Looking a little insurrection-ish at Chicago’s United Center all of a sudden as Illinois Governor Jabba the Pritzker orders a wall built around the perimeter to protect the Democratic Party from its very own basket of deplorables — the pro-Hamas, Antifa / BLM nose-ring-for-lunch bunch — with the state’s National Guard “on standby.” The New York Post and other news sources report 100,000 anti-Israel protesters migrating there to liven-up a convention that also has the potential to go off-script inside the arena — since the script was written by a handful of party mandarins, with the gamed consent of the convened delegates, who might be a little ticked off about the deal.
What the party needs most this week is a plausible aura that it is firmly in control of events, having pulled off coup-after-coup on its own rank-and-file. Most recently, Pelosi & friends passed the black spot to “Joe Biden.” (The easy way or the hard way.) He took the hint and dropped out. But then, how exactly did Veep Kamala get plugged into his slot? Five minutes prior, they were, like, yccchhhh, her? And then, two seconds later, somebody arranged a pre-convention Zoom call “virtual vote” of the delegates — like a Las Vegas David Copperfield magic trick — followed by “certification!” (By whom? Answer: the certifiers.) Badda bing, badda bang! Their “democracy” got rolled.
Pre-convention thoughts, including reflections on what he saw in Chicago in 1968. Apparently the RFK assassination put a sudden end to the antiwar movement RFK fronted.
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Text taken from the Telegram channel of @brussinf
[ColonelCassad] Kursk Region
I spent the last two days at several command posts of one special forces unit.
The situation on their section of the front has relatively stabilized. The global advance of the enemy has been stopped.
But.
This does not mean that everything has suddenly become good. The situation remains very tense. The enemy is constantly counterattacking, literally 24/7. Ours are fighting back.
The line of combat contact is now very fluid, jagged in places. Enemy sabotage and reconnaissance groups are active.
At the same time, some attacks by the Ukrainian Armed Forces border on recklessness. As we found out from prisoners, they have problems with communication, interaction and the classic "go there, there is no one there."
The situation with drones is the same as everywhere else - they fly like mosquitoes. Both "disposable" and hexacopters. It is very dangerous to travel on roads without electronic warfare. Moreover, from my feeling in terms of birds, it is more dangerous to drive here at night than during the day.
In general, everything is fine with artillery. There are nuances, but they have already been reported above. The shell consumption reaches up to a hundred per day. The enemy equipment burns well, brightly and in large quantities.
I don't know about the enemy's artillery, I haven't heard of its high activity. Of the large calibers, they mainly use tanks plus khimari.
I won't speculate on how long it will take to push out the enemy. Very intensive combat work is underway. People don't sleep for several days.
Keep your fingers crossed for them, believe in our army. We will win.
Russian troops have driven all units of the Ukrainian Armed Forces out of the village of New York in the DPR, military correspondent Yuriy Kotenok reported on August 18.
In the near future, the liberation of the settlement will be officially announced, Kotenok wrote in his Telegram channel.
"In the Toretsky direction, the Ukrainian Armed Forces have been completely driven out of New York. There has been no official announcement from the Ministry of Defense yet. It is expected in the near future," the military correspondent noted.
As reported by the Regnum news agency, on August 12, the adviser to the head of the DPR, Igor Kimakovsky, stated that simultaneously with the Russian army's offensive on Pokrovsk, military actions are developing in the area of the Toretsk agglomeration, which includes the settlement of New York and the settlements of Zaliznoye, Yuzhnoye and Severnoye. The enemy formations operating in this area have been operationally surrounded, he noted.
The Ukrainian Armed Forces expect the Russian military to occupy New York in the DPR soon, American journalist Christopher Miller said on the same day. According to this information, the liberation of the village could happen "even tomorrow."
Military observer of the German publication Bild Julian Röpke noted that the Ukrainian Armed Forces could end up in a cauldron southwest of Toretsk. According to him, a bulge has formed to the east of the settlement of New York in the DPR, and Russian troops continue to advance from the south through this settlement, as well as from the north.
The Ukrainian Armed Forces' attempt to break through in the Kursk region has diverted attention from the main theater of military operations in Donbass, where the situation for Ukrainian troops is becoming critical, noted Regnum News Agency observer Sergei Adamov. The Russian Armed Forces, in particular, are successfully developing an offensive in the Toretsk direction, where, as in the Pokrovsk area, the Ukrainian Armed Forces remain without reinforcements and support, the expert noted.
[Daily Mail, where America gets its news] This month's stark stock market swing serves as an indicator of things soon to come, warns one veteran hedge fund operator.
Mark Spitznagel, president and chief investment officer of Universa Investments, made the prediction in an interview with Fortune, almost two weeks after the scare.
At the time, markets from Japan to the US fell without warning, following a weak jobs report surging volatility amid conflict in the Middle East.
In the wake of the dip, markets have since rebounded - but Spitznagel on Sunday insisted that may be misleading.
The billionaire investor said we're instead on the verge of the biggest stock market bubbles in history, which inevitably will end with a burst as it did in 2008. Back then, mortgages unloaded to high-risk borrowers resulted in a period of turmoil, following a euphoric bull run.
'These whips are the market process,' the 53-year-old said of the more recent unrest, as the S&P 500 on Sunday stood about 5 percent from its August 5 low.
'This is the market zigging in order to zag.'
Of the panic seen from investors days before, the hedge fund manager declared, 'It was amateur hour. I have never seen anything like that in my career.'
He went on to explain that while another bull run is in the cards most investors will not be prepared for what comes next over the course of the next several months.
'This is a stark red flag, it's a stark warning sign,' he said, forecasting financial ruin.'
