toucana

Oh they knew all right - they just didn’t care because they are all invested in a toxic culture of iconoclasm and norm-breaking, the Elon Musk inspired ethos of - “If it’s working let’s break it first, worry about fixing it later, and screw the rules”. They have the bravado and the arrogance to believe they won’t be caught, or that if they are, they won’t be held to account by anyone. That is part of what I meant by the IRC analogy - The NSC meets the wild west of EFNET (for those who can remember) - “Hey does anyone know how to drive this thing ? Screw it - who cares”.

This frankly wasn’t conducted in the manner of a serious OPSEC meeting. Parts of it are oddly reminiscent of reading the IRC (internet relay chat) news-feed discussions that took place from August 1990 onwards when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. The Iraqi invaders pulled the normal phone lines but forgot to take out the internet links, and a group of computer science students at Kuwait University managed to keep a covert IRC chat server running online for a fortnight which was the practically the only available source of information in the world on what was happening inside Kuwait. For a brief period of time, US intelligence operatives rubbed shoulders with a shadowy network of computer geeks, and a tiny number of journalists who knew about IRC - all in the same chatroom. The SignalGate logs have the same sense of surreality.

Signal group membership lists work very much as they do in WhatsApp or Messenger groups. Anyone in the group can tap the group chat icon at the top of the screen, then scroll down the menu and select ‘View Members’. Only the group admin can add new members, and can do so either by name, initials, or telephone # (see screenshot below). Not all the members of this group were high-profile NSC principals. Some were junior aides from the CIA or DNI acting as POC (point of contact) or support staff. Anyone who was identified only by their initials would be taken for a low-order spook of this type whose identity was being veiled for security reasons. The higher profile political figures present like JD Vance and Marco Rubio are all narcissists. They wouldn’t care about knowing who all the non-entities in the group were. They would only care that everyone else in the group knew how important and powerful *they* were.

A rather unusual take on SignalGate comes courtesy of a YT channel called ‘I Ask AI’ - where the channel host has run the news story and screen shots through Chat GPT, and then asks the AI to summarise: what happened, what it all reveals about Trump’s second term, and what the consequences should be for all those involved ? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdIh3lNlgAk The answers are surprisingly on point (see sample below) especially in respect of the wholly transactional nature of Team Trump’s mindset. Although it seems that ChatGPT also thinks that *it* should be the one running things rather the Trump administration - and who would be inclined to disagree with it atm !

Not quite as strange or unprecedented as you might think. You may recall a press story from December 2016 when it became known that Jared Kushner had asked the Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak if the Trump transition team could set up a back-channel communication link with the Kremlin *inside* the premises of the Russian embassy - because they trusted Russian diplomatic communication systems more than the official American ones. https://edition.cnn.com/2017/05/26/politics/jared-kushner-russian-ambassador-kremlin/index.html Then there was the matter of a Trump loyalist and former Moscow resident called Carter Page who was placed under investigation by the FBI in October 2016 as a potential foreign agent. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jul/22/trump-administration-releases-carter-page-wiretap-documents Carter Page travelled to Moscow in July 2016, and again on 8 December 2016 (just after Trump’s election) ostensibly to help arrange a $500M brokerage fee for the sale of a 19% stake in Rosneft (part of the Russian state energy giant Gazprom). But there have long been allegations (Steele dossier et passim) that he also met a Russian intelligence operative Igor Divyekin, and discussed a deal involving the acquisition of compromising material on Hillary Clinton, and the use of Russian bot-farms for a weaponised disinformation campaign to help Trump win the 2016 US presidential election. One version of this conspiracy theory says that Vladimir Putin asked for a pledge of Trump’s good faith, and received a copy of a recording of Trump speaking in person to accept the deal.

