#has not and does not schedule its military operations

[intern-seraph]

if your activism can be significantly disrupted by a few hours of award show, you're just a bad activist

[raven-at-the-writing-desk]

Something has been bugging me since the end of the Playful land event: How does the world not notice that these people are never seen again after going to this park. Even if its stated that only the positive magicam posts are the only things that leave the park, surely those guest's families/friends/employers/neighbors that didn't attend the park wouldn't eventually notice their absence. Moreover, how does no one still on land notice that the moving park leaves whilst everyone is still on it, and it never comes back to drop them off.

Makes me wonder if Twst has some sort of United Nations that would be alerted of this and set a worldwide lock down, so when the park needs to connect to a mainland again the country's military can apprehended them.

One of the biiig question marks of both Glorious Masquerade and Stage in Playful Land are all of the potential repercussions of Rollo/Fellow's schemes coming into fruition. The stakes of these two events are notably much higher than your typical TWST event, and that opens their stories up to further scrutiny. I'll talk about GloMasq first, then Playful Land, since I feel the former is also relevant to the points the asker mentioned.

This is going to be kind of a long post, so I'll slap everything below a cut! ^^

I don't know how frequently this is brought up, but I've heard some say it's unrealistic how Rollo was able to find the seeds for a supposedly wiped out plant and cultivate a ton in secret for his master plan. Now, I'm willing to suspend my disbelief in this instance because:

Spite can make a person do insane things (and what is Rollo is not spiteful as heck)

Rollo has lore which paints him as a diligent person who has a talent for gardening, so it feels in line for his character; he also seems to have an interest in history and is extremely neurotic so I could buy that he obsessively researched until he came across records or some trail to the flowers

The Bell of Salvation's ringing twice in a row is what triggers the flowers to bloom, and this has not happened prior to GloMasq because Rollo is the one who is consistently tending to the bell + the bell normally has a preset schedule; anyone that passes by the flowers would do so when they are inactive, and they are such an old phenomenon to begin with that no one in modern day would really recognize it or the danger the flowers pose

The narrative of GloMasq does not call extended attention to HOW Rollo was able to get the seeds, so it's not something that comes to mind unless you as the fan speculate about it; this doesn't come across as a plot hole, but it would be one if the narrative had pointed it out because then it would practically be obligated to fill the details in

The other major fallacy of GloMasq is that Rollo's machinations would have inevitably led to chaos once the flowers reached the rest of Twisted Wonderland, as some sections of society are reliant on magic. Now, I disagree with the notion that mages could band together and fight back against the flowers; we've seen from how the NRC students handle it that this would be a pretty useless effort since only the super powerful (which are few and far between) would be able to muster up enough magic to overpower the flowers. The majority of people are non-mages though, so the argument could be made that these people could help the mages by weeding or something similar. The question is, could this truly outpace the growth and attack of the flowers, especially when the average mage has far lower magical reserves than the average NRC student??? Remember how long it took the NRC kids (who are mostly healthy, youthful, and strong) to weed just the flowers in the waterways? My money's on the crimson flowers just overrunning the entire world long before they can be plucked out.

I actually think most societies would still be intact and able to operate without magic, seeing as 90% of the human population (which is implied to be the predominant race) are non-mages. Only very select industries and professions require magic to operate, and these are overrepresented to us (the players) since we are seeing the perspectives of mainly students who attend an elite magic school. These magical sectors, as well as societies which run primarily on everyday magic use (like Briar Valley) are the ones that would be the most in danger. This most likely explains why Malleus in particular was so panicked about Rollo's plans: if fully realized, his people would be in peril. This is not outright stated, but can be inferred. The main story also retroactively affirms Malleus's fears of being powerless. He was always told by his grandmother that the Draconias have great power so they can defend their people's smiles. What happens if that magic is stripped away? Then he is no longer able to protect his people nor his loved ones. In this way, GloMasq works well as both a standalone event as well as supplements TWST' grander story. It does not challenge what we already know but does support it.

Altogether, most details in GloMasq make sense and the event doesn't go out of its way to create more questions than answers. They all tie together in the end to feed into the overall themes of forgiveness and atonement, which are also consistently present throughout the event. This... isn't the case for Playful Land. In fact, I would say that Playful Land does the opposite (in trying to explain plot holes, it creates a LOT more questions) and tries to hand wave everything away with one thing: money.

Firstly, Playful Land is kidnapping and trafficking innocent people (even if the park is said to be a more recent phenomena). Would their friends and family not notice they went missing and report this to the local authorities? My guess is yes, it's just not elaborated on in the event itself since the perspective through which the story is told is limited (Yuu doesn't know this world that well + the NRC kids, who are the people Yuu gets a lot of the lore from, are mostly privileged and don't need to worry about crimes of this magnitude). I believe the "people go missing, why aren't the police doing anything about it" can maybe allude to real world crimes that occur but aren't reported or resolved, which is very scary to think about. I don't know if this was the intention of the devs, but the comparison is certainly there and can be made. Or maybe it’s just that law enforcement hasn’t caught up yet?

It’s also odd to me that so many people were able to be taken by this huge, very showy moving park. I think that Fellow lures people out under the cover of night (which was the case with the NRC students, I will assume this is the case for the other victims too) and the park starts moving away from the pier after the guests go inside, but???? Even so, there are night owls and cities that don’t sleep. You mean to imply there were zero witnesses whatsoever??? Even though Playful Land is so big and bright, especially at night… Maybe this part plays into the idea that crimes may be reported but aren’t necessarily resolved…? That’s the only way I can rationalize it in my head.

Where the bulk of the issues start to come in is in alllllll the surrounding details. For example, a lot of the NRC students Fellow is kidnapping are connected to wealthy and influential families. How the heck are Fellow and his benefactors going to keep Vil’s fans, the Kingscholars, the Shrouds, the Asims, the hypothetical Leech mob family, and maybe even Maleficia herself and Malleus, from coming after their asses???? AND FELLOW SPECIFICALLY FUCKED UP BY ENCOURAGING THEM TO “INVITE THEIR FRIENDS” FROM SCHOOL… because guess who will be spilling the beans to the headmaster about students going missing the day after inviting everyone to go to this supposedly “free” amusement park?? All the students Fellow told them to blab to just so he could catch more of them 😭 Then from there it would definitely escalate and governments might get involved since Leona is a prince and Kalim has royal relatives. I could see Playful Land having to go on the run (as in, have supplies delivered to them rather then docking for them, knowing that police or military would be there to arrest them at ports). But they can’t do that forever, especially since not being able to dock effectively prevents them from picking up new prey.

With the combined powers of the NRC victims’ families, they would surely be able to challenge the people behind Playful Land, no?? Unless you mean to tell me these mysterious people somehow have more power than literal royalty AND the Asims combined??? And we’ve never heard of them until just now??? Okay, you’re starting to lose me here because this is adding on top of the lore we already have but in a way that comes off as difficult to believe since the amount of wealth and power some of the NRC kids have is already ridiculous.

Playful Land is also supposedly constructed by very powerful mages which makes me wonder why they got together to create such a thing???? Did they literally all get bribed with enough money to agree to this project? Were they deceived about the true nature of it?? Are the other 4 of the top 5 strongest mages involved in any way??? How was this not publicized that it was a project that very strong mages were working on given how few mages there actually are and how much Playful Land is talked about in online rumors?? And let's remember that the park also somehow has tech that easily disables Ortho's functions so he can't send a SOS signal or anything. Okay??? And you're telling me this supercomputer child who was made by a genius inventor CAN'T override it???

Speaking of online rumors, that’s another thing. How are the people behind Playful Land able to monitor any and all talk about their park to this degree?? This is the internet we’re talking about here, surely stuff will fall through the cracks or come to light eventually. Someone would leak insider info or make up conspiracy theories about the park, someone would say something. It doesn’t work if you claim the park cuts off wifi after hours so the only things circulating on socials are the positive experiences of the park. That’s still leaving a data trail implying the last place these missing people were seen was in this shady park… And even if the people behind Playful Land purged the web of the proof, it doesn’t stop others from saving or downloading that proof. It also doesn’t stop non-attendees from theorizing or spreading the news.

And what happens to all of the non-NRC students who got puppet’d???? Their fates are never addressed, and nor do any of the characters mention helping them. You’d think at least Kalim would try to lend a hand, even if the others are self-serving. But no, the NPCs that got turned into puppets are never relevant again.

The easy explanation given for everything is that there are very rich and very powerful people running these operations. They would be able to silence people who speak out against them or bribe the corrupt into complying or looking the other way. Maybe that’s just a sad truth I don’t want to acknowledge (because this stuff for sure happens irl 😞) but that all sounds WAY too convenient for fiction (where the devs have total control over the circumstances) especially when we’re given so little lore for who these benefactors actually are.

There’s still way too many questions and even turning on suspension of disbelief couldn’t stop those questions from arising in my head. At best, I think we could give the devs the benefit of the doubt and say this was intentional to keep up the idea of a “shadowy” underbelly to Twisted Wonderland society. Even so, that doesn’t account for every little thing and the event’s attempts to explain it all only makes more things to explain. There’s also themes of poverty and privilege that get touched upon, but never elaborated on in a meaningful manner; it feels kind of carelessly tossed in there despite how tricky and nuanced of a subject it is.

I tried to explain my perspective as best I can here! However, I admit that there may be bias in my judgment because I’ve made it no secret that GloMasq is my favorite TWST story event. Please let me know if you have any other issues with GloMasq’s narrative or if you have explanations for the issues I pointed out for Playful Land; I would love to hear your takes too ^^

[odinsblog]

Donald Trump took the stage in Greensboro, N.C. last Saturday calling for rounding up millions of Latinos across America and putting them in mass detention camps as part of “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” Unfortunately, this kind of rhetoric has become so common among the MAGA Republican playlist that it’s tempting to see it as a joke. But that wasn’t just somebody’s racist grandfather running off at the mouth or a standup comedian with bad taste playing to the crowd. My parents and grandparents would have called it a dog whistle, but my generation should know it’s a bullhorn. But whatever you call it, it was calculated, drafted, tested and approved as part of the far-right Project 2025 plan to turn back the clock on civil rights, women’s rights, workers’ rights and democracy itself. It was the white Christian nationalist agenda on full public display in all its un-American glory and we can’t afford to take it lightly.

Now, if you haven’t heard about Project 2025, don’t feel bad. Most people haven’t. Founded in 2022 by the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation, it’s an organization led by Trump insiders preparing for one nation under Trump if the twice impeached and four times indicted former president wins the November election and to call them dangerous is an understatement.

