Links 6/14/2016

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1. Trees&Trunks June 14, 2026 at 7:15 am

   Kallas backlash: this sounds like the Biden/Trump angry at Netanyahu while helping him genocide away.

   Countries angry at Kallas while The German, French and UK ambassadors go to Russian MFA and demand Russian surrender.

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2. The Rev Kev June 14, 2026 at 7:24 am

   ‘Days of Palestine
   @PalestineDays
   Horrifying: The Israeli military has released footage documenting the extensive destruction it carried out in the town of Aitaroun in southern Lebanon.’

   Pretty sure that IDF soldiers were allowed to go in and loot those places clean before they were bombed.

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   1. nycTerrierist June 14, 2026 at 8:57 am

      Yes, the looting is a thing.
      how do people not see the resemblance here to Nazi hooligans?
      smh

      https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/israel-security/2026-04-23/ty-article/.premium/israeli-soldiers-testify-to-looting-in-lebanon-commanders-know-and-do-nothing/0000019d-b999-d2d7-af9f-bbb986480000

      “Motorcycles, TVs and Couches Israeli Soldiers Testify to Widespread Looting in Lebanon…”

      The looting has expanded in part because some Israeli military police checkpoints at exit points from southern Lebanon were removed, while others were never set up. IDF soldiers say that ‘when there is no punishment, the message is clear'”

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   2. Wukchumni June 14, 2026 at 9:08 am

      Gonif with the win!

      Frankly Scarlett my dear, I don’t give a damn about worldwide condemnation…

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3. Trees&Trunks June 14, 2026 at 7:31 am

   EU army crash
   Lemme guess, US noticed less F35 sales and forced the spineless Germans to crash the party.

   Also, surprised that Russia considered Ukrainian EU membership when every nation (except SWE & FI) joined NATO first and only after that EU.

   Don‘t tell me that EU is not a CIA-project. The value of the union is also in line with the value of CIA. https://archive.ph/3UXyR

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   1. vao June 14, 2026 at 7:54 am

      Very doubtful. As I explained yesterday, all common armaments programmes involving France and Germany are either collapsing, or being postponed without plans, or seeing partners leaving: not just the fighter jet, but also the main battle tank, the naval surveillance airplane, the self-propelled cannon, the MALE drone, the modernization of attack helicopters…

      Furthermore, Germany and France have not yet agreed on how to set up a joint development for the successor to the existing common LRU rocket launchers (before they reach their end-of-life), nor have they agreed on how to develop new common artillery ammunition (so far the Germans are going their own way fulfilling only their own requirements).

      All those troubles are essentially a European problem. Pressure from the USA does not play the main role — all the more so since the North American ally is failing to ensure timely deliveries of the F-35 and Patriots already ordered. After all, such a staunch groupie of the USA as Poland ordered plenty of self-propelled howitzers, tanks, and airplanes from South Korea instead.

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      1. jsn June 14, 2026 at 9:28 am

         Both can be true at the same time.

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   2. hk June 14, 2026 at 8:54 am

      France and Germany have had plenty of projects that fell apart–even when they wanted almost the same thing: the 50s joint projects that eventually led to the Leopard and AMX30, if I understand correctly, was over slightly different guns and engines.

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4. farmboy June 14, 2026 at 7:50 am

   all hell breaking loose next week!
   cohamizu
   @cohamizu1
   ·
   11h
   Translated from Japanese
   Most people who think the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), which has been keeping oil prices in check, will last for several more months are overlooking the lease portion in their calculations.

   When factoring in the leased amount, my calculations show that the remaining days are already below 50.

   Cushing, the key storage and trading hub, will dip below the 20 mb level next week, starting to disrupt operations.

   Once that happens, the only options will be to rush into bids for delivery or close out positions, which means the massive short positions currently in play are highly likely to get squeezed.

   Incidentally, the final trading day for the July WTI crude oil futures contract is “three business days before the 25th of the month preceding the delivery month.”

   In other words, this leads to the following understanding:

   Contract expiration: June 22 (final settlement and clearing related)
   Final trading day: June 18 (Thursday)

   So, from June 15 (Monday) to June 16 (Tuesday), I believe sellers—including intervention forces—will tend to aggressively suppress prices (by continuing short selling).

   However, from June 17 (Wednesday) to June 18 (Thursday), with Cushing inventories reaching extreme lows, they’ll have no choice but to rush bids for delivery or close positions.

   As a result, right before the trading deadline, the following activities will intensify:

   Rushing to complete rolls (July contract → August contract).
   Reducing short positions as much as possible, given the extremely high delivery risk.
   Starting some forced buybacks with high likelihood to avoid physical delivery risk.

   The July contract’s open interest of 128,861 contracts is quite high for this time of year.

   Typically, this level a week before the contract month’s end is on the higher side, indicating a large volume of unsettled positions remaining.

   Having this much left over suggests that roll pressure and buyback pressure are likely to intensify.

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   1. jsn June 14, 2026 at 9:33 am

      What if the shorts are somehow tapped into the fiat spigot?

      Trump/Bessent don’t need no stinkin’ rules, and post DOGE it’s not clear to me the Fed can stop them.

