Links 2/21/2026

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1. Wukchumni February 21, 2026 at 7:18 am

   Re: Chilean tanker explosion

   Big fan of John McPhee, and in his tome partially on transporting hazardous materials: Uncommon Carriers, I learned what those lozenges on the back of trucks signify, and propane trucks sport a 3, and you see them all the time.

   A number 8 or a 9 lozenge on the rear echelon of an 18 wheeler means whatever is in the cargo of the truck is muy malo from a hazardous standpoint, and since reading that most excellent book, i’ve accelerated past said trucks in a hurry.

   1 out of 1,000 big rigs you’ll see, will have an 8 or 9 lozenge, in my estimation.
   1. The Rev Kev February 21, 2026 at 7:40 am

      Reports are that there are four dead and seventeen injured but it could have been a lot worse. I was going to say that it was like watching a pyroclastic flow but in effect it was more like a thermobaric bomb explosion-

      https://gulfnews.com/world/americas/4-killed-17-injured-as-gas-truck-overturns-and-explodes-in-santiago-caught-on-camera-1.500450782
   2. Thasiet February 21, 2026 at 7:50 am

      I’ve got Coming into the Country on my Kindle, been meaning to get to it. But you shouldn’t have to read John McPhee to know when dangerous cargo is in a truck. A couple years ago I passed a tanker on my commute with a giant Yosemite Sam plastered on the back of the tank. Above him, in a font so enormous it reverberated read “BACK OFF!!!”

      And below him, more lettering in just as large of a typeface, spoke the truth: “WE AIN’T HAULING MILK”.
   3. ChrisFromGA February 21, 2026 at 8:13 am

      I’ve always wondered about liquified NG trucks. How hard would it be to get a tanker to go boom?

      An episode of Mythbusters where they tried to blow up one of those propane tanks for your gas grill you buy at the local hardware store comes to mind. If I recall, regular ammo didn’t do the trick. You had to use tracer rounds, then you got your “boom!”
      1. The Rev Kev February 21, 2026 at 8:27 am

         Still gotta treat them with respect. Not long before we left Sydney, this guy returned a propane tank BBQ to the BBQ store in the nearby suburb claiming it was faulty. The manager told the young fella to take it to the back of the store as see what the problem was. When he did so, flames came roaring up and not only burnt down that store but the ones on either side of it. Oops.
         1. herman_sampson February 21, 2026 at 8:59 am

            Any compressed gas, flammable or not is dangerous. I need to be more observant when I go to a $tree or any place that sells balloons to make sure their tanks are secured.
            Like masks, and easy way to make everyone safe (if only more KN/N95 masks were available).
            1. lyman alpha blob February 21, 2026 at 10:26 am

               I lived in the Lake Tahoe area in early 1993 and they had a huge snowfall that winter. You would see summer homes that were completely buried and I remember reports of a few going ‘kaboom’ because snow wasn’t cleared around propane tanks that were under tons of the white stuff.

               I would not recommend using compressed propane as a substitute for shoveling.
               1. Wukchumni February 21, 2026 at 1:37 pm

                  One of the ski in-ski out on slope chalets @ Mammoth went kaboom! in the epic winter of 2022-23 when over 700 inches of snow fell. They’re finally rebuilding it this winter.

                  It was one of at least a dozen structures in Mammoth that all blew up real good that winter on account of snow not being cleared around propane tanks.
               2. Marking Time February 23, 2026 at 5:50 pm

                  My wife & I were stuck in Tahoe for a President’s weekend (i thought 92 but maybe 93), intended leaving on the Friday before it but huge dumps on the Thursday meant no traffic in or out for 3 days. Staying wasn’t much fun as no skiing allowed anyway. No power for a day, casinos were open without hot food & bottled drinks only but the machines were lit up & working all day long.
                  Had a day at Kirkwood earlier that week , minus 20-25, still the coldest day skiing ever for us poor ozzies.
         2. skippy February 21, 2026 at 6:59 pm

            In the early 70s in Franklin County, MO on my grandparents farm, middle of the day in summer, a huge boom was heard over several counties. It ended up being one of those large [station wagon] NG tanks cooking off. Usually offset from the house around 50 yards. Even registered as a small earth quake.

            Then again during my childhood, with some mining experience, military, and industrial work the one thing that I do is keep an eye on any stored energy/potential. Especially with instructing young people who have no clue and never seen energy released in less than a blink of any eye.

            Hence why I prefer a charcoal BBQ on the deck, tastes better, no boom/flame issues, uses less energy as I can close off air when done and save fuel for next time.
   4. Carolinian February 21, 2026 at 8:37 am

      I accelerate past all big trucks in a hurry. If you talk to truck drivers they will tell you about their blind spots and the foolishness of the non professional public.

      And of course not all truck drivers are professional in practice and sometimes it can seem like you are in the Spielberg film Duel. Some claim Amazon hires drivers straight out of driving school for their 18 wheelers and anecdotally this may be true.
      1. Wukchumni February 21, 2026 at 11:07 am

         They allow triple-trailer big rigs in many western states, but not Cali, and they kind of freak me out, so very long, and you wonder where they park the daddy longlegs when taking a break?
      2. .Tom February 21, 2026 at 2:11 pm

         I don’t drive fast enough to pass any trucks. They all pass me. Sometimes quite aggressively, as though I had no right to observe the law.
   5. doug February 21, 2026 at 10:37 am

      Once, we were in the yard and heard a long(30 seconds?) horrible screeching sound. Within 30 minutes, we found out as a policeman showed up advising us to vacate until they truck contents had been safely transferred. It turned out that sound was a propane tanker sliding sideways on the highway next to us.
      Ever since then, I have been in awe of the folks that set the standard for tanker trucks. I can only imagine how long and boring those important meetings must have been. Most impressive unsung heroes to me at the time.
   6. Lee February 21, 2026 at 10:59 am

      From my neck of the woods on a route I have frequented: Caldecott Tunnel fire

      The Caldecott Tunnel fire was caused by a chain reaction traffic collision involving a gasoline tank truck which killed seven people in the third bore of the Caldecott Tunnel, on California State Route 24 between Oakland and Orinda, California in the United States, just after midnight on April 7, 1982. It is one of the few major tunnel fires involving a highly flammable cargo.
2. Samuel Conner February 21, 2026 at 7:18 am

   re: “This is extremely sinister! Israel plans to turn Gaza into a “cashless society” where the IDF fully controls who has access to e-money, who one can transact with, how much, & who starves to death”

   This may create a crisis for Evangelical Zionists. Cashless society with government control of who can and cannot purchase food is one of their nightmares from the Book of Revelation.
   1. Wukchumni February 21, 2026 at 7:37 am

      ‘Club Meddle’

      Bead there, done that
      1. Wukchumni February 21, 2026 at 8:42 am

         Blighted city gonna set my soul
         Gonna set my soul on fire
         Got a whole lot of Board of Peace money that’s ready to burn
         So get those seaside highrises up higher

         There’s a couple million Palestinians out there
         And they’re all livin’ devil may care
         And I’m just the devil with a lot of dare
         So Viva Gaza Vegas, Viva Gaza Vegas

         How I wish that those Gazans
         Weren’t in the way
         And even if there were no more
         I wouldn’t miss a minute of sleep anyway

         Oh, there’s casinos, and casitas, and seaside ideal
         A fortune won on every Jared deal
         All you need is a mass exodus and a nerve of steel
         Viva Gaza Vegas, Viva Gaza Vegas

         Viva Gaza Vegas with your ersatz fascism
         And the local population crashin’
         All their hopes down the drain
         Viva Gaza Vegas turnin’ the rubble of a hubble
         And turnin’ consternation into condos
         If you seize it once, you’ll never have to seize it again

         I’m gonna keep on my campaign run, I’m gonna have me some fun
         If it costs me my constituents their very last Dime
         If they wind up broke up well
         I’ll always remember that I had a swingin’ time
         I’m gonna give it everything I’ve got
         Lady luck, please, let the dice stay hot
         And let me shoot a seven with every shot

         Viva Gaza Vegas, Viva Gaza Vegas
         Viva Gaza Vegas, Viva, Viva Gaza Vegas

         Viva Las Vegas, performed by Elvis Presley

         https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MO1KyNUOIs
   2. ChrisFromGA February 21, 2026 at 8:22 am

      Never underestimate the dispensationalists’ ability to compartmentalize and cut the IDF some slack.
   3. JohnA February 21, 2026 at 8:47 am

      Surely, one of the factors behind Christian Zionism is to hasten the arrival of judgement day when Christ will return and transport true believers like them to heaven. As allegedly explained in Revelation. The recreation of the state of Israel is part of that. Or something along those lines.
      1. Pat February 21, 2026 at 10:02 am

         Beyond all the other illogical beliefs of the Armageddon cheerleaders, I also love the certainty that they will be leaving everything behind. Especially since so many also believe in an absurdly low set number for the people who will be ascending.
         If the fevered dream of Revelation does come to pass, one of the numerous plagues and traumas facing those left behind will no doubt be the loud and furious victimhood of the “good Evangelists true believers” mistakenly left behind with the rest of the rabble and criminals.
         1. Wukchumni February 21, 2026 at 12:13 pm

            A quite fervid Book of Revelations evang follower I know, regales me with tales of future 1,000 year Reich, er hanging out with the big cheese upstairs.

            My mom was pretty feeble @ 98 when she passed away, imagine how you’ll feel when you’re 382 years old with over 600 to go, to fulfill your end of the dogma bargain?
         2. skippy February 21, 2026 at 7:18 pm

            Ref – Revelation/Armageddon

            What some have theorized was written under the influence of ergot or its ilk has wrought over countless generations. Amazed how some focus on the punishment aspect first and foremost over love thy enemies, cast no stone, brotherhood, life is about preparing your soul for the afterlife and not amassing wealth/power for self aggrandizement. Might be something to do with most of the flock finding someone too tell them what the scriptures mean with a side of blind faith ….
   4. Ben Panga February 21, 2026 at 9:36 am

      Once more Gaza is the testing ground. We are next…
3. The Rev Kev February 21, 2026 at 7:35 am

   ‘The Bulwark
   @BulwarkOnline
   Trump: “I am allowed to cut off any and all trade…I can destroy the trade, I can destroy the country, I’m even allowed to impose a foreign country destroying embargo…I can do anything I want to do to them…I’m allowed to destroy the country, but I can’t charge a little fee.” ‘

   I got an idea. Let him have the right to charge a little fee with a cap of say 10% – but then take away his power to destroy the trade, embargo and the right to destroy a country. Sounds like a fair trade to me.
   1. mountainhead February 21, 2026 at 9:45 am

      If SCOTUS rules against POTUS, and POTUS ignores the ruling, are there consequences? Are SCOTUS decisions enforceable? (Asking as a layperson)
      1. Oregon Lawhobbit February 24, 2026 at 2:19 pm

         As one POTUS is reputed to have said:

         “John Marshall has made his decision. Now let him enforce it.”
4. Wukchumni February 21, 2026 at 8:07 am

   Our Donald, whose Art of the Deal
   hallowed be thy Fame,
   thy kingdom come,
   thy tariffs will be undone,
   on Earth as it is ruled by the Supremes.