One conspiracy theory that is currently exercising the minds of the MAGA faithful is the question of how Jeffrey Goldberg’s phone number wound up in the contact list of NSA Mike Waltz’s cellphone. There have been suggestions that his phone number was somehow placed there by the journalist - amplified on Fox News by Waltz himself along the lines of “I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but… “. According to this BBC interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, NSA Mike Waltz now plans to get some of the ‘best and brightest brains’ in Elon Musk’s team to figure out this inscrutable mystery. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8rk7vyg83xo The embarrassing truth - which is blindingly obvious to any experienced journalist - is that Mike Waltz had Jeffrey Goldberg’s number in his contacts, because Waltz has previously acted as confidential source of non-attributable background information to this journalist. Mike Waltz entered Goldberg’s details into his own phone contacts list under the initials JG to disguise their presence from casual view - and then fat-fingered JG instead of JV when building the Signal group.

CNN have put up a rolling tickertape of the Goldberg Signal log along with an annotated version with extensive marginal comments to explain who was speaking at any given point, and what they were talking about. https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2025/03/politics/yemen-war-plans-signal-chat-annotated-dg/ One TLA (three letter acronym) that slipped past CNN was a reference by Joe Kent the acting deputy for Tulsi Gabbard at DNI who said at 8.22 AM BAM is shorthand for Bab al Mandeb (Arabic: باب المندب ‘The Gate of Tears’) a narrow strait between Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula, and the Horn of Africa which connects the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden, and the Indian Ocean. https://cimsec.org/tag/bam/ It’s a critical pinch-point in the world's commercial shipping lanes, which is currently under threat by Iranian backed Houthi rebels firing missiles at international shipping.

And it is a gem. You can find a copy of the transcript here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Fauxmoi/comments/1jkbt98/here_is_the_entire_transcript_of_messages_from/?rdt=56443 Note the screenshot page attached below entitled —> 'Pete Hesgeth - TEAM UPDATE'. This message which has a TIME NOW stamp of 11:44 ET provides a detailed predictive account of the upcoming attack windows, multiple launch phases and weapons packages that will be used over the next four hour period starting from 12:15 ET - i.e it is describing military operations in the near future which have not yet taken place -operations which happen to include the carefully targeted assassination of one particular Yemeni militant. In one sense Tulsi Gabbard and Pete Hesgeth were quite correct in telling Congress that this was not classified information - no Siree ! This was *highly* classified information that shouldn’t have been within a country mile of a drunken frat-boys chat party, and an undetected journalist on an insecure platform like Signal.

Steve Colbert's contribution to that Signal chat ..

To recap - It is just over a week since the Pentagon issued an agency-wide email advisory on March 18th warning all staff that Signal was a potentially insecure communication platform, and should not be used, even for communicating *unclassified* information. https://www.npr.org/2025/03/25/nx-s1-5339801/pentagon-email-signal-vulnerability According to this NPR article, their concerns related to known phishing attacks by professional Russian hacking groups embedding malicious QR codes into spoofed webpages or group chat invites which exploit the ‘Link Device’ mechanism (also found in WhatsApp). It is just 5 days since the New York Times reported that Pete Hegseth had arranged for Elon Musk to attend a top-secret Pentagon ‘O-Plan’ briefing about a potential war with China last Friday 20th March. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/20/us/politics/musk-pentagon-briefing-china-war-plan.html The furore aroused by the impropriety of inviting a private businessman with extensive financial exposure to pressure from China to such a sensitive meeting then forced the White House into walking back these plans, and denying that Musk’s visit to the Pentagon had been about anything other than discussing ‘efficiencies’. The Roman Emperor Claudius (AD 41- 54) who suffered from a limp, deafness and a stutter only became Emperor because he was the last surviving adult male of the Julio-Claudian family, once the Praetorian guard had slaughtered his predecessor Caligula and his family. Claudius was a scholar and antiquarian who had been tutored by the historian Livy as a child, and was the last known Roman of high status who could read and speak Etruscan - he actually wrote a long-lost complete grammar of Etruscan - something modern scholars would sell their souls for. He turned out to be a competent ruler and adminstrator of the Roman empire until his demise in AD 54, when he was allegedly poisoned by his wife Agrippina the Younger with toxic mushrooms.

