* Blog & notes for the current week.
DAYLOG MON 17 MAR: Donald Trump's spasmodic economic actions are suggesting to many that he is deliberately trying to cause a recession -- leading to the question of why he would want to. Billionaire Mark Cuban, who has a popular account on BlueSky, gave one answer: Trump starts a recession, interest rates fall, the billionaires get (in effect) cheap money, and the government doesn't pay so much on debt servicing.
As Cuban more or less points out, managing the national / global economy is not easy even for the competent, and the Trump regime is not competent at anything but criming. They could well end up with a crushed economy and stagflation. Cuban writes: "Do I think they can thread the needle? No." If things get bad enough, at least the complacent may start to take notice.
* With regards to Trump's stated determination to annex Canada, a poll of Americans showed ~10% thought the USA should seize the country; ~30% said it would be OK if Canadians agreed (they won't); and ~60% thought it was out of the question.
Given the lack of American public support for annexing Canada, is Trump really serious? He seems to be, but only as a lunatic delusion. He can make trouble, but could he really invade Canada? It seems hard, if not impossible, to believe, but Trump is stupid and crazy. It should be said that he is careful to say "annex" and not "conquer" -- which would be a big giveaway.
DAYLOG TUE 18 MAR: The Trump regime is making a habit of ignoring court orders, leading to the questions: What are the courts going to do about it? What CAN they do about it?
In principle, the courts could hold the relevant regime officials in contempt for refusing to obey orders, and send the US Marshals to arrest them. However, what happens if the White House pardons the contempt charge? In addition, the US Marshals report to both the judiciary and the DOJ -- with the Attorney General likely to tell them to stand down.
However, as reported by one David Noll in DEMOCRACY DOCKET, it doesn't necessarily end there. In the first place, while the White House can pardon cases of criminal contempt, it cannot pardon cases of civil contempt. Criminal contempt is disrespecting the court; civil contempt is refusing to obey the court. The contemptor can be held until compliance. In the second place, if the Marshals can't do their job, the court can deputize anyone to do it.
So, there are options -- state or municipal law enforcement, for example. Now, how does this work out in practice? Who knows? I've been thinking of the Blue states setting up a joint law-enforcement operation that could be deputized for enforcement, even prosecution. That's open-ended speculation: Things are going to happen, but nobody can say exactly what, and they won't happen quickly.
* WIRED has been performing some serious journalism trying to follow Elon the Musk Rat and his evil activities. Now WIRED is putting some articles on the subject outside their paywall. I think: OK, I need to support the free press, I'm subscribing to WIRED.
It's $10 USD the first year, $30 USD after that -- cheap. Magazines & newspapers are dying, now we've got an online world instead. We get stuff that is free but not very substantial; if we want more, we need to pay for it. Let's see who thrives in the new era.
As far as the Musk Rat goes, it turns out that he used Tesla stock as collateral for big loans, primarily to buy Twitter. Tesla share price is crashing bigtime, and that means serious trouble for the Musk Rat. Wotta loser. He's trying to say that Tesla robots will turn things around -- well, maybe, maybe not. Oh, and another thing: there was a second failure of SpaceX's Starship booster, with the Musk Rat claiming that failures are expected with rocketry. That's true, but analyses of Starship suggest that it is too ambitious, and likely to continue to fail.
DAYLOG WED 19 MAR: Ukrainian forces have been suffering badly from oversized Russian KAB glide bombs -- dropped by aircraft outside of air defense range, with the bombs being difficult to intercept, and leaving huge craters when they hit.
However, according to David Axe in FORBES, for the moment the KAB bombs are not as effectual as they were. They're guided by navigation satellite -- the Russian GLONASS system -- and now the Ukrainians are jamming GLONASS effectively, so few of the bombs hit targets.
The bomb's navsat guidance unit traditionally has four receivers; the Russians then went to eight, to locate the satellites and ignore the spoofing signals. The Ukrainians updated their jammers and kept up. It seems that sometime KAB bombs even turn around. Now the Russians are going to twelve receivers -- we'll see if they can be confounded as well.
* In other Ukraine War news, the EU is upping its game in Ukraine support, increasing funding to European defense firms for munitions. One example is the "HX-2" killer drone from Germany's Helsing. It's an "X-wing" drone, like the well-known Russian Lancet, with four little electrically-driven props around the tail. It has a range of about 100 kilometers (60 miles).
