World’s largest rays may be diving to extreme depths to build mental maps of vast oceans Phys.org
‘Chicago Rat Hole’ was not made by a rat, say rodent researchers Chicago Sun-Times
Faulty mitochondria cause deadly diseases: fixing them is about to get a lot easier Nature
Study: We’re losing the war against drug-resistant infections faster than we thought NPR
Climate/Environment
CrOP30: Why burning food for land-hungry biofuels is fuelling the climate crisis Transport & Environment
2025 floods have altered the very ‘foundation’ of Punjab’s agriculture: its soil structure Down to Earth
Disaster Insured Losses Top $100 Billion for Sixth Year in a Row Bloomberg
Lack of weather data due to Trump’s budget cuts impacted forecast for deadly Alaska storm CNN
Pandemics
Want to Call CDC to Report a Possible Disease Outbreak? Fuhgeddaboutit MedPage Today
Beyond all reason The Gauntlet
The Koreas
US has backed down on demand for $350 billion all-cash investment, says Korea’s top diplomat Hankyoreh
Japan
Economic, diplomatic fears rise with Japan in political limbo The Asahi Shimbun
US expects Japan to stop buying Russian energy: Treasury secretary Anadolu Agency
India
Process for India’s shift from Russian oil ‘to be over soon’: Donald Trump Indian Express
Mumbai Police Detain TISS Students Who Attended Gathering In Honour of G.N. Saibaba The Wire. “Saibaba, who suffered with over 90% disability and was wheelchair-bound, was incarcerated for a decade for having alleged links with the banned Communist Party of India.”
China?
Why is China cracking down on a Christian group? Beijing’s action on Zion Church and ’tariff connection’, explained Hindustan Times
Top Venture Capitalists tour China, declare Western energy firms “uninvestable” Kevin Walmsley
Chinese Merchant Fleet Avoids Western Controlled Waters with First Shipment Through Russian Arctic Military Watch
The Gulf Turns East: How Central Asia Became a New Financial Frontier The Diplomat
IN FOCUS: As US closes tariff escape route via Southeast Asia, what’s next for region’s firms, workers? Channel News Asia
Old Blighty
‘The Fraud’ links Labour minister Steve Reed to hacked data scandal The Canary
O Canada
Canada flying in lockstep with the United States Canadian Dimension
Pakistan-Afghanistan
Pakistan, Afghanistan agree to 48-hour ceasefire after deadly border clashes Press TV
Syraqistan
Israeli attacks kill two in Gaza despite ceasefire Al Jazeera
Israel still holds thousands of Palestinians hostage Stephen Semler
Far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich vowed that “there will be Jewish settlements in Gaza,” speaking at an event in the southern border city of Sderot.
His declaration came just days after a ceasefire with Hamas forced the Israeli army to withdraw from some areas… https://t.co/kgK7LbMOe3
— Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) October 14, 2025
US Central Command Issues Warning To Hamas That Contradicts President Trump Antiwar
‘No shame’: UK invites private firms to compete for Gaza reconstruction contracts Middle East Eye
A Plan to Rebuild Gaza Lists Nearly 30 Companies. Many Say They’re Not Involved Wired
***
Israeli forces enter villages in Syrian countryside Arab News
Syria’s al-Sharaa seeks to rebuild ties with Russia in first Kremlin talks Intellinews
Syria’s ticking time bomb Responsible Statecraft
European Disunion
The most dependent companies in Europe for components from frozen and sanctioned Nexperia are VW, BMW, Stellantis, Bosch, ASML, Siemens, and Airbus. Germany wasn’t deindustrialising fast enough to please the Trump administration? Substitution of alternatives will take 12-18… https://t.co/Klft0HER1M pic.twitter.com/NGnpxg1mJW
— Kathleen Tyson (@Kathleen_Tyson_) October 15, 2025
Opaque new EU budget could boost Euroscepticism, top auditor warns Euractiv
New Not-So-Cold War
European NATO allies pledge to buy more US weapons under PURL scheme for Ukraine Euronews
Trump admits his proxy war in Ukraine and that Zelensky is proxy: Trump says that Zelensky wants to launch offensive, and that Trump would determine if Zelensky would go on offensive after their talks. pic.twitter.com/mGa9IvHFAH
— Ivan Katchanovski (@I_Katchanovski) October 15, 2025
this is nuts: between 100,000 and 250,000 AFU soldiers have deserted
that is at least a quarter of the force. maybe more. adn this is from Ukr sources, not Russian
UKR Pravda recently reported that there are kilometer long holes in the front line now, being covered only by…
— BenAris (@bneeditor) October 15, 2025
‼️🇺🇲🇷🇺 “Kaliningrad and Sevastopol will be destroyed in the very first hours” — there will be no war between Russia and NATO similar to the beginning of the Russia-Ukraine war,” said former US forces commander in Europe, General Ben Hodges.
📌 “If Russia attacked Poland in 2025… pic.twitter.com/sdB9jeiIT5
— Visioner (@visionergeo) October 14, 2025
US has confirmed continued presence of troops in Poland, says defence minister after Hegseth meeting Notes From Poland
Special Interview: Sean McMeekin Big Serge Thought
South of the Border
US is working on doubling aid to Argentina to $40 billion by tapping private funding sources AP
Trump Approves Lethal Covert CIA Operations in Venezuela as Another Strike in the Caribbean Kills Six Venezuelanalysis
So there are two B-52 bombers—part of the nuclear deterrence and global strike operations force AFGSC—currently tracing a dick and balls with their flights paths off the coast of Venezuela. pic.twitter.com/2RuGB5qCEV
— New Left EViews (@NewLeftEViews) October 15, 2025
L’affaire Epstein
Bank of America, BNY sued over alleged ties to Jeffrey Epstein New York Post
Trump 2.0
US approves new bank backed by billionaires with ties to Trump FT
A “very wealthy” private Trump donor offered to pay U.S. troops’ salary if funding ran out amid U.S. government shutdown.
