Thursday Roundup: Monetary Front, Home And Abroad; Menendez; Ukraine; O'Reilly; And Trump

In a way this Roundup is all about Trump. Be patient and you’ll see what I mean. We’ll start with a series of tweets gleaned from Tom Luongo’s thread. I’ve rearranged them, and I’ll admit up front that some of it is over my head. But it’s important. It’s about what’s going on behind the headlines. Most readers will be familiar with the idea that All Wars Are Bankers' Wars. I’m not here to argue that, but I will state that that construct contains far more truth than I would have been willing to concede not that many years ago. So let’s dive in.

We start with the Trump theme—this tweet is a response to a Luongo attack on the ECB’s and Globalists’ (including Yellen and Obama) attack on the USD:

GiovanniPaolo

@jpbello27

ECB arguably the seat of Satan. If Trump was not elected & Powell nominated the world would most likely be very different today. Yes other issues exist but Powell raising interest rates slowing down lending etc is a historical event that will be talking about throughout history.

10:07 AM · Sep 28, 2023

Hold on to that idea. The difference Trump made. We shift to Menendez—but it’s all connected. The same people who wanted Powell in at the Fed may be behind getting Menendez indicted.

I basically have little interest in corruption stories. They’re mostly boring. I did a fair amount of investigation in my day of financial related crimes. I initially thought that unraveling the fraudsters’ schemes would be interesting, but it really wasn’t. The concepts were largely fairly simple when you got to the bottom of them, and the people themselves weren’t interesting than most of your ordinary thugs. So the only thing about the latest Menendez indictment—which looks like it’ll stick—was: What does a Dem senator need to do to get a Dem lawfare stronghold like the SDNY to indict him? It can’t be about the crime itself. Luongo has an answer: the banksters are the real power brokers, and the most powerful US banksters, he reminds us, are not in love with Davos.

Claire Williams

@byclairew

Sen. Bob Menendez, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, is also an influential member of Senate Banking.

Tom Luongo (Head Sneetch)

@TFL1728

This is likely the angle most interesting about the situation on Capitol Hill. Menendez is as compromised and corrupt a person as one can be up there.

How many manila folders hit his desk in the past week?

Who's really in charge up there? [I.e., up there on the Hill]

It ain't Davos, folks.

Now, to add some nuance, remember when Jamie Dimon went to Davos and basically told the assembled globalist climatistas to shove it all—we need to start drilling more? Now this:

Tom Luongo (Head Sneetch)

@TFL1728

Kek. GS has definitely been working the anti-Davos agenda on Wall St. In retrograde since the Biden Junta took power.

Goldman CEO Solomon Sidesteps ESG, Embraces Support For Fossil Fuel Companies

“Traditional energy companies are hugely important to the global economy, they are hugely important to Goldman Sachs. We are all going to continue to finance traditional companies for a long time."

12:24 PM · Sep 27, 2023

Sidesteps ESG? JPM and GS are clearly on some sort of war path. They’re not our friends, but they sure like the enemies of our enemies. They’re also backing Powell. And Trump brought Powell in. They undoubtedly want someone other than Trump, but it’s hard to see them going for more Zhou or for a Davos made-man like Newsom. I’d like to know their views on war—after all, if there’s gonna be a war these days it’ll certainly be a bankers’ war. Dimon is in tight with the Chinese, so that Neocon pivot to China? Not on his watch. Something’s up.

Now, at the link is Judge Nap talking with Scott Ritter. The Judge plays two clips from NBC News in which the NBC reporter cites a letter from Sen. JD Vance and challenges WH spokester John Kirby to answer Vance’s questions about what in the world is up with our support for the losing side in Ukraine—at about 12:00 and again at about 15:30. The reporter wants to know, ‘What’s the exit strategy? Does the US have an exit strategy?’

What is the West Up To in Ukraine? w/Scott Ritter

Now, that NBC reporter knows as well as any of us that the strategy is precisely to not exit. The strategy remains, As long as it takes, and it may take seven more years. My question is, Who gave her permission—or, more likely, urged her—to challenge Kirby and try to put him on the spot? She didn’t do that on the spur of the moment. Again, something is up. Next question, Who does NBC News take their orders from? It sure looks like some very powerful people are intent on pulling the rug out from under not only Zhou but the whole Neocon venture.

By the way, Ritter makes a very pithy statement in the video. He says that the US is now in the position of a sports team playing for a tie, but the Russians are playing for the win. We all know that playing for a tie is usually a losing proposition.

Now, somewhere else this morning I heard a clip of someone—my recollection is that it was Kirby again—stating that the US and NATO had spent 8 years getting Ukraine ready for “just this type of war”. In other words, a high tech war pitting Ukraine against Russia’s missile systems and utilizing NATO ISR assets to take out Russian targets. Let’s repeat this: Trump. My belief is that if Hillary had won in 2016 this war would have started sooner. It had been in the planning stage for years. Imagine the rage against Trump on the part of the Deep State. We saw it for his four years, but now think about it again in retrospect. Who thinks they want Trump back in the White House saying, I toldja so?

