U.S. conducts ‘self-defense strikes’ in Iran as Trump pushes for peace deal
... CENTCOM spokesman Tim Hawkins said targets included missile launch sites and Iranian boats attempting to emplace mines. ...
Why is the winner pushing for a peace deal?
Usually the loser does that.
Iran is in the ‘process of blinking’ over the Strait of Hormuz, Petraeus says
Trump's stupid November 2016 Contract With The American Voter had 28 points, too, remember?
The first thing on that list was "impose term limits on all members of Congress" and the last ten things started with the words "work with Congress".
This peace plan is just the banal repurposing of that template, same as with Gaza, filled with more surrender to Russia Russia Russia and more Pie In The Sky than gramma can bake.
The unseriousness is off the charts.
AXIOS had the scoop here:
1. Ukraine's sovereignty will be confirmed.
[What, like the 1994 Budapest Memorandum ROFLMAO?]
2. A comprehensive non-aggression agreement will be concluded between Russia, Ukraine and Europe. All ambiguities of the last 30 years will be considered settled.
[LOL, they're going to wave a magic wand and start over with a blank slate. Cue Burt The Invisible from Soap.]
3. It is expected that Russia will not invade neighboring countries and NATO will not expand further.
[Sure, sure. In your dreams, pal. This was definitely written by Trump at 3AM]
4. A dialogue will be held between Russia and NATO, mediated by the United States, to resolve all security issues and create conditions for de-escalation in order to ensure global security and increase opportunities for cooperation and future economic development.
[ALL issues, lol.]
5. Ukraine will receive reliable security guarantees.
[Like from God maybe?]
6. The size of the Ukrainian Armed Forces will be limited to 600,000 personnel.
[I'll take Nation Building for $1,000, Alex.]
7. Ukraine agrees to enshrine in its constitution that it will not join NATO, and NATO agrees to include in its statutes a provision that Ukraine will not be admitted in the future.
[Ukraine misbehaved in class and has to write "I will not join NATO" on the blackboard 100 times after school.]
8. NATO agrees not to station troops in Ukraine.
[Watch me herd cats!]
9. European fighter jets will be stationed in Poland.
[There are no European fighter jets.]
10. The U.S. guarantee:
[What if Russia launches missiles at Kyiv, which happens every goddamn day?]
11. Ukraine is eligible for EU membership and will receive short-term preferential access to the European market while this issue is being considered.
[Do they get frequent flyer miles with that?]
12. A powerful global package of measures to rebuild Ukraine, including but not limited to:
[All this new spending by a bankrupt country already $38.2 trillion in debt]
13. Russia will be reintegrated into the global economy:
[Russia will never pay for its war crimes in Ukraine.]
14. Frozen funds will be used as follows:
[The G7 holds $300 billion in frozen Russian assets, hardly enough for the current estimates for rebuilding Ukraine, which run from $524 billion to $1.1 trillion.]
15. A joint American-Russian working group on security issues will be established to promote and ensure compliance with all provisions of this agreement.
["Ensure compliance" how?]
16. Russia will enshrine in law its policy of non-aggression towards Europe and Ukraine.
[Molotov-Ribbentrop anyone?]
17. The United States and Russia will agree to extend the validity of treaties on the non-proliferation and control of nuclear weapons, including the START I Treaty.
[This peace plan is the everything bagel.]
18. Ukraine agrees to be a non-nuclear state in accordance with the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
[This worked out great the last time in 1994, didn't it?]
19. The Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant will be launched under the supervision of the IAEA, and the electricity produced will be distributed equally between Russia and Ukraine — 50:50.
[Like Chernobyl, right?]
20. Both countries undertake to implement educational programs in schools and society aimed at promoting understanding and tolerance of different cultures and eliminating racism and prejudice:
[Mighty woke of you.]
21. Territories:
[Trump is Chamberlain ceding the Sudetenland to Adolf Hitler in 1938.]
22. After agreeing on future territorial arrangements, both the Russian Federation and Ukraine undertake not to change these arrangements by force. Any security guarantees will not apply in the event of a breach of this commitment.
23. Russia will not prevent Ukraine from using the Dnieper River for commercial activities, and agreements will be reached on the free transport of grain across the Black Sea.
24. A humanitarian committee will be established to resolve outstanding issues:
25. Ukraine will hold elections in 100 days.
26. All parties involved in this conflict will receive full amnesty for their actions during the war and agree not to make any claims or consider any complaints in the future.
[In other words there will be no Nuremberg Tribunal for the Butchers of Bucha.]
27. This agreement will be legally binding. Its implementation will be monitored and guaranteed by the Peace Council, headed by President Donald J. Trump. Sanctions will be imposed for violations.