What do you think about overhauling federal law enforcement so that the Department of Justice and the FBI, designed to be independent and insulated from political influence, were controlled directly by a newly elected and emboldened President Trump so he could protect his minions from investigation, arrest and prosecution no matter how many laws they broke? Project 2025 loves the idea.

Want to bypass the Senate confirmation process and stop notifying Congress when we sell weapons to foreign governments? Project 2025 does. What about terminating every diversity, equity and inclusion program in the federal government? Project 2025 says right on. What do you think about invoking martial law, using the military as local law enforcement and locking up Trump opponents? Project 2025 calls that progress.

But how do they plan on doing all this? After all, the federal government is more than just one person in the Oval Office. Trump already learned that lesson when federal employees and even some of his own appointees refused to break the law just because he said so.

But Project 2025 has a solution to that roadblock. They call it Schedule F and it’s a plan to fire as many as 50,000 federal employees and replace them with dyed-in-the-wool MAGA fanatics who swear their loyalty not to America or the Constitution but to Donald J. Trump. They’re not even trying to keep it a secret. But why would they?

You see, Project 2025 isn’t confused about who they are. They’re the MAGA Manifesto committed to the unapologetic vision of right-wing nationalism and they don’t care who knows it. Let’s be honest, these guys are attacking President Biden for pushing “racial equity in every area of our national life, including in employment.” Is that supposed to be a bad thing? Are we supposed to think our president should not be fighting for equality and justice?

That’s what Project 2025 says. But that shouldn’t surprise us. After all, they don’t think folks who look like me are real Americans. Neither does Trump.

But they’re not clowns. They’re highly trained, well-funded political operatives dedicated to winning in November and remaking America in their white nationalist image. They’ve spent the past two years putting together a plan to do just that setting the highest stakes imaginable for this election.

(continue reading)

[usafphantom2]

AC-130 Gunship’s Laser Weapon Cancelled, 105mm Howitzer May Be Removed

The AC-130J was set to get the first operational airborne laser weapon, but that plan is over as the gunship changes to ensure its relevance.

Joseph TrevithickPUBLISHED Mar 19, 2024 1:56 PM EDT

The US Air Force no longer plans to flight test a laser directed energy weapon on an AC-130J Ghostrider gunship.

USAF

The U.S. Air Force has scrapped plans to flight test an AC-130J Ghostrider gunship armed with a laser directed energy weapon after years of delays. The Airborne High Energy Laser program for the AC-130J had for a time looked set to become the U.S. military's first operational aerial laser directed weapon. This all also comes amid a review of the AC-130J's current and future planned capabilities, which could see the gunships lose their 105mm howitzers, as part of a broader shift away from counter-insurgency operations to planning for a high-end fight.

Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC) confirmed that there are no longer plans to test the prototype Airborne High Energy Laser (AHEL) system on an AC-130J and provided other details about the current state of the program to The War Zone earlier today.

"After accomplishing significant end-to-end high power operation in an open-air ground test, the AHEL solid state laser system experienced technical challenges," an AFSOC spokesperson said in a statement. "These challenges delayed integration onto [the] designated AC-130J Block 20 aircraft past the available integration and flight test window."

One past US Air Force rendering of an AC-130 with a laser directed energy weapon. USAF

The original hope was flight testing of an AC-130J with the AHEL system would take place sometime in the 2021 Fiscal Year, but this schedule was repeatedly pushed back. In November 2023, AFSOC told The War Zone that a laser-armed Ghostrider was set to take to the skies in January of this year, something that clearly did not occur.

Lockheed Martin received the initial contract in 2019 to supply the AHEL's laser source for the system and lead the effort to integrate the system onto an AC-130J. The complete AHEL system also includes a beam director and other components.

A now-dated US Special Operations Command briefing slide discussing the AHEL program and the components of the weapon system itself. SOCOM

"As a result, the program was re-focused on ground testing to improve operations and reliability to posture for a successful hand off for use by other agencies," the statement added.

This is all further confirmed by the Pentagon's 2025 Fiscal Year budget request, which was rolled out last week, and does not ask for any new funding for AHEL. Official budget documents say this is because the program is expected to close out in the 2024 Fiscal Year.

What "other agencies" might now be in line to benefit from the AHEL program's work and the exact status of the 60-kilowatt class laser directed energy weapon system developed under the program are unclear. AFSOC directed further questions to U.S. Special Operations Command, which The War Zone has now reached out to for more information.

The U.S. Navy's Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division (NSWC Dahlgren) had already been deeply involved in the AHEL program. The Navy has been very active in the development and fielding of various types of shipboard directed energy weapons, including another 60-kilowatt class laser directed energy weapon called the High-Energy Laser with Integrated Optical Dazzler and Surveillance, or HELIOS. Lockheed Martin is also the prime contractor for that system.

The US Navy's Arleigh Burke class destroyer USS Preble pierside in San Diego in July 2022. The ship's HELIOS directed energy weapon system can be seen on a platform immediately in front of the main superstructure. USN

The U.S. Army and U.S. Marine Corps have also been working to develop and field different types of air and ground-based directed energy weapons.

The Air Force has been working on at least one other aerial laser directed energy weapon in recent years, under the Air Force Research Laboratory's (AFRL) Self-protect High Energy Laser Demonstrator (SHiELD) program. The SHiELD effort was centered around a podded system for tactical jets ostensibly intended to help defend against incoming missiles, though it would have the ability to engage other target sets. In the past, the stated goal was to begin flight testing of the SHiELD pod in 2025, but its current status is unclear.

A rendering of a US Air Force F-16C Viper fighter with a podded laser directed energy weapon. Lockheed Martin

The Air Force is pursuing other directed energy weapon programs, including for base defense use on the ground. Additional work is understood to be going on in the classified realm, including efforts tied to the larger Next-Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) initiative.

For the Air Force's current fleet of 30 AC-130Js, the end of the AHEL program comes amid larger questions about the future of Ghostrider's armament package and other current and future capabilities. There are growing signs that the Ghostriders are set to lose their 105mm howitzers as part of this reassessment of the aircraft's capabilities.

"Initiate engineering analysis and development to remove the aft weapon system (105mm Gun), refit the aft section, and optimize crew workload in support of the United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) crew reduction initiatives," is the plan for the AC-130Js in the 2024 Fiscal Year, according to the Pentagon's latest budget request. The War Zone has reached out to AFSOC for further clarification.

The Air Force originally planned not to include a 105mm howitzer in the armament package for the AC-130J, which was originally focused more on the employment of precision-guided missiles and bombs than guns at all. The service subsequently changed course and had more recently been in the process of integrating improved howitzers onto the Ghostriders. That work came to a halt last year after the start of the capability review. As of last November, only 17 of the 30 AC-130Js had gotten this upgrade.

AFSOC has been taking this new look at the Ghostrider's current and future planned capabilities in large part due to discussions about how AC-130Js might contribute to future high-end conflicts, especially one in the Pacific against China. AC-130Js, which are today primarily tasked with providing very close support to special operations forces on the ground, currently operate almost exclusively in permissive and semi-permissive environments and at night.

AHEL has been presented in the past as being ideally suited to supporting lower-intensity counter-insurgency-type missions.

"Without the slightest bang, whoosh, thump, explosion, or even aircraft engine hum, four key targets [an electrical transformer, the engine of a pick-up truck, communication equipment, and a parked drone,] are permanently disabled," now-retired Lt. Gen. Brad Webb, then head of AFSOC, said in a 2017 interview with National Defense magazine, describing a notional mission for a laser-armed AC-130. "The enemy has no communications, no escape vehicle, no electrical power, and no retaliatory intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capability. Minutes later, the team emerges from the compound, terrorist mastermind in hand. A successful raid."

In line with all this, the Air Force is also looking to add a new active electronically-scanned array (AESA) radar to these gunships, "allowing the platform to detect, target, identify, and engage across a spectrum of threats at longer ranges and react with greater precision," according to Pentagon budget documents. You can read more about the benefits of adding an AESA to the AC-130J here.

Other specialized C-130 variants belonging to AFSOC have been heavily involved in the testing of a palletized weapon system called Rapid Dragon. Rapid Dragon offers a way to readily transform existing cargo aircraft into launch platforms for AGM-158 Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile (JASSM) cruise missiles and other stand-off munitions. SOCOM has previously expressed interest in the past in integrating precision-guided munitions with longer reach onto the AC-130, in part to help keep those aircraft away from increasingly capable enemy air defenses. A return to a focus on precision-guided munition employment when it comes to the Ghostriders could be important for ensuring their continued operational relevance.

Altogether, the exact mix of capabilities found on the AC-130Js looks set to significantly evolve in the near term. However, a laser directed energy weapon is no longer on the horizon for the Ghostriders.

Howard Altman contributed to this story.

Contact the author: joe@twz.com

@warzonewire via X

[bunnytalksf1]

GPDA / FIA thoughts

So in (a rather belated, in my opinion) response to the penalty given to Max Verstappen for swearing in a press conference in Singapore, (and kind of also for Leclerc's 10k$ suspended fine in Mexico), the GPDA (Grand Prix Drivers' Alliance) has made an instagram and published an open letter to the FIA asking Sulayem to "treat them like adults".

I've seen a lot of praise for this from fans, but my view on it is that it's just missed the mark, and that the drivers' alliance is in severe need of a proper union representative who isn't a driver, and is ideally a specialist of some kind. The statement is a bit flimsy in general, and doesn't really lay down any kind of demand, nor a concrete threat should the demands not be met.

There's also some (rightful) criticism that this in particular is a weird hill to die on. We saw no collective action after Qatar, where there were serious issues regarding the conditions the drivers were racing in, which caused serious concerns from both teams and from fans. There was no action over racing next to military bases, or over the right to political statements within the sport (which in actuality acts as a ban on left wing statements rather than a ban on politics as a whole: see McLaren this year). There has been no noise at all regarding the very questionable stewarding at the Brazilian GP, which had even fans noticing the flaws in the systems in place regarding delays in VSC calls, yellow flags, and red flags, particularly in cases where rain is involved. Although safety in the sport has come a long way since 2014, and crashes are very, very survivable, it seems weird to want to tempt fate with recovery vehicles on track and low visibility. There's also been no threat of collective action regarding the way the schedule is expanding to become borderline unworkable for the personnel in and out of F1.

So, the swearing ban being the deciding factor in this is a little-- weird, to say the least. But the collective action for most of these issues would probably be the drivers not racing, which isn't something that will likely ever happen because of contracts, and because the teams don't want to miss out on points, prize money, or open up a gap. Ultimately if a driver refuses to race, teams have reserves waiting in the wings, and apart from maybe 2 or 3 drivers on the grid, all would face termination of their contracts. Given that for most of them, this career is a childhood dream, and given that even without the loaded nature of this career path, they would lose their job with little education or other options outside of motorsport.