   Give us this day your daily excess.
   and forgive not the 4 treasonous trespassers,
   as we forgive the Robes Père
   who trespassed against us.

   And lead us not into temptation of tithing tariff rates,
   or you suing somebody for all they’re worth.
   1. ChrisFromGA February 21, 2026 at 8:32 am

      I worry that Taco’s is going to resemble Al Pacino in “Scarface.” He is still CoC and can order the Navy to start seizing ships full of Chinese goods.

      Picture him in the White House office, alone and angry, pointing his metaphorical embargo gun at Modi.

      “Oh, so you wanna keep buying Russian oil?

      (very NSFW)

      Say hello to my little friend!”
      
      1. Wukchumni February 21, 2026 at 11:30 am

         Tariffs Are Cancelled Out?
         1. ChrisFromGA February 21, 2026 at 12:32 pm

            Tariffied At Cretinous Oligarchs?
5. flora February 21, 2026 at 8:11 am

   re: ” 1/5 Buried inside the Epstein files is something far more disturbing than a blackmail network, as sinister as that is. What the documents reveal is a worldview. A coherent, funded, institutionally embedded worldview about what human beings are, what they’re worth, and who gets…”

   Western governments are now run by members of what is now called the Epstein Class. The West is being destroyed by the Epstein Class.
   1. CanCyn February 21, 2026 at 8:43 am

      ‘The west has been destroyed…’ – there fixed it for ya 😉
      I was having this very discussion with some folks yesterday. People are shocked by the lengths that these psychopaths will take to make and keep money – what to do they do with it?? Not to mention how little they value the earth or the rest of humanity.
   2. Screwball February 21, 2026 at 11:28 am

      The West is being destroyed by the Epstein Class.

      I agree. Focus on these file and ALL the people in them. Too many want revenge but their scope is too narrow. As an example, so many think this is how they can get Trump. They hate him every minute of every day and that’s all that matters. If the files took down Orange Hitler they would cheer and go back to brunch.

      They ALL need to be taken down. The first, the last, and everyone in between. Nothing less is acceptable.
      1. Norton February 21, 2026 at 3:17 pm

         Makes you wonder what kind of psy-ops he was running to influence bamboozle and ruin so many men, women and children? His photo alone is repulsive so there must be some explanations yet to surface.
         1. flora February 21, 2026 at 5:52 pm

            Whitney Webb thinks he was a front man or go-between for other very powerful people and entities. From: Redacted with Clayton and Natalie Morris. utube, ~1hr, 8+ minutes.

            Whitney Webb on Massive Epstein Document Revelations, Palantir, Clintons and “Kill List” | Redacted

            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKAy5i2XmfE
   3. .Tom February 21, 2026 at 2:16 pm

      I first heard that locution from our dear friend professor Marandi.
   4. lyman alpha blob February 21, 2026 at 2:22 pm

      You can see the whole thread here: https://xcancel.com/DrMcFillin/status/2024567808538066958

      It does give a person pause when it dawns that the world we live in is one where it turns out a guy like Don DeLillo has not been nearly paranoid enough.
6. flora February 21, 2026 at 8:17 am

   Max Blumenthal interviews Prof. Marandi. utube, ~1hr, 24+ minutes.

   ‘An existential war’: Prof. Mohammad Marandi on the coming US-Israeli assault on Iran

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QseGXTqYDc
7. Clankenfoot February 21, 2026 at 8:18 am

   Bit of a rabbit hole to be had here, for users of archive.today (AKA archive.ph archive.is archive.li archive.vn archive.fo archive.md):

   https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/wikipedia-bans-archive-today-after-site-executed-ddos-and-altered-web-captures/
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Archive.today_guidance
   https://lj.rossia.org/users/archive_today/
   1. Jason Boxman February 21, 2026 at 12:22 pm

      More than 695,000 links to Archive.today are distributed across 400,000 or so Wikipedia pages. The archive site is commonly used to bypass news paywalls, and the FBI has sought information on the site operator’s identity with a subpoena to domain registrar Tucows.

      Interesting, though, and I found the service so useful I never even questioned the fact that clearly they can alter these pages, should they choose to. I did wonder why someone might run such a service, though, for free.

      As we previously reported, malicious code in Archive.today’s CAPTCHA page was used to direct a DDoS against the Gyrovague blog written by a man named Jani Patokallio. The Archive.today maintainer demanded that Patokallio take down a 2023 blog post that discussed the archive site founder’s possible identity. Patokallio wasn’t able to determine who runs Archive.today but mentioned apparent aliases such as “Denis Petrov” and “Masha Rabinovich,” and described evidence that the site is operated by someone from Russia.

      I hadn’t considered that I could be part of a distributed denial of service attack, either. Fun times.

      On the other hand, apparently the blog owner in question is trying to doxx the acrhive.ph owner.

      So much inside baseball I don’t really follow at all what’s even going on in all of this.
8. William Beyer February 21, 2026 at 8:41 am

   Regarding the Carlson party detentions at the Tel Aviv airport, I once flew an El Al charter home from Paris to NYC – it was the first time I ever saw an Uzi (several) and the luggage and personal searches took half an hour. The year was 1971.
   1. Carolinian February 21, 2026 at 8:55 am

      But does our Lindsey get the same treatment after one of his bimonthly trips to headquarters? Or is it more likely the red carpet and rose petals?

      A recent story said that Israelis on the street greet him as “Uncle Lindsey.” He probably makes more trips to Tel Aviv than to SC.
      1. The Rev Kev February 21, 2026 at 9:03 am

         I saw a recent video of our Lyndsay a day or two ago. He was saying that when we go to war with Iran, that some Americans will be “hit” – meaning killed, crippled or wounded – but that it will be worth it to regime change the Iranian government. He really is the pits.
      2. Yves Smith Post authorFebruary 21, 2026 at 9:04 am

         The point here is Tucker’s naivete and/or poor staff work.

         1. He is one of the top official enemies, per Zionists. He has no rights in Israel. He is a guest. Their house, their rules.

         2. Israel’s long standing practice is to give long jerkface interviews to furrriners when they leave by Ben Gurion. I can tell a long form story about a Jewish friend with 30 cousins in Israel, including 2 in the Knesset, who was harassed when leaving for among other things having an adopted Thai son.

         She blew up at them, demanded their names, and said her Knesset cousins would get them fired.

         They did back off after that.
         1. raspberry jam February 21, 2026 at 10:51 am

            I meant to comment on this in yesterday’s links because the whole episode strikes me as either naive or intentionally obtuse to make a point for his audience.

            As you say and others upthread imply, getting in is easy, but on departure you are subject to extensive searches and the third degree. Every non-resident gets the third degree. If you don’t get the shitty exit interview, you get the shitty exit searches, and many get both. Non-residents have a separate security queue just for the searches, and they fully unpack your entire luggage to hand check everything. I had a small leather zipper wallet for jewelry that was in a bag inside another bag in my toiletry bag in my suitcase. I remember coming back out of the physical check area on my last trip to see security opening it up and spreading out my jewelry. All the luggage also goes through the scanners as well! It took me over an hour just to get through that portion of security on that trip and I was told I got off lightly!

            I’ve never been subject to the shitty exit interview. I have a suspicion why but it is not for public discussion here. My point in sharing this is to reinforce what you’re saying in point 1: he’s on the list of designated enemies, and he was in their house. If they were really trying to make a point it would have been rougher; the way he described it sounded to me like he was offended at not being treated as a A class media guest and he was doing American “Let me speak to your manager” behavior in retaliation. And poorly done for effect: he didn’t do it there, he did it on his show. It came across as whiny.

            So the question is, who was he making the fuss for? Certainly not the Zionists (he could have thrown a real fit at Ben Gurion; hell, he could have called Huckabee back to plead on his behalf directly to someone in the government and dealt with it then and there if he was serious). So I think this was a bit of performative Karen-ing for the emerging anti-Zionist MAGA front as everyone begins jockeying for the post-Trump world.
            1. danpaco February 21, 2026 at 11:40 am

               I was subject to both back in 96. My only justice, I was living out of a backpack and was particularly ripe that day. I’m sure they had regretted their decision.
            2. Bugs February 21, 2026 at 1:48 pm

               Thanks for your account.

               Having watched him mostly after he’s gone indie, I find him a terrifically naive guy, in that he doesn’t know how things work for the vast majority in the real world; things like going through really tough airport security.

               Visiting Israel is not for the faint of heart. When you’re Jewish, getting in there seems like a sort of Disneyland entry ritual until you do the goddamn math. When you start a country that probably should not be where it is, you’re gonna have issues.
            3. Revenant February 21, 2026 at 6:38 pm

               I’ve been to Israel twice, on school trips ,(“See the Holy Land”, they said. “Whose?”, I should have asked…). We were subject to interview (as 13 and then 15 year old teens) by El All check-in at Heathrow on the way out and in Ben Gurion on the return.

               I remember nothing of the exit interviews, just that if you lay down to sleep on the cold marble floor of Ben Gurion, a bruiser would poke you with an Uzi….

               The first departure interview was memorable because we were separately interviewed but side by side in synchrony. It started going wrong at the moment when we are asked “are you visiting anyone in Israel” and I say “no” and my schoolmate says “yes” because he has some friend he might call on. Our parallel answers then become a black comedy of contradiction and misunderstanding, culminating in the luggage search when the unsmiling El Al lady produces a sweet tin from my hand luggage. She proceeds to shake it; it rattles. “What is in here?”. “Boiled sweets.” “Open it”.

               I know I cannot get the tin open: the sweets are dusted in icing sugar and the lid has been frustratingly jammed on the sugar for half the journey. I try for a bit until she grows impatient and summons a guy. It’s all getting serious.

