[POST] Sunday Cutdown LXXX (29 June 2025)
Clearing my inbox of stories I want to document
This is a reader-supported publication. I give it all away for free but could really use your support if you want me to keep doing this.
1) Because the light’s better over here
YAHOO NEWS: Pickaxe mountain: Iran’s new hidden nuclear fortress
Pickaxe Mountain is now in the news as the alleged replacement/upgrade from the trio of Iranian nuclear sites hit last weekend by the US. Supposedly, this is where the higher-enriched uranium stockpile was taken.
So, why wasn’t Pickaxe bombed with the rest?
Two reasons: not yet operational and far harder to attack, as it is located twice as deep underground as Fordo.
I am reminded of the joke I used to use in my presentation many years ago:
A drunk is crawling around under a street lamp, searching the ground.
A police officer walks up and asks, “What are you looking for?”
“My car keys,” slurs the drunk.
“Did you lose them here?”
“No, I lost them over there by my car.”
“Then why are you looking here?”
“Because the light’s better here!”
The US has bunker-buster bombs that we had hoped would be enough to take out Fordo if they hit sequentially and deepened the damage each time.
Point being, we were already operating beyond known capacity, so a daisy-chain effort was required.
With Pickaxe twice as deep, there’s really no point/hope in attempting that there.
So, while the “keys” may now be in Pickaxe, we hit Fordo instead because the “light’s better there.”
Two decades Iran has been expecting this strike, so, yeah, they were prepared.
2) China asks: Do you want fries with that?
ECONOMIST: Chinese brands are sweeping the world. Good.
True enough:
Ask a westerner for an example of a successful Chinese consumer-goods brand, and until recently most would have struggled. Although China is the world’s premier manufacturing power, it has long lagged behind when it comes to imaginative home-grown retail brands and products, even as its factories have cranked out vast numbers of them for foreign companies. This is now changing. Innovative Chinese brands are popping up everywhere. Consumers and investors around the world stand to benefit.
I myself would have said Haier with its appliances (fridges, washing machines), where China’s flagship has done well enough to buy itself GE Appliances. Then there’s the companies selling indoor AC stand-alone units that you start to see more and more across the US.
The Economist is starting to spot far many more success stories.
From Stockholm to Sydney, the electric car gliding silently by is increasingly likely to be Chinese. Mixue, a purveyor of ice-cream and cold drinks, has dethroned McDonald’s as the world’s largest fast-food chain by number of outlets. It is expanding in South America, as is Meituan, a Beijing-based delivery app. Chagee, a chain of tea shops, is on track to have at least 1,300 stores outside China by the end of 2027, mainly in South-East Asia; a few years ago it had barely any. And Pop Mart, a Chinese toymaker, has created a buzz worthy of Disney around its strange grinning (or are they grimacing?) nine-toothed dolls, called Labubus. Fans include Rihanna, a pop star, and Sir David Beckham, a retired footballer.
I am old enough to remember when Japan traversed the same trajectory, going — in one generation — from laughable source of cheap-ass products that most Americans mocked to admired source of the latest cool consumer goods — like the transformative Sony Walkman.
Well, China is replicating that track, to no surprise:
Chinese brands were long seen as poor-quality, unimaginative and unfairly subsidised. Scandals around food safety and labour standards did not help.
New firms are now overturning those old assumptions. Many happily advertise their roots.
First you copy, then you improve, then you transform.
3) And won’t you smile for the camera?
THE TIMES: My make-up class at Glastonbury to fool facial recognition cameras
I have face-painted thousands of kids over my career as father.
It started with my eldest and a kit I received from my sister Maggie during Emily’s long cancer fight. I’d paint her face up and we’d have her wear costumes whenever she had to go to the Lombardi Cancer Center at Georgetown University — as a form of distraction for her and to assert her “star quality” at the clinic.
There was about 20 years then ,when I volunteered to face-paint at all manner of festivals/parish events.
Just fun stuff to remember. I won’t say I miss it because it’s hard work and tough on your back/shoulders.
So, surprised I was to see this article on people trying to thwart/spoof facial recognition technologies with … simple face paint.
The future of protesting is fabulous, darling. In a world of increased police surveillance, activists are turning to face paints to stop AI facial recognition software picking them out of a crowd.
Activist artists in the Greenpeace area of Glastonbury festival held a workshop to teach the foundations of how to cause a glitch in facial recognition software — a tactic known as “face breaking” or “computer vision (CV) dazzle”.