So, what does the GPDA actually need to do?

For one, it needs to make its role clear. Are we primarily concerned with safety, or with defending the right to self-expression for the drivers? The GPDA CAN do both, but they need to be clear about it. The original statement lumping in jewellery and underwear rules (imposed for safety) with the swearing ban (FIA being overly controlling) isn't great because it muddles their points.

Second, it kind of needs to expand. I would argue it needs to expand to, at the very least, reserve drivers, and ideally into the teams themselves, i.e. Team Principals and other team figures who talk to the media. This is largely to strengthen the effect of any collective action taken by giving the drivers a support system. The teams themselves are also negatively impacted by the FIA's inconsistency, and by loopholes and negligence (Sainz's penalty at the Las Vegas GP in 23 springs to mind, but there are other instances).

The FIA's main issue, as is noted by many others, is their inconsistency as well as the lack of transparency on how they actually operate. An organisation that is simply meant to be there as a non-profit governing body, in the last twelve months alone, has had allegations of race-fixing, incompetent and dangerous stewarding, covering up and allowing a high-profile sexual harassment scandal despite being implored to step in and investigate it, and the President, on top of all that, has implied in interviews that he thinks the FIA should recieve more monetary compensation for doing their jobs. As a non-profit. Whilst not disclosing where the money collected from fines is going.

But ultimately the systems in place from both the teams and the FIA and liberty media mean that refusing to race is not an option, but there has to be some form of collective action threatened or carried through or else the drivers are just shouting into a void. And ultimately, whilst I love George Russell, and think he's a great spokesperson, he's also not educated enough to lead a union, nor should it be his job.

I also think that all twenty drivers and reserves should refuse to speak in FIA conferences, like Verstappen, until the issues are resolved. Takes no revenue from the teams, or from the press, who can still find drivers elsewhere in the paddock. It takes revenue from Liberty Media and the FIA and it will take a maximum of two races for them to give in given the inconvenience it causes.

But the threat and the action actually have to be there, past an instagram infographic or a vaguely worded open letter.

[mariacallous]

The need for good intelligence has never been more visible. The failure of the Israeli security services to anticipate the brutal surprise attack carried out by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023 reveals what happens when intelligence goes wrong.

In contrast, in late February 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s planned three-day “special military operation” to invade Ukraine and topple the government was pushed onto the back foot by the U.S. and U.K. intelligence communities. While Putin’s rapid seizure of Crimea by a flood of “little green men”  in 2014 was a fait accompli, by the time of the 2022 invasion, anticipatory moves including the public declassification of sensitive intelligence ensured that both the intelligence community and Ukraine remained a step ahead of Putin’s plans.

Yet, despite the clear and enduring need for good intelligence to support effective statecraft, national security, and military operations, U.S. intelligence agencies and practitioners are undermined by a crisis of legitimacy. Recent research investigating public attitudes toward the U.S. intelligence community offers some sobering trends.

A May 2023 poll conducted by the Harvard University Center for American Political Studies and Harris Poll found that an eye-watering 70 percent of Americans surveyed were either “very” or “somewhat” concerned about “interference by the FBI and intelligence agencies in a future presidential election.”

A separate study, conducted in 2021 and 2022 by the Intelligence Studies Project at the University of Texas at Austin and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, found that only 56 percent of Americans thought that the intelligence community “plays a vital role in warning against foreign threats and contributes to our national security.” That number is down 10 points from a previous high—if it can even be called that—of 66 percent in 2019, and the downward trend does not give us cause for optimism. Reframed, that statistic means that in 2022, an alarming (in our view) 44 percent of Americans did not believe that the intelligence community keeps them safe from foreign threats or contributes to U.S. national security.

Worse, despite abundant examples of authoritarian aggression and worldwide terror attacks, nearly 1 in 5 Americans seem to be confused about where the real threats to their liberty are actually emanating from. According to the UT Austin study, a growing number of Americans thought that the intelligence community represented a threat to civil liberties: 17 percent in 2022, up from 12 percent in 2021. A nontrivial percentage of Americans feel that the intelligence community is an insidious threat instead of a valuable protector in a dangerous world—a perspective that jeopardizes the security and prosperity of the United States and its allies.

The most obvious recent example of the repercussions of the corrosion of trust in the intelligence community is the recent drama over reauthorizing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). First introduced in the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, Section 702 is an important legal authority for the U.S. intelligence community to conduct targeted surveillance of foreign persons located outside the United States, with the compelled assistance of electronic communication service providers. According to a report published by Office of the U.S. Director of National Intelligence (DNI), 702 is “extremely valuable” and “provides intelligence on activities of terrorist organizations, weapons proliferators, spies, malicious cyber actors, and other foreign adversaries.”

Section 702 was scheduled to “sunset” at the end of 2023 if not reauthorized. Yet Congress failed to reauthorize 702 by the end of 2023, electing to punt the decision—as is so often the case—to this spring, when it was finally reauthorized (with some important reforms) in late April 2024, but it was only extended for two years instead of the customary five. An unusual alliance of the far right and the far left squeezed centrists and the Biden administration, which was strongly pushing for a renewal that would protect the civil liberties of U.S. citizens and not needlessly hobble the intelligence community in protecting the United States itself.

But the frantic down-to-the-wire negotiations about reauthorizing some recognizable form of 702 obscured a deeper problem at the heart of the contemporary Americans’ relationship with intelligence that has been brewing over the last decade: The fundamental legitimacy of a strong intelligence community—and the integrity of its practitioners—has been questioned by U.S. lawmakers on the far left and the far right, perhaps reflecting a misguided but increasing consensus of tens of millions of Americans.

This trend is now a crisis.

Section 702’s troubled journey faced queries from the privacy-oriented left, where those with overblown concerns about potential abuse by the intelligence community viewed reauthorizing 702 is tantamount to “turning cable installers into spies,” in the words of one opinion contributor published in The Hill. The intelligence community’s revised authorities (some adjustments were required given the 15 years of communications technology development since the amendment was first passed) were called “terrifying” and predictably—the most hackneyed description for intelligence tools—“Orwellian.” On the power-skeptical right, Section 702 is perceived as but another powerful surveillance tool of the so-called deep state.

In response to legitimate concerns about past mistakes, the intelligence community has adopted procedural reforms and enhanced training that it says would account for the overwhelming majority of the (self-reported) mistakes in querying 702 collection. According to a report from the Justice Department’s National Security Division, the FBI achieved a 98 percent compliance rate in 2023 after receiving better training. Further, the Justice Department and the DNI have gone to unprecedented lengths to publicly show—through declassified success stories—the real dangers that allowing 702 to lapse would bring to the United States and its allies.

Never before has an intelligence community begged, cajoled, and pleaded with lawmakers to enable it to do its job. After all, a hobbled intelligence community would still be held responsible should a war warning be missed, or should a terrorist attack occur.

For instance, Gen. Eric Vidaud, the French military intelligence chief, was promptly fired over intelligence failings related to Putin’s (re)invasion of Ukraine despite the Elysée’s criticisms of the warnings made by the United States and United Kingdom as “alarmist.” And Maj. Gen. Aharon Haliva, director of Israeli military intelligence, recently resigned over the Oct. 7 attacks despite the fault probably lying across Israel’s political landscape as well. Intelligence professionals pay more than their share of the bill when their crystal ball stays cloudy.

The hullabaloo over 702 is not the only recent instance painting the actions of the U.S. national security apparatus as questionable state activity conducted by dishonest bureaucrats, and some recent history helps put the recent events into a broader downward trend in trust.

In 2013, National Security Agency (NSA) mass-leaker Edward Snowden, a junior network IT specialist with a Walter Mitty complex, sparked a needed but distorted global conversation about the legitimacy of intelligence collection when he stole more than 1.5 million NSA documents and fled to China and ultimately Russia. The mischaracterization of NSA programs conveyed by Snowden and his allies (painting them as more intrusive and less subject to legal scrutiny than they were) led to popular misunderstandings about the intelligence community’s methods and oversight.

It was not only junior leakers whose unfounded criticism helped to corrode public faith in intelligence; it has also been a bipartisan political effort. In 2009, then-U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi claimed that the CIA had lied to her after she wished to distance herself from the agency’s “enhanced interrogation techniques”—which critics call torture. But Pelosi’s comments earned a “false” rating from Politifact’s “truth-o-meter.” Then-CIA Director Leon Panetta countered that “CIA officers briefed truthfully.”

Some suspicion of a powerful intelligence community stems from genuine failings of the past, especially the CIA’s activities in the early and middle stages of the Cold War, which included some distasteful assassination plots, the illegal collection of intelligence domestically (such as surveillance of Americans on political grounds, including illegally opening their mail), and the LSD experimentation on unwitting Americans as part of its infamous MKULTRA program.

Most of these excesses—characterized as the CIA’s “Family Jewels”—were reported to Congress, which held explosive hearings in 1975 to publicize these activities, bringing the intelligence agencies into the public realm like never before. Images of Sen. Frank Church holding aloft a poison dart gun, designed by the CIA to incapacitate and induce a heart attack in foreign leaders, became front page news. These serious failings in accountability were the dawn of rigorous intelligence oversight.

Public trust in government was already sinking when, in 1971, the Pentagon Papers revealed that politicians had lied about US activities in the deeply unpopular Vietnam war. The Watergate scandal the following year added fuel to fire. Although the CIA was not directly involved in Watergate, the involvement of former agency employees led to a wider belief that the agency was tainted. And in the late 1970s, CIA morale sank to an all-time low when then-President Jimmy Carter began the process of sharply reducing its staff, attributing the decision to its “shocking” activities.

In response to congressional findings and mountains of bad press, subsequent directors of the CIA considered the criticisms and made numerous changes to how the intelligence community operates. While the intelligence community (and its leaders) made good-faith efforts to operate strictly within its legal boundaries, be more responsive to congressional oversight, and embrace some level of transparency, the public image of the CIA and the broader intelligence community didn’t change. After the Cold War ended, the preeminent vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, called twice for the disbanding of the CIA. Such political pummeling of the role of intelligence and the integrity of its practitioners was bound to leave a mark.

The politics of distrust are back to the bad old days. By 2016, distrust of the intelligence community had returned with a vengeance: then-presidential candidate Donald Trump claimed that NSA was circumventing domestic legal constructs to spy on his campaign through its close partnership with the Government Communications headquarters (GCHQ), the British signals intelligence agency. (The NSA said those claims were false and GCHQ called them “utterly ridiculous”.) As president-elect, Trump also compared U.S. intelligence to “living in Nazi Germany.” Once Trump entered the Oval Office, the FBI was a frequent target for his invective thanks to the investigation into possible Russian interference in the 2016 election.

