Hi there, !
Today Thu 09/17/2026 Wed 09/16/2026 Tue 09/15/2026 Mon 09/14/2026 Sun 09/13/2026 Sat 09/12/2026 Fri 09/11/2026 Archives
Rantburg
582797 articles and 1984932 comments are archived on Rantburg.

Today: 41 articles and 95 comments as of 7:20.
Post a news link    Post your own article   
Area: WoT Operations    WoT Background    Non-WoT    Local News    Politix   
'They were advancing too confidently.' Where did the Houthis get their drones and precision missiles?
Today's Headlines
Headline Comments [Views]
Page 4: Opinion
4 14:23 Grom the Reflective [229] 
3 14:47 NN2N1 [232] 
3 18:50 Jefe101 [182] 
5 23:36 trailing wife [197] 
0 [136] 
1 23:43 trailing wife [195] 
1 12:48 Skidmark [205] 
3 04:54 Grom the Reflective [216] 
Page 1: WoT Operations
1 18:11 Frank G [158]
0 [120]
0 [176]
4 08:00 Gloluter Phavick7614 [512]
0 [199]
0 [194]
5 22:03 Frank G [312]
Page 2: WoT Background
1 10:10 MikeKozlowski [243]
3 12:59 DarthVader [243]
1 11:52 Grom the Reflective [239]
3 07:01 Skidmark [214]
6 14:20 Grom the Reflective [309]
0 [136]
0 [150]
Page 3: Non-WoT
3 14:05 Besoeker [204]
4 17:20 Sheba Slusogum9971 [208]
5 12:32 Besoeker [214]
6 09:37 Skidmark [236]
7 14:01 DooDahMan [280]
1 08:39 Frank G [182]
1 10:07 Dopey Photch2701 [159]
1 03:52 DooDahMan [175]
4 12:32 Skidmark [266]
0 [184]
Page 5: Russia-Former Soviet Union
0 [126]
0 [129]
0 [135]
1 06:44 Skidmark [159]
0 [154]
Page 6: Politix
2 13:43 Super Hose [167]
3 13:42 Super Hose [194]
10 18:09 Frank G [264]
3 13:37 Super Hose [286]
-Signs, Portents, and the Weather-
CDC: Only 40%? Hold My Beer...
[Malone News] A seasoned stock analyst colleague texted me a link today, and when I clicked it open, I could hardly believe what I was reading. What a headline. “Indiana life insurance CEO says deaths are up 40% among people ages 18-64”. This headline is a nuclear truth bomb masquerading as an insurance agent’s dry manila envelope full of actuarial tables.

People frequently write to Jill and myself. People we have never met. They call, they arrive at the farm by appointment or unannounced, they fill our email in boxes with their inquiries. They all want something; time, attention, an interview. Many want to tell us about their fear, illness, nightmares, or (what often seems like) outright paranoid conspiracies. And then, over time, these fears and “conspiracies” keep getting confirmed. As Jan Jekielek (a senior editor with The Epoch Times) recently said to me, it is getting harder and harder to tell which ones are mere conspiracy theories and which are true reality.

One farm visitor told me of his foreshadowing massive numbers of deaths within three years consequent to the genetic vaccines, and that this was all about the “Great Reset” and the depopulation agenda of the World Economic Forum (WEF). I tried to reassure him that, in my opinion, this was highly unlikely- while privately thinking about how easily people fall into this type of conspiracy ideation, and how I need to be careful to avoid going there when confronting so many public health decisions that appear either incompetent or nefarious. At the time, I only knew of the WEF as the host of a big annual party in Davos Switzerland where the uber rich and the hoi oligoi of the Western nations went to watch Ted talks, drink the best wine, see and be seen. Silly me. What a long, strange trip this has been. I doubt that even Hunter S. Thompson could have imagined it in his most drug and booze addled state. Suffice to say, I nominate Ralph Steadman as official illustrator of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Or a resurrected Hieronymus Bosch.
Posted by: Mercutio || 09/14/2026 08:53 || Comments || Link || [232 views] Top|| File under:

#1  Note that this is from 2022 — during the Biden-Harris Politburo period. It doesn’t make the idea any less horrifying, but hopefully something more has been learnt since.
Posted by: trailing wife || 09/14/2026 10:35 Comments || Top||

#2  yeah right, these ppl are stuck on stupid.
Posted by: chris || 09/14/2026 11:30 Comments || Top||

#3  REAL #'s happen, when real data is collected and shared.

