#11
Saw the X-posted video of the LA's ____ Men yesterday removing items in a hurry with a fire already at the house behind it, early this morning.
The comments and captions read, that they were helping their friend move his stuff to a safe location. ☺
But, now, think of this in another way.
Insurance company will cover the house and X-amount $$$ for the contents - minus the usual +/- $1,000 deductible?
[TCN] America’s proxy war with Russia isn’t anything new. It’s been decades in the making. Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick explain what nuclear war would actually look like.
[CTH] Despite my reservations about Mike Waltz, this is the best approach.
During an interview with Breitbart News, incoming National Security Advisor Mike Waltz says the entire National Security Council is going to be removed from position and new staff assigned to the NSC. Every member is expected by the Trump administration to willingly resign at 12:01pm on inauguration day.
This is very much needed because the NSC is a petri dish for political manipulation of intelligence and policy depending on the ideological alignment with the NSC member. We have talked about this issue at length. The various silos of the DC intelligence and policy institutions send and embed ideologues in the NSC to represent their interests. The only way to deal with it correctly is to remove all of them and vet their replacements.
BREITBART NEWS – […] The way the NSC works is the National Security Advisor oversees a team of political appointees from the president who oversee a wide range of what are called “detailees”—people who work at the various agencies and departments across the federal government who are assigned, or detailed, to work at the White House for a period of time on the NSC in a portfolio in which they demonstrate expertise.
These career intelligence officials come from places as wide-ranging as the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, the Pentagon, and other law enforcement and intelligence agencies, and report up to the political appointees atop each major portfolio in the NSC.
The NSC has various issue-specific portfolios like counterterrorism and cyber policy as well as regional portfolios focused on things like the western hemisphere or the Middle East or Europe or Asia. The detailees then help coordinate back to the various agencies and departments so the whole federal government executes on the decisions that the president makes.
… “[T]he folks that we’re bringing in are 100 percent aligned with the president’s agenda. Hell, the entire world seems to be aligned with his agenda if you just look at the outreach from world leaders and everybody who wants to come to Mar-a-Lago. So, there’s a little bit of a difference in that everybody was reflexively just against him [the first time] just for the sake of it and the Trump Derangement Syndrome was out of control in 2017.
Now, after seeing and feeling four years of progressive governance under Biden and seeing the world come unglued, we’re not even seeing the levels of resistance to his agenda—that’s just a broader point. But also, the folks we’re bringing in, the key members of my team, have relationships out in these agencies and we know who is completely on board.”
Waltz was one of Trump’s first personnel announcements right after he won the presidential election, and since the National Security Advisor position does not require confirmation in the U.S. Senate, he has been one of the most vocal and public figures among the incoming Trump administration since then.
Other folks who are slated for Cabinet positions need confirmation by the Senate before they start regularly engaging publicly with the media, so Waltz and a few others have filled the void in the meantime. But most importantly, Waltz is fighting to get the right team in place at the NSC so Trump is ready to roll on day one, and added there has been “zero issue” in so doing. (read more)
[IsraelTimes] Venezuela
...a country in Central America that sits on an enormous pool of oil. Formerly the most prospereous country in the region, it became infested with Commies sniffing almost unlimited wealth. It turned out the wealth wasn't unlimited, the economy collapsed under the clownish Hugo Chavez, the murder rate exceeded places like Honduras and El Salvador. A significant proportion of the populace refugeed to Colombia and points south... opposition leader Maria Corina Machado has been sprung after being detained upon leaving a protest in Caracas Thursday against President Nicolás Maduro ...Commie el presidente para toda la vida of Venezuela, successor to Hugo Chavez. Nick is his country's attempt at producing a Muammar Qadaffy, except that even though his country's sitting on an enormous puddle of oil, he can't manage to get it out of the ground. Unlike Qadaffy and Hugo Chavez, he's not dead yet... , whom she accuses of stealing a presidential election last July, her team says.
Machado "was intercepted and knocked from the cycle of violence she was traveling on" leaving a rally in the capital, her entourage says on X, adding shots were fired."She was forcibly detained. During the period of her abduction, she was forced to record several videos and then released."
