A Common Disaster
There's going to be blowback.
Back in the day, I’d get into the office around 7am, and by 7pm it felt like something I’d done in the morning had happened days or a week ago. Same feeling now. Some things in the post are a week old, and may (but more likely are not) dated. Things are moving quickly now, yet seem suspended at the same time.
There are a bunch of good interviews and quotes and things you will agree and disagree with below.
I’ve been getting hit with both barrels from morons online all week. I’m either a libtard or a fascist, or some combination thereof. People are angry, and I wish they’d blame the right people, instead of me.
People read one tweet and then create a stick-figure caricature in their little minds of whatever demon they're envisioning. Nevertheless, I persisted.
I remain skeptical that America is “winning”, Wall Street remains utterly complacent, and our leaders remain insane. Godspeed.
“You and I are friends first. If we agree on political issues, that’s great. If we don’t agree, I don’t care. We’re still friends. I like you. I have this core my best friends from high school. We’re all in each other’s weddings and we’re godfather to each other’s kids. It was five of us all together…two Democrats, two Republicans, and an independent. But it never mattered because we never talked about politics or when we did, we’d kid each other.”
Note: A couple of people have told me that this is NOT from George Carlin (thank you). I haven’t done a deep dive yet, but that’s likely, as I did not do my usual ‘find original source’ routine…Regardless, I think the message here is a good one so I’ll leave it here unattributed.
“When your identity is your ideology, congratulations—you’ve officially screwed yourself, because now it’s not just an idea, now it’s you. When the idea gets challenged, you don’t hear disagreement. You hear an attack.
So what do you do? You build a bubble. A nice, soft, padded little bubble, where everyone agrees with you, uses the same words, hates the same people, and claps at the exact right moments, and you will defend that bubble at all costs, even if it makes you sound incredibly stupid. Facts don’t matter anymore. Logic’s gone, humor, dead. Because admitting you’re wrong would mean admitting you are wrong, and that’s unacceptable, so you double down. Louder. Angrier. Dumber. And that’s how you end up defending nonsense like it’s sacred scripture - not because it’s true, but because without it, you’d have to actually develop a personality.”
The Republicans are just as tone-deaf as the Democrats.
The Biden White House tweeted this on July 1, 2021:
Meanwhile, for Easter 2026, we get this:
Core CPI, well above the model’s made-up ‘2% target’, for FIVE YEARS in a row.
A financial war crime against most Americans.
Oracle, which I mentioned in my last post, just laid off 30,000 people. They also “filed for roughly 3,126 petitions to employ H-1B workers in fiscal years 2025 and 2026. Employers must submit the paperwork when seeking to hire foreign workers in specialty occupations like technology.”
Trump pal Larry Ellison is worth around $200 billion (and is the largest private funder of the Israeli Defense Forces).
MAGA!
Our Newspaper of Record1
Interviews
Heard this from Lobo Tiggre that I can relate to, having solely managed my own investments for almost 50 years:
“I make my own calls, and I’d rather wait for something that I understand, and make my own decision, than follow somebody else. If you just blindly follow somebody else and the trade turns south on you, it’s really hard to hold on to that, and to have the the courage of your convictions. If you don’t understand why you own something, it’s hard to see a sell-off as an opportunity to average down as opposed to a reason to panic sell.”
I’ve mentioned before that I break a cardinal trading rule in that I have no problem adding to a losing position if I have “the courage of my convictions.” This has almost always worked out very well for me over the years. I am patient, and I don’t see temporary losses as risk as much as opportunity. Then again, I don’t have clients calling me and yelling at me. Another thing that has helped me over the years is I do not panic (and I don’t use leverage - strange, I know). It also helps that I always hold “too much cash.” I am a dinosaur, but my returns have been excellent (and I rarely own any of the cool kid stocks.)
Tiggre is a big long-term bull on Copper and Uranium by the way.
Steve Eisman
“An entire generation of Wall Street executives mistook leverage for genius.”
On gold’s recent correction:
“Gold going down makes no sense. Gold is viewed as a hedge against the demise of fiat currencies, rising inflation, and an increase in overall risk. So normally gold prices go up during a war. The combination of a war with rising inflation expectations should cause gold to skyrocket. Here we have a war and fears of inflation and yet gold has declined about 10% since the war began. What explains this negative move in gold? Apparently, a bunch of major hedge funds from Caxton to PIMCO to Citadel to Millennium and Balyasny all had similar trades where they were betting on lower interest rates and higher commodity prices, including gold. When the war began, their interest rate bets went badly against them. All of the funds in these trades have suffered fairly significant losses since the war began. And I’m guessing that the risk managers of these firms ordered all the portfolio managers with these trades on to reduce risk. That meant selling bonds and gold, and that’s why gold prices are down when they should be up. It also could explain why interest rates have gone up so quickly.”
