Here’s a longer-than-usual LinkSwarm, since last week’s edition was wiped out by the ice storm power outage.
“That’s because economic growth is slowing down,” explains research fellow EJ Antoni. “Even the areas which contributed positively to gross domestic product (GDP) are not necessarily signs of prosperity. For example, business investment grew at only 1.4 percent in the fourth quarter, but that was almost entirely inventory growth. Nonresidential investment, a key driver of future economic growth, was up just 0.7 percent.”
“Meanwhile, residential investment fell off a cliff,” Antoni continued, “dropping 26.7 percent as consumers were unable to afford the combination of high home prices, high interest rates and falling real incomes. No wonder homeownership affordability has fallen to the lowest level in that metric’s history.”
There was a gain in net exports, but that was largely a mirage created by a major slowdown in international trade. “Imports are simply falling faster than exports, which shows up as an increase in GDP.”
But probably most concerning to Antoni is the sharp decline in real disposable income in 2022, which exceeded $1 trillion.
“This is the second-largest percentage drop in real disposable income ever, behind only 1932, the worst year of the Great Depression,” he observed. “To keep up with inflation, consumers are depleting their savings and burning through the ‘stimulus’ checks they received during 2020 and 2021. Credit card debt continues growing, while savings plummeted $1.6 trillion last year, falling below 2009 levels.”
(Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
A Tampa jury acquitted Billy Adams of killing two men in a makeshift recording studio in Lutz. He walked free from a Tampa courtroom on January 27.
Three days later, a young mother who was pregnant with her second child was found shot to death in a residential area of New Tampa. Her toddler was still in her vehicle nearby.
A week after her death, Tampa police said Billy Adams “did admit to being the one to pull the trigger.”
(Hat tip: Dwight.)
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umm… nice summary, but, about that pipeline thing?
The Sy Hersh latest line of BS?
I don’t know what happened to Nordstream, but I’d lay a month’s paycheck on that whole thing being a tissue of lies. So many details, so much bullshit.
For one thing, the last country that’d be involved would probably be Norway. Not only that, the Norwegian P-8 that supposedly played a key role? Those aircraft haven’t even reached initial operating status in Norway yet. They’re recent purchases, due to be going on active service later this year. Additionally, all those details about salinity and the fusing? Utter ‘effing bullshit.
If the US was involved in this, they’re not likely to use schoolhouse divers to do something like this. Those guys are trained for underwater salvage under totally administrative status; the idea that they’d just willy-nilly be re-tasked, even by the CIA to go blowing up pipelines in the Baltic? Laughable.
This whole Hersh thing smacks of some old-school FSB type reaching out to an old contact/patsy, and handing out a bullshit fairy tale for him to disseminate. Hell, Hersh may even believe it, being unable to identify when he’s being played. Which does not speak well to his “journalism”.
There are so many holes in this story he’s relating that it’s not even funny.
Hunter’s laptop: Now he needs to tell AOC.
Kirk – do you know what an SSQ-86 is?
Have you ever heard of ‘reflagging’ a US plane for a special mission?
Have you ever visited the NEDU? Know what they can do?
Could be BS. But it doesn’t surprise me.
https://nexttobagend.blogspot.com/2023/02/unsurprised-and-brace-for-shock.html
@the Gaffer,
Here’s the way we were taught to evaluate intelligence when I did S-2 work in the Army:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_source_and_information_reliability
Sy Hersh and this story are about what I’d term an E-5, so far as reliability and credibility go. He’s unreliable, and the story he’s trying to sell is entirely implausible.
Do you seriously want me to believe that the Norwegians would be able to keep this a secret? As left-wing as most in their military and government actually are? That they’d sign up for starting some sh*t like that with their European allies and NATO partners? That they’d take the risk?
All I can say is, yeah, sure they did.
Also, what do you think is significant about the SSQ-86? It’s a sonobuoy; BFD. Why on earth do you think that they would use something like that, which has a significant signature that would likely wind up being noticed and recorded in that part of the Baltic, likely by the Germans or the Danes? The whole idea for the fusing on those bombs is freakin’ ridiculous on the face of it all. Plus that, the quantities on the explosives for those blasts being big enough to trigger seismic sensors? Do you have any idea how much conventional explosives that takes? You’re not talking stuff you’re going to go hauling around in someone’s backpack; those are significant quantities that take up a hell of a lot of space and are simply not concealable.
Anything is possible. The question is, how likely is it? If you were sitting there in some CIA office, would your go-to be “Let’s get Norway on board with this deal… They’re good candidates to partner up with…”? Or, would you be more likely to say, talk to the Poles?
Sy Hersh is a left-wing tool, who has time and time again acted against US interests, taking credit for things he had nothing to do with. The asshole claimed he “revealed Abu Ghraib…”, when the reality is, the f*ckwit got a briefing from the Army about one of it’s already ongoing 15-6 investigations. Hersh turned that into some big New York Times “scoop” that he claimed responsibility for. The man’s a lying sack of sh*t, always has been. He’s also dumb as a box of lobotomized rocks.
