Iran killed 600 US troops in Iraq

What about those pallets of cash? State Department

The US has always been wary of potential escalation.  We know now that US pilots fought Russians all through the Korean War, but no one wanted to admit, for example, that one Naval aviator shot down Soviet 4 Mig-15s in his F9F Panther.

Williams would remain quiet about the event for 50 years while he flew with Air Force Korean War aces at the Fighter Weapons School at Nellis, and commanded Navy fighter squadrons through the Cold War and Vietnam. Following the end of the Cold War in 1992, the Russians revealed that Williams had indeed gotten four: Captain Belyakov, Captain Vandalov, Lieutenant Pakhomkin, and Lieutenant Tarshinov of the VVS-PVO, the Air Defense Forces.

F9F Panther as shown in the Bridges of Tokori

“If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.”

Nicolás Maduro’s constituent assembly removes protection from Guaido, opening the door for arrest of man backed by dozens of countries as interim leader. Guardian

As Russia opens military center. The center was inaugurated Thursday, the same day that President Donald Trump warned that “Russia has to get out of” Venezuela and “all options are open” in ensuring it does.

New at the Belmont Club: “zones of order” under siege by entropy

It may not be long until societies are componentized into well defined groupings separated by interfaces roughly defined by the Fourth, First and Second Amendments. But first they have to realize componentization is the thing to do.  Just as developers can only build larger systems by shielding components behind standard protocols so that they can interact with dissimilars so too may politicians discover the key to rebuilding the global world is creating interfaces of the right kind against the emperors of chaos.  The second decade of the 21st century is shaping up to be a battle between information and chaos.  But it may be some time before the public realizes what is happening.

The Belmont Club

If I can’t make it there …

I’ll try again somewhere. New York too expensive for millionaires increasingly going elsewhere.

“The governor and mayor don’t want to talk much about highly paid people like bankers leaving New York,” said Alan Johnson, CEO of New York-based compensation consultancy Johnson Associates.

“There are many relocating — and if you see financial service firms expanding in future, it will be to Tampa, Fla., and Austin, Texas, and other places where it’s not as expensive to live as New York,” he added. “It’s showing up in the numbers.”

New York Post

Russia is acquiring an empire of chaos

Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, brought in Russian mercenaries in January to help shore up his rule against nationwide protests. And last spring, five sub-Saharan African countries — Mali, Niger, Chad, Burkina Faso and Mauritania — appealed to Moscow to help their overtaxed militaries and security services combat the Islamic State and Al Qaeda. …

“Moscow and its private military contractors are arming some of the region’s weakest governments and backing the continent’s autocratic rulers,” said Judd Devermont, director of the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “This engagement threatens to exacerbate current conflict zones.” New York Times

The globalized world cannot survive a bifurcation into functional and dysfunctional universes. But that may well be what is happening.

“President Trump said on Friday that there would be a ‘very good likelihood’ that he would seal off the United States border with Mexico next week, even as he moved to punish Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador for migrant caravans by cutting off all foreign aid to the countries.”

Venezuela de-electrified

“Another day, another blackout. Power went out across Venezuela on Sunday, just as it did on Saturday, and the day before that.”

Candles are now the norm. Maduro announces plans to put country in sleep mode. “Nicolas Maduro announced 30 days of electricity rationing on Sunday, after his government said it was reducing the length of the workday and keeping schools closed due to devastating blackouts plaguing the country.”

Dim the brightness, lower the volume of system sounds, shut down any unnecessary applications, close any process that has been inactive for more than one minute. Low batt.

In the end it’s only going to work if Maduro finds a charger.

Turkey’s Erdogan says his party may have lost Istanbul mayorship | Article [AMP] | Reuters

Erdogan also said his party would appeal results wherever needed, and added that he would take the necessary measures at ministries and institutions to make the system of governance more dynamic. He said there would not be other elections for four and a half years.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-turkey-election-istanbul-idUSKCN1RC0X6

Merkel to protect its Irish frontier

Ireland is where Brussels now begins.

“The Irish border issue has become an almost intractable problem. The EU’s proposed “backstop” arrangement, contained in the Brexit deal rejected three times by the British Parliament, is aimed at preventing the need for infrastructure and visible checks on the frontier by keeping the U.K. in a customs union with the bloc until a replacement solution is found.

But Ireland, which insists there can be no return to a hard border — a symbol of decades of violence which ended with a peace accord in 1998 — has been reluctant to spell out what would happen if the Brexit deal fails. The EU will oblige Ireland to check the flow of goods across the frontier because of Ireland’s place in the bloc’s customs union and single market, but officials are working on ways to ensure this can happen as much as possible away from the border, people familiar with the matter said.”

Bloomberg

The age of belief


A survey argues that atheism aka “no religion” is rising. That’s only because they didn’t offer categories of belief systems that are effectively religions. When these are accounted for the number of believers may have increased.

The behavioral clues are everywhere. Celibacy is on the rise. Not for traditionally Christian reasons, but for reasons of intersectionality. “The analysis found that since 2008, the % of men under 30 reporting no sex had nearly tripled to 28 %, compared with an 8 % increase reported by women in the same age bracket. It found that 18 % of women between the ages of 18 and 30 reported no sex in the past year.”

Cultlike behavior is everywhere, especially on campuses. Ritual diets, virtual signaling, zealotry, laws against blasphemy tricked out as measures against hate speech. There’s an obsession with ‘mindfulness’ and ‘centering’. Yet withal a kind of terrible anomie has descended over everything.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/from-moms-to-medical-doctors-burnout-is-everywhere-these-days/2019/03/29/1cea7d92-401d-11e9-922c-64d6b7840b82_story.html

How many people, for example, belong to the church of climate change? We are not living in an irreligious age. On the contrary there have never been so many cults.