It’s quite a depressing development from a resistance perspective (which I guess almost all of us share) because it means now that the US Carrier Strike Group (CSG) only needs to remain out of range of Ansarallah’s anti ship ballistic missiles(ASBMs), (max range 500km for Tankeel/Raad-500, maybe 700km if Iran gives them Zolfogar Basir), and that the CSG can just absorb the long range drone and cruise missile attacks, the few that get through the air patrols can be dealt with by the ships themselves. While remaining outside of the range of ASBMs is blunting the CSG’s attacks and US airstrikes as the US fighter planes have to fly longer distances, airstrikes are still happening, and the CSG is not being driven to the extreme north of the Red Sea or anything like that anymore (aside from maybe day two of this lastest conflict).

Editing to say that satellite imagery from the 19th March 2025 has confirmed this, the USS Harry Truman is operating off of the coast of Jeddah, around 700-800km from Yemen. So outside of ASBM range (Zolfogar Basir has a 700km range), but within the range of cruise missiles and drones. This explains why Ansarallah did not launch any ASBMs over the past two nights, the CSG was out of range.

The solution is probably to give Ansarallah longer range ASBMs, but that’s an idea with its own big issues. The short range ASBMs Ansarallah currently use don’t have any midcourse guidance updates, they fire them at the general location the enemy ship is expected to be at, the Manoeuvrable Re-entry Vehicle (MaRV) of the missile does a pull up manoeuvre and performs a short glide phase, in which it’s terminal guidance systems (EO/IR sensors or radar) locate the target and dive down to it. This all happenes in a handful of minutes, the Tankeel/Raad 500 has a burnout velocity of Mach 8 (2.7 kilometres per second), and an impact velocity of probably around Mach 1.5-2. A ship can’t move that far in that time, which is why this approach works, from missile launch to glide phase, the ship can’t move out of the effective range of the terminal guidance systems on the MaRV. Once you start trying to hit ships over longer ranges, the ships can move further, and you need midcourse guidance updates to ensure that the MaRV arrives in a close enough proximity to the target for the terminal guidance systems to work. Who is going to provide that midcourse guidance? Iran with their own ships, or Iran giving Ansarallah long range radars that datalink to the ASBMs? I think the US would consider that an act of war. I also don’t think Ansarallah has this capability themselves. China’s ASBMs use AWACS aircraft to provide midcourse guidance updates for instance. That’s a capability not currently in the possession of Iran or Ansarallah.

Another solution would be really fast (Mach 3+) cruise missiles or really stealthy subsonic cruise missiles. But I don’t see Russia or China giving these weapons to Ansarallah.

And most importantly threaten critical infrastructure across the Peninsula to increase the scale of the zone of engagement

Abdul-Malik al-Houthi gave a speech yesterday specifically calling out all the Arab regimes for collaborating with Israel, so I guess striking them is an escalation option they are considering, and it makes sense given their capabilities. A lot easier to hit a static oil field or refinery than a moving ship.

Haha CK Hutchison… it’s been in deep trouble on Chinese and Hong Kong media after Li Ka-shing announced the selling of the Panama Ports. It’ll be interesting to see whether the Chinese government will stop the sale, but that will further raise tension with the US.

Illan Pappé: ‘‘Chinese interests are mostly commercial, they want to do business. Israel is a hi-tech hub, nowadays Palestine is not an economic bonanza. So no, I don’t think they will play a role in the liberation’’

A lot of talk involved around the legacy of the CPC anti-imperialist past, but let’s face it, the legacy is mostly for the myth building and the maintenance of legitimacy for the party any value is thrown out of the window when the reality of the nation-state is involved. As for the people, I doubt a majority really care about Palestine, most of the time it is bought up when the motive is to be anti-American. the average people don`t have a say in the foreign politics of the country as the system is less and less democratic as you go up the ranks of the party (I guess that explains why the youth are more extreme in their support for Palestine, there are no real future prospect in mainstream politics)

Do you, or anyone reading, have a good article/book getting into the history of anonymous especially regarding fed shit? I’m bumping up against people around me talking them up and haven’t had a chance to find a good deboonking and I don’t remember the specifics about it.

Edit: meant to respond to Awoo, but same deal.

Please Elon, shut down the money printer! I’d be so owned if you did that

i can’t tell what he’s up to. is he genuine or trying to get a slice of the fed reserve (made of a group of private banks) grift pie?

Actually, lovely way to explain this subject. I’ve been having the convo about how gov spending works very often recently, I’ll have to try that way out.

I feel like it’s important to at least try to bring up the fact that money ultimately exists because people with guns say it exists, and if those same people say that more money exists, there’s nothing you’re going to be able to do about it. In that framework, money is only limited by the amount of productivity that can be mobilized by the gun-havers. The rest is just keeping track of how money flows between the non-gun-havers.

A lot of non-gun-havers have gotten it into their heads that the internal consistency they experience is reflective of the entire system, or that the gun-havers are in the same construct as the non-gun-havers. That’s why MMT is hard for them to understand, or hard for them to accept. If they accept MMT, they also have to accept that there’s no natural law or anything like it maintaining the system. It’s all just violence and promises of future violence, with money acting as a way to facilitate the promise of violence without having to constantly threaten people directly.

