Cunigulus [they/them]

One of the few pleasures of the Trump administration is when their petty vindictiveness is directed towards other ghouls. Like Hegseth cancelling his meeting with Kaja Kallas after her transatlantic flight had already landed in DC, or withholding military aid already in transit to Ukraine. Sadly for every humorous instance of base spite there’s another directed at the vulnerable.

That’s right, keep pushing till it breaks! Keep pushing until the nothing ever happens memes are banished forever!

Damn that sounds serious if true. Artillery and airstrikes? Remember we’re looking for a mention of a town called Nawa. If Israel takes Nawa it means they’re probably gunning for the whole of southern Syria. If they’re just fucking around near the Golan Heights and Mt. Hermon they’ll leave it alone.

Assume for a moment that they know the US empire is on its last legs and China is about to ascend and break the US’s grip on global finance. What would the logical next step be? If we’re really going to have a multi-polar world, the US had better get its act together and consolidate a power base it can defend while it still enjoys the advantages of global hegemony. Tightening the grip on Europe, consolidating direct control in North America and the near abroad, and trying to protect and rebuild domestic industry are all sensible moves if the objective is not to justify a global neoliberal hegemony, but to survive as a separate imperial bloc among several competitors. I honestly don’t see that as being much more workable than maintaining global hegemony, but if you can’t beat China, you need a different plan.

Egotistical individual capitalists vs institutional capitalist minions who don’t want to know that they might have to disrupt their business to prevent their wage-slaves from dying.

It’s true that the Deepseek news didn’t seem like it should impact Nvidia. If someone found an even richer gold vein they’ll still need shovels to dig it. I think it had more to do with Nvidia as a symbol of the AI hype and the fact that it was already insanely overvalued by any metrics, even considering the most feverish dreams of AI evangelists. I would have expected the companies that invested in OpenAI to take the biggest hit.

One corrective to my understanding of Deepseek is that the algorithm to train the AI model was not made open source. They did publish a white paper with some of the theory behind it that should make it possible for people to reconstruct it, but basically only the finished model with weights is open source, and the training data and algorithm are still proprietary. This is still a big deal, but not as big a deal as dropping the whole thing into the public domain and nuking the whole upstream IP of the AI industry.

On the Taiwan tarriff angle, it is interesting. I read it as Trump being briefed on the reality of TSMC investment in the US and looking for a way to strong-arm TSMC into installing its cutting-edge fab processes in the US so we’d actually get the strategic benefit we’re looking for. I just don’t think Wall Street takes Trump seriously enough to make big trades on this kind of posturing, but I could be wrong.

Weird language, made it sound like they’re hiring the homeless to round up migrants.

There have been some details emerging about how he’s running things, and TBF he’s doing a lot more than he did when he entered in his first term. He’s got a coterie of conservative think-tankers and lawyers calling the shots from outside the official bureaucracy. They’re basically trying to sabotage the government as much as possible. He’s turned it over to the craziest neoliberal ghouls and they’re just trying to make as big a mess as they can.

I think this going to be the last gasp of neoliberalism because big capital is going to look at this fucking disaster and realize they need a different ideology to serve their interests. Or really the whole class will be forced into a series of ad-hoc interventions against this sabotage of the useful parts of the state, and create the perfect opening for a corporate democrat to step in to save them. Think FDR without all the labor-friendly populism.

ASML is Dutch, not Danish.

How funny would it be if Denmark bends over backwards to satisfy the US, and then the US takes Greenland anyway? It almost feels good watching Europe get abused by the US after vehemently arguing to Europeans for the last 15 years that they need to get their shit together and assert their independence from Washington. Vindication.

A major provocation in Syria is necessary for the next step of the Zionists plans. The Gaza ceasefire is not the end of this conflict.

NVIDIA is a big meme stock. The whole petite bourgeois stock trading hobby is paying attention to what they’re saying. It was only a matter of time before the trade war started generating real push-back.

This might be why it feels so different. These things just don’t penetrate a lot of people’s bubbles.

I really get the sense that there’s some kind of directive out to downplay natural disasters in the media in the US in recent years. It used to be something like the LA fires or Hurricane Helene destroying parts of NC would get days-long media extravaganzas - it was a good way to boost viewership and grab attention. Now the reporting is present, but kind of pushed off below the fold. I think maybe whoever does the soft censorship when it comes to geopolitics etc… is suppressing US natural disaster coverage, maybe to prevent people from freaking out over climate change? Maybe to combat the general feeling of malaise and dysfunction settling in?

Am I crazy or do any of you get the same impression?

Denmark basically gave their whole army to Ukraine, so what are they going to do about it?

Big fires on the north side of LA. Looks like they might even take out Malibu altogether. This is some very expensive real estate going up in smoke.

To bring it back around, the British debt was secured with crown lands in Canada until just before US entry the war debt got too big and they ran out of Canadian assets. The US could’ve stayed out of the war and just taken Canada.

The Canadian Liz Truss, only the actual descendant of Ukrainian Nazis.

I don’t follow it closely enough to give you particulars, but it seems like the army has lost a lot of territory around the country to various rebel groups, but still has a firm grip on its core territory.

I suspect Israel may have further plans for southern Syria that might involve antagonizing HTS more than even they can accept. There are ridges south of Damascus that would make an excellent defensive line from Mt. Hermon straight to the area just south of Damascus international airport in the desert. That whole chunk of Syria south of Damascus has about 40% Druze or Christian population and it’s currently controlled by the Southern Operations Room which seems to have clear ties to both Russia and the Israelis. There’s a highway connecting Israel to the main Druze settlement of As Suwayda, route 109. Every settlement along that highway is either Druze, Christian, or has been decimated by the war except for the first city along the highway, Nawa. So far the IOF hasn’t moved too far from the former zone of occupation, apart from along the Lebanese border on Mt. Hermon and a small excursion to an intelligence base on a strategic hill near Al Harah. If you see them move on Nawa, which has a population of 60k mostly Sunni Muslims, I would take that as an indication that they basically want to take control of the entire part of the country south of Damascus and set up a puppet Druze region there.

For now I don’t see any indication that they’re doing this. They’d have to take on the occupation and control of a population of at least half a million Muslim Syrians. That’s the kind of thing they might want to disarm HTS-lead Syria before attempting.

Edit: That part of Southern Syria is also one of the most fertile areas of the entire region, far more productive agriculturally than anything the Israelis occupy. It’s basically the equivalent of Ukraine for the Nazis from a strategic point of view.