Robert

Low noise #MMT #Science

[Sushobhan @Santhal24]

@policytensor

[Robert @Rerrez_]

@jcmittelstaedt It seems to me that they don't answered what you wanted, so, you have to justied it somehow.

[Trita Parsi @tparsi]

LOL! Best Hitler-bunker-scene rendition so far!

“You didn’t tell me these were the same Persians that defeated the Romans.”

"Have Bari Weiss write why high oil prices are actually a good thing..."

[Dave DeCamp @DecampDave]

Would you be surprised to learn that the US has bombed Somalia at least 83 times this year

[Seyed Abbas Araghchi @araghchi]

The Israel lobby is getting less shy about its grip on U.S. policy toward Iran. In Miriam Adelson’s publication, the Lobby's loudspeaker says U.S. policy must ensure America pays a price for any slight against Israel.

High time for Washington to break free from these shackles.

[Robert @Rerrez_]

@Sir_Henry_III @MarioNawfal For you a terrorists is whoever don't do as you said.

[Robert @Rerrez_]

@IkerBasanti @MarioNawfal They allowed inspectios and they were in the negotiating table and they were bomb anyway. Now they would be stupid if they don't develope nuclear capabilities. So, right, done.

[Eli Clifton @EliClifton]

Odd for the CEO of FDD, a think tank claiming to be committed to “strengthening U.S. national security” to advocate for US-Israel “intelligence & economic integration to such an extent that inflicting financial harm on Israel would also carry a significant cost for Washington.”🤨

[Collingwood 🇬🇧 @admcollingwood]

I love the way it's presented as a bit like the weather -- something that just 'happens' and there's nothing you can do about it except dress accordingly. "Ah, well. Looks like war is coming. Better top up on canned food and iodine tablets." How about a headline like "War appears ever more likely. Here's what we can do to mitigate the risk."

[𝕋𝕙𝕖 𝔸𝕣𝕔𝕙𝕚𝕧𝕚𝕤𝕥 @TheArchivistLC]

There is an Israeli venture-capital firm called Kinetica.

Norm Coleman, former Republican senator, is a senior adviser to Kinetica.

Coleman got Pete Hegseth the job of Secretary of Defense. Coleman told JNS that he personally advised Hegseth during the process and helped engineer what he described as a turning point in the nomination. https://t.co/uhqSegoK8K

Then Hegseth gets control of the Pentagon.

June 2026, Hegseth appoints Coleman vice chair of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board. https://t.co/93XzcoxFJF

The same board that advises Pentagon leadership on military modernization, force structure, defense policy and national-security strategy.

So Coleman helps Hegseth become Defense Secretary. Hegseth then appoints Coleman to help advise him on defense policy.

Meanwhile Coleman is publicly listed as a senior adviser to a private Israeli defense-tech investment fund.

Hegseth also put Marc Andreessen on the Defense Policy Board.

Andreessen runs Andreessen Horowitz, one of Silicon Valley’s biggest venture-capital firms, which has invested in Anduril.
https://t.co/askQTZt5Kt

So a major private investor in Pentagon contractors is now helping advise the Pentagon on the defense environment those companies operate in.

Reporting has already raised questions about Hegseth’s selections because Andreessen Horowitz and companies connected to other board members overlap with defense investments tied to 1789 Capital, where Donald Trump Jr. is a partner. https://t.co/4gCkz0fGWH

Now go back to Kinetica.

Its advisory board also includes Kenneth Braithwaite, Trump’s former Secretary of the Navy.

And Alex Moore, a board member of Palantir.

Palantir is already deeply embedded in the U.S. military and disclosed to the SEC that it entered a strategic partnership with the Israeli Ministry of Defense in 2024 to supply technology assisting Israel during the war.

Kinetica then entered a strategic partnership with American venture firm 8VC to help Israeli defense companies access American capital and markets.

8VC itself is deep inside the same Silicon Valley defense-tech ecosystem around Palantir, Anduril, Saronic and other military startups.

At the same time, the Trump administration continues expanding military cooperation and weapons transfers to Israel. As recently as September 2026, the administration was preparing another proposed $2.8 billion munitions sale to Israel.

Trump’s estimated net worth rose by roughly $3 billion from 2024 to 2025.

And US senators have requested that the SEC investigate Pete Hegseth for insider trading.

Yeah so anyways, most working Americans are one paycheque away from homelessness but at least Israel will send ai drones to eliminate us. So that’s fun.