On Arrogance:
“Let’s turn to the world of private credit. When I watch business news and see interviews of the executives of private credit, I’m struck by how almost universally they defend the industry. The defense is not surprising, but the tone somewhat is. Most of these executives are arguing that there is nothing wrong, just bad publicity. Since there is obviously something wrong, the question is whether they actually believe what they are saying. I’m convinced that they do. They actually believe that there is nothing wrong. There is an arrogance to their presentation and that arrogance feels like the same arrogance Wall Street executives displayed before the great financial crisis. History does not necessarily repeat, but it sure can rhyme. And here’s the rhyme. Prior to the great financial crisis, Wall Street executives suffered from one of the worst cases of arrogance in business history.”
“I don’t think Blue Owl is going to come out of this one.”
“The top 25 banks have 94% of all the exposure. Private credit is concentrated in the biggest banks, and only about 6% is in community banks around the country. So this is a big bank problem. If private credit turns sour, it’s all going to fall back on to the big banks, without a doubt.”
One of his comments made me look up these charts:
The Trolley Dilemma, 2026
For what it’s worth, here is Zerohedge’s take on Tuesday’s deal, which appears to be falling apart as I write this.
“My bottom line is that I believe that this war, especially the the timing of it, was largely driven by the Israeli’s agenda and the Israeli’s timeline, and we were forced to react, plunging us into this conflict.”
- Joe Kent
Even if Kent is correct, I still hold Trump responsible, as the U.S. President. Israel would not survive without the U.S., and Trump needs to make that clear, and put them on a tight leash. The U.S. agenda should be the ONLY agenda that matters to a U.S. President.
CNBC Sociopath Sara Eisen never disappoints:
Not sure if this is satire or not…
Theodore Postol
“People talk about oligarchs in Russia. Well, let me tell you, the oligarchs in Russia are much less powerful than the oligarchs we have in the United States, because Putin has taken their teeth and claws out.”
"I'm fed up with our soldiers being put at risk for things that are not in our national interest...We misuse and abuse our military, because we put them in harm's way for reasons that are not justified."
“These Jewish oligarchs who have shown more loyalty to Israel than they have to their own country - and I mean that explicitly. They’re more loyal to Israel than they are to the United States. I come from a Jewish background, but I’m an American. I don’t think of myself as an American Jew even. I’m an American. And a lot of other people, Jews and otherwise, think the same way.”
Farris: What are your thoughts when you hear the idea of a possible ground invasion?
Postol: That would be an incredible disaster.
Ladies and Gentlemen - The President of the United States
“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP”
God help us.
Tucker Carlson’s excellent response to Trump’s Easter post:
James Dorsey
“If you want to derive or conclude that the United States has become a rogue superpower, that’s one way of looking at it, and it’s not totally inaccurate.”
“This is not the first time that Iran’s been here. you know. You had the Iraqi assault on Iran in September of 1980, which was backed and funded by the Gulf States. You had in the middle, barely two and a half years after the revolution and in the middle of a war, the killing of a president, of a prime minister, of 72 members of parliament, including prominent clerics in a bombing. Iran’s still there. The Islamic Republic’s still there. You had multiple significant popular mass anti-government protests. You had the 12-day war in June of last year. You’ve had assassinations before. Iran’s still standing. In their mind, they look at the last 32, 33 days of massive - the most massive assault since the Iran/Iraq war on Iran, and probably more massive in fact. They’re standing strong. They’ve maintained regime cohesion. They’re capable of waging an asymmetric
warfare which has allowed them to shape the battlefield, not the Americans and not the Israelis. Like it or not, that is success.”
“The Iranian perception is that the United States and others have been gunning for the overthrow of the Islamic Republic since day one, and they felt that they were being encircled, if they looked at US bases, US allies, that they were being encircled. And so what in a sense they tried to do is duplicate that in terms of encircling Israel, you know, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen.”
“The key takeaway is that this war was unnecessary, and a huge mistake, for which everybody is going to pay a heavy price, including those who didn’t have a say in this.”
