More Chaos from Western Countries. Especially the U.S.
Published by Terrance Ó Dhomnaill in Newsletter · Thursday 13 Mar 2025 · 31:00
Tags: Trump, climate, change, politics, Europe
Tags: Trump, climate, change, politics, Europe
I would ask that if you do watch the video, please excuse the glitches. I’m still learning how to maneuver things on the fly while I talk to everyone. I am working on getting better at this, I promise. Use this link to watch or listen if you wish.
I am going to lead off with Trump's latest crazy edict to remove from all federal, public mention and records, the words, climate change and DEI. As we all know by now, or most of us anyway, he has decreed that DEI has to be done away with and all mention removed from all government records and institutions.
This applies to all federal offices, and any schools across the nation that receive federal money in any way and so on. So, from pre-K to grade twelve, all colleges and universities, the three letter acronym DEI, is to be erased from all mention by anyone. For everything up to grade twelve, it's up to the states to enforce as he would remove the states federal school funding if they don't comply.
In line with that, he has also decreed that the two words, climate change, must also be removed from federal records. I have a news article that talks about how the U.S. coast guard officer academy has been told, they're not to mention or teach anything about climate change in their curriculum anymore. It's to be scrubbed from all instructor syllabuses.
The terminology will be stricken in classes for future officers in a service that confronts global warming every day, a move some say will weaken it.
By Marianne Lavelle in Inside Climate news
So, as the journalist writes, how are these young officers in training supposed to learn about the actual climate change that anyone with a half a brain knows is going on? What if these officers graduate and end up working climate change weather disasters (which we know they will), and know little to nothing about the science behind the extreme weather event they are rescuing people from?
If they're not allowed to mention those two words in fear of losing their commissions, how's that going to affect morale? How’re they going to explain to someone they're rescuing, why their house or boat just got destroyed by extreme weather? Apparently, now that king Donald has outlawed the terminology, they can't. Or they have to get creative with their language. I'm sorry, but that's too much of a burden to put on some young officer who’s already under a lot of stress trying to take care of people.
I have another article about the environment and speech. Industrialists, who are trying very hard to get everything deregulated, want all scientific references to environmental protections erased.
From ProPublica.org
If you take out the science of why something is contaminating the environment, then there's no need for environmental protections. Real simple, right? Except for the people living around these industrialized areas who are getting sick with cancers and other things and dying. But the CEO's and investors don't care about those poor sods. They're expendable as long as they keep showing up for work, or replaced when they can't work anymore. Oh, and let's not forget that there's no more Medicaid, so no more health care either. You have to know that Obama Care is also on the chopping block, just waiting for the right moment to cut that out too.
Universities are all under assault once again as of the last couple of weeks. Now, it's from Homeland Security. Trump and his minions have given the greenlight for the immigration police to enter college and university campuses nationwide without warrants to round up any students or faculty who may have publicly supported the Palestinians or condemned the genocide. If those they arrest are in the U.S. under a student visa, it's being revoked. If they're in the U.S. with a valid green card, it's being revoked, if they’re naturalized citizens, that's being stripped away. If anyone says anything in the media in support of the Palestinians, condemns Israel or the genocide, and is attending any college or university right now, they’re a target. ICE will be coming for them to deport those they can and try to jail those they can't deport.
To give everyone an example of how little Trump cares, the infamous (I say infamous only because of the campus protests last year) Columbia University just lost $400,000,000 in federal subsidies. all because Trump needed to make an example out of them to bring all of the other higher learning campuses across the country under heel. Even though they went out of their way to comply with his demands about shutting down the right to peaceful protest and freedom of speech.
You can bet that every higher learning campus in the country took notice and the not so higher learning institutions, such as vocational schools and others. Americans are losing more and more of their basic civil rights every week. Not that we have that many left by now anyway.
I have another article from my friend Mitch about education. He writes that public schools anymore, have had their curriculum so restricted now, that they're little more than propaganda outlets to just teach the very basics in order to prepare students for the corporate work force.