               He disappears and returns tooled up with a hammer and chisel. He prises the lid off, there is one boiled sweet inside. The El All lady scowls and declines it when offered….
         2. Santiago B February 21, 2026 at 8:49 pm

            But isn’t that yet another point to be made here? Even though Tucker and his crew may have been ‘naive’ -and- even though they never even attempted to enter the country (as in cross through customs or a LPOE and then move about the country) since the interview was to be conducted pre-customs (or whatever the Israeli equivalent is) and they were scheduled to fly back out immediately, doesn’t it still paint a damning picture of a hyper paranoid totalitarian police state?

            From reading responses here at NC, it doesn’t look like anyone else’s experience in Israel was the same as Tucker and Co’s because the ones I’ve read are all from people who actually intended to enter (and then exit) Israel. At least from the US (and most western country) legal perspective, they never entered Israel, and thus this prolonged “exit interview” where they were asked a bunch of totally mystifying and irrelevant questions by “goons” serves very well to show his audience what Israel is really like.

            BTW, he does debunk the debunking with regard to the “hugs and laughter” stuff I’ve seen in other media reports. It was a person who casually asked him for a selfie. That is, if what Tucker says in the video you linked above is true.
            1. Yves Smith Post authorFebruary 21, 2026 at 11:25 pm

               No, you are misrepresenting what happened as Tucker explained it.

               Only two members of his team were interrogated. Those were the ones who had gone overnight into Tel Aviv. And others (posted after you commented) have confirmed the experience.

               My hosts in 1997 made clear that absolutely every person leaving Israel then who was not an Israeli passport who had entered Israel would be closely interrogated when they tried to leave, that this was not a prevalent but a “no exceptions” practice.
               1. Santiago B February 22, 2026 at 2:56 am

                  OK well thanks for the reply and I do appreciate being approved for moderation, but still have some concerns. They all tie back to the “naivete” angle. I can’t picture myself – and maybe I AM being naive here – being subjected to that kind of treatment no matter who (or how well) well know(n) it should have been to anyone preparing to go to an Israeli int’l airport with no visa or other application, with stated intent to leave shortly – and to interview “my” country’s ambassador or any other official acting in a diplomatic capacity – Like nobody even ever pretended to want to legally enter Israel.

                  Sorry if this sound, frankly, dumb, but in what other country would this have happened considering all the context?! I’m not being disingenuous at all.
                  1. Yves Smith Post authorFebruary 22, 2026 at 6:29 am

                     Please look at what the UK did to George Galloway and Craig Murray. This is a government acting against its own citizens for their position on Israel. And they are supposedly a democracy.

                     You are assuming, as Tucker did, that he has privilege due to his prominence. He is Enemy #1 of US Zionists. Why should Israel be nice to him when in their view, he is operating against their interest and there is plenty of political (if not popular) support for that position in the US, most importantly among critically important Trump constituencies?
         3. Roland February 21, 2026 at 9:16 pm

            I transited Israel overland in 2005, through Eilat, on my way from Jordan to Egypt.

            I was closely questioned, and at length: twice when entering Israel, and a third time on departure (even though all I did was take a taxi from one border post to the other.) Total interrogation time was nearly two hours. They tried hard to catch any sort of inconsistency (e.g. asking the same question a few minutes later, phrased differently), and each interrogator phoned the previous ones, to compare notes.

            They read pages out of my journal, and some of that found its way into the questioning. At least there were no body cavity searches. I did get X-Rayed twice, and metal detected inch by inch.

            However, I must say that the officials were polite and professional the whole time. The border was pretty quiet that morning. Maybe they were just keeping themselves busy. I guess a lone Canadian arriving on foot from Aqaba was something unusual. For my part, I was in no great hurry, so I could just find the process interesting, and compare it to other border crossings.

            It’s sad for me to remember now that, back in 2005, the Jordanian/Syrian border, which I had crossed at Dara’a a few days before, had reminded of me of what the Canada/USA border had been like when I was a kid in the 1970’s–nothing but a friendly nod, barely a glance at your papers, didn’t so much as open your bag. I wonder what it’s like now.
            1. Keith Newman February 22, 2026 at 1:20 am

               @Roland at 9:16 pm
               Re the US/Canada border, circa 1977: I remember driving down to Burlington, Vermont, from Montreal with a girlfriend to get a milkshake at Howard Johnson’s. Crossed the border no problem by showing my Quebec driver’s license. It had no photo. She showed no ID at all. Both of us were around 25.
   2. Henry Moon Pie February 21, 2026 at 10:21 am

      My OT prof in Lutheran seminary was an archaeologist as well as a Ph.D. in Hebrew bible. His doctoral father was William Albright, one of the most esteemed scholars in his field of the 20th century.

      After many bad experiences, he quit doing digs in Israel, and limited himself to Jordan and Syria. He did his best to avoid even flying through Israel. This was 40 years ago.
   3. YuShan February 21, 2026 at 12:40 pm

      I visited Israel three times in the mid 1990’s. The third time was only for 4 days, after having backpacked in a few African countries. I flew El Al via Tel Aviv, so I decided to spend 4 days in Jerusalem again because I was there anyway. I stayed in hostel ‘Al Arab’ in the Muslim part of the old city. It was kinda fun, watching “Life of Brian” on video there around Xmas time (LOL). But anyway, this hostel organised tours to a refugee camp in Ramallah. It was all very politicised but interesting.

      On my home flight from Ben Gurion Airport, I got the usual long questioning that single backpackers without pre determined plans always get. They are really trained to notice unusual things. Like: “Why is there dust on your day-pack?” (I demonstrated that I had put it on the ground and push it forward with my foot while queuing at the airport). I also always got questioned by two different security ladies (for some reason they were always young ladies), who ask more or less the same questions and then compare notes.

      But this time I was stupid enough to tell the truth where I had stayed and what places I had visited. I needed to go to a separate room and they went through all my stuff, including a bag of really dirty underwear (after backpacking in Africa!). They literally scanned every single piece of dirty underwear with some kind of detector. It was so embarrassing. I also had a electric (battery) shaver that I had dropped and then repaired with a piece of tape. This went all the way to yet a different room for analysis. They were also intrigued by the (Arabic) stamps in my passport, which included one that they didn’t know: entering Morocco by boat. I felt really cool that I has a stamp that they didn’t recognise and had to ask me about.

      Eventually they let me go, but I think they spent the best part of half an hour on me (LOL)!
9. Carolinian February 21, 2026 at 8:51 am

   Re “penis gate” (impossible to resist click bait)

   —————
   German publication Bild reported earlier this month that Olympic ski jumpers were using hyaluronic acid injections to artificially enlarge their genital area, which would allow them to wear bigger ski jumping suits.

   Bigger suits would help generate more lift on jumps and make it more aerodynamic, potentially adding a few extra meters in the air.
   —————–
   One wonders what those long ago naked Greeks at their original Olympics would make of our modern techno/fractions of a second Olympics. On TV it makes quite the visual spectacle but still the whole thing is a bit odd.
10. Wukchumni February 21, 2026 at 8:55 am

    “The Idler Book of Crap Jobs ranks pig wanker #10. I wonder what the life of a salmon wanker looks like.”
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

    I was out to dinner with a couple of Brit coin dealers in Cincinnati @ the big American Numismatic Association coin show-circa 1979, and I’d only learned recently what wanker meant in English-English, and was merrily saying it at the table-practically proclaiming it meant nothing in the USA as they were getting a little uncomfortable, and let out another wanker when our waitress overheard me, and she was a Brit as it turned out, and my friends were so red in the face.

    Not lost in translation, as it turned out.
11. The Rev Kev February 21, 2026 at 8:56 am

    “11 Million Visitors Short: Inside America’s Continuing Tourism Slump”

    This article briefly mentions it but I will expand on it. So you have a couple like that mentioned at the start of this article. They book the flight to America for all four of them, Accommodation, transport and also booked for places like Disneyland and the Grand Canyon. As you can imagine, you are talking big money here. Much tired they arrive at JFK and are met by customs agents who by reputation are rude. They take the guy’s mobile and go digging into it where they find that he once heavily criticized Trump. That is enough. He and his family are barred from entering the country and ordered to return home on the next available flight. Now the guy has to go cancelling the hotels, transport, tourist places, etc. and try to get his money back. You can take that risk if you really want to visit America – or you can go to Asia or Canada or the Bahamas or any other place where this rarely happens. Not hard to work out why numbers are dropping. With social media, word gets around rapidly. Visitors from Germany dropped to when they heard that two young German girls were arrested in Hawaii as being suspected prostitutes. The reason why? Because they wanted to go where ever they felt like and did not have a string of accommodation places booked which brought them under suspicion by border agents. Who needs that crap.
    1. Wukchumni February 21, 2026 at 9:12 am

       We seem to be going the Israeli route as per the Tucker Carlson video, fine-toothed combing of sojourners. Who wants to experience that?

       I’ll tell you where you don’t want to be in the middle of the summer, and that’s one of the many most popular National Parks that required reservations for entry, prior to them abandoning the practice recently.

       Doesn’t matter if you’re an American or a tourist from another country, its gonna be a madhouse without reservations at Yosemite NP, Glacier NP and Arches NP.

       Yosemite NP peaked @ 5.2 million visitors in 2016 with no reservation system in place, and have kept visitation to around 3 million per year, until now.
       1. Carolinian February 21, 2026 at 11:28 am

          But don’t all peak season visitors to Yosemite still have to park at the entrance and take shuttle buses? It’s not gigantic like Yellowstone but surely big enough to accommodate crowds who just want to see the waterfalls.

          One suspects that Park Service employees–as often true of librarians–have a jaded view of their public.

          And I resent the notion that Americans have to make reservations to visit what is after all their own property. To me this sounds more like Disney than TR.

          One could make more of a case for Arches where you do have to drive distances inside the park to see it and traffic is more of an issue. I know when I took a holiday weekend drive through the Smokies not that long ago traffic was a nightmare. There they started requiring paid parking tags for visitors which still didn’t suppress the traffic.
          1. Wukchumni February 21, 2026 at 1:32 pm

             You have to drive into Yosemite Valley and its a pretty tight space that gets jammed up quick.

             I related the other day we were on a backpack trip in YNP 4 years ago and came across an NPS ranger who regaled with tales of oh too many people in 2016 (5.3 million visitors vs about 3 million in 2025), to the point where it was obvious at times that nobody was having much fun, neither the tourists or park employees.

             We don’t suffer as much from too much of a good thing, here in Sequoia NP. It only gets stupid on Memorial Day, July 4th and Labor Day weekends, where the backup into the NP can be 5 miles long @ say 11 am on Saturday.