Honk honk.

[theleahfiles @leahfiles]

Scott Bessent sat in front of Congress on Tuesday and either lied or is clueless about how to do his real job. There is no third option. But based on Bessent's testimony and what I found, it looks like we could be stealing ~$11 billion from Venezuela.

Bessent told the committee Venezuela's oil money is "one of the largest assets ever to go on the US balance sheet."

The executive order the president signed on January 9 states that the money is "property of the Government of Venezuela," held by the United States "solely in a custodial and governmental capacity." You cannot hold another country's money in custody and call it your asset, because that is the difference between a bank and a thief.

Bessent said he "won't give out" the total. I found it in 15 minutes on Treasury's own daily cash statement, the one he wants to call a balance sheet when it flatters him. It is public record. So it is hard for me to believe he can't tell Congress how much.

So let me help him and Congress out. Attached is the Daily Treasury Statement for February 5, 2026, the month the Venezuelan money left Qatar. The State Department, which runs the fund, deposited $514 million in a single day. The prior two-year high for that line was $54 million. Since January it has taken in $14.5 billion against a normal year of $3.4 billion, roughly $11 billion more than it should have. About $3.5 billion has been documented going back to Venezuela. That leaves about $7.5 billion nobody has accounted for.

SO, we took a country's primary revenue stream at gunpoint, routed it through a bank in Qatar, then a Citibank account, handed the sales to two Swiss traders with federal bribery cases, put the Pentagon in business with a man the Justice Department once named in a $1.2 billion PDVSA laundering case, and declared the whole thing immune from American courts by decree. Okay....

A little more on the people we handed this to.

(1) Trafigura is the Swiss trading house that sells the oil and now carries Venezuela's gold to US refineries too. In March 2024 it pleaded guilty in a Miami federal court to bribing Brazilian officials and paid $126 million. That is a felony conviction less than two years old, and it was handed a no-bid contract to market another country's oil "at the request of the U.S. government."

(2) Vitol, the other trader, paid $135 million in 2020 under a deferred prosecution agreement for bribery in three countries. One of Vitol's senior traders gave $5 million to the president's super PAC, then stood in the White House on January 9 and told Trump that the "influence you have over the Venezuelans" would make sure he got what he wanted. Vitol had the first contract five days later.

(3) Alejandro Betancourt is the Venezuelan businessman the Pentagon just took a 35 percent stake alongside. His earlier company, Derwick Associates, won billions in no-bid power-plant contracts under Chávez. Federal prosecutors in Miami named him as an unindicted co-conspirator in a $1.2 billion scheme to launder PDVSA money. He hired Rudy Giuliani in 2019 to lobby the Justice Department about it. The AP reports that investigation was "paused earlier this year." Spain reopened its own case against him in June. He has never been charged and denies wrongdoing, and he now has the United States military as a business partner under a contract nobody outside the government has read.

(4) And David Rivera, a former congressman and Marco Rubio's old housemate, was convicted on May 1 of acting as an unregistered foreign agent after taking a $50 million contract from Citgo's parent company to lobby for normalizing relations with the Maduro government. Rubio testified at his trial. Rubio's State Department now signs off on every dollar that leaves the Venezuela account.

The president says we "paid for that war many times over" and that "to the victor belong the spoils." The executive order says it isn't our money. Bessent says it's our asset and won't say how big. Meanwhile Venezuela's acting president spent July writing to King Charles begging for gold in a London vault while we sat on eleven billion dollars of her country's oil revenue.

The written agreement Bessent promised Congress in February still has not been produced. When asked Tuesday when they'd get it: "I'll check with my staff."

Sure as heck looks like we are stealing from Venezuela and Congress doesn't have a clue, doesn't care, or both.

[Rabbi Jeff @RabbiJeffx]

Grok says it would save one Jew over a million others because it was taught Jewish lives matter more.

https://t.co/BzZVDeX6K9

[Robert @Rerrez_]

@shaimasterxx @s_m_marandi Sure Dani, that's the reason.

[Drop Site @DropSiteNews]

💢🇺🇳 NEW: A UN Commission of Inquiry has concluded that “Israel continues to commit genocide and other atrocity crimes by deliberately targeting Palestinian children,” finding Israeli authorities and security forces have committed genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes in Gaza, as well as war crimes in the occupied West Bank.

