Life adventurer, Lubertarian, Traveller, Sailor & AC tragic, Sportlovin' Grandfather & Political dog chaser
AOTEAROA
Joined May 2010
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Bo Jangles retweeted
O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
Bo Jangles retweeted
For every leaf pulling down carbon, there are endless miles of mycorrhizal fungi weaving an underground logistics network through the soil profile.
The Earth has 3.04 trillion individual trees, roughly 400 trees for every person on Earth, and around 80% to 90% of all plant and tree species form this mutual partnership. While NASA’s satellite data tracks the Taiga marching north, it misses the silent biological exchange working beneath the frost and leaf litter.
Estimates suggest roughly 250,000 plant species partner with about 50,000 species of fungi. There are around 73,300 distinct tree species worldwide. Russia has the most trees (641 billion), followed by Canada (318 billion), Brazil (302 billion) and the United States (228 billion).
The world has 380,000 documented plant species, and the majority - about 260,000 species - produce seeds.
Plants supply fungi with sugars and carbon produced via photosynthesis, since fungi cannot make their own food. In return, thread-like mycelium networks forage deep into the soil for vital water, phosphorus, and nitrogen to deliver back to the root systems.
Nature sidesteps the soil bottlenecks predicted by computer models because the soil itself is a living, decentralised energy marketplace. Trees pump excess carbon sugars from elevated atmospheric CO₂ down into their root systems. They trade sugars with fungi and microbes. In return, the fungi act as an underground mining and delivery service. They tap into deep mineral pools for the nitrogen and phosphorus that roots cannot reach on their own.
Earthworms drive the mechanics of the system, aerating the earth and recycling organic matter into the nutrient-dense humus that feeds the growth above. But without mycorrhizal fungi, soil is just sterile geology; with them, it functions as an active biological recycling plant.
Climate narratives often paint the planet as a fragile system on the edge of failure. But look at the astonishing symbiosis between a root, a fungal network and an earthworm. It reveals a self-regulating, highly resilient natural architecture.
The planet isn’t just surviving higher CO₂ levels; its converting carbon into the currency needed to fuel the networks below our feet. The nitrogen bottleneck may exist in a spreadsheet, but underground, the energy trade routes are wide open.
Against this vibrant, multi-layered genius of the living soil, the modern carbon agenda appears oddly sterile. It reduces the immense, self-directed architecture of the biosphere down to a simple liability on a global ledger.
While international summits broker complex financial mechanisms to police carbon through COP summits, the earth is already deploying it - quietly turning atmospheric surplus into living roots, fungal networks and rich topsoil.
Nature requires neither central planning, spreadsheets nor green subsidies. The planet’s inbuilt resilience is already written into its biology.
Bo Jangles retweeted
Honestly, there's a pretty high chance that the Gulf States are basically doomed eventually either way.
Bo Jangles retweeted
In Colorado, researchers gave breastfed babies puréed beef as their very first solid food instead of the iron-fortified cereal on every weaning chart, and the beef babies grew bigger heads.
Nancy Krebs took 88 babies, breastfed and four months old, and split them at random.
From five months, half were spoon-fed puréed beef. Half got the iron-fortified baby cereal American paediatricians had handed out as first food for generations.
The babies took to the beef just as happily as the cereal.
Between seven and twelve months, the heads of the beef babies grew faster. The amount of zinc and protein a baby took in predicted how much its head grew.
Her team kept going. Breastfed babies given more protein from meat grew longer, without putting on extra fat.
Then they took formula-fed babies and gave half of them meat purée and half of them yoghurt, cheese and whey from five months to a year.
The meat babies climbed up the growth charts for length. The dairy babies slipped down them, and got heavier for their height instead.
At two years old, the difference was still there.
The World Health Organization now says babies should have meat, fish or eggs every day from six months if they can.
The jar on the supermarket shelf still says baby rice.
Bo Jangles retweeted
US DRAWS CLOSER TO RUSSIA TO KEEP A MIDDLE EAST FOOTHOLD: TRUMP ABANDONS EUROPE TO SAVE THE GULF
Peter Hanseler, a Swiss geopolitical analyst and independent writer focused on great-power strategy, argues that the United States, stretched thin by wars it can no longer win, is quietly drawing closer to Russia. The goal is not friendship but a lasting commercial foothold in a Middle East it is about to lose. Europe, in this reading, is simply left behind—and later bought out cheap.
THE MIDTERM TRAP
➡️ Congressional elections put both chambers at risk for Republicans, with projections giving Democrats a clear edge.