             The NP is closed until they can remove the snow and fallen trees on the road from the potent storm, and can’t wait to go cross country skiing among the giants, and when you have deep enough snow cover, all of the lower lying shrubberies and small trees are covered up and all you have is white as the driven snow and colossal columns of red.
    2. vao February 21, 2026 at 9:54 am

       “two young German girls were arrested in Hawaii as being suspected prostitutes. The reason why? Because they wanted to go where ever they felt like and did not have a string of accommodation places booked which brought them under suspicion by border agents.”

       Holy molly. European youngsters have been spending holidays like that for, oh, many decades: (1) go to some place; (2) find accommodation in the local youth hostel or a cheap hotel; (3) visit, have fun; (4) look at the map and decide where to go next; (5) repeat from (1).

       The advent of the Interrail Pass greatly facilitated that procedure — actually, it almost made it a way of life.

       But in the USA not booking trips and accommodation in advance makes you suspect?
    3. Ben Panga February 21, 2026 at 10:35 am

       In the same vein:

       ‘Don’t go to the US – not with Trump in charge’: the UK tourist with a valid visa detained by ICE for six weeks (Guardian)

       The dream holiday ended abruptly on Friday 26 September, as Karen and Bill were trying to leave the US. When they crossed the border, Canadian officials told them they didn’t have the correct paperwork to bring the car with them. They were turned back to Montana on the American side – and to US border control officials. Bill’s US visa had expired; Karen’s had not.

       “I worried then,” she says. “I was worried for him. I thought, well, at least I am here to support him.”

       She didn’t know it at the time, but it was the beginning of an ordeal that would see Karen handcuffed, shackled and sleeping on the floor of a locked cell, before being driven for 12 hours through the night to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centre. Karen was incarcerated for a total of six weeks – even though she had been travelling with a valid visa.

       Karen has no criminal record. She is a grandmother who spent eight years working as an admin assistant at a primary school before her retirement. “I don’t even have parking tickets in the background anywhere,” she says. “I am not a dangerous criminal. I didn’t enter the country illegally and I had everything I needed to be there.”

       I’ve said here before that I used to be a US Green Card holder but as I have a history of posting about geopolitcs and a non-ayran ethnicity I would not even consider travelling to the US now.

       It was bad enough under Biden – I came very close to being detained in 2022 when entering Philly airport with legal but complex paperwork situation (waiting for the Green Card, I’d returned to UK for 3 days for Dad’s funeral). In the end I was released after a few hours but it certainly left a taste in my mouth.
    4. Peter Steckel February 21, 2026 at 10:52 am

       Possible, but my gut hunch is that the declining economy has more to do with it…
       1. flora February 21, 2026 at 3:38 pm

          With the ICEmen raids on US cities word gets back to the EU and other places. I wonder what this summer’s FIFA World Cup in the US will see in terms of foreign visitors compared to past years.
       2. John9 February 22, 2026 at 12:01 pm

          I have heard specifically from UK and Canadian friends who touri$t regularly in the U$ that they won’t visit as long as Trumpism rule$. Tourists with money want a nice experience, not a brown shirt beatdown.
    5. A1 February 21, 2026 at 11:22 am

       Rev I don’t believe the bit about barring someone from entry unless they are on a list. I know people who go across regularly and have no problem. The border guards into the US are overly aggressive about food – which is ridiculous considering the integration on the food industry between the US, Mexico and Canada. Having to throw out your homemade sandwich which includes a piece of cucumber is annoying, especially when the cucumber is a product of USA.

       In my opinion the reasons Canadians are traveling less in general and especially to the US is due to the inflation of food and accommodation that is unavoidable while traveling.
       1. The Rev Kev February 21, 2026 at 6:05 pm

          Go onto YouTube and you will find a good number of videos of Canadians explaining why they won’t/can’t travel to the US and none of them mention that it is because of high prices. The Trump effect is as real as a punch in the face and it is not just Trump but a lot of his officials that denigrate and mock Canadians as well. They have in little over a year turned America’s strongest ally into country non grata. And yes, you can get knocked back from the border for criticizing Trump. Why do you think that there are proposals for visitors to hand over the past five years of their social media history, emails and the names of all their addresses.
12. Ben Panga February 21, 2026 at 9:03 am

    That Semantic Ablation article is really good and IMO hugely important.

    If “hallucination” describes the AI seeing what isn’t there, semantic ablation describes the AI destroying what is. We are witnessing a civilizational “race to the middle,” where the complexity of human thought is sacrificed on the altar of algorithmic smoothness. By accepting these ablated outputs, we are not just simplifying communication; we are building a world on a hollowed-out syntax that has suffered semantic ablation. If we don’t start naming the rot, we will soon forget what substance even looks like

    Where I am this is already clearly occurring. We have a majority non-English native speaker expat community which uses English as a common language.

    95% of event adverts, articles, and posts are written by chatgpt. They have the same structures, same rhetorical tricks (my personal least favourites is “It’s not X. It’s Y and Z.” and “No X, no Y, just Z.”)

    My brain fully rejects these and as soon as it realises it’s AI writing I just stop reading. I have the same with all social media. Even here in links, there are often tweets which are chatgpt written and I just can’t.

    The sad part is the people behind them (often) had nuanced rich ideas. But they chatgptified them and now it’s shallow thin trash.

    It’s an extension of the Instagram/twitter degradation of the language into cheap hooks and marketing speak. (“Let that sink in” is a pet peeve long predating AI).

    I see it now in how people speak. A lot of under 40s seem to speak in this facile way about facile things.

    And if language is the framework for thought (which I only partially believe), human thought is also being degraded. This obviously continues the trend started by screens, videos and the decline of books and long-form. But AI is accelerating it.

    All of this is just one aspect, this banalification and loss of all but the most mundane middle is happening across culture, across all kinds of fields. Human knowledge is being reduced to the top ten samey Google results, and further reduced to a crap software’s distillation of that.

    (Not going into it here, but I think human emotional range and capacity is becoming similarly crapified)

    We train the next AI on all this crap and we get recursive idiocy until where?

    F*** that, I decline. I still write from my own mind, and think my own thoughts, errors and all.

    I am so grateful to NC. What Yves has built and protected and what many others add value and richness to is an antidote. Bless you all, in your imperfect perfection.
    1. What? No! February 21, 2026 at 10:49 am

       I don’t know if I’m late to the party, but someone came up with ai;dr.

       That’s not good.
       That’s not even great.
       This is game-changing.
    2. Mikel February 21, 2026 at 1:00 pm

       Yes.
       On another note, I still think about what all the screens may have done to vision. Just not what it used to be.
       I’ve missed things with the morning blurry vision. Not seeing all of a pic, etc.
       1. Ben Panga February 21, 2026 at 2:49 pm

          Gray-scale mode on phone and laptop has greatly changed my eye health
    3. Cassandra February 21, 2026 at 3:39 pm

       >If we don’t start naming the rot, we will soon forget what substance even looks like

       Actually, George Orwell named it in his 1984 seventy five years ago… Newspeak. I don’t know whether to bless him for providing a warning for us, or curse him for providing a blueprint for the powers of darkness.

       I would also recommend John Varley’s Steel Beach for its depiction of a post-literate society managed by AI. I won’t offer spoilers for those reading it for the first time.
    4. Ignacio February 21, 2026 at 4:54 pm

       On the other hand, you have to suffer the killing of English from people like me, who never use Chatgpt but think in other language and translate while writing here with “mixed results” to say it mildly.
       1. Bazarov February 21, 2026 at 6:07 pm

          When I was teaching, I had many foreign students some of which were fluent in English and others merely proficient. Talking to the proficient students was always very interesting. They would come up with creative constructions for concepts in their native languages that either they didn’t know the English word/idiom for or that English lacked a word/idiom for.

          While these constructions were often absurd or awkward, occasionally they’d utter something poetic that’d stick in my head for months. One student described a “flap,” like you would find on a purse, as a “wing-fold,” for instance. Another, trying to describe the act of exhaling, called it a “calm-cough.”
    5. Alphonse February 21, 2026 at 5:25 pm

       AI makes it easier to write well. It takes less time and, it is easier to understand and it reaches larger audiences. But here’s what nobody tells you: when you streamline sentences and use punchy words you lose your unique voice. Here is how AI writing strips voice and value from what we write and what we read:

       1. It makes extreme statements to attract attention. Words like “always,” “nobody” and “profound” signal that what you have to say is uniquely important. But there is a cost. Depth is stripped away. Nuance is lost. It is impossible to sort what matters from what doesn’t.

       2. It is punchy. It uses short sentences. It alternates negatives with positives. It sums up at the end with a moral or lesson. These are powerful techniques for focusing a reader’s attention. But AI has no sense of values. It does not know what is important and what is not. With AI, every statement is breathless, every statement is categorical, every conclusion is revelatory. When everything is punchy, nothing is punchy. Like the boy who cried wolf, a continuous stream of AI writing makes it impossible to have impact when it matters.

       3. It often claims secret knowledge. It promises to reveal a hidden truth behind a false reality. It tells the reader they are not just a reading words or learning something new, but joining a privileged group. It divides the world between those who know the truth and those who believe illusions.

       4. It breaks writing into pieces that are easy to digest, replacing integration with repetition. A human writer faces the challenge of reducing a web of ideas to a linear flow. But for complex ideas this is impossible. There must be references backwards and forwards like threads woven through the text. Instead of threads, AI uses chunks – lists, short sentences, itemized claims. Instead of returning to a topic and adding depth, instead of taking the next step to provide real insight, it simply repeats the same idea with different words. For example, if AI writing divides people between the ignorant and the enlightened, how does this reflect the wider culture at this moment in time? AI doesn’t need to say more because it only needs one payload, and that payload has already been delivered.

       5. It has only one purpose: attention. Ideas don’t matter, communication doesn’t matter – only attention. Not because that’s what the writer wants, not because that’s what the reader wants, but because that’s how AI has been trained. No matter what priority you begin with, AI will rewrite for attention.

       6. It is generic. It uses the same techniques, the same language, the same tone over and over again. It breaks statements into groups of threes: A and B and C. It uses negation –  it says not A, not b, but C. Even if you tell it to adopt a certain style its writing will be generic for that style. Whatever unique voice you put in your writing, AI will strip it out. Not only does AI remove the author: it also removes the audience. The unique position and interpretation of the audience is replaced with a generic target of the largest possible number of people.

       The problem is not that AI writing is not the grammar. It is not the words. It is not the techniques. It is that it is barely communication at all. Everett Rogers explains that communication is not possible when writer and reader share nothing in common. It is pointless when they share everything in common because then there is nothing to say. Communication is maximized at a point in between, when there is commonality and difference. AI does not err on the side of too much difference but too little. It minimizes novelty and maximizes emphasis.