Although it has a jam-resistant datalink to an operator, it uses AI technology for navigation and targeting, allowing it to fight on even if communications are cut off. It can also be used in swarms by a single operator. 4000 HX-2s are being sent to Ukraine, being funded by the German government, using printed parts, with 6000 more to be made. It was designed to be relatively cheap and readily produced, with Helsing saying their new factory can turn out over a thousand per month.
* In the meantime, the Trump regime continues its bizarre "peace offensive" for the Ukraine War -- issuing a stream of declarations, none of which have much connection to reality or seem to go anywhere. Trump likes Putin but few Americans otherwise do, so we get muddle. There's a lot of talking that leaves me knowing less in the end than I did before I started.
Things are not going well these days and it's easy to be gloomy. It is not really justified, however: present circumstances could lead to a wide range of outcomes, we can't know which will happen, so we focus on the outcomes we want. Assuming the worst outcome is defeatism. We can't afford it.
DAYLOG THU 20 MAR: Russian President Vladimir Putin has been talking up a "cease fire" between Russia and Ukraine, in which they stop attacking each other's energy infrastructure. It's just verbiage; the attacks aren't even slowing down. The interesting thing is that Putin effectively admitted that Ukrainian attacks on Russia's oil infrastructure are hurting. Everyone knows that, but it's revealing that Putin would say as much, since he so rarely speaks the truth.
In another interesting revelation, Russian Prime Minister Dmitriy Medvedev said that the Russian government isn't getting any feelers from foreign firms to invest in Russia. That's not news either, but again it's revealing that Medvedev said so. Some commenters online said foreign businesses don't want to invest in a bad actor like Russia. I agreed, but suggested that, more importantly to businesses, Russia is an economic disaster, things are steadily getting worse, and there's no money there.
* Ukraine is keeping up the attacks on Russian oil infrastructure, both on refineries and pipeline pumping stations. I would suspect the pumping stations are particular bottlenecks and entirely vulnerable. Ukraine has in the last day also attacked Engels air base, hundreds of kilometers inside Russia, used by Russian missile carriers that launch cruise missiles against Ukraine. This is the latest in a series of attacks on Engels.
The puzzle is that Engels is clearly well-defended, but the drones are still getting through -- there were phone videos online of a big mushroom cloud, it seems from a munitions bunker full of cruise missiles.
No data on how Ukraine penetrates Engels' defenses: jammer drones? Small drones to attack surface-to-air missile launchers? And the cruise missiles were presumably stored in a hardened bunker -- did some of the drones have penetrating warheads? Nobody's talking.
* In related news, Ukraine has struck up a partnership with Finnish-Norwegian company Nammo ("Norwegian Ammo", more or less). Nammo makes ordinary munitions of various sorts, but has a new ramjet-powered guided 155mm round with a range of 150 kilometers (90 miles).
Ukraine also has relationships with US defense firms. Although the Trump regime is not a friend to Ukraine, I'm sure Ukraine still has many friends in the USA -- the friends just have to be discreet in their assistance. The Trump gang is clueless, & not hard to trick.
DAYLOG FRI 20 MAR: The shaky cease-fire in Gaza has broken down, with the Israelis hammering the Palestinians there. According to Asher Kaufman, writing in THE CONVERSATION, the breakdown is because Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants it.
The immediate reason Netanyahu wants war is because hard-Right elements would otherwise cause the fall of his government in the near future. The long-term reason is that Netanyahu was indicted in 2019 on fraud and corruption charges, and more war gives him more time to subvert justice.
Netanyahu is not all that popular with Israelis, with mass demonstrations against him up to the Hamas raid on Israel in 7 October 2023. That stalled Netanyahu's prosecution, and since then he has been installing loyalists in government positions to obstruct it.
The war against Hamas hasn't made Netanyahu more popular -- it seems the opposite, with the majority of Israelis against the resurgence of fighting. It appears Israelis are unhappy because the fighting stopped release of hostages, and possibly some weariness with the uncontrolled violence. Netanyahu doesn't care, in large part because Donald Trump has given his stamp of approval to the onslaught.
Protests are ramping up again; the majority of Israelis want to end the war on the basis of the cease-fire agreement, and want Netanyahu to resign. That gets a bit strange in that his Likud Party is still the biggest party in Israel, and in a general election Netanyahu would be prime minister again. It would seem the push is to disconnect him from Likud as well. How long he will stay in power, nobody can say. We have a similar problem here in the USA.
* Oh, and in updated news, Netanyahu has fired Ronan Bar, boss of the Israeli security service Shin Bet -- clearly to replace him with someone more obedient. Israel's High Court froze the dismissal, with opposition parties lining up to support Bar.
