Submarine hulls made of titanium can go deeper than standard steel hulls.  The Soviet Union built a series with titanium hulls but the USA did not.  Why?

https://nationalsecurityjournal.org/why-...ke-russia/

Titanium brings real virtues—strength, corrosion resistance, low magnetism—but it also demands a bespoke fabrication ecosystem that chokes output and complicates repair. Steel, by contrast, supports acoustic superiority at tactically useful speeds, locks in commonality with allies, and enables rapid battle-damage recovery.

You cannot conjure up electron-beam welding cathedral-halls and titanium-purity workflows on a forward base after a near miss.

the gist is that the US went with steel as easier to work with and interchangeable with allies.  titanium work requires very special environments; fixing damage would have required taking the sub to one of a handful of facilities.

considering the track record of Soviet / Russian manufacturing, I wonder how fragile those titanium subs would have been in combat.

and of course the Titanium was much costlier than steel.

The daring daylight robbery happened this morning at 9.30 local time , 3 men had driven a lorry with a basket lift crane to the museum yesterday and seemingly left it there overnight , they returned this morning to use the lift , brake a window in the building and lower the thief into the building where he took the Crown Jewels , they then retrieved the goods made good their escape on motorbikes.

Quote:Art detective Arthur Brand told Sky News the heist is "the theft of the decade" - adding that in order to recover the "priceless" items, police will need to find the culprits in just one week.

"These crown jewels are so famous, you just cannot sell them," Mr Brand said. "The only thing they can do is melt the silver and gold down, dismantle the diamonds, try to cut them. "That's the way they will probably disappear forever.
He continued: "They [the police] have a week. If they catch the thieves, the stuff might still be there. If it takes longer, the loot is probably gone and dismantled. It's a race against time."

https://news.sky.com/story/louvre-museum...y-13453106

...or is it just another means of reset?

Quote:October 10, 2025 / Joseph P. Farrell

Even as I sat down last Sunday afternoon to comb through my emails and pull stories for blogging and honourable mentions, a story shared by A.F. popped into my inbox, and it intrigued me so much I postponed my original scheduled blog - which I had intended to title "I am Leo, Hear me roar!: The Papal Icecapades" - to blog about this story, because I have recently advanced yet another of my crazy high octane speculative scenarios that the whole Artificial Intelligence meme might be being pushed by the American government and deep state as the latest economic rope-a-dope scandal, much like Ronald Reagan's Star Wars strategic defense initiative was simultaneously a real project, but also a Potemkin village designed to ensnare the Soviet Union - and its economy - in a non-existent arms race it could not win, by getting it to invest money to try to keep pace with an American project that was more bluster than reality.

Similarly, my "artificial intelligence" scenario, I urged, might be a similar such project. For the relatively small investment of a few hundreds of millions or even a few billions of dollars in a few "megadata" centers, and for a momentary drain on the country's power grid and a little "suffering" on the part of the people trying to sustain skyrocketing energy costs, nations such as China might be fooled into committing massive monetary and energy resources into an artificial intelligence "race" and bust their economy. I even quipped that something had to be done to soak up all that excess Chinese energy production, and to syphon off the electrical output for useless artificial intelligence projects.

And then along came this paper shared by A.F. (with our thanks):

The AI Bubble and the U.S. Economy: How Long Do “Hallucinations” Last?

Why the AI, as in Artificial Information, bubble looks primed to pop soon despite it being a top bipartisan project in the US.

Now there's much in this paper to ponder, but what caught my eye is the relevance of the scenario of a "bubble" being outlined in the paper, to my recently advanced "break the tablets" scenario. The statement that concerns me occurs near the beginning of the paper:

Quote:The U.S. is undergoing an extraordinary AI-fueled economic boom: The stock market is soaring thanks to exceptionally high valuations of AI-related tech firms, which are fueling economic growth by the hundreds of billions of U.S. dollars they are spending on data centers and other AI infrastructure. The AI investment boom is based on the belief that AI will make workers and firms significantly more productive, which will in turn boost corporate profits to unprecedented levels. But the summer of 2025 did not bring good news for enthusiasts of generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) who were all hyped up by the inflated promise of the likes of OpenAI’s Sam Altman that “Artificial General Intelligence” (AGI), the holy grail of current AI research, would be right around the corner.

