WORLD'S LEADING TERRORIST STATE MAINTAINS TOP SLOT WITH DECAPITATION OF HOUTHI LEADERSHIP

Sometimes it looks like they are trying a bit too hard, as the opposition is simply nowhere in sight, but Israel has done it yet again by pulling off yet another awe-inspiring terrorist attack.

This time the targets were the leadership of the Houthi state, an entity that also occasionally try its hands at terrorism, but is a rank amateur compared to the true master of terrorism, the Israeli state. 

As reported by the BBC:

Yemen's Houthi rebel movement has confirmed that its self-proclaimed Prime Minister Ahmed Ghaleb Nasser al-Rahawi was killed in an Israeli air strike earlier this week.

The Iran-backed group said several other senior officials were killed when the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) targeted Yemen's capital, Sanaa, on Thursday.

The IDF said at the time that it attacked a Houthi "military target" in the Sanaa area, giving no further details.

The assassination apparently involved blowing up a large chunk of real estate in the Yemeni capital city, with scant regard for any civilians that might have been in the vicinity, suggesting that any Yemeni women, children, and family pets in the area were viewed as a nice, juicy secondary target.

The attack comes on top of Israel bombing the fuck out of Iran and "genociding" over 40,000 Gazans, while pushing millions more into near starvation, all because Gaza's Hamas leadership challenged Israel's "top dog" terrorist credentials by launching a relatively a terrorist operation of its own in October 2023. 

When it comes to hard terrorism, or even "soft terrorism," using blackmail, bribery, or info ops aimed at supposedly friendly Western states, no one comes close to the Israeli champs. 

Too bad there isn't a Nobel Prize for Terrorism as one for Peace, because Israel would win every single year. 

Where it all started: the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946 to "thank" the British for liberating Jews from Nazi death camps. 91 killed.

Israel's formative act: the 1947 kidnapping, torture, and murder of two British sergeants, and booby-trapping their bodies afterwards, because why not. 

1967, the USS Liberty gets a taste of Israeli terrorism with an unprovoked attack that killed 34 seamen and wounded 171.

1990s: Mossad kompromat op uses "soft terrorism" on a vulnerable member of the British royal family to keep the UK in line with Israel's agenda.

2020: More soft-terrorism with Israeli assets hyping fake charges of "anti-Semitism" against Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, leading to his replacement by Sir Keir Starmer who has a Jewish wife and is strangely tolerant of Zionist excesses.

ONLY CANKLES CAN SAVE AMERICA FROM ITS POLITICAL AIDS

It's a race between the poor health of the body politic and the poor health of the pathogen

by Colin Liddell

The signs for America are have never been worse. Since his re-election, Trump has been riding roughshod over the so-called checks and balances of the American system.

Right now he is trying to crush the Federal Reserve. This comes after "primarying" the GOP into abject subservience, weaponising the FBI and the DOJ, sending the National Guard into several cities as an intimidatory tactic, blithely ignoring court orders and any laws he feels like, personally profiteering in every way possible, and gerrymandering the electoral maps in preparation for the mid-term elections. Not to mention supporting genocide in Gaza and stabbing NATO in the back over Ukraine!

An even worse symptom for the American system, however, is the way in which all these blatant abuses of power have been greeted with mind-numbing apathy by almost every other element of society that is not MAGA.

Really, nobody cares that there is effectively a President who is behaving increasingly like a mid-20th century dictator right in their midst. There is no real pushback and the Dems are unable to cut through and mobilise any kind of popular reaction or resistance.

The best that America can do is a few legal challenges to Trump's arbitrary centralisation of powers. But, without a sense of popular outrage behind them, the Trump regime can push these to one side and ignore them until they can be struck down by more compliant elements of the judiciary. 

What makes it even worse, is that the "supervillain" behind this formerly unimaginable coup is just a fat, bloviating, narcissistic dumbass, who is probably clinically insane. Yes, the United States effectively has political AIDs and can't even fight off the equivalent of a petty cold germ like Donald Trump that it would have chewed up and spat out years ago.

