than Puerto Rico in terms of representation.
The way Denmark and Germany settled their border dispute was by referendum in 1920, so if my dear compatriots walk their talk, they should let Greenland hold a referendum and respect the outcome. Of course, in this case there are all those natural resources – definitely not the case in northern Germany/southern Denmark!
Well, the Thule base, which goes back to WWII, has been an environmental disaster.
It is now known as the Pituffik Space Base.
Yeah, I would really like to see who’s going to plow hundreds of billions of dollars to strip mine Greenland (nothing extracted there would be competitive in price with other resources). There are also some kilometers of ice sheets to be melt to start with…
Maybe Elon finally realized that colonizing Mars was too hard and will settle for Greenland.
It is much cheaper to buy from China…
But China may not be willing to sell in the future.
I don’t see a pathway where Tesla stays a viable company, nevermind one deserving of P/I ratio over 100, in the next 10 years. Their cars are backward, poor built quality, expensive, and incapable compared to what’s already coming from China EV makers and what will be coming from other automaker’s joint ventures with Chinese EV makers.
Why would China not sell?
Maybe because they can’t afford to trust the dollar anymore and no longer wish to sell to their enemy? Just a thought.
>Japan sanctions 11 individuals, 54 entities in Russia, some companies in 7 other countries TASS (guurst)
According to Russian Ambassador to Japan Nikolay Nozdrev, Tokyo essentially went for a complete dismantling of relations with one of its main neighbors, deciding that the costs of it would be less than the benefits of joining the anti-Russian campaign launched by the West.
What happened to Japan? I remember working at a mid management job in the 90’s when the Japanese sun was on the rise with consultants regularly coming in to offer advise, expensive advise, on certain concepts in Japanese manufacturing/production practices. It was these “techniques” that they, the consultants, attributed to making them such formidable economic competitors. Now it seems that, like Europe, they are simple vassals to the Anglo- British hegemon
“What happened to Japan?”
Allow Paul Krugman to introduce Adam Posen with the answer to the way in which the Japanese government undermined Japan’s economy:
https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/01/people-should-be-reading-adam-posen/
December 1, 2008
People Should be Reading Adam Posen
By Paul Krugman
Everyone’s looking back to the 1930s for policy guidance — and that’s a good thing. But we don’t have to go back that far to see how fiscal policy works in a liquidity trap; Japan was there only a little while ago. And Adam Posen’s book, * especially on, “Fiscal Policy Works When It Is Tried,” is must reading right now.
* https://www.piie.com/publications/chapters_preview/35/2iie2628.pdf
September, 1998
Restoring Japan’s Economic Growth
By Adam S. Posen
Fiscal Policy Works When It Is Tried
If the current Japanese stagnation is indeed the result of insufficient aggregate demand, what should be the policy response? Fiscal stimulus would appear to be called for, especially in a period following extended overinvestment that has rendered monetary policy extremely weak. Yet the statement is often made that fiscal policy has already been tried and failed in Japan. Claims are made of variously 65 to 75 trillion yen spent in total stimulus efforts since 1991, even before the currently announced package.1 Both the Japanese experience of the late 1970s of public spending as a ‘‘locomotive’’ to little-lasting domestic benefit, and the worldwide praise for government austerity in the 1990s, have predisposed many observers to dismissing deficit spending as ineffective, if not wasteful. Could there really have been this much stimulus effort having so little effect?
The reality of Japanese fiscal policy in the 1990s is less mysterious and, ultimately, more disappointing….
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1CPQo
August 4, 2014
Real per capita Gross Domestic Product for China and Japan, 1990-2023
(Indexed to 1990)
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1CPQZ
August 4, 2014
Real per capita Gross Domestic Product for China, Vietnam and Japan, 1992-2023
(Indexed to 1992)
Anglo-British hegemony would be good but that ship has sailed. As seemingly has its Anglo-American replacement. I think we are now in the Western hemispherical version of what Yes Minister would call a Franco-French solution (the Americo-American hegemony, the Columbo-American hegemony, who knows what to call it?).
Princes of Yen documentary. Highly recommended.