As the government looks into banning face coverings at protests — which have been widely used since the Covid pandemic and recently particularly by pro-Palestine groups — CV dazzle could provide an alternative way for activists to go unrecognised.
The concept is based on dazzle camouflage used by Royal Navy ships during the First World War, which used high-contrast colours and sloping lines to distort the structure of a vessel and disguise the direction of travel.
Per my longtime theme that the key security dynamics having migrated over time from the system level (fears of WWIII) to the state level (state-on-state war historically infrequent today) to the individual level (bingo!), we now see people taking their camouflage cues from WWI-era warships!
What does this tell us?
The future is not about mass control but the control of individuals. That’s where the freedom/security equation is truly located.
4) 90 percent of being a superpower is just showing up
SPACE.COM: NASA's been pulling out of major astronomy meetings — and scientists are feeling the effects
Sad and deeply worrisome that our best and brightest USG scientists are being sidelined from international gatherings by the Trump Administration.
Sounds like an old Soviet quote, yes?
"We are given rules by our own institutions about what we can and cannot say."
I am finding the Republican woke mob to be far more damaging than the Dems’ woke mob. The latter sought to call out people on their unstated biases, while the former seeks the wholesale eradication of “bad thought” like admitting there is climate change going on all around us.
I found the Dem woke mob annoying.
I find the MAGA woke mob rather fantastically reactionary — like Flat Earth reactionary (e.g., the push to restore the invisibility of LGBQTI+).
These quests to suppress reality strike me as quintessentially Orwellian.
And yes, they overwhelmingly emerge on the Right versus the Left, because the latter accepts many paths to happiness while the former typically allows only one path — increasingly defined within the US as White Christian Nationalism, the acceptable Western fascism of our century that’s not much of an “improvement” on the 20th-century variants (thus the constant and painful comparisons to Weimar Germany and the rise of Nazism).
Hmmm. Entry started with NASA and then everything went dark.
I guess that’s the point: once the science is corralled, what is left of truths that seek to describe life factually?
5) China breaking wind at record rate
GUARDIAN: China breaks more records with surge in solar and wind power
China is the future; America is drill baby drill!
There is a Dark Ages feeling to it all, as we are running away from the future in such a willful fashion.
This is China:
Between January and May, China added 198 GW of solar and 46 GW of wind, enough to generate as much electricity as Indonesia or Turkey.
Meanwhile, Trump is opening up national parks and monuments and reserves to mining and drilling, despite our leading the world in oil and gas production.
Brilliant, if you want to rule the past, but China is setting itself up to run the future.
China’s installed solar photovoltaic capacity has now surpassed 1,000 GW for the first time, equivalent to half of the world’s total installed solar capacity.
This is how you deal with today:
China is the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases but is also the world’s biggest supplier and installer of clean energy technology.
This is how you lead your country:
In a speech in April, Xi highlighted the fact that in the past five years China has built “the world’s largest and most complete new energy industry chain”. The term new energy refers to renewables and supporting technology such as batteries.
China is good but not great. We are losing because we used to be good and now we’re just backasswards in our vision.
6) Soya later American farmer!
YAHOO FINANCE: China pens Argentine soymeal test deal with eye on US trade war disruption
SCMP: US farmers face tough outlook as China switches suppliers amid trade war
I have said it many times: when you ruin your own reputation as a stable supplier of food, your customers will go elsewhere with a vengeance.
We are destroying our most important superpower: our ability to grow food beyond our needs.
China is the world's biggest consumer of the protein-rich animal feed raw material but produces most of it by crushing soybeans mainly imported from Brazil and the United States. Argentina is the world's top exporter of soy oil and meal.
Chinese buyers have been scooping up Brazilian soybeans and shunning U.S. exports due to high tariffs imposed during the ongoing trade war between Beijing and Washington.
The trail of causality here is easy to spot:
China opened its market to Argentine soymeal in 2019 after years of resistance that was motivated by a desire to protect its domestic crushing industry. Market participants at the time said the decision was prompted by the U.S.-China trade war during U.S. President Donald Trump's first administration.
China would rather waste its own domestic crushing industry than put its soybean imports at risk with the latest craziness out of DC.
Once lost, these are not markets easily won back — whatsoever. We’ve seen that dynamic time and again.
From the second citation above:
China’s imports of a slew of US farm goods plummeted in May. Analysts say the trade may never fully recover.
Another painful example of superpower suicide.
It’s just so fucking weird to see America ruled by some Kim Jong Un-wannabe.