➡️ A loss of both houses would leave Trump a lame duck, isolated and unable to launch major initiatives.
➡️ Impeachment talk is loud but faces a high Senate bar that remains unlikely to clear.
THE RUSSIA RETHINK
➡️ A small diesel deal with Ukraine looks like a stunt, yet it coincides with scaled-back target data, early warnings, and Starlink support for Kyiv.
➡️ Trump has suspended the sanctions law pushed by the late Senator Graham—a clear signal of rethinking policy toward Russia.
➡️ Hanseler notes the long Western desire to weaken and divide Russia, from the Rand Corporation’s 2019 “Extending Russia” blueprint backward through the Crimean War, 1905, 1917, and the 1990s oligarch sell-off. Those efforts failed. Russia is now stronger militarily, economically (lowest debt among major states), and socially.
THE MIDDLE EAST COLLAPSE
➡️ Hormuz is controlled by Iran and Oman; Bab al-Mandab by Ansarallah, which Hanseler sees as the best chance of toppling the House of Saud.
➡️ MBS faces a two-front fight: an uncontrollable military conflict and an internal family feud. Gulf mercenaries will not die for the regime.
➡️ The Gulf states are artificial Sykes-Picot constructs without shared national identity. If the House of Saud falls, the others follow.
Hanseler judges further bombing of Iran useless against deep granite bunkers and rules out a ground war the U.S. cannot staff. He writes that the Americans have underestimated Iran, Ansarallah, Hamas, and Hezbollah while overestimating Israel.
THE NEW STRATEGY
➡️ An intelligent U.S. move, in Hanseler’s view, is to give Russia free rein in Ukraine by withdrawing support.
➡️ That would produce a rapid Russian military victory and leave Moscow as a reliable advocate for remaining U.S. commercial interests in a reordered Middle East.
He quotes Bill Clinton from 2013: “He kept his word in all the deals we made.” Turks are unreliable, Iranians are adversaries, Chinese are the main rival; Russians keep treaties.
THE EUROPE PRICE
➡️ Abandoning Ukraine support also abandons Europe, undermines NATO, and neutralizes the EU.
➡️ Friedrich Merz has made the Russian threat Germany’s top priority even as the economy sits on the brink. Hanseler quotes him: “My biggest concern is NOT our economy. My biggest concern is the influence Russia exerts on our society.”
He places beside it Hermann Göring’s 1946 remark that leaders need only tell the people they are under attack. Unrest is already visible in France, Italy, and Albania.
Unless a miracle occurs, Hanseler concludes, Europe becomes a poorhouse and American firms such as BlackRock return to buy it for 10 cents on the dollar.
THE BOTTOM LINE
Hanseler’s thesis is that Washington, facing military, economic, and diplomatic limits, will trade Europe and Ukraine for a residual foothold in the Middle East via Moscow—averting great-power war in the process. The people of Europe and Kyiv are irrelevant to the calculation.
#USRussiaPivot #MiddleEastShift #EuropeAbandoned #UkraineEndgame #HanselerThesis #GulfCollapse #StrategicRealignment
HT: Peter Hanseler - Forum Geopolitica
Bo Jangles retweeted
‼️ The House of Saud Bends the Knee in Tehran
Türkiye and Pakistan are just there to console the Saudis in their moment of humiliation.
Meanwhile, somewhere in the great beyond, Ali Khamenei and Qasem Soleimani are sharing a triumphant high five.
Bo Jangles retweeted
The peak of globalism was Obama and Macron.
Two men, two continents, the same casting.
Young, polished, brilliant speakers. Perfect résumés. Total ease in front of a camera. Able to electrify a rally in Ohio and charm a room full of CEOs in Davos in the same week.
They are excellent actors. I mean that without irony. Public charisma is a real talent, and they have it at a rare level.
But look at what they actually embodied.
Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize nine months into his presidency. Before he had done anything. They weren't rewarding a record, they were rewarding an image: a post-national world run by institutions and experts.
Macron is the European version of the same product. A movement founded one year before the election, no historic grassroots base, carried by the economic, media and administrative elites. "Neither left nor right." Translation: attached to no people and no history. Just the efficient management of globalization.
Their whole software fit in one sentence: the global market, supranational institutions and experts know better than nations what is good for them.
Unlimited free trade. Deindustrialization sold as modernization. Borders treated as an archaism. Sovereignty treated as populism.
They weren't the architects of this project. They were its faces. The best salesmen it ever had. When you need millions of people to accept that their factory is moving to the other side of the world and that it's for their own good, you don't send a gray technocrat. You send someone who knows how to talk.