Here in Ga. the Dem controlled areas are running political ads trying pass off the idea more violent crime happen under Trump than Biden. After several were caught under reporting crime to the FBI for several years.
Posted by: NN2N1 || 09/14/2026 14:47 Comments || Top||


-Land of the Free
Hillbilly on Religious Tolerance
[RushBabes] I support a mosque being built anywhere in the US. I think it should be the goal of every American to be tolerant regardless of their religious beliefs.

To promote tolerance, I would also propose that two nightclubs be opened next door to the mosque. We could call one of the clubs, which would be gay, The Turban Cowboy and the other, a topless bar, would be called You Mecca Me Hot.

Next door should be a butcher shop that specializes in pork and across the street, an open-pit barbecue pork restaurant, called Iraq of Ribs.

We could also have a lingerie store called Victoria Keeps Nothing Secret and a liquor store called Mohammered.
All of this would encourage Muslims to demonstrate the tolerance they demand of us.

Yes we should promote tolerance, and you can do your part by passing this on. 😎 I did my part 😉or we can just send them back to where ever they came from…..
Posted by: Mercutio || 09/14/2026 08:56 || Comments || Link || [229 views] Top|| File under:

#1 
Posted by: Gloluter Phavick7614 || 09/14/2026 12:32 Comments || Top||

#2  The strip club would be popular with the Moslems, but most of the dancers would go missing.
Posted by: Super Hose || 09/14/2026 13:46 Comments || Top||

#3  STOP, CHRIS
Posted by: chris || 09/14/2026 13:58 Comments || Top||

#4  ^A disciple of Marshal Voroshilov?
Posted by: Grom the Reflective || 09/14/2026 14:23 Comments || Top||


China-Japan-Koreas
China has a chokehold on your medicine cabinet. It's a national security threat
[FOX] The United States produces roughly 3% of the active pharmaceutical ingredients in the world. Meanwhile, China produces a whopping 45%. A Johns Hopkins study found that China supplies more than 60% of the essential components American manufacturers need for antibiotics.

That’s not just a trade imbalance, it is surrendering sovereignty.

The health of our military, our leaders, our children and our neighbors is beholden to an adversary who could weaponize not just the availability of and access to essential medications but the safety of those very products.

We didn’t get here by accident. Decades of offshoring gutted the American industrial base and shipped critical manufacturing jobs overseas. As recently as 1981, the United States produced 25% of the world’s pharmaceutical ingredients. Today, China controls nearly half the global market. A nation that cannot make its own antibiotics and cannot stop adversary-sourced chemicals from crossing its border does not fully govern itself.
Posted by: Skidmark || 09/14/2026 07:16 || Comments || Link || [197 views] Top|| File under: Commies

#1  Given Americans are over medicated, sponsored by the people who made us all beta testers for their mRNA vax, this may not be as bad as it seems. Beyond time for a critical analysis of what we fundamentally need.
Posted by: Procopius2k || 09/14/2026 9:41 Comments || Top||

#2  A nation that cannot make its own antibiotics and cannot stop adversary-sourced chemicals from crossing its border does not fully govern itself.

Zambians warned not to eat dead wildlife after anthrax kills dozens of animals
Posted by: Skidmark || 09/14/2026 9:44 Comments || Top||

#3  And India provides 40%+ of the generic prescription meds to the US
Posted by: Dopey Photch2701 || 09/14/2026 10:08 Comments || Top||

#4  ^^^^ And 68% of the doctors.
Posted by: Besoeker || 09/14/2026 12:33 Comments || Top||

#5  We discovered Chinese monopolies on medicines, nutraceuticals, and chemical precursors to be a problem early in the COVID problem. One hopes there has at least some of it has been moved elsewhere since then.
Posted by: trailing wife || 09/14/2026 23:36 Comments || Top||


Cyber
The coming AI war will be about whether truth can triumph over propaganda
[FOX] As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes how we learn and understand the past, America and China are competing over systems that will shape what billions believe.