Why Education is No Longer About Learning, But Workforce Training
By 🌬️Mitch in Medium.com
I remember rhetoric like that back when I went to school decades ago. "Get good grades so you can be ready to go out and get a better job." I didn't get good grades in public school because I had other things going on to distract me but, the propaganda was there all the same and it still is. Mitch tells us that kids are still pushed into getting the best grades in STEM courses to prepare for the work force. Get the best grades in order to get into the best college or universities, in order to achieve the best salaries in the work force after graduating.
We’ve all heard the adage that if you don't go to college, you’ll only ever be able to get a job as a janitor or hotel maid, or restaurant waiter and so forth. I, for one, never graduated from any formal college. I have been to a couple of vocational schools and graduated from both with honors. Thanks to my military education.
I used those schools to get into lucrative, hardworking, trades careers in appliance repair and commercial HVAC and refrigeration. Then later in life, a career in IT. Which brings me to something I want to talk about that effects all of us in one way or another, most without us even thinking about it.
Cybersecurity. The reason I chose to talk about it this week is because I watched a limited Netflix series last week called Zero Day, with Robert DeNiro. We all know who he is, or most of us do anyway. He's been in the movies and such for many years. He produced and starred in this series about cyber-hacking.
Without giving it all away, the series is about what would happen if some people were able to use a computer virus to take down the power grids across the country. Obviously, chaos ensued when airplanes, trains and cars lost all traffic control and other bad things that could happen with just a one minute complete electrical outage across the country. Lots of people die or are seriously hurt in this show.
In the real world, we have cyber-hackers working to take down systems all the time now. Everything from state sponsored actors, like China, Russia and North Korea. Iran, Israel and many others who are actively trying to get into computer networks every day. All to try and steal information, ransom institutions (ransomware) and everyday hackers, such as kids trying to see if they can hack into something just for the thrill and some streetcred.
Very few succeed only because so many have succeeded in the past and robust deterrents were invented and deployed after the fact to prevent it from happening again. How many news stories have we heard over the last several years about ransomware infecting hospitals and locking up networks until they administrations paid the ransom?
There have been lots of stories through the years about state sponsored hackers stealing technical information from government servers, and military industrial corporations. North Korea is famous for this, plus they use viruses and scams to steal a lot of money for their government. China has stolen a lot of classified technical information through the years. Russia is famous for setting up all of the cyber farms to try and subvert American elections. Especially back in 2015 and 2016. Iran was just accused of trying to hack into political party systems recently.
I could go on and on but you get the idea. So, let me tell you a little about my IT background.
As I mentioned, I'm a graduate (I graduated at the top of my IT class) of an IT vocational school. In order to graduate, I had to study all of the basics in the IT world (except coding). One of which was cybersecurity. This was one of my industry standard IT certifications.
So I feel like I am somewhat qualified to talk about the lack of IT security rampant across the private sector in the United States and the world actually. But I want to focus on the U.S. right now.
In the United States, most, if not all, electrical grids are privatized. And that makes them more vulnerable to hackers than government systems as a rule. Cybersecurity can be expensive to set up and maintain. Don't get me wrong, the government has laid down some regulations regarding minimal security that these infrastructure corporations must have in place to prevent hackers but, it's up to the company to decide just how much they want to deploy in order to maintain services.
If the company operates in a low revenue state, they may not deploy real robust security out of cost concerns. If the company makes a lot of profit from its subscribers, they may spend a little more to keep their reputation intact.
If the company operates in a near monopoly in a low population area, they might not spend a lot of money on upgrades to their systems, since they want to keep the profit margins as high as they can.
What this means for the customers, is that a lot of these these companies are using out of date software that doesn't meet current security standards, out of date server and computer hardware and so on. I know this because I used to work for a state agency when I was still a forty hour a week commuter. They were constantly fighting to keep IT systems compliant with new security requirements and always behind schedule. They probably still are. These are the people who provide you with all of the state services that most people take for granted. Like DMV, agriculture inspectors, state police, state DOT and so many other services that most people don't think about until they need something.