The US has blacklisted China’s largest shipping line and two shipbuilders over alleged links with the People’s Liberation Army, as Washington turns its attention to the country’s massive maritime sector.
Cosco Shipping Holdings Co. was named in a Federal Register filing on Tuesday, qualifying it as a Chinese military company as determined by the Pentagon, along with China State Shipbuilding Corp. and China Shipbuilding Trading Co. While the blacklist carries no specific penalties, it discourages US firms from dealing with those companies.
It also signals increased scrutiny of marine transport and shipbuilding as Donald Trump ...dictatorial for repealing some (but not all) of the diktats of his predecessor, misogynistic because he likes pretty girls, homophobic because he doesn't think gender bending should be mandatory, truly a man for all seasons... prepares to return to the White House. China has the world’s largest shipbuilding sector, producing more than half of merchant vessels globally, while the US industry has virtually collapsed over the last generation.
Chinese shipbuilders accounted for almost 60% of the worldwide orderbook in the first quarter of last year, according to shipbroker BRS. The US’s nervousness over this dominance comes as shipping lines and ports become increasingly important as arenas of geopolitical competition, with Covid-19 and its aftermath exposing the fragility of global supply chains.
Washington telegraphed its unease over China’s shipbuilding industry at Senate hearings last year. The US builds only one container ship for every 359 such vessels that China constructs, Raja Krishnamoorthi, a Democratic congressman for Illinois, said at the time.
The latest Pentagon blacklist also included Tencent Holdings Ltd. and Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd., as well as Chinese oil major Cnooc Ltd.
Cosco shares fell as much as 4.4% in Hong Kong on Tuesday, outpacing a decline in the city’s benchmark stock index, while Cnooc was down as much 1.6%.
The two companies didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Both Cosco and Cnooc have been previously targeted by Washington. Cosco was sanctioned in 2019 for hauling Iranian oil, with those penalties lifted in 2020. Cnooc was one of the earliest Chinese state-owned enterprises to be hit with US sanctions and was also added to a Pentagon blacklist in 2021.
Cnooc, meanwhile, has two onshore shale oil and gas projects in the US, two deepwater projects and interests in several other exploration blocks in the US Gulf of Mexico, according to Bloomberg Intelligence. Rising tensions with Washington could cause the company to reassess its ownership of those assets, it said in a note late last month.
The Biden administration on Tuesday blacklisted the same Chinese shipping company over its ties to the Chinese military that Hunter Biden was set to partner with in a failed railway deal in Southern Europe.
The Department of Defense added the China Ocean Shipping Corporation (COSCO), the largest shipping company in China, to the list identifying “Chinese military companies” in the United States along with other Chinese shipbuilders. Though listed companies do not face penalties, U.S. companies are discouraged from pursuing business relationships with them.
HUNTER COURTED CHINESE COMPANY
As a state-owned enterprise, COSCO has long faced scrutiny for its ties to the People’s Liberation Army and its participation is expanding the influence of the Chinese Communist Party across the globe, even as the United States’ own commercial maritime power is on the decline.
Yet, Hunter Biden, the president’s son, and his business partners in 2015 courted COSCO for funding in an acquisition deal. The project was a proposed acquisition of the Greek national railway TrainOSE which was set to be privatized. This was just one of many deals the younger Biden organized with Chinese partners while his father was Barack Obama’s vice president.
Evidence shows Hunter Biden also provided real access to his father to his business partners, despite the president having claimed repeatedly that “I have never spoken to my son about his overbusiness dealings.” This deal, emails show, was no different.
The Department of Defense added Chinese electric vehicle battery maker CATL—which Ford Motor Company has partnered with on a billion-dollar EV project in Michigan—to a list of companies that actively aid China's military.
Burying the lede a little…
The Pentagon published documents Tuesday designating CATL and 133 other companies to its Section 1260H list of Chinese military companies, which the Department of Defense is required to update on an annual basis.
Lawmakers, security experts, and former federal officials have warned for years that the China-based CATL maintains strong ties to the Chinese Communist Party infrastructure even as the firm continues to develop a high-profile EV project with Ford in Michigan.