We win the Cold War to achieve this pathway?
You know, the need to go that direction tells you everything you need to know about who HATES America right now, because it sure as hell ain’t the Left, whose “cures” are comically minimal compared to the Cultural Revolution now being conducted by Trump 2.0.
As we learned with Mao, you really have to hate your own people to effect such fundamentalist change.
You have to despise them.
Again with the ultra-dark tie-offs!
7) America’s fill-in-the-blank demographic fix
WAPO: Immigrants drive population growth in a graying America, census shows
Guess where we locate MAGA’s center of gravity?
Ah … it would be that first plunging bar.
And MAGA’s fear of the future?
That would be the six bars on the right.
Get me more South Afrikaners STAT!
8) All we are is dust in the wind
NYT THE MORNING: The Size of Government/Trump and Trade
We are told that the Big Beautiful Bill will jack up our national debt like nothing before it — not even his 2017 tax cuts.
Ah, but tariffs are going to solve that issue.
Good luck with that one.
9) Hell hath no fury
EURASIAN TIMES: Canada “Snubs” U.S.; Signs Strategic Defense & Security Partnership With The EU; Mulls Scrapping F-35 Deal
You go! Canada! You go!
You’ve got options. Now’s the time to explore them.
I mean, who could have seen this coming?
Disappointed with the United States due to unprecedented tariffs and repeated verbal assaults on its sovereignty by US President Donald Trump, as well as uncertainty associated with buying American arms, Canada is forging closer ties with Europe to reduce its dependence on its North American ally.
Yes, yes, berate Canada for “riding on America’s coattails.”
That attitude is going to pay off big time in an altered world climate that favors Canada bigly while punishing America bigly.
Then we’ll see who eager to ride whose coattails.
10) So let it be declared, so let it be sold
FORTUNE: Beijing’s No. 2 says China is growing into a ‘major consumption powerhouse,’ even amid ‘intensifying’ trade frictions
Yes, China’s push to become a consumer society is nowhere near where it needs to be, but at least the leadership is talking the right talk.
China’s #2 (a complete unknown relative to Xi) speaks of “promoting China’s growth into a major consumption powerhouse based on the solid foundation of a major manufacturing powerhouse.”
Again, at least that’s the right direction, per my Thursday post.
11) You can’t handle the truth!
AXIOS: Scoop: Trump to limit sharing classified info with Congress after leak on Iran bombing damage
Watching our political leaders accuse journalists of being unpatriotic WRT our brave airmen, etc., is deeply embarrassing.
Trump made his usual over-the-top claim, spiking the football on the 50-yard line. Problem is, that’s not a reality he can bend to his will.
Expect these accusations to only grow more desperately vile. The news out of Iran will inevitably and increasingly degrade our sense of “obliteration.”
So, good thing we did the military parade first.
12) I’m on the bottom of the world looking up at creation
ECONOMIST: How to avoid anarchy in Antarctica
I get the logic: whoever’s closest gets to claim territory:
It’s just funny how the advanced West seems to clean up on both poles.
In the Arctic, these powers are the closest nations to the territory.
But, in the Antarctic, they’re either not close (Norway, France, Britain) or grabbed that closeness in a previous imperial age (Norway, France, Britain, New Zealand, Australia).
Here you have to look upon New Zealand and Australia especially with the same jaundiced eye inevitably to be applied to Canada: such a tiny slice of population claiming such a huge slice of territory because … they stole it last from the natives.
Time to start buying your Antarctic force-projection militaries!
Antarctica is the only continent unbloodied by war. For over six decades peace on the frozen land mass has been kept by the Antarctic Treaty, an agreement signed in 1959 at the height of the Cold War that established it as a demilitarised scientific preserve. But much like its ice sheet, the system governing Antarctica is in trouble as global warming opens up the possibility of mining virgin resources.
Because, of course, both the Russians and the Chinese are coming.
This is a classic example of a very outdated model/ruleset trying to manage a rapidly changing strategic reality.
The politics simply lags too far behind the climate, leading to dangerous situations that need not be.
I just want to say I appreciate these missives so much. I consider it your return to blogging! And I can't not appreciate inclusion of Lord John Whorfin!
re especially your points 4 to 7. Someone quipped on social media
"the US is not shooting itself in the foot but rather in the chest"
...and also on FB the following from an acquaintance:
"Be a Man, work too much, sleep too little and HATE electric cars".
Turning science generally and electricity specifically into a cultural wedge issue may be MAGA's worst dynamic (amongst many contenders)