Uranium jerky: Angle on Ukraine (Part VII)

Back in the fall of 2020, I published a series of six articles* under the subject “Uranium Jerky” (explanation in the first article), taking note of the extraordinary connection of the events recounted in them to the Obama administration and – among other things – the high-profile Clinton-involved developments of the time, including the sale of Uranium One to the Russians.

One of those events was Goldman Sachs’s unique, remarkable decision, announced on 20 January 2009, that it would become a buyer of and dealer in physical uranium.  It proceeded to do so, and to this day has not shed that role, although the company began suggesting it would do so under congressional pressure at least seven years ago.

I’m still not sure most readers fully grasp the significance of a firm like Goldman Sachs, with little visibility or transparent exposure to observers of the uranium industry, owning and moving around thousands of tons of uranium.

TOC Ready Room 22 July 2022: Biden returns from MidEast, with prejudice; CNN v. Bannon; Bonus tag

We’re on deck with a full-up Ready Room today, after a relatively extended blogging hiatus.  Strap in for some serious (if selective) situational awareness.

Biden’s Middle East adventure

It turns out to be a good thing I didn’t get the segment on President Biden’s Middle East trip posted on Sunday, as originally planned.  Quite a bit has ensued since Sunday, all of it fallout from the essential failure of Biden’s junket, and the fallout is significant.  It’s what needs to be highlighted up front.

Here’s the short list of fallout items.  We’ll look at a few implications with each topic.

On Sunday, a senior Iranian official made a rare statement about nuclear weapons, and baldly averred that Iran is capable of producing them.

The chain gang (an Alfa-gate tale): From Senator MBNA, to Aon, to Twitter and Musk

Checking in recently with some history of the Alfa-gate series of untoward Russia-hoax events, we unearthed some “degrees of separation” type dots through which the events linked, however innocently, to MBNA, the Delaware banking giant Joe Biden was at one time referred to as “the Senator from [i.e., “from MBNA”],” and other aspects of the Biden family enterprises.

The most pertinent TOC articles are here and here.  That’s where you’ll find background links for most of the assertions of fact below.

The reason for this opening exercise is to set the stage for broader links that reveal a big-picture pattern, one that goes beyond the links highlighted earlier.

This big-picture pattern goes beyond the known outlines of Alfa-gate and its parent -gates, Russiagate and Spygate.  In fact, it reaches all the way to Elon Musk’s bid to buy out Twitter, and for me illuminates the full meaning of “investor activism,” and how it appears to connect in at least some cases to the politics of interventionist government.

Starting with the MBNA thread, a brief summary:

Hunter Biden got a lucrative $100,000-a-year job at MBNA in 1996,

TOC Ready Room 24 Feb 2022: Putin in Ukraine, “C’mon man” Thursday edition

We now proceed to wait-and-see mode on practically everything, as the intelligence coming out of the combat theater will be uniformly unreliable at this point.  We can at least say with some confidence that Kyiv has not fallen, and it doesn’t appear that Russia has established full control of the Odessa environs, much less the entire southern coast.

Various unrealistic claims have been made about the number of Russian weapon systems destroyed, shot down, etc. by the Ukrainian armed forces, and there’s no point in overloading on salt to go with them.  I wouldn’t assert that the Ukrainian defense minister is deliberately lying, but the chaos of combat is probably clouding the vision of battle damage assessors.  Some of the numbers don’t seem to add up because there’s been no evidence of the kind of combat that would produce such losses – but there are big chunks of Ukraine into which we have little visibility, at least in real time.

As others have mentioned, watching activity around Lviv, in the west, will be informative.

TOC Ready Room 24 Feb 2022: Putin makes his move

This will be rough and ready, fast and furious, and who knows what else.  Readers will be aware that Putin has just invaded Ukraine.  I include a few interesting tweets below, but for me the significant point is that we can now judge better what Putin’s intentions are.

We’ve always been able to assess with certainty that he wants to subjugate Ukraine.  The question was really what the timeline would be, and how much he was willing to breach the shaky semblance of order we still had left.

I wasn’t unprepared to see him move in something of a blitzkrieg style, but he’s being more emphatic and even “in your face” than I expected.  He’s apparently ready for a full, no-holds-barred breach, and will be counting on no residual conditions of stability to simplify his campaign.