A library gave you 10 books. Google gave you ten links. Artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly gives you one answer.

Generative AI is becoming the layer between us and the record itself. It reads and synthesizes information before we see it. We ask what happened, what it means and whom to believe, and the model answers.

As billions of people use AI to encounter history, politics, science and culture, the contest between the United States and China extends beyond chips, compute and energy to the information from which AI learns and the rules that shape what it tells us.

Billionaire businessman Marc Andreessen argued early that the fight over what AI is allowed to say could become more consequential than the censorship battles of the social-media era and warned that China sees AI as a tool of authoritarian control. OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman later described the contest as one between democratic and authoritarian visions of AI.
Posted by: Skidmark || 09/14/2026 07:31 || Comments || Link || [182 views] Top|| File under:

#1  Microsoft drafts code of conduct to keep its AI under human control

Time to revisit Isamov's robot rules.

[AI]
Asimov's robot rules

**Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics** are a set of ethical guidelines for artificial intelligence introduced in his 1942 short story "**Runaround**" and later expanded in the 1950 collection ***I, Robot***. The laws establish a strict hierarchy where human safety is paramount, followed by obedience to humans, and finally self-preservation.

The three original laws are:
1. **First Law**: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. **Second Law**: A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. **Third Law**: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

In 1985, Asimov added the **Zeroth Law**, which supersedes all others: a robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm. This addition allows a robot to harm an individual if necessary to protect the human race as a whole. While these rules are foundational to science fiction and AI ethics discussions, **real-world robots** are governed by engineering safety standards (such as **ISO 10218**) and legal frameworks like the **EU AI Act**, rather than these fictional axioms.
Posted by: Skidmark || 09/14/2026 9:54 Comments || Top||

#2  The 'Anti-AI' Panic Is Led by...AI Companies
What we are seeing is a massive, pretty obviously coordinated campaign by AI researchers, companies, NGOs, and politicians to strangle competition in an industry and, as I will show, save the financial bacon of the top AI companies that are vastly overextended financially because they have made contractual commitments that they simply have no prospect of paying for.
Posted by: Grom the Reflective || 09/14/2026 14:54 Comments || Top||

#3  https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TNc0aTIZBcc&ra=m

Personal opinion. AI can be extinction level dangerous…but, examine the “pr” in the last year. From revolutionizing the world to must be stopped. The reality might be that they speculated incorrectly with trillions of dollars, and the truth would destroy their corporations.
Posted by: Jefe101 || 09/14/2026 18:50 Comments || Top||


Europe
CTH - Putin Talks About Why NATO Wants War
Posted by: NoMoreBS || 09/14/2026 00:00 || Comments || Link || [136 views] Top|| File under:


Great White North
Victor Davis Hanson: Canadians Feel Real Pain in Stage 4 of Trade War
[DailySignal] I’d like to offer an update on the Canadian-American trade spat.

Earlier, I had staged it. I said stage one was surprise on both sides of the border that two neighbors who spoke the same language, had the same civilizational origins in Britannia, were close neighbors, and had the largest undefended border in the world were at a point of very angry disagreement.

The second stage was that Prime Minister Mark Carney started to suggest that the United States was solely culpable, was a bully, and had forced him to cancel the agreement at the 11th hour late on a Friday afternoon without warning.

Stage four is more serious for Canada. The jobs report came out. They’ve lost 41,000 jobs just in one week of the tariff war. We created 160,000 in August. It’s gonna get worse for Canada.
And he said that the United States tried to impugn or intercede or limit, prune back, whatever term you use, Canadian illusory sovereignty, both by telling Canada that it couldn’t import cheap Chinese EV vehicles or that it could not import cheap steel and aluminum from China that were really, to be fair, dumped below the cost of production as a way of getting around American tariffs via being used for assembling autos or vehicles in Canada and then shipped into the United States at a cheap price.