       This isn’t only about style. It isn’t only about knowledge. It is a metaphysical flaw. It is about value. It is about the ability to tell the difference between what matters from what doesn’t, the ability to distinguish what is good from what is bad. Because value is something that AI does not understand. Only humans understand value. And AI strips it out.

       — I did not write this with AI (never have done). I find the AI style really striking, as distinctive as the King James Bible. AI uses powerful techniques, but it uses them so relentlessly that they become cliche. I find myself intentionally reducing my use of negations because that pattern is now so over-used. I have been unable to find a name for this style. I once asked an AI if such a name existed. The best it could come up with was “clickbait.”
       1. Ben Panga February 21, 2026 at 7:57 pm

          >I have been unable to find a name for this style?

          If I was a sci-fi writer I might go with: Ænglish

          Your post is really well-made Alphonse; it triggered my brain instantly :)
       2. AG February 22, 2026 at 12:09 am

          Thanks

          Sorry of this post may appear a bit arbitrary.

          I originally wanted to post below at morongobill´s comment on AI-video.
          But maybe it´s better here.

          You write about fiction text, which is possibly more difficult for AI.

          But even if we speak about image/film one needs to address the level of craftsmanship and the failure of AI.

          A few days ago I linked to the trailer for the upcoming Spielberg sci-fi flick. And that is really a simple one with very brief shots. But it´s worth to freez-frame and look at each image carefully. Nothing in there is accidental. And AI-video footage pales by comparison.

          DISCLOSURE DAY trailer
          length 1:12
          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLv9WFOe6GU

          To just address a couple of examples:

          TC: 0:06: You have a very classical staging and dividing of masses of pedestrians at an intersection in downtown along the golden ratio. The groups, one closer to the camera than the other, are divided by the crosswalk to underline the spatial separation. The group further away from the camera is more anonymous to us but the car being parked oddly with the red backlights already signals enough unease. On the crosswalk we can single out a male staring at his phone in disbelief. This feeling is amplified in the group in the foreground closer to us.

          Also note the different ways they are holding their mobile phones so that the displays are directed criss-crossing or aligning with their imaginary lines of sight. Nothing in this image is accidental.

          Spielberg did such details extensively e.g. in “War of the Worlds” which this film is probably closely related to. There he used reflections or video images to show the horror the people were looking at but not shown to us directly.

          This is actually the theme of this trailer: Spielberg denies the counter-shot containing the revelation. Which is the topic of the film I assume, in directorial terms.

          TC 0:04: The extreme illuminations are something Spielberg/DOP Kaminski have developed as a trademark since their cooperation started. Light can be used in the classical sense as a positive enlightening symbol but also the opposite, a destructive force. The way Kaminski uses it very often in Sci-Fi is as disturbance. The light carries the knowledge of potential destruction. Overexposure or steep colour grades are a favourite means to achieve this.

          TC 0:12: You have the data-stick pushed into the interface and below on the desk surface you have a wooden pattern of waves symbolizing – I dare speculate – the insight probably from the data on the stick propelling the story.

          TC 0:14: The two people have crossing lines of sight when their gaze wanders to the laptop. This is a very standard setup in staging in such a scene but still you have to integrate it wisely into the entirety of your hundreds of shots across the whole film.

          The next shot shows both lines of sight already parallel since they are now watching and understanding the same thing. Also the male (who is most likely less knowing and less important than the female) has changed his position while she has remained in her seat and her posture is signaling her importance and understanding and she was probably right in whatever she was thinking before they met in this scene.

          And this is obviously a tiny fraction of ideas that has flown into this one film.

          I doubt a sloppy AI-generated mix of superficial impressionism would create the same intricacies.
13. AG February 21, 2026 at 9:05 am

    re: F-35 Germany

    REUTERS
    “Germany is considering ordering more U.S.-made F-35 fighter jets, two sources told Reuters, a move that would deepen Berlin’s reliance on American military technology as its joint next-generation fighter program with France falters. One source said Berlin was in talks that could lead to the purchase of more than 35 additional jets.“

    This even though other countries have stopped this madness and knowledge of the plane´s flaws has even entered MSM discussion to an extent. E.g. people in the ministry and think tanks must know it.

    Insanity and corruption are ruling us.
    Coooool.
    1. vao February 21, 2026 at 10:04 am

       It is all the more damning, since the Germans and the French have been unable to make the FCAS project work (the official death notification is yet to be issued, but FCAS is clinically dead).

       And the Germans will probably be unwelcome as a major partner in the GCAP.

       For all the talk about renewing Europe as a power and the renaissance of the European military industry, Germany doubling down on the F-35 will probably make any European-centred fighter aircraft project (whether GCAP or the possible French sucessor to FCAS) face immense difficulties achieving economic viability.
14. Anon February 21, 2026 at 9:13 am

    I thought one of the most interesting things about Carlson’s interview with Huckabee was his intro on the strategic difficulty of handling Huckabee: he, Carlson, can often come off as a jerk in the moment (in his own estimation), while Huckabee presents as a mild, imperturbable country grandpa. In fact, this was a very savvy observation, and made the interview almost unwatchable (I made it 45 minutes in).

    Regarding Carlson’s party’s departure, I thought the story was that Carlson chartered a plane to make sure the interview happened, Carlson’s plane had a scheduled window to leave the runway, and the questioning of his producers threatened to make the plane miss the window. Presumably the producers could have stayed and taken a later commercial flight out of Israel. It is pretty notable that, when they chartered the plane, they tried to pass on the plane’s identifiers to the Israeli military so that they weren’t “accidentally” shot down.
    1. Henry Moon Pie February 21, 2026 at 10:33 am

       I made it about 1:45, of which about 50 minutes was Tucker interviewing Huck.

       I was disappointed in Tucker’s performance. He had been picking up on the Darbyism thread in other interviews, talking about the Scofield Bible and the premillennialist heresy, but he’s backed off that for some reason. He even apologized to Huck for some of the things he said about “Christian Zionism,” which is based on Darbyism. The arguments he tried to make in place of that were weak for the most part, and Huck, who’s no fool, ran circles around him.

       Maybe Tucker regained his footing in the part I didn’t watch, and if someone has watched it and thought that was the case, please let me know. Otherwise, Carlson took a big gamble, and it ended up paying off for Huck, Trump and the Israelis.
       1. dingusansich February 21, 2026 at 4:13 pm

          I’m inclined to agree. I got through only a few minutes, up to Huckabee’s repeatedly challenging Carlson to answer whether Israel has a right to exist. Why not say, “Let me ask you a question, Huck ol’ buddy ol’ pal. Let’s set aside the G-word momentarily. Tell me this: Does a state have a right to ethnically cleanse? Seems to me a few countries took up that question in a place called Nuremberg, ‘less I’m mistaken. So, did Germany have a right to exist? Its people, sure. That regime and certain of its officials (ahem), not so much. Consider yourself answered.” Instead Carlson ingratiated and mea culpa’d when not disingenuously expressing “concern” while flailing for crankish gotchas about Israeli protection of pedos and mistreatment of Christians. Guess that’s what he thinks his audience wants. Not his best showing, IYAM.
    2. pjay February 21, 2026 at 10:34 am

       I’ve noticed this about Huckabee before. He has media skills, and his personae can soften the actual impact of his dangerous ideas. To me this is also true of House Speaker Mike Johnson. He usually has a calm, even delivery – in fact he has the charisma of a cardboard box – but his Apocalyptic beliefs are quite chilling for someone third in line for the US Presidency. Of course our top two leaders are pretty scary as well, but I think Johnson actually believes in God’s Plan for Israel. Let’s get that Third Temple started!
    3. hemeantwell February 21, 2026 at 11:03 am

       Re the Huckabee interview: I love the stench of arrogance in the morning. It smells like impending defeat.
       1. Lefty Godot February 21, 2026 at 12:59 pm

          But will the Supreme Court recognize the “Biblical right to conquer the entire Middle East” as a valid legal concept? That Huckabee is inventing a “right” based on the ancient delusions of a tribal war god mythology tells you all you need to know about the state of US “diplomacy” and about general lack of connection with reality of all the power structures in the US.
          1. gk February 21, 2026 at 4:58 pm

             Can the Supreme Court also consider Isaiah 9:13 as evidence that He has changed His mind?
    4. raspberry jam February 21, 2026 at 12:13 pm

       It is pretty notable that, when they chartered the plane, they tried to pass on the plane’s identifiers to the Israeli military so that they weren’t “accidentally” shot down.

       Sorry, does he say that in the interview? Does he think this is the first chartered flight into Israel? Does he think he has a special direct line to the IDF/IAF for special pleading?

       This reinforces my belief that he is engaging in some performative showmanship for his audience.

       Please swap “Israel” with “United States” when trying to pass on plane identifiers to avoid a shoot down to see how insane this sounds.
       1. Anon February 21, 2026 at 2:37 pm

          I believe he said they asked the embassy staff to report the plane’s identification to the Israeli military, and they refused to do so. From memory. I don’t think he was implying that the Israelis routinely shoot down chartered planes; I think he was worried the Israelis would shoot down the plane and then later claim that it was unidentified.
          1. raspberry jam February 21, 2026 at 3:46 pm

             This is a site dedicated to critical thinking. So please do not take what I am about to say as either picking on you or engaging in defense of Israel.

             If George Galloway or Jeremy Corbyn chartered a plane to the United States for a 4 hour block of time to do an interview with Thomas Massie where he did not leave the DC Dulles airport, and he made a statement on his substack/YouTube/whatever that he asked that embassy staff report his plane’s identification to the US military so it was not shot down, would that sound like reasonable precaution or would it sound like bombastic horseshit to incite his audience?

             I am American. I happen to know that the US military does not have anything to do with domestic flights, nor is there a history of shooting down domestic flights except in extreme terroristic circumstances (like the fourth plane on 9/11). Chartered planes will publish their flight plans to the domestic flight agencies of whatever countries they’re flying over and into. Tucker Carlson is a rich man, and I am sure he does not fly commercial normally. He would know this. He would know that there is no direct line to the military to tell them Hey, Maybe You Don’t Like My Politics, But I’m Flying In With My Team In A Chartered Domestic Aircraft, So Please Don’t Shoot Us Down. So why say something like that to his audience of several million unless he thinks they already have a prejudicial thought of that sort of thing? (How does Carlson’s audience feel about the USS Liberty?)