While the intelligence community is a long way away from the excesses of the 1970s, it is not perfect. Intelligence is an art, not a science. It is not prediction so much as narrowing the cone of uncertainty for decision-makers to act in a complex world. Even when acting strictly within the law and under the scrutiny of Congress and multiple inspectors general, the intelligence community has been wrong on several important occasions. It failed to stop the 9/11 attacks, got the assessment that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction spectacularly wrong, and was made to look impotent by Osama bin Laden for nearly a decade before the U.S. Navy SEALs caught up with him on a CIA mission in Pakistan in May 2011.

Errors still happen because intelligence is hard, and the occasional failure to warn, to stop every attack, or to prevent every incorrect search query is inevitable. Today, mistakes are self-reported to Congress; they are no longer hidden away as they sometimes were in the past. Yet the intelligence community has done a poor job telling its own story and self-censors due to widespread over-classification—a problem that the DNI has acknowledged, if not yet remedied. It has only belatedly begun to embrace the transparency required for a modern intelligence apparatus in a democratic state, and there is much work yet to be done.

It is the job of the intelligence agencies to keep a calm and measured eye on dark developments. In a world in which the panoply of threats is increasing, the role of the intelligence community and its responsibilities within democratic states has never been greater. If the community cannot be trusted by its political masters in the White House and Congress, much less the American people, then it will not be given the ability to “play to the edge,” and the risk is that the United States and its allies will be blind to the threats facing them. Given the adversaries, the consequences could be severe.

U.S. intelligence has had a rebirth of confidence since 9/11 and the incorrect judgments of the Iraqi weapons program. It was intelligence and special operations that hunted and killed bin Laden, U.S. law enforcement that has kept the U.S. homeland safe from another massive terror attack, and the intelligence community correctly predicted the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

That increased sense of purpose and morale is moot if the U.S. people, Congress, or the president (sitting or future) do not trust them. This crisis of legitimacy is a trend that may soon hamper the intelligence community, and the results could be unthinkable. Getting the balance between civil liberties and security right isn’t an easy task, but the intelligence community must have the tools, trust, and oversight required to simultaneously keep faith with the American people while serving as their first line of defense.

[runwayrunway]

A New England Planespotter In...England (And Scotland)

So I've just gotten back from two weeks in London, almost directly beneath one of the arrival paths to Heathrow. One weird thing about being in London was that...my home airport, Logan, is big, sure, lots of international flights, but it's weird in that it's only a hub for three airlines, one of which is domestic. Being sandwiched between NYC and Newark does that to a place. So we get a pretty small selection of airlines here, all things considered.

Heathrow? Literally while taxiing from the runway to the gate I saw us go past an Air Mauritius and a Royal Brunei Airlines plane (and I didn't have my camera out to take a picture!). On the way out on my way home I saw a RwandAir plane (and it was at an angle behind me where I couldn't get a picture of it either!). I saw multiple A380s a day from British Airways and Singapore Airlines, and even a 747 flying for Korean Air Cargo went overhead! (747s never fly to Logan.) I saw THAI, Air India, TAROM, Air Serbia, and the full complement of gulf carriers - which I expected - and China Southern Airlines, which I somehow didn't.

Hey, wait, is that tailfin...

There she is! (I was so happy to see her that I think I startled the person sitting next to me.)

There were of course the usual faces as well - Delta, American Airlines, and even JetBlue now flies to London. I didn't see any full-size FedEx planes, but I did see a FedEx Feeder ATR 72 (at least I think it's a 72) at Edinburgh Airport.

(she was quite far away and the image is inevitably very crunchy)

A few other cargo airlines more typical of Europe were parked nearby her - DHL, Maersk Air Cargo (in the old Star Air livery), West Atlantic, and whoever that is at the end - the livery feels so familiar, actually, but there's no wordmark and half of me thinks it's a wet lease that hasn't been painted. If anyone remembers what's on the tip of my tongue, please do tell me.

While entirely expected, I also enjoyed seeing little Loganair ERJs around in Edinburgh. They're so short! I was arriving in an A320 and even then I had to wait until I was on the ground to take a decent picture that wasn't half cut off by the plane I was actually in.

I don't know enough about Loganair's routes to know what they actually fly to Edinburgh, but a tiny part of me was sad I didn't see any of their littler prop planes. I have a huge soft spot for the Britten-Norman Islander, the first prop plane I ever got to fly on, which Loganair operates two of. Among their uses in the fleet is operating the shortest scheduled route in the world, which lasts around a minute and is about as long as the runway I landed on when I took all those pictures. I won't pretend it's not on my bucket list. (To be fair, I am also legitimately interested in the archaeological sites on Papa Westray...just maybe not interested enough to take a longer flight to see them.)

These aren't all the airlines I saw, but the rest I'm saving for other days and other posts. Still, there is one more type of airplane I saw which I think I have never actually seen in Massachusetts. When I was at Edinburgh I heard this bizarre loud thing that sounded like nothing I'd ever heard before and looked up and saw what I thought was a C-130. Then I realized it was actually an A400M with its weird scimitar propellers. As far as I'm aware this is the first airlift plane I've seen in person that wasn't a static display and it's definitely the first plane I've seen that sounds like that. I also got to see my first ever helicopter that wasn't a tiny little general aviation thing in the form of a Chinook going right over my head at...really not that high, but it didn't have its transponder on so I couldn't tell you more exactly. Is that a thing in London? Airplane-sized military helicopters at low heights over populated areas with their transponders off? I don't remember ever seeing that before but I suppose it has been a while. It was very, very strange.

And that's a non-exhaustive list of the things you just don't get to see in Boston! I will definitely talk about some of these airlines in full someday, but some of them I probably won't. I at least had a lot of fun pointing at airplanes and going "wow...".

[steelbluehome]

I just want you all to know, I didn't originally want this to be any kind of political blog. But I am queer, I live in a red state, I can't afford to move, I am disabled, I am on several prescription medications, and I am literally scared af that Trump will win.

I have nightmares about it.

If Trump wins, sometime during his 4 years, I will die.

I will lose my financial support, or my meds will be priced beyond my financial ability to purchase them. The air and water quality will no longer be under a department of the federal government. I believe that hate crimes will no longer be punished or prosecuted, and that their instances will skyrocket.

So you are seeing a lot of political posts here now. I just hope it encourages you to vote, and maybe make sure that like-minded people vote as well. Keep them from refusing to vote out of a defeatist attitude. Provide transportation if they need it. Convince them that it is important. Their one vote does count! At least argue that it won't take long at all, if they vote by absentee ballot they don't even have to leave the house, offer to mail it for them. Please do what you can. You will not want to live in this country under Trump.

Even if you think the things I have written are hysteria or hyperbole, still vote. PLEASE!

Project 2025

"The 2025 Presidential Transition Project paves the way for an effective conservative Administration based on four pillars: a policy agenda, Presidential Personnel Database, Presidential Administration Academy, and playbook for the first 180 days of the next Administration."

****

Trump’s plans if he returns to the White House include deportation raids, tariffs and mass firings

***

Donald Trump has insisted on the campaign trail that life was better under his administration, and he has vowed to reverse many of the policies enacted since he left office. His successor's sweeping climate change agenda, new restrictions on guns and protections for transgender people would all be on the chopping block, he has said.

***

Trump reveals how he would govern if reelected to another term in the White House

"he was asked, should states monitor pregnancies to determine if an abortion happened in a state where it is illegal? Trump responded: "I think they might do that."

Then, should states process women for abortions? He said: "The states are going to say. It's irrelevant whether I'm comfortable or not."

Now, again, this is a consistent "states will do what they should do" policy from the former president. It is a policy proposal. It is also political. But this idea that states monitoring pregnancy is something that he could accept is incredibly notable. Whether he's a president who vetoes legislation or not, he's the leader of the Republican Party making these statements."

***

Trump may get another chance to be president. He's planning an aggressive second term

"If elected again, Trump would gut the federal bureaucracy and remake it in his ideological view, using something called Schedule F to fire career nonpartisan civil servants. A similar purge and rebuilding of the Republican National Committee and several key state Republican parties has taken place in recent years, with Trump's daughter-in-law Lara leading the RNC alongside former North Carolina GOP Chair Michael Whatley.

Trump said in the interview he would not hire anyone who believed Biden won the 2020 election, continuing to repeat false claims that voter fraud cost him the presidency but saw Republicans elected up and down the ballot in key states."

***

Time

". . . an imperial presidency that would reshape America and its role in the world. To carry out a deportation operation designed to remove more than 11 million people from the country, Trump told me, he would be willing to build migrant detention camps and deploy the U.S. military, both at the border and inland. He would let red states monitor women’s pregnancies and prosecute those who violate abortion bans. He would, at his personal discretion, withhold funds appropriated by Congress, according to top advisers. He would be willing to fire a U.S. Attorney who doesn’t carry out his order to prosecute someone, breaking with a tradition of independent law enforcement that dates from America’s founding. He is weighing pardons for every one of his supporters accused of attacking the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, more than 800 of whom have pleaded guilty or been convicted by a jury. He might not come to the aid of an attacked ally in Europe or Asia if he felt that country wasn’t paying enough for its own defense. He would gut the U.S. civil service, deploy the National Guard to American cities as he sees fit, close the White House pandemic-preparedness office, and staff his Administration with acolytes who back his false assertion that the 2020 election was stolen."

***

This is real. He is telling you exactly what will happen. Click on the links, read the entire articles, understand what is happening.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Steve Brodner :: What's a Military for, Anywayzz??

* * * *

[THE REPUBLICAN ROAD TO CRAZYTOWN]

Wednesday was one of the wildest days on Capitol Hill, as FBI Director Chris Wray faced a conspiracy-addled House Judiciary Committee in a hearing that really did go “off the rails.”

Can you make sense of this:

Chair Jordan appeared on Fox News’s Hannity after the FBI oversight hearing that went off of the rails, where he said:

“A federal judge disagreed with what Christopher Wray testified to today and he did that decision on July 4th just eight days ago for goodness sake that's exactly what happened with uh with the decision the the uh when it came to the uh the the decision with um uh I drew a blank there so I apologize I got a huge echo in my ear and I can't I can't even hear.

“But but yeah that's exactly what what happened they uh they pre-bunked this story and Facebook specifically asked the FBI is the Hunter Biden story Russia misinformation and the FBI said no comment this is after they had the laptop for an entire year after they've been telling all the big tech companies get ready for a hack and dump operation it's coming and it's going to involve Hunter Biden and then it happens and they get that fundamental question no comment and this is from the foreign influence task force director the lead on that that foreign influence task force that Christopher Wray created.”