– ‘Defining the Deep State’ – Larry Johnson. He sees outsourcing as seminal
I think outsourcing, and multiple overt and covert links between government entities and “private” assets in general, are central to most definitions of the “deep state.” It’s easy to agree with Johnson’s main points, but this passage was puzzling:
“I place the birth of the Deep State in the early 1990s, during the Presidency of Bill Clinton. It was during Clinton’s presidency that the US government, especially in the areas of intelligence and the military, started outsourcing jobs that once were classified as civil service.”
The Clinton administration?? This would be news to any of the writers I know on this subject, who trace the roots of this formation back at least to WWII if not before. I think I recall something Ike said about a “military-industrial complex” as he was leaving office. But most conceptions of the “deep state” involve more than just overt financial ties. We often talk about the outsourcing of CIA destabilization practices to “non-government” organizations; this really took off with the creation of the National Endowment for Democracy during the Reagan years. But the use of private or civilian assets or proxies has always been a central feature of what most people mean by “deep state” activities. The mafia in Italy during and after WWII; paid proxies in Iran and Guatmala; right-wing Cuban exiles for all sorts of stuff; countless comprador clients in businesses and governments abroad; drug lords and warlords and their private armies all over the world; global networks of banks through which billions flow to finance illicit trade in drugs and guns for such activities, etc., etc.
Clinton? You’ve got to be kidding.
It may have started in WW2, but it was expanded under both Carter and Reagan and went on steroids during Clinton. Many of the controls that were in place were dismantled in that 12 year period, so by the time Iran Contra finally got buried, Clinton just had to step on the gas and make sure the government stepped back and was largely staffed with those ready to enable anything to get to feed at the trough whether elected, appointed, or hired.
The body politic had to get past the post Watergate hangover. That would have been difficult for a Republican administration. Clinton ad was the first opportunity for the intelligence apparatus to press their case. Of course there was a lot of pent up enthusiasm.
The Clintons were already “in bed” with the CIA from their time as the Autocrats of Arkansas. Much of the Guns for Drugs airfreight traffic carried on by the CIA to and from Central and South America was funneled through the airport at Mena, Arkansas. See the life and times of Barry Seal for an example of American Exceptionalist Enterprise in the air as it were.
Read (the sanitized version): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Seal
The Clintons took a rake off from the profits of the flights in return for “protection” of the enterprise. This was at the same time that Hillary Clinton beat the odds and parlayed a $1000 USD investment in cattle futures into an over $100,000 USD profit. (Sarcasm tag available on request.)
Read: https://moneymorning.com/2015/11/06/the-mystery-of-the-hillary-clinton-cattle-futures-controversy/
Oh man. The stories I could tell about the Clintons (both) and, well, the Federal Air Marshal Service and the protective services wrt stuff and stuff. I’ll leave it at this entirely vague comment. / ;)
Looking back, knowing how much corrupts our elections, I end up wondering if Perot was an alternative or a spoiler. I know what the Democratic Party would say, but they also told me Russia stole the election from Hillary, Biden was sharp as a tack and Covid is over.
a relevant anecdote, from my late dad, who worked at the pentagon at the DIA from 65 or so, until i was born in 69.
we had occasion, some years ago, to watch the Matt Damon film, the good shepherd.
loosely based on angleton’s career.
and towards the end, dad said, “yep, thats how it was”…referencing both the soup of spies all over washington dc, but also the generalised paranoia.
and backstabbing,lol.
and remember, dad very very rarely spoke of any of his gvernment work.
so, my point is, this has been the norm for a long time.
it just accelerated under clinton’s regime…finishing what reagan started, and all.
Yea, there were many milestones on the road to the tenth circle, beyond the fraud and treachery of the Democratic Party.
My favorite was the “capital strike” when Wall Street/The City invested in Hitler instead of domestic workers, leading to Munich and the Assassination of FDR (C), starting with the nomination of Truman in 1944, and culminating in MI6/OSS/Operation Paperclip/CIA in 1945 et seq.
Pick your own milestone; as Andy Grove said, “there are so many to choose from “.
It’s fair to say that the latest iteration of the deep state started under Clinton. GHWBush was the last president who made an effort to try reintegrating USSR/Russia into Europe and reined in the Israelis in any way. As Wilkerson frequently notes, he called neocons like Perl and Wolfowitz “crazies at the basement of the Pentagon”.
