The usual. Long-term political damage is being done to preserve the fragile egos of a bunch of people who are objectively privileged, subjectively persecuted, and mostly going to be dead in a couple of decades.
As you were.
Trump's really doomed this time!!! Right? Right???
What makes me say "WTF" at this moment is reading about the K-pop industry. This is the phenomenon that to me seems closest to something from a sci-fi satire.
Does the beginning of this Wikipedia entry sound like it describes something happening on Planet Earth, the planet populated by human beings?
Loona (Hangul: 이달의 소녀), stylized as LOOΠΔ, is an upcoming South Korean girl group set to debut in 2018. Formed by Blockberry Creative, the group has 12 members and has been actively promoting since 2016.
The group started its pre-debut project in October 2016 by revealing new members periodically and subsequently forming sub-units. In the following 18 months, the members were introduced through the release of individual solo tracks, single albums and extended plays. Individual promotional activities were held for each member and sub-unit. In March 2018, with the last member revealed, there are 3 sub-units,[1] and all 12 members will debut as one group.
That can't be pop music. The Eagles are still touring, so pop music hasn't changed since the 70s.
Just swap out the names and that's the branding strategy for every current tentpole Hollywood franchise.
6: It is very similar to the Marvel Universe - the big difference being that those characters already existed in comics form.
Also just an incremental improvement and rationalization of the way that bands like New Edition and New Kids on the Block were put together. Or maybe even (to go way back) the Monkees.
4: That doesn't sound much different from how the Japanese pop business has been run for ages. There are "girl groups" that are decades old and have had 60+ members over the years, rotating them out when they're no longer fresh.
Yeah, but they didn't announce they were doing these things years ahead of time and have adoring fans following the machinations as the corporate product was painstakingly assembled.
Really what gets to me is the use of words like "sub-units". Probably it sounds better in Korean.
9 to 7.
From the dawn of the entertainment industry until about 10-15 years ago, I think the entertainment industry thought they had to keep all this stuff secret and put up a facade that things happened organically. Turns out they don't, there will be a hardcore audience that loves corporate machinations (aka "backstage intrigue") and the casual audience doesn't notice.
Which is fine. The divinely inspired artist thing has always been bullshit.
Yes, but the spreading use of corporate jargon is really fucking up English usage.
As long "training" remains uncountable I think I can deal.
10.last Hell, you could probably have a reality tv show tie-in. In fact I'd be surprised if it hasn't already been done.
You should check out Hatsune Miku some time. That's some shit. She tours.
So do the Eagles, and statistically, they are more likely to be dead.
15: Gotta give William Gibson credit for predicting this back in 1996.
Wikipedia doesn't provide a confidence interval for the probability that Glenn Frey is dead.
18: Did I ever post my joke about Trump doing the right thing not inviting the Eagles to the White House? Because without Glen Frey it's not really the Eagles!
If I did, it's probably even funnier the second time.
We can know if he checked out, but not if he left.
15/17: See also Fiona Apple in Macross Plus, which somehow predates that by a year.
Sorry, Sharon Apple. Mixing up my real and fake starlets.
The reports of roaring economic growth are making me very uneasy. I suppose this is not going to end in an economic collapse that makes 2008 look like a blip? I have no information outside my own entrails (I should at least consult a second or third set of entrails, maybe from a different species to eliminate bias) to suggest that the inevitable downturn is going to be worse than, say, the dot-com crash or the early 90s recession.
The usual. Long-term political damage is being done to preserve the fragile egos of a bunch of people who are objectively privileged, subjectively persecuted, and mostly going to be dead in a couple of decades.
That reminds me, the Vox article, "Elite law professors are brushing politics aside to support fellow elite Brett Kavanaugh. That's inexcusable in the Trump era" was better than I expected from the headline.
These opinion pieces take me right back to my childhood in Jamaica. Development scholars who study the "Third World" often observe that it is rarely the poor who hamper the development and disrupt the functioning of institutions that must be strong and trustworthy in order for a nation to thrive.
More often, elites are the problem. In my own region of origin, the Caribbean, the problem is endemic. Elites act to protect other elites, even when they belong to different political parties and have widely divergent interests, and even when the fundamental institutions of their country are at risk.
...
The integrity of the fundamental institutions of justice of the United States is being questioned. We may not reach the point of crisis that backsliding democracies like Turkey or Poland are seeing; Poland's ruling party is, as I write, purging judges who do not support its agenda, and replacing them with allies.
However, we are perhaps not so far from that kind of scenario as many hope; particularly if Americans come to question the legitimacy of the judiciary in the way that the president clearly does.
...
In a time of institutional crisis, attending good schools and being a thoughtful colleague aren't sufficient qualifications for the high court.
The reports of roaring economic growth are making me very uneasy. I suppose this is not going to end in an economic collapse that makes 2008 look like a blip?
My hope is that the continued growth, past the point in the business cycle at which I would have expected to see it slow, is a result of the tax cut, rather than a sign that, like 2008, fraud is making up an increasing portion of reported economic activity (there was a word that was in use for that concept which was something like "the bezel" but that's not right). I know that the tax cut hasn't had a large impact on growth numbers, but $100-$180b/yr has to have some impact, right?