             There are real things to blame Israel for: genocide. Manipulation of governments with kompromat and bribery. Spying and theft of state secrets and corporate IP. The Netanyahu regime’s suicidal pact with religious Zionism in service of keeping Netanyahu out of jail. But trifling claims about shooting down a domestic aircraft “playing by the rules” in order to play on fears/prejudices of Carlson’s audience piss me off immensely because it contributes to the bs claims about Israeli insanity and uncontainability (see also: Samson Option and nuke talk) while the real and actual issues are unspoken and ignored because it isn’t polite to talk about genociding Muslims among the Christian Zionists, who (let’s be real!) agree in principle on the action.

             There is constant and ongoing discussion about who is the alpha in the US-Israel relationship. Stuff like this contributes to the false perception that a tiny, corrupt country wholly dependent on the military largesse of the US is somehow dictating world events. Which sounds quite a lot like a certain long-standing conspiracy theory that tends to come up over and over again. Again, I’m so sorry if I sound like I’m picking on you or defending Israel, because I’m doing neither. I’m gritting my teeth and trying to keep the conversation here on piste and critically focused. I treasure the discussion here and I don’t want the comments to fall into various traps that could be perceived as anti-Semitic and thus expose our hostess to threats.
             1. NN Cassandra February 21, 2026 at 5:39 pm

                You are right that shooting Carlson out of the sky would be insane. However, current Israel leadership isn’t famous for sanity. Bibi explicitly stated that propagandizing US population is their main problem right know and Carlson is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, critic of Israel on the right. They also have long history of assassinations. And if they did kill him, does anyone doubt US would treat it like another USS Liberty, simply because anything else would blow up the whole Israel-US edifice and too many other things/people depend on it? Frankly, if I were him, I would not go near Israel at all, even if it may look a little bit paranoid.
             2. hk February 21, 2026 at 11:08 pm

                Agree with you 100%. I want to add that this seems disturbingly common, though: Aurelien likes to refer to the myths of Srebnica. It is indisputable that Serb militiamen massacred male Bosniaks of military age, which is awful enough, but all sorts of lurid tales of questionable provenance have also been concocted and are widely believed; much the same thing has happened about the conduct of US forces in Korea and Vietnam, behavior of various authoritarian governments in the past and present, and various other historical atrocities: the truth is pretty terrible to begin with, but people come up with fanciful tales that are utterly ludicrous to make the other side look comically evil. Carlson coming up with the tale about fear of being shot down was absurdly juvenile.
                1. John9 February 22, 2026 at 12:30 pm

                   Does anybody remember a US ship called the USS Liberty in 1967. I think that was claimed to be a case of mistaken identy. Oopsie. The Zionists have been at it for a long time.
15. Chris February 21, 2026 at 9:14 am

    I wasn’t grilled when I visited Israel about a decade ago.
    1. Yves Smith Post authorFebruary 21, 2026 at 9:25 am

       Did you leave by air?
       1. Chris February 21, 2026 at 11:47 am

          Yes
16. The Rev Kev February 21, 2026 at 9:22 am

    ‘Orbán Viktor
    @PM_ViktorOrban
    Announcement❗️
    As long as Ukraine blocks the Friendship oil pipeline, Hungary will block the €90 billion Ukrainian war loan. We cannot be blackmailed!’

    Hungary stopping diesel deliveries to the Ukraine really must have hurt, not that Zelensky really worried as Brussels has his back. But Orban blocking that €90 billion loan would have really hurt Zelensky. A big chunk of that money is destined for his off-shore bank accounts and Zelensky wants his money.
    1. Polar Socialist February 21, 2026 at 10:19 am

       Slovakia just announced they will stop delivering electricity to Ukraine on Monday, unless Ukraine opens the Druzba pipeline. Hungary and Slovakia together provide 61% of the electricity of Ukraine… There’s something in the water in Poland and Ukraine that makes them piss off all their neighbors, it seems.

       Speaking of diesel, there are news that a Hong Kong flagged tanker Sea Horse has received 200,000 barrels of Russian diesel near Cyprus, and is now heading towards Cuba. If true, things could get interesting in about 4-5 weeks.
       1. chuck roast February 21, 2026 at 9:28 pm

          This from Google on Hong Kong flagged vessels:

          – Baltic Sea Incident (Feb 2026): A Hong Kong-registered cargo ship’s captain pleaded not guilty to charges related to damaging a Baltic Sea gas pipeline.

          – US Sanctions/Boardings (Feb 2026): Reports indicate US forces boarding vessels, including a Hong Kong-flagged tanker, Veronica III, involved in trading with sanctioned nations.

          China, apparently will not feel abused if the Amis turn it around or board it. And Pootin can say, “Gee, we tried to aid our fraternal brothers.”
    2. Victor Sciamarelli February 21, 2026 at 10:32 am

       I assume you mean Ukraine stopping fuel to Hungary. I wouldn’t underestimate what’s going on. Hungary is a land locked country and that pipeline is a lifeline. Hungary doesn’t have an equal alternative source of fuel. Though the pipeline originates in Russia, this game by Ukraine is the stuff that can start wars.
       1. Revenant February 21, 2026 at 5:47 pm

          No, if I understood the reports correctly, Hungary has forbidden diesel tankers to cross its border into the Ukraine. I think Slovakia has done likewise. This is the quid pro quo for the Ukraine not delivering crude oil (or nat gas, I lose track of which pipeline is which!) via the Druzhba pipeline.

          When I read the reports, neither Hungary nor Slovakia was proposing but withhold electricity because of the nature of the treaty obligations, whereas fuel shipments are a unilateral matter. As is hitting Zelensky in the wallet….
          1. The Rev Kev February 22, 2026 at 12:26 am

             I heard a fairly reliable account of how the Ukrainians have been nabbing Hungarian truck drivers – who are full Hungarian citizens – and impressing them into the Ukrainian army. Crazy when you think about it and the Hungarians are not amused.
          2. Victor Sciamarelli February 22, 2026 at 3:44 am

             I was referring to Orban’s X comment and ft link here in Links.
             Orban stated, “As long as Ukraine blocks the Friendship oil pipeline, Hungary will block the €90 billion Ukrainian war loan.
             We cannot be blackmailed!”
             No mention of diesel fuel.
17. The Rev Kev February 21, 2026 at 9:55 am

    “France says surprised by European Commission presence at Board of Peace”

    This sounds like Ursula’s work. By sending a EU Commissioner, it can be claimed that they represent all the members of the EU – whether they know it or not. It’s another power grab like when Ursula closed the EU skies to Russian planes in ’22 off her own bat or when she stated that the EU back Israel in the Gazan wars. In neither case did she bother asking any of the EU member States.
    1. Bugs February 22, 2026 at 4:17 am

       The blame is entirely on the Council of ministers for abrogating their authority to the Commission. If they wanted to slap down the Commission for actions outside its treaty purview, they could do it. But they just whine and shuffle. The EU Commission has become a weird undemocratic sideshow aside the legislative circuses in the weak member states. When you leave money on the table, somebody’s gonna take it. The member state pols seem to put up with it because Brussels provides tax free sinecures for washed up party apparatchiks. Plus corruption. Rince and repeat.
18. Tom Stone February 21, 2026 at 9:57 am

    Trump’s courtiers are in a tough spot, He is formally challenging the Rule of Law and asserting the powers of a Tyrant.
    His mental and physical health are also deteriorating rapidly and visibly, which makes his SOTU address a make it or break it performance.
    Miller, Vought and Noem are all in, Trump triumphs or they potentially face prison, Hegseth is dumb and will go along with whoever appears to have power, Bondi will do whatever it takes including betraying anyone and anything in order to come out on top and Patel is a weakling.
    The Military has shown its cards by obeying clearly illegal orders to commit murder and Piracy, they will deploy American Troops in American Cities if so ordered which might not work out the way they want…mutiny is a distinct possibility.
    The spooks back Vance, the FBI,DEA Etc are NOT HAPPY with the ascension of DHS…and they know how the system works
    While the Supreme Court has made itself irrelevant the lower Federal Courts and the @ 3,000 career prosecutors purged from the DOJ are not.
    Congress is a toothless dog except for Massie and Ro Khanna.
    The continuing Epstein revelations and War with Iran are wild cards, there is across the board anger and revulsion about the latest revelations and the continued coverup of Epstein’s network and a War with Iran which will almost certainly be a disaster could have wide ranging and severe economic and political consequences for the USA and the World.
    My suggestion?
    Do something kind today, hold the door open for someone, compliment a woman on her color choices, listen to some one who needs to be heard even if they talk at you at first.
    Refuse to act from fear.
    There is no such thing as a small kindness and it is an act of defiance that we can all take.
    1. Jeremy Grimm February 21, 2026 at 12:52 pm

       Small kindnesses make small remedy for the gross follies, gross violations and injustices, and gross cruelties, brutalities, gross insanity, … gross stupidity … of our ‘elites’ and their destructions of our country, its principles, its justice, and its unconstrained depredations on the u.s. and the world. But small kindnesses are the basis for Society and any possible recovery from the fall of this terrifying Empire we are become a part of.
    2. wol February 21, 2026 at 1:40 pm

       Caitlin Johnstone, today: It’s Very Possible To Be Both Happy and Well-Informed: https://substack.com/home/post/p-188676376

       The key isn’t finding a balance between blissful ignorance and painful awareness, it’s learning to find happiness in sources that don’t depend on the delusional belief that everything is fine.
19. Maxwell Johnston February 21, 2026 at 10:23 am

    The Multipolar Delusion –Foreign Affairs

    It’s a thought-provoking article and worth sacrificing a disposable email account for a one-time free read. Simplicius has a good pre-paywall summary too.

    The USA has effectively agreed that since it’s now a free-for-all multipolar world, it might as well use the USA’s residual power — especially its unique ability to project military force worldwide, and its outsize power over the world’s financial and legal systems — to do what it can while the possibility still exists. From the article: “Despite the widespread claims of its imminence, then, multipolarity is nowhere close to being realized. If anything, aspirations of multipolarity have contributed to this new order of unfettered American power.”

    Well, maybe. But the author (and the Trumpians) really ought to consider the application of Newton’s Third Law (for every action in nature, there is an equal and opposite reaction) to geopolitics. I suspect that the USA’s current behavior will eventually get it into deep trouble. Hubris, nemesis, catharsis.

    July 1945 to August 1949 was also a unipolar moment, in that the USA had a brief monopoly on nuclear weaponry which it did not use after WW2 ended. But countries change, and not always for the better. One can only imagine the consequences if the Silicon Valley crowd were to present The Donald with some kind of electronic wunderwaffe. Or to any future occupants of the White House. From the article: “An American foreign policy establishment accustomed to the ease of unilateral action will likely continue to pursue it no matter who is in the White House.” This does not bode well, methinks.