This is the unhealthiest that America has ever looked in political terms. Whatever one's political preferences, seeing a body politic that is numb and apathetic to its own accelerating necrosis is pretty disconcerting.

However, the silver lining here is that the vehicle for this sad decline of America is himself someone in a sad physical decline.

In recent months, as his power has spread like a disease through the rotting corpse of a once healthy political entity, Trump seems to be bending under the weight of his years, obesity, and shitty karma. Many have commented on his fading powers, his sagging skin, his flaccid, yet bloated appearance, and his grotesque cankles, oozing over his shoes like the fat from a melted candle.

None of this is good for Trump or his drive to impose himself on a much weakened America. 

Also, while America's plight is dire, not one of Trump's successors has what it takes to carry on his dark legacy. Almost all of them may be smarter, stronger, and more ruthless than him, but they all lack the appeal and the para-social connection to the base that has made Trump formidable.

They also lack unity. When Trump fades or goes, their infighting will intensify and the unpopularity of MAGA will deepen to the point where America will shake it off like a bad dream.

If Trump were 10 or even 5 years younger, or else a lot healthier, America would probably be doomed to die of its political AIDs and become an English-speaking version of a Latin-American tinpot dictatorship. But thanks to his own mortality and physical frailties closing in, the Republic may have a late reprieve and even a chance to crawl off the pus-soaked sickbed back that it has found itself on. 

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Colin Liddell is the Chief Editor of Neokrat and the author of Interviews & Obituaries, a collection of encounters with the dead and the famous. Support his work by buying his book here (USA), here (UK), and here (Australia), or by taking out a paid subscription on his Substack.

Follow on Twitter and Bluesky

TRUMP KICKED IN THE NUTS (AGAIN) BY COURT RULING ON ALLIGATOR ALCATRAZ

If you're going to act like a dictator, it might be a good idea to actually become a dictator first. That's what most dictators do, before swinging their big dicks about and kicking up shit.

This is a lesson that Trump is increasingly learning, after a federal judge effortlessly humiliated him again by ordering his ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ immigration prison to be shut down. 

As reported by the Guardian:

A federal judge in Miami late on Thursday ordered the closure of the Trump administration’s notorious “Alligator Alcatraz” immigration jail within 60 days, and ruled that no more detainees were to be brought to the facility while it was being wound down.

The shock ruling by district court judge Kathleen Williams builds on a temporary restraining order she issued two weeks ago halting further construction work at the remote tented camp, which has attracted waves of criticism for harsh conditions, abuse of detainees and denial of due process as they await deportation.

In her 82-page order, published in the US district court’s southern district of Florida on Friday, Williams determined the facility was causing severe and irreparable damage to the fragile Florida Everglades.

Yup, like they got Al Capone on tax dodging, they got Donald Trump on disturbing the delicate ecological balance of the swamps!

The cost to the taxpayer of a few "pistol hot" headlines to boost Trump's "cheesy 1980s TV show" brand, is estimated to be a cool $600 million.  

This is not the first time that Trump's "dictatorship in a democracy" approach has run into trouble.

In March, judges blocked his deportations under the Alien Enemies Act as wildly unconstitutional. That Act was designed for actual wartime!

In April, the courts kicked him squarely in the gonads with his birth-right citizenship restrictions, with federal judges in several states issuing nationwide injunctions against his executive order denying citizenship to children born in the U.S. to non-citizen or non-permanent resident parents. 

In May, the U.S. Court of International Trade trampled on Trump's tiny tender private parts with a ruling that his sweeping "big dick" tariffs on imports from nearly every country were unlawful, laying the groundwork for future challenges. 

In July, a federal judge kicked the President firmly in the beans by striking down his attempt to withhold Medicaid funds from abortion clinics. The ruling ensured that "Planned Parenthood" clinics continue to receive federal funding for their "eugenic" policies.

Then this month, just as the feeling was slowly returning to his battered testicles, another federal judge showed up to put the boot in by striking down Trump actions aimed at ending DEI in schools and colleges, followed immediately by another federal judge ruling that the Trump administration could not withhold funding from sanctuary cities. WTF!?