Just had a long talk with a former IAF commander on why Iran is managing to shoot down these US planes. He told me that since the 12 day war Iran has rethought its entire system after seeing how easily it was bombed. The new system is far better and more resilient and Israeli pilots have noticed how difficult it is to operate there now:
1) Each of Iran's 31 zones now has the authority to operate independently if central command is cut off, allowing local commanders to launch missiles and engage aircraft without waiting for orders from Tehran. That was a major problem for them in the past.
2) Recognizing that fixed sites are easily destroyed, Iran moved many of its restored air defenses into missile cities, deeply buried underground tunnels and rugged coastal terrain that serve as cover for mobile launchers. These targets are now hardened.
3) Since traditional radar gives away a system's location, Iran has leaned into passive infrared (heat-seeking) sensors and new software algorithms that can track jets without emitting detectable signals.
4) Iran has increased reliance on mobile, medium-range surface-to-air SAM systems. Its mobility allows shoot-and-scoot tactics that make it difficult to target with pre-planned airstrikes.
5) Iran has moved away from Russian missiles to its own Bavar-373 which appears to be superior to the S-300 and possibly to the S-400 too. Recent upgrades include increased autonomy for launchers, allowing them to operate even if centralized command centers are destroyed.
6) They use new Majid system, which relies on passive infrared detection rather than radar. Because it doesn't emit radar signals, it is significantly harder for aircraft to detect before a missile is launched.
7) Most important, he confirmed to me that Iran is using HQ-9B, the best long-range surface-to-air missile China has to offer. It has both active radar homing and a passive infrared seeker. This makes it harder for aircraft to spoof the missile with standard electronic countermeasures and improves its ability to track stealth. It seems to be exceeding expectations.
He told me, "the days when flying over Iran was a walk in the park are over." In sum, new tactics and a switch from Russian technology to Iranian and Chinese technology have turned Iranian airspace into a contested space. Air superiority there is gone. The IAF and USAF will have to adapt accordingly or lose more aircraft.
Chris Hedges with John Kiriakou: Is Iran the 'Leading State Sponsor of Terrorism?
Excellent. Link
Hedges: “The CIA has long funded and armed groups that use terrorism as a tactic. Cuban anti-Castro organizations funded by the CIA, for example, placed a bomb on a Cuban commercial airliner 1976 that killed all 73 passengers on board. The CIA helped form and fund death squads in Chile, Argentina, El Salvador, Guatemala, and later during the war in Iraq armed and trained murderous Shiite militias. The US backed right-wing terrorist organizations in Italy during the so-called years of lead from the late 1960s into the early 1980s. From 1979 to 1990, Washington provided financial, logistical, and military support to the Contra rebels in Nicaragua. The Contra seeking to overthrow the leftist Sandinista government carried out an estimated 1,300 terrorist attacks.
The US also provided extensive military aid to Syrian militias including the notorious Nour al-Din al-Zenki Islamist group and ISIS in Syria fighting against the Syrian regime. These Islamist groups abducted and tortured journalists and foreign aid workers and carried out executions by beheadings.”
Kiriakou:
“Certainly the United States and its major allies - the UK, France for example, others that are that are close to the United States - have committed acts even recently that I think you or I or any reasonable person would consider to be acts of terrorism.”
“The generally agreed upon definition of terrorism is the act of carrying out violence in the civilian population for the purpose of creating terror for a political purpose... I would add that there are close US allies - you named Saudi Arabia for example - that if we were to to hold the Saudis to the same definition they would be at least as guilty as the Iranians. Look at the havoc that the Saudis have wreaked, for example, in Yemen. It’s incalculable and it’s gone over the course of decades.
Look at what the United States has done. You mentioned the Contra rebels. That’s a great example. But look at others. Look at the Greek military junta for example that carried out acts of terrorism against its own people. Look at Israel that has carried out assassinations all over the world. Or we could even point the finger at the government of India for that matter, for carrying out assassinations and terrorist attacks in Canada, blowing up a 747 no less.
So really the complaint that I have with this designation, this terrorism designation, is that because we’ve manipulated the definition so many times over the years, and we’ve used that designation as a cudgel against countries that we don’t like, or whose policies we disagree with, it’s become meaningless to place a group or a country on the list of terrorists. It means nothing now in the end.”
Hedges:
“Well, Iran does is a very repressive regime. I was thrown in jail there once, and deported in handcuffs another time, but it doesn’t appear to carry out the spate of targeted assassinations against opponents, especially outside its borders, that Israel does.”
