CB Gadtaula

आज होकी भोली होकी जिन्दगी यो जानेनैछ
छैनौं कोही अजम्बरी कालले एकदिन लानेनैछ
तर पनि हार्छ काल सत्कर्मले बाच्यौं भने
परेलीका आँशु पुछ्न जिन्दगी यो सांच्यौ भने

[Glenn Diesen @Glenn_Diesen]

George Kennan on NATO expansion (May 2, 1998): ''I think it is the beginning of a new Cold War... I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves... Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are -- but this is just wrong.''

[Iran Embassy in Zimbabwe @IRANinZIMBABWE]

American democracy every four years.

[Donald Tusk @donaldtusk]

Mark Rutte @SecGenNATO przekazał mi właśnie swoją ocenę sytuacji w regionie i na froncie ukraińsko-rosyjskim. Tak jak ostrzegałem, eskalacja ze strony Rosji postępuje. Ukraina potrzebuje większego wsparcia w powietrzu, co ma także znaczenie dla naszego bezpieczeństwa. To zadanie dla całej Europy. Najbliższe pół roku będzie rozstrzygające i musimy być przygotowani jako Polska i NATO na różne scenariusze. Nie możemy wykluczyć prowokacji ze strony Rosji wobec któregoś z członków NATO.

[Angelo Giuliano 🇨🇭🇮🇹 @angeloinchina]

The Circus and the Plan: Trump’s Headlines vs. the Real Game Over Iran

Trump’s announcements are the circus. The long-term game is the plan.

Greenland, Venezuela, “destroying Iran fifty times,” claiming the Strait of Hormuz as U.S. territory — these are distractions. They are produced for domestic consumption and to confuse both allies and adversaries. The actual strategy has been sitting in policy papers for years, including Brookings’ Which Path to Persia?: contain Iran, provoke it, use Israel as the deniable instrument, and pursue regime change or destruction. Iran understands this and is playing the long game.

The Strait of Hormuz remains Iran’s strongest bargaining chip — potentially tens of billions in security and management fees — at the exact moment Washington wants to pressure Iran and Russia in order to bleed China. The United States still possesses unmatched power projection (800+ bases, a global navy) and is trying to lock down the world’s chokepoints: Panama, the Greenland/Arctic route, Gibraltar, Malacca, the South China Sea. China’s Belt and Road was built precisely to escape that maritime trap.

This is the Thucydides Trap in motion: a declining hegemon that refuses to relinquish primacy, led by elites who want to deconstruct nation-states, history, culture, family, and faith so populations become easier to manage. Two inflection points are now visible — Ukraine and Iran. The question is whether the shift to multipolarity can happen without World War III.

Watch the full analysis: https://t.co/GL9VPQ3DUO

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[Chris Martenson @chrismartenson]

OMG.
This is called "stealing" in every imaginable context. Also, not something that is likely to withstand the test of time, given the poor history of people tolerating their wealth being stolen. Jungles, I should point out, are poor environments for securing explodey assets like oil upgraders and pumping stations.

[CNN International @cnni]

The Nepali army has released video showing rescuers saving several people from the tunnel of a hydro power plant in Rasuwa. The footage shows survivors crawling through thick mud to reach rescuers.

Follow live updates: https://t.co/76b0bURXg7

[Shen Shiwei 沈诗伟 @shen_shiwei]

Our fingers crossed.😭😭😭

🙏🙏🙏Today, rescue helicopters of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) filmed footage near a devastating mudslide hit port of Gyirong (吉隆), along the🇨🇳#China-🇳🇵#Nepal border in China's Xizang Autonomous Region.

[Angelo Giuliano 🇨🇭🇮🇹 @angeloinchina]

NEPAL > Western NGOs have always opposed essential infrastructure projects that could avert/mitigate risks of floods.

Instead, those same NGOs. poured millions of dollars into Nepal’s civil society to control and manipulate Nepal’s democracy to serve US empire’s agenda.

Nepal’s elites is completely controlled by those NGOs, they all get their salaries and free trips to Washington and Tel Aviv.

[Angelo Giuliano 🇨🇭🇮🇹 @angeloinchina]

Western NGOs didn’t just block Nepal’s dams. They built the political class that still can’t protect the country—and the last “revolution” was their handiwork.

Today’s flash flood catastrophe on the Nepal-China border—dozens dead, hundreds missing, villages and infrastructure erased—exposes the same pattern.
For decades Western NGOs and their funders (USAID, NED and the usual network of “civil society” outfits) systematically blocked major barrages and storage projects. Environmental purity tests and “indigenous rights” campaigns killed Arun III, stalled West Seti and others. Nepal was left with run-of-river schemes that generate power when the weather cooperates but offer almost no flood regulation when an upstream avalanche or glacial surge hits. Sovereignty over infrastructure was surrendered to foreign vetoes.