Any guesses? pic.twitter.com/lo0Og6hiXf
— DD Geopolitics (@DD_Geopolitics) October 14, 2025
WHY ARE US TROOPS OCCUPYING AMERICAN CITIES? Seymour Hersh
Inside the War on Antifa Ken Klippenstein
‘I love Hitler’: Leaked messages expose Young Republicans’ racist chat Politico
***
Federal judge temporarily blocks Trump shutdown layoffs The Hill
Why odds are increasing that the government shutdown could last into November Yahoo! Finance
Democrats en déshabillé
Democratic Establishment Targets Maine Working-Class Senate Candidate Graham Platner Common Dreams
What this text describes—the calculated American effort to reorient the Western left from class struggle to cultural critique, from the collective to the individual, from socialism to liberal moralism—resonates almost prophetically with the forgotten work of Michel Clouscard.… https://t.co/VuEuhNcGdr pic.twitter.com/Oeh9000uG3
— Hispanic American Studies (@hispano_studies) October 15, 2025
Immigration
This Family Visit to a Military Base Ended With ICE Deporting a Marine’s Dad Military.com
Imperial Collapse Watch
Pentagon retreats from climate fight even as heat and storms slam troops Floodlight
Learning From The Defeat? Aurelien
Army general says he’s using AI to improve “decision-making” Ars Technica
Brave New World
Grenade-launching war-ready robot dog that strikes autonomously unveiled in US Interesting Engineering
MAHA
Inside FDA, career staffers describe how political pressure is influencing their work STAT
From Medicine to Mysticism: The Radicalization of Florida’s Top Doc Mother Jones
Groves of Academe
Brown University joins MIT in rejecting Trump’s academic funding pact Al Mayadeen
White House opened funding compact to all higher ed. Christian Science Monitor
Big Brother Is Watching You Watch
Inside SF’s private surveillance state 48 Hills
Flock’s Gunshot Detection Microphones Will Start Listening For Human Voices Tech Dirt
Healthcare?
A closer look at what’s driving the rising rate of uninsured children Public Health Watch
AI
Lawyer Caught Using AI While Explaining to Court Why He Used AI 404 Media
Man Stores AI-Generated ‘Robot Porn’ on His Government Computer, Loses Access to Nuclear Secrets 404 Media
Economy
The Used Car Market Is Imploding Jacobin
Gain-of-Function Monetary Policy Racket News
The Bezzle
Mr. Market Froth Bonanza
The Frothiest AI Bubble Is in Energy Stocks WSJ
Nvidia-backed firms plan massive West Texas AI data center. The Real Deal. “Self-powered “Horizon” campus will sprawl across 500 acres and tap into Permian Basin gas.”
Class Warfare
Atlanta’s city-run grocery sees early success, sparking debate over government’s role Fox News
When Bread Becomes a Weapon: Rethinking Hunger on World Food Day The Wire
Sacrificing the Present for An Anticipated Memory Scantron
Antidote du jour (via):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
“‘No shame’: UK invites private firms to compete for Gaza reconstruction contracts”
Would anybody be really surprised if the firms with the winning bids all had ties to Tony Blair? Gaza is going to be a helluva grift in the coming decades.
Hamas and the other Palestinian groups may object to being raped by the Zionist west again. I would think this may be a problem for the rapists.
Ok, who? Twitter just shows a TV photo of Trump.
So, will it then be know as PMC US Army?
I find myself in the odd position of hoping that is the case. I’m looking at the Vance article above and wondering if there are dots to be connected.
By “Vance article” I mean the Young Republicans piece.
If they will be privately paid, they might be instead called Mercs’R’US.
Hessians were paid for services rendered in America in what are known as Blood Thalers nowadays, here have a look see.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blutdollar
I’m gonna guess Fat Larry.
Prepare for gig work, zero hour contracts, trigger sensors so troops are only paid when actually shooting.
Gooooooooood Moooooooorning Fiatnam!
The platoon was frankly in a tither regarding getting paid next week. with some thinking that a Go Fu** Me program was in the cards if a mysterious really rich anonymous donor didn’t come through, his gender being the only thing acknowledged.
This just made my day, thank you.
The words “water” and “cooling” do not appear in the article at all. Where will it come from? West Texas is a very dry place…
Same way that Arizona has all that “arid land for agricultural purposes” to grow cash crops….thinking of past articles about growing alfalfa and similar nonsense. Growth for sake of growth, we don’t need no stinking guidelines on water restrictions. SMH.
My knowledge of the Permian region would fit on a thimble, outside of knowing all manner of oil and natural gas fields are or have been based there. Oh and also, that high school culture and football played in Midland and Odessa featured prominently in Friday Night Lights. An excellent book.
used fracking water, would be my guess…which is itself often sourced from rather vast stores of ancient saltwater in the deep aquifers out thataway(just sample some tap water in any west texas town…brackish, as if one is on the gulf coast)
i briefly knew a dude who was setting up a shrimp farm out there, due to this water being so readily available, and no one else really wanting it, back then.(dont know what happened to that guy, or his endeavor)
Or all that methane from the oil and gas industry in Texas can be turned to chlorofluorocarbons – the Montreal Protocol is basically just a recommendation, right? Freon for the win!
Perfect – shrimp contaminated with radionuclides, metals, PAHs
They will ship ice from Alaska.
Learning From The Defeat? Aurelien
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Another beaut!
They reckoned that something like 80% of frontline GI Joes in WW2 never fired their guns at the enemy, you can make murdering somebody you don’t know official by calling it war, but we aren’t wired that way in real life.
By having no risk of loss of life, drones do away with human niceties-bits don’t get buck fever.
Hard to imagine we’re not that far away from Terminator, all of us being potentially Sarah Connor.
<"Even during the Cold War, fleet-to-fleet actions were no longer really expected"
I think Aurelien is mistaken about that. The Soviet navy was generally considered "coastal" or more suited to the Black/Baltic Sea environment. When they did leave local waters they spent much of their time anchored.
That view radically changed after the Soviet naval exercises Okean. It probably coincided with other Reagan administration ideas for a larger fleet, but provided justification for the "600 ship Navy".
This resulted in doctrinal change with the concept of "Surface Action Group" (SAG), a naval force structure lacking organic fixed-wing aircraft that was designed for "blue water" engagement of Soviet naval forces. At the heart was the "BB-SAG", with one of the reactivated battleships as its central force provider.
The emphasis was engagement at over-the-horizon ranges (beyond surface radar range) using Tomahawk anti-ship missiles. The missiles were designed to conduct open-water search with onboard sensors to acquire targets within the search area, after which the missile would initiate an attack tactic.
In those days before VLS surface launched tomahawk was fired from armored box launchers; each launcher holding four so-called "all-up rounds". There were also submarines, mostly 637s and the early 688s, with tube-launched tomahawk. The BB was the "big dog" with 8 launchers (32 missiles).