Kiriakou:
“Right? I mean Israel is in my view an extreme example. I mean, if you happen to be an Iranian military official or nuclear scientist or businessman who is carrying out trade that the government of Israel disagrees with, and you happen to be in Vienna or London or Dubai, for example, you can easily be assassinated by Israeli officers there as you could be in the center of Tehran. And and let’s talk about the center of Tehran. The Israelis use cutouts. They use recruited assets on the ground to carry out acts of terrorism in the center of Tehran targeting military officials. A cutout is a person recruited to carry out an action that gives the initiator of the action plausible deniability. So, for example, if you don’t want to send an Israeli government, an Israeli intelligence officer into Tehran, you assess that the risk is too high, you recruit, let’s say, an Afghan refugee to do it. He might do it for $100. Or you recruit somebody that’s already in Iran, maybe an Iranian national who is has the ability to come and go. Perhaps you recruit that person in Dubai and send it back to Tehran to carry out this act. There are a million ways to commit acts of terrorism, and the Israelis use a lot of them.”
Here Kiriakou describes U.S. (including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Rudy Giuliuani, and Howard Dean) support for former “terrorists” Mojahedin-e-Khalq (People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran):
Kiriakou:
“We know that the Israelis have provided an inordinate amount of so-called intelligence to the US government since the beginning of this conflict with Iran. I use air quotes around intelligence because, in my view, a great deal of it is just made up out of thin air…”
“Maryam Rajavi [head of the MEK] takes Israeli money. They the Israelis brag about it in their media. Maryam Rajavi tells the Israeli government that the people of Iran are on the brink of an uprising. All the government needs is a little shove. It’s a house of cards. It’s going to topple when the first missile flies and there will be democracy and everybody will live happily ever after. And anybody with any brain, anybody who has ever followed developments in Ira,n would have been able to say that that was preposterous, that no such thing would happen…
I was intimately involved in the planning for the 2003 Iraq war, something of which I’m not at all proud. I was the executive assistant to the CIA’s deputy director for operations. One of the things that I learned then, I guess I already knew it, but I learned it definitively, was that the United States, no matter its intent, will never be seen as a liberator. it will be seen as an invader and an occupier. And so for the average Iranian, it is better for them to live with the system that they have now than to risk the chaos that invariably comes from an American Israeli invasion. I can only imagine what the average Iranian thinks about a joint invasion by the United States and Israel.”
Hedges:
“The Israeli objective appears in Iran different from the American objective. I mean, who knows what the objective is? I’m not sure Trump knows, but they would like to see the regime changed. I think Trump foolishly thought that decapitating the top of the Iranian regime would give him a Venezuela type situation. The Israeli goal is really to do what they can to create a failed state. They destroyed Iraq. We were urged by the Israelis to start the Iraq war. Iraq is fractured into antagonistic factions.
Syria is a failed state. They’re carrying out a Gaza-like obliteration of southern Lebanon as I speak, and it seems clear - Netanyahu has been lobbying for the war with Iran for almost four decades - that what they would do is like to splinter, destroy, fragment [Iran].”
Kiriakou:
“As somebody who’s dealt with and studied terrorism for a long time, it’s those failed states that really spawn terrorist groups, isn’t it?”
“The Israelis believe that they benefit from surrounding countries being mired in chaos. For example, in Syria, the Israelis benefited from never-ending war there. I always maintained that the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t, and that Bashar al-Assad was no threat to Israel. But then you put the former co-founder of ISIS in charge. A man who was a longtime member of al-Qaeda in charge. He immediately begins a pogrom against minority communities, whether they’re they’re Druze or Christian or what have you. And that’s supposed to be better for whom? In Iraq, the same thing. The Israelis were threatened by a central government led by Saddam Hussein. They benefited from chaos. Their view was if Iraqis are busy killing each other, they’re not going to be a threat to Israel. They they won’t threaten to kill Israelis. We saw the same thing happen in Libya. Now we’re seeing the same thing happen in Iran. I think that you’re exactly right that the Israelis really want at the end of this a failed state. They want to see decades where Iranian is pitted against Iranian and they just simply take years and years to kill each other.”
An anecdote from Kiriakou on his time as senior investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee:
“When we get to Lashkargah, we get into a couple of jeeps with a translator, a security detail, we go into the poppy fields and we stumble on a poppy farmer. And I asked him what in retrospect was a very naïve question. I said, “Why do you grow poppy when instead you could grow things with two growing seasons like onions or tomatoes or pomegranates?” He was very frustrated with me and he angrily said, “The Americans told me in 2001 that if I told them where the Arabs were, I could grow all the poppy I wanted.”
