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All Canadian energy is going to be 10%. I can only hope that in New England this is going to be the year where we regional energy conglomerate CEOs. Our prices are a cluster fuck because of inept government management (thanks "transition" fuel and "free market" energy) and the fact that our regional energy conglomerates are monopolies that have captured all regulation, to the point where they are freely admitting they haven't done proper maintenance and also that money is gone so they need to raise the rates to do maintenance. Obviously the YoY profit keeps coming.

“Over the course of the last decade,” writes Admiral Holsey, “the United States has focused predominantly on the Indo-Pacific, while China has taken a global approach.” By going global, China has emplaced Latin America and the Caribbean “on the front lines of a decisive and urgent contest to define the future of our world.” The SOUTHCOM chief sees Beijing’s gambits in the Western Hemisphere as part of a globe-spanning strategic offensive: “China is assailing U.S. interests from all directions, in all domains, and increasingly in the Caribbean archipelago—a potential offensive island chain.”

We're dealing with levels of projection that have never been seen before on this planet. And the worst part is that I know they don't actually believe that China is fucking funnelling guns and fortifications into the Caribbean or whatever, they're just writing this drivel to prod Trump into devoting more resources to the region + Latin America.

[...] By securing commercial and diplomatic access to seaports spanning the globe, then, China has been laying the groundwork for a network of Mahanian-style bases for many years. What would Holsey’s offensive island chain look like? For one thing, it would not be an island chain occupied entirely by authoritarian societies friendly to China and hostile to the United States. That’s a marked difference from Asia’s first island chain, inhabited solely by U.S. allies, partners, or friends closely spaced from one another on the map and wary of the mainland.

Nor would an offensive Caribbean island chain completely sever U.S. access to the Atlantic and Pacific, the way the first island chain—which encloses 100 percent of China’s continental crest—obstructs access to the Western Pacific and points beyond.

All of that being the case, it is doubtful in the extreme that China will negotiate military access throughout the Greater and Lesser Antilles, the loose line of islands that forms the northerly and easterly rim of the Caribbean Sea. The PLA Navy will be unable to make the Antilles into an impassable barrier, the way the United States and its Asian allies and partners can by stationing military implements along the first island chain.

But the Chinese navy could cause serious trouble anyway. Think about plausible candidates for PLA Navy bases in the Caribbean. Two stand out: Cuba and Venezuela. Cuba is a fraternal communist country, and perpetually impoverished. Thus, both out of ideological solidarity and in order to boost its economy, it might well prove receptive to CCP entreaties to host Chinese warships. Venezuela is ruled by a leftist regime and might likewise prove a convivial host for China’s navy.

...

That Havana or Caracas would go so far as to host such a system is doubtful: the United States does remain the regional hegemon by far, and the last attempt by an external great power to station its missiles on Cuba nearly led to thermonuclear war. But either of these countries might take the lesser step of admitting PLA Navy flotillas on a rotating or permanent basis without that shore fire support. Even smaller-scale arrangements would let Beijing threaten to stage what Mahan’s contemporary Julian S. Corbett called a “war by contingent.” Corbett recalls that a modest contingent of British Army forces supported by the Royal Navy landed in Iberia during the Napoleonic Wars. The army fought alongside Portuguese and Spanish partisans, bogging down French forces sorely needed for the main fighting front to France’s east.

In short, Britain extracted disproportionate gain from the amphibious expedition. The Iberian theater was so distracting, and devoured so many martial resources, that the little emperor wryly called it his “Spanish Ulcer.”

Think about what responses a Chinese naval presence—a Caribbean Ulcer—would likely elicit from Washington. It would beckon U.S. leaders’ strategic gaze to home waters, long regarded as a safe sanctuary. Tending to that zone of neglect would reduce the policy energy available for theaters like East Asia. It would stretch U.S. naval and military forces that are already under strain trying to manage security commitments all around the Eurasian perimeter. It would probably compel the U.S. Navy to station a squadron of combatant ships at one or more Gulf Coast seaports for the first time since the Navy vacated them after the Cold War. That would impose a new, old theater on the U.S. Navy—amplifying the demands on a too-lean fighting force. And on and on.

First, the US Navy doesn't need any help to fall apart given the war they waged to unblock the Red Sea - and lost. Second, this is all under the assumption that China will indeed want to militarily challenge the US for hegemony, when there's no indication of that at all. They don't even want to economically challenge the US for hegemony right now, much to our disappointment. I think it's infinitely more likely that China will eventually gain Taiwan back by some method or another (probably after a couple US aircraft carriers crash into each other and their satrapies in South Asia collapse due to lack of funding and/or internal unrest), then just basically chill. There's no reason for China to get involved in a second Cold War when they know perfectly well how the first one ended for the USSR. They see how well the whole "world empire into which all goods flow and which produces nothing of productive value" thing is going for the US (increasingly badly) and rightfully see no reason to aspire to that position, when peaceful co-operation does genuinely seem more effective, efficient, and less likely to lead to catastrophic (and potentially nuclear) wars.