Can anyone who isn’t an avid viewer of Faux Snooze or a consumer of other conservative media understand what Jungle Gym was talking about?

Jordan speaks almost entirely now in the language of conspiracy theories; only the “extremely online” members of MAGA can make sense of the word salad that was tossed around.

The hearing, and Jordan’s appearance on Hannity, demonstrate that there is a bigger issue here:

The Republican Party is now running on insanity.

Jordan is pushing the issue of “FBI censorship” to legitimize the Hunter Biden laptop - which was mentioned so many times that Eric Swallwell used his five minutes to wonder if the GOP had another subject. According to witnesses, the Biden laptop has had its data manipulated so that Russian misinformation could be inserted into it. But all the tracks the GOP Crazy Train rolls on lead here, because the lies and falsehoods created and told by MAGA about Hunter Biden is the centerpiece of Trump’s 2024 campaign.

While the MAGA Republicans have spent nearly four years attempting so far unsuccessfully to legitimize The Hunter Biden Laptop and get their fantasies into corporate media, all the non-conservative media that have investigated the laptop have found the tale dubious and not credible.

Jordan and the rest of MAGA know they are running out of time. The 2024 campaign season begins this fall, and Congress always has an even shorter schedule than normally during election years. If Jordan and his co-conspirators can’t make anything stick to Joe Biden before January, their mission to restore Trump to the White House will have failed.

This is why hillbilly moron James Comer (R-Klueless) is now depending on fugitive Chinese spies to provide evidence against President Biden. The fact he does so is proof of their desperation born of their continuing failure to slime the president since taking control of the House this year.

Trump’s lies about having the 2020 election stolen from him has accelerated the slow decline of conservatism within the Republican Party over the past 40 years since the arrival of what became the Gingrich Revolution. Trump’s insanity has now turned the collective crazy of the Republican “kook’ fringe into the GOP’s DNA.

That we have one of our two political parties in such a collective psychosis is a dangerous spot for the nation to be in. The House Republicans know no bill on any topic that they pass will come out of the Democratic-majority Senate, so what they are passing are “messaging” bills to show the MAGA base that they are “fighting the good fight.” To much of the base, the fact that the antics the MAGA House Republicans are engaging in get a negative response from the Democrats is a plus - their representatives are “owning the libs.”

And so many of the far right “stars” have their own political and financial base, which means the GOP leadership in the House holds little to no sway over them. Thus, when Marjorie Traitor Goon’s amendment to strip all funds for support of Ukraine out of the “must-pass” NDAA was tossed by an overwhelming majority against her pro-Putin nuttiness, she blithely announced to Quiverin’ Qevin that this meant she would be unable to vote in favor of the amended NDAA. McCarthy can only afford to lose three more Republicans before he loses his majority to pass that bill (which will never come back from the Senate with any of the Kulturkampf amendments still in it), since Democrats have announced they will not vote in favor of the bill due to the amendment stripping the Pentagon of the ability to grant leave and travel assistance to service members who require abortion services in another state if they are unlucky enough to be stationed in one of the Republican-run states that have now abolished the right to an abortion in that state.

Regarding the NDAA, the Republicans managed to hang 70 far right amendments on the legislation in voting on Thursday, with every “moderate” “Biden district” “moderate” voting in lockstep with the nutballs the “moderates” claim to dislike.

Democrat Jim McGovern had this to say about today’s votes:

“This process has shown us the priorities of the Republican majority. Protecting the reputation of confederate leaders. Banning books because they want to rewrite history. Controlling women's bodies, overturning Roe vs. Wade wasn't enough. They want to ban abortion nationwide. They want to restrict a service members' ability to get travel expenses covered. Attacking LGBTQ+ service members. Cutting off aid to Ukraine in the middle of their fight against Putin. Stifling diversity and equity in the military. And shrugging off climate change which the Department of Defense says poses a direct threat to our national security. You can't make this stuff up, Mr. Speaker...

“The Speaker of the House needs to grow a spine. Not for his own reputation but the good of his country. This is a terrible, terrible process. These amendments are pathetic that have been made in order. They are offensive. It disrespects and diminishes this institution. It is sad to see this small group of extremists calling the shots here, but that is what is happening right now.

“Let me again remind everybody. In this rule, 70 Republican amendments, six bipartisan amendments, and four Democratic amendments. On what planet is that even considered reasonably fit? This is outrageous. A big chunk of the Democratic amendments, you may not agree with them, but we ought to have 10 minutes of debate and vote up or down. They say that this is about getting woke out of the military. They blocked my amendment to help homeless vets get rides to medical appointments. What the hell is woke about that? They blocked it because it was woke. I don't even know what they are thinking.”

Following the votes on amendments Thursday night, the three top House Democrats - Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Minority Whip Katherine Clark and Democratic Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar - issued a blistering statement outlining their opposition to the revised NDAA bill:

“House Republicans have turned what should be a meaningful investment in our men and women in uniform into an extreme and reckless legislative joyride. The bill undermines a woman’s freedom to seek abortion care, targets the rights of LGBTQ+ servicemembers and bans books that should otherwise be available to military families.”

Adam Smith, top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, and other subcommittee ranking members also released their own lengthy statement criticizing the legislation. These Democrats would normally be vocal supporters of any defense-related bill, but they’re not doing that now.

“The bill we passed out of committee sent a clear message to our allies and partners, global competitors, and the American people that democracy still works, and Congress can still function….

“That bill no longer exists. What was once an example of compromise and functioning government has become an ode to bigotry and ignorance.”

What clearly demonstrates where the Krazies are really at is the report that one of them lobbied a Republican “moderate” to vote for the Jackson anti-abortion amendment on the grounds that it would be stripped from the bill when it came back from the Senate. Performance is everything with these mendacious morons! All they wanted these amendment votes for was to get on Faux with their bullshit, and to con the morons who vote for them in their fundraising. Their cynicism and malicious acts are truly stunning.

The NDAA passed the House by a 219-210 vote Friday morning, but, with all the amendments, it is DOA on arrival in a Democratic-majority Senate.

House Republicans have shown this week what happens when the post-2020 election MAGA GOP is elevated into power.

It doesn't matter whether the politicians are driving the Republican base or the base is driving the behavior of elected Republicans. The result must be defeated and kept away from power. As many times as necessary until the radicalism is beaten out of the party or it ceases to exist in its contemporary form.

[TCinLA ::: Thats Another Fine Mess]

[back-and-totheleft]

"I don't assume I have any power"

Robert Downey Jnr, no stranger to nocturnal excess, once observed how an evening out with Oliver Stone was 'like pagan Rome, 26AD'. When I meet the director at lunchtime in a hotel room in Edinburgh he looks very much as if he is regretting just such a night-before. His eyes seem wary of the light; his big gap-toothed grin could equally be a wince; he reaches with some fervour for coffee.

In fact, Stone's fatigue is innocently explained. He has, he says, flown in the previous night from Bangkok where he has been scouting locations for his life of Alexander the Great, starring Colin Farrell, which goes into production next month. (Stone is not a man to shy away from the big subject: having made his obsessive epics on JFK and Nixon, there are not that many ways to up the stakes, but Alexander is possibly one.)

'We're doing the stage work in England,' he says, 'a lot of other stuff in Thailand and Morocco. It's a fast shoot. We have to do the whole thing in a hundred days. So it's going to be like an old-fashioned military machine.'

In the past year, Stone has had a good deal of first-hand experience of how just such an operation might work. He is in Edinburgh to launch the documentary film he has made about Castro's Cuba, Comandante, the result of an unprecedented three days of interviews with the dictator. The film was scheduled to be shown by the HBO network in America in May. 'But unfortunately,' Stone explains, apparently surprised, 'it got politicised by the Cuban American lobby in Miami. Millions of emails were sent to HBO. They really pounded it. And, of course,' he adds, 'Castro gave them some juice by arresting these dissidents in April.' HBO pulled the film.

The irony of this is, Stone suggests, straightfaced, that he was not at all trying to make anything 'political'. 'I mean, I ask him a few questions. But it was a broad picture of a strong man, a comandante. I wanted to ask him his feelings about life and death, about the future, about globalisation, philosophy rather than politics…'

The best moments of their encounter offer little human insights, as Stone's neurotic camera dwells on the detail of Castro's life: the dictator's boots with a Nike logo, the exercise regime he undergoes in his office, keeping in shape, at 75, for his people; his coy admission of having enjoyed Titanic and Gladiator and how Sophia Loren was his pin-up. Sometimes, too, Stone's bluff line of questioning works. 'Everyone seems to like you, Fidel. Why don't you hold an election?'

Often though, Stone's film threatens to take its place alongside the key sycophantic interviews of our times, Clive James on Barbra Streisand, say, or Tony Benn on Saddam Hussein. In part this seems a technical fault. The intimacy Stone is afforded by the use of digital cameras does not sit well with his love of bold gesture and grand emotion; he struggles with subtlety and contradiction and wit. Damien Hirst, oddly, once said that 'Oliver Stone had no irony, and I applaud him for that'. That lack is very much to the fore in Comandante.

Stone the interviewer is predictably anxious to be a co-star, sporting a dictator's moustache, and stranded somewhere between acolyte and best buddy. Much of the fascination of Comandante thus comes from his increasingly clumsy efforts to establish a kind of locker-room banter with Castro.

At one point Stone, with a leery grin, offers to break the American blockade by smuggling Castro some Viagra (as if, we are invited to understand, either man would ever require it?). In a limo, Stone becomes Ruby Wax and starts rummaging through the stuff on the back seat. Inevitably, he comes up with a gun. 'Do you still know how to use it, Fidel?' he wonders, his arm around the older man's shoulder. Just for a moment Castro looks tempted to remind himself.

Despite appearances, the pair had met only once before, in 1989 at the Havana film festival, which featured Salvador, Stone's first film. 'I thought he was a charming man,' he recalls, 'and a movie star, no question about it. The hard part of Comandante was cutting. We could have used almost anything from the 30 hours of film. I was amazed at his inner strength. His morality. He really believes in a dream. It's like Don Quixote.'

And is he as naive as Quixote at times, too?

'No, he reads voluminously. He reads the internet, he reads books, he loves writers, he's friends with [Gabriel García] Márquez. He's an introspective man. He talks about the terrible effects of global warming…'

And he also would have sanctioned a nuclear war…

'He had a good life, but he chose a hard path, and he has stuck with it. Stayed in power. The truth is, it seems to me, the people like him.'

In conversation, as in his work, Stone is not inclined to shades of grey. In the film he happily lets Castro get away with his assertion that Cuba is the 'most democratic country on earth' and explain how he has furthered the cause of gay liberation (Castro expelled many gays, along with 'other scum' in 1980, and they are not allowed to join his party). I wonder whether Stone decided not to press him on these issues because he thought it important simply to give Castro a platform?