“I have a good friend who was an IDF special forces officer and is now an American citizen and married to an American. And he told me that he was actually taught in school to automatically accuse anybody who criticized Israel in any way of anti-semitism. That it served to silence dissent. And so we see that now to the point where it’s beginning to backfire, and people just aren’t buying it anymore.”
“One of the most memorable tours that I ever had in the CIA was in Pakistan. I loved every minute that I was in Pakistan, and I enjoyed working with the Pakistani intelligence service and the Pakistani military. That is not to say that they don’t actively support a myriad of terrorist groups. They do.”
Hedges: “I’m curious what your thoughts are, but given the fact that Israel and the United States have assassinated, including of course the Supreme Leader, these major figures, and before that in the first Trump administration, they assassinated Soleimani, the general. Do you see the Iranians essentially attempting to pay us back?”
Kiriakou: “I do. I do. It’s something that I think we should we should be thinking of…If I were Iranian, if I were an Iranian leader or an Iranian intelligence officer, I would be plotting my revenge starting right now…I said a moment ago that there are no Iranian sleeper cells in the United States. They don’t need to have sleeper cells. They need to have a cell in a country or a city where the United States has diplomatic interests…”
Hedges: “They see this as a war on Shi'ism. And we have already seen a series of attacks by Shiite militias in Iraq on American interests…”
Kiriakou: “Many Lebanese are Shia. Most Bahrainis, as you said, are Shia. There’s a large minority Shia population in Kuwait. There’s a Shia population in the Emirates. Most of them are ex-patriots. There’s a large Shia population in the eastern province of Saudi Arabia [around the oil facilities around the oil fields.] There are Shia in Afghanistan, the Hazaras. There are Shia in Pakistan. So sure, I could see it. It’s what they call blowback.”
“Huckabee2 should have been fired for welcoming that traitor, Jonathan Pollard, into the embassy and feting him like a hero. This is a guy who spied on the United States. Not even just for Israel. That’s bad enough. But the Israelis traded the top secret documents that he stole from the Pentagon, traded them to the Soviet KGB in exchange for a plane load of Jewish refugees. So, he was essentially spying for the KGB.”
“You can’t have as your policy: kill everybody, women, children, the sick, the elderly, bulldoze the hospitals, bulldoze the schools, the homes, the businesses. That is the very definition of a genocide. Like, has anybody here bothered to read the genocide law? It that’s the definition of a genocide3. If your goal - and Donald Trump told us what the Israeli goal was to push out all Palestinians, and to develop the property. His words - it would be better than Monte Carlo. That is the very definition of ethnic cleansing. You can’t do that.”
“As Americans, we have an incredibly short-term view of the world. That’s why we keep losing these wars. I think the Israeli worldview is even shorter. They don’t care who’s elected President next. They’ll deal with that when it comes.”
fyi Here’s another great interview with Kiriakou I covered back in October 2025. A remarkable guy in my opinion.
Trita Parsi
“The U.S., as much as it’s committed a lot of atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States did not deliberately target universities in Iraq. But that is what the Israelis have been doing in Gaza and in Lebanon. And this is exactly what they’re doing right now together with the U.S. and Iran. Sharif University, their top university was hit just yesterday. So we’re seeing the Israelization of America’s conduct of the war.”
“Why would any country at this point agree to a phased ceasefire? …mindful of the track record that Israel and the United States have in Lebanon and in Gaza, in which these ceasefires have been violated within minutes by the Israelis without any repercussions from the U.S. We have never reached phase two or phase three because they were not meant to go to that point.”
This time, instead of killing Iran's negotiators, we just just make deals, then break them the next day.
This is Tuesday, from the Pakistani PM, the guys who brokered the deal:
Wednesday, U.S. officials were completely denying what was said the day before.
“The greatest advantage the Republicans have is the Democrats.”
Steve Hanke
“This is going to be a bloodbath.”