Then there was the Pakistan-India war in 1971 (or “liberation of Bangladesh”) and the 10th Operative Task Force of Soviet Navy “intercepting” the Task Force 74 of US Navy from intervening in the war.
“Learning From The Defeat?”
A very interesting essay though I have a very minor quibble. At one time in the 50s/60s the USAF was really thinking about missiles on their aircraft and made it a priority so it was not always just about manned aircraft. The idea was that interceptors like the F-4 Phantom would engage Soviet bombers over the Arctic using just missiles. Of course the missiles were very primitive back then and it was not unknown for a heat-seeking missile to target the sun. They were so obsessed with missiles that the F-4 Phantom never had an inbuilt gun initially as missiles would do all the work or so it was reckoned and dog-fighting skills went by the wayside because again, missiles would do all the work. When those F-4 phantoms were sent to Vietnam the flaws in that thinking became quickly apparent.
It gets better: North Vietnam’s available MIG fighter jets could be completely disassembled using hand tools. The jets were ferried in pieces down to South Vietnam on the Ho Chi Minh trail by bicycle, then reassembled and deployed on short, camouflaged runways in the middle of the jungle. Overflying F-4s suddenly found themselves with a hostile fighter jet on their tail at close range, with no machine guns on board to shoot back with.
Human ingenuity is amazing sometimes.
Don’t forget DBP, where the Vietnamese army carried heavy artillery up mountains to shell the French compound.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Dien_Bien_Phu
During 1950s, as I understand it, US military thinking also downplayed the role of pilot, at least in air defense roles, as I understand it. A lot of automated systems with ground radars and autopilots where the pilot’s job was limited to launching the air to air missiles (likely the Genii with nuclear warhead) when ordered to.
Reducing those pilots to essentially spam in a can.
Skimming Aurelian, I am reminded of Norm Augustine, one time president emeritus of Lockheed (before Martin added).
He said aircraft were getting so expensive one day the US would have only one and it would be shared, rotated between the Air Force, Navy and marines. F-35 is a major achievement toward Norm’s predications.
The gun on a fast moving aircraft is inaccurate, keeping it “fixed” in the slot difficult given G force, and not much good too few bullets.
Gun considered was not worth the weight and overhead. You need a loader!
Missiles today are much better the sidewinder been upgraded over the decades and now is world class near engagement.
Seems the IDF ran into some very compliant targets and got some kills with guns……
F-35 is fitted with a 25 mm gun.
> F-35 is fitted with a 25 mm gun.
Reminds me of Swiss Army Knife variants that got too wide to safely hold. If the range of a 25 mm gun is about a mile, that puts it in range for rpg’s, normal rifles, and ballistae/trebuchets. So your hundred-million dollar fatduck goes down from a rock, that’s not a good risk assessment. And it adds to the load, affecting everything from lift capacity to fuel usage.
I guess somebody got paid.
The F-4 Phantom did not have a gun when it started flying in Vietnam, but they found out that sometimes the pilots really needed one especially if the fighting became the aerial equivalent of a knife fight. This is why they stuck gun pods onto the F-4 Phantoms. While the early versions of the phantoms had no gun, later versions did as well as all the different fighters built later.
I noticed that the ammunition stored for the gun keeps declining with each new airplane from around a thousand rounds during Vietnam to less than two hundred today. I would think that it would make the weapon almost useless especially in any oddball situation that would require it to be used considering modern missiles.
At its firing rate of 3300 rounds minute it can fire for about 3.5 seconds
Wikipedia claims that an F-35 only carries about 180 rounds which sounds about right. Did they ever get the software fixed so that they can actually fire those guns?
180 rounds fired in anger from a F-35 would probably take out Pixley on a mission from NAS Lemoore.
Every time you press the trigger, it checks for software update. :)
Windows 10 is no longer supported.
So no no update.
Funny, mine was updated just today (Thursday, 16 October in the UTC+7 time zone [11 hours ahead of US east coast]).
Then we have had this week Rutte bragging about the power of NATO “infinitely superior” to that of Russia in military terms. Basic psychology suggests insecurity by Rutte. He also spoke of the power of coordination as a NATO advantage when I believe that NATO coordination must be more like a pain in the neck and lots of paperwork. NATO is showing useless except as a tool to extract money and resources from members with no strategic purpose other than the extraction itself. This won’t last for long.
NATO has an overwhelming advantage in bullshit. Wonder what they’re going to say when Russia comes to collect its money, interest and reparations for financing the Ukraine’s destruction of the Donbass, &c.
Offered as a companion piece to “Young Republicans”, JD Vance brushes off racist texts by adults in Republican group chat as ‘what kids do’, Guardian.
Vance defends his people,
Vance expressed irritation at people he said had allowed themselves to be distracted from the Democrat’s “incredible endorsement of political violence … by focusing on what kids are saying in a group chat”.
Meanwhile, there is strong bipartisan pushback,
Other Republicans demanded more immediate intervention. Republican legislative leaders in Vermont, along with the governor, Phil Scott – also a Republican – called for the resignation of Sam Douglass, a state senator, revealed to be a participant in the chat.
Today I’m feeling a bit proud to be a freeman of Vermont.
Wasn’t Charlie Kirk’s murder just kids?
Speaking of which, funny how Tyler Robinson has been completely erased, no?
Along with Ryan Routh, whose trial for the attempted murder of a US president barely got a notice. Why would that be?!??! One would think a trial like that would be big news.
As this Kirk murder gets curiouser and curiouser, and you notice certain similarities between it and the first attempt on Trump, one wonders if the Kirk shooting was intended as a warning to Trump to stay on message.
I did a search on a couple of the “kids” to see if their ages are available, nothing showed up. Somewhat strange. They don’t look like my definition of “kids”.