On that note, Simplicius’ substack today is a real must read for anyone who wants to understand this war. What emerges is that, ready as Russia had tried to be, they still weren’t totally ready for NATO’s participation. In particular, Simplicius takes a deep dive into the limits of radar in defending Crimea against low flying missiles like the Storm Shadow that are being directed by NATO ISR resources. Russia could easily take out the ISR assets and solve the problem that way, but they’ve avoided that escalation—so far. They way to do it, with that restraint in place, is to use AWACS planes with look down radar, that can pick out sea skimming missiles. Simplicius states that Russia is short on those resources, although it is addressing that issue:

Analysis of Ukraine's Escalating Crimean Strike Campaign

But I’ve outlined before that Russia has an AWACS problem. It reportedly only has ~15 or less. However you must add the following considerations:

• All planes have a certain readiness percentage of 30-70% at most, which represents how many of the air frames are flyable at any given point, compared to those which are in repair, etc.

• Russia needs some of the planes for its entire long border, including in the far east against NATO, as well as in the north where heavy NATO activity takes place around the Baltics, not to mention western districts to protect Moscow’s western flank

• Russia also needs them along the whole border of the SMO including north of Ukraine. For instance, we’ve seen from the attempted saboteur strike that Russia keeps some of them in Belarus to oversee that northern flank

• A single plane can’t fly 24/7, for obvious reasons. That means even to patrol just one given area without coverage gaps, you need several planes (perhaps at least 3) which can rotate one after the other in 8 hour shifts, etc.

Given all these factors, if we allocate the appropriate amount of planes to each needed zone, as well as readiness rates which would relegate a portion of the fleet to unflyable status—undergoing overhauls, upgrades, repairs, etc.—we can assume that only 1 or 2 max will likely be available for the Crimean theater and likely result in large coverage time gaps.

Russia has been developing and building the successor upgrades to the A-50, the A-50U and A-100 for a long time. Therefore it was big news that reportedly, in the wake of the Sevastopol strikes, Russia announced a rollout of a brand new A-50U.

This is supposed to be a much more advanced, modernized variant with a better radar specifically in its look-down capabilities. It’s only one hand-over for now, but if Russia can keep producing them it will greatly help to secure that region from missile strikes.

Note that once again, Ukraine has not been able to reprise the attacks. Why is that? The Rostov and Minsk are still sitting in the same berth in Sevastopol, easy pickings for more missiles, especially given that Russia plans to repair them. Surely Ukraine would be highly motivated to finish those ships off.

It’s a game of cat and mouse. Ukraine can only conduct a successful strike once in a while when all the appropriate surveillance measures are taken by 5-Eyes partners and everything is pre-planned out with an accommodating coverage ‘gap’ available somewhere.

In other words, these attacks are largely PR stunts, since they use up scarce resources for minor results. But Simplicius goes into more detail as well as addressing issues like the difficulties Ukraine has in using certain types of aircraft, as well as Russian difficulties in hitting certain airfields. A lot of this has to do with NATO ISR assistance, and Simplicius also goes into the significance of the Russian attack on the hotel in Odessa, which housed Ukrainian as well as “mercenary” personnel operating against Russia in the Black Sea. My guess is that the high rise building—supposedly assisting the “grain deal” shipments—was being used as part of the targeting of Crimea. Russia is progressively removing its gloves, but is still getting all its resources lined up. The bottom line is this:

This encapsulates the fact that this war is the most high-tech peer-level conflict in history.

Russia is proceeding cautiously because everything in this conflict is new territory. Step by step. But indications are that they are feeling more and more confident. Just as importantly, whoever told the NBC reporter to challenge John Kirby must have a clear view of where this is all heading.

In the meantime, we end with Trump—via Bill O’Reilly’s interview with Tucker Carlson:

"The American People Know The Fix Is In" - O'Reilly Warns Carlson "We Are In The Age Of Disorder Now"

Excerpts via Zerohedge:

"America has entered the age of disorder, and it's because of the progressive movement," O'Reilly lamented.

"President Biden, in my opinion, is diminished mentally, doesn’t know what he’s really doing from day-to-day. You can see that in his public statements," O'Reilly remarked, adding that "the progressives like that, because the people who control him inside the White House can tell him anything, and he’ll do it."

O’Reilly said that Ron Klain and Susan Rice were the original string-pullers, but since their departure from The White House, their assistants took their place "basically telling Joe what to do and say."

“The more money you take from people, the less power they have, and the progressives want to run everything, including telling your children what to think when they’re five years old,” O’Reilly said.

"And most Americans don’t get it, because the press is working with the progressive movement and suppresses all this.”

However, O'Reilly notes that, given the constant overwhelming bias evident in the Biden admin's judicial actions, it is becoming too hard for media to suppress the reality of political persecution:  

"The American people understand what this is... they understand that the documents in Mar A Lago basement parallel the documents in Joe Biden's garage. Yes it's the same thing, but one guy gets raided and charged and the other guy," remains under an opaque investigation.

"Does it really take nine months to figure out why Joe Biden illegally - because he was vice president had no right to take anything -  had documents in his garage? Does it take nine months to do that? No. Has Joe Biden been interviewed? No."

"So," O'Reilly concludes, "the American people know the fix is in now."

And "Trump can stop the age of disorder."

Are there powerful people who realize that, no matter their personal preferences, the country can’t go on the way things are going now? Maybe.

Thanks, Bluto. Thanks, Turtle.