CATL's inclusion on the list is another black eye for both Ford's struggling EV business and Democrats' climate ambitions—the Ford-CATL project was made possible by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D., Mich.), whose administration helped fund it with nearly $2 billion in direct subsidies and tax breaks. It is the latest evidence of the Chinese government's stranglehold on global green energy supply chains.
[YahooFinance] As it looks to accelerate the pace of its AI development, Google is further streamlining the teams building its AI services, platforms, and tools.
On Thursday, Logan Kilpatrick, who leads product for Google's AI Studio developer platform, said in a post on X that Google's AI Studio team and the team developing the API for the company's Gemini series of models will be moving under Google DeepMind.
Google DeepMind, formed in 2023 from a merger of Google's DeepMind team and the Google Brain team from Google Research, is the AI R&D division behind many of Google's more recent AI product innovations, including Gemini.
"This move will allow us to double down on our already deep collaboration and accelerate the research to developer pipeline," Kilpatrick wrote in his post. "The mission for our team stays the same."
Jaana Dogan, an engineer on one of the teams moving to Google DeepMind, said in a post on X the reshuffling will help to make DeepMind's work "publicly available in ways that [weren't] possible before."
"Better APIs, more open source, more tools, you name it ... it is just the very small percentage of what’s coming next," she wrote.
TechCrunch reached out to Google for more information and will update this post if we hear back.
Google's folding of dev-focused AI teams into its Google DeepMind org comes after the company moved the team behind its Gemini-powered chatbot, also called Gemini, to DeepMind. At the time, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the reorg was intended to "keep increasing the pace of progress" of Google's AI development.
Google has also moved its models, research, and responsible AI teams to DeepMind in recent months.
In audio from a December Google all-hands meeting obtained by CNBC, Pichai described the company's Gemini chatbot as having "strong momentum," while also acknowledging "we have some work to do in 2025 to close the gap and establish a leadership position there as well."
"Scaling Gemini on the consumer side will be our biggest focus [in 2025]," Pichai reportedly said. “I think it’s really important we internalize the urgency of this moment, and [the] need to move faster as a company. The stakes are high."
[NY Post] US longshoremen reached a contract agreement with ports and shippers Wednesday, averting a potential strike that could have damaged the American economy.
The International Longshoremen’s Association union and the US Maritime Alliance of ports and shipping companies said they had reached a tentative agreement for a six-year contract, a week ahead of a Jan. 15 deadline.
In a joint statement, the two sides said the agreement protects union jobs and allows ports on the East and Gulf coasts to modernize with new technology, " making them safer and more efficient, and creating the capacity they need to keep our supply chains strong.’’
They said they were not releasing details of the agreement publicly to give union and alliance members a chance to review and approve the document.
The longshoremen staged a three-day strike in October, suspending the walkout after agreeing to a 62% pay increase over six years. But that truce was contingent upon reaching an agreement over automation: The union worried that machines — especially semi-automated cranes — would replace human workers.
"This agreement protects current ILA jobs and establishes a framework for implementing technologies that will create more jobs while modernizing East and Gulf coast ports — making them safer and more efficient, and creating the capacity they need to keep our supply chains strong.
"This is a win-win agreement that creates ILA jobs, supports American consumers and businesses, and keeps the American economy the key hub of the global marketplace."
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Oleg Khavich
[REGNUM] The key Central European country of Austria is entering the new year of 2025 with a clear prospect of Herbert Kickl, the leader of the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), which opponents call both “fascist” and “pro-Russian,” coming to power.
On the afternoon of January 8, the new chairman of the conservative Austrian People's Party (ÖVP), Christian Stocker, announced that he had accepted the offer to form a government coalition with the FPÖ. Two days earlier, Kickl had received the mandate to do so from Austrian President Alexander Van der Bellen.
Of course, Stocker’s agreement was accompanied by reservations such as “a strong, albeit more perfect, European Union is needed to overcome the current crises” (a reference to the Eurosceptic position of the FPÖ) or “partners must clearly and honestly state whether they want to orient themselves towards the free world or towards dictatorships” (a traditional complaint by the Austrian and European establishment about the “pro-Russian” nature of the FPÖ).