Busted!
https://archive.ph/AAhDZ
Where is Al Franken? A new chapter is needed!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies_and_the_Lying_Liars_Who_Tell_Them
I was told in a crossfire presser hurricane
And I howled at my screen as if to intervene
But it’s all right now, in fact, India’s getting Russian gas
But it’s all right, just jumpin’ to conclusions half assed
It’s a gas, gas, gas
I was bothered by his bottle blond hags
I was troubled by his martial law like jags
But it’s all right now, in fact, India’s getting Russian gas
But it’s all right, just jumpin’ to conclusions half assed
It’s a gas, gas, gas
Dissenters drowned out, occupations left for dead
I fell down to my feet and I saw they bled, yeah yeah
I frowned at the petty vendettas, yeah yeah yeah
I was taken by a hoaxer again, misinformation fed
But it’s all right now, in fact, India’s getting Russian gas
But it’s all right, just jumpin’ to conclusions half assed
It’s a gas, gas, gas
Pumpin’ Russian jack, it’s gas gas gas
Pumpin’ Russian jack, it’s gas gas gas
Pumpin’ Russian jack, it’s gas gas gas
Pumpin’ Russian jack, it’s gas gas gas
Pumpin’ Russian jack, it’s gas gas gas
Pumpin’ Russian jack, it’s gas gas gas
Jumpin’ Jack Flash, by the Rolling Stones
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXUJMaYzh6U&list=RDKXUJMaYzh6U
“Bottle blond hags” lol, I am definitely borrowing that phrase.
I think that Trump must have gone off his meds and he had a severe case of verbal diarrhea. He was trash talking Putin, Russia, the Russian economy and the Russian military, claimed that Modi assured him that India would stop buying Russian oil and that he was going to get the Chinese to stop buying Russian oil as well, claimed to have destroyed BRICS with his threats of tariffs, is pressuring EU nations that support Kiev to impose 500% tariffs on Chinese imports with the proceeds directed toward funding Ukraine’s war effort and there was other stuff as well – but you can only listen to Trump talk for so long. You wonder how much stuff he just makes up in his head and how much he gets from people like Keith Kellogg and Scott Bessent.
‘Spinocchio’
The problem with making stuff up is you get caught.
I assume he lies because hubris – he thinks he can get away with it, the press won’t call him out on it, etc.
Now that I think more about it, it is also possible he’s showing advanced signs of senility/memory loss. I’m not a doctor but delusions might be caused by his advanced brain decay.
Or he may have confused India with Estonia.
He reminds me of a few telemarketers I unfortunately knew, who when not selling oil leases, metric tons of gold, limited edition lithographs and the like, were seemingly ok people, but would say anything on the phone to make you buy, masters of swatting away objections as if they were dealing with gnats.
Speaking things into existence is a powerful technique. Only a few people throughout history have mastered it and it appears Trump is well on his way as well!
The Used Car Market Is Imploding Jacobin
There’s a smarty of a mechanic on YouTube who goes by Car Wizard, and he’s pretty knowledgeable and not afraid to let you know what he thinks of given makes and models from what he’s seen come through the shop over decades.
With the exception of Toyota, most everything other car makers efforts as of late in the past decade are crap or crappier in terms of reliability.
And talkin’ about reliability, i’m just 8,000 miles away from driving to the Moon* in my mighty Taco (it was Taco before Taco stole its thunder) over the course of 15 years since purchased new.
I’m entertaining few thoughts of entering it into the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, as that 1/4 inch deep crease on the side panel from when I almost missed a cement filled steel pole at a gas station would certainly result in a reduction in points, not to elaborate further damage vis a vis dings and bumps too numerous to mention.
* getting back can be problematic, might need a new timing chain en route, counting on slingshot effect
New car prices in the US are also going through the roof. Was reading today that the price of a new car in the US has now passed $50,000-
https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a69030985/average-new-car-price-united-states-america-over-50000-dollars/
This little detail caught my attention:
“The second story feels like a flashback to the foreclosure crisis. Tranches of AAA-rated asset-backed securities (ABS) are going belly-up after vulnerable consumers — including an outsize share of low-income Hispanic and undocumented communities — were extended credit.”
Seems that would become a bigger problem that couldn’t be ignored and bound to explode with this administration’s immigration polices.
Further on. This (emphasis mine),
So what’s the problem? First Brands’ lenders, like Jefferies and UBS, are owed money from the sellers, not the newly bankrupt supplier. The issue is that First Brands likely used the same customer invoices, and thus the same loan collateral, to access multiple streams of financing. The repayments would be some orders of magnitude smaller than the outstanding loans.
Is that a devolution from the GFC derivative era?
And this is nuts.
My graduate student loans were a similarly large amount, for 26 months of higher education rent extraction. But I at least ostensibly got an education of sorts from that funding. And I could pause it if I had a job loss, with interest still accruing, naturally.
It’s great how Jacobin, a supposedly working class focused publication, also ignores the ongoing COVID Pandemic.
(bold mine)
This timeline is beyond stupid. We live in hell.
Granted, Jacobin is the publication that insisted that Sanders and Warren are the “same lane”, so there’s that.
WSWS seems to be the only legitimate working class publication.
The CrOP30 article in Transport & Environment concerning the tremendous land use associated with biofuels (mostly for transportation) was an interesting read.
A related topic is the use of biomass for power generation: https://www.nrdc.org/bio/matt-williams/drax-makes-mockery-international-day-forests. This activity is also non-viable but touted as “green”.
The CrOP30 article…
I understand the “optics” of saying something like “burn food for fuel” but for a lot of the soy and corn that gets turned into biofuels it’s not food. Which in my opinion makes it worse, as I’ll explain.
They take marginal lands, nuke hell out of them with fertilizers and herbicides, overplant GMO and Roundup-ready varieties and pour on the water. Stuff is practically toxic, but then it’s not intended for people or even to be forced on animals in a CAFO. It’s only intended to make something to ferment (corn) or press (soy).
Some of the problems are the use of marginal lands for farming — lands that if conserved and left alone would be habitat for wildlife and buffer zones for wind and water erosion; overuse (by human standards) of fertilizers, pesticides and GMO organisms; pollution of ground and groundwater.
As Jay Farrar from the band Son Volt sang: “Goin’ green’s a casino catchphrase/Ethanol’s made from smoke and mirrors…”
NW California is selling boatloads of wood chips to England cuz it’s so eco, dude. Fuel oil, what fuel oil?
‘Ivan Katchanovski
@I_Katchanovski
Trump admits his proxy war in Ukraine and that Zelensky is proxy: Trump says that Zelensky wants to launch offensive, and that Trump would determine if Zelensky would go on offensive after their talks.’
As a US President, Trump is also the Commander-in-Chief of the US Armed Forces. Looks like he also regards himself as Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces as well. Good thing that this is still Biden’s war and that Trump has nothing to do with it except for being the Mediator.
It surely beats General Ben Hodges.
Isn’t Hodges an AI hallucination?