See the record:
• International Rivers and allied groups helped force the World Bank withdrawal from Arun III and later targeted West Seti: https://t.co/cV1t799H12
• Civil society coalitions including International Rivers urged the World Bank to abandon Upper Arun and other mega-dams: https://t.co/Q2Jebd8HiJ
• US lobbying, driven by NGO pressure and legislation, instructed international lenders to avoid large reservoir projects in Nepal: https://t.co/ffjWqO4bu8

That same foreign NGO ecosystem runs the political system. USAID and related Western money poured hundreds of millions into “governance,” “civil society,” media, youth empowerment and “democracy promotion.” Local NGOs became parallel power structures, more responsive to Washington and European donors than to Nepali voters. Ministers, activists, media figures and “independent” experts rotate through these funded networks. The result is a political class trained in the language of Western grants rather than in building real national capacity.
Foreign NGOs effectively set the limits of what Nepal is allowed to do.
Look at the last so-called revolution. The September 2025 “Gen Z” uprising that toppled KP Sharma Oli was sold as a spontaneous youth revolt against corruption and a social media ban. In reality it followed the classic color-revolution script: digital coordination through Discord channels linked to NGOs like Hami Nepal, rapid escalation, selective violence, and an interim government staffed with figures drawn from USAID- and NED-linked organizations.
An online “vote” produced Sushila Karki as interim prime minister.
Half the early interim cabinet had direct ties to Western-funded fronts. The process cleared the old parties and installed a new configuration more amenable to the same external networks. Elections in March 2026 then delivered Balen Shah and the Rastriya Swatantra Party—another product of the post-uprising landscape shaped by those same influences.
This is not organic national renewal.
It is managed regime change that keeps Nepal dependent, unable to pursue large-scale infrastructure without Western approval, and geopolitically pliable between India and China.

The empire’s NGOs first prevented the dams that could have mitigated today’s disaster. Then they engineered the political upheaval that installed leadership still operating inside the same donor-dependent framework.
Nepal’s rivers remain unmanaged for extreme events because the people who decide policy were selected and funded by the same external actors who oppose real sovereign development.
Sovereignty is not a slogan for Discord polls or grant applications.
It means the right to build the infrastructure that keeps your people alive—and the right to reject foreign NGOs that treat your country as a laboratory for their ideology and strategic games. Until Nepal breaks that dependency, catastrophes like the one unfolding today will keep repeating.

[Former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 @FmrRepMTG]

The President did not deny that they are actually talking about lowering the threshold to use nuclear weapons.
He just called me silly names, which I don’t care about and doesn’t hurt me at all. It actually helps me because he has become so unpopular.
He called it fake news just like he calls everything that he doesn’t like and doesn’t want to talk about.
Just like he called the Epstein files a hoax, which is all true and definitely not a hoax.
Why didn’t the President promise the American people that he would not use nuclear weapons on a country that does not have nuclear weapons?
Why wouldn’t the President, who promised America “no more foreign wars” and that he would be “the peace president”, promise that he will not drop a nuclear bomb murdering hundreds of thousands of innocent people instantly?
And it’s true I don’t have insight into what the President is thinking because no one can comprehend what he is thinking anymore.
But I do talk to people.

[Former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 @FmrRepMTG]

They are discussing using nuclear weapons on Iran in strategy meetings.

Yes you read that correctly. It’s real. I’m not speculating, I know.

And it’s pure evil.

The last time a nuclear weapon was used was August 6th and 9th of 1945 on two cities in Japan, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, immediately killing 110,000 people, vaporizing people at ground zero, and total deaths reached 214,000 by the end of the year from severe burns and trauma.

But the extreme suffering continued for the Japanese people from radiation sickness, skyrocketing cancer rates, and generational birth defects.

Not to mention wiping out all means of their economy.

And the suffering was so great that all of humanity vowed, “never again.”

Trump and his admin were told by our own intelligence that Iran was no where near creating a nuclear weapon, then Israel said the same line it’s repeated for decades, “Iran is only weeks away.”

So we bombed anyways, killed their leaders and innocent little children in a school, and Iran has controlled the Strait of Hormuz ever since and punished the region for their part in it.

And now our government is the one actually discussing lowering the nuclear threshold in order to use nuclear weapons against Iran even though Trump claims he’s won the war like 40 times and says the U.S. controls the SoH.

Trump promised no more foreign wars, but may actually be the one who delivers a nuclear holocaust that would likely drag the entire world into major conflict, economic depression, and mass human suffering we’ve never seen in our lifetimes and maybe throughout history.

People need to speak out and boldly stop this insanity.

America is not untouchable.

If and when that happens, everyone, and I do mean everyone, will hold ALL of those in leadership right now fully responsible for the rest of human history.

Do not use nuclear weapons and stop this war NOW.