Apart from what the other user has said, let’s walk through this in a manner that I hope is as simple as possible.

First, bear in mind that “debt” simply means promise. I owe you something. I am indebted to you. It means I promise to pay/give something back to you at some point in the future.

If you take some money from your checking account and buy a Certificate of Deposit of 2 years to earn, say, 3% interest, you are effectively transferring the money from your checking account to a new savings account. The bank “borrows” from you by safekeeping the money for the next 2 years in the new savings account, then return that same amount of money + interests when it matures. Note that nothing actually changes, except that you cannot use that money for 2 years.

The government debt functions the same way by “borrowing” from private investors. This used to serve a function in the old days when national currencies were tied to gold, or another currency. This is known as the “fixed exchange” currency regime, as opposed to the “floating exchange” system we have today in the modern financial system where for many countries, their currencies are not tied to anything.

To understand why government debt matters in the past but not today, we need to learn about the difference between fixed and floating exchange regimes.

In the gold standard era (or the Bretton Woods era when currencies were pegged to US dollar, and the US dollar itself was pegged to gold), you need to accumulate reserves (e.g. gold) before you can issue the currency of an equivalent amount. That’s because in a fixed exchange system, you are promising that, say, 1 oz of gold can be exchanged for $35. If you do not have enough gold reserves to back your exchange rate of $35 to 1 oz gold, then you have to devalue your currency if you want to print more money.

This becomes a problem when it comes to government spending. Let’s take a simple example of a small economy with $100M worth of gold reserve. In principle, you can issue $100M of currency into the economy. You have enough gold to support the exchange rate you have set.

Now, let’s say you want to build a hospital that costs $10M - you can simply print the $10M into the economy, but you would end up with $110M of currency in the system, but only $100M worth of gold reserve.

To defend that exchange rate, you have to take $10M out of the circulation. There are two ways you can do this: first, by taxation (this is where the myth of “taxing billionaires to fund healthcare” comes from - the government doesn’t need the money itself creates, it simply wants to take the money out so it can defend its own exchange rate).

Second, by issuing government bonds. Unlike taxation, which collects money from the people and then destroys the money, government bonds act exactly like a savings account - you let the government safekeep the money for you over, say, 10 years while you get to earn interests. This way, you still get to keep your money, you simply can’t use them for 10 years, and you get interest payment every year as a bonus. This is another way to take $10M out of the system - but note that the government “borrows” not because it needs your money, it simply wants to take the money out of the system to defend the exchange rate.

Of course, there are other ways, like increasing your gold supply. You can dig for more gold within your national boundary, you can export goods to other countries and use those revenues to purchase gold, you can colonize another country and steal their gold. Many ways to do that. The government can even choose to devalue its own currency, or simply default when it can no longer keep its “promise” (paying its “debt”).

The upshot here is that when your currency is pegged to something else (fixed exchange rate), you have limited fiscal space to grow your economy. This is why the Bretton Woods system didn’t last long and, when the US overspent its dollars during the Vietnam War, culminated in the French asking the US to pay them in gold instead of dollars. Nixon ended the Bretton Woods and we have since entered a new phase of fiat monetary system.

So, what is the role of the government bond in a “floating exchange” system, then?

First, we need to learn a bit about central banking operations. It’s pure accounting but you will need to understand this to make sense about why the US government still continues to issue treasury bonds.

The Central Bank (Federal Reserve in the US) has special accounts known as Reserve accounts. These reserves are only accessible to other banks, and not the general public. Commercial banks have Reserve accounts with the Central Bank. The Treasury also has an account (Treasury General Account, or TGA) with the Central Bank.

When the Federal Government wants to spend $10M to contract a company to build a hospital, the TGA goes into negative $10M at the Central Bank. The Central Bank then creates an equivalent positive $10M at the Reserve account of the Commercial Bank, where the Private Contractor’s deposit account is linked to. The Commercial Bank then creates $10M deposits at the Private Contractor’s deposit account, which it can then spend to hire labor, purchase raw materials etc. to build the hospital.

Note that the Commercial Bank now still has +$10M in its Reserve account. Because these are dead money, the Commercial Bank will want to lend it out to earn some interests. These reserves are only accessible in the Central Bank (not available to the public), so it will try to lend them out in the interbank market at the Central Bank, where other banks have their reserve accounts linked to.

What are reserves then? They are what banks use to clear everyday payments! When you take a $1000 check (payer has a different bank to yours) to a bank to deposit the money, Bank A doesn’t have to “send” any money to Bank B. Instead, Bank A (payer bank) subtracts $1000 from its Reserve account and Bank B (recipient bank) adds $1000 in its Reserve account, then creates an equivalent $1000 in your Deposit account. Therefore, the reserves allow banks to clear payments very rapidly (we’re talking about billions of transactions every single day!) and this is an essential component to support a highly efficient modern economy.