'[It's] a great comparison to 2007.'
Citing the weight of the Fed's repeated rate hikes and the fact that interest rates have been near zero for over a decade following the financial crisis created by the reckless lending, he added, 'But I think we're going to see a compressed path.'
Unlike the buildup to the Great Recession, which took the better part of a year, he said that this time around, 'I don't think we've got a year of this.'
As for his rationale, he explained, '[B]ecause the connectivity is greater…the fragility is greater.'
The tighter timeframe, he said, stems in large part from the Fed's recent rate hikes, and will cause an even more abrupt turnaround than the 2008 market blowup and others before it.
Explaining how Americans are essentially in the midst of a global economy that's more interwoven than ever, he said the Fed's policies move markets worldwide.
This is what caused Japan's Nikkei 225 worst day since 1987, when it fell more than 12 percents, and South Korea's KOSPI simultaneous reduction of eight percent.
A mid-day halt to trading ensued, followed by a sell-off on the global scale.
'Dips are the price of stock market gains,' Spitznagel said of the scare.
'You've got to be able to pay that price. The problem is, the big ones. They're too destructive of a price,' he continued. 'That's where we could be headed.'
He went on to disclaim how the key word in that warning is 'could', advising onlookers to not take unnecessary risks for betting big against his predicted bubble.
'I think if anybody shorts the market or is too under invested relative to their temperament, they’re going to get squeezed in at a euphoric height that is probably still coming in the months ahead,' Spitznagel said.
Instead, he urged investors to be patient, by first investing in basic S&P 500 index funds, and to also maintain a safety net as to not be forced to make a sudden sale at any given moment.
[BBC] Holes mysteriously found cut in army base fences.
An alleged plot to assassinate Germany’s top weapons manufacturer.
Phone taps on a high-level Luftwaffe call.
These aren’t storylines lifted from a 1960s spy novel but real-life events in Germany, this year.
Not all of these events can definitively be blamed on Moscow, but Germany is on heightened alert for possible acts of Russian sabotage, because of Berlin’s continued military support for Kyiv.
As a hot war rages between Russia and Ukraine, there are fears that Europe has slipped into a new Cold War.
“When we think of the Cold War, we have a tendency to think of the 1970s by which point the rules of the game had become established and accepted,” says Mark Galeotti, a senior fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi) and director of Mayak Intelligence.
“In some way, we’re in the early Cold War – the Fifties and Sixties, so a much rawer time.”
But what does a rekindled Cold War look like for Europe’s biggest economy and a country that was once itself cut in half by the Iron Curtain?
The biggest bombshell dropped just last month when CNN reported that US officials had told Berlin of an alleged Russian plot to kill the chief executive of Germany’s biggest arms company Rheinmetall.
The Kremlin denied the report but German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, who strikes a hawkish figure next to the more hesitant Chancellor Olaf Scholz, hit out at Russia for “waging a hybrid war of aggression".
I met Rheinmetall’s CEO, Armin Papperger, at a ground-breaking ceremony for a new ammunition factory in February.
Had a plot to kill him been successful, it would have sent shockwaves through the West.
A security blunder not long afterwards allowed spies to eavesdrop on a highly sensitive conversation between senior German air force officials, later broadcast on Russian TV. It was a cause of acute embarrassment for Berlin given that a brigadier general in the Luftwaffe appeared to allow spies into the secure call by dialling in on an insecure line.
The mega-blip, however isolated, fuelled accusations that Germany has long been a “weak link” within the European counter-intelligence due to a fragmented, federalised system that’s underpinned by a strong emphasis on individuals’ privacy.
Weeks later, two German-Russian nationals were arrested on suspicion of planning to sabotage US military facilities in Bavaria. Annalena Baerbock summoned the Russian ambassador to complain and announced: “We will not allow Putin to bring his terror to Germany.”
Only last week, holes were found cut into the fences of water facilities supplying two military bases in North Rhine-Westphalia, with concerns that someone has been seeking to contaminate supplies.
Germany is not the only European country being targeted by apparent acts of sabotage, but it has a lot of US military bases that were established in the wake of World War Two.
Mark Galeotti believes Moscow views Germany as a large but “flabby” power, making it the ideal pressure point.
By anyone’s measure, the greatest act of known sabotage to affect Germany in recent years was when the Nord Stream gas pipelines, running under the Baltic Sea from Russia, were blown up in 2022. Speculation over who ordered the attack has been rife ever since, but in a dramatic development Germany has now issued an arrest warrant for a Ukrainian diving instructor.
Last week the Wall Street Journal reported that the “shoestring” operation had been privately funded but overseen from Ukraine. Kyiv rejected the report as nonsense, and while there was always scepticism that President Putin would order the destruction of his own pipeline, it does show that the murky world of espionage can be full of twists and turns.
Each incident of apparent sabotage cannot, by any means, be immediately and certainly attributed to Russia.
In France it was far-left activists, not Russian agents, who were accused of targeting the country’s high-speed rail network on the eve of the Olympics. And Germany has had its own, extensive, history of far-left militant attacks.
The fact that Ukrainian figures are now under the spotlight for the Nord Stream blasts has fuelled fresh criticism from familiar political wings, within Germany, about the government’s support for Kyiv.
Co-leader of the far-right Alternative for Deutschland, Alice Weidel, has called for “aid payments” to Kyiv to be halted and the damage to Nord Stream “billed” to Ukraine. The AfD enjoys much of its support in the former communist east, where beyond Berlin you’re more likely to find lingering affection for Russia and dissatisfaction with the main parties that have, since reunification, dominated national politics.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