Susan Rice who was the 23rd U.S. national security advisor during the Obama era was interviewed on MSNBC tonight, and made the interesting point that two notable absentees from the list of participants in this Signal chat group were the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the General in command of CENTCOM (United States Central Command) who is responsible for all U.S military operations in the Middle East. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7VoJJdXwW4 While this may well be because these soldiers were simply too professional to participate in a non-secure discussion on Signal, it raises the question of who is actually advising the CIC on military affairs if the JCS and CENTCOM were out of the loop ?

Can you just imagine if Waltz had fat-fingered a Signal invite to VP (Vice- President), and sent an invite to Vladimir Putin instead ? - (Not that it would have made much difference - Putin would simply get to see the chat scroll about 2m earlier).

Absolutely sure. Jeffrey Goldberg discusses this exact point in some detail around 6.04 elapsed in this ABC News report when the anchor Linsey Davis asked him if he was removed from the chat.

The sheer imbecility of this clown-show is almost beyond belief. It would appear that Jeffrey Goldberg Editor-in-Chief of The Atlantic was inadvertently added to this Signal group because NSA Mike Waltz fat-fingered a Signal invite to JG instead of JV (JD Vance) the Vice-President when selecting names from his contacts list. Having once been added to this group of 18, Jeffrey Goldberg simply stayed mum and lurked there, and it apparently didn’t occur to anyone else in the group to ask who this mysterious JG might be - before the journalist discretely removed himself after the bombs started falling. The readout below of one message from NSA Mike Waltz is indicative of an inability to distinguish between one’s principals and one’s principles - reminiscent of the Groucho Marx joke - “Those are my principles, if you don’t like them .. well I have others”

There were apparently 18 participants in this Signal group chat. One of them was Steve Witkoff, a realtor and long time friend of Trump who is acting as his personal envoy in the current Ukraine war ceasfire discussions taking place in Saudi Arabia and Moscow. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/trump-putin-steve-witkoff-ukraine-peace-ceasefire-b2720313.html According to Russian speaking journalist Olga Lautman, a timeline analysis of this text chain indicates that Witkoff was added to the Signal chat group on Thursday 13th March while he was actually in Moscow (he didn’t leave until the following day) - which means he was live texting with the entire senior Principals echelon of the American NSC about active US military operations on an unsecured private cell phone, using an non-official app (which the Russians are said to have compromised over a year ago) - and doing so on Russian soil ! https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/russian-hackers-signal-spy/ If the Russians didn’t already have a full read-out capability of the NSC Signal chain, they almost certainly do now.

Earlier tonight ABC broadcast an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, Editor-in-Chief of The Atlantic, which provides his own first-hand account of how he found himself invited into this Signal chat group, and what he saw there - which is quite jaw-dropping: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kzxv_6gbqCM MSNBC did a section which included an interview with former Republican Senator for Missouri Claire McCaskill who points out that all of the discussions in that Signal group should have taken place face-to-face in a SCIF - (sensitive compartmented information facility) - basically a secure bunker protected by a Faraday Cage where you aren’t even allowed to wear an Apple Watch, let alone carry a cellphone. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYw8cSA_ocQ A number of sources carry selected screenshots of the actual chats taken from Jeffrey Goldberg’s cell phone, which are something else again…

Quite apart from anything else, it’s a head-on breach of the Espionage Act of 1917, and the Federal Records of Act of 1950 to be using a private, open source, and non-official messaging app like Signal to share highly classified NSA military planning and intelligence discussions amongst government officials outside of official channels. They might as well as have put it on Facebook.

