STRAIGHT LINE LOGIC

Don’t think that empire building abroad will lead to anything but tyranny at home. From Ron Unz at unz.com:

Back when I was a young child, I used to enjoy watching my Saturday morning cartoons, and they were often quite amusing.

More decades have passed than I’d like to consider and my memories are garbled, but I recall that those cartoons occasionally featured a character called something like Ugh the Cave-Man.

Ugh was always casually dressed in a one-piece leopard-skin sarong and he walked around with a gigantic club slung over one shoulder. Whenever he saw another cave-man with something that he wanted, he would smash that fellow on the head with his club and take the item. This suggested the nature of business transactions in those prehistoric times.

President Donald Trump is quite a bit older than I am, but those cartoons had already been around for many years when I watched them, so he may have done the same as a child. It’s also quite possible that his love of television cartoons remained strong even as he reached adulthood, so he might have still been watching such cartoons at the age of twenty or thirty, prior to his gradual shift to the far more sophisticated adult fare of pro-wrestling shows.

For whatever reason, it does seem that Trump’s understanding of international relations derives from the lessons that he had originally learned from old Ugh the Cave-Man.

Last week I published an article on the sudden American commando raid on Venezuela and our seizure of President Nicolas Maduro. I noted that at the press conference announcing his military triumph, Trump declared that America will now control Venezuela and that our country will “take back” the Venezuelan oil reserves, which he stated were rightfully ours.

Continue reading

It doesn’t look like there’s going to be a Maidan moment in Tehran. From Larry C. Johnson at sonar21.com:

The CIA/Mossad plan to spark a color revolution in Iran, which has attracted global attention and a tsunami of propaganda pieces portraying the Iranian protests as a massive, unstoppable popular movement, has failed. Yes, protests continue in some parts of the country, but Iranian security forces have taken off the gloves and are fighting back. Casualty estimates are all over the board… Ranging from hundreds to thousands dead. Iranian officials have announced that the alleged ring leaders of the violent protests will be publicly executed starting Wednesday.

While Trump is now promising to try to come to the aid of the protestors, his promise appears to be more rhetorical than substantive. According to a report by the Jerusalem Post:

US President Donald Trump is expected to assist Iranians who are protesting nationwide against the Islamic Republic regime, several sources familiar with the details of the discussions held in recent days told The Jerusalem Post on Sunday.

“Trump has essentially decided to help the protesters in Iran. What he has not yet decided is the ‘how’ and the ‘when,’” they said. . . .

“The spectrum ranges from a military option, namely strikes against regime targets, to cyber support against the regime, to providing Starlink systems to help protesters,” one source told the Post.

“While the Trump administration does not believe that the Iranian regime is collapsing, it definitely sees problems and cracks that did not exist a week ago,” the source added.

Continue reading

Failure to obey is the ultimate crime in any authoritarian regime. From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

People have generally taken sides (again) with regard to the shooting to death of that woman in Minneapolis last week – but the thing to understand is we’re all on one side now. It is the side of those who face summary execution by armed government workers if we “resist” in any way. This encompasses attempting to drive away, which is what the woman who was shot to death was trying to do.

“Conservatives” – many of whom manifest a dog-like adoration of armed government workers, which is hugely strange given they say the are leery of government – say the woman earned her death sentence because she attempted to drive away. It does not trouble them at all that the armed government worker could have – and actually did – move out of the way, thus ending any putative “threat” to his “safety.” The murdered woman bumped the AGW but he was never in any danger of being run over – and it is pretty clear the woman was not trying to run him over. If she had been, she would not have turned her wheels to the right. She would have driven straight ahead.

She just wanted to get away. For failing to obey, in other words. This is the ultimate crime in any authoritarian system, as evidenced by how severely it is punished. Videos of armed government workers tackling, beating and shooting people who aren’t criminals – in the sense that whatever they were being initially pestered over was some petty statutory “offense” that entailed no harm done to anyone – abound. Here is one. A man is ordered to get down on the ground, now – IDF tactics – and beaten, over jaywalking. But his real crime was not obeying. How about a “turn signal violation”?

Continue reading

The Europeans are extending their war on free speech to America via American companies. From Thomas Kolbe at zerohedge.com:

Italian authorities are attempting to force the internet service provider Cloudflare to delete and block certain online services. Cloudflare is resisting and has turned to the U.S. government for support.

The fight for a free internet is intensifying.

The struggle over control of information, censorship, and economic dominance in the digital space is increasingly becoming a fundamental civilizational question. That the European Union now sees not only the EU Commission but also national governments and security apparatuses siding with information diktats, against the fundamental principle of free speech, sends a dangerous signal to the world. The EU has effectively withdrawn from the circle of freedom-oriented state actors.

Into this picture fits a recent report from Italy. A tweet by the founder and CEO of the internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare, Matthew Prince, has caused a stir.

Prince reports that Cloudflare has been hit with a $17 million fine by a — as he calls it — clandestine cabal in Italy. The accusation: Cloudflare refused to participate in an Italian censorship mechanism at the behest of this group.

Continue reading

When I was a kid I didn’t like peas and carrots. Now that I’m all grown up, I don’t like government and fraud. From Karen Kwiatkowski at karenkwiatkowski.substack.com:

Like the lifelong love affair of Forrest and Jenny, government and fraud go together like peas and carrots.

Somali refugees – refuging to the US because we’ve been bombing Somalia for decades, where we “kind of” took the “side” of the national government in its civil war against our ISIS and Al Qaeda friends – are now in big trouble for defrauding taxpayers. As I wrote last week, beating up on these once welcomed immigrants of an “ally” for fraud occurs just in time for our new Zionist tilt towards the Republic of Somaliland, which itself is in the dangerous process of becoming a US-Israeli “ally” as we dump Mogadishu.