That's why footage of Obama at a rally rings so hollow today. Same tone, same inflections, same staging. But the audience has changed. They've seen the movie. They know how it ends.
And the project they carried is dying everywhere.
The US is back to tariffs and reindustrialization. Europe is finally talking about energy, military and tech sovereignty. Borders are a legitimate topic again. Supply chains are coming home. Covid proved that a country that can't produce its own masks isn't modern. It's vulnerable.
Macron is at 15% approval, his lowest since 2017. Obama is back on the rally circuit, and the magic is gone.
But the most revealing part is what came after them.
The system can no longer produce an Obama or a Macron. Nobody that charismatic, that polished, that smooth.
There are two reasons for that.
The first is arrogance. For fifteen years they won without really fighting. The media was on their side, the elites aligned, the opponent demonized in advance. When you win too easily, you get lazy. You stop caring about the casting. You stop working on the script. And it shows: less polished, less prepared, less credible.
The second runs deeper. Truly brilliant people no longer want to enter this system. They know it has no future. Fifteen years ago, an ambitious young prodigy aimed for the elite schools, Harvard, high civil service, the big international institutions. Today they start a company, they build, they go where things are moving. Nobody signs up for a sinking ship.
So look at the bench.
In the US, they ran Biden. A president whose cognitive decline was obvious to everyone except his inner circle, who spent months hiding it. Then they swapped him out in a panic for Kamala Harris, who couldn't answer a simple question without drifting into word salad. After Obama, that's a staggering fall.
In France, same movie. Attal is Macron on a photocopier. Same codes, same lines, none of the depth. He announced his presidential run from a village square in rural France to make people forget he's a pure product of Paris's wealthiest neighborhoods. Everyone sees the set. Nobody buys it.
And on the left, the new great hope is Glucksmann. Son of a famous philosopher, Brussels MEP, darling of the Parisian salons. He talks about the nation and the working class with the polish of a dinner party in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The words are right. The voice isn't.
They all sound off. Like instruments out of tune. You still recognize the score, but nobody wants to listen to the concert anymore.
That's the first sign of a dying system: it no longer attracts the best. All it has left are heirs and imitators.
Charisma isn't enough when reality contradicts the story.
What comes next won't necessarily be better. But it will be different: leaders judged by what they build, not by how well they tell it.
The age of actors is over. Make way for the builders.
Bo Jangles retweeted
There is a specific kind of American who has traveled the world, reads the news, considers himself globally aware, knows the names of countries his government has bombed.
And still, in his gut, believes those countries are lucky America is paying attention to them.
He cannot locate this belief consciously. He would deny it if you named it.
But it shapes every conversation he has about foreign policy.
Every time he says "It's complicated."
Every time he says "We have to consider the geopolitical reality."
Every time he says "Well, their government is also corrupt."
The belief is: "We are the protagonists."
Everyone else is context.
That belief is empire.
Not the bombs. Not the bases.
The belief.
Bo Jangles retweeted
Seed oils were sold as paint for a century before they were sold as food, and they do in you what they do on a window frame.
Linseed oil hardens on a fence post in a few days. Chemists call it a drying oil.
Soybean oil hardens too. So does sunflower, so does safflower. They were sold to the paint trade before they were sold to the kitchen.
Linoleum was invented in 1860 and it is named after linseed oil, because that is what it is, oxidised and pressed into a floor.
The oil does not dry by evaporating. It dries by oxygen attacking the double bonds in its fats and welding them into a hard skin.
The oil in your chip pan and the oil in your body carry the same double bonds, so the same attack runs there, with aldehydes thrown off as it goes.
A painter calls that curing. A biochemist calls it lipid peroxidation. A doctor calls it inflammation and prescribes something for it.
Once the oil is in your fat, it stays about two years, drying from the inside, every time it meets oxygen or sunlight.
Butter never dried a fence post. Tallow never varnished a boat. Saturated fat has no double bond for oxygen to attack, which is why it sits in the pan for a week and why it sat in your great-grandmother's cells for a lifetime.
A fat that sets hard in the air was never a candidate for the inside of an artery.
The flooring industry understood the chemistry in 1860. The heart charity recommended it in April.
Bo Jangles retweeted
Independent senator David Pocock has described Anthony Albanese's actions as
"not good enough", after the Prime Minister claimed a dirt sheet distributed from his office about Helen Haines was merely aimed at highlighting that "people of integrity stand up for their electorate".
Mr Albanese's claim on Thursday was at odds with the document released last month, which clearly questioned whether the Indi MP had conflicts of interest over funding proposals for which she was advocating.