China is gonna build a hospital in Trinidad and Tobago and they're gonna call it a military base and say they're getting encircled

One of the few pleasures of the Trump administration is when their petty vindictiveness is directed towards other ghouls. Like Hegseth cancelling his meeting with Kaja Kallas after her transatlantic flight had already landed in DC, or withholding military aid already in transit to Ukraine. Sadly for every humorous instance of base spite there's another directed at the vulnerable.

What's important to figure out is "how out in the cold are they"? Did we pull back intelligence? Are they relying on laughs Britain?

Like is the Kid Starver MI6 and Royal Airfarce supposed to be supplementing their field. The materiel is pointless without the actual intelligence. The US is essentially their lifeline to geostationary battlefield intelligence. Without that they have absolutely nothing in comparison.

America has no qualified workers, no production chains to supply production, and no capital interested in industrial development. It'll work great.

Politics in Greece are unfortunately more or less dead. After Syriza's capitulation in 2015, they were in government for one term, they lost the next election but they were a close second to the conservative party. The election after that we have a surge of extreme right wing parties (I think since the restoration of democracy in Greece it was the first time that the right wing parties all together get more than 50% of the vote) and the collapse of Syriza. After that Tsipras resigned from its head and then Syriza splits into 2 parties both of which collapsed in the polls even further. Right now, the polls show a very weak conservative party at ~25%, and then 5-6 parties around 6-10%, some of them being far-right, christian fundamentalist and the others center left and left. On a bright side, the communist party is making some gains, even though not sure how much faith to put in them.

2 years ago a horrible train crash happened (head-on collision between a passenger train and a freight train). The result was the death of 57 people, many of them university students returning after a holiday to Thessaloniki where they were studying. The train company (used to be public but privatized during the economic crisis) had dismantled many of the security measures, so the accident has a political dimension and caused a shock in Greek society. Furthermore, there seems that the government tried to botch the investigations on the accident, there is a theory that one of the trains was carrying illegally some flammable substance which is used to adulterate gasoline that made the fire that was caused by the crash even worse, and this is why the government is trying to hide what happened. Last Friday was the 2 year anniversary of the accident, and a general strike was called that was joined by most sectors, and lead to the biggest demonstration in Greece at least in the last 40 years (some estimates puts the number of Greeks attending throughout Greece at more than 1 million people). I was quite surprised by this, and shows some fighting spirit back in the Greeks which had disappeared after the capitulation of Syriza. Unfortunately, I don't think there is any political party leadership who can use this discontent and push for real left change in the country, but we will see.

I said this exact thing about the reworded deal lol. They want it to be an overseas US territory.

I already said this a couple of weeks ago, but it's funny how libs made fun of former President Yoon of South Korea for trying to do back in December what Zelenskyy has been successfully doing for the last 3 years.

Yet libs have no problem with Z-man doing it.

Ukraine continues to be a litmus test for leftists even after three years

Trump vs Zelensky is like a switch triggered in people's brains and because it's Trump being mean to him that means Z-man is good. Fucking brainrot. It's happening everywhere. I even see "leftists" defending british military because JD Vance said we haven't been to war in 30 years. This shit causes people to turn off their brains or reveal deeply held nationalist thoughts.

Here we go again

I've stopped dismaying that the most anti-war (ukraine war at least) energy right now is on the right, mostly because in my country that's very much not the case but it's gotta fucking suck to live in these power centers like uk and germany where they're lefts only rise the more pro-war they are

Seeing people glaze Starmer over literally being the carrot to Trump's stick is maddening, Britain is a fetid Lovecraftian hell island and beige Hitler announcing HMS Queen Elizabeth being cut in two like a fortune cookie by hypersonic missiles in a year or two will be ASMR to me.

I know said glazing is purely vibes based and temporary but still, got people in my group chats talking about Ukraine winning and shit, driving me nuts.

As much as I hate to say it, the rise of Reform/Farage has been coming, and Reform got screwed by the first past the post system in the last election. Reform had a large share of votes, but got minimal seats in government by comparison. Labour only won by such a large margin last time round because they were able to play the first past the post system to their advantage, Starmer got less votes than Corbyn in actuality. But eventually once a movement or party gets popular enough (such as Reform in this case), no amount of electoral obscurity can stop them from taking the largest share of seats in government.