Honestly, you couldn't make up an administrative shit show as bad as this! No one would believe you.

In fact, almost anything that Trump does merely serves the purpose of getting the Orange Attention Freak a few temporary headlines, while achieving nothing of substance.

His moronic voter base, however, continue to slurp up this empty slop as if it were the ambrosia of the gods -- the best argument ever for why America can't continue to exist as a democracy! 

TOP GERMAN NAZI SENT TO WOMEN'S PRISON AFTER CHANGING GENDER

In yet another reminder of the chronic sub-masculinity of the dissident right, a top German Neo-Nazi has been sent to a women’s prison after changing gender.

The Neo-Nazi, Sven Liebich, who is now known as "Marla-Svenja" Liebich, was given an 18-month custodial sentence for "inciting hatred," "criminal insults," trespassing, and trying to sell a baseball bat over the internet as a "deportation aid."

Now, rather than spending his sentence in a grubby male prison, where he could face the daily prospect of anal rape, possibly from "non-Aryan" ethnic inmates, Liebich will instead spend his time behind bars in a nice "lady prison" in the town of Chemnitz after discovering his feminine side. 

The move also represents a change in German law.

Previously, gender reassignment required two separate supporting opinions from medical specialists, but in November last year, the previous government’s "self-determination act" came into force, allowing people to self-identify as either gender simply signing a form at a local registry office.

Liebich, who is 53, has been involved in the German extreme-right since the 1990s, and ran the regional chapter of Blood and Honour in Saxony-Anhalt before it was banned in 2000. In recent years he has campaigned energetically in support of the Putin regime and its criminal war against Ukraine.

Source: The Times

MAGA STASSI RAID "CRITIC OF THE REGIME" JOHN BOLTON

Artistic reconstruction of the raid on Bolton's home

In a chilling re-run of the Nazi and Communist tyrannies of the mid-20th century, Donald Trump has apparently sent his FBI goons to kick in the door of his former National Security Adviser, John Bolton, who now a well-known critic of the Trump regime.

It is not yet clear if Bolton has been arrested or shot in the raid, or was even present during the raid, although it appears that a major search of his Maryland home is now underway.

Given the low standards to which the FBI has fallen under the leadership of its Director, Trump-appointed stooge Kash Patel, this could also be an operation to "plant" evidence on Bolton to help the regime stage a "show trial" of Bolton in its ongoing struggle to keep the President's connection with Jeffrey Epstein off the news.

Patel moments after he read the Epstein Files

Bolton's home in Bethesda, Maryland, was raided by the FBI at around 7:00 am local time (ET).

It is not clear which of Bolton's many criticisms of the US leader led Trump to order the dawn blitz on his home, but it may be linked to an October 2024 interview with CNN, when Bolton argued that Trump lacked the intellectual capacity to be a true fascist, stating, "To be a fascist, you have to have a philosophy. Trump’s not capable of that." 

Such a remark, brought to Trump's attention by an underling like Stephen Miller, could easily have sparked the impetuous "American strongman" and convicted sex criminal to order in his Stassi-like goons to teach Bolton a lesson.

FOREIGN AGENTS (1): OWEN MATTHEWS

Part of a new series on people who seem to be working for someone far far away, rather than the people they claim to be serving with their efforts and outpourings.

Loyal to the Motherland?

More properly known as "Owned Matthews," as there is a good case to be made that he is "owned" by the Kremlin, a case we will be making here.

He is a journalist (born 1971), whom we theorise the Kremlin probably got some sort of hold on during his lengthy stays in Moscow as Bureau Chief for Newsweek (2006-12). This was either through kompromat or from threats or leverage on members of his family -- he is half-Russian through his Soviet mother Lyudmila Bibikov and is married to another Russian, Xenia Kravchenko.

His career trajectory -- Oxford educated, reporting on Yugoslav and Balkan matters before moving onto Moscow -- would be exactly the kind that would lead the Kremlin to target him to convert into an agent of influence in the West, and Matthews is intelligent enough to do quite a good job at it, masking his toxic shillery behind a disguise of "political realism" and jaded cynicism, a bit like John Mearsheimer.