Let us more closely consider the hype. Already in January 2025, Altman wrote that “we are now confident we know how to build AGI”. Altman’s optimism echoed claims by OpenAI’s partner and major financial backer Microsoft, which had put out a paper in 2023 claiming that the GPT-4 model already exhibited “sparks of AGI.” Elon Musk (in 2024) was equally confident that the Grok model developed by his company xAI would reach AGI, an intelligence “smarter than the smartest human being”, probably by 2025 or at least by 2026. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that his company was committed to “building full general intelligence”, and that super-intelligence is now “in sight”. Likewise, Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, said “powerful AI”, i.e., smarter than a Nobel Prize winner in any field, could come as early as 2026, and usher in a new age of health and abundance — the U.S. would become a “country of geniuses in a datacenter”, if ….. AI didn’t wind up killing us all.

For Mr. Musk and his GenAI fellow travelers, the biggest hurdle on the road to AGI is the lack of computing power (installed in data centers) to train AI bots, which, in turn, is due to a lack of sufficiently advanced computer chips. The demand for more data and more data-crunching capabilities will require about $3 trillion in capital just by 2028, in the estimation of Morgan Stanley. That would exceed the capacity of the global credit and derivative securities markets. Spurred by the imperative to win the AI-race with China, the GenAI propagandists firmly believe that the U.S. can be put on the yellow brick road to the Emerald City of AGI by building more data centers faster (an unmistakenly “accelerationist” expression). (Italicized and boldface emphases added)

Ponder that emphasized statement in the context in which it occurs very carefully. The artificial intelligence scheme being currently pursued would soak up more credit than the current credit market could sustain.

And therewith my high octane speculation of the day, for if this be true and if Morgan Stanley's evaluation of the situation is correct, then we are confronted with yet another scenario: might an artificial intelligence bubble simply be one means of soaking up all the bad paper sloshing around in the system? Is a bubble(artificial intelligence) being created to soak up a previous bubble (the derivates crisis hangover from 2008?)

Well... maybe.

But there's a huge fly in the ointment, according to the article, and that fly is so huge that it is implying the exact reverse of my artificial intelligence-Potemkin village scenario. After rehearsing a number of "letdowns" in the artificial intelligence world, from the increasing failures of large language models to the fact that 95% of generative artificial intelligence companies fail, the author closes in on the fundamental problem of the American economy and the current artificial intelligence bubble: it's all hallucination and completely unreal:

Quote:America’s High-Stakes Geopolitical Get Gone Wrong

The AI boom (bubble) developed with the support of both major political parties in the U.S. The vision of American firms pushing the AI frontier and reaching GenAI first is widely shared — in fact, there is a bipartisan consensus on how important it is that the U.S. should win the global AI race. America’s industrial capability is critically dependent on a number of potential adversary nation-states, including China. In this context, America’s lead in GenAI is considered to constitute a potential very powerful geopolitical lever: If America manages to get to AGI first, so the analysis goes, it can build up an overwhelming long-term advantage over especially China (see Farrell).

That is the reason why Silicon Valley, Wall Street and the Trump administration are doubling down on the “AGI First” strategy. But astute observers highlight the costs and risks of this strategy.

Prominently, Eric Schmidt and Selina Xu worry, in the New York Times of August 19, 2025, that “Silicon Valley has grown so enamored with accomplishing this goal [of AGI] that it’s alienating the general public and, worse, bypassing crucial opportunities to use the technology that already exists. In being solely fixated on this objective, our nation risks falling behind China, which is far less concerned with creating A.I. powerful enough to surpass humans and much more focused on using the technology we have now.”

Schmidt and Xu are rightly worried. Perhaps the plight of the U.S. economy is captured best by OpenAI’s Sam Altman who fantasizes about putting his data centers in space: “Like, maybe we build a big Dyson sphere around the solar system and say, “Hey, it actually makes no sense to put these on Earth.”” For as long as such ‘hallucinations’ on using solar-collecting satellites to harvest (unlimited) star power continue to convince gullible financial investors, the government and users of the “magic” of AI and the AI industry, the U.S. economy is surely doomed. (emphasis added)

What is highly intriguing about these paragraphs is the geopolitical context in which all this artificial intelligence development is couched. Indeed, the statement that China is focused on optimizing current artificial intelligence capabilities while the USA is focused on developing the next generation capabilities is a misreading of the situation, for one only need recall all of those stories in recent years, emanating from China, of this or that breakthrough in quantum computing, or entanglement encryption, and so on. And that suggests, quite strongly, that if anyone has been erecting Potemkin villages to force an opponent to waste vast amounts of money on projects that have no immediate or mid-term benefit, it is not the United States doing so to China, but rather the opposite, China doing so to the United States.