As you can see, by the end of every business day, some banks will have less reserves (because more money is withdrawn from their banks) and some banks will have more reserves. There is a legal requirement to keep a minimum amount reserves relative to the bank’s assets (Reserve Requirement Ratio). To meet this legal requirement, the banks will have to make sure they have this minimum amount of reserves by the end of every day (of course, in reality this is audited over an average of period).

There are two ways a bank can increase its reserves: it can directly borrow from the Central Bank (Discount Window lending), but because the government doesn’t want to encourage banks to keep borrowing to fill their reserves, they will usually set some penalty. So, the second way to increase reserve is to borrow reserves from another bank via the interbank market within the Central Bank.

Now we’re back to the above scenario where the Commercial Bank has racked up an extra $10M reserves it wants to lend out via the interbank market. However, many other Commercial Banks also want to lend out their excess reserves, and will compete with one another by lending at a lower rate. Without any intervention, this competition will quickly drive the interest rate down to 0%.

Usually, this is not a problem if the government wants to run a 0% interest rate policy. However, if the government is targeting, say, 2% interest rate, then it will have to intervene at the interbank market.

Remember that the Treasury General Account (TGA) went into negative $10M after government spending? This account also needs to be balanced out so it runs a surplus or at zero balance.

Usually there are laws where the Central Bank is not allowed to purchase bonds directly from the Treasury, so to fix this, the government simply issues Treasury bonds at the target rate it wants (2%) to “borrow” from the secondary market (the Commercial Banks).

This solves two problems at the same time: first, by setting an interest of 2%, the government has guaranteed that the interest rate will not be driven down to 0%, because every bank with excess reserve will rather lend to the government’s 2% interest. (This is how the Fed rate determines interest rate in commercial banks); and second, the negative TGA account can be filled up.

Thus, government debt simply soaks up the excess reserve created by the Treasury to finance a $10M hospital in the first place! Government debt = deficit = spending - tax!

To re-iterate:

1. Congress passes spending bill, which includes building a $10M hospital
2. Treasury spends by having the TGA going into negative $10M
3. Federal Reserve adds $10M matching reserves in the Commercial Bank from the TGA deficit
4. Commercial Bank adds $10M deposits in the Private Contractor account, which it can then use to build hospital
5. Commercial Bank still left with $10M reserves, and wanting to lend out these excess reserves
6. Treasury issues bond to soak up the $10M reserves that itself created in the first place

Steve Keen has a nice double entry bookkeeping illustration to keep track of how the spending works, if you’re interested in the details:

The final point to make is that this only applies if the government wants to run a >0% interest rate. If it doesn’t want to target any interest rate, it can simply let the reserves build up in the system. This whole system is inherited from an already defunct financial structure during the gold standard/Bretton Woods era.

At this point, the evil dogs will probably happily accept credit.

The truth is somewhere in the middle. Ansarallah and Yemen are obviously a sovereign country that makes their own decisions to support the people of Gaza and carry out a naval blockade. However, this blockade, along with the direct attacks against Israel, is only possible thanks to the advanced Iranian designed weapons that they use. Without these Iranian designed weapons (with some components likely manufactured in Iran), there would be no blockade.

Lebanon’s entire history under and after colonialism has been a dedicated attempt to keep it separated unfortunately. It’s part of why Hezbollah couldn’t go all out against israel, because of the internal enemies. Brutal situation

The article by Decker also outlines another point I’ve made in the past, that a fighter aircraft designed to fight against the Soviets (and now Russia) independently/without American support needs to be cheap and easy to maintain, quick to re-arm, needs very long range air to air missiles to counter the MiG-31 threat, and able to take off and land from makeshift runways and highways so they they can be scattered around the country, to prevent strikes on airbases taking out an entire squadron.

The only aircraft that fulfills all these requirements is the SAAB Gripen, because it was the only aircraft designed with all of this in mind, as Sweden was a lot more neutral at the time. A head technician and five assistants can get a landed Gripen combat ready in less than ten minutes, and a Gripen can take off less than 60 seconds after a take off order is received, on short makeshift runways or highways. The Gripen can also be equipped with the Meteor long range air to air missiles, with the largest “no escape zone” of any current missile. American fighters, such as the F-16, F-18 and F-35 do not fulfill these requirements, they are envisioned to be used with US support at sophisticated airbases. European fighters like the Eurofighter Typhoon and Dassault Rafale fulfill some of these requirements, but not all.

I’ve always said that if NATO was serious about countering Russian air power in Ukraine, they’d give Ukraine Gripens with Meteor missiles. Instead they gave them old F-16s with similar capabilities to Ukraine’s modified MiG-29s, with the F-16s only being superior on the electronic countermeasures side. This shows that NATO was just preventing Ukraine from losing capabilities in this regard as more and more MiG-29s got taken out by Russia, not giving Ukraine new capabilities.

Pathogenically inclined Maoists call it Germ$money$

KKKrautland

deutSSchland, the demonym is KKKrauts

Germoney, G€rmany, burgermany?

1,557 civilians by current estimates, but given the mass graves, disposal of bodies, and the source, I’d say it’s a minimum.

https://www.syriahr.com/en/357944/