And he accused us of trying to squelch Canadian and indigenous Canadian expression. In other words, our digital media companies were so successful in bringing the news and social media accounts to Canada that people who wanted to get the indigenous voice out and the French voice out couldn’t, and therefore he was going to unilaterally tax us 5% on top of corporate income tax, which nobody else does.

We don’t tell Canadian broadcasters or Canadian newspapers we’re gonna tax you so you include the particular culture of the San Joaquin Valley of Caliphornia, an impregnable bastion of the Democratic Party,. We feel that you don’t know anything about it, and so you’re gonna have to pay a tax to operate in our country. It’s absurd.

So then the second stage was this war on the United States. The third was a recalibration. People said Carney hasn’t really digested the actual details of why he walked out. He’s been mysterious. He’s been murky. He won’t tell us exactly.

And why would he side with a totalitarian communist government with Maoist roots that has a million Uyghurs in camps, destroys international trading protocols with dumping products below the cost of production, maintains asymmetrical mercantile trade surpluses, manipulates money and currency, and copyright and patent violations?

Why would he want to side with them over the largest, the longest democracy in the world, its neighbor, its English-speaking neighbor? It doesn’t make any sense. Why would he do that?

And I also suggested in stage three that one of the reasons he was doing that is Canada has not utilized its treasure house of natural resources. I’m talking about precious metals, potash, timber, oil, gas, you name it.

It’s a socialist, ossified, calcified European-style economy plagued with 45% of the population was not born in Canada or their parents were not born in Canada, and they have enormous social welfare needs that the ossified European socialist economy cannot meet.

And so, because it is failing, it has to have trade surpluses with the United States, and it has to have the United States protect it, and it resents the United States, thinking that we caused its problems. We didn’t cause its problems.
List of self-caused Canadian problems discussed at the link.
So that was stage three, a second look at Carney’s narratives.

Stage four is more serious for Canada. The jobs report came out. They’ve lost 41,000 jobs just in one week of the tariff war. We created 160,000 in August. It’s gonna get worse for Canada.

We have, as I said, nine times the population, 13 times the nominal GDP, and Canada is entirely reliant. Seventy-five percent of it is reliant. I don’t say that out of triumphalism or boasting, but in sadness for Canada. I don’t know what they’re doing.

Mr. Carney, who had three passports before he was prime minister, a Canadian, a British, and an Irish. He was the epitome of a globalist, and he wasn’t a nationalist. So his immigration, his energy, his defense policy, and his trade policy were all globalist. They were all European-style, and they didn’t realize or properly exploit the natural gifts of Canada.

So now we’re in stage four, and the Americans are starting to notice something. The Canadians are booing us at sports events between Canadian and American teams. They keep bragging about elbows up, i.e., we’re gonna be like hockey players and defend ourselves from aggressors like you, violent mostly peaceful aggressors.

And they are waging anti-American propaganda. Carney is. He’s whipped this up because he did not want, as I said in stage three, he didn’t want an autonomous Alberta and an autonomous Quebec, and those referenda are coming up.

More importantly, he’s now interfering in U.S. internal midterm politics. He’s got left-wing governors and senators deliberately taking the Canadian side, trashing their own president, with Gavin Governor Hair Gel Newsom
...mayor of San Franciscoas it transformed itself into Poopville, currently governor of Californiaas it transforms itself into Cinderland...
cutting videos in support of Canada, not us, and then targeting these tariffs at red and purple states along the border to get Trump supporters financially endangered, and therefore they won’t vote for Republican congressional candidates.

So far, the Americans have not noticed this. It’s just water off a duck’s back. But when you show on media day after day people booing us, and you hear him talk about war and battle, and you think that the whole world’s against us, they’re not. He’s all alone.