As for how far the deep state goes back. This series between Ben Norton and Aaron Good covers stuff up to JFK assassination pretty well. https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDAi0NdlN8hNArLl765PXe8tsTKmOciGL
I’d say that the US was a deep state conspiracy from its founding. The “American Revolution” was the richest American plantation owners and merchants deciding that England was putting too many restraints on how quickly they could steal Native American land and break treaties, and that they could get themselves a better financial arrangement than what they were getting under the British Empire. Their formulation of liberty certainly didn’t expand to poor men, nevermind women, blacks, and Indians.
That’s how democracy puts to work those $10m that were just lying around since the head headchopper of Syria became kosher.
Isn’t this technically a declaration of war?
Truth is out of style, and so are declarations of war. You just drop the bombs, and call it an act of peace, and blame the victims.
Also, USA has it’s own Venezuelan president, that is not on USA wanted list. You know that your country is on the right path, if it has bonus
president with USA checkmark.
You mean like confiscating gold reserves? And “selling” a chain of gas stations? I think we crossed that line a long time ago.
If anything, this smacks of frustrated desperation, in that nothing else seems to have worked. Sometimes, incompetence is a good thing?
Re Woodward–Woodward isn’t talking but new book quotes him as saying everyone knows that Biden is financially corrupt but it may not be illegal and would be hard to prove.
Gee if only there were some electronic device with extensive evidence of influence peddling by Biden’s son and The Big Guy himself. Even if not illegal such a device might have saved us from four years of misrule and thousands of overseas dead.
Woodward is a joke just like the Guardian claim that he is strictly impartial in his books. Another octogenarian among us.
Filling in the implied sarc tag, that would be the Internet, which was likely used for the Biden family’s corrupt dealings, tho then the problem becomes actually using the data gathered via surveillance to prosecute people like Biden, which we know will never happen.
figured i just throw this out here – ran across it this morning – something like this was discussed a while back to isolate phones from signal – i do not have nor can attest to the efficacy – but it is a very interesting product line – will probably give a try to a phone bag –
https://shop.faradaydefense.com/
“The national security harm arises from the very fact of a foreign adversary’s capacity to secretly manipulate the platform to advance its geopolitical goals in whatever form that kind of covert operation might take,” Prelogar said.
“Content manipulation is a content-based rationale: we think that this foreign government is going to manipulate content in a way … that concerns us and may very well affect our national security interests,” Kagan said.
There are them future tense words -is going – may very well – concerns us(who is that ‘us’ for clarification again?) so why is this just not tossed along with the Tik-Tok ban as not even being on a tree from which to ripen the fruit for consideration – it’s just a bunch of speculative that has the real chance to indeed turn domestic-
It shows that the elected have a certain disdain and dislike of their powers being derived from the consent of the governed – that consent can only be derived from free speech and exchange of ideas not hampered by transient fears, manufactured distrust or hysterics designed to limit exchange of ideas and free speech – even if they be not popular – and in effect, limits and deprives the governed of agency – it invites domestic tyranny.
“The tyranny of the legislatures is the most formidable dread at present, and will be for long years,” Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison on March 15, 1789. “That of the executive will come in its turn, but it will be at a remote period.”
Thomas Jefferson went on at many times including “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be … The People cannot be safe without information. When the press is free, and every man is able to read, all is safe.” – Thomas Jefferson
I do not see any mention domestic adversary which may be assumed as equally capable to ‘secretly manipulate the platform to advance its geopolitical goals in whatever form that kind of covert operation might take,’
and further the oath- not of the pres but of the rest.
“I, AB, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.”
i consider kagan and his ilk to be the very definition of “enemies domestic”
.
root them out, and i might consider putting my plow aside occasionally.
i hate my country, BECAUSE i’m a patriot.
Sounds like projection. “It’s okay when we manipulate content (and we are doing it).” Etc.
RE: US announces $25m reward for arrest of Venezuela’s Maduro
So in other words, they have placed a bounty on Maduro and other officials. Kind of like those bounties the Russians put on US soldiers, except actually real this time. OK when the US does it, or course.