I live in what I would call a moderate state when it comes to state services. They don't have a lot of money but they aren't poor either. This state is one of those that has a good mix of urban and rural areas and, and depending on where you live, you get a level of services based on the average income base for that area.
Most states are like that when it comes to IT services. In the urban and affluent suburban areas, IT infrastructure is usually kept up better than the rural areas. In my state, we still had government facilities in the poorer, rural areas operating with old DSL networks provided by the local internet providers. That internet technology went out a couple of decades ago. But we have state offices still working with the old baud modems with the screechy-scratchy noise makers of old. They were trying to upgrade as they could but, due to state budgets, it will be a slow process. Remember what I said, I live in what I would call a moderate operating budget state.
Imagine what the computer and network infrastructure systems look like in one of the poorer states? Say, Idaho, Maine, Iowa, West Virgina, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and so many others? I know that when I ran my own repair business in very rural northern Maine, the best internet I could buy, was the outdated broadband cable system. Which they still run today. Some poor, rural communities don't even have that yet. They're still using the vastly unsecure DSL phone line systems still. It's rare but it's still a thing for some of the rural farm communities across the country and remote cattle ranches out west.
What you will see is these poorer state agencies and public schools still using unsecure internet systems because they can't afford to upgrade and this is only going to get worse as the country's infrastructure continues to decline.
This is how the hackers get access to money and technical secrets. By getting into non-secure systems or tricking untrained personnel. I remember a story dating back a few years, about how a rural school secretary where I used to live, lost thousands of dollars of the school districts money because she hadn't been trained about identifying fake emails. This happens all the time because these rural school systems don't have any money to pay for the cyber training for their employees.
We all know that state public school systems don't normally have anything worth stealing, other than some public funds but electrical grids, sewage waste water treatment plants, clean water pumping stations, and other essential infrastructure systems that any country needs to be able to operate safely, and provide stable services to its customers? We all agree, they need to be kept secure from hackers.
Unfortunately, in the United States, these systems are not integrated very well. So what works in one district doesn't always talk nice to another districts network due to antiquated systems and out of date security protocols.
A wealthy urban or suburban area of the country will usually be using the latest security protocols but a poor, rural area, they'll be using what they can afford. Which doesn't communicate so well with the newer security protocols.
What if the Chinese were to get mad enough to create a computer virus and deploy it around the country. Essentially, knocking these antiquated computer systems offline, even for just a few minutes? Imagine street lights going off during the work commute? Imagine the electricity going out to water pumping stations, and sewage treatment plants? What about police and fire dispatch communications?
This would cause a minor hiccup for a small, rural town but for a midsized town or city, or worse, a large city like Chicago or Los Angeles? It would be catastrophic. There would be lots of dead people.
This is the condition of the U.S. IT network infrastructure outside of most federal institutions. Even some lesser federal institutions are vulnerable. A few years ago, the IRS, the U.S. tax department, had a big problem with tax form backups due to out of date computer systems. They were promised new, upgraded systems in order to handle all of the backlogged tax forms. It took them a long time to upgrade things and some state offices still haven't been sorted yet.
The U.S. Veterans Affairs department suffered with the same thing, and still does in some of the poorer states and regions. Access to health records of veterans on these ancient computer systems was a nightmare. I was still receiving CD discs with my health records on them not even a couple of years ago. I guess the VA considers the postal service a secure delivery system versus secure servers. I suppose that's one way to implement an air gap security system for health records, unless the post office loses it or someone steals the disc in transit.
This just goes to show everyone that the United States is extremely vulnerable to hackers in nearly every aspect, except the Department of Defense, the white house, the congress and senatorial offices in Washington D.C. For politicians with state offices, maybe not so much.
Meanwhile, the rest of the developed world has mostly surpassed the United States in protecting their computer networks from bad actors. The EU is passing newer, more stringent regulations constantly. East Asia has been way ahead of the U.S. for a long time. China is so far above the U.S., there's no way the U.S. can get an equal footing anymore.