Everything that he’s ever done links back to his being a probable tool for Soviet/Russian intelligence and their efforts at disseminating disinformation. He’s parroted their lines too many times, and consistently always come out for things supporting their needs.
I wouldn’t doubt that the US could have done Nordstream. I’m just going to go on record that if they did do it, they wouldn’t have done it like this. The Norweigians as partners in nefarious deeds in the Baltic, ones that could rebound on them heavily? LOL… Not. F*cking. Happening. Not for us, anyway. And, trust me on this: The Germans, the Danes, the Swedes, and the Norwegians know who did Nordstream, and if it was the United States, they’d have crucified us already.
it’s got nothing to do with this particular fairy tale.
I still think the most likely culprits are the Ukrainians. They are at war with Russia and the pipeline is a legitimate military target. They have the ability to do this and they certainly have the balls required.
Lots of folks are treating this as some kind of bleeding-edge technology is required to pull this off. Nope. The bombs used are the equivalent of WWI depth charges – century-old technology. GPS (for positioning) and ROVs (for placing the charges) have been around since the 1990s. An oil-patch offshore crew boat (around since the 1950s-1960s) could be used to mount the attack.
Ukraine has a university offering a pipeline engineering degree (according to my pipeline engineer son, the only place that offers that specialty) so they have the technical know-how on what it would take to destroy the line. Put a time delay fuse on the mines so they explode days (or even a week) after they are placed and it would be hard to track down the boat used to place the mines.
Not rocket science and the Ukrainians have shown plenty of imagination during this conflictl
The only way the Ukrainians could have done this is with the full and complete cooperation of one of the countries around the Baltic. Could have been any one of them, from Finland going clockwise to Poland.
My own take is that the odds are quite good that this was yet another in a long line of Russian self-owns due to essential incompetency. I don’t buy the entire “We found explosive residue” thing, because all the existing imagery I’ve seen of the actual pipeline breaks shows the sort of thing I’m used to seeing from cutting charges placed on the inside of a pipe, not external charges. The pipes are bent outwards, not inwards. Not having had an awful lot of experience on targets like that, with charges placed in that manner, I’m just gonna say “It doesn’t look like that, to me…” and caveat it with “I could be wrong…”
The idea that the US would do something like this, and it’d take this long for anyone to start talking? Nope, nope, and nope again. The supposed divers that did this were the schoolhouse guys in Florida. One, most of them aren’t the sneaky-pete types; just vetting them for something like this would have taken forever. Two, their absence at the schoolhouse for training up and conducting the operation? It would have been noticed. Three, that’s just not what they’d do, TBH. If the CIA wanted to do something like this, they’d have used their own in-house divers (which we know they have at least a few of, going back to Azorian…) and/or contractors. Using “line” assets like from the schoolhouse? I just can’t see that happening. At. All. Doing that would literally be “programming for failure”. The other thing about this that militates against it is that you’d need to have extensive US-standard dive support equipment on those Norwegian “Alta-class minesweepers”. D’ya really think that that could have been concealed from the entire crew of that minesweeper, and that they’d just keep quiet about it all? Seriously?
The rest of Hersh’s story is just chock full of similarly stupid details that just make your head spin, if you’ve ever been in the military or around any sort of these operations. The idea that they’d be using schoolhouse divers? Ludicrous. That they’d be using normal US explosives, in Baltic waters, and then leave the charges there for months to set off with a communications sonobuoy usually used for signaling submarines to surface and call home with a radio? That they’d rely on that for setting off what amount to a strategic strike? Seriously?
The US might have done it. No idea, really. But, this convoluted Rube Goldbergesque thing that Hersh is relaying to us? Ain’t. No. Damn. Way.
I mean, if a Norwegian minesweeper sank with all hands back around June-July 2022? And, there were suspicious vacancies down at Panama City? Ones people would have commented on, like “Oh, hey… What happened to all the graduates of Class 04-22? Where are all those instructors they’re suddenly having to replace?”, then I might believe something like this could have happened, and we’d only hear about it now, from Hersh.
Trust me on this… If some random Norwegian sailor had seen a bunch of American divers working off his boat, and then the pipelines were blown up? I think that Norwegian seaman might just have been able to put two-and-two together to get to four, followed by him either having his throat slit some dark night by Norwegian intelligence or he would have gotten to a journalist in Norway, which is not a notoriously no-questions asked US ally. Someone would have noticed something, someone would have talked, if this Sy Hersh fairy tale were even halfway true.
As it is, the whole story smacks of some late-night vodka-fueled FSB dezinformatsiya session, wherein the participants were trying to one-up each other for “incredible bullshit that Sy Hersh would say for us”. The odds that any of this is true would be ludicrously bad. As in, buy some of last week’s Lotto tickets, you’ll have a better chance of winning bad..