He and the Chinese are the only two countries that issued counter tariffs. People in Europa
...the land mass occupying the space between the English Channel and the Urals, also known as Moslem Lebensraum...
love what he’s doing, but not one of them would follow his example. He’s got his neck out, and the fate of 41 million Canadians depends on him being successful, and he’s gonna fail because the United States is saying, "This is a new world. We’re not gonna subsidize everybody’s defense and run up $200 billion deficits with one neighbor, Mexico, and $50 billion to $60 billion with our northern neighbor and call it a free trade zone."

It’s not. It’s a mercantile effort, and we are at our wit’s end, and it’s gonna be a new world. We’re not the wealthy powerhouse we always were. We have $31 trillion, maybe $40 trillion, depending on how you calculate it, in debt, and it’s a new world.

We want symmetry, and we want gratitude, and this man wants to wage an economic war and gin up world opinion against the United States in alliance with the most pernicious, deadly government in history, as a direct descendant of Mao Zedong, who killed 70 million people, and he’s championing Chinese interests by trying to get around our leverage.

What he doesn’t understand, to conclude, is this: Canada has key interests in the Arctic. Given warming temperatures, the Northwest Passage may be used to navigate from east to west and west to east. We’re in a dangerous world where an increasing number of countries like North Korea
...hereditary Communist monarchy distinguished by its truculence and periodic acts of violence. Distinguishing features include Songun (Army First) policy, which involves feeding the army before anyone but the Dear Leadership, and Juche, which is Kim Jong Il's personal interpretation of Marxism-Leninism, which he told everybody was brilliant. In 1950 the industrialized North invaded agrarian South Korea. Twenty-one countries of the United Nations eventually contributed to the UN force opposing the invasion, with the United States providing around 90% of the military personnel. Seventy years later the economic results are in and it doesn't look good for Juche...
have intercontinental ballistic missiles that have nuclear tips on the missiles.

What am I getting at? Canada has 79 jets, and they’re 45 years old. Seventy-nine. Seventy-nine. I think California’s National Guard has almost as many. It has about 30 large, considerable ships rather than speedboats, but 30, 35 maybe. It has no military. It hasn’t kept its promises. It has welched.

It depends on the United States to protect it from incoming aircraft or missiles, to protect it when Russian or Chinese ships decide that they’re going to claim areas of the Arctic that Canada thinks it has possession of or when they want to transit the Northwest Passage.

In other words, we are subsidizing their defense like we just subsidized Europe’s defense.

We are subsidizing their economy by allowing them to run up a $50 billion annual surplus. There are one million Canadians in the United States. There’s only a quarter of a million Americans in Canada. You’d think there’d be more since we’re so big, 360 million versus just 40 million. But a little tiny country of 40 million has a million in the United States.

And you know what the final irony is? Two of Mr. Carney’s four children, his daughters, went to Harvard and Yale and live in the United States, and 95% of his globalist investments are in America.

So when he tells Canadian small businesses to tough it up, we’re going to war economically against the United States, and your little businesses might have to go broke, but my investments are American because I’m betting on America over Canada because I would not dare put my capital into Canadian financial investments. He’s not. And my children prefer to live where? Not in socialist Canada with socialist medicine, with 45% of the population being immigrants colonists or first- or second-generation Canadians, with a bankrupt economy. They want to live in the United States.

And so the whole thing is absurd. And I would just caution Mr. Carney: The one thing you do not want to do is so gin up this war that you get on the wrong side of the American people. But all that invective, all that cheap booing, all that grandstanding, all of your flirtation with this communist, lethal government are not going down well.

And for the first time, people are starting to notice. And your entire economy is in peril because when these reciprocal tariffs start to go back, they were aimed at lowering your $50 billion surplus, our deficit, to a manageable level. But now it’s going to go beyond that.