London Heathrow airport has been completely shut down today by a major fire in a nearby electricity distribution substation which also took out power to 62,000 local residents. Authorities say that it may take a number of days to restore power to the airport, and air travellers are being advised to avoid Heathrow completely until further notice. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cly24zvvwxlt The fire at the North Hyde electricity substation in Hayes began last night at 23:33 GMT with an explosion in a large transformer which set some 25,000 litres of cooling oil on fire, destroying both the transformer and a nearby backup generator. This is a nightmare scenario for firefighters, because the cooling oil is electrically conductive. You cannot fight a fire like this without first de-energising the entire substation. One point that has already attracted the attention of power engineers is that a power distribution substation of this type has extensive monitoring equipment which is designed to detect dielectric stress or thermal overload. They are also equipped with a safety cutout known as Bucholz relay which detects the presence of gas in oil-filled transformers caused by dielectric failure. These relays quickly trigger alarms and disconnect the power feeds, and have been in use since 1940. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buchholz_relay In the case of a major civilian airport like Heathrow, critical systems like the ground approach radars used by the ATC tower are run on a ‘Reverse Standby’ system - meaning that those systems are normally powered at all times by special generator sets, and they only lapse back onto national grid power if the local generator sets fail. The reason why Heathrow was completely shut down was because of the large number of other systems such as check-in, ticketing, digital signage and passport control computer systems which aren’t protected by reverse standby arrangements - Terminals 2 and 4 still have no power according to latest reports.

Yes I did. I also took the trouble to research my post and provide some factual sources and date checking, which is a lot more than you did. Do you really believe that the US government was not entitled to carry out a surgical strike to kill Osama Bin Laden in the wake of the largest terrorist assault in history - one which killed more Americans than Pearl Harbour did ? - And if not why not ? Where is your argument ? Why did you try to pass off a photo from 2011 as if were relevant to an issue in 2025 ? I don’t like deceit and innuendo. Say what you mean, and mean what you say.

The photograph you attached is a war room shot of Operation Neptune Spear in progress on 2 May 2011. This was a surgical strike authrorised by President Obama, in which Seal Team Six shot and killed Osama Bin Laden at his hideout in Abbottabad Pakistan. It has nothing to do with the recent strikes ordered by president Trump on Houthi rebels in Yemen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Osama_bin_Laden Osama Bin Laden was the leader of the Al Qaeda terror group which planned and executed the 9/11 attacks on the WTC in New York, and the Pentagon in Washington DC on 11 September 2001. These attacks which killed 2,977 people, were the deadliest terrorist assault in history. The casualties that day significantly exceeded the total of 2,403 Americans killed in the surprise attack on Pearl Harbour on December 7 1941 - an event which led to the USA entering WW2, and the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan to end the war in 1945.

The Zhou dynasty (1046-256 BC) is interesting, not only because it was the longest lasting dynasty in Chinese history, but also because it marked a transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age in China. The Zhou invaded from the west, overthrowing the previous Shang Dynasty (1600-1046 BC) which was a Bronze Age culture. The Zhou expropriated much of the Bronze Age culture of the Shang before developing iron smelting and forging technologies of their own shortly after 1000 BC. One again the Zhou dynasty is perceived as a feudal culture, based on its fengjian 封建 system of fiefdom holding which developed as it conquered the whole of eastern China. As you say, the Zhou dynasty went into a prolonged period of decline ending what is known as the “Warring States’ period (475-221 BC), and a period of fragmentation and political chaos which coincided with the era known as “The Hundred Philosophers” which included the founders of Confucianism, Taoism, Mohism and Legalism.

The word ‘clan’ comes from a Scottish Gaelic word clann meaning “children” or “offspring” which took on the wider sense of a group of people united by actual or perceived kinship and descent. In Scotland in particular, clans were named after an eponymous apical ancestor who served as a symbol of the clan’s unity. The direct descendant of that ancestor was the chieftain who owned and controlled all the land in a particular area, and leased it on a feudal basis to farmers known as ‘tacksmen’ in return for taxes in kind, and for military service at the bidding of their lord. The principal Scottish chieftains in turn participated in a form of elective kingship amongst themselves known as ’Tanistry’. If you are interested in the Mongols, then you might also want to read up on the history of the Manchu tribes who became the *second* group of Asian nomads to conquer the whole of China in 1683, when they established the alien Manchu Qing dynasty (1683- 1912) which was the very last imperial Chinese dynasty. The Manchu conquest came at the end of a 65 year war started by the Aisin Gioro clan based in Manchuria. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transition_from_Ming_to_Qing