      Big spike in the National Debt?

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5. Carolinian June 14, 2026 at 8:00 am

   Re auto spying story –the soon to be mandated sleepy driver monitoring feature has long been offered as part of the ADAS package that automakers add to more expensive models. Reviewing this feature on at least one car that I looked at says you can turn it off.

   However you cannot turn off all those Flock cameras that were the other part of the article. Perhaps drivers will follow the example of Trump who demanded a large tarp to block the removal of his Kennedy Center vanity badge. There are coverings to be bought for license plates that obscure them from certain angles. Whether this produces a Streisand Effect among passing police cruisers–just as Trump’s tarp itself became the story–is unclear.

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   1. The Rev Kev June 14, 2026 at 8:43 am

      Petty of Trump to leave tarps covering John F. Kennedy’s name simply because his name no longer appears there, even though it was illegally added. Don’t even know why he wanted his name added to this building as if there is one thing that you would never associate Trump with, it is the arts.

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6. The Rev Kev June 14, 2026 at 8:04 am

   “The Air Force One 747 That Qatar Gifted To Trump Is Getting Its Finishing Touches

   Frankly the new livery is a better look for Air Force One than the older livery except for one thing. The blue on it is far too dark and is verging on a blue-black. I have noticed on a lot of depictions of the US flag this shift to a much darker blue but don’t know why. And it looks like Trump too is unsurprisingly going along with this colour scheme as well.

   Still sucks that Trump gets to keep this plane for himself after he retires from office rather than saying that it was a gift to the nation. Instead it will be a personal grift to Trump.

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   1. vao June 14, 2026 at 8:24 am

      I always believed that official flags and emblems were defined precisely, with fastidious norms specifying the accurate geometry of their various elements and the exact colours to be used. But perhaps they were never as meticulous in the USA?

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      1. hk June 14, 2026 at 8:50 am

         This reminds me of the continuing Imperial Japanese war flag saga, the navy version. The JMSDF continues to fly a flag that looks like the old imperial naval war flag, except, in theory, it’s not: the red color is just a tad bit brighter. But flags on actual warships are never quite of the original color–even if you could tell the difference between the different shades of red anyways. After some use, the JMSDF flag looks exactly like the old IJN flag, annoyingly reminding Japan’s neighbors of the unpleasant past history. (That and the JMSDF keeps the old Imperial Navy march also…)

         I am actually convinced the choice of the new color was quite intentional, for precisely this reason.

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7. Michaelmas June 14, 2026 at 8:53 am

   FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF: IS MUSK A LIAR OR A FOOL OR BOTH? PART 99.

   And if there’s a sucker born every minute, is the U.S. a population of 340 million suckers given the apparent acceptance there of Musk’s latest scientifically and technologically illiterate claims about datacenters in orbit? Because Musk has made two contradictory claims about why that would be a good idea.

   
   [1] Datacenters in space are a good idea because space is cold and the cost of cooling would be greatly reduced.

   No.

   Space is cold, as it has a background temperature of ~2.7K, or a few kelvin above absolute zero. But that’s the temperature of empty space as a radiation sink. It says f*** all about thermal management when there’s no atmosphere and the only heat dissipation mechanism is radiation, with no conduction and convection.

   To radiate meaningful amounts of waste heat in space you need either very high temperatures or very large surface areas (or both). Look at a picture of the ISS: its thermal radiator system covers roughly 2,500 square metres and is one of its most complex subsystems, and it manages orders of magnitude less heat than a serious datacenter would generate. Datacenters in space would need enormous — like, maybe, kilometers wide — radiator panels. Any object in LEO would also be directly subjected to the Sun’s light every 90 minutes. That’s 120–150°C on Earth’s sunlit side, and can become higher. That’s a variance of 400-500°C, which adds an engineering problem of violent thermal cycling to that basic dissipation problem.

   And just to beat this to death, no geostationary orbit will keep an object in shadow. The Earth-Sun L2 Lagrange point,does exist about 1.5 million km in the anti-solar direction, and gravitational and centrifugal forces balance there, so objects can maintain position relative to the Sun-Earth line. The James Webb Space Telescope is located there to keep its sunshield permanently facing the Sun and its instruments in cold, stable shadow. But the Sun is only partially occluded at that distance and the Webb telescope still needs its own sunshield rather than relying on Earth’s shadow.

   [2] Datacenters in space are a good idea because sunlight in space is all free energy (with an additional helping of Musk nonsense about the Kardashev scale, with which all longtime SF readers are familiar and the rest of you can look up.)

   So this has more substance, but is still moronically oversimplified by Musk. Yes, solar irradiance in space (~1,361 W/m² at 1 AU, the solar constant) is higher than what reaches Earth’s surface after atmospheric absorption. And in particularly high orbits like GEO or L2, you’re in sunlight for a high fraction of your orbital period, unlike LEO where you cycle in and out of shadow roughly every 90 minutes. But: –

   [1] Space radiation degrades photovoltaic efficiency and meaningfully so over a satellite’s operational life.
   [2] You still need to transmit the data from your orbital datacenter to Earth, which requires either laser or microwave links with distictly non-trivial bandwidth constraints and latency.*
   [3] Everything needs to be built to survive launch and operate in vacuum with zero servicing. How does that work?
   [4] Solar panels in space still have mass. Getting mass to orbit costs roughly $1,000–$10,000/kg with SpaceX’s Falcon 9. SpaceX’s Starship aims lower, but that hasn’t moved anywhere beyond rapid unscheduled disassembly yet.