This is all very apparent in his latest piece for the Spectator, a masterclass in subtle shillery, where he uses weasly writing to push the myth of "Russian invincibility," "Putin's genius," and the "weakness of the West."

Due to the pressure that Russia is currently under, with its economy and the morale of its brutalised army on the brink of collapse, he has apparently been asked to push harder than usual, revealing a disturbing bias, as these quotes will show:

"The 'Nato Article Five-like' security guarantees of which Italy’s Giorgia Meloni spoke in Washington this week sound formidable. The problem is that security guarantees have to be credible to work. And will Putin believe that Starmer or Macron will send their voters’ sons to fight over Donbas, when they have already said that their proposed minuscule peacekeeping force will be ‘backstopped’ by US air power?"

And:

"Putin would like nothing more than for Europe to encourage Ukraine to fight on, and to lose even more of their land and independence. The question Ukraine’s friends must ask themselves today is whether it’s time to choose an unjust peace over a righteous but never-ending war."

Of course, like all cunning influence ops, this can be presented as "just my opinion, bro," but it is exactly what a Putin shill, intending to undermine support for the Ukraine amongst educated and influential Brits, could be predicted to say at this juncture.

However, Owen's meta-data -- half-Russian, married to a Russian, exposed to Kremlin attempts to compromise him for several years, and working for a publication that was bought with £100 million of Russian-linked money, points to the bigger picture.

Paul Marshall, the current owner of the Spectator is joined at the hip with the Dubai-based Chandler Brothers, who were themselves in financial partnership with Putin himself. These three now finance institutions like the highly suspicious GB News (also known as "KGB News") and the so-called "Alliance for Responsible Citizenship."

Mathews appears to have gradually fallen out of favour at Newsweek, possibly due to his hard-on for Putin and continuing personal and business connections to Russia, writing his last piece for them in 2019.

He was then picked up by the Spectator in 2023, being appointed "Associate Editor" with an emphasis on Russia and the Ukraine, by the Chief Editor Fraser Nelson, shortly before its acquisition by Marshall. This suggests that the Spectator may even have been infiltrated by "fake realist"/ Kremlin-friendly forces even before its formal acquisition.

Matthews has written several books, many of which are backhanded attempts to glorify Russian Imperialism through the ages.

These include Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of Russian America (Bloomsbury 2013), An Impeccable Spy: Richard Sorge, Stalin's Master Agent (Bloomsbury, 2019), Overreach: The Inside Story of Putin's War on Ukraine (Mudlark/HarperCollins, 2022).

The last of these emphasises "NATO expansion" as one of the triggers for the Ukrainian war, although this thesis is dressed up with Matthews' usual weasly writing for an audience that starts from a position of outright sympathy for the victim of Putinist aggression. 

The role of writers like Matthews is to dampen down the justified outrage all decent Westerners feel at this unprovoked aggression, while drawing attention to all the unpleasant things that might accrue from continued Western support for Ukraine, while also painting a fuzzy backdrop of "muh Russia" as an invincible and relentless opponent, who nevertheless could be easily placated with a few weak-kneed concessions. 

1.2 YEAR SENTENCE IN RUSSIA FOR CALLING STALIN A "MURDERER"

Russia's reversion to the Soviet Union is well underway. Although the attempt to reassert old USSR borders has run into major difficulties, internally freedoms continue to be crushed at an impressive rate, as demonstrated by the case of a pensioner in Yekaterinburg, who was convicted for calling Stalin a "dictator" and a "murderer."

Really, that's like getting locked up for calling the Pope Catholic.

According to Nexta:

"In Yekaterinburg, 75-year-old Nikolai Dolgushin left a comment on "Odnoklassniki" calling Stalin a dictator and a murderer. The phrases: "The dictator and murderer Stalin started World War II" and "The murderer and dictator Stalin declared war on peaceful Poland" led to a criminal case.