And yet, the U.S. is supposed to be the wealthiest country on the planet. We all know where all of that money is going and it sure isn't into the infrastructure of the country.
In overseas news, Europe wants to go all in on defense spending now, since Trump has decided to stop supporting them. I wonder where they're going to find the money? They don't have the robust economies anymore to devote five percent of their GDP to defense. Common sense tells us that the PM's and the EU council will strip out social services and borrow the money they likely can't pay back. And they wonder why the extreme political, conservative parties are gaining such a large foothold in their parliaments these days.
Poland's PM is so scared of the Russians, he's making it mandatory that all young Polish men, and some women, go to military training. A lot of them will become reservists but still? That'll make him popular with the younger voters. Meanwhile, Russia is laughing at them.
By Adam Easton for BBC News
Donald Tusk has called for the EU to escalate its military buildup in order to outpace Russia
From RT News
England and France are becoming very buddy, buddy over their fears of the Russians. France is thinking about how to extend their nuclear warheads to cover all of western Europe. Maybe Britain can help with that, despite being pariahs in the EU.
Things in Europe are becoming very interesting as these Russophobes go crazy with the fear of an invading Russian Army. It looks like it will be up to the voters to corral these idiots before someone lights the fuse to a nuclear warhead.
In the middle east, I found an article about how the U.S. now is thinking about arbitrarily boarding marine vessels they suspect of carrying Iranian oil to other countries. They call it enforcing sanctions. I call it what it is. High seas piracy using U.S. navy assets. What if the Iranians decide to protect their ships? Any sensible sovereign nation has the right to defend its people from threats like pirates within their territorial waters.
The initiative comes as part of Trump’s campaign of sanctions on Iran and aims to stifle funding for the Iranian nuclear program
From The Cradle.co
For their ships outside of their territorial domain, after the first couple of boardings and ships being detained for carrying so called sanctioned cargos, I bet they might set up naval escorts to prevent that from happening again. I know I would if I were someone like Iran. The question is, can they protect their ships? Would other countries help? Iran has a security agreement with Russia and China has said that they would do what was necessary to secure oil deliveries to China from the gulf states.
Could king Donald start a naval war with Iran, Russia and maybe China, who has the largest navy in the world? The U.S. doesn't have many allies anymore. I don't see the Canadians stepping in to help. The Brits don't have much of a navy anymore, so France? Given what Trump just did to Europe, probably not. And so go the biggest players in the EU, so go the rest. Australia might help as they are all about helping so long as the submarine deal with the AUKUS treaty remains intact. If that deal goes south, as certain U.S. defense people are intimating about, the Aussies may also abandon their American cousins.
That leaves the mighty U.S. navy to handle things on their own. How long would that last after a couple of American ships get seriously damaged or even sunk in the Persian Gulf or off the straights of Oman?
If king Donald is worried about his favorable poll ratings, wait until a bunch of sailors and marines die in the seas off the gulf states while attempting to board any vessels they were told to hijack.
If we didn't have enough stuff to keep us up at night, the U.S. immigration police are starting to arrest pro-Palestinian protestors who either made it into the news feeds or have arrest records from the campus protests last year. Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian student, now graduated, married to an American woman who is eight months pregnant with their first child, and had a valid green card up until they arrested him last weekend, is now sitting in a ICE detention center somewhere in Louisiana, waiting for deportation without his wife and unborn child. He will likely never see his Columbia university diploma as Columbia will probably erase all of his records as if he never attended. As of this articles posting date, a judge has paused his deportation to review his case. Mr. Khalil has also requested a transfer back to New York to be closer to his wife.
There is a German woman who was in ICE custody in San Diego for weeks, who made the mistake of trying to cross the border from Tijuana with her American girlfriend a couple of weeks ago. ICE is had been holding her, accusing her of trying to work in the U.S. because herself and her American girlfriend had tattoo equipment with them when they tried to cross. Another German tourist was detained for a couple of week, and a British girl was arrested and detained in Washington state for the same thing. Accused of attempting to work in the U.S. on a tourist visa.