'Whether he is in denial or not, my job is not to judge the veracity of his answers,' Stone says. 'My job is to try to open him up, really like a movie director tries to open up an actor. If you see deception, it is up to you. If you see him lying about torture or about gays, then that is up to you. I did not see it, but I present it for you to judge.'

He suggests there are some freedoms in Cuba that are not enjoyed in America, the freedom to see his film for a start. Could he work there, live there, do a Hemingway?

'No,' he says, with slightly belligerent illogic, 'because I was raised in the North, in North America. But if I grew up in Cuba I would grow up healthy, with an education, no doubt a foreign language, whereas if I grew up in Honduras or Guatemala I would probably get sick, likely die before I was three. I'd be scared shitless of government troops coming through and taking my mom and dad out and saying, "Who did you vote for in the last election?"'

But Castro has been in a position to create proper democracy?

'The people in these places do not care about elections,' Stone says. 'They care about good water and healthcare. The things of life. The things that Iraq for example needs now. No one there is wondering about voting, they want electric ity and sanitation. That's what matters.'

It would be fair to say that Stone, the Vietnam veteran, has never run away from a controversy. (Rather, he's prepared to fly half way around the world to promote one.) Comandante, of course, offers him another chance to expose some raw nerves at home, and for good measure he has just completed a similar film about Yasser Arafat. These are the latest chapters in a career in which he has spent Oscar night with Mexico's Zapatista guerrillas and been sued for responsibility in the murders committed in America by a young pair of teenage lovers who had stayed up all night watching his film Natural Born Killers. (The case was thrown out, but the film, a glamorously violent 'attack' on glamorised violence, struggled to recover.)

Though he is reluctant to say so, Stone's element is this kind of scandal. It allows him to indulge his maverick self-image. In some respects he proves, according to Michael Douglas (who won an Oscar in his film Wall Street) 'that in Hollywood you can be an artist and a capitalist at the same time', though Stone's critics would dispute the first description and he would take exception to the latter.

For a while, at least, he seemed to have understood the trick of making powerful issue-led films (Salvador, Born on the Fourth of July) that also appealed to the box office. (Platoon, his 'anti-establishment' Vietnam film, made $160 million.) He says he sees all of his films as coming out of the same place. 'I work from a need to dramatise what I see in the world around me,' he says, a vision that typically involves an element of megalomania, a dose of paranoia, and a liberated relationship with historical fact.

Are his insights about Castro feeding into his idea of Alexander the Great?

'Being with a world leader, seeing him work, has given me more insight into power, certainly. It is interesting to feel it, that power. The thing about these people, be it JFK or Nixon or Castro, is that the things that they are dealing with are the things we all deal with except on a much grander scale. I mean Nixon's government, it seemed to me, was a result of his childhood demons. Castro had a very happy childhood. And that seems to be the root of his sense of morality. He has married just one time; he may have many other children, but he has stayed true to that idea of marriage.'

In this (arguable) propriety, Stone has suggested, Castro reminded him of his late father, Louis. If he were making a film of his own life - and perhaps all his films are that to a degree - you are left in little doubt that his father would figure centrally in it. Louis was a successful Wall Street broker; the family had Jewish roots, a fact which Oliver was told to deny because of his father's fears of persecution. Pointedly, Stone dedicated both Nixon , his study in paranoia, and Wall Street , his morality play on greed, to his father (whose evening Scotch Oliver once laced with LSD); the films could be seen, in turn, as a working through of his own demons.

Despite his apparent obsession with powerful men, though, Stone does not believe that he is in thrall to power himself, still less trying to force the world to fit his idea of it. 'I don't for one second assume I have any power,' he says. 'I can make a movie that has an effect on the world, like JFK say. But real power is something you build on, can hold on to. In movies you start over every fucking time. I am concerned about power, but I have no power.'

I quote to him something his wife once said - 'I don't think Oliver could make a movie without being completely in love with the main character' - and wonder if that applied to Castro?

'To a degree,' he says. 'But that does not mean that I would be in love with a dictator if I did not admire him. I mean I'm not going to fall for Saddam Hussein. But I would try to humanise him. Nixon was the greatest liar of all. But I tried to humanise him. We should not get into the Hollywood thing of always having a sympathetic hero, because it undermines drama. Can we really say we like Oedipus? Or Lear? But they make great drama. America sentimentalises drama.'

There must, given his engagement in the here and now, be a temptation to bring his own American vision up to date? Has he thought about doing an Iraq film, or an al-Qaeda film?

'Well, I think a terrorist film would be an important thing to do,' he says, 'but you know even Comandante can't get on the air in America. The British are much more independent-minded: you see that in this inquiry that is going on. In America it is much more easy to float a stupid idea - you know, Iraq is the source of the 9/11 attacks - and people in the main will buy into that without questioning it too much.'

The great challenge for someone like him, in this environment is, he says, to stay true to himself. He hopes that, in 20 years' time, at 75, he will still stand for something, like Castro. 'It is very hard to maintain a vision and a voice. Nobody wants singular statements.'

Stone is pessimistic about his prospects of getting his own singular statements financed because he believes these attitudes are hardening. 'There's a danger,' he says, 'that we are turning into a giant lynch mob, you know, that mentality. The greatest film to be made at the moment would be a version of The Ox-Bow Incident, that Henry Fonda movie. A movie about hanging three people in a cowboy town. That blind vigilantism is what you see everywhere in America now, in the media, in the people. America wants to see Schwarzenegger wiping up the baddies. They wanted vengeance for 9/11. They wanted to kill Arabs. That was why Bush got away with it. It was a lie, that war, and as Goebbels I think said, the bigger the lie, the more they will believe it.'

However much you think that phrase could happily sum up the director's career, Stone is one of the few Americans prepared, eager, to say that the reaction to 11 September was 'disproportionate and hysterical'. What we need, he says, is a Costa-Gavras to come along and make a big film about terrorism and imperialism. Part of him certainly wishes he could do it but he believes there 'would be so much pre-judgment of it, no one would want to go near it'.

Instead, Stone is looking forward to finding some contemporary resonance in Alexander the Great's imperial progress. Baz Luhrmann is making a film about Alexander too (with Leonardo DiCaprio as the lead) and you imagine the pair will offer, if nothing else, a compelling contrast in style: Stone's polemical realism against Luhrmann's insistent light-footedness.

Stone says, of course, that there is no element of competition, though it is hard to imagine him not relishing it. The only thing he admits to be racing against is the script. 'You could tell any number of stories about Alexander because he is such a powerful character. But we are going to make an attempt at one. It's a big-budget movie, but of course,' he says, grinning, 'I will be shooting it like a guerrilla, I guess.' He likes that idea. 'No rest for one hundred days!' For a moment, the prospect seems to wake him up.

-Tim Adams, "Oliver's One Man Army," The Observer, Aug 31 2003

[swldx]

6080Khz 0258 4 APR 2024 - VOICE OF AMERICA (UNITED STATES OF AMERICA) in ENGLISH from MOPENG HILL. SINPO = 55333. English, dead carrier, @0259z w/Yankee Doodle int fb news anchored by Richard Greene @0300z. A powerful 7.2 magnitude earthquake struck Taiwan's eastern coast near Hualien County on Wednesday morning, killing nine people and injuring more than 900. Taiwan's biggest earthquake in at least 25 years is likely to tighten the supply of tech components such as display panels and semiconductors as manufacturers in the global tech powerhouse restore operations at affected facilities. The bodies of six foreign aid workers killed in an Israeli airstrike were moved Wednesday to Egypt for repatriation to their homelands, while Israel faced wide condemnation for their deaths. A total of seven staff members of the U.S.-based food charity World Central Kitchen were killed in the late Monday airstrike that United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said was “unconscionable” and "an inevitable result of the way the war is being conducted.” U.S. President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are scheduled to speak Thursday, according to a U.S. official familiar with planning for the call. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken held talks with NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg on Wednesday on how to bolster the alliance’s long-term military support for Ukraine. The United States will host a NATO summit in Washington from July 9 to July 11. Blinken discussed priorities for the meeting with his counterpart as the alliance celebrates its 75th anniversary this year. Uganda's constitutional court has declined to annul or grant a permanent injunction against the enforcement of the country’s anti-gay law. In their ruling Wednesday, the judges said the law does infringe on some fundamental human rights. Lawyers representing members of Uganda's LGBT community described the ruling as retrogressive. A 12-year-old suspected of shooting and killing a classmate and wounding two girls at a school in Finland said he had been motivated by bullying, police said Wednesday. Flags flew at half-staff as the northern European country observed a day of mourning a day after the boy opened fire in a classroom in Vantaa. Police also said that the young suspect had been a student at the school only since the beginning of the year. The police opened an investigation into murder and attempted murder but said the suspect has been handed over to social services as he could not be held in police custody because of his age. A New York judge on Wednesday denied Donald Trump's bid to delay his April 15 trial on charges stemming from hush money paid to a porn star until the U.S. Supreme Court reviews claim to presidential immunity in a separate criminal case. The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear on April 25 the former U.S. president's arguments that he is immune from federal prosecution for trying to overturn his 2020 election defeat to President Joe Biden. In a court ruling on Wednesday, Merchan said Trump had waited too long to raise the issue. @0305z “Daybreak Africa” anchored by male announcer (w/African accent). MLA 30 amplified loop (powered w/8 AA rechargeable batteries ~10.8vdc), Etón e1XM. 100kW, beamAz 350°, bearing 84°. Received at Plymouth, MN, United States, 14087KM from transmitter at Mopeng Hill. Local time: 2158.

[lifeafterthelayoff]

Part II, Day 38

Interviews: 5 x Clinton x 5.

I had five interviews this week, one on each day. I didn’t plan it that way; it’s just how the universe (and schedules) aligned. A nice way to cap a week like that is with a Thelonious Monk record, a puzzle, and some decaf green tea.

Monk’s record, like so many things he did, was clever on a few levels. It’s five tunes, all written by the man himself, performed by a group of five musicians. 5 x Monk x 5.

The 5 x 5 part has a history beyond this jazz record, extending into the radiotelegraph world. After telegraph communications moved from wired to wireless, operators required confirmation of the quality of an incoming transmission to ensure accuracy.

The person receiving a transmission would send back a report with a rating of both the readability and signal strength. The scale has evolved since its first use in the 1910s, but looked like this in 1929:

Readability responses: R1 - Unreadable R2 - Poor but readable—send each character twice R3 - Fair—readable at slow speed, send code twice R4 - Good—readable at moderate speed R5 - Easily readable

Strength of signals responses: K1 - Very weak—hardly audible K2 - Moderately weak K3 - Medium strength K4 - Moderately strong K5 - Strong

(Via Wikipedia, of course.)