The court found him guilty of "rehabilitating Nazism" under Article 354.1 of the Criminal Code. The prosecutor demanded 1.5 years in prison, but the sentence was lighter: 1 year and 2 months probation."

Of course, he was also banned from the internet as well. 

Being sent to a gulag or getting a bullet in the back of the head for having opinions can't be too far behind, but don't get upset, because, let's face it, the Russian people love being abused and humiliated in this way, or else at least one of them would have successfully put a bullet in Putin by now.  

THE LOONEY IN THE WHITE HOUSE

Vlad Vexler psychoanalyses the soulless clown in the White House and his need for "narcissistic supply," with a side stab at JD Vance who cynically exploits and amplifies his boss's weakness.

CYBER PEDO LINKED TO NETANYAHU ALLOWED TO FLEE USA

Mug shot

An Israeli government cybersecurity official was arrested recently by Las Vegas police and other authorities in Nevada and then allowed to leave the country and flee to Israel. 

As reported by the Guardian:

"Tom Artiom Alexandrovich, 38, faces felony charges of luring a child with a computer for a sex act, alongside several other suspects who were apprehended during the two-week sting operation, the Las Vegas metropolitan police department said in a statement published on Friday. He has since evidently been released from custody and returned to Israel.

As first reported by the news site Mediaite, a publicly posted screenshot of Alexandrovich’s page on the LinkedIn professional networking platform described him as the executive director of the Israel Cyber Directorate, an Israeli government agency under the purview of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office.

The screenshot also showed a post under Alexandrovich’s name alluding to his having been in Las Vegas earlier in August for the Black Hat Briefings, a yearly meeting of cybersecurity professionals."

Two days after being arrested, Alexandrovich was allowed to return to his hotel and fly back to Israel. The two days was probably how long it took for the arrest to be reported back to Tel Aviv and then for someone in the Israeli government to pull the appropriate string in the US. 

It looks like their is a two-tier system of policing pedophiles in America. We already know that from the Epstein case and Trump's attempts to cover up his involvement in that. 

PUTIN-TRUMP MEETING FAILS TO PUSH EPSTEIN INTO LONG GRASS

In yet another failed attempt to use cable news slop to put the Epstein Files behind him, US President Donald Trump has had a pointless meeting with Vladimir Putin in Alaska. 

The two leaders were unable to reach an agreement on the war in Ukraine that would be interesting or significant enough to stay on top of the news agenda long enough to make people forget about Trump's connection to the Epstein Files. 

Before the summit, it was hoped that the convicted sex criminal and reality TV star and the ex-KGB dictator and mass murderer would reach a comprehensive agreement on Ukraine, leading to an immediate ceasefire.

It was also hoped that the talks would produce a framework for permanent Ukrainian security that would also satisfy Putin's desire to bathe every morning in a giant steaming bath filled with the the blood of his victims.

Instead, the two soulless clowns made a few dumb wisecracks and blew smoke up each other's worthless arses, while the world quickly lost interest and returned to its main obsession,  namely the fact that Donald Trump has refused to release the Epstein Files, is clearly in them doing lots of weird pedo shit, and Vladimir Putin is probably using this info to blackmail him. 

JD VANCE AND THE "TARIFF SCOTS"

Heather sniffer, JD Vance

by Colin Liddell

Just after President Trump had a holiday a few miles from my Ayrshire hometown, it is now the turn of his VP JD Vance to do likewise. He appears to be staying just outside Kilmarnock in a pleasant but rather nondescript country hotel about 3.5 miles from the "worst run prison is Scotland."

While Trump's motivation to stay in bonnie Ayrshire was to visit his golf resort at Turnberry, Vance's reason to visit the area is, apparently, to get in touch with "muh Hilly Billy roots." You see, Vance identifies as part of that much-misunderstood category the "Scotch Irish."

Actually, I would call them the "Tariff Irish" or more accurately the "Tariff Scots" because, whether one wants to see the hand of God at work here or not, the story of Vance and his ancestry is very much the result of tariffs, with Ireland merely a staging post until his ancestors could find a powerful enough political entity to settle in to protect themselves from the sharp end of trade taxes. 