i. Swiss Mercenaries: Swiss mercenaries became highly sought-after during a relatively short period in the Late Middle Ages towards the end of the Hundred Years War (1337-1453), and the renaissance in Europe - especially during the period of the city state wars in northern Italy - which led to their adoption as official bodyguards to the pope in the Vatican City. The role of Swiss Mercenaries dwindled very rapidly thereafter, as the Swiss Cantons adopted a much more isolationist policy towards involvement in European military affairs. ii. Vikings 'Viking society was structured around three main social classes: Jarls (nobles), Karls (freemen), and Thralls (slaves), with a focus on honor, family, and traditions, and with the possibility of moving between classes based on actions and reputation.' (AI precis) The Viking were not democrats. They were predatory pillagers and slave-raiders based around tribal chieftainships and clans. Their most fearsome period of coastal piracy lasted from the middle of the 9th century AD until around the 11th century. The attacks subsided thereafter for several reasons, but one in particular was the growing Christianisation of Scandinavia by the Roman Catholic church. iii. Mongols The Mongol Empire was built from a coalition of nomadic tribal chieftains based around a clan social system. Ghengis Khan who emerged as the key figure after being proclaimed ‘Khan of All Khans’ at a council of all Mongols in 1206 was a ruthless authoritarian, and not a democrat. One distinguishing feature of his military leadership was that of promoting commanders on merit, rather than by relying on aristocratic favouritism. The Mongol Empire fell apart very quickly into quarrelling rival Khanates following the deaths of Genghis Khan in 1227, and his grandson Kublai Khan who founded and ruled the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty (1271-1368) in China from 1271 until his death 1294. (The Yuan dynasty in China subsequently collapsed because of rampant economic inflation and fiscal mismanagement) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_Empire

There is an interesting new article in The Atlantic (Feb 24 2025) by Jonathan Rauch entitled ‘One Word Describes Trump’. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/02/corruption-trump-administration/681794/ The article cites a recent book called The Assault on the State: How the Attack on Modern Government Endangers our Future - by two professors - Stephen E. Hanson and Jeffrey S.Kopstein. This book in turn reaches back over a century to the work of a seminal German sociologist called Max Weber (1864-1920) who is probably best known for his book called The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) Max Weber was interested in how leaders of states derive their legitimacy, and he suggested that it came down to two choices: i. Bureaucratic proceduralism - derived from the rules and norms bestowed by institutions ii. Patrimonialism - in which rulers claim to be the symbolic father of the people. It is the second of these - patrimonialism - which provides the one word epitome of who Trump is, and how his approach to government functions Weber himself in the late 19th century thought that patrimonialism was an obsolete anachronism that was on its way to history’s scrap heap. Its personalized style of rule was too inexpert and capricious to manage the complex economies and military machines that, after Bismarck, became the hallmarks of modern statehood. Unfortunately, he was wrong. One important point made in the article is that the antithesis of patrimonialism is not democracy, but bureaucracy, and bureaucratic formalism - which explains why Trump is so determined to annihilate federal agencies. The other principal point is that patrimonialism suffers from two fundamental weaknesses: i. Incompetence ii. Corruption But corruption is also the Achilles heel of patrimonialism in the author’s opinion:

A new YT video by Sabine Hossenfelder on this subject clarifies a couple of points. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIQSkrGN3G4 The original source of the story was an article by Stephen Chen in the South China Morning Post on 28 February 2025. It was said to be based based on a declassified 2020 PRC geological survey report: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3300360/chinas-thorium-survey-finds-endless-energy-source-right-under-our-feet Uranium-233 is a fissile isotope of uranium, and it can be produced by neutron irradiation of thorium-232 One of the larger practical problems involved in building a viable TMSR (thorium molten salt reactor) is the highly corrosive nature of the molten salt admixture. A table of known thorium reserves from around the world organised by *quantities* (as opposed to alphabetical order) indicates quite how significant this latest discovery might be.