“Regime changes and covert regime changes almost never work. Almost never. The history of it’s just one failure after another. So this is another failure. This goes in the failure book. It’s failed already. The strategy and the objective of Israel and the United States has failed already, because they thought this was going to be over in in a few days. Assassinate the Supreme Leader and it’s over. Didn’t happen. Sanctions don’t work. Regime changes don’t work. What about an occupation of the country? Has that worked in the past? You’re going to occupy an area that’s larger than Europe4. We’re talking about Iran. We’re not talking about some rinky dink island someplace. Okay? 90 million people. They’ve got over a million troops that have just been called up. Now we’re going to send 10,000 Marines against a million Iranian well-trained troops. This is going to be a bloodbath.”
“The Iranians have a Muhammad Ali rope a dope strategy. And the rope a dope strategy - remember Muhammad Ali in Kinshasa, Zaire in the 1970s? It was a heavyweight match. Ali was was not favored. The favorite was the the champ George Foreman, big George5. And what the rope a dope strategy was, Ali just stayed on the ropes and let heavy punches come in from Foreman. He absorbed the shock, took the damage, and waited until Foreman had exhausted himself, and then Ali landed the knockout blow and won the fight. And that’s the strategy of the Iranians…The Houthis haven’t moved yet. And maybe that will be part of the knockout blow. When the Houthis shut off the Red Sea entrance, that means that Suez Canal gets shut. So we’re talking about shutting the world economy down big time.”
“Washington DC is complaining because the UK hasn’t sent mind sweepers down there, and they forget to tell us that we had six mine sweepers in the area before the war and we took them out of the area, so they’re not even there. I mean the whole thing has not been thought through properly…the reason for that is this major strategic mistake made by the intelligence offered by Mossad. And the intelligence said that the whole thing would collapse in Iran. The regime would be changed in two or three days if they assassinated the supreme leader.”
[Responding to David Lin saying Iran has no right to close the Strait of Hormuz]
“This is part of a counterattack. You don’t get the thing right. There was a war of choice, an illegal war waged against Iran, and now they’re counterattacking. And what you’re saying is that, oh, why should they have the right to counterattack? We should be able to shoot at them, but they can’t shoot back at us?”
“This is what happens when you do foolish things. Trump has done very foolish things, and when you don’t listen to people you got a problem. And he listened to the Mossad. He didn’t even listen to the CIA and the US intelligence.”
Here’s the Fortune article mentioned in Hanke’s interview: The Treasury just declared the U.S. insolvent. The media missed it
Matt Bracken
“Gallipoli 2.0”.
“Sociopaths can end up leading a mass movement, because they’ll mirror back whatever they think the audience wants to hear. And a lot of people would say that maybe that’s Trump. Maybe he’s just been doing this all along.”
Iran “invented classes of weapons that we hadn’t even thought of, like these Shahed drones that cost like $30,00 to $40,000. A little tiny motor on the back, thousand kilometer range. They’re so accurate that these $30,000 Shahed drones have taken out billion dollar radars of ours across the Middle East. So, we build the billion-dollar radar, or the billion dollar master satellite uplink, and we are saying, well, that will help protect against these ICBMs or medium-range ballistic missiles flying over us towards Israel. And meanwhile, Iran just sneaks in at low level and blinds it.”
“Our entire goal now is to open the Strait of Hormuz, which - news flash - was open until February 28th, right?”
“Just for the sense of scale, 550,000 Americans in South Vietnam was not enough to do the job. They were willing to take the punishment and just stay and stay and stay. They live there. They win by surviving. We weren’t willing to continue the bloodletting and we left. So you can say they won because we quit.
All of that investment, billions of dollars, 58,000 dead, couple hundred thousand wounded, lives ruined, and we left and Vietnam won. Iran is 10 times bigger. So just think of that. If 550,000 troops wasn’t enough for a country one-tenth the size of Iran, then what do you think it would take to conquer Iran? Iran, which is a country with higher mountains than in our Rocky Mountains.”
“The mountains in Iran are at least as tough as jungle in Vietnam to operate in. At least, if not harder. And we’re talking about a place where we have to fight our way to get the first toe-hold on a beach or an island. We have to fight our way in. Our ships can’t even approach it without a threat of a missile hitting them. So to even get a toe-hold in Iran, a country 10 times bigger than Vietnam, South Vietnam with six times the population, trying to do this with 10,000 shooters, 10,000 guns, you know, Marines, 82nd Airborne Rangers, it’s a joke.”
“Trump got…like four college deferments, then the bone spur, the famous bone spur, which is basically a paid-off doctor.”