Posted by: trailing wife || 09/14/2026 00:00 || Comments || Link || [205 views] Top|| File under: Commies

#1  Carney, locked in US trade war, pitches Canada to global investment titans

Good luck with that.
Posted by: Skidmark || 09/14/2026 12:48 Comments || Top||


Home Front: Politix
Not voting Republican to "punish" them doesn't work and never has. An insider explains what really happens.
[X]
Posted by: Clyde Thaviling6482 || 09/14/2026 00:00 || Comments || Link || [195 views] Top|| File under:

#1  He raises important points, discusses from an insider’s perspective.

Good find, Clyde Thaviling6482.
Posted by: trailing wife || 09/14/2026 23:43 Comments || Top||


Home Front: WoT
20 years ago ABC broadcast a docudrama called The Path to 9/11 showing all the national security failures the 90s that led to the attacks
[X] The movie was banned due to political pressure from the Clintons Here is Part 1 in full:
All 2:41:29 at the link. Get cozy before you start.
Posted by: Clyde Thaviling6482 || 09/14/2026 00:00 || Comments || Link || [216 views] Top|| File under:

#1  I'll wait for the book.
Posted by: Skidmark || 09/14/2026 0:02 Comments || Top||

#2  Quick search for title at YT suggests it might be worth comparing rips before settling in.
Posted by: Sheba Slusogum9971 || 09/14/2026 0:33 Comments || Top||

#3  25 Years After 9/11, America Dotes On Its Enemies
Posted by: Grom the Reflective || 09/14/2026 4:54 Comments || Top||



Who's in the News
25[untagged]
4Commies
3Houthis
2Govt of Iran
1Narcos
1Pirates
1Sublime Porte
1[untagged]
1Govt of Saudi Arabia
1Human Trafficking
1Lawfare

Bookmark
E-Mail Me

The Classics
The O Club
Rantburg Store
The Bloids
The Never-ending Story
Thugburg
Gulf War I
The Way We Were
Bio

Merry-Go-Blog











On Sale now!


A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.

Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.

Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has dominated Mexico for six years.
Click here for more information

Meet the Mods
In no particular order...
Steve White
Seafarious
tu3031
badanov
sherry
ryuge
GolfBravoUSMC
Bright Pebbles
trailing wife
Gloria
Fred
Besoeker
Glenmore
Frank G
3dc
Skidmark

Two weeks of WOT
Mon 2026-09-14
  'They were advancing too confidently.' Where did the Houthis get their drones and precision missiles?
Sun 2026-09-13
  Results of the Houthi offensive in Western Yemen. September 9-12, 2026
Sat 2026-09-12
  Houthis seize strategic al-Mandeb chokepoint
Fri 2026-09-11
  
Thu 2026-09-10
  The Houthis have stepped up their attacks, sparking renewed civil war in Yemen
Wed 2026-09-09
  Iran fires 20 missiles at Jordan; 18 intercepted 2 fall in empty areas
Tue 2026-09-08
  IDF eliminates two 3 terrorists from the terrorist organizations Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip
Mon 2026-09-07
  The US secretly cleared mines in the Strait of Hormuz for four months, according to media reports
Sun 2026-09-06
  US military says it destroyed 3 Iranian oil tankers after IRGC targeted its warships
Sat 2026-09-05
  Security forces kill 48 terrorists in 'high-tempo' Balochistan operations over 72 hours: ISPR
Fri 2026-09-04
  US strikes killed Iranian pilots, naval and IRGC personnel
Thu 2026-09-03
  US pounds Iran, Tehran strikes back at bases in biggest exchange since July
Wed 2026-09-02
  US strikes IRGC targets after 'attempted attacks' in Strait of Hormuz: CENTCOM
Tue 2026-09-01
  A supertanker hit two mines in the Strait of Hormuz
Mon 2026-08-31
  Iran fires 'massive' 8 rocket attack on US Base in Jordan after U.S. bombs 2 rocket launchers on Larak Island
Mon 2026-08-31
  US forces strike Iranian rocket launchers on the Strait of Hormuz in first military action in weeks


Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
216.73.216.168
Help keep the Burg running! Paypal:
WoT Operations (7)    WoT Background (7)    Non-WoT (10)    Local News (5)    Politix (4)