[Joe Kent @joekent16jan19]

Laura is rage-baiting because the war that she and her benefactors advocated for is going terribly.

One of the fundamental reasons the war in Iran is failing is a lack of basic understanding of both the country we started a war with and of the Middle East as a whole.

Loomer displays this lack of understanding/inability to assess the threat environment, and the sad irony here is that because our leaders have listened to rhetoric like hers we’ve now successfully radicalized the Iranians—so not only are we taking our eye off the very legitimate threats still posed by ISIS and Al-Qaeda, we will almost certainly face blowback terrorism as a result of the Iran war here on U.S. soil.

My late wife was killed by an ISIS suicide bomber. At the time of her death, the Iranian-backed Shia militias & the Assad regime were also actively fighting against ISIS. That is a fact.

Iranians have targeted Americans, but only when we intervened in their region. That is not sympathizing with the enemy—that is also, simply, a fact.

In Trump’s first administration, he exercised restraint—conducting a measured and effective retaliatory response via targeted strikes (Solmani), while having the discipline to not take the bait of a full-blown war with Iran, precisely because we knew it would result in the same disastrous outcome we’re dealing with today.

Unfortunately, this time around POTUS opted to listen to the likes of Laura and the Israeli lobby instead of those who actually understand the region & the threat—and now that we are in this mess and public support has cratered, Loomer & her ilk are blindly screaming “Islam!” as a distraction. It’s the same tired Bush-era “with us or with the terrorists” binary that got us twenty years of failure.

The American people deserve better.

[Prashant Bhushan @pbhushan1]

भ्रष्टाचार, महँगाई, नफ़रत: ये सब बच्चे तो थे, लेकिन लोकतंत्र नहीं आया था। उसको स्कूल से क्यों निकाल दिया? क्योंकि वह सवाल करता था? देखिए शेखर सुमन की बेहतरीन पेशकश

[Laura Loomer @LauraLoomer]

Last night, @RepOgles Rep. Andy Ogles, one of the only members of Congress who was willing to speak out about the Islamic takeover of America, lost his primary.

Everyday, the GOP looks more like the Democrat Party.

[The Hormuz Letter @HormuzLetter]

BREAKING: Trump exploded and lost his temper during a security meeting, shouting and cursing out of frustration over the military options presented to him and the lack of progress toward a deal with Iran, per NBC News.

A US official adds "after all this time, there is no unity" inside the administration, which is "facing a strategic defeat without clear policy guidance or a decision about where this is going."

An ally close to Trump adds the president is "exasperated" and there was "not a real strategy for how long or what they should do."

[Mario Nawfal @MarioNawfal]

Saudi oil is burning, Hormuz is choked, the Red Sea is closed, and the United States has itself to blame.

Steve Hanke, a Johns Hopkins professor and one of the most followed economists on X, pulls no punches:

"Trump has actually himself closed 2 of the 8 important straits in the world. The Strait of Hormuz was open before we waged war. That's a war of choice on them."

Prof. Hanke believes we will end up with the Iranians permanently managing the strait, and draws a historical comparison to Turkey managing the Bosphorus and Dardanelles since 1936.

He says the inflation genie is out of the bottle, the Fed cannot put it back, and diesel, jet fuel, and gasoline are all feeding a structural price problem that predates the war and is now being made dramatically worse.

On tariffs, sanctions, and interventionism: "This is a good way to make lots of enemies and put sand in the gears of commerce," and he sees no coherent plan from Trump, just ad hoc decisions made in real time.

Then there's the wheat story nobody is covering, the grain corridor out of Odessa being shut down, Russian gloves coming off, European sanctions backfiring on European manufacturing, all of it pointing to a food crisis that oil headlines are crowding out...

We've only begun to see the consequences of this war.

Thanks for making the time, @Steve_Hanke

[Seyed Mohammad Marandi @s_m_marandi]

America is the Great Satan

[CB Gadtaula @cbgadtaula]

@s_m_marandi How can I get it in Nepal sir?

[Ro Khanna @RoKhanna]

The Israeli government is lying to cover up for 4 IDF soldiers who aided violent settlers brandishing M4 guns and threatening American lives. I am calling for their arrest and prosecution.

I have met with Israeli hostages and condemned the brutal, terrorist attacks of Oct 7. That does excuse the IDF from detaining American citizens.

[Tucker Carlson @TuckerCarlson]

An Amercian member of congress is threatened by foreign terrorists carrying American rifles, backed by a foreign military paid for by American taxpayers, and the US ambassador to that country says not a word in defense of his own countryman, and instead uses his social media accounts to promote his own vapid cable news appearances, which amount to propaganda for that same foreign country. It’s too much, too insulting and humiliating to America. This is how revolutions start. For the sake our nation, Mike Huckabee should be removed from his post immediately.