So the US puts on several illegal coup attempts in Venezuela, but it’s the elected Venezuelans who are the criminals here??!!?? This is some supreme arrogance. How long will it be before other nations follow suit and put out rewards for US elites, especially given that US officials are blatantly aiding, abetting and committing war crimes and other breaches of international law on a daily basis? It can’t come soon enough if you ask me.
We offered $5,000 for Pancho Villa, after Madero’s assassination, so there is precedence.
isnt that a sort of bill of attainder?…or a letter of marque?
and thus forbidden by the much solemnly referenced Constitution?
Letters of marque are expressly allowed by the Constitution (Article 1).
Re; As the agricultural drone industry takes off, federal regulators struggle to keep up
And Chinese drone-maker DJI is the industry leader? Additional headwinds, or roadblocks, from our China-hawks should be expected:
The Pentagon says a Ford EV battery plant partner has links to the Chinese military
Republican State Representative Sarah Lightner represents the district the plant is in.
Lightner said she has never been a supporter of the project, believing the state will not see a strong return on its investment in the plant. In response to CATL’s recent DOD classification, Lightner has renewed calls for the state rescind tax subsidies awarded to Ford for the BlueOval project.
“When you have those people infiltrating our Michigan or United States businesses, it’s a security concern. And we have to be cautious about it and make sure we do our due diligence,” she said.
She added that Michigan should cut all funding for the project.
“We shouldn’t be using our taxpayer dollars to cut our own throat with the Chinese military.”
https://www.wmuk.org/wmuk-news/2025-01-09/the-pentagon-says-a-ford-ev-battery-plant-partner-has-links-to-the-chinese-military
(Also see:)
https://www.eenews.net/articles/pentagon-blacklists-chinese-battery-giant-tied-to-ford-tesla/
While drones are proving themselves to be hugely beneficial to the agricultural industry, “defence” has the stronger lobby plus numerous bought-and-paid-for congress-critters like Lightner ready to spin BS about anything Chinese.
American-made drones are clunky, half as good and at least twice the price of their Chinese counterparts. While the US agricultural drone industry won’t be strangled in the cradle, it will be crippled from birth. And this applies to the emerging “low-altitude economy” as a whole.
“Pentagon says a Ford EV battery plant partner has links to the Chinese military”
The point is that Chinese vehicles are going electric, but what the US wants is to undermine Chinese development and “Chinese military” is a wonderful reason to try again and again. Nonetheless, turning vehicles electric in China for highly improbable tasks, such as high altitude low temperature mining where even diesel vehicles will not start, is happening.
Re: Israeli woman
cf. Exodus 22:20-23
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus%2022%3A20-23&version=NABRE
Those are ordinary Israeli Women.
Ordinary American Women would react the same given a few years of Propaganda about any minority.
My best success with weight loss was something from someone’s rapid fat loss ebook, from a weight training coach and former competitor. He’s always deep diving and interpreting studies on his Facebook forum. His approach revolved around no carbs, except for a weekly cheat meal and a weekly 5 hour re-feed, unless you were a very low body fat competitor and then you just suffer through for ~ 10 days. The usual protein intake requirements, no carbs, low starch vegetables okay. I was able to sustain this while lifting for weeks and lost weight. Eating enough protein, it isn’t really even that unpleasant at a deficit. But running a calorie deficit is never really fun. I never had any success with the 40/40/20 approach to macros while doing interval training, never worked for me. I have to omit carbs to get results.
lol. come follow me around the farm for a week or two, and do what i do.
if a “big person” can’t keep up with my crippled, painful ass, then those wonderdrugs might actually be in order.
The point of the article is not GETTING weight off (which admittedly many don’t manage to do) but keeping it off. Many people lose weight and have it come back on after 1-2 years.
Love the Anteater. I wonder if they’d make good pets? A couple comments on ants. We get them off and on in various places, the house and the garden. In the garden, not too much of a deal “we all should get along”, but sometimes, especially fruit, you need to corral or distract them.
A couple tricks.
Vinegar kills them on the spot.
They hate mint
They hate (and will not cross) cinnamon
Borax (remember that cleaner) kills them too. Make a sweet paste, including Borax. They’ll eat the sweet and take it to the nest, killing the nest.