A quick history lesson on the so-called "Scotch-Irish" is in order here. They were a Scottish people who settled in Ireland, mainly in the 16th and 17th centuries, as part of the pacification and "protestantization" of that island by the Tudors and the Stuarts. Due to the religious difference, they generally married within their own group. In those days, the relatively undeveloped lands confiscated from the Catholic lords in the North, were a big inducement to hard-working but impoverished farmers from the South West of Scotland. 

But, why were those hard-working farming folk so impoverished in the first place?

One reason was that the Union of the Scottish and English crowns in 1603 did not lead to free trade between these two countries. In fact, quite the reverse!

England, as yet unenlightened by the future genius of Adam Smith, continued to follow mercantilist policies, condemning itself and its Northern neighbour to greater poverty and higher prices than would otherwise have been the case. 

The wide number of tariffs included almost everything, including such goods as wool, linen, cattle, and coal. Also, like we see with "TACO Trump," many of these were on-again-off-again-on-again, creating general uncertainty and chilling the hand of commerce. 

Scotland was also shut out of England's growing trade with its North American colonies, most particularly by the Navigation Acts of 1651, 1660, and 1663, leading the nation to attempt its own ill-advised colony in the malaria-infested swamps of Central America.

Essentially, until the union of the parliaments of Scotland and England in 1707, Scotland was kept impoverished and thus effectively overpopulated by the tariff hammer. Settling the undeveloped lands of Northern Ireland, and greatly boosting their productivity in the process, was a way out, and one taken, according to Vance, by his ancestors and that of several dozen other US Presidents. 

But our tale of the "Tariff Scots" does not end there. Initially, the English government, which controlled Ireland, had welcomed Protestant Scots to Ireland for economic and security reasons. The Ulster Scots were certainly a useful bulwark against Catholic rebellion. So, they flourished, increasingly exporting their excess produce to the English and colonial markets, in the process lowering prices and increasing the living standards of the average Englishman and proto-American.

But unfortunately these two beneficiaries of Irish beef, butter, cheese, corn, linen, and wool were not represented in Parliament; only the selfish landowners. A 1663 amendment to the Navigation Act hit back on their behalf against the flood of cheap Irish beef to England's colonies. This was followed up by the Cattle Acts  or 1665, 1666, and 1680, which prohibited the import of Irish cattle into England, and a number of other tariffs that hits wool, linen, and corn, like the infamous "Corn Laws." 

In short, what had been a flourishing colony was economically devastated by English upper-class greed.

Unable to export their produce to the growing colonies of America, many Scots-Irish, including Vance's ancestors, made the decision to get round the English tariffs by "exporting" themselves. 

Now to return to the present, I am not really sure why a fat, flaccid, eye-liner-wearing couch-fucker, married to an Indian woman, insists on identifying with me and my fellow Scots. Of course, he is free to do so and it may even be good for Ayrshire's tourist trade. But it is clear that JD Vance could make an additional journey of self-discovery and economic enlightenment by viewing his DNA-trajectory through the  prism of the "Tariff Scot." 

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Colin Liddell is the Chief Editor of Neokrat and the author of Interviews & Obituaries, a collection of encounters with the dead and the famous. Support his work by buying his book here (USA), here (UK), and here (Australia), or by taking out a paid subscription on his Substack.

Follow on Twitter and Bluesky

ROBO-DOGS WILL MAKE THE ENFORCED REUNIFICATION OF TAIWAN POSSIBLE

Binkov's Battlegrounds looks at the latest data on robodogs, the next frontier in military technology. These create a lower cost solution to the age-old problem of getting "boots on the ground." In the context of the geopolitical stand-off between America and China in the Pacific, this technology is set to give China the edge and to make the forced reunification of Taiwan with mainland China much more feasible.

POOR U.S. JOB NUMBERS MAY REFLECT POSITIVE TRENDS

by Colin Liddell

The full story of Trumponomics is yet to be revealed, and I am not overly sanguine. However, I have my doubts about the latest headline story that "Trump is fucking up the economy," namely the recent revelations about job numbers. 