“Trump said something last week which told me his mental state. He said that the tanker captains were gutless. They just got to show some guts and drive through the straight of Hormuz. That’s a tanker that making tight turns, is going like 10 miles an hour, 12 miles an hour. It’s staying in channels. It’s 1,000 feet long, you know, it’s 300,000 tons of petroleum and we don’t dare send our destroyers in there. And he said the tanker captains should just show some guts and run for it. And their tanker captains are like, “What are you smoking? There’s no way I’m doing that. No way.””
“It’s crunch time. Trump is mad. Where’s our allies? You know, why aren’t they helping us force the straight of Hormuz? Remember, our own ships won’t go there. Which is the first navy that refused to fight its way into the strait of Hormuz? Which is the first navy that refused? The US Navy. Those captains and admirals have said no way. You know, that’s the Little Big Horn out there.”
“People are looking at America now like we're Joe Pesci with a gun in a bar.”
“You can’t say, “Oh man, I was just the getaway driver.” Yeah, you drive the hitman to each place. Okay, we’re the getaway driver. Israeli jets can’t make it there without sucking off a US Air Force tanker, so we are complicit to the rest of the world. It’s an American bomb. Who cares what is painted on the side of the plane that let that let it go? When they say we eliminated another man, we’re taking down apartment buildings Gaza style. You know, the whole Palantir Lavender program - we think there’s Hamas guys in that building. That’s enough for us. Boom. 20 more families. Who cares? That’s our style of war now. And the rest of the world is seeing it. There’s going to be blowback.”
“I think [Trump’s] an egomaniac, and he can’t admit he made a mistake. So, he’s gonna continue to double down, and doubling down is going to be the 82nd Airborne Custer’s Last Stand.6”
This is from the book, "Soldier," by Korean and Vietnam veteran Anthony Herbert, who was awarded four Silver Stars, three Bronze Star Medals with a 'V' for valor, six battle stars, and four Purple Hearts:
Late in November, 1965, I was told to take forty days off from my duties aboard the Duxbury Bay. “A Christmas furlough?” I asked. Well, yes, in a way. I was ordered to Torrejon, Spain. The day I arrived I was shoved aboard the Embassy Flight, the State Department courier plane that is continuously moving from embassy to embassy around the world. We landed at Bangkok and then, in the late evening, put down in Saigon. I was given a name and a place to report to, and suddenly I discovered that I was right back in Special Forces. They asked me to become a part of the Phoenix program, a CIA-run operation whose basic purpose was to identify Viet Cong and eliminate them. The first thing I learned about the operation was that although it amounted to political assassination, they called it “execution” because, I suppose, it gave the whole thing a more judicious ring, a sort of legal mantle.
What they wanted me to do was to take charge of execution-teams that wiped out entire families and tried to make it appear as though the VC themselves had done the killing. The rationale was that the other Vietnamese would see that the VC had killed another VC and would be frightened away from becoming VC themselves. Of course, the villagers would then be inclined to some sort of allegiance to our side, otherwise known as the good guys.
It was obvious what they were doing. I said I wouldn’t be a part of it. I agreed to some other kind of mission or assignment but not that. I asked just in passing, who identified the people to be killed. I was told there were Vietnamese people in the villages who were being paid to point the finger. I asked how they knew for certain that the informer might not have a more personal reason for pointing the execution-teams to a particular family. I suggested that some of their informers might be motivated, for instance, by revenge or personal monetary gain, and I also threw out the possibility—not that they hadn’t already considered it—that some of their stool-pigeons could be double or triple agents. They had answers for all my questions. I suggested that they just hand the Vietnamese informer a rifle and let him take care of the victims—which, I suppose, would have been an early form of Vietnamization.
The fellow running Phoenix at that time was a Colonel Singlaub, now General, though I believe he used a cover-name. Everybody there seemed to have a pseudonym of some sort or another. I saw guys I’d known in Special Forces back at Bragg whose names were entirely different in Vietnam. Maybe that was one way of escaping any guilt feelings about their work. It was my first contact with the dreamlike quality of that war. Perhaps that is one of the factors contributing to our defeat there. The war was unreal. The SF people took on assumed names. The enemy became dinks and slopes and gooks. The plane that fired mini-guns was called Puff, the Magic Dragon, and areas designated for complete devastation were called free-fire zones. It was like going through the looking-glass and, after your tour was finished, you could step back through the mirror and leave all the horror and all the dead in another, unreal world.
Rory Johnston
“There remains a firm belief in the market that we can see, both in commodity and crude prices, as well as in broader equity prices, that this war is going to end very very soon, and that we likely won’t have any kind of long-term consequences. That’s essentially what the market’s pricing right now and I think that is a very sanguine, far too optimistic view of our current picture in the market.”