Lack of weather data due to Trump’s budget cuts impacted forecast for deadly Alaska storm CNN
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Return with me now to those thrilling days of yesteryear when a long-range weather forecast was as far as your eyes could see on the horizon…
Top Venture Capitalists tour China, declare Western energy firms “uninvestable” – Kevin Walmsley
The same type of finance-oriented brains that told Western companies that outsourcing was the end all and be all are now telling some industries that they were put in a trick bag.
None of them noticed how localized industry spurred science and invention as well as increased people interest in the same.
And it was the “innovations” of the financial sector that have hugely contributed to the rising cost of living for workers in places like the US. Healthcare, housing, education…
Quite a track record for anyone in the financial sector to now claim they have a grasp on long-term thinking.
That article cites this Bloomberg one from Sep 21 that summarizes the opinions of eight VCs who toured China together in July visiting high tech firms in the energy sector. The gist of it:
The Bloomberg article closes with a quote from one of the VC’s: ‘Today, says Bro, “if you want to build something like a Northvolt in Europe, you should invite these guys over and do it with them.”’ Now that the Netherlands government euthanized Nexperia for no obvious reason other than to support Trump’s trade war I wonder how the Chinese peers will respond to those invitations.
“US expects Japan to stop buying Russian energy: Treasury secretary”
‘Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent meets with Japanese Finance Minister Katsunobu Kato to discuss plans for mobilizing Japan’s strategic investment in US’
The Japanese should explain to Bessent that if they stop buying Russian energy, their economy will go down meaning that they may not have the money to invest in the US. But Bessent here is just wanting Japan to invest in the US so that they can’t invest in their own economy instead. Maybe they should ask him when the US plans to stop buying Russian refined Uranium but they won’t go there.
And England expects every man to do his duty.
Pakistan, Afghanistan agree to 48-hour ceasefire after deadly border clashes – Press TV
Surprise! (Not…)
Another day, another clash, another “ceasefire”…
Re: US approves new bank backed by billionaires with ties to Trump
Anduril’s Palmer Luckey with Joe Lonsdale are behind it, with Thiel investment.
Called Erebor (apparently a LOTR reference like Anduril, Palantir and JD Vance’s Mithril) because it’s the Hobbit-botherers bank.
Replacement for SVB. Innovation economy blah blah.
“Erebor “getting approval so fast is a reflection of its extremely conservative business plan”, the person close to the launch said. The person added that Erebor was not going to be a “wacky, techno crypto bank”.
It will be run by co-CEOs Jacob Hirshman, who previously worked as an adviser at crypto group Circle, and Owen Rapaport, co-founder and CEO of digital assets software company Aer Compliance
I never was a LOTR guy, and it’s adoption by the Thielites means I’m now knee-jerk repulsed by any reference to it. They take it so so seriously when it’s just a damn fantasy book.
Off-topic: I will never not be enraged that fantasy and sci-fi are shoved together in one bookstore section. I browse spines, pluck out a book who’s title suggests exciting space adventures and it’s got a Vampire snogging a werewolf on the cover. Maddening!
Don’t forget that they are calling their enemies “orcs” like the Russians are being called by the Ukrainian Nazis.
We are all orcs now.
They had to name it after the mountain. Naming it “Smaug” would be too telling.
I guess somebody got a copy of the book, “The best way to rob a bank , is to own one”
Not clear why Theil and his fellow travelers consider Erebor a good thing:
“In 2770 T.A., while the young Thorin II Oakenshield was out hunting, the dragon Smaug flew south from the Grey Mountains, killed all the dwarves he could find, and destroyed the town of Dale. Smaug then took over [Erebor], using the dwarves’ hoard as a bed.”
Worse are the mash-up novels that aren’t advertised as such. Several years ago I read some good space opera novels from Peter Hamilton. So then I started on his Night’s Dawn Trilogy and not far in zombie Al Capone showed up on some faraway planet. Yet I read the whole 2,500 or so pages hoping this scifi-horror mashup would get better. It didn’t.
Horrifying in the truest sense of the word!
who is the billionaire that’s promised to pay military salaries ?
My guess would be the Adelsons as they had first dibs on Trump!
Nah, she’s paying for the Arc d’Trump monument.
And it better not be him, as that would make Sheldon the second coming!
Ellison or Palmer Luckey. Luckey has been trying to ingratiate himself with military rank and file since he started Anduril in 2017. Although Luckey would probably be making loud proclamations about it.
When I look at “Team TRUMP” I see a mix of sycophantic ideologs and high functioning sadists.
Ideologs have no use for reality and sadists are all about the jollies rather than achieving some sort of rational goal.
These are not the sharpest sporks in the drawer and if they have to deal with a real emergency the results are likely to be spectacular, and not in a good way.
Two of the flock of grey swans would be the AI bubble and bird flu, which is one or two mutations away from efficient human to human transmission.
Toss those two in the mix with the chaos being generated by “Team TRUMP ” domestically and things will get real messy, right quick.
I know, right? Now Trump is openly musing getting into a land war in Venezuela, which I guess I’ll soon be able to spell correctly from memory without spell check. Thanks for that, Trump!
>Syria’s al-Sharaa seeks to rebuild ties with Russia in first Kremlin talks
There must be a misunderstanding regarding Al-Sharaa’s status as a terrorist leader. A man as astute as Putin would never claim that having such a person as Syria’s leader would benefit the Syrian people.
You may have quoted the wrong part, since I can see Putin only stating that Russia benefits Syrian people. al-Sharaa is not even mentioned anywhere.
Anyway, maybe people should be reminded that this is how most of diplomacy was done between 1648 and 2014. States deal with states and care (publicly) very little how they other side is governed. Something about sovereignty and all that.
I guess you’d prefer Putin to send his deputy foreign minister to give out cookies to the demonstrators on the main square of Damascus?
Interesting Big Serge. Gore Vidal, whose father worked for FDR, seemed to agree with the interviewee’s suggestion that Roosevelt was a sneak and a schemer. He also saw the WW2, that killed his lover and sent him to the frozen Aleutions and a lifetime of arthritis as misbegotten to the degree that it turned the USA from ‘a republic into an empire.’
But one might counter argue that the war’s outsized outcome was less about FDR’s sympathies for communism and was always about imperial Europe’s fierce anti-communism. After all many of them were for Hitler’s business friendly dictatorship before they were against it. Even now righties write books about how the world might have been different if Hitler had taken out Stalin rather than attacking to the West. It seems doubtful that such a result would have been preferable or that Hitler was indeed ‘rational.’