I sure would like an Anteater however.
…and don’t forget good old diatomaceous earth. Just scatter it about where the ants are, and wait a day or so for them to disappear. Effective, safe and non-toxic.
https://todayshomeowner[dot]com/pest-control/guides/diatomaceous-earth-for-ants-complete-diy-guide/
Will they eat fire ants?
“Will they eat fire ants?”
Just what they enjoy and do. Yum.
Wow, just wow…
From “All Our Future Money Is Gone”: The Impossible Task of Providing Child Care in Rural Illinois
This is not a serious country. Why isn’t child care a public good, paid for at the federal level? This is absolutely insane. The complete collapse of rural America continues apace. Thanks Clinton! Thanks Obama! And thanks Biden for nuking from orbit the Pandemic aid. Learn to code?
Kind of insane, no? It is almost as if we don’t want there to be child care options at all for the poors. Not sure how this helps with labor shortages.
From “All Our Future Money Is Gone”
I am reminded of 2 important matters: 1) There was legislation passed in 1971, providing for early childhood care programs. The legislation was vetoed by President Nixon. (This is from class lecture a while ago and I will look to the matter. An evident problem was limited support because the program would have meant added integration.
2) I tried explaining that Ireland had in recent years become a “rich” European nation. I was told by readers that this was absurd. However, it turns out that I was correct and a reflection of the gains in per capita wealth in Ireland there was a corresponding increase in social welfare programs such as early childhood care.
…I only remember there was a time when artists in Ireland famously were exempt from paying taxes….
“…I only remember there was a time when artists in Ireland famously were exempt from paying taxes…”
This since 1997; when artistic work is considered culturally significant.
Gross National Income per capita data from the World Bank:
Norway
GNI per capita: 108,790 PPP dollars (2023) World Bank
Ireland
GNI per capita: 98,650 PPP dollars (2023) World Bank
Luxembourg
GNI per capita: 98,490 PPP dollars (2023) World Bank
Switzerland
GNI per capita: 90,080 PPP dollars (2023) World Bank
US
GNI per capita: 82,190 PPP dollars (2023) World Bank
Denmark
GNI per capita: 79,390 PPP dollars (2023) World Bank
Netherlands
GNI per capita: 77,750 PPP dollars (2023) World Bank
Austria
GNI per capita: 73,520 PPP dollars (2023) World Bank
Sweden
GNI per capita: 72,990 PPP dollars (2023) World Bank
Germany
GNI per capita: 72,110 PPP dollars (2023) World Bank
France
GNI per capita: 62,130 PPP dollars (2023) World Bank
Canada
GNI per capita: 60,700 PPP dollars (2023) World Bank
Italy
GNI per capita: 58,650 PPP dollars (2023) World Bank
UK
GNI per capita: 58,140 PPP dollars (2023) World Bank
I haven’t yet read ” ‘Separatist terrorists’ in Syria ‘increasingly cornered, looking for new patrons’: Turkish president ” , but I will venture the guess that he means the Kurdish Autonomistas in Syrian Kurdistan. When I get a chance I will read the article and if I was wrong, I will admit how wrong I was.
Here is a fascinating laymans’ language talk about mass economic oppression and class oligarch privilege
permitted onto the Joe Scarborough Show on MSNBC of all places. Here is the link.
https://www.reddit.com/r/economicCollapse/comments/1hyjkx8/they_are_scared/
The same laypeople who would be capable of understanding this layperson-friendly language might also be capable of responding to a genuine legitimate party-movement if such a thing were to arise. The vacuum able to suck such a party into existence and then possible prominence is steadlly growing.
Here is a funny little video titled Peak Childhood: Having children does have its perks.
https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/1hyu7y2/having_children_does_have_its_perks/
So far in our winter of missed content here in the southern Sierra, the snowpack is only at 61% of average, and nothing but sunny days on the long range forecast.
The LA infernos have propelled me to do more pole saw dancing to entice deceased members down from their perch on high, and you couldn’t start a wildfire here even if you tried, everything being lush and green.
The interview of Mark Sleboda by Jamarl Thomas was a good watch. Thanks for this link. Sleboda talks a lot, but he indeed has a lot of interesting things to say no matter whether you agree with him or not.