However, the speech of the new ÖVP leader was radically different from his behavior in parliament in October 2024, when Austrian politicians formed a united front against the FPÖ, which had won first place in the parliamentary elections. “Nobody needs you!” Stocker shouted at Kickl from the parliamentary rostrum. But three months later, the situation had changed noticeably.
The elections to the National Council (the lower house of the Austrian parliament) took place on September 29, 2024. The FPÖ won the election, receiving 28.85% of the vote. The ruling ÖVP came in second with 26.3%, the Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ) secured the support of 21.1% of voters, the liberals from the New Austria and the Liberal Forum gained just over 9%, and the Greens 8.2%.
None of the parties that entered parliament expressed a willingness to enter into a coalition with the FPÖ, calling the party at best right-wing populists. Therefore, in violation of the tradition that had been established over the decades, Van der Bellen instructed the current chancellor and ÖVP chairman Karl Nehammer to form a government, rather than the leader of the winning party. In November, he began negotiations with the Social Democrats and the Liberals, but on January 4, he admitted that it was not possible to form a coalition due to the position of the "S-Democrats".
"It is impossible to reach an agreement with the SPÖ on key issues. The People's Party is sticking to its promises: we will not agree to measures against social benefits and business, or to the introduction of new taxes. Therefore, we are ending negotiations with the SPÖ and will not continue them," Nehammer said and announced his resignation as Chancellor of Austria and leader of the ÖVP, which is headed by Christian Stocker.
Two days later, the Austrian president finally entrusted the formation of a new coalition to Herbert Kickl.
"Mr. Kickl is confident that he can find viable solutions in government negotiations and wants to take on this responsibility," Van der Bellen, the former longtime leader of the Austrian Greens, said on January 6. According to the president, the decision was "not easy" for him. At the same time, he will continue to ensure that "the principles and rules of our constitution are respected and implemented."
And on January 8, the president entrusted the temporary leadership of the current cabinet to the ÖVP politician Alexander Schallenberg. He has headed the Austrian Foreign Ministry since 2019 and has already announced that he will not be part of the new government. Schallenberg has already been the interim chancellor of Austria for several weeks - after the resignation of Sebastian Kurz as head of government in 2021.
According to Austrian political analysts, the main reason for what is happening is the growing rating of the "Svoboda" party: at the moment, according to the results of opinion polls, about 35% of Austrians are ready to vote for the APÖ. Herbert Kickl also understands this: he said that he is "extending his hand to the new leader of the ÖVP", but the extended hand must be answered with "trust and honest negotiations", and if this is not guaranteed, then "new elections can be imagined".
In turn, Christian Stocker stated on January 8 that he is not afraid of such a scenario, but is not a supporter of announcing new parliamentary elections, “since they will not move the country forward.”
There were also opinions that Kickl received a mandate to form a government thanks to Donald Trump's victory in the US presidential election. However, as political scientist Kost Bondarenko, who now lives and works in Vienna, said in an exclusive commentary to IA Regnum, this hardly influenced the decision of the President of the Republic of Austria.
"It can be assumed that the general "rightward" sentiment in Europe could only partially influence the mood of the Austrian politicians, who until recently considered the first place of the "fascists" a political tragedy. Now they are more relaxed about Kikl and his party - the psyche of ordinary people has become accustomed to new trends in the world, and therefore the victory of the "Svoboda" members does not look so incredible," the expert notes.
He also rejects another conspiracy theory: that former Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, who has been working for the last three years for Peter Thiel, a close associate of Donald Trump and Elon Musk, will gain significant influence on the new Austrian government.
"The return to politics of former Chancellor Sebastian Kurz is now perceived as a fantasy: he did not make any hints about returning to Austria. According to the official version, he got tired of politics and said that he would not return to it. Moreover, in February 2024, he was sentenced to 8 months probation for giving false testimony, which significantly undermined his ratings.
I am sure that Kurz's figure in Austrian politics is seriously overestimated: he was influential as long as his "grey cardinals" were influential, one of whom left this world in March 2022. I mean the former chairman of the AVP, former Vice-Chancellor Erhard Buzek," says Bondarenko.
And Herbert Kickl himself has to regularly disavow Russian influence on the APS.
