Starrwulfe ランーム投稿機械

"Bombs, Bargains, and a Strategy That Isn’t One" or “War, Oil, and Unintended Consequences”

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 09:28:00 -0400

Just read an op-ed piece in The Telegraph entitled Trump’s plan makes perfect sense, and it’s working and I have my own opinions.

The writer opines Trump is doing an “Art of the Deal” with this war in order to wrestle China to the bargaining table. Venezuela, Iran (and even Cuba) have in common the production of cheaper than market rate oil for China so he thinks US strategy is to swoop in to snatch this out from under them (and also make a few bucks in the process along with nabbing the spoils.)
Totally textbook NeoCon 101 with some 1980’s Wall Street tactics mixed in (and very much not why a good chunk of America First MAGAs voted for him– they really don’t like any of this.) In a logical sense it’s the right idea, provided this were still the Reagan Era with Reagan’s State Department playing full court. But it’s 2026 and this is Donald Trump and his Merry Band of Grifters running the show, snd they haven’t exactly had a good track record on anything so far…

🪖 Instead of lighter but consistent and constant manipulation, we get Pete Hegseth war hawking, and videos of double-tapped schools along with walls of flames and black smoke causing an environmental crisis near Tehran because F rules of engagement, war isn’t supposed to be fair. Umm-hmm. What happened to empowering the Iranian people to change their government? So of course Iran makes good on drone striking anyone and anything involved with US forces in the area and shutting the Strait of Hormuz down like literally every expert on the subject ever has always said, which made gas prices jump over here by a buck and some change per gallon literally overnight.

🐮 This tactic of bull-in-china-shop isn’t winning any friends here. Bombing folks to get a deal never goes right in my limited time on this planet either even when we were mostly playing by the rules. And Reagan, Bush, Obama, and even Trump’s first administration era people would never try anything like this without allies. We have zero compatriots in this latest “excursion” in the Middle east except Israel for any of this. And they are now saying they’re running outta ammo for their defenses. It’s almost like nobody planned anything… But I also remember how COVID was done over here so I have very little faith in whatever our orange president promises.

🐉 My biggest worry vis-a-vis China is what happens if/when we wind up pressing them into using their ultimate trap-card: Taiwan. They can take the whole world hostage with that one due to everything running on microchips forged in Hsinchu factories. Oil is one thing, but watch what happens when nearly everything built gets put on pause because there’s no chips to put in them… And we already have a RAM and GPU shortage thanks to AI and datacenter proliferation. Also remember, global militaries need silicon too… What’s the plan for that one? China and its government will do whatever it takes to survive– they don’t give a damn about telling their rich folks to run their pockets for the country or get tossed into prison for corruption like we do; they have a singular voice and motivation.
They also are at the forefront of renewable energy and battery technology, so they are more suited to dealing with gas and diesel disruptions on a national level than us too. They might stand to make more money with an oil shortage by getting others to buy their EVs, robots, batteries and solar panels, locking us out of our own markets. That would be the ultimate Uno “reverse, draw 2, skip, uno, and done” move, played right into their hands if we’re not careful. Underestimation and failure to reason deeply is suicide here.

Tue, 10 Jun 2025 13:10:15 -0400

Day 10 of Micro.blog photo challenge: “rails”

I’ve been facinated with trains my entire life. Living in Japan not only gave me the chance to ride them twice a day, everyday but also to really turn my interest into a full-blown #railfanning hobby. I’m forever the #Tokyo #TrainNerd."

📷 #mbjune

Sun, 08 Jun 2025 21:46:10 -0400

Day 8 of Micro.blog photo challenge: “travel”

Big Hank, our RV is usually on the road this time of year for family weekend trips and excursions, but for now we’re just sticking close to home while we save some money for an upgraded electrics and boondock friendly goodies to come.

📷 #mbjune

Tue, 15 Apr 2025 16:51:08 -0400

This is what happens when you put a bottle cap anywhere within earshot of our kitty 🐈 Playtime!

Finished reading: "Shift" by Hugh Howey 📚 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Sun, 30 Mar 2025 11:33:42 -0400

Because Shift (Silo Trilogy) continues where Season 2 of the Apple TV+ series leaves off, I couldn’t help myself and ran to check this out from my local library.

Amazing how sometimes novels can uncannily mirror current events – and that’s why I couldn’t put this one down, reading 500+ pages over the course of a week. It’s a page turner to say the least, and I’m eagerly awaiting my time with the final book in the trilogy, Dust.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

And they thought they were free…

Thu, 27 Mar 2025 00:12:19 -0400

Q: should I wait for others to stand with me if I see injustice?

A: Always be the change you want to see. Just like you, people are also waiting for someone to back them up for calling out injustice or waiting for it to hit personally. But as my old man told me growing up, “study long, study wrong.”

Here’s an excerpt from “They thought they were free,” a book recounting the lives of the everyday people living in Nazi Germany to illustrate my point:

_“Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk alone; you don’t want to “go out of your way to make trouble.” Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, “everyone” is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, “It’s not so bad” or “You’re seeing things” or “You’re an alarmist.”