Well, once again, that's possible in our usual high-octane-speculation way.  The problem, however, is that all that bad paper is sloshing around not just in the American financial system, but in China's as well, and that means that this financial game and the artificial intelligence Potemkin villages accompanying it may be a much more complex and complicated game than meets anyone's eye.

Even so, it's worth remembering a significant fact that I pointed out way back in my book Babylon's Banksters(see pp. 21-23): the man responsible for creating the mathematical model that led to the creation of all that bad paper - the derivatives mess with its mortgage based securities and credit default swaps and bundles of bundles of securities - was a mathematician by the name of Dr. David Li.

And, yes, he was Chinese, and after a stint with the Canadian Imperial Bank, he returned to China where he headed up a department - and no, I am not kidding here - evaluating economic risk and risk assessment strategies. Just the sort of thing one might specialize in if one wanted, perhaps, to create Potemkin village projects...

See you on the flip side...

Three sentences which i feel go far in the rabbit hole .....


Culture is not you friend   (Terence Mckenna )







And the way language affect, models our perception in to level beyond reality....






Did you ever got that odd feeling ?  What is this.....is this the matrix....is this some kind of simulation .....or something is off and you have felt that your entire life ,but cant precisely accurately define it ?


I think, much of our surroundings /  realitys  are too articifial , not true enough .Which then keeps our minds distracted and dumbed down .

I really dont feel using the word hallucination is wrong word to be used in this context related to this all ........

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Quote:FBI & DHS CRUSH Antifa As Network Leaders ARRESTED Under RICO & Terror Charges | MASSIVE PANIC Federal agents have launched a sweeping nationwide crackdown on Antifa, targeting key organizers accused of running a violent network under RICO and terrorism laws. The FBI and DHS raids have led to multiple arrests, asset seizures, and digital takedowns that have sent shockwaves through activist circles. Analysts say this could be the beginning of a broader federal push against extremist groups operating within U.S. borders. Subscribe for ongoing coverage of major federal operations, national security updates, and the real stories behind the headlines.

Probably a good place to invade after Venezuela; at least there would be locals who would absolutely appreciate the help. 

Quote:Trump EXPOSES Former Mexican President’s MASSIVE $100M Miami Bribe With CJNG | Claudia TERRIFIED Donald Trump drops a bombshell linking a former Mexican president to a $100 million bribe involving the CJNG cartel. With evidence pointing to Miami money laundering operations and political cover-ups, Mexico’s leadership is on edge—especially Claudia Sheinbaum. This deep dive unpacks how the U.S. and Mexico could be heading toward their biggest corruption showdown yet. Watch till the end for full context and political fallout.

Quote:Los Viagra & CJNG ATTACK With Drone Warfare On Military Base | Top Cartel Leaders Jailed Mexico faces new chaos as Los Viagras and CJNG launch a violent drone strike on a military base, marking a dangerous shift in cartel warfare. Authorities respond with a massive crackdown, capturing top leaders and exposing shocking alliances within Mexico’s underworld. This video breaks down the attack, the government’s retaliation, and what this means for the future of cartel power.

Quote:We are thrilled to unveil "Jetson Air Games" Concept with Electrifying Aerial Showcase at UP.Summit 2025. the Jetson Air Games, a competitive format designed to redefine personal air mobility through dynamic aerial sport. For the first time ever, Jetson executed a 4-ship formation flight, followed by a high-speed pylon race, culminating in a solo aerial display by Jetson Co-Founder and CTO Tomasz Patan, who took the controls himself and participated in both the formation and the race. The performance, set against the backdrop of the UP.Summit’s Community Day airshow, was a powerful demonstration of Jetson’s technological maturity and bold vision for the future of personal air mobility.

opa! blini for everyone 

First, a song to set the mood:





Gather 'round, children. Have a seat around the camp fire, and let old gramps tell you a tale.