The article though isn’t being doctrinaire about such conclusions.
Every effective politico has sneaking and scheming in their repertoire. The worst ones have only those.
Vidal is not the only one: I’ve read somewhere that Marshall thought of FDR as a dirty rotten schemer: his description, granted through rather foggy memory, made FDR sound like a suave version of Trump, to be honest. I also read the account of a meeting between Irish envoy Frank Aiken and FDR when the latter completely lost his temper (extreme rarity for him) when the former steadfastly held to Ireland’s neutrality and the principles it was based on in face of FDR’s persistent cajoling and bullying.
FDR was a narcissistic and self centered bully and bastard with dictatorial and fasciscistic instincts. That he was a shrewd capable and highly effective politician (in very manipulative and often underhanded way) mostly did things we like in retrospect does not make him a “good” guy. I, personally, respect that. I’d expect no less from a good politician who gets things done.
But, as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, when comparing Patton and Friedendall, while being a bastard may be a necessary part of an effective leader, just being a bastard is no qualification for leadership.l roles
It wasn’t that long ago the Chicago Tribune bought the Cubs for $20 million, and it was just announced today that the fishwrap I learned to read by, managed to lose $48 million last year.
The LA Times had their chance, could have bought the Rams for $19 million back when newspapers ruled the roost.
Last time I held a physical LA Times in my hand, my first thought was that maybe it doubled as a lighter-than-air craft of sorts, there not being a lot there @ 28 pages, it bore more resemblance to a systematically starved GI in a Japanese POW camp, and what’s with that weird $2.77 cover price?
Yesterday’s news-today!
>Israel still holds thousands of Palestinians hostage
“Living While Brown”
Well, so many of the nine thousand remaining captive Palestinians have no charges against them so when do they even see a court? It is a two tier justice system, civil for Jews and military for Arabs.
Correct term is Kamgaroo. Kangaroo courts
I thought Sevastopol is in Ukraine?
Ha! Good catch. Even the loonies are letting the facts slip through. ;)
>Why Is China Cracking Down on a Christian Group?
Besides the issue of the Church’s failure to conform to Chinese laws, Pastor Jin’s daughter being married to a senior researcher at the Hudson Institute, which recently published a noxious collection of regurgitated propaganda titled “China After Communism,” wouldn’t have anything to do with it?
Indian news sources about China are notoriously biased and unreliable. At least the linked report doesn’t indulge in outright lies, such as the claims that originated with an Indian news service that China was planning to colonize Pakistan.
Got my insurance bill on the all cats and no cattle ranch, and it went from $8100 last year to nearly $10k, its hard not to feel as if i’m paying the LA Infernos indirectly.
I have no mortgage and I’m getting to a decision point, in that the house is on the verge of being 50 years old (we had to remove a flashy disco ball from the ceiling in the living room) and is no spring chicken, and yeah it’d cost a fair amount to put Humpty Dumpty back together were a fire to befall us, but going on a historical basis, not one home has ever been lost here due to a wildfire, we’re in a largely oak savanna, oak leaves smolder-while pine needles burn.
The tree cutter i’ve utilized in the past has for lack of a better descriptor, ‘tree monkeys’ who scurry up and down oaks with a chainsaw, cutting off dead limbs out of reach to yours truly with a pole saw.
Part of me wants to give him the nearly $10 grand and really go at it on the trees, making them fireproof.
Pictures of very much alive trees amidst homes burnt to a crisp in the aftermath of the LA Infernos, was quite the testament to how difficult it is to set a live tree (non-pine) on fire.
Bonus Antidote
https://x.com/militar_ru/status/1978797927767118044
MAGA on the March
Tariff costs to companies this year to hit $1.2 trillion, with consumers taking most of the hit, S&P says (CNBC)
Going according to plan! This timeline is so lit.
I see that S&P white paper is mentioned in several dozen different blogs today, all referring to the research by Daniel Sanberg. They all quote the expectation that consumers will take two thirds of the 1.2 trillion $ hit from the tarrifs. While I agree the policy as conceived and implemented by Trump was not a good idea, I can’t find a link to the S&P white paper to see what data they’re relying on.
Which is a shame because I’d like to see it. Based on the data I’ve seen that we collect on the US economy, inflation in durable goods is stable to declining. Here’s a recent analysis making that argument based on data from Wolf Richter. Inflation is crushing people. Inflation is especially hurting poor people. But the component of inflation attributable to tarrifs on goods we purchase seems to be missing not only anecdotally, but in the data we’re collecting on the economy as a whole. So… where is the S&P getting its numbers from? Because right now, it looks like these crazy a$$ tarrifs are the most effective corporate taxes we’ve been able to levy in decades, and they are demonstrably hitting corporate profits hard. In which case I understand why the S&P is creating a basis to say they’re bad and should be scrapped. I also understand whatever the tarrifs are doing, they’re in direct conflict with Trump wanting to support a robust economy and increasing stock market indices. Absent our insanity, it is hard to decrease profits and increase share prices at the same time.
Syria’s al-Sharaa seeks to rebuild ties with Russia in first Kremlin talks – Intellinews
Kevork is not pleased one bit.
His post today is some contrarian analysis – just for kicks:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lj5yeSOZs-E/
I agree with Kevork.
If Iran, Russia and China do not deal with Turkey we are headed for an even bigger hell than the present.
Tell me where the Empire in actually losing. It is not.
Proxies are more important than leads in militarily hardware, which the west can certainly catch up with Russia, Iran and China in terms of missiles/drones over a period of time.
He had tour de force points aplenty throughout.
I noticed in the comments to his post that some brought up “Syria not proving it can defend itself.”
And all I could think in the back of mind is that’s something that so many players mentioned in his presentation never bring up about Israel.
Yes, people are still underestimating sanctions at least against smaller countries like Syria.
The only thing not mentioned maybe is the west’s propaganda dominance which Putin acknowledges as a hard nut to crack.
To be fair, what is Russia’s business in Syria? Its interests are modest and if the locals are willing to meet Russia’s limited goals, does it matter who the locals are? Furthermore, this actually hrlps underscore the the point that Russia traffics in soclvereignty, not word games. Russia deals with the govt of Syria, and for now, al-Israili is the leader of Syria heading its govt.
>Top Venture Capitalists tour China, declare Western energy firms “uninvestable”
Chinese companies would rather build new factories than return profits to their shareholders.