   * Not incidentally, there’s also the small geopolitical problem that this might be potentially weaponizable.

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   1. Michaelmas June 14, 2026 at 9:08 am

      On a related Earthbound note, I was futzing around the other night, trying to get a printer to interface with my laptop, as one invariably does.

      And it struck me that the same people who for thirty-plus years have failed utterly to even deliver printers that work reliably with computers are the same people — Musk among them — who in 2026 are telling us that they’ll now deliver AGI.

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8. Rolf June 14, 2026 at 8:59 am

   From the Politico piece, in reference to the USMCA trade agreement,

   But Trump on Wednesday injected a fresh dose of uncertainty by saying he was “not looking to renew” the pact and dismissed the notion that the U.S. needed either of its neighbors.

   Is the guy really that stupid and uninformed to make such a statement? About two thirds of all crude oil imported to the US comes from Canada (>60%) and Mexico (7%), Venezuela aside. These countries supply heavy, high sulfur crude (API gravity 27 or less). In the case of US refineries, these feedstocks are necessary for jet fuel and diesel, as these refineries have been engineered to accept them (US crude produced from hydraulically fractured shale beds is light, low sulfur crude, which is destined primarily for export).

   There’s always a decision to make in listening to anything coming from Trump or his loyal lieutenants: are they ignorant, lying, or both?

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   1. Michaelmas June 14, 2026 at 9:12 am

      Is the guy really that stupid and uninformed to make such a statement?

      Come on. Is the Pope a Catholic?

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9. pjay June 14, 2026 at 9:16 am

   – ‘The Democrats’ 2024 “Autopsy” and the Party’s Refusal to Halt Weapons to Israel’ – Scheerpost

   – ‘Why Won’t the Cowardly, Corrupt Democratic Leadership Act to Impeach Trump?’ – Common Dreams

   While I agree with the points made by both authors in today’s Democrat Death Watch section, I think they both miss key issues. Regarding Robin Andersen’s Scheerpost comments on the ‘Autopsy,’ she is right about the importance of Gaza to activist Democrats, the general unpopularity of the Party’s support of Israel, and the hypocrisy of the Party’s leadership on the issue. But I’m not sure this was the key issue among rank-and-file voters. Most of them are more concerned with everyday economic issues and tend to neglect foreign policy. The Democrats were too scared of their corporate supporters to push the few good things Biden did in this area (e.g. Lina Khan at the FTC), and they followed the effort to re-run a clearly failing Biden by forcing a clearly unelectable Harris on their constituents. Israel was perhaps the key issue for us (i.e. NC readers), but for the general public there were other factors not mentioned in this article.

   Regarding Nader on impeachment – well, the Democrats tried that the first time. But rather than go after Trump for the actually impeachable offenses discussed by Nader, they used a bogus charge linked to Russiagate and their war in Ukraine (which they were afraid Trump might actually bring to an end). Of course the Dems would never use actually impeachable offenses like undeclared wars or links to corporate malfeasance since they are guilty of the same things. And after two weak impeachment attempts, the Russiagate bs, and an extensive lawfare campaign after Trump’s first administration – all of which much of the voting public could see through – Trump was basically handed lifetime immunity by the liberal Establishment for future impeachable crimes. And he has taken full advantage of this during his second administration.

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10. Alice X June 14, 2026 at 9:16 am

    Ana Kasparian – Unaligned:

    Censorship and Thuggery Won’t Save Israel’s Reputation

    Unable to defend the indefensible, Israel’s ardent defenders seek to dismantle liberal democratic values to squash debate. They’re failing.

    Per Kasparian (and Parsi himself) there is no investigation to deport him. And other take downs.

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11. Wukchumni June 14, 2026 at 9:21 am

    The Bicentennial was a big deal in 1976, eagerly anticipated and I remember tall sailing ships from all over the world had a regatta of sorts, quite dignified!

    Now on the 250th anniversary we have motorcycle riders doing jumps ala Knievel on the White House lawn…

    Evel Con Evil

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    1. The Rev Kev June 14, 2026 at 9:30 am

       Welcome to the Idiocracy timeline. America’s bad luck to have a President that wants to make the 250th anniversary all about him.

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12. Tom Stone June 14, 2026 at 9:27 am

    I think it’s time for a Republican to introduce a bill to make Trump’s Birthday a National Holiday.
    They would score big points with Trump and it would give the Dims an excuse for Aghastitude that couldn’t be beat…without their having to do anything about the current polycrisis.
    A Win/Win, Virtue signalling at its best!

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13. flora June 14, 2026 at 9:32 am

    re: Visa Officially Allowing AI Agents to Go Ham With Your Credit Card – Futurism

    Where is the ‘opt out’ switch?

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