And so, 5 x 5 means both easily readable and strong. You may have heard of it as “loud and clear.” Something to aspire to, as a content designer, I’d say!

The hip language of the be-bop jazz players probably included this slang, likely adopted from young men returning from the military, post-WWII.

How does that relate to my week? Five interviews in five days. I certainly hope that I came across as 5 x 5, loud and clear. (Not that I’m shouting in these interviews. Could you imagine?)

One interview each day may not seem like much from the outside. What could it take, 45 minutes each? Yes, that’s the time that my camera was on, the transmission going out 5 x 5. But there’s so much more to an interview than the time spent on the Zoom or Google Meet.

I’ve conducted many, many interviews from the other side of the table (or camera), so I have a feel for common questions and what good answers should include. And it’s different for each role and at each stage in the interview process. 

My prep includes intensive review of the job description, copying it into a Google Doc to mark up, highlight, and dissect. I’ll set up another doc with anticipated questions I may receive and a list of questions I want to know about that role.

If it’s my first interview, I want to know the company history. I’m interested in how long the interviewer has worked there, so I’ll view their LinkedIn profile. You know, gathering context like a good content designer always does. 

And then I’m ready to deliver my best self 5 x 5, loud and clear.

[usafphantom2]

End Of An Era: A-10C Thunderbolt II Demo Team Announces Final Airshow Season

The A-10 Demo Team has just announced their farewell tour 2024.

David Cenciotti

A-10 Demo Team Farewell Tour 2024

The U.S. Air Force A-10C Thunderbolt II demonstration team is the unit in charge of highlighting the A-10C’s capabilities during airshows across the United States and to recruit, retain and inspire the next generation of Airmen. The team will perform its duty for one last season this year: in fact, as announced on social media, 2024 is going to mark the final airshow season for the Warthog demo.

The farewell tour does not come unexpected though: last month, the 355th Wing at Davis-Monthan AFB, Arizona, where the Demo team is based, begun divesting its fleet of A-10 aircraft after nearly 50 years.

The first model of the aircraft to arrive at Davis-Monthan was an A-10A on March 2, 1976. This model was assigned to the 355th Tactical Fighter Wing that arrived here in 1971 and replaced the Vought A-7D Corsair flown by the 355th TFW. The 355th TFW was later reclassified as the 355th Tactical Fighter Training Wing, prompting the 354th, 357th, and 358th Fighter squadrons to train U.S. Air Force Pilots on the A-10A aircraft.

A-10 Demo Team

The heritage paint scheme of the A-10C Demo Team, introduced for 2023 season.

The U.S. Air Force has plans to divest the entire fleet of A-10 aircraft within the next 3-5 years, when the iconic jet will be replaced by the F-35.

“The A-10 has been the symbol of Davis-Monthan Air Force Base for many years, and it will continue to be a symbol for the Airmen of DM, a symbol of their commitment, excellence and service,” said U.S. Air Force Col. Scott Mills, 355th Wing commander and A-10 pilot in a public statement. “For now, we’re divesting a single squadron during the summer-fall timeframe of 2024.”

Coinciding with the divestment, Davis-Monthan plans to expand its Rescue Footprint, which may lead to additional utility of the HC-130 aircraft and the HH-60W helicopter. Airframes expected to arrive from the Air Force Special Operations Command include the MC-130 and OA-1K.

A-10 Demo pilot

Capt Lindsay “MAD” Johnson, Demo Team Commander, poses in front of her aircraft.

“From an Ops personnel standpoint, this divestment arguably allows a more expeditious stand-up of the F-35, even as that program continues to struggle with a variety of delays,” said U.S. Air Force Col. Razvan Radoescu, 355th Operations Group commander.

The aircraft 82-648 was the first to be retired from service at Davis-Monthan on Feb. 6, 2024, and transited from the 354th Fighter Squadron to the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group for final maintenance procedures and display preparation for the Davis-Monthan where hundreds of retired Aircraft are stored.

“There will always be a job for maintainers; it may not be on the A-10, but the Air Force needs maintainers to sustain airpower,” said U.S. Air Force Col. Clarence McRae, 355th Maintenance Group commander, “Perhaps the biggest draw of future maintainers will be in the F-35 community. Airplanes are still going to break, and we are still going to fix them.”

One of the memes that you could find online during the early days of the Ukrainian invasion by Russia.

Anyway, there’s still time to attend an airshow and watch the A-10 Demo Team, commanded by Capt Johnson, an Instructor Pilot and Flight Commander assigned to the 357th Fighter Squadron, Davis-Monthan AFB, Arizona and previously served also in Texas and Korea, at her second season as the commander of the team.

Here’s the schedule.

About David Cenciotti

David Cenciotti is a journalist based in Rome, Italy. He is the Founder and Editor of “The Aviationist”, one of the world’s most famous and read military aviation blogs. Since 1996, he has written for major worldwide magazines, including Air Forces Monthly, Combat Aircraft, and many others, covering aviation, defense, war, industry, intelligence, crime and cyberwar. He has reported from the U.S., Europe, Australia and Syria, and flown several combat planes with different air forces. He is a former 2nd Lt. of the Italian Air Force, a private pilot and a graduate in Computer Engineering. He has written five books and contributed to many more ones.

@Aviationist via X

[dragoneyes618]

(October 29, 2023 / JNS) Hamas is preventing hundreds of American citizens from leaving the Gaza Strip, U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan revealed to CBS on Sunday, ahead of a scheduled call between President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“The challenge right now … is that the Egyptians are prepared to let Americans and other foreign nationals out of Gaza. The Israelis have no issue with that. But Hamas is preventing their departure and making a series of demands,” Sullivan told CBS’s “Face the Nation” program.

“We’re trying to work through that to create a circumstance where all of the Americans who are in Gaza are able to get out. It is a priority for the president. He has no higher priority than their safe passage out,” he added.

Some 500 to 600 U.S. citizens are believed to be stuck in the Hamas-controlled enclave, Washington previously confirmed. Sullivan did not elaborate on the demands the terrorist group was making to permit their departure.

In a separate interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Sullivan said Biden would speak again with Netanyahu on Sunday and stress the need for the Israeli army “to make every possible effort to distinguish between terrorists and Palestinian civilians during the ground operation in Gaza.”

Hamas’s use of human shields “creates an added burden for Israel but does not lessen Israel’s responsibility under international law to distinguish between terrorists and civilians and to protect the lives of innocent people,” claimed the Biden administration official.

The U.S. has been asking Jerusalem “hard questions” about “Israeli military objectives and the steps they have taken and intend to take to achieve those objectives,” added Sullivan.

“We’ve asked them hard questions, the same hard questions that we would ask ourselves if we were seeking to conduct an operation to take out a terrorist threat,” he continued. “We pressed them on questions like objectives and matching means to objectives, about both tactical and strategic issues associated with this operation.”

The Israel Defense Forces continues to expand its ground operations in the Strip.

Soldiers of the 52nd “The Breachers” Battalion, part of the Armored Corps’ 401st “Iron Tracks” Brigade, who entered the northern Gaza Strip on Saturday, raised the Israeli flag on one of the buildings there, according to video documentation shared online.

A soldier recording his comrades raising the flag can be heard in the video saying that three weeks after the Oct. 7 massacre of Israelis by Hamas terrorists, troops “lift the flag of Israel in the heart of Gaza, along the beach. We will not forget, we will not forgive and we will not stop until victory.”

Israel launched “Operation Swords of Iron” on Oct. 7 after Hamas invaded southern Israel, murdering at least 1,400 people, wounding more than 5,000 and taking over 200 hostages back to Gaza. According to the IDF, the families of 230 people have been notified that their loved ones are being held by Hamas.

[mariacallous]

The recent reshuffling of the Russian government and presidential administration represent qualitative changes to Vladimir Putin's aging regime. The losers were those directly responsible for the preparation and execution of the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Putin's new government is weighted much more clearly in favor of the clans that formed under his rule. According to Alexei Levchenko, editor of The Insider, the rise of the “princelings” — relatives of Putin and his closest associates — suggests that the government is preparing for a new stage in the transition of power.

While most observers are discussing the unexpected appointment of new Defense Minister Andrei Belousov, much less attention has been paid to the simultaneous demotion of the main planners of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Although both Sergei Shoigu and Nikolai Patrushev were given new positions (as we know, Vladimir Putin rarely lets anyone leave his circle completely), the change in their jobs does not look like a promotion — to say the least.

After serving as FSB director from 1999 to 2008, Patrushev was tasked with leading Russia’s Security Council, a coordinating body operating under the authority of the presidential administration and staffed largely with special services officers, generals, and former intelligence officials. Under Patrushev’s highly influential leadership, the council has become a kind of think tank aimed at fighting against “enemies” inside Russia, at masterminding schemes of political repression, and at dealing with any potential threats to Putin's regime of personal power. It is rumored that the lists of foreign agents and new candidates for undesirable organizations are approved at Security Council meetings every Friday.

The Security Council played a key role in the analytical preparation for Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The operational reports and coded messages that passed through this body — and which were condensed by Patrushev personally — are believed to have promised a quick and glorious victory on the Ukrainian front.

Success in the “short, victorious war” was to be secured by the shiny new Russian army, a brand created by Sergei Shoigu and triumphantly sold to Vladimir Putin at parades, military exercises, and well-choreographed forums in Moscow’s Patriot Park. The PR successes of Shoigu's tank biathlons were so impressive that even Western military analysts began to consider Russian troops “the second best army in the world.”

The sandcastle collapsed in the first month of the war. Rather than crushing the enemy using its modern Armata “super tanks,” Russian soldiers attempting to advance on Kyiv in Soviet-era T-72s were killed en masse by Ukrainian forces wielding Western-supplied Javelin missiles. ” The Security Council and Ministry of Defense blamed each other, with sources close to the military blaming the very wrong analysis of Patrushev’s group, and sources friendly to the FSB and the Security Council blaming rampant corruption in Shoigu’s ministry.

But the Kremlin could not confess to such a catastrophic failure. That's why the two long-time, high-level Putin confidants were replaced in a manner that made it appear as if it were simply part of a routine, scheduled rotation at the beginning of Putin's new presidential term. In practice, however, neither Shoigu nor Patrushev will have the same opportunities as they did before. Shoigu will not become Russia’s new mastermind of political security, as he lacks the necessary skills and access to the infrastructure of the security services. For Patrushev’s part, the appointment of a man once seen as the second most powerful figure in the country to the role of “presidential aide on shipbuilding” looks like mockery.