“We’re seeing an increasing spread between that kind of more sanguine financial market reaction, and the utter panic we’re seeing in physical markets in Middle East, Asia, and now increasingly in Europe as well.”
On Trump’s Speech
“I had been optimistic very frankly - and I’ve been wrongly optimistic on a lot of this. So take everything take all of my prognostications with a grain of salt. I am so pessimistic about the consequences of this, that I am optimistic that people will see reason before those consequences hit us in the face, is kind of my view on this. And so far I’ve been wrong. And I think what we saw last night is that President Trump does not yet feel the pressure of these markets in a way that’s going to push him to back down immediately. He’s committing to further escalation.”
Won't you share a common disaster?
Share with me a common disaster.
“The Whole Thing Was a Lie”
1966 article by Donald Duncan7
"We can best immortalize our fallen members by striving for an enlightened future where Man has found another solution to his problems rather than resorting to the futility and stupidity of war."
From a letter John F. Kennedy wrote to his father following a 1939 trip to Palestine:
At present, situation still seems to be difficult as far as outrages and bombings. There were 13 bombs set off on my last evening there, all in the Jewish quarter and all set off by Jews. The ironical part is that the Jewish terrorists bomb their own telephone lines and electric connections and the next day frantically phone the British to come and fix them up. Incidentally I have become more pro-British down there than I have been in my other visits to England as I think that the men on the spot are doing a good job. This roughly, in fact very roughly, is an outline of the situation. It will be interesting to see it develop and see what the solution takes, as a definite solution has not been found yet. I thought Danzig was a tough problem, but I have never seen two groups more unwilling to try and work out a solution that has some hope of success than these two groups.
George Knapp: “Does anyone you know know the answers to the big questions? Who are they? Is it non-human intelligence? If so, where are they from? Why are they here, what’s their interest in us? Do you know the answers to those? And does anyone else in the government intelligence community know?”
James Lacatski: “I don’t, and I don’t know anyone that does, and I would seriously question their claim that they do.”
More on Lacatski here.
“Where newspapers are concerned, it is better to cite “newspapers of record”—major papers with reputations for accuracy and integrity. In the US these include The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times (for which the phrase “newspaper of record” was invented).”
In 2021 Trump pardoned "Aviem Sella, an IAF colonel, who was indicted by a US federal grand jury in March 1987 on 3 counts of espionage for recruiting Jonathan Pollard to collect US military secrets for the Israeli government."
Here’s the 1948 definition of “genocide“:
“In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
While I get Hanke’s point - Iraq is 169,235 square miles - Hanke is wrong about Europe. The EU is about 1.6 million square miles, the continent of Europe much larger. Maybe he means just Western Europe. Iran is 636,372 square miles of land. For comparison, Alaska is 665,384, so Iran is indeed huge. All of Vietnam is around 128,000 square miles.
Foreman was 25, Ali 32. Ali was a 4-1 underdog. I met Ali once in the 1990’s. I have his autograph around here somewhere on the back of one of my old business cards. The brutal effects of his Parkinson’s when I met him was very evident.
Matt Bracken was a Navy Seal back in the 1980’s.
“MASTER SERGEANT DONALD DUNCAN left the United States Army in September of 1965 after ten years of service, including six years in the Special Forces and eighteen months on active combat duty in Vietnam. While in Vietnam he received the South Vietnamese Silver Star, the Combat Infantry Badge, the Bronze Star, and the United States Army Air Medal. He was nominated for the American Silver Star and was the first enlisted man in Vietnam to be nominated for the Legion of Merit. Both nominations are still pending. He participated in many missions behind enemy lines in War Zone D, Vung Tao and the An Khe Valley. Last March he turned down the offer of a field commission to the rank of captain. Instead he left Vietnam on September 5, 1965 and received his honorable discharge four days later.”
You know there was a clip circulating here in Oz where an old guy was getting lambasted by a young guy for filling up a few gerry cans, “you greedy old bastard” he was called. But the old guy was just trying to be prepared and get ahead of future fuel constraints. I think many young people agreed with the message, certainly government does as they begin to educate us all on using less. And just like those that ridicule you, they don’t see the big picture, don’t blame your fellow man, blame a big bloated useless government that don’t give a flying fuck about us for getting us into this mess.
Thank You (as always) For Your Attention to These Matters!