Life adventurer, Lubertarian, Traveller, Sailor & AC tragic, Sportlovin' Grandfather & Political dog chaser
AOTEAROA
Joined May 2010
- Tweets39.4K
- Following845
- Followers344
- Likes20.4K
Bo Jangles retweeted
🇮🇷🇺🇸 Iran's foreign ministry looked the Empire of Chaos in the eye today and said "there is absolutely no trust between Iran and America", because nobody in Tehran believes Washington "won't tear up its signature after two or three weeks", and frankly why would they, when Israel opened fire on Iran in June 2025 two days before talks in Muscat, the Americans piled in nine days later, and then on 28 February this year the bombs fell again just two days after Oman hailed "significant progress" in Geneva...
So while Washington waves JD Vance's letter around like a peace offering, spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei answers with the cold memory of a nation that has been here before, saying the letter "has no new basis", which means the Strait of Hormuz, now moving roughly 3% of its pre-war traffic, a trickle where a fifth of the world's oil once flowed, stays shut to hostile nations until America lifts its blockade of Iranian ports and accepts Iran's full terms. The receipts for that distrust stretch back to May 2018, when the same Donald Trump who now wants a deal walked out of the nuclear agreement while the IAEA was still certifying Iranian compliance, and the "rules based order" barely cleared its throat. And Tehran has also studied the fate of Gaddafi, who handed over his weapons programs in 2003 in exchange for Western smiles and was hunted down under NATO bombs eight years later, which is a lesson no Persian strategist is ever going to forget.
Eight months into this war of choice the invoice has landed on the Pentagon's desk, with Iranian missiles critically damaging 274 structures across 24 American bases by the Wall Street Journal's own count, twenty-three US service members dead and 865 wounded, and $47.1 billion burned, much of it on interceptors that can no longer be spared for anywhere else on the imperial map.
Oil traders, who are far less sentimental than the Western client media, have already done the math, with Brent sliding from around $118 last week to roughly $105 today on nothing more than the market manipulation rumour that Washington might finally blink, while Tehran has signalled it could reopen Hormuz within days once the blockade ends and full terms of the MOU are fulfilled, which tells you exactly who is setting the terms.
Let's not spare a thought for the Gulf palaces that rented out their sands as launchpads for the Empire and now discover that hosting American bases buys them nothing but a front row seat to their own oil terminals and demise, because every further escalation pushes these fragile monarchies, and the global economy along with them, closer to the abyss. Meanwhile Moscow calls the blockade illegal and Beijing receives Iran's security chief with a pledge to back its "sovereignty and security", so the Eurasian heartland is quietly underwriting Persian defiance, while every month of this siege only strengthens the case for moving Eurasia's trade onto the North-South corridor and settling it far beyond the reach of the failed petrodollar.
What we are witnessing is the slow motion eclipse of the Empire of Lies, whose priests in DC and idols in Tel Aviv still recite the old liturgy of sanctions, blockades and broken signatures to a congregation that has quietly left the cathedral, from the bazaars of Tehran to the boardrooms of Beijing and the ports of the Global South, because a civilisation that measures time in millennia has simply outwaited an empire that measures time in midterm cycles. The bill for Bibi's political survival and his zealots' apocalyptic fantasies lands on the kitchen tables of Ohio and Texas, the Transatlantic puppets applaud from the gallery, and out in the Gulf the only deterrent that truly works is a 21 mile strait the mightiest navy in history cannot reopen. Was it all worth it?
Agent Orange is POTUS
Agent Orange is still killing people.
Let that be your starting point every time someone wants to have a "civilized" conversation about American foreign policy.
Not metaphorically. Not as history. Right now, today, children are being born in Vietnam with devastating disabilities because the U.S. Air Force saturated the Vietnamese countryside with dioxin-laced herbicide between 1961 and 1971.
The half-life of this poison in human tissue and in soil is not a matter of decades. It is a matter of generations.
They poisoned the land. They poisoned the water. They poisoned the genetic legacy of millions of families.
And then they left.
And then they had the audacity, the breathtaking audacity, to spend the following decades positioning themselves as the moral authority of the planet.
To sanction other countries for human rights abuses. To fund international courts. To write reports about atrocities committed by governments they didn't like. To show up at the United Nations and speak about the "rules-based international order."
The same government. The same institutional continuity. The same flag.
The country that is still poisoning Vietnamese children from a war that ended more than fifty years ago is the country that lectures the world about human rights.
And here is the thing about Vietnam that makes this hypocrisy historically radioactive:
Vietnam won anyway.
Despite everything done to it. Despite the poison in its soil and the bombs in its mountain.
There are still undetonated American bombs in the mountains of Vietnam, still killing farmers today. Still.
Despite all of it, Vietnam rebuilt. Vietnam developed. Vietnam survived.
They tried to make Vietnam an example of what happens when you resist.
Vietnam made itself an example of what happens when you survive.
Every country watching this story has to make a choice about which example matters more.
The example of: this is what we will do to you if you resist.
Or the example of: this is what is possible if you refuse to be destroyed.
Vietnam chose. Vietnam chose to fight and to suffer and to rebuild and to stand.
And today Vietnam is a country. A real one. With its own government. Its own choices. Its own future.
And the men who ordered the Agent Orange are dead, and their war is over, and their example failed, and Vietnam is still here.
That is the most important sentence in modern history.
Vietnam is still here.
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