As deputy Liberal leader Jane Hume declared Mr Albanese's comments showed he had "a problem with the truth", Senator Pocock accused the Labor leader of dodging accountability. "Dr Haines' integrity is beyond question.
Helen is one of the most principled people I know." Senator Pocock told The Australian. “It seems clear that staff in the Prime Minister’s office have been caught engaging in underhanded behaviour.
Bo Jangles retweeted
No More ‘Trust Us’: Climate Scientists Urged To Open Their Books
climatechangedispatch.com/tr… @ccdeditor
Bo Jangles retweeted
A Cornish pasty was built so that a man a mile underground with arsenic on his hands could eat a hot dinner holding it by a handle he then threw away.
The crust is the point. A proper one is shortcrust rolled thick enough to survive a shift in a tin miner's jacket, crimped along one side into a thick rope of pastry that stays cold while the middle stays hot. The miner held the crimp, ate the rest, and dropped the crimp down the shaft for the knockers, the spirits of the mine, which was the polite name for keeping the arsenic out of his mouth.
Inside was skirt of beef, chopped not minced, with potato, swede and onion, all raw, sealed in and cooked together so the beef fat ran through the vegetables and the juice stayed in the case. No gravy, because gravy leaks. A good one had the initials of the man it belonged to cut into the corner so the right pasty got to the right miner. Some had meat at one end and jam at the other, and you knew which end from the mark.
It fed Cornwall's miners for two centuries, and when the mines died the miners took it to Mexico, to Michigan, to South Australia, and there are pasty shops in all three to this day with Cornish names over the door.
The thing about it is how much of the animal was in it. Skirt is the diaphragm, a cut the supermarket will not stock, cheap, hard-working, full of flavour and fat, and the whole dinner was built round it. The vegetables were there to stretch the beef and soak up what it gave off.
Since 2011 the name has been protected by law, which means the pasty in the motorway services, made with minced beef, a glossy lid and a filling that was cooked before it went in, can only call itself Cornish if it is made in Cornwall, and some of the worst of them are.
The miner's dinner was a cut of beef in a pastry handle. The modern one is a pastry handle looking for the beef.
Bo Jangles retweeted
The System does NOT want you to know this...
Don't be emotional because it is an unpopular opinion BUT you need to understand that the war between Russia and Ukraine is a "civilizational war" and the PSYOP is playing out entirely on YOU...
Ukraine is losing around 11,000+ men to around 35,000+ young men PER MONTH, every month.
Russia is losing at minimum the same number of young men EVERY single month.
They are BOTH predominantly of Christian Orthodox Slavics fighting each other, while being egged on by two other European camps who are sponsoring the war entirely...
The other side sponsoring the wars are Germanic Christians and Romance Christians. Many will dismiss this because they do not understand historical context, but you should look into this.
When you see it through this historical and religious lens, you understand that this is not "just about Russian aggression".
It is an old feud being reignited trying to be settled by Europeans but instead of using their own men to do it, they are doing it by crushing the productive age men of the Slavics on BOTH sides of Ukraine and Russia for the benefit of Western Europeans.
These are what I call "civilizational wars", and you will understand it this way once you read and look into history without your emotions and despite what you have been spoon fed by your respective governments.
They are trying to crush Russia using Ukrainian bodies to reduce the numbers of Slavics across Europe overall to eventually take over and divide Russian lands and resources. That's it, that's all.
SIGNAL, not noise!
Bo Jangles retweeted
I have a confession to make: every pound of this physique was built by plants.
- Ryegrass, most of it
- White clover
- Heather, off the hill
- Bramble, off the hedge
- Nettles and docks
- Hay, a whole June of it
- Silage, a whole wet June of it
- Turnips, in February
I didn't eat a single one.
The cow, the ewe and the goat did, with the four stomachs and the yard of bacteria that the job needs, and sent them down to me as mince, mutton, butter and a litre of milk a day. So the thanks go to them.
A ruminant is the only machine on earth that can turn a hillside into muscle. I just stand at the end of it with a fork.
So I'm plant-based, technically. I've simply outsourced the chewing to something that's good at it.
Bo Jangles retweeted
You can hate Putin. He still made Russia stronger, richer, more stable, and more influential than he found it.
Western leaders did the opposite to our countries. We are weaker, poorer, less stable, less influential and none of that is his fault.
This is the simple truth!
Bo Jangles retweeted
"Unprovoked"
😂😂😂
I'm old enough to remember Ukraine before February 2022. Before the great PR makeover. Before billions in British public money started flowing. Before the swastikas were quietly airbrushed out of the picture and yesterday's neo-Nazi problem became today's inconvenient history.