    The author is Indian, based currently in Singapore, but with strong links to the USA (Carnegie Foundation, Kissinger Scholar, among others).

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raja_Mohan

    This article will annoy anyone who fantasizes about imminent USA decline and the inevitable rise of the BRICS. Well worth a read.
    1. AG February 21, 2026 at 1:00 pm

       thanks!
       by now:
       https://archive.is/fXtZS
       1. JG February 21, 2026 at 5:10 pm

          Thank you; my reading for the afternoon. ❤️🐴🔥
    2. Kouros February 21, 2026 at 7:41 pm

       https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/multipolarity-a-delusion-in-face
    3. chuck roast February 21, 2026 at 9:46 pm

       And to the Valai Club above. Carney is a Bank Of Canada/Goldman Sachs creature, but you wouldn’t know he was GS from his PM website. The Valdai piece says absolutely nothing unless you read between the lines.

       So, I pop my foily on my head and figure he is inviting all the banksters and (ex-silicon valley) money men from around the world to join his fiat/debt pluto-consortium in opposition to the digital coin creeps rapidly gaining ground in the US. Adults in the Room…of course.
    4. hk February 22, 2026 at 12:09 am

       I think there’s a bit of conceptual confusion, or, at least unclarity, on the author’s part, namely confusing “multipolarity” and “anarchy” and “unipolarity” with “order.”

       Any transition in the international ordering, I think, would almost inevitably be accompanied by some state of chaotic interregnum. The real question is whether some sort of “multipolar order” can be instituted in its place sooner than later (or even ever?) I am actually somewhat optimistic that the Russians and Chinese seem to understand the importance of durable institutions and of getting buy ins from all major players, but it will be a doubtlessly difficult process since the strongest powers–see US–are liable to go rogue–ie what Mohan is describing. Still, to dismiss the idea of a multipolar order as “delusion” seems a bit much.
20. lyman alpha blob February 21, 2026 at 10:35 am

    New Harper’s is out and Sam Kriss has a banger of an article – Child’s Play: Tech’s new generation and the end of thinking

    One interviewee is “Donald Boat” who semi-famously wrangled some hardware out of prominent techbros not long ago, and another is a very young “entrepreneur” who very much resembles the eponymous character from William Gaddis’ prescient novel JR which was mentioned here not long ago. Those are the good guys. The others he talks to make one’s skin crawl. Highly recommended.
    1. Jason Boxman February 21, 2026 at 12:54 pm

       What I discovered, though, is that behind all these small complaints, there’s something much more serious. Roy Lee is not like other people. He belongs to a new and possibly permanent overclass. One of the pervasive new doctrines of Silicon Valley is that we’re in the early stages of a bifurcation event. Some people will do incredibly well in the new AI era. They will become rich and powerful beyond anything we can currently imagine. But other people—a lot of other people—will become useless. They will be consigned to the same miserable fate as the people currently muttering on the streets of San Francisco, cold and helpless in a world they no longer understand. The skills that could lift you out of the new permanent underclass are not the skills that mattered before. For a long time, the tech industry liked to think of itself as a meritocracy: it rewarded qualities like intelligence, competence, and expertise. But all that barely matters anymore. Even at big firms like Google, a quarter of the code is now written by AI. Individual intelligence will mean nothing once we have superhuman AI, at which point the difference between an obscenely talented giga-nerd and an ordinary six-pack-drinking bozo will be about as meaningful as the difference between any two ants. If what you do involves anything related to the human capacity for reason, reflection, insight, creativity, or thought, you will be meat for the coltan mines.

       At an employer I know, the directive for this year is “upskilling”. There, the technical writers are being very much encouraged to use AI tools being introduced to write release notes and conduct content planning. Not sure what would happen to the content strategists if all the writers were using the content planning AI/LLM. This is an acceleration from the 4 part “AI training” that said company demanded every employee complete last year.

       What the “upskilling” exactly is isn’t clear yet. After the Q1 pilot, all writers were told they need to participate to “drive innovation and success”.

       I don’t envy any of their chances.

       What a stupid timeline.

       The future will belong to people with a very specific combination of personality traits and psychosexual neuroses. An AI might be able to code faster than you, but there is one advantage that humans still have. It’s called agency, or being highly agentic. The highly agentic are people who just do things. They don’t timidly wait for permission or consensus; they drive like bulldozers through whatever’s in their way.

       Industrious and stupid. Dangerous.
       1. mrsyk February 21, 2026 at 5:49 pm

          “Upskilling” = uploading your skill set? Damn, that’s cold.
    2. Michaelmas February 21, 2026 at 1:07 pm

       Great piece.

       Kriss is a talented writer.
    3. Jason Boxman February 21, 2026 at 1:16 pm

       Man, this is other-worldly to read. Thanks for posting it! I’ve needed a laugh for a while now.
       1. lyman alpha blob February 21, 2026 at 4:55 pm

          Chef’s kiss to the line “I don’t care about the Decanterbury Tales.”
       2. SES February 21, 2026 at 6:16 pm

          Only slightly OT, for sheer linguistic sprezzatura, nothing beats Kriss’s 2014: “Tony Blair, dread creature of the forbidden swamp.” A taste:

          “Tony Blair rises every couple of months, like a bubble of swamp gas. First there’s an uneasy buried rumbling, then small tremors shake the surface, and then suddenly he bursts through, a gassy eruption stinking of farts and sulphur. It doesn’t matter how many rounds you fire into his shambling frame; he just won’t die. Whenever something unpleasant happens in the Middle East, whenever some huge corporation is discovered to be starving people to death or poisoning them through calculated negligence, whenever the chaos of the international order starts to wobble into another death-spiral, a damp wind blows through a graveyard somewhere in England and Tony Blair emerges from his tomb.”

          At: https://samkriss.com/2014/06/23/tony-blair-dread-creature-of-the-forbidden-swamp/
    4. amfortas February 21, 2026 at 5:57 pm

       i need a frelling bath , after all that,lol.
       these people get millions handed to them, while i scrounge around for firewood in winter.
       (and cant get my teeth fixed)>
       the sooner my civilisiation(sic) falls, utterly, the better.
       we are well and truly into the Barzun version of Decadence.
    5. Yalt February 21, 2026 at 8:34 pm

       Of one thing I am absolutely certain: AI will never replace William Gaddis.
21. leaf February 21, 2026 at 10:40 am

    https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2026/02/the-rise-and-fall-of-nuremberg-christianity/

    Interesting article by Malcolm Kyeyune about changes to moral authority in today’s world
    1. Taner Edis February 21, 2026 at 4:51 pm

       This was interesting. Thanks for the suggestion!
    2. amfortas February 21, 2026 at 7:34 pm

       thats prolly his best yet.
       whole lot of fat to chew
    3. albrt February 22, 2026 at 12:21 am

       I think Tinkzorg spent several months taming his impulses to produce that one. It is quite good.
    4. hk February 22, 2026 at 5:04 am

       This is fascinating, although I wonder if he’s looking too narrowly.

       The vast structure of Western liberal “crusaderism,” whether for democracy, multiculturalism, “pride,” or feminism, is built into the “Nuremberg Christianity” (ironic name, probably intentional, given the role of Nuremberg in both Reformation and Nazism): the Holocaust is the big thing, but I don’t know if doing losing the “Jewish cause” would necessarily doom it: when the old crusaders couldn’t get to the Levant, they went to Albi or something closer, after all. And the idols of the crusaderism don’t need to be Jewish to milk their fanaticism to their own advantage: we’ve had Ahmed Chalabi and Alexei Navalny and such, right, just on the “democracy” front. There is a saying in Chinese (I’ll confess to twisting it in the opposite direction from the original): if you are the Buddha statue, people still praise you and give you offerings even if you are full of mud and straw. (NB: the original had a cantankerous man of letters comparing a supercilious and quick tempered warlord to the idol of Buddha: his underlings may offer him praise and tribute, but he’s really got nothing. This cost the former his head–this shows up in Romance of the Three Kingdoms–the guy who did the insulting is named Mi Heng.)
22. Wukchumni February 21, 2026 at 10:40 am

    If you search for legal tenderness
    It isn’t hard to find
    You can have the local lucre you need to live
    But if you look for truthfulness
    You might just as well be blind
    It always seems to be so hard to give

    Hegemony is such a lonely word
    Everyone is so untrue
    Honesty is hardly ever heard
    And mostly what we need or it’s through

    I can always find someone
    To say they Dollar sympathize
    If I wear my reserve currency status out on my sleeve
    But I don’t want some dismal scientist
    To tell me pretty lies
    All I want is everyone to believe

    Hegemony is such a lonely word
    Everyone is so untrue
    Honesty is hardly ever heard
    And mostly what we need or it’s through

    I can find an ICE lever
    I can diss NATO friends
    I can have security until the bitter end
    Anyone can comfort me
    With promise sorry notes again
    I know, I know

    When we’re in too deep inside of the Ukraine war
    Don’t be too concerned
    We won’t ask for nothin’ while it’s game on
    But when we want security
    Tell me where else can we turn
    ‘Cause spoils of war is what we depend upon

    Hegemony is such a lonely word
    Everyone is so untrue
    Honesty is hardly ever heard
    And mostly what we need or it’s through

    Honesty, by Billy Joel

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4gOIt-M02A
23. Wukchumni February 21, 2026 at 11:18 am

    Don’t you ever, don’t you ever
    Stop being dandy, showing up in handcuffs
    Don’t you ever, don’t you ever
    Stop being dandy, showing up in handcuffs

    Prince Harming
    Prince Harming
    Ridicule is nothing to be scared of
    Don’t you ever, don’t you ever
    Stop being dandy, showing up in handcuffs

    Don’t you ever, don’t you ever
    Lower yourself, forgetting all your standards
    Don’t you ever, don’t you ever
    Lower yourself, forgetting all your standards

    Birds of an Epstein feather
    Disrespect yourself and all of those around you together
    Birds of an Epstein feather
    Disrespect yourself and all of those around you together

    Don’t you ever, don’t you ever
    Lower yourself, forgetting all your standards
    Don’t you ever, don’t you ever
    Lower yourself, forgetting all your standards

    Prince Harming, Prince Harming
    Ridicule is nothing to be scared of
    Prince Harming, Prince Harming
    Ridicule is nothing to be scared of

    Prince Charming, by Adam Ant

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_aWXGS4yFM&list=RDu_aWXGS4yFM
24. Ben Panga February 21, 2026 at 11:25 am

    Lt Col Daniel Davis live now going into the nuts and bolts on what an attack on Iran would like like.

