🇨🇳🦑🇵🇪 A satellite view of Chinese illegal, unreported & unregulated (IUU) fishing vessels swarming in Peruvian waters!

Chinese vessels illegally enter Peruvian waters mostly to catch giant squids.

🔗 Michael Turner

🇺🇸 Rubio says intercepting drug vessels doesn’t work, blowing them up does

Rubio on Wednesday argued that the traditional policy of intercepting drug-carrying vessels had not worked. Instead, the US is “going to wage war on narco-terrorist organizations.”

“The United States has long, for many, many years, established intelligence that allow us to interdict and stop drug boats. We did that. And it doesn’t work,” Rubio said at a press conference in Mexico City.

“What will stop them is when you blow them up, when you get rid of them,” he said, arguing that interdiction doesn’t work because drug cartels plan to lose 2% of their cargo.

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/09/03/politics/rubio-blow-up-drug-ships

🇺🇸🇺🇳 "If Washington isn’t careful, its dive into deep-sea mining risks undermining the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and creating opportunities for China and others to bend, break, and remake the rules of the sea to their benefit," — CSIS

📝 John Konrad on X:

1) USA didn’t sign the law of the sea

2) China doesn’t follow the law of the sea

3) Nobody is willing to stop them

4) The UN’s Maritime Agency is already on a voyage to crazytown

5) The UN’s Seabed Mining Law Agency was born in crazytown & never left

🔗 John Konrad

🇺🇸🌎 The Fourth Turning and America’s Hemispheric Play

The Fourth Turning lens suggests every 80–90 years, the U.S. reaches a crisis climax where the old institutional and monetary order can no longer hold. The Civil War, the Depression and WWII, the Cold War and Bretton Woods each reset emerged out of turmoil, redefining the structure of power. By that clock, we are in the late stages of another cycle. The period 2025–2032 is the decisive window when the next system will be hammered into place. Against that backdrop, the U.S. may be moving to lock down its own hemisphere before the global showdown with Eurasian rivals escalates.

If you step back, Washington’s actions in Venezuela, Mexico, and across the Caribbean look less like isolated counternarcotics missions and more like an effort to eliminate vulnerabilities. Cartels are being recast not simply as criminals but as parallel sovereigns. By designating them as terrorist entities, sanctioning their banks, and striking their logistics at sea, the U.S. is asserting that migration flows, mineral corridors, and energy infrastructure fall under national security, not law enforcement. This is a prelude to reshaping the Western Hemisphere into a secure bloc under U.S. oversight.

This is important now because in a Fourth Turning, external wars and internal instability collide with monetary strain. The dollar based order, built after 1971, is stretched by debt, inflation whiplash, and rival experiments in commodity backed clearing. The U.S. can only preserve leverage if it has unchallenged depth at home. Guyana’s oil, Mexico’s supply chains, Brazil’s minerals, Venezuela’s reserves, these aren’t regional matters anymore, they are pillars of the global system. If China, Russia, or Iran can exploit instability in the Americas, they can weaken Washington at its core.

Seen this way, the moves in South America are not distractions from Ukraine, Taiwan, or the Middle East, they are prerequisites. In the 1940s, before storming Europe, the U.S. secured the Western Hemisphere through bases, naval patrols, and political deals. In the 1980s, before the Soviet endgame, it did the same through counterinsurgency in Central America. Today’s strikes and sanctions are the modern version of trying to clear the board at home so resources can be projected abroad.

The risk is that the U.S. is running out of time. Fourth Turnings force resolution. If cartel power is not brought to heel, migration crises, illicit mineral flows, and energy disruptions could destabilize the U.S. politically just as global confrontation peaks. That would embolden adversaries to push harder, believing Washington is overstretched. But if the U.S. succeeds in forcing cartel concessions and bringing Latin America into closer alignment, it would emerge with secure depth, resource flows locked down, and financial dominance intact far better positioned to face China, Russia, and Iran.

In this hypothetical, what looks like drug enforcement is really a structural play to tighten control of the hemisphere, convert shadow powers into constrained actors, and secure energy and minerals before the crisis climax. Whether it results in war abroad, a cold bifurcation of the world economy, or a negotiated reset, the aim is the same which is to ensure that the next monetary and strategic order is written on U.S. terms.

🔗 EndGame Macro

🇺🇸🏆🌎 Pure MAGA foreign policy is imperial,

It conceptualizes spheres of influence in which the US remains dominant in the Western Hemisphere (and China in East Asia, Russia in Central Asia/Eastern Europe, India in South Asia, etc).

And because all countries in Latin America are weaker than China or Russia, the Trump admin is picking on them more so. This attack on Venezuela is the latest such example. Don't forget about retaking the Panama Canal, renaming Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America, claiming Canada as the 51st state, and conducting covert action to push Greenland away from NATO ally Denmark.

Indeed, Trump 2.0 foreign policy is "Americas First."

🔗 Derek Grossman

🍔 Prices in fast-food restaurant chains have grown between 54-100% in the last 5 years but the U.S. official inflation rate still is under 3%.

