halalmoney

*One reason the rulers and bankers can get away with it is because of short memories. Others include the overall ignorance of how the fiat/government and crony capitalism systems work. The other is that the blowhards just make it into a personality thing. Trump blames Biden, Biden blames Trump. The masses get focused on the players and not the game. The masses are like fans of pro-wrestling that believe it's all real.*

Stacker News

US has been in a economic depression since 2007 \ stacker news ~econ

Got around to watching the Jim Rickards talk that @SimpleStacker posted last week: https://stacker.news/items/1330619 https://www.youtube.com/watch...

*A deniable, proxy-operated capability is designed to stay below the threshold of public confirmation. The test is not proof. The test is best fit. The theory matches the posture, the incentives, the geography, the technology, and the pattern of foreign military cooperation that Venezuela has already established with Iran, Russia, and China. The administration appears to have concluded that it cannot tolerate a hostile, foreign-enabled maritime denial capability taking root near U.S. approaches. If that assessment is correct, the willingness to use military force to remove it will only grow. Venezuela and autonomous underwater vehicles may be to the second Cold War what Cuba and ballistic missiles were to the first.* View quoted note →

*Something crossed a red line. The previous threats were concerning but manageable. Drones with a 1,000-kilometer range can complicate regional operations. Anti-ship missiles on Su-30s create risk for naval vessels operating close to Venezuelan waters. But none of these capabilities threaten to cripple the U.S. economy or paralyze military logistics. A viable maritime denial threat does. UUVs operating in the Florida Straits and near the Panama Canal would put at risk the commercial arteries that carry half of American trade and the sea lanes that sustain military power projection. That is the kind of threat that changes posture overnight.* View quoted note →

*UUV programs are newer and far more sensitive than drone manufacturing or conventional arms transfers. Governments do not advertise capabilities designed for deniable operations. If Venezuela and its partners were developing a maritime denial capability, it would be precisely the kind of program kept out of leaked documents and diplomatic cables.* View quoted note →

*By establishing co-production on Venezuelan soil, Iran has created a sustainable forward node for asymmetric military technology in the Western Hemisphere. One that does not depend on risky transatlantic shipments that could be intercepted.* View quoted note →

*If the U.S. response to Venezuela is to arm Ukraine with sea drones, it could paralyze the Russian economy. Escalation from there is unpredictable. Both sides may now be deploying a weapon that neither can defend against, in theaters where the other’s commerce is exposed. Once the AUV genie is out of the bottle, it cannot be put back in.* View quoted note →

*The cost curve runs steeply against defense. The economics overwhelmingly favor the attacker because the defended area is vast and oceanic targets are extremely expensive. A workable sub-drone kit costs a fraction of what a tanker or a major naval vessel cost. A dual-route cable system runs on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars. The defended area is vast and the marginal cost of defending more water rises with every additional mile. The attacker chooses the time and place. While the defender has to prove the water is clean across every mile of every transit lane.* View quoted note →

*A serious administration cannot plan to solve that problem after the shooting starts. It has to be solved while the cost is still manageable.* View quoted note →

*If counternarcotics is a cover story, the next question is why the administration would need one. The most likely answer is that the real concern is harder to talk about publicly. A serious vulnerability close to home, one that requires this kind of posture to address, is not something you advertise. Saying it openly makes homeland defense look porous. It invites a public reaction that could narrow options and force escalation on a political timetable rather than a strategic one. It also tells adversaries exactly what you’re worried about and how much leverage they have.* View quoted note →

*Every once in a while, a new technology emerges that breaks the existing equilibrium. Machine guns collapsed the logic of massed infantry. U-boats shattered the assumption that surface fleets controlled the seas. Autonomous underwater vehicles belong in that category. Our entire globalized trading system rests on a basic assumption that goods can move freely across the world’s oceans. For decades, U.S. naval dominance secured the shipping lanes on which increasingly stretched supply chains depend. We offshored critical parts of our industrial base and spread key inputs across the globe, assuming they would always remain accessible. UUVs threaten to shatter that assumption. They are cheap, nearly impossible to detect, and a handful of them can shut down entire shipping lanes. They can sever undersea cables, isolating countries both digitally and physically. And there is almost nothing we can currently do to neutralize the threat at scale.* View quoted note →