Yes, he’s a high bit rate transmitter.
From the Bozeman Daily article on climate change/mental health, “Mental health is one of the most overlooked impacts of climate change”. Agreed, but I’d raise that stake to “impacts of our current reality”. Almost everyone I know is suffering from high anxiety, and mostly it’s the metaphorical version of keeping one’s head above water that’s causing it.
On a related note, if my memory serves me well, Aurelian covered this a bit in his very first blog post, described it as PTSD (accurately imo).
Here’s a video showing somebody’s very creative way to pre-plan for easy snow removal from a walkway.
Its called . . ” Peeling away the snow”.
https://www.reddit.com/r/oddlysatisfying/comments/1hz34qh/peeling_away_the_snow/
Some will note that , technically speaking, he just rolled the snow up into one compact bunch. I would say that it is easier overall net-net to just have that one compact bunch of snow to then shovel to the side.
Here’s a photo of an unburned home between two close by burned-down buildings in California, titled:
California home miraculously spared from fire due to ‘design choices’ . Here is the link.
https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1hyxn7w/california_home_miraculously_spared_from_fire_due/
I liked one guys comment-
‘fireproof materials don’t catch fire, more at 11’
What is happening in LA is not a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention, I have in the past mentioned that a 7.0 quake on the Hayward/Rogers creek fault during a high wind event in October would be the end of the East Bay as well as Santa Rosa.
Thousands of ignition points from Richmond to Hayward, the fire would burn all the way to the water…and the Northbay destruction would be a multiple of what the Tubbs fire did.
It’s going to be an interesting next few years for the survivors.
In order to pull off an ongoing saga such as the LA infernos, its tantamount to needing all 3 numbers to open the safe, in this case bone dry foliage, Santa Anas on steroids, and a spark to light the fuse.
If nothing else, it will hopefully have in the end a positive in that fire preparedness in the near future will be as high profile as all the movers & shakers on the tony Westside of LA who all got religion this week, sadly.
I’m in the midst of doing Swedish Death Cleaning (no immediate plans on checking out anytime soon) and have a closet full of clothes that will be headed down to LA next week when things simmer down hopefully. So many evacuees having only the clothes on their back.
You’re a good man, Wuk.
Here’s a present-day-New Yorker-quality cartoon about some Class’s response to the current fires.
https://www.reddit.com/r/WorkReform/comments/1hz9rob/satire_will_soon_become_obsolete/
re: RU/UKR
Voice from Washington, by the interesting Lee Slasher. I would like to hear more from him.
This was Dec. 24th 2024
The USS Gettysburg
Friendly Fire in the Red Sea
https://archive.is/A5uoW
He writes about the ominous incidents between USS Cook, unarmed Su-24s, superior RU EW and Aegis Ashore. Albeit it’s a short item.
p.s. Martyanov has this crazy – film-worthy story – about revenge (he is not sure if its true):
https://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/2025/01/well-all-per-nato-standards.html
“As Ukrainian TV Channel reports (in Ukrainian), the soldier from Odessa deserted. Came back home and found the policeman who forced him into mobilization (together with others, evidently). He got the trust of this policeman and one day both got to the bar, where a deserter spiked this policeman’s drink and later … fucked him in the ass. That’s 404’s revenge for ya”
I can’t imagine this would be reported on Ukraine TV unless the perp has been arrested and can expect even worse from his jailers. As in the video clip is to send the message that you lose if you fight back.
Re: Biden to further limit Nvidia AI chip exports in final push
One interesting thing about this is who actually get to be in the Tier 1 of US BFFs and who is relegated to the also rans of Tier 2, who apparently aren’t supposed to participate in the development of West AI industry and will have to beg US for its technology on case to case basis and only after agreeing to some nebulous security and human rights conditions. (Tier 3 are the real baddies like Russia and China, so no surprise there). Namely, according to the map, it looks like the whole Central Eastern Europe is excluded, not only renegades like Hungary and Slovakia, but also Poland, the Balts, Austria, Romania (which was just couped to keep it in the NATO fold), and others (what bad thing Portugal did to US?). If that map is true, I really can’t wait to watch our local overlords trying to renegotiate this with Trump.