    Most informative thing I’ve heard in this so far.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctiAqxkj83Y

    —

    (The Larry Johnson article in links today suggests due to moon phase, an attack needs to happen by Sunday, or wait another 28 days.)
    1. Jason Boxman February 21, 2026 at 12:33 pm

       109 refuelers, 200-250 fighter aircraft, in theater. Literally all over the map. Some would come ever from Europe. 50% of the C-17 transport. He expects a sustained operation. Could be as early as tonight; the military pieces are in place now. How important is the Ford? Not fully in position until Friday. So Trump could wait until it is available, which is bringing air defense capacity.

       I guess we’ll see. Will he or won’t he end his presidency on this hill?
    2. Lefty Godot February 21, 2026 at 9:55 pm

       It seems like there would still be a window after moonset but before dawn when the attack force could cross Iran’s borders. That’s if they are waiting for next Friday night to get the rumble underway. But Iran should have detected the incoming forces by other means well in advance of their getting that close, and their best move would be to go massive before they start getting hit, once they know it’s definitely coming. If the methodology resembles what was used in the 12 day war, sabotage and cyberattacks and locally launched drones (from within Iran) will probably be the first move, so they have to be prepared for a “dead hand” type launch in that scenario. I wonder if any of the Russian and Chinese ships that were doing an exercise with the Iranians will still be in theater when hostilities break out, and what the risks will be if one of those gets hit by US drones or missiles.
       1. Yves Smith Post authorFebruary 21, 2026 at 11:20 pm

          China is reported to be now providing real time satellite images to Iran, so anything other than small raiding parties would be visible, certainly any meaningful equipment.
25. ChrisFromGA February 21, 2026 at 11:52 am

    Globalism is back!

    Sung to the tune of, ‘My boyfriend’s back’ by the Angels

    Melody

    Globalism went away … and you hung around, and tariffed me every night
    Then the robed ingrates came, and said things that weren’t very nice

    Globalism’s back and there’s gonna be trouble
    (Hey la-dee-da, globalism’s back)
    The tariffs got deep-sixed, now the Street will blow a bubble
    (Hey la-dee-da, globalism’s back)

    You’ve been spreadin’ lies, hypin’ Article Two
    (Hey la-dee-da, globalism’s back)
    So look out now, it’s a free-trade boogaloo!
    (Hey la-dee-da, globalism’s back!)

    Hey, we’ll all be buyin’ Russian oil now!
    And we won’t have to on the down low

    The WTO has been gone for such a long time
    (Hey-la-day-la, globalism’s back)
    Now its back, and things will be fine
    (Hey-la-day-la, globalism’s back)

    You’re gonna be sorry you were ever born
    (Hey-la-day-la, globalism’s back)
    ‘Cause the bezzle’s kinda big, and it’s awful strong
    (Hey-la-day-la, globalism’s back)

    Hey! the bubble blonde’s a-pumpin!
    Now, there’s Chinese ships a-dumpin’!

    [Bridge]

    What made you think he’d believe all your lies?
    (Wah-ooh, wah-ooh)
    You were a big man then, but Roberts cut you down to size
    (Wah-ooh, wait and see)

    Globalism’s back, it’s gonna save our EU reputation
    (Hey-la-day-la, globalism’s back)
    MAGA-land just took a permanent vacation
    (Hey-la-day-la, my boyfriend’s back)

    Yeah! Globalism’s back!
    Yeah! Soros is a-celebratin’!
    Well, free trade is a-comin so you’d better get a runnin’ … all right now,
    La-day-la, globalism is back
    1. Martin Oline February 21, 2026 at 12:23 pm

       Like Big Ed would say on a long ago Sunday night “Wonnerful, wonnerful! A really big shoe!”
26. Jeremy Grimm February 21, 2026 at 1:32 pm

    Reflecting on a discussion between Larry Johnson and Garland Nixon I listened to yesterday:
    “More Egregious Disinformation Regarding Iran”
    https://larrycjohnson.substack.com/p/more-egregious-disinformation-regarding

    This posting on Larry Johnson’s site referenced an interview of Larry Johnson by Garland Nixon:
    “LARRY C JOHNSON – THE US INFORMATION OPERATION IN IRAN – TRUMP’S PRESIDENCY HANGS BY A THREAD”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmvk6DtocqI
    One thing Garland Nixon suggested in this interview with Larry Johnson struck home with me. Garland Nixon did an excellent job suggesting moves Iran could take in response to the pending u.s.-Israel attack, moves William Gibson might call lateral moves in his fiction. The u.s. is gathering a major portion of its operational, and perhaps somewhat operational Naval force around Iran. China has been providing military aid to Iran. The u.s. threatens China in the Pacific, and the u.s. Navy is a key component in that threat. Garland Nixon suggested the Chinese might have provided all their most advanced anti-ship missiles to Iran complemented with Chinese support technicians — not unlike the u.s. and NATO support technicians thought to help Ukraine use advanced u.s. missile technology. If China helped Iran destroy or seriously disable the u.s. Naval forces aggregated around Iran … the u.s. threat to China becomes an even more flimsy paper eagle.

    I still wonder whether Iran might attack the u.s. Internet and shut down the large part of the u.s. economy which relies on the Internet. Attacks on the Populace are a ‘complicated and fraught’ tactic, but attacks on u.s. commerce and Finance hits the ‘people that matter’ where it hurts.

    Lateral attacks are the essence of asymmetric warfare.
27. morongobill February 21, 2026 at 2:55 pm

    Probably off topic, but have you guys seen this trailer for a movie, totally AI?
    I think the Hollywood types are getting pretty nervous as this AI might kill the goose laying those eggs.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5AFQaEbHQU&t=194s
    1. Alice X February 21, 2026 at 10:09 pm

       Links are not off topic

       thanks so much well worth considering

       so much ai entertainment to bauble

       and betray the masses

       another brave new world since those heretofore

       minus the natural biosphere
28. Jason Boxman February 21, 2026 at 3:57 pm

    Another temper tantrum is being thrown

    Trump to hike global tariffs to 15% from 10%, ‘effective immediately’ (CNBC)

    President Donald Trump on Saturday said he would increase global tariffs to 15% from 10%, one day after the Supreme Court struck down his “reciprocal” tariffs.

    The new tariffs will be “effective immediately,” Trump said in a Truth Social post.

    While Trump’s announcement claimed that the new tariffs will take effect without delay, it is unclear if any official documents have been signed detailing the timing.

    This dude really does have some kind of cognitive decline.
    1. Tom Stone February 21, 2026 at 7:09 pm

       Tuesday is far enough away that something might turn up in the Epstein dump or elsewhere that sets Trump off, just the Tariff ruling might be enough for a meltdown live on TV but something like a Grand Jury calling Ross in to face questions about the murder of Good would definitely do the job.
       And it was murder, the shots that killed Good were fired through the driver’s side window and Honda Pilots don’t drive sideways except on black Ice.
       Once the threat stops the justification for the use of force disappears and Ross’ provocative behavior before the murder might qualify this as murder in the first degree (Premeditated).
       It’s going to be a lively week in any event.
    2. Tom Stone February 21, 2026 at 7:12 pm

       At least it’s “White” matter disease…
29. Victor Sciamarelli February 21, 2026 at 4:09 pm

    Venezuelan oil is now being shipped to Israel. According to Middle East Forum, “On February 10, 2026, Bloomberg reported that traders shipped Venezuelan crude oil to Israel’s Bazan Group, the country’s largest refinery operator in Haifa. https://www.meforum.org/mef-observer/venezuelas-return-to-oil-markets-enhances-israels-energy-security
    Now that Trump has taken care of Israel’s energy security he can better focus on Iran in oder to enhance Israel’s national security.
    It’s my understanding Trump met with Netanyahu 7-times but Iran’s Supreme Leader not once. I don’t think Trump “the deal maker” has even spoken on the phone with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei; Netanyahu, the neocons, the Israel Lobby, and zionist donors won’t allow it.
30. Balan Aroxdale February 21, 2026 at 5:53 pm

    Hoo boy. So much for Saudi claims they won’t let the US use their airspace:

    The UK kayfabe about not allowing the use of their airfields can be seen in precisely the same way, as a cynical lie. The airfield is itself leased and not UK owned, the aircraft are not US planes, etc, but to anyone reasonable these are differences without distinction. Eventually the UK will simply outright lie as the Arab regimes do.
    1. eg February 21, 2026 at 11:01 pm

       “Eventually the UK will simply outright lie”

       Eventually???
31. amfortas February 21, 2026 at 8:18 pm

    re: sober dui’s.
    what they dont really accentuate is that these folks are frelling tired from working too much.
    3 hours of sleep and too much work(i can attest!) are very similar in their effects on the body and mind as being a bit drunk.
    i was out by 8pm last night…awoke with a neck pain at 11:30…staggered in and made coffee…drank a cup, and only then noticed the time,lol….this happens to me often during the winter months….so i frelled around in the lil greenhouse, took a hot, hot bath, and crashed again at 4am…which is when i “usually” awake.
    really fucks up yer day.
32. Ben Panga February 21, 2026 at 11:59 pm

    Telegraph breaking with the UK media’s cautious silence and giving space to some full fledged frothing madness.

    The case for a military strike on Iran (Telegraph, opinion section)

    There was a time when Britain was able to identify an enemy and defeat it. Most of us miss those days; there’s a reason, after all, why Sir Winston Churchill remains so revered. Today, our old certainties have become so eroded that our leaders make excuses for those who would destroy us rather than taking action to stop them….

    …The reason? “International law”, that most debased of terms, which has become so beloved of our gutless elites. One suspects that the same excuse would have been used to avoid bombing the railway to Auschwitz….

    Churchill, Holocaust, International Law is evil…my bingo card filled up quickly with this one.

    As is my wont, I decided to look up the writer’s background.

    Jake Wallis Simons (per wiki)

    ...Jake was aged 5 and his mother sent him to a series of religious Jewish schools. He graduated with a first class degree in English from St Peter’s College, Oxford….

    …He was appointed editor of The Jewish Chronicle in December 2021, succeeding Stephen Pollard…

    …He participated in the team which won a Webby award[14] and a European Newspapers Award[15] for the 2014 multimedia project for the Telegraph entitled Meet the Settlers about Israeli settlements in the West Bank…..

    ….His book Israelophobia, a work criticising anti-Zionism, was published in 2023….

    I would add comment but I wouldn’t want to seem Israelophobic /s
33. hk February 22, 2026 at 12:42 am

    The new Big Serge post is very much worth a read in light of the current events.

    https://bigserge.substack.com/p/sunrise-japans-leap-for-empire

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