[Who will head it in 2029?]
28. Once all parties agree to this memorandum, the ceasefire will take effect immediately after both sides retreat to agreed points to begin implementation of the agreement.
J. P. Morgan explains gold's rise as having something to do, in part, with "waning confidence in fiat currencies." 😏
Why should anything pegged to fiat be more confidence inspiring, especially involving PayPal?
People who've been permanently banned by PayPal this morning are probably saying, "Couldn't have happened to a finer company".
This event should be good for fiat, and really good for gold, which won't suddenly be minted by anyone to the tune of $300 trillion, at least not until Elon Musk lassoes one of them thar asteroids.
PayPal’s crypto partner mints a whopping $300 trillion worth of stablecoins in ‘technical error’
Paxos, the blockchain partner of PayPal, mistakenly minted $300 trillion worth of the online payment giant’s stablecoin on Wednesday in what the company called a “technical error.” ...
Transactions on Etherscan showed that the mistake had been fixed after about 20 minutes.
PYUSD is advertised as a dollar-pegged stablecoin that is fully backed by U.S. dollar deposits, U.S. treasuries and similar cash equivalents. Therefore, PayPal says the tokens are always redeemable for U.S. dollars on a 1:1 basis.
However, the technical error highlights that the dollar peg is guaranteed by PayPal and its independent third-party attestation reports, rather than intrinsically tied to the minting of a stablecoin. ...
In a stunning move, Trump's chief of staff
Susie Wiles told those who will become his top lieutenants to get
anything they put on X, or other networks, cleared first. ...
'While this instruction has been delivered previously, I am reiterating that no member of the incoming administration or Transition speaks for the United States or the President-elect himself,' Wiles wrote in a memo reported by the New York Post.
'Accordingly, all intended nominees should refrain from any public social media posts without prior approval of the incoming White House counsel.'
More.
Ken Griffin just hates tariffs, which funded the (necessarily very small) federal government until the 20th century.
Meanwhile he's afraid the 12,000 lobbyists which already populate Washington procuring handouts like the Chips Act's billions of dollars for businesses will be replaced with 12,000 other ones lobbying for something else, ROFLMAO.
Citadel’s Ken Griffin says Trump’s tariffs could lead to crony capitalism
“I am gravely concerned that the rise of tariffs puts us on a
slippery slope towards crony capitalism,” the billionaire investor said
Thursday at the Economic Club of New York. ...
“Those same companies that enjoy that momentary sugar rush of having their competitors removed from the battlefield, soon become complacent, soon take for granted their newfound economic superiority, and frankly, they become less competitive on both the world stage and less competitive at meeting the needs of the American consumer,” Griffin said at the event. ...
“Now you’re going to find the halls of Washington really filled with the special interest groups and the lobbyists as people look for continued higher and higher tariffs to keep away foreign competition, and to protect inefficient American businesses have failed to meet the needs of the American consumer,” Griffin said.
The article has this response from Michael Mann:
The timeline, published Thursday in the journal Science, is the most
rigorous reconstruction of Earth’s past temperatures ever produced, the
authors say. ...
Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania who is known for his analyses of past global temperatures, said he was also surprised by the suggestion that the planet got so warm. The finding supports many scientists’ concern that feedback loops in the Earth system could lead to much higher temperatures than most climate models predict, he wrote in an email. But it’s also possible that the data assimilation assumes too much warming and is missing factors that might forestall a runaway greenhouse effect. “While I applaud the authors for this ambitious and thoughtful study, I am skeptical about the specific, quantitative conclusions,” Mann said. ...
Even under the worst-case scenarios, human-caused warming will not push the Earth beyond the bounds of habitability.
The article, which places us today in some of the still coolest climate conditions in 500 million years, never connects the dots.
It maintains that a dramatic warming event 250 million years ago caused the largest mass extinction ever, spewing carbon dioxide and other gases into the atmosphere, 25 million years BEFORE the first mammals appeared, who breathe the OXYGEN emitted by carbon dioxide consuming PLANTS, who then in their turn THRIVED for 125 million years under EVEN WARMER conditions than that extinction event produced.
Evolution was evidently turbocharged by this warming and its carbon dioxide, but then suddenly the first humans supposedly started to evolve 6.5 million years ago at the end of 50 million years of cooling conditions, WHEN THE TEMPERATURE WAS 62.6 F*, and continued to evolve into modern humans 300,000 years ago just as temperature KEPT FALLING to the coldest point in the record (51.8 F).
How did that happen?
The study authors are worried about what warmer conditions in the future will mean for humans, but seem oddly uninterested in how humans supposedly evolved in relatively much cooler conditions.
Maybe we don't really understand the evolution of mammals. Maybe humans are much older than the record indicates, and much more resilient.