It was a few years ago now, back when I was able to get around better than I can today. I was out in the woods poaching  searching for deer sign so as to know where to go and what time of day to go there to get my quota of deer on the first day of deer season so's I didn't have to spend the entire hunting season in the woods among armed and dumbassed Yankee visitors - that's a reipe for gettin' yerself shot by accident, y'know? It was just about this same time of year, early in the fall just before the harvest.

Now, you need to know a little bit of the lay of the land in these here woods. I live on the side of a mountain, a great ridge that separates the waters on the west that flow westward into the Ohio River from the waters on the east, which flow southward into the Tennessee River. A great high dividing ridge, that divides two separate watersheds. The mountain rises to the clouds behind my house, covered in a quilt of forest that hasn't changed much since Methuselah's possum hound was just a pup.

Near the top of the mountain lies a line of rock cliffs where it looks like the mountain tried to outgrow it's blanket of forest. In those cliffs, in a small alcove that nature cut into them eons ago, there is a small cottage or cabin, built, it appears, of field stones. This is a few miles back into the woods, way up high on the mountain. The cabin built of stone in that alcove appears as if whomever built it was trying to camouflage it among the cliffs, building it of stone the same color as the cliffs, and using the cliffs themselves for the left and right exterior walls and the back wall - mostly it looks like a single wall was laid out between two cliffs and a roof plopped onto to it. The roof itself looks old, very old, and has all manner of greenery which has taken root on it and grown into a tangle over the years, further camouflaging the structure.

In the winter time, curls of smoke can be seen emerging from the brush and laurels that cover the roof, wafting upward until it is whipped away and dissipated by the winds before it can fully emerge above the cliffs. You have to be pretty close on to the place to see any smoke at all, although the smoke can be smelled - but not precisely located - for some distance away.

Now given that description of the old cabin, and the fact that it is so far back into the woods, even more so than my place, one might be forgiven for assuming that anyone living there means to be isolated, even more so than myself... and I purely hate what has come to be referred to as "civilization". T'ain't nothing civil about it, near as I can tell.

So anyhow, there I was, just a-minding my own business, slipping through the woods scouting for deer sign, when I found myself near to that ancient cabin in the cliffs. From my vantage point, I could see into the alcove where the cabin resided. There were slight wisps of smoke wafting among the brush on it's roof before rising above the brush and being dissipated by the wind. Bunches of gathered herbs hung here and there in front of the cabin for drying, and there was a medium sized fire burning cheerily in the front yard of the place, with an old iron kettle, the sort that looked like it came across these mountains on some pioneer's wagon two or two and a half centuries ago, suspended on a tripod above the fire, steam lazily rising from it's contents. Nary a sign of a living soul or inhabitant of the structure was in evidence beyond those few meager indicators.

After that brief observation of the place, and desiring to give the inhabitant the privacy they so obviously craved, I simply and stealthily slipped past the scene, and went on my merry way, keeping to my own business and leaving whomever lived there to theirs. It was just the neighborly thing to do.

It was about 40 or 45 minutes after that, and some distance farther along the trail, that things got weird. As you might imagine, scouting for deer sign is not a quick business. You have to move along slowly and stealthily, and keep an eye to the ground as you go in order to ferret out the faintest of signs - a scuff here, a nibbled twig there, the occasional foot print or scat pile, that sort of thing. It's easily missed if you go too fast. So, time-wise, i was well beyond the cottage structure, but distance-wise, perhaps not so much.

It was then that i heard a thin, wispy, papery-parchment voice saying "Yoo-hoo! Little bo-oy!...". Now, you must understand the culture of these hills. You do not call a grown man "boy" unless you're ready for a tussle. I bristled at the appellation, and was about to spew forth a retort of "Boy? Boy HELL! How are you gonna like going home and tellin' your mama that a 'boy' whipped the piss outta you and then whipped you fer pissin'?" when my seeking gaze caught sight of the speaker.