Jessica Brösche to join Lucas Sielaff, who is reported to have returned to Germany on 6 March
From The Guardian/World News
There is only one way to look at this now. If you're here in the U.S. under a student visa, are from the middle east, or anywhere else for that matter, your profile picture is on some social media app showing that you were at one of the campus protests somewhere on a campus in the U.S. last year, ICE is coming for you. They are supposedly using AI to search through millions of social media feeds to find anyone who attended a protest, in order to ascertain their immigration status. If they find you, they will revoke your visa, green card or naturalized citizenship and deport you.
If you're a foreign tourist attempting to enter the U.S. from Mexico or Canada, no matter your intent or where you’re from, whether you have a passport and/or a return plane ticket to your country of origin, or what used to be any other legal means of stepping foot on U.S. soil, those days are gone.
If you land in a U.S. airport in a stopover to another country, you could be detained at the whim of the immigration SS troopers at customs and held on bogus charges indefinitely now. This has happened in the last couple of years.
I wouldn't be surprised that this may apply to Canadians very soon with the trade wars escalating. The U.S. is already forcing them to be fingerprinted if they want to winter over in the U.S. The new liberal Canadian PM says he’ll stand up to Trump's government over the tariffs. Canadians are already boycotting American imports across the country. A couple of provinces that are selling electricity to a handful of U.S. states are planning on raising the prices soon. The Canadians are pretty mad right now and that's not something the yanks want to have. It's going to hurt a lot of U.S. wallets. Tourism is way down already and it's not even summer yet.
In other news, the protests are starting to get louder. Tesla dealers across the U.S. and Europe are seeing lots of protestors disrupting business everywhere now. Sales are way down. I have to wonder what the boy wonder is going to do about that? Is this the start of something bigger?
A lot of experts on this sort of thing (grass roots protesting), have been saying that it will only take one small spark to set off nationwide protests such as the U.S. hasn't seen since the late 1960's and early 1970's. Are we starting to see something take off here?
I have to also wonder about western Europe once people start protesting all of these social services cuts in order to pay for the extra defense spending their leaders are pushing for. It's coming. Just wait for it a bit.
Civil unrest is breaking out in little spurts here and there right now but, if the leaders of these countries keep going the way they are, there could be nationwide strikes and boycotts galore in countries like Germany, France, and Poland. It may spread across Europe as well. England may catch the fever and start striking and protesting against Starmer's government. Romania is having protests over their barring of Georgescu from running for office again. All because he ran on a platform that was Russian friendly and no NATO. There are rumors that the EU council told the Romanian election officials and judges that they had to get rid of him and vote in a EU favorable candidate. As of this article’s posting, Mr. Georgescu was barred, despite his appeal, and the protests are ongoing.
Whatever happened to EU democracy? Apparently the Russophobia has scared the EU council members so badly, they're acting against their voter's wishes. I expect to see more protests soon.
The U.S. and Europe are starting to become very scary places to live in or even just step foot in for any reason. You can bet that foreign tourists will be looking for more peaceful and safer places to go on vacations from now on.
Noted economists are starting to predict a global recession by the end of 2025. It may be sooner in the EU. Trump's isolationism is going to bring on a lot of financial pain domestically. Countries are already starting to cancel American private contracts and import orders. The U.S. stock market is tanking. Trump and his cabinet are all either in denial or shrugging their shoulders, telling Americans, it will probably hurt a little before they straightens things out.
I'm sorry but once the damage to the economy is done, there will be no coming back to the way things were. Maybe that's the point. There are other op ed's being written that say that this is what the oligarchs want. To crash the American economy so bad that the prices of everything, except food and housing, will crash so they can buy things like small companies and real estate cheap and resell at a higher price later, like they did in the 1930's.
The trouble is, the U.S doesn't have another FDR to come riding out of the sun to save the day. If there's another major depression, it will be for good. There will be no do overs. Democracy will probably say bye-bye for the United States and Europe.