@CIG_telegram

🇺🇸 Pentagon considers leasing part of Camp Pendleton to help fund Golden Dome missile defense system

The Defense Department is considering leasing parts of Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, California, for commercial use, with profits potentially helping fund President Donald Trump’s Golden Dome missile defense project, a current defense official and a former defense official told NBC News.

The base sprawls across more than 125,000 acres of Southern California, less than one-quarter of which is build out, including what the Marine Corps says is the “largest undeveloped portion of coastline in Southern California.”

Marines use some of the undeveloped land’s variety of terrain for training. The beaches are critical to amphibious landing training, for instance, while mountains, desert and rangeland are used in combat readiness drills.

The Pentagon has conducted an initial survey of the areas that could be leased for commercial use, but the officials could not say how many acres are under consideration or how long those leases would be. Various areas spread around the base would most likely be up for lease, rather than one large chunk of land, and the Pentagon is focused on areas the Marines rarely use, the officials said.

📝Anon: America is out of money.

🔗 https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/pentagon-considers-leasing-part-camp-pendleton-help-fund-golden-dome-m-rcna228813

🇭🇹🇺🇸🇵🇦 US and Panama propose new force of 5,550 in Haiti with the power to detain gang suspects

"Gangs have grown in power since the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in 2021. They now control 90% of the capital, Port-au-Prince, and have expanded their activities, including looting, kidnapping, sexual assaults and rape, into the countryside. Haiti has not had a president since the assassination."

🔗 https://apnews.com/article/un-haiti-kenya-panama-1255acdacddbf8dff502c19e9695aac4

🇺🇸🇻🇪 July 10th 2025, this was a suspected stop off the coast of Venezuela back in July by the US Coast Guard.

They used a sniper and 50cal Barrett to disable the vessel rather than blowing it up and killing its occupants.

🔗 Sal Mercogliano

🇬🇧 The UK is arresting on average 30 citizens a day for offensive speech online, amounting to 12,000 a year.

The story of Bernadette Spofforth: immediately after the Rwandan migrant, Axel Rudakubana, murdered 3 young girls in Southport and injured 8 others, Spofforth retweeted someone claiming that the murder was caused by a "newly arrived migrant".

Even though Bernadette deleted the retweet from her timeline as new information came to light that the attacker was a 2nd generation migrant, a British law enforcement officer had already seen it and sent a patrol to her home and arrest her.

Maxie Allen, a radio producer in Hertfordshire woke up to six officers knocking on their door to haul him and his wife to jail over comments they posted in a private WhatsApp group for parents at their children’s school.

In 2018 a man identifying himself as “Adam” phoned into the British talk radio station LBC to describe his encounter with police earlier that year.

“I’m Asian myself and I did this drawing of a mate of mine, who’s also Asian, and I said, ‘you look like a terrorist.’ And he took it really well. He thought it was funny,” he told the host.

But someone else saw the humorous doodle, took issue, and called police. Months later, Adam and his friend were interviewed by authorities — the friend told cops he laughed at the drawing and wasn’t offended — but police still made an official report for a “non-crime hate incident” and forced Adam to write a letter of apology to his friend, which he had to email to him.

Last October, Adam Smith-Connor, a 51-year-old Army veteran, was convicted and forced to pay a $12,000 fine for silently praying outside an abortion clinic in Dorset. In April, anti-mass migration French philosopher Renaud Camus was banned from the UK, where he was set to give a speech.

Lucy Connolly was sentenced to 31 months in prison for “publishing written material with the intent to stir up racial hatred". Her crime? She posted on X her support for mass deportations. Coppers say she “falsely claimed” the Al Qaeda-supporting killer was a migrant, even though his parents were migrants.

Connolly, like Spofforth, realized her mistake and deleted the tweet three hours after posting but police still showed up a week later to arrest her.

Free speech activists called Britain a “two-tier” justice system when Labor councillor Ricky Jones was found not guilty after calling for the murder of anti-migration protestors, telling a crowd “we need to cut all their throats.”

This summer, the UK government updated its definition of terrorist ideologies to include “cultural nationalism,” singling out Westerners who express concern over mass migration.

Of the 33,000 car thefts recorded in London alone last year, only 300 arrests were made; while just five percent of the over 40,000 shoplifting incidents reported in London in 2023 led to charges.

🔗 https://nypost.com/2025/08/19/world-news/uk-free-speech-struggle-30-arrests-a-day-censorship/

🇪🇺🔫📍🗺 — 📰 Financial Times | Europe has ‘pretty precise’ plan to send troops to Ukraine, von der Leyen says | Post-conflict security guarantees will be fully backed by US commitments, commission president tells FT | August 31, 2025:

"European capitals are working on “pretty precise plans” for potential military deployments to Ukraine as part of post-conflict security guarantees that will have the full backing of US capabilities, Ursula von der Leyen has said.

There was a “clear road map” for possible deployments, the European Commission president told the Financial Times in an interview.

“Security guarantees are paramount and absolutely crucial,” von der Leyen said. “We have a clear road map and we had an agreement in the White House . . . and this work is going forward very well.”

🗄 Archive

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