Back in January 2015, Ross Kemp travelled to Ukraine for his Extreme World documentary series, investigating the rise of the far right and the Azov Battalion, including its neo-Nazi elements and symbolism.
This was British mainstream television, not Russian propaganda.
Funny how quickly history gets rewritten when the geopolitical interests change and the public chequebook comes out.
Of course, Ukraine's corruption, extremist movements and internal divisions didn't magically disappear in February 2022. But suddenly, mentioning what British journalists had openly reported for years was enough to get you branded a Kremlin sympathiser.
Well, here's Ross Kemp reporting from Ukraine in 2015, long before the political rebranding.
No Russian bots. No Kremlin script. Just the history they would rather you didn't remember.
Bo Jangles retweeted
There is a way that Zelenskyy describes contacts with the U.S. administration when he is unable to manipulate the narrative within the conversation. This is an example of that.
Note the difference in tone.
The reality of dealing with a person skilled in diplomatic clarity is unnerving to those who are skilled at diplomatic political theater. Their tone retreats, because the conversation is no longer swirling around pretense.
I spoke with Marco Rubio @SecRubio, and it was a substantive conversation – focused on the issues that matter. I am grateful for his readiness to help and his clear position. First, ballistic missile interceptors, which are needed to protect lives. Second, early warning of Russian ballistic missile attacks, which is vital. Third, the situation with Starlink/Starshield, which needs to be restored. Of course, all of this comes against the backdrop of our diplomatic efforts to end this horrific war and the constant killing of people. We agreed to get in touch again soon for an update. Thank you, Marco, for the constructive discussion! Thank you to everyone in America who supports fair approaches!
Bo Jangles retweeted
They will tell you to be peaceful.
To protest within sanctioned channels.
To write letters.
To vote.
To trust the process.
The French aristocracy told the peasants the same thing in 1788.
The British told the American colonists the same thing in 1775.
The slaveholders told the enslaved the same thing for three hundred years.
The process they are asking you to trust is the same process that produced the conditions you are protesting.
The channels they are asking you to use were designed by the people who benefit from the current arrangement.
This is not cynicism.
This is the pattern, repeating across centuries, across continents, across every society that has ever had to decide whether the people with power would voluntarily give any of it up.
They have not. They do not. They will not.
History is not a suggestion.
Bo Jangles retweeted
I spent 35 years building banking systems for banks worldwide, including central banks. I know how banks decide where their money goes.
When you build systems, you have to make them work, so you have to know how they work.
The Basel Committee de-industrialised the countries that adopted its rules. It's that simple: I explain the whole complicated mechanism in my essay. They simply regulated it away because that was the most profitable thing to do. It was implemented in such a systemic global way, and nobody seemed to notice
Capital is what a bank must hold before it can lend, the way a manufacturer or miner must hold supplies before it can sell. No miner doubles their costs to serve one group of customers. But that's what the banking system does to miners and manufacturers. Since 1988, the Basel rules have required banks to hold twice the capital against a factory loan as against a home loan, and under Basel III the gap reaches five times. So banks lend less to industry and more against houses. It should be stopped tomorrow.
Manufacturing's share of GDP fell in ten of the eleven countries I examined. In Australia it fell from 13.7% to 5.4%. Every other country that followed fell as well. The only truly crafty ones were the Koreans, who did a good job of offsetting it.
Regulators were warned in writing that the rule would steer credit, and they adopted it anyway. No parliament voted for it, and it's simply too dumb to keep doing, but we do . Not today; there is no justification. Yet from India, across Europe, across the US, including Australia, sanctions against industrial capacity. Financialization has gone too far it needs to be reviewed .
The charge is manslaughter by gross negligence. The mechanism is proven.
Same Rules, Different Ruins:ctindale.substack.com/p/same…
Bo Jangles retweeted
They need you to believe in their invincibility more than you need to believe in your own.
Think about that asymmetry carefully.
Their entire strategic position in the world rests on what other countries believe about the cost of defiance.
If you believe the cost is total destruction, you don’t defy them, and they never have to pay the cost of actually destroying you.
The deterrence is the point. The threat is the product.
Which means the moment the deterrence stops deterring, the moment a country calls the bluff and survives, the entire architecture shifts.
Vietnam called the bluff.
Survived.
And in surviving, changed the calculation for every country that came after.
The empire had to actually fight after that, instead of just threatening to.
And fighting, it turns out, is much more expensive than threatening.