The link to the work of Michel Clouscard is another example of the poor understanding of the work of the Frankfurt School and their place in mid- 20th c radicalism. The tweet’s opener rests on plagiarism:
The tweeter ignores the fact that this idea is lifted wholesale from Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man of 1964, in which the concept of repressive desublimation, involving the harnessing of hitherto repressed desires to commodity production, was pivotal.
From there the tweet blends with Thomas Fazi, who is usually very good on a range of issues, but who here lapses into a lazy conspiratorial mode by quoting someone who sees a plot behind the supposed neglect in mid 20th c radical thought of class-based critical analysis in favor of cultural critique. His reading seems to imply that second wave feminism and the civil rights movement should be reconsidered for taking our eye off the ball of class struggle.
This line of criticism doesn’t takes into account that during that period many writers across the left, ranging from Baran and Sweezy at Monthly Review to Galbraith, had concluded that Keynesian economic management had largely integrated the “first world” working class into what eventually was termed “late capitalism,” and that the revolutionary potential of the Soviet-led state socialist bloc was buried under neo-Stalinism It ignores that many critics of capitalism, such as Marcuse, shifted to an emphasis on post-colonial liberation struggles and proposed looking to those struggles for critical inspiration. Instead of trying to link these tidal forces to the theoretical shift in question, we get
“The United States” as an actor? What’s most important about this bundle of errors is that it fails to appreciate how much the development of radical thought in the “West” was conditioned by the grinding down of the labor movement. It is true that over time for some writers this suppression brought theoretical erasure, and “good-bye to the working class” became a theme. However, trying to pin the blame on a segment of left intellectuals implies a rah rah voluntarism that underestimates the efficacy of capitalist suppressive techniques. A recent article at Jacobin traces these developments in Europe during the 70s and 80s in a much more balanced way.
I liked this rant about crazy wealth turning people psycho, and the reply about monarchs:
https://old.reddit.com/r/stupidpol/comments/1o43vws/i_thought_thiel_was_the_antichrist/nj07x4t/
“Billionaires who DON’T lose their fucking mind are the outliers. ….”
Also that thread points out that “Peter Thiel” is an anagram of “The Reptile”.
What comes first: the sociopathy or the billions?
It should be pointed out that the tweet citing the work of Michel Clouscard misses how Clouscard apparently borrowed wholesale from Herbert Marcuse in an uncredited way. The tweet’s opener:
ignores the fact that this is identical with Marcuse’s concept of “repressive desublimation” in his One-Dimensional Man of 1964. Marcuse is often criticized along with the rest of the Frankfurt School for the turn to “cultural Marxism.” As in this example, the truth is that they were interested in the increasing enlistment of culture to capitalist processes.
NYT:
Hmm… A conscience against State murder?
If so, what’s left after they all go?
Good question, but I shudder at the answer.
>If so, what’s left after they all go?
Guys that came up in the War-On-Terror who believe in a clash of civilizations and that loyalty to strength outweighs laws, values and democracy.
NYT:
Crocodile tears, one crocodile being eaten by another, but crocodiles running amok is the story.
Greenwald is presently on it.
My favorite part of this story is how all of the sudden, John Bolton is being portrayed as some sort of heroic figure, not a warmonger who would have us all turned into radioactive dust if his policies were implemented.
Quite the good career move, being indicted by Trumps DoJ.
‘Death to the IDF’ graffiti spotted on a train in Belgium:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/e8yVLe-7-Po
Pass the word.
And again, as I intersect with YT shorts via Chrome alerts (my algorithm?), a clip from a recent Hedges/Nader joining:
Nader recollects and reposes the nature of civil engagement. To which I would humbly add: humanity’s engagement. Thoughtful…
https://www.npr.org/2025/10/16/nx-s1-5576499/trump-putin-zelenskyy-russia-ukraine/
Trump says he plans to meet Putin again as Ukraine war drags
Is this just a drinking game now? A shot for each day that passes before it’s all claimed to be thrown out of the window?
If I was Putin I would shift that meeting from Hungary. Too many people in NATO and the Ukraine would get some smart ideas about trying to shoot his plane down. And you would never know if Trump would help with this by letting US assets be used to enable this. I would suggest Vladivostok instead.
Hello COVID.
Diane Keaton Died of Pneumonia, Death Certificate Says (NY Times)
Perhaps a consequence of one or more previous COVID infections?
It’s kinda like the early years of AIDS when on death certificates all sorts of illness were listed as being the cause of death except the true one – that they died of AIDS.
Yes, I remember reading at the dining table the San Francisco Chronicle’s Sunday obituaries, which consisted of page after page of people dying “after a brief illness.” Usually, but not always, of men in their 20s and 30s. But even after the disease was regularly killing in the rest of population besides gays, people still didn’t want others to know about what actually killed them. And I guess we can partly thank Hudson for people becoming more honest and aware.
Susan Stamberg has died at 87.
https://variety.com/2025/digital/obituaries-people-news/susan-stamberg-dead-npr-1236554884/
Another boomer era icon at NPR when some of us were devoted listeners.
I listened more than I should have, I passed her by, but I had gathered the ilk.
I think you would have to put a more circuitous route even if I believe there is a good chance you are correct. Keaton had apparently had a large unspecified health decline in previous months. There were cancellations of standing plans and she left the home she had intended to be her last. This says to me she was probably fighting an aggressive and fast moving cancer. Something we have seen more and more of in Covid’s wake, including in many younger than Keaton.
It does remind one of AIDS. Especially because people didn’t die of AIDS, they died of the diseases and cancers that AIDS immunosuppression enabled. The one difference is that many of the diseases that flourished in the wake of AIDS were rare enough that they became linked to it. This kind of linkage does not seem to be happening with Covid…yet. I attribute it to Covid being air borne, the sexual transmission aspect of AIDS allowed for easier personal protection and avoidance. That and the ridiculous “vaccine”. If the immune suppression apocalypse that can follow infection were really clear, ventilation, sick leave, testing, etc would become the responsibility of our robber barons who seek responsibility only for profits, undeserved and inflated that they are.
bill ackman pissed me the fuck off on twitx:
people like you get bailed out when you fuck up everything,no? so, yeah, fuck off. better to feed you to the poor…or you can just pay yer goddamned taxes.
quit yer bitchin from yer literal yacht.
oh, and fuck off.