➡️ The commission found the deliberate targeting of children is “one of the key elements establishing genocidal intent” and said Israel is pursuing “a deliberate strategy to destroy the future of the Palestinians in Gaza by targeting their children.”

➡️Among its findings, the commission said Israel has:
🔹 “Deliberately shot children in vital organs using precision weapons”
🔹 Attacked homes, schools, displacement camps, and neonatal and maternity care centers, harming newborn survival and Palestinians’ reproductive future
🔹 Used starvation through blockade and siege, causing child deaths and severe malnutrition
🔹 Arrested, tortured, and subjected Palestinian children to sexual violence in detention
🔹 Destroyed healthcare, orphanages, and education, obstructing children’s cognitive, social, and emotional development and undermining the foundations of Palestinian society

[Robert @Rerrez_]

@shaimasterxx @s_m_marandi If the competition is about number of children killed, I have to admit Israel is the winner. Globally.

[Casual Geopolitics @Adamemedia]

🚨 THE BBC JUST TURNED ON ISRAEL

"The BBC World Service has compiled material on over 160 cases where children have been shot in Gaza & found that in 95 cases the CHILD was SHOT IN THE HEAD or chest. In most these cases, the victim was UNDER 12 years old"

Wow.

[Drop Site @DropSiteNews]

🇨🇺 Washington insiders are positioning themselves to take over business inside Cuba

Trump- and Rubio-linked investors, lobbyists and political allies jockeying for access to Cuban assets as foreign companies are forced out amid Washington's maximum pressure campaign. Reporting from Ed Augustin and Lee Schlenker for The Guardian points to potential deals involving mining, hotels, shipping, humanitarian aid and other sectors, while foreign companies pushed out by US sanctions leave openings for US-linked investors and businesses.

“If I had done during the Biden administration what Trump’s friends have done now, I’d have been put in jail,” said a person with several decades of experience in Cuba policy.

Meanwhile, Washington continues to intensify sanctions aimed at forcing political change in Cuba, with Rubio announcing a new wave of sanctions on Thursday targeting state-run enterprises, military enterprises and officials. The latest sanctions come as a new report from Augustin for the New York Times reveals thousands of shipping containers—filled with food, medicine and humanitarian aid—destined for Cuba are stranded throughout the Caribbean as shipping companies aim to avoid U.S. sanctions.

[Robert @Rerrez_]

@academic_la Did you guys have to come back to lower numbers because nobody was believing the 40.000 thing?

[The Intellectualist @highbrow_nobrow]

Marco Rubio: "For years to come, there are many people on the right...that are going to be having to explain and justify how they fell into this trap of supporting Donald Trump because this is not going to end well.” (2016)

[Robert @Rerrez_]

@QuettaCafpk @MazMHussain @PakDefTeam Are not you forgetting something? In your view, why are the yemenis doing this?

[Drop Site @DropSiteNews]

In Yemen alone, where the U.S. supplied weapons and aircraft, shared intelligence, established a joint planning cell with Saudi Arabia, provided military and logistical support, and refueled coalition warplanes in midair until November 2018, UNDP estimated 377,000 conflict-attributable deaths by the end of 2021: 154,000 from combat and other direct violence, and 223,000 indirectly from hunger, disease, and the destruction of essential systems as Saudi Arabia-US-led coalition blockaded the country.

The Saudi-UAE-led coalition carried out 25,054 air raids in Yemen between March 2015 and April 2022, according to the Yemen Data Project. U.S. military support for the coalition began under President Obama, continued under the Trump and Biden administrations.

[Robert @Rerrez_]

@m4h007 If you send a lot to the USA, can be oil, manufacured products or whatever, and don't buy a lot from the USA, you finish with a lot of dollars that you have to put somewhere. You can exchange it for other currency or buy Treasuries and get some interest.

[Drop Site @DropSiteNews]

Earlier, Kuwait Hospital, one of Gaza’s largest, said it would suspend most medical services beginning Sunday after the WHO notified it that the fuel needed to operate would stop arriving, Al Jazeera reports.

➤ Surgeries, maternity care, clinics, scans, laboratory testing, ambulances and patient transport will stop.

➤ Only general and maternity emergency departments will remain open.

Israel’s restrictions on fuel, engine oil and spare parts are forcing Gaza’s remaining health system into collapse.

Nasser Hospital is already rationing electricity between buildings, with one of its four generators inoperable. Gaza’s Health Ministry says several hospital generators have failed, while those still working are running nonstop and cannot power every life-saving department.