And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.

But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to—to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.

But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds of thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions, would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the “German Firm” stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all of the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying “Jewish swine,” collapses it all at once, and you see that everything has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early morning meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair."_

Yes, this post is written very much through the lens of current events, and no you are not crazy for thinking “why the fuck are people not out in the streets yet?”

Everybody is waiting for something that has already happened under their noses. You couldn’t see the forest for the trees. There was no big explosion, just a silent scream and the reality shifted almost imperceptibly for most of us, except those who were looking (like me).

The swamp was drained! …and they replaced it with their own alligators.

Sun, 16 Feb 2025 20:56:41 -0400

Installing this QM2 quad NVMe board with 2Tb for some fast data storage to add to the 8tb HDD pool (and the 1tb SSD I already have too.)

Sun, 16 Feb 2025 20:52:56 -0400

Thank God for being able to nerd out and take my mind off things for a bit. #homelab upgrades making for a productive Sunday.

Mon, 20 Jan 2025 02:52:03 -0400

Really digging what Ben is saying about The next four years<\a>. I said it in 2017, and I’ll say it again: We sometimes need the worst of us to bring out the best in us.

Sun, 19 Jan 2025 11:32:58 -0400

This sums up my thoughts about the TikTok ban charade right now:

Isn’t this a “promises made, promises kept” moment from OrangeMan? Or will he reverse his own-goal and look like a savior… even though he was incessantly shoving this down our collective throats since forever ago.

🤷🏾‍♂️

Fri, 10 Jan 2025 09:50:24 -0400

They said it wouldn’t be much snow in Atlanta on the news last night.

Right now:

#snowday #atlanta

Sun, 05 Jan 2025 16:45:38 -0400

Dammit, c’mon Falcons.

New Years Traditions 2025: New Years Beans & Black Americans

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 20:31:14 -0400

New Years Day means soul food for most African Americans. In particular it means black eyed peas, neckbones and greens (mustard/turnip/collard mix) in mine.

The beans symbolize planting seeds of success to grow in the coming year, greens for health and wealth, and neckbones meaning “making something outta nothing” since these used to be the “throwaway” part of the pig.

Most of us do this every new year and down South, White folks, Hispanic folks, Asian folks, lots of us do it because the Culture spread like that. It’s one of the things l like about living down here: we all have a lot more in common than different.

Please remember this in 2025!

Tue, 31 Dec 2024 23:58:16 -0400

Apparently Pets 3 is filming in the RV…

Mon, 30 Dec 2024 00:07:08 -0400

Godspeed Mr President.

Thu, 12 Dec 2024 13:20:09 -0400

I need to have this guy’s builder skills, time and space. I’d be both terrified and thrilled to drive this contraption 🤩

youtu.be/hiCFrq2MP…

Thu, 12 Dec 2024 13:19:57 -0400

Keep your eyes on the prize. The battle is never fought alone so long as you remember the ancestors teachings.

Sat, 02 Nov 2024 18:20:23 -0400

That time my moms, my BFF and I rode the Delmar Loop trolley in our home town.

Mon, 28 Oct 2024 22:31:36 -0400

Testing once more…

Mon, 28 Oct 2024 16:37:28 -0400

Making a test post here… and now I’m updating the post with micropub…

Yimbys for Harris $100k

Thu, 29 Aug 2024 01:18:12 -0400

Reblog via StarrWulfe (JLGatewood)

http://YIMBYsforHarris.com

ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS FOR HARRIS/WALZ!!
Support better neighborhoods/affordable housing/sustainable development!!

@KamalaHarrisWin

Mon, 19 Aug 2024 13:54:43 -0400

Why does it seem like Atlanta’s transit agencies continually aim lower and lower when it comes to planning?

I was this many years old when I was told it was going to be an extension of the Red Line rail service from North Springs Station, about 5 miles away. Now all we get is a noisy, smoggy bus island in between 8 lanes of speeding traffic.

Nah, this ain’t it chief.

Sun, 21 Jul 2024 17:55:09 -0400

#LFG.

Sun, 16 Jun 2024 07:51:07 -0400

In honor of Father’s Day, I’m going to engage in one of my favorite past-times: $#!+posting dad jokes. 😏

If you’re a dad (or you have a dad– I guess that’d be everyone here except my immaculate conception, clones, androids and the asexual reproduction homies) please add to the ensuing and possibly annoying thread. Consider yourself warned for irony, cringe and general rando post fun & mayhem.

–Also go wish your dad a Happy Father’s Day before you forget 😜

Let’s get it started:

I was going to get a brain transplant, but I changed my mind
Did you hear about the guy whose whole left side was cut off? ...He's all right now...
I've been trying to come up with a dad joke about momentum . . . but I just can't seem to get it going.

Tue, 11 Jun 2024 19:48:38 -0400

Apparently they were trying to film Speed 2 near my house today…