I have been to counties where there's no democracy. I have been to places where the warlords ruled the populace and usually not in a benevolent way. This is where the U.S. and Europe are heading if something doesn't change very quickly.
I’ve been saying since I got back from my last tour of duty in the middle east that Americans and western Europeans are so spoiled. The Europeans have forgotten what Europe was like at the end of WWII. The U.S. never had to experience any of that and that's why they behave the way they do.
We'll soon see how all of this turns out as more and more people start protesting all of this anarchy created by the governments and war mongering over nothing. Once the cost of living and the loss of social services reaches a level of unsustainability, things will get ugly. I don't imagine Europeans will stand by too long once the EU council starts stripping away their health care and senior pensions, among other social services, to pay for a EU defense force to defend against an imaginary enemy.
In the U.S., once more and more green card holders and citizens start being rounded up for deportation in the name of national security, the prices of everyday items like food, clothing and household necessities will go up beyond the reach of most households, and the civil unrest will crank up in earnest. Are Trump and the immigration stormtroopers going to declare an insurrection and call out the soldiers to quell the rioters? Will the soldiers actually shoot unarmed protestors, if called upon to do so?
Some will, without a doubt. But, with all of the civilian gun owners in the U.S. right now, that would be an open invitation for a violent civil war. How many national guardsmen will disobey orders and refuse to shoot their neighbors?
There will be a lot more unrest and protests before things get that far but there is already a lot of chatter on social media and chat boards talking about these things. Expect things to get worse as the economies keep nosediving into the basements in the next few months. Just this week, the U.S. stock market lost 1.7 trillion, spelled with a T, dollars because of the tariffs.
Tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 plunges 3.81 percent, its steepest single-day loss since September 2022.
From Al Jazeera
Canadian provinces threatened to raise the tariffs on their electricity sold to Minnesota, Michigan and New York State. Trump threatened to raise the tariffs on steel and aluminum to 50% in retaliation. Now, once again, he has backed off to 25%. Canada backed off with their threats of tariffing the electricity. Canada is getting ready to turn away all American imports as soon as they can once this new prime minister Carney takes over in a few days. There is a serious boycott of American goods taking place across Canada, and Europe right now and it promises to get worse.
Peter Beaumont for The Guardian
President Donald Trump says increased tariffs come in response to Ontario’s surcharge on electricity exports to US.
From Al Jazeera
The US president had previously announced plans to hit Canadian steel and aluminum exports with a 50% tax
From RT News
All of this instability by Trump is creating havoc in the stock markets and with the used to be allies of the U.S. Trump is even going after the Veterans' Administration so, for all of you U.S. veterans out there who receive health care from your local VA hospital, stand by. Services may be getting cut short very quickly, along with the other benefits that previous presidents promised us. Remember, Trump considers disabled veterans losers so he has no sympathy for any of us.
“To be seen or cast as this bad person after I served this country…feels really awful.”
- Sonner Kehrt with MotherJones.com
If you want to know when it's time to stock up on essentials, watch the morbidly wealthy. When they start selling off a lot of stock investments for cash, you know something's coming. They have ways of finding things out ahead of time that only their money can buy. Musk has lost billions in tesla stock all over the world lately. That should tell you something. Watch Warren Buffett.
For the rest of us, all we can do is protect ourselves as best as we can and try to survive what's coming. There is apt to be a whole lot of angry, hungry people in the U.S. and Europe by this time next year.
What do you think king Donald is going to do about that? To quote a famous French queen, "Let them eat cake." We know what happened to her.
At this point, I air my little commercial and return with my narrations of the first two chapters of Steel People. Chapter 1 that I narrated last November for Crann na beath Stories and Poetry. I cut out just that story from the podcast and spliced it into the video above. Chapter two I narrated this week using my new editing software and boy, was that a chore. I still have some things to learn about using that, as I found out. That and the video backgrounds were a bit of work to put together today.
For those who like to listen to stories, watch the video. For those who like to just read, here are the stories themselves from Ken W on his Vindicator Substack page.
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