Like all interventions conducted by the US and Israel, the end goal is chaos, division, and collapsed economies. How else can Washington or West Jerusalem gain leverage, expand borders, control resources, kill with impunity, all while putting on an act of caring oh-so-deeply for people who just can’t seem to govern themselves?

American-style interventions consist of bluffs, lies, kidnappings, revolution pimping and handpicking the satraps, lots of shooting and bombing, and selling of weapons, followed by political suppression and economic rape – yeah I know, Country X was asking for it, did you see all those resources hanging out and she didn’t even have a single nuclear weapon?

Continue reading

Does the U.S. military have an intense sound-wave weapon? From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

White House Spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt amplified claims about American special forces super-soliders deployed advanced weaponry during the extraction phase of former Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro.

Leavitt reposted an alleged account from a Venezuelan security guard at Maduro’s compound describing what happened when Delta Force operators descended from helicopters in pitch-black conditions. This account was originally posted on X by California-based political activist Mike Netter, who is seeking to recall left-wing Governor Gavin Newsom.

“On the day of the operation, we didn’t hear anything coming. We were on guard, but suddenly all our radar systems shut down without any explanation. The next thing we saw were drones, a lot of drones, flying over our positions. We didn’t know how to react,” the security guard on Maduro’s compound said. This account was considered credible enough for Leavitt to repost.

Here’s the full account from the security guard that reads Venezuelan forces were unable to comprehend the modern battlefield, where drones, sonic weapons, and we’re sure insane helmet-mounted optics with AI, just made an unlevel playing field, in which the guard said, “Yes, but it was a massacre. We were hundreds, but we had no chance. They were shooting with such precision and speed… it seemed like each soldier was firing 300 rounds per minute. We couldn’t do anything.”

Continue reading

The economy is nowhere near as rosy as Trump and fans make it out to be. From David Haggith at thedailydoom.com:

Factory workers, small businesses, homeowners and shoppers are all feeling the heat or economic collapse.

It’s time for an overview of the US economy before the government’s likely fraudulent GDP report comes out, which the Trump administration says (unsurprisingly) has been postponed until some indefinite time beyond January:

GDP (Advance Estimate), 4th Quarter and Year 2025 will be rescheduled. These data were originally scheduled for release on Jan. 29, 2026. Sufficient source data will not be available in time for the original release date.

Surprise, surprise. For them, if they are going to honest, the longer they can forestall release of the data the better. Even if they are going to be dishonest, it will probably take extra time to figure out how to dress the numbers up.

Therefore, we are going to look at other economic data to get a sense of what’s happening in gross domestic production.

Jobs

While, the President claims the job market is booming for US.-born, the Data doesn’t show it.

Since the summer, Trump officials have been trumpeting the idea that job creation is booming for U.S.-born workers….

Trump administration officials … said recently that more than 2.5 million U.S.-born workers gained jobs in 2025 as 1 million immigrants left the workforce.

But economists on both sides of the political aisle say they have seen no evidence that American-born workers are getting jobs by the millions or moving en masse into positions abandoned by deported immigrants.

In fact, data shows that U.S.-born workers are doing moderately worse under Trump than they were under President Joe Biden because the labor market has weakened — partly due toa sharp slowdown in immigration.

Even after firing the head of the BLS for reporting slowing job growth, Trump’s own administration keeps reporting the exact opposite of what the president is bragging about. In fact, the reports keep looking worse. The top numbers in the latest jobs report stagnated at an already recessionary level, but the numbers beneath the surface—the revisions to numbers reported in past months that come in when the government hopes people are paying less attention—just got revised down (as is typical) to a lot worse than they already were.

Continue reading

h/t el gato malo

h/t el gato malo

This is the most sensible thing I’ve seen about the ICE shooting in Minneapolis. From Luke Gittos at spiked-online.com:

American Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents shot and killed a woman in Minneapolis, Minnesota on Wednesday morning. The reaction online has been alarming, from both sides of the aisle.

Footage shows two officers approaching a car, parked horizontally across a suburban street, and telling the driver to exit. One officer stands at the side of the car, trying to open the driver-side door. When the car begins to move suddenly in his direction, the second officer, standing in front of the car, fires multiple shots, one of which penetrated the front windscreen. The car veers off down the street before crashing into a parked car and a power pole. The driver, who has since been identified as 37-year-old mother-of-three Renee Nicole Macklin Good, was found with a single gunshot wound to the head, and pronounced dead on arrival at hospital.

The context of the killing is significant. Local residents had been protesting against federal immigration enforcement for days, following what the Department of Homeland Security described as its largest ‘immigration-enforcement operation ever’ in the city. It followed allegations of industrial-scale fraud at daycare centres run by local Somali residents. The street where the shooting occurred is little more than a kilometre from where George Floyd was murdered by police six years ago – an act that sparked the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020.

Much as Floyd’s death did, the shooting on Wednesday has split America along partisan lines. Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem said that the driver killed on Wednesday had engaged in ‘domestic terrorism’, and claimed the officer had acted in self-defence in firing at her. The Democratic mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, dismissed this as ‘bullshit’. Protests have erupted on the streets of Minneapolis, demanding that ICE agents leave the state.

The commentariat is also split. Right-wing commentator Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire posted that ‘an easy way not to get shot by a federal agent is to refrain from hitting them with your car’. Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, claimed that the ‘Democrat Party is committed to inciting violent insurrection’. Meanwhile, those on the left are calling for the officer to be arrested for murder, while the ICE agency has been called Trump’s ‘Gestapo’.

Continue reading