Zohran IS is the Middle Ground.
you people sure as shit dont want people like me in charge,lol.
rich people fertilizer, etc. or just cement you into yr bunkers when the shit u caused goes down
again, fuck you, and your kind. u are a cancer
in answer to:https://x.com/BillAckman/status/1978940859597939081
I think of people like Mr. Ackman whenever the hoary old trope that New York pays more in taxes to the federal government than it receives in benefits is rolled out to support a holier than thou attitude from Team Blue.
Last time I checked, Kansas hasn’t caused multiple financial crises and wasn’t responsible for early spread of COVID-19 throughout the country. Missouri isn’t the reason people can’t afford to live in NYC. Alabama isn’t the reason why the cost of living in NYC is out of control. But you’d think Mr. Ackman is bravely pushing back against the entire MAGA right and the commies from the Xweet replies he’s getting from follow New Yorkers.
No one seems to be asking why if markets were so god d@mn perfect that aren’t there already grocery stores in the places that Mr. Mamdani is proposing to install his upgraded state sponsored food banks? And why aren’t we asking the question of what happens if rents inflated infinitely in places like NYC?
It’s a strange world. I’m not used to seeing such wealthy men act like they’re defending the little guys. Will no one think of the petit millionaires struggling in Chelsea?
Wailing ghosts through loudspeakers’: Cambodia accuses Thailand of psychological warfare along border (Guardian)
Ghosts are a serious thing in these parts. They are often a major part of Thai soap-operas (ละครผี, lakorn phi).
I think there are a couple of points raised in Big Serge’s fascinating interview with Sean McMeekan which I thought might have been picked up by other commentators.
The first is fairly easily disposed of: “FDR, by contrast, was almost brutally offensive in his treatment of “lesser” figures such as de Gaulle and more painfully, Churchill. In Stalin’s War, I only mentioned a few of these episodes, such as Roosevelt publicly insulting Churchill at Teheran in order to cozy favor with Stalin, or forcing Churchill to “beg like Fala” (Fala being FDR’s dog) at Québec. Far more dramatic was a story Peter Hitchens recounts in his recent book Phoney War, when FDR forced Churchill’s ship to circle around aimlessly at sea for several hours before being welcomed into Placentia Bay in August 1941, simply to get his beauty sleep.”
Churchill became an imaginary hero, the modern archetype of what a war leader should be, after the US and other forces stumbled across Italy and France and finally reached Germany following FDR’s death while the real war was fought in the East. Frankly FDR thought Churchill to be dissolute and a drunken braggart with a gift for prose whose general demeanour was, at best, fairly idiosyncratic, and barely relevant to the conduct of the war, and treated him accordingly. FDR made decisions and speeches. Churchill made speeches and Attlee, his Deputy Prime Minister and Chairman of the key Cabinet committees, made decisions.
The second point it is useful to address is contained in McMeakin’s comments: “When Roosevelt (at first, secretly) opened the spigot for Lend-Lease aid to the USSR in July 1941, the United States was neutral in the war, and most Americans had no strong preference for either side in the Nazi-Soviet war – or thought, like Truman, that the U.S. should help whichever side was losing (though still hoping the Nazis would lose the larger war in the end). Had the power to tap the vast hydraulic forces of the U.S. economy been in Churchill’s hands, the “cannon fodder/saving lives” argument would have made more sense: Britain was already at war but saw no way to defeat Germany, and now here was the world’s biggest army to do what the smaller British armies couldn’t do, grind down the Wehrmacht while saving British lives. In the circumstances of July-November 1941, however, none of this logic applied in Washington DC.”
FDR had two strategic objective in WWII: the first was to provoke Japan into a war by cutting it off from US aviation fuel, oil and scrap iron which Japan was sure to lose. The second was bring about the destruction of the British Empire, a task which the Japanese and Lend-Lease undertook with alacrity and the final outcome of the war would be the control of shipping in both the Atlantic and the Pacific, leaving the UK much diminished as a naval power, and as a financial power forced to maintain a reserve currency as a debtor nation.
If FDR had survived the war and that vapid creature of the Pendergast Machine, the genocidaire, Truman had not become President, do you think that our imagined memories would have coalesced around Churchill and, even then, only after he made the Fulton “iron curtain” speech which pretty much defined the Cold War policy adopted and if he had not started pushing his highly personal interpretation of the Second War immediately the British wisely chose Attlee as the prime minister who could get things done? I suspect that FDR would have been lionised, Churchill would be a minor figure without any real purpose, stuck in the bottom of a drawer and forgotten, and the US may well have been able to develop an working relationship of strained but amicable competition with the USSR.
A vibe check on America’s semiconductor boom by Asianometry:
America’s Semiconductor Boom is Real
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-jt3qBzJ4A
So is the CHIPS and Science Act actually paying off?
CHIPS and Science Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIPS_and_Science_Act
I remain somewhat skeptical since it’s somewhat tied into the AI data center bubble. (And somewhat surprised that “digital twin” is now big being somewhat involved with that effort in aerospace.)
Bitcoin and Ethereum dumping again.
Down 5 and 6% today.
P.S. Soundtrack: world’s smallest violin. /
Playing ‘My Heart Bleeds For You.’
I always think of the song by Travis Tritt: Here’s a quarter, call someone who cares
The daughter of Pastor Jin, of the Zion Church mentioned in the link above, is married to Bill Drexel, an American Zionist affiliated with the Hudson Institute.
https://x.com/nikstankovic_/status/1978012042025123854
The Hudson Institute recently published a collection of essays titled “China After Communism” that repeats tired propaganda while discussing regime change, covert ops, and post-regime change US boots-on-the-ground.
Could the Chinese government’s actions have had anything to do with the Hudson Institute connection?
As regards the source of the linked news report, The Hindustan Times, it would be pertinent to recall that Indian news sources are notoriously unreliable about China.
In 2018, The Economic Times of India reported that China was planning to turn its development project in the Port of Gwadar, Pakistan, into a Chinese colony. This unsubstantiated report was simultaneously echoed by another Indian media site, Business Today India. This yellow journalism was picked up by the Western MSM, which essentially whitewashed the yellow journalism lending it an unjustified aura of reliability. John Pomfret, former bureau chief in Beijing, wrote an opinion piece shortly after in The Washington Post that repeated these outlandish claims. From there, the baseless claims took on a life of their own, finding their way into scholarly analysis and think tank reports. One cannot help but wonder if the CIA or the MI6 do not have a conduit enabling them to plant stories in India media that serve the cause of Anglo imperialism?