The emergence of Andrei Belousov as Defense Minister indicates Putin's deep distrust of the military. But then again, the president has never trusted his country’s generals. That began in 2001, when Putin replaced the last military officer to hold the top job in the MoD, Igor Sergeyev, with his ex-KGB colleague Sergei Ivanov. The Kremlin chief has always been afraid of rebellion — and as demonstrated by Yevgeny Prigozhin's antics of 2023, which were supported by several generals, that fear was not groundless.

Belousov's surprise candidacy for his new post appears natural in hindsight. A workaholic economist absolutely devoted to Putin could not be kept in the job of first deputy prime minister forever. Isolated from all Russian clans and without his own team, Belousov came into conflict with half of Russia's oligarchs and business elite, whose profits he actively “confiscated” for the benefit of the state budget — and also with Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, with whom he never found a common language. Putin could not simply throw away such an important and useful person, especially when Belousov’s anomalous attributes — the absence of a personalistic team and no traces of serious corruption, combined with meticulous administrative abilities — were so fitting for the suddenly open post in the Defense Ministry.

For opponents of Russia’s war in Ukraine, this is bad news. Belousov, a cold, introverted statesman, will be expected to cleanse the military establishment of corruption and direct the freed-up funds to the increasingly efficient killing of Ukrainian military personnel and civilians. Shoigu's former economic team is already being dismantled in the harshest possible manner, a process that shows the supreme commander-in-chief's extreme disappointment. However, defeating the military corporation will not be an easy task. In the army, Belousov, who has no military experience, will be seen as nothing less than the second coming of Anatoly Serdyukov.

Serdyukov, a businessman and former tax official who served as Russia’s Defense Minister from 2007 to 2012, was tasked with reforming the country’s armed forces and creating an efficient, “professional” military — better equipped, smaller in troop size, and more financially responsible. Several aspects of the reforms, such as major cuts to Russia’s officer corps, were met with fierce opposition from the army’s “old guard.”

Putin’s other personnel moves appear to preserve the previous balance of factions, at least at first glance. However, while there has been no change in the quantitative nomenclature of positions, there has been a change in the quality of those positions. Mishustin's new government has moved away from the dichotomy of previous cabinets, in which supervisors-slash-deputy ministers and sectoral ministers often came from different teams. This created a conflict that worked to the Kremlin's advantage, allowing it to avoid over-strengthening any of the members of the government.

This time, the clans of the Russian government have distributed responsibility quite openly. The Rostec-Sergei Chemezov vertical has emerged, evident in the link between First Deputy Prime Minister Denis Manturov and Minister for Industry Anton Alikhanov. Transportation and logistics are linked to the Rotenbergs, who are close to both Deputy Prime Minister Vitaly Savelyev and the new Minister of Transportation Roman Starovoit, the former governor of the Kursk Region.

Former FSB men who had previously taken over the agriculture sector retained control not only over the Agriculture Ministry, but also saw the promotion of Dmitry Patrushev — son of the freshly appointed “presidential aide for shipbuilding” Nikolai — to the post of supervising Deputy Prime Minister.

The team of Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin — represented by the head of the Ministry of Economy Maxim Reshetnikov, Minister of Education and Science Valery Falkov, and the Deputy Prime Minister for Construction Marat Khusnullin — has seen its representatives retain their posts. Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Trutnev has two ministers of his own — Alexei Chekunkov, head of the Ministry for the Development of the Far East, and Alexei Kozlov, head of the Ministry of Natural Resources.

The biggest loser, oddly, looks like Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, who lost one of the figures in the new government makeup — Deputy Prime Minister Viktoria Abramchenko. Although the loss does not look critical, the beginning of the cutback in spheres of influence foreshadows a future career decline for Mishustin himself toward the end of Putin's term.

Mishustin has a reputation as an extremely ambitious bureaucrat, but he avoids showing it, remaining the modern equivalent of the inconspicuous Nikita Khrushchev in Stalin's Politburo. However, the post of the Prime Minister is an extremely important one, as in the event of any kind of force majeure, he will become the acting head of state. And the closer we get to 2030, the more arguments Putin will have to appoint a truly “dear” person as prime minister.

As a regime ages, authoritarian leaders have less and less trust, even in their inner circle. Once former friends turn into powerful bosses themselves and start playing their own games. This forces the dictator to periodically thin out and shake up the elites.

During Putin’s 24-year reign, the banker Sergei Pugachev, special services associates Viktor Ivanov and Vladimir Yakunin (who were once considered aces in the Kremlin deck) have fallen out of the boss’s inner circle. At the current stage of the reshuffle, it seems that representatives of the Yeltsin “family” have finally been distanced from the Kremlin. In the newest incarnation of the presidential administration, Alexandra Levitskaya, wife of the once influential Alexander Voloshin, former chief of staff during Putin's first term, has lost her position as an adviser.

And the closer the transition of power gets, the more often the leader’s closest relatives appear to be the most reliable potential successors. Nursultan Nazarbayev in Kazakhstan and Islam Karimov in Uzbekistan, for example, tried to pass power to their daughters — but both failed. Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus also dreams of monarchic succession.

Vladimir Putin's daughters still seem to be on the sidelines, but the appointment of Sergei Tsivilev, husband of Putin’s great-niece Anna, as Minister of Energy, already looks quite revealing. And Anna herself, by the way, also holds an important position in Putin's value system as director of the “Special Military Operation” veterans' fund, which enjoys a multibillion-dollar budget.

The example of the Tsivilevs is not the only case of the rise of “princelings” as a result of the recent reshuffling of power. The appearance of Yuri Kovalchuk's son Boris at the head of the Accounts Chamber and his rise to the position of Deputy Prime Minister of Dmitry Patrushev fall in the same line.

The elite, wanting to consolidate its position, will try to appoint more and more of its children, wives, nieces, and nephews to senior positions. But it is this very symptom that often becomes a harbinger of change, when, in the final stage of a dying regime, the authorities fail to resist the fact that society is tired of stagnation.

[summarychannel]

After Sisi's speech and the launch of the red line, Israel activates the war code and reveals a massacre threatening the Egyptian border

Updates on the Al-Aqsa Flood operation presented in this episode of Samri Channel. The beginning of the official launch of the humanitarian truce between Israel and the Islamic Resistance Movement Hamas, which is scheduled to continue for 4 days, during which hostages held in the Gaza Strip will be released in exchange for Palestinian detainees. This "humanitarian truce", which was mediated by Qatar, Egypt and the United States, came on the forty-ninth day of the war between Israel and Hamas. 50 hostages will be released in exchange for 150 Palestinian detainees in batches during the duration of the truce.

Aid flowing to the besieged Gaza Strip will also increase during the first truce since the beginning of the war that has been ongoing for nearly 7 weeks. The Israeli army escalated its targeting across the Strip a few hours before a temporary truce took effect in the Gaza Strip. Jabalia camp in the northern Gaza Strip, Nuseirat in the centre, and Khan Yunis and Rafah in the south witnessed intense bombardment, resulting in dozens of deaths and injuries, in addition to targeting several hospitals.

Meanwhile, on Friday, Israeli army spokesman Avichai Adraee sent a message to the residents of the Gaza Strip, saying: “The war is not over yet. The suspension of fire for humanitarian purposes comes temporarily.” The Israeli army spokesman pointed out that "the northern Gaza Strip area is a dangerous war zone and it is forbidden to move around it." He added: "For your safety, you must remain in the humanitarian zone in the south of the Strip." He continued: "It is only possible to move from the north of the Gaza Strip to the south via the Salah al-Din Road. The movement of residents from the south of the Gaza Strip to its north will not be allowed in any way."

In a parallel context, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi stressed that the forced displacement of Palestinians is a red line that Egypt does not accept and will not allow. He added in his speech at the “Long Live Egypt Conference” in Cairo Stadium, that if the Palestinians leave their lands, they will not return to them again, stressing that the Arab region is facing a grave crisis in addition to the threats it has been suffering from for decades, declaring that the Palestinian issue is facing an extremely dangerous and sensitive curve. In light of an uncalculated and inhumane escalation. Al-Sisi denounced the use of "the approach of collective punishment and committing massacres as a means of imposing a reality on the ground that leads to the liquidation of the Palestinian cause, the displacement of the Palestinian people, and the seizure of the land."

He also stressed that Egypt seeks to bring in the largest amounts of aid to alleviate the suffering of more than two million Palestinians under siege, stressing Egypt's keenness to carry out its responsibilities towards the Palestinians. He said that the Rafah crossing has never been closed and will not be closed to humanitarian aid entering the Gaza Strip. He added, "All Egyptians participated to alleviate the suffering of the Palestinians in Gaza, stressing that the work started by the volunteers is not finished, especially since there are 2.3 million Palestinian citizens under siege and in need of all relief materials and humanitarian aid, in light of the cuts in water, fuel, food, and medical supplies."

Finally, the Israeli military pilot, Nof Erez, said that it is possible that the Israeli army has implemented the “Hannibal Protocol,” which allows the killing of Israelis, during its response to the attack launched by the “Hamas” movement and the Palestinian resistance factions on October 7, 2023, against settlements. In the Gaza Strip.

“Hannibal” is a controversial military protocol, the use of which has been attributed to the Israeli army since its official adoption in 2006, and allows the lives of captured soldiers to be risked. It returned to the forefront again after Palestinian factions in Gaza captured dozens of Israeli soldiers, including high-ranking military personnel, in Operation “Al-Aqsa Flood” on July 7. October 2023.

In a statement to the Israeli newspaper "Haaretz", the pilot, Lieutenant Colonel Erez, indicated the possibility of his country's forces that intervened to deal with the Hamas attack implementing the "Hannibal Protocol", which the Israeli army uses to prevent the capture of its soldiers, even if it leads to their killing. Erez said that "it is not known whether the warplanes and drones fired on the hostages when responding to the attack by Hamas," but added: "It appears that the Hannibal Protocol was implemented at some point" on October 7. Erez explained, "When a situation of hostage-taking is discovered, this requires 'Hannibal', knowing that the Hannibal maneuvers that we conducted over the past twenty years were limited to one vehicle carrying hostages, but what we saw (October 7) is considered a large-scale Hannibal."

 Israeli media report that Lieutenant Colonel Erez was dismissed on October 31, 2023, after criticizing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Israeli army announced that Erez was dismissed after expressing his opinion on “political issues” while on active duty. Erez's statements come after a Haaretz report showed, on Saturday, November 18, 2023, that an Israeli military helicopter opened fire on "Palestinian militants" and Israelis participating in a party organized near Kibbutz "Ra'im" on the outskirts of the Gaza Strip on October 7 last year.

#Egypt #Palestine #Gaza