The retort froze on my tongue, and my blood froze in my veins... and that cold seeped into my bones down to the marrow. The sight I beheld was a horror, the likes of which I'd never seen before. To say it inspired fear is an injustice to the word fear. Understand, boys and girls, that I have been around the world 9 times. I daresay that only one other Rogue has been around the world more than I. I have fought wars on 3 different continents. So understand, young-'uns, that when I say I felt fear, it's not a light statement.

I must have pulled a face at the sight, for the apparition began to cackle, a wispy dry cackle that seemed as if you could hear the dust issuing forth from it and peppering the surrounding trees. I had just enough presence of mind to whip out my cell phone and take a few photos to document the encounter.

I present the sight I beheld here. I had to run it through the Rogue Nation Board of Censorship and Other Ugly Things, LLC, in order to post it, and they rubber-stamped over the more objectionable parts in order to protect the innocent, and shield the guilty from shame. So, it's not the original image, but an AI-generated reasonable facsimile of what it was that I saw, suitably redacted to prevent trauma to children under the age of 40. 


What I saw was this:



Then it said, through the hideous cackling: "Boy, have I got sumpin' fer YOU!"

I've never been one to just stand around when danger presents itself. Fight or Flight takes over, depending on what the occasion demands.

I ran.

I ran like Hell, like the Devil's Hounds were nipping at my heels as I went.

I didn't run a little bit, I ran a lot, I tell ya! It's axiomatic that one does not run straight downhill in these mountains, for fear of momentum causing one to do a faceplant and probably break his neck in the effort. Heedless of that warning, I ran straight down hill, only catching the occasional sapling to fling myself off onto a zig-zag tangent in order to avoid a straight-line pursuit. I ran for all I was worth, and the net worth of all my ancestors. I was hauling ass outta there!

Behind me, I heard that same thin, whispery, dry and dusty voice calling after me: "Ya little bastard! Imma gunna gitcha! I'll work the roots agin' ye! I'll fling a hex upon ye! I WILL have ye! I WILL HAVE YE!"... but that only served to spur me onward and increase my breakneck speed in getting the hell out of Dodge. She pronounced "roots" more like "ruts", which imparted an extra layer of ancient chill on her curses.

I finally made it back home, entirely out of breath and unable to speak. My hair had turned two shades whiter during the flight.

That's been six long years ago. Since that day, I have been unable to sleep more than 4 hours at a stretch, and even then my wife stands guard over my sleeping form with a meat cleaver and dogged determination. For 4 hours a day, every day since then, she is my only Sentinel against the horrors that lurk without. Kill the witch or kill me, it doesn't matter - one of us has to go if she gets in.

Now, long ago, my Dear Old Dad told me the secret of dealing with spooks, and haints, and witches and such. He saud "Yuh cain't be skeert of 'em. Yuh treat 'em like reg'lar folk, an' iffen they wants to play that spooky shit, well, yuh make 'em skeert of YOU! That's how yuh git over on a haint of any kind."

Since that time, I've been what gives your Nightmares nightmares. I'm the reason the monster is under the bed - it's hiding from me, and maybe peeing itself a little when I'm around. 

For all that, I seem to have been unable to inspire fear in this old bitch. I dunno why, just as I dunno why it is that no one in my family can have a hex flung on 'em. Hexes just don't take on us, for some reason. I'm sure there IS a reason, but whatever it may be, the tale has been lost in the dim mists of antiquity, and hasn't been transmitted to the present time - for us, it's just a thing that is. Work the "ruts" all you care to, it ain't gonna have no effect on us.

Every year, just about this time of year that I've come to think of as "The Season of the Witch", I feel a sense of overwhelming foreboding. I know she's out there, waiting, watching, biding her time to seize the opportunity in a moment of inattentiveness. I'm determined not to give her that moment.

Twice now, at this time of year and in broad daylight, I've spied her in the woods, lurking, staring, just watching towards the house for her opportunity. It still makes my blood run cold to think of the horror awaiting me. I don't go to the woods any more, day or night. I don't even leave the house at night.

On one occasion, I caught her image in a trail cam, standing on a rock cliff overlooking the house, just standing there... watching...




Life has now become a race. A race between Death and that dreaded instant of inattention, when I hear the chilling wispy, paper thin but triumphant phrase:

"I'VE GOTCH'ER NOW ME BOY-O!!"


.

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