As reported by Bloomberg:

"US job growth cooled sharply over the past three months and the unemployment rate rose, showing the labor market is shifting into a lower gear amid widespread economic uncertainty.

Payrolls increased 73,000 in July after the prior two months were revised down by nearly 260,000, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report out Friday. In the last three months, employment growth has averaged a paltry 35,000 — the worst since the pandemic."

In fact, this is supposed to be really, really bad news, so much so that Trump flew off the handle and started firing bean counters. As reported by the BBC:

"President Donald Trump has fired the head of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) after the department revised down recent job numbers by more than 250,000.

He says the figures were "rigged" to make his administration 'look bad'."

But on the positive side, these job numbers could simply reflect the crack-down on illegal migrant workers by ICE, as a vast chunk of the US labour market is basically illegal labour.

As with anything in economics, the full picture is not entirely clear at the moment, especially as the data systems are not even set up to show the effects of immigration restriction. If the job figures are really being hit by this, then Trump should actually be boasting about them as proof of delivering his election promises to the American people.

Of course, the other big factor that could be hitting job numbers is the economically chilling effect of tariffs.

But if tariffs are to work at "reshoring" US manufacturing and solving severe supply chain weaknesses -- like the US's pathetic dependence on microchips from Taiwan -- then they will have to create significant shortage and price pressure to incentive home production. Simple as!

Anyway, it sounds better than a future WWIII with China over Taiwan.

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Colin Liddell is the Chief Editor of Neokrat and the author of Interviews & Obituaries, a collection of encounters with the dead and the famous. Support his work by buying his book here (USA), here (UK), and here (Australia), or by taking out a paid subscription on his Substack.

Follow on Twitter and Bluesky

TRUMP DECLARES ECONOMIC WAR ON INDIA — GOOD!

by Daniel Barge

I don't have too many hard positions on most things, as it interferes with understanding our ever-changing rather topsy-turvy World. But if I do take a hard position on anything at all in the current news cycle, it is that the war in the Ukraine must be ended as soon as possible and definitely in Ukraine's favour.

So, it is with some pleasure that I see Donald Trump has finally backed away from what we can call his naïve policy of ending the war through "having a cosy chat" with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, and is now applying more solid pressure, this time, on those countries that have economically enabled Russia to continue its war of aggression.

As reported by the Wall Street Journal:

"President Trump signed an executive order imposing an additional 25% tariff on imports from India in response to the country's continued purchases of Russian oil.

That comes on top of the 25% tariff on Indian imports Trump announced last week. India has repeatedly defended its purchases of Russian oil as necessary to support its economy and keep energy prices steady."

Excellent, and fuck you, India!

Of course, China is the worst offender here, but number two in supporting from the side-lines the murder of Ukrainians is definitely India, which has effectively been playing both sides to seek its selfish advantage.

At least with China, it is a fellow anti-Western totalitarian autocracy to Putin's, and can be expected to behave that way. After all, no one blames a tiger for behaving like a tiger.

But with India, it is a different story. Unlike China, India pretends to be a "part of the West" - speaking English, playing cricket (quite well sometimes), and being a supposedly "freedom-loving democracy." Just like us, except somewhat browner and less provided with water closets, although even that may be changing. 

It is also particularly keen to be seen as a "friendly face" when it comes to sending millions of its young men — thirsty for knowledge and other things — into the Western tech sector on H-1B visas, etc.

Then, while they are sidling up to us, they are secretly betraying the West by buying up Russian oil and supplying the labour to fill the gaps in the Russian economy, in the process enabling Russia to keep murdering Westerners in the persons of the citizens of the Ukraine, while driving up our defence costs. 

So, well done, Donald Trump, for finally calling India out for its bullshit and duplicity. I only hope you don't TACO out this time. Let's face it, you need to stick it out, as too many people already think the Russians have got something on you. Hurting Putin by hurting his Indian friends is not a bad way to start rolling that back.