Where debating everything under the sun is only the beginning

1/ Denmark was reportedly preparing for full-scale war with the US over Greenland in January, with military support from France, Germany, and Nordic nations. Elite troops and F-35 jets with live ammunition were sent, and runways were to be blown up to prevent an invasion. ⬇️ Image
2/ The Danish public broadcaster DR reports that officials in Denmark, France and Germany say that Donald Trump's threats to seize Greenland were taken so seriously that wide-ranging preparations were made to forcibly resist a US invasion of the Danish island.
3/ The Danish and French governments worked together to create a northern European coalition to defend Greenland from the United States. Under the cover of a pre-planned defence exercise, Greenland's defences were bolstered to raise the costs of any US invasion attempt.
4/ This included sending blood to treat wounded soldiers; sending elite Danish troops and French alpine troops to Greenland; preparing Greenland's runways for demolition to prevent a Hostomel-style seizure; and sending armed F-35 jets to patrol the skies.

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I don't agree with your contention, that Operation Epoch Fury was all about China, even in this author's opinion,; and I don't see how you reached such.
Would you care to explain how you came to such a conclusion? (Yes, I read the whole piece...)

The Iran Question Is All About China

Why Operation Epic Fury Is the Opening Act of the Indo-Pacific Century

Iran is most often discussed as a nonproliferation problem, a sponsor of terrorism, a regional spoiler. Each of these framings captures a real problem, but none captures what matters most. The nuclear file, the militia archipelago stretching from Lebanon to Yemen, the question of Gulf security architecture: these only acquire their full meaning when read against the backdrop of Chinese grand strategy.

In fact, Beijing has spent years and billions of dollars building Iran into a structural asset. Everything that follows in the Middle East flows from this fact. Which is why Operation Epic Fury is the first American military campaign that threatens to sever that asset. By striking Iran directly, the Trump administration is dismantling, whether by design or by consequence, a pillar of China’s regional architecture.

The urgency of saying so plainly has never been greater. In June 2025, Israel launched Operation Rising Lion, a 12-day campaign of precision strikes that destroyed Iranian enrichment facilities, killed over 30 senior commanders and a dozen nuclear scientists, and drew the United States into direct strikes on 3 nuclear sites. The Islamic Republic’s deterrent mythology, cultivated over four decades, collapsed within a fortnight. In late December, the largest protests since 1979 erupted across all 31 provinces, fueled by economic freefall and a population that no longer believed in the regime’s strength. The government responded in January 2026 with massacres that killed thousands, prompting the European Union to designate the IRGC as a terrorist organization and further increasing the isolation of the regime.

China is Scrambling

The men in Zhongnanhai do not rattle easily. Decades of patient statecraft, a foreign policy built on studied ambiguity, and an economy engineered to absorb external shocks have granted Beijing’s leadership a remarkable tolerance for turbulence. Operation Epic Fury, the American-Israeli air campaign now dismantling Iran’s military architecture, has produced something unusual in the corridors of Chinese power: visible confusion.

Xi Jinping is scrambling. The word is not used lightly. For a leader who has built his image on strategic composure and long-horizon thinking, the current moment is acutely dangerous. Not because China faces a direct military threat, but because every available response to the crisis in the Persian Gulf leads Beijing into a trap of its own contradictions.

Of the entire New Atheist gang, Sam Harris was always the most far-right extremist one politically, openly pro-W and genocidally Islamophobic.

The next point the rural dude makes is stronger: Farmers are not working class. They are property owners, little corporate bosses. They think about things like investment returns, inheritance tax, and bailouts - things that normal people have no reason to think about. Thus they are not normal people and have no reason to break out of their one-sided media bubble, but have all the reason to bubble up more firmly in the pro-corporate propaganda.

One of the major problems with the EU always was that the biggies thought of themselves as better and more knowledgeable in everything, while failing hard in geopolitics. No matter how hard the failure, they hold on to their superiority complex.

(my transcription may be off - my German sucks)

My guess is that Trump will give Alaska to Putin, so that everybody will get furious and shocked about it, entirely forget about Epstein files and nobody will notice when Trump kills off Ghislaine on the side.

Okay, fine, Make Automobiles Great Again, and the Big Beautiful Bill will “drive the return of the great American car.” You’d think with that sort of sentiment in mind, they’d have picked some sort of legendary American car to feature behind the president, right? Maybe an old Mustang, or a GTO, or a Toronado or a Jeep or a Charger or even a Corvair or, hell, a Gremlin? Something American and iconic.

But the GOP (or whoever made the graphic) took a very different approach here. The car proudly stationed behind the President, proclaiming a re-birth of great American cars, appears to be a Lada 2101.

Early Monday morning, Butselaar was to be released from Danbury federal prison in Connecticut after serving his sentence for committing tax fraud. His release, however, did not go as expected. He was met by agents of the ICE. Because Butselaar was extradited to America from Italy, he is in the country illegally after his release and does not possess a residence permit.

His American lawyers opposed the arrest. They tried to make it clear to ICE officials by phone that the taxman was precisely planning to leave the U.S. as soon as possible. In fact, he already possessed a plane ticket to return to the Netherlands on Monday evening.

Who knew that Tmux has popups?