At
its hottest, the study suggests, the Earth’s average temperature
reached 96.8 degrees Fahrenheit (36 degrees Celsius) — far higher than
the historic 58.96 F (14.98 C) the planet hit last year. ...
At the timeline’s start, some 485 million years ago, Earth was in what is known as a hothouse climate, with no polar ice caps and average temperatures above 86 F (30 C). ...
For most of the Phanerozoic, the research suggests, average temperatures have exceeded 71.6 F (22 C), with little or no ice at the poles. ...
But humans evolved during the coldest epoch of the Phanerozoic, when global average temperatures were as low as 51.8 F (11 C).
Without rapid action to curb greenhouse gas emissions,
scientists say, global temperatures could reach nearly 62.6 F (17 C)
by the end of the century — a level not seen in the timeline since the
* Miocene epoch, more than 5 million years ago.
FILE - A border wall section stands on July 14, 2021, near La Grulla, Texas, in Starr County. On Wednesday, Oct. 4, 2023, the Biden administration announced that they waived 26 federal laws in South Texas to allow border wall construction, marking the administration’s first use of a sweeping executive power employed often during the Trump presidency. The Department of Homeland Security posted the announcement with few details outlining the construction in Starr County, Texas. (Delcia Lopez/The Monitor via AP, File)
McALLEN, Texas (AP) — The Biden administration announced they waived 26 federal laws in South Texas to allow border wall construction on Wednesday, marking the administration’s first use of sweeping executive power to pave the way for building more border barriers — a tactic used often during the Trump presidency.
The Department of Homeland Security posted the announcement on the U.S. Federal Registry with few details outlining the construction in Starr County, Texas, which is part of a busy Border Patrol sector seeing “high illegal entry.” According to government data, about 245,000 illegal entries have been recorded in this region during the current fiscal year.
“There is presently an acute and immediate need to construct physical barriers and roads in the vicinity of the border of the United States in order to prevent unlawful entries into the United States in the project areas,” Alejandro Mayorkas, the DHS secretary, stated in the notice.
The Clean Air Act, Safe Drinking Water Act and Endangered Species Act were some of the federal laws waived by DHS to make way for construction that will use funds from a congressional appropriation in 2019 for border wall construction. The waivers avoid time-consuming reviews and lawsuits challenging violation of environmental laws.
Related stories
Although no maps were provided in the announcement, a previous mapshared during the gathering of public comments shows the piecemeal construction will add up to an additional 20 miles (32 kilometers) to the existing border barrier system in the area.
“The other concern that we have is that area is highly erosive. There’s a lot of arroyos,” said Starr County Judge Eloy Vera, the highest-elected official in the county, pointing out the creeks cutting through the ranchland and leading into the river.
Starr County is home to about 65,000 residents spread over about 1,200 square miles (3,108 square kilometers) that includes ranchland and part of the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge.
Environmental advocates say structures will run through public lands, habitats of endangered plants and animal species like the ocelot, a spotted wild cat.
“A plan to build a wall through will bulldoze an impermeable barrier straight through the heart of that habitat. It will stop wildlife migrations dead in their tracks. It will destroy a huge amount of wildlife refuge land. And it’s a horrific step backwards for the borderlands,” Laiken Jordahl, a southwest conservation advocate for the Center for Biological Diversity, said Wednesday afternoon.
During the Trump administration, about 450 miles (724 kilometers) of barriers were built along the southwest border between 2017 and January 2021. Texas Governor Greg Abbott renewed those efforts as part of his ongoing immigration enforcement from the state level after the Biden administration initially halted them at the start of his presidency.
The DHS decision on Wednesday contrasts the Biden administration’s posturing when a proclamation to end the construction on Jan. 20, 2021 stated, “building a massive wall that spans the entire southern border is not a serious policy solution.”
U.S. Customs and Border Protection had no immediate comment.
The announcement prompted political debate by the Democratic administration facing an increase of migrants entering through the southern border in recent months, including thousands who entered the U.S. through Eagle Pass at the end of September.
“A border wall is a 14th century solution to a 21st century problem. It will not bolster border security in Starr County,” U.S. Representative Henry Cuellar said in a statement. “I continue to stand against the wasteful spending of taxpayer dollars on an ineffective border wall.”
Political proponents of the border wall said the waivers should be used as a launching pad for a shift in policy.
“After years of denying that a border wall and other physical barriers are effective, the DHS announcement represents a sea change in the administration’s thinking: A secure wall is an effective tool for maintaining control of our borders,” Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, said in a statement. “Having made that concession, the administration needs to immediately begin construction of wall across the border to prevent the illegal traffic from simply moving to other areas of the border.”
