Archive for 2025

HEH.

CDR SALAMANDER: Chinese Ballistic Missile Submarines and Their Implications. “The Chinese don’t have a lot of waterspace to work with, like most continental land powers. Should a war in the Western Pacific break out, a conventional war, it will be fought in the same place as their SSBN bastion(s). Targeted or not, an enemy submarine if found will be attacked. If you start sinking their strategic nuclear deterrence…that can lead paranoid minds into dark places.”

YEP.

SAY ANYTHING:

HMM: Where’s Tulsi Gabbard? Intelligence director missing from key moments as insiders call her ‘wrong on the big stuff.’

President Trump’s strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities were the result of 15 years of intel work, the Pentagon said Thursday — but Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard curiously was missing from key moments before and after the raid.

The ex-Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii — an outspoken opponent of US military intervention in the Middle East — now faces the perception that she’s being shunted to the side by the commander-in-chief, with CIA Director John Ratcliffe, who previously held her job, taking on a larger profile.

Gabbard, 44, was missing from an intelligence briefing with Congress on Thursday, where Ratcliffe gave lawmakers classified details of the Saturday strike.

She also was excluded from a June 8 national security pow-wow at Camp David, where Trump began to shape his plans for Iran with Ratcliffe and other key leaders, such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Two days after that meeting — to which administration officials told Fox News Gabbard was not invited — she released what one person close to the administration described as a “fear-mongering” video on the dangers of nuclear war, in what was seen as a swipe against a preemptive strike.

It was a very strange thing for a DNI to do.

MOTHER OF THE YEAR AWARD:

 

IT ISN’T DEMOCRACY WHEN THE PEOPLE CHOOSE THE WRONG SIDE:

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: More Likely Than Not, Nick Ut Took ‘Napalm Girl’ Photo.

I attended a screening the other day (June 15) of “The Stringer,” a provocative film that challenges authorship of the famous “Napalm Girl” photo, taken in Vietnam in June 1972.

I remain unpersuaded by the film’s centerpiece claim that a Vietnamese photographer other than Nick Ut of the Associated Press took the image, formally known as “The Terror of War.” The photo shows a cluster of frightened Vietnamese children, fleeing a misdirected air strike on their village, Trang Bang. At the center of the photograph is a wounded and naked 9-year-old girl, Phan Thi Kim Phuc.

The weight of the evidence – including accounts by journalists who were at Trang Bang when the photo was made – still points to Ut’s authorship of the photograph, which won a Pulitzer Prize. More likely than not, the soft-spoken Ut took the image, as he says he did, despite claims to the contrary generated by the film more than 50 years afterward.

Read the whole thing.

IRAN: Iran crackdown deepens with speedy executions and arrests.

Three Iranian men were executed this week on alleged charges of collaborating with Israel, according to the Islamic Republic judiciary, bringing the total number of people put to death on similar charges during the 12-day war between Iran and Israel to six.

The hangings were part of the “season of traitor-killing,” according to Iran’s ISNA News Agency, as Iranian authorities pushed the executions through less than 48 hours after the ceasefire between Iran and Israel was announced on Monday.

Iran’s judiciary said the men were convicted of espionage on behalf of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency. However, human rights activists claim the men were Kurdish day-laborers with no access to classified information and were denied fair trials.

Tehran can’t stop stealth bombers or Donald Trump so they lash out at whatever they can.

DEMOCRATS IN A NUTSHELL:

ICYMI:

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