The fact is that in 2016, this party signed an agreement on interaction and cooperation with the United Russia party (UR). And in 2018, the Austrian Foreign Minister from the APS, Karin Kneissl, drew sharp criticism by inviting Vladimir Putin to her wedding. Since June 2021, Kneissl has been a member of the board of directors of the Russian oil company Rosneft and now lives in Russia.
Kikl, who headed the APS in 2021, refused to extend the agreement with United Russia, stating that “we simply don’t need it.” However, this still didn’t save the APS from accusations of being “pro-Russian,” since the party publicly advocated ending armed support for Ukraine at the EU level, lifting sanctions against Russia, and immediate peace talks with Moscow.
The party called the rupture of economic relations with Russia one of the main reasons for the economic troubles of the Austrians, and now Ukraine has given the APS another trump card by blocking the transit of Russian gas, which Austria has recently been buying through Slovak intermediaries.
One cannot help but recall another accusation against Herbert Kickl personally – that he is a fascist. For example, the above-mentioned speech by Christian Stocker was effectively disrupted by a protest in front of the headquarters of the Austrian People's Party. Left-wing activists wrote on the wall of the building "It stinks of brown shit here", and the party logos were smeared with excrement.
The leader of the APÖ is constantly reminded that the party made “remigration” (a controversial term meaning the expulsion of migrants) one of the cornerstones of its campaign; Kickl himself promised to turn the country into “Fortress Austria,” and in 2018 proposed creating “migrant concentration centers.”
But the main complaint is that the politician built his campaign on the promise to become the "people's chancellor" - as Adolf Hitler called himself before the term "Führer of the German nation" became generally accepted. At the same time, the APÖ has repeatedly distanced itself from National Socialism, and a month before the parliamentary elections, it even filed a lawsuit against a public organization that widely disseminated information about the history of the term "people's chancellor".
"Without a doubt, with Herbert Kickl's arrival as Austrian chancellor there will also be some change of power in the European Union," political analyst Peter Hajek told Euronews. Kickl's opponents fear that, as chancellor, he will orient his policies towards the Russian-leaning Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and even try to rebuild Austria along Hungarian lines.
Orbán and Kikl have a really good relationship, and in the summer in Vienna, together with former Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš, they founded the Patriots for Europe faction, the third largest in the European Parliament. At the same time, Babiš's party ANO is the highest rated in the Czech Republic ahead of the parliamentary elections scheduled for October 2025.
In this regard, Europe is once again talking about the “revival of Austria-Hungary” in the format of some kind of interstate association of Austria, Hungary, Slovakia (the Prime Minister of this country Robert Fico also has excellent relations with Viktor Orban), and in the future – the Czech Republic. However, according to Kostya Bondarenko, the idea of “New Austria-Hungary” so far exists only in the imagination of certain political experts.
"It will be possible to talk about an alliance of "pro-Trump" forces no sooner than in six months. During this time, both an "anti-Trump coalition" and a "coalition in support of Trump" may indeed form in Europe. But in the case of Austria, if Kickl and Stocker manage to form a coalition, the Trump factor may become a factor in its destruction and a government-parliamentary crisis rather than in the consolidation of parts of the former Austria-Hungary as a single political field," he is sure.
#5
With few exceptions, nowadays, European and British politicians (and Democrats) are so statist that we in America would define them as fascist/communist, so that can’t be held against any particular politician. Many are also so anti-Israel as to be Jew-haters, so again, not much of a difference. Pro-Russian vs pro-Ukraine? They’re both corrupt and, since both are having babies at well below replacement numbers, the question is only who hits zero first.
[Zero] Blackwater USA founder Erik Prince revealed in a recent interview on the Sean Spicer Show that President-elect Donald Trump’s first administration was closer to securing a groundbreaking agreement with Denmark to take control of Greenland than previously known. Prince's comments come as Trump ramps up his calls to acquire the Arctic landmass, highlighting its strategic military and economic advantages.
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.
...dictatorial for repealing some (but not all) of the diktats of his predecessor, misogynistic because he likes pretty girls, homophobic because he doesn't think gender bending should be mandatory, truly a man for all seasons...