Ah, yes, the bezzle"
To the economist embezzlement is the most interesting of crimes. Alone among the various forms of larceny it has a time parameter. Weeks, months or years may elapse between the commission of the crime and its discovery. (This is a period, incidentally, when the embezzler has his gain and the man who has been embezzled, oddly enough, feels no loss. There is a net increase in psychic wealth.) At any given time there exists an inventory of undiscovered embezzlement in - or more precisely not in - the country's business and banks. This inventory - it should perhaps be called the bezzle - amounts at any moment to many millions of dollars. It also varies in size with the business cycle. In good times people are relaxed, trusting, and money is plentiful. But even though money is plentiful, there are always many people who need more. Under these circumstances the rate of embezzlement grows, the rate of discovery falls off, and the bezzle increases rapidly. In depression all this is reversed. Money is watched with a narrow, suspicious eye. The man who handles it is assumed to be dishonest until he proves himself otherwise. Audits are penetrating and meticulous. Commercial morality is enormously improved. The bezzle shrinks.
14: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Making_the_Band
Lou Pearlman, the second most famous sexual predator from reality television.
Ken Cuccinelli with a spectacularly ill-considered tweet backing Jim Jordan for speaker:
[Picture of a young Jordan in wrestling garb]
2 time National, Division I wrestling champion. 4 time (that's every year folks...) Ohio State High School champion wrestler...
Who better to wrestle the Dems to the ground?
#JimJordan4Speaker !
I'm sure Jordan has the drive of a champion, but he's not even a real sex criminal.
Why is Jordan waging a public campaign to be speaker, anyway? That doesn't seem like a thing people normally do.
That's because there's only one of them.
33: To be fair, we don't know that he's not a real sex criminal. These things can take a while to be revealed. Look at Hastert.
Great tweet from David Klion yesterday:
Oh, so you question moral progress? Just a decade ago the Republican House Speaker was himself a pedophile gym teacher, but the next one will merely be an active enabler of a pedophile gym teacher. The arc of history is long but it bends toward justice
I would like the arc of history to bend away from child molesters without rushing into the arms of white supremacists.
Particularly given the way the white supremacists are shouting "pedophile" at everybody who opposes them.
Has Republican projection been demonstrated to have sufficient statistical significance to give probable cause for launching investigations?
I don't think they're that creative. They wait until somebody has reliably accused one of them of something before accusing Democrats or whatever of it.
The only innovation was to replace "day care" with "pizza shop." I assume because now people fear carbs the way people in the 80s feared women with children working outside the home.
Honestly, "make a pedophile-enabler Speaker of the House to own the libs" is basically the for-real argument Republicans are making for Jordan. I guess we shouldn't be surprised.
Is the "pedophile" established? Nearly all students at Ohio State have attained their majority.
Fair enough. Outrageous rapist?
I wasn't sure if there was a story I'd missed. The news is just so eventful lately.
46: Outrageous is a subjective call. Can we agree on serial rapist?
47: It seems likely when the investigation is done there will be high school students that were victims as well.
In honor of your helpfulness, I dub you "The peep".
26, 28: Ideally we'd get moderate, steady growth for most of the next 5 years except for sharp downturns in September and October of this year and 2020. But I know better than to be hopeful.
Given that the OP opens this thread up to non-political complaints, I have one. These days most of my job is something we'll call ITIL for now, and I've let some of it get so delayed or disorganized that I've worried a little bit about my job. I get that we all worry about procrastination, but I really think I've been even worse than usual recently. For months now I've been wondering about ADHD, a resurgence of depression, or something similar. That is, until yesterday, when I did a great job on an unexpected assignment on short notice. I got about six sentences of description of a process. It was due Monday but we missed it (and I'm not mainly responsible for that). Based on personal experience and general principles I turned those six sentences into a 5-page document in 4 hours, while doing a couple other things too. Haven't had comments from the boss yet but overall I think it turned out pretty well.
It turns out I can stick to something perfectly well when it's something I'm good at, I just hate ITIL.
49: You spend you whole life molesting 18-21 year-olds and do they call you "Sam the respecter of the age of majority"? No. But you molest just one minor.
||
This isn't national WTF, just personal, but people here might know: I have a law firm doing some work for me. When we started, they told me their hourly rate, how many hours they thought the work would take, and I gave them a retainer for roughly half that amount. Now I get a bill for the first chunk of the work (and there will definitely be more) and it's 4-5x their original estimate. I'm a little shocked.
Should they have given me any kind of heads up when they stated to blow past either the estimate or my retainer?
|>
Don't pay until you know the stripper is going to keep quiet.
52: since we're in the same line of work, I'll say that I think a lot of what we do is extremely low on both motivation and payoff, and that the state of the world in 2018 has made it seem contemptibly trivial to me on a daily, maybe hourly basis. I'm counting the days until my planned departure at this point, which at least gives me a hard deadline for wrapping up my tenure here on a high note, and allows me to think about goals in a more structured way. Do you have any path to promotion or interesting lateral moves? Is anything changing in ways that will impact your duties, even slowly?
Actually I'm curious: has anyone else noticed a general change in motivation at their job since the beginning of this year, and/or since Trump took office? I'm not sure how much this depends on the particulars of my work-life sitch. Everything at work objectively sucked through April, then I had a month of being depressed for personal reasons, then my dad was diagnosed with cancer and the national/international news started to get exceptionally grim. I am just fucks-to-give bankrupt.
Turner Gill had interesting lateral moves.
54: I think so. But ask CCarp how to approach it?
61: I thought it was complicated?
For me, everything has always felt trivial, so the same as ever. If I were American I imagine I would be thinking constantly about useful things and feeling like useless shit for not doing them.
I sometimes forget my stereotypical duties and watch the viking kittens for hours.
Is this a colorless green ideas type conversation?
Mossy! Do you really not know????
My life is probably better because Selah always requests The Immigrant Song ("Thor," which has the added bonus of helping her learn to make the th sound) and Rock Lobster in the car and Spotify builds amazing mixes off that combination. Other than that, yeah, I'm feeling pretty useless and grim.
I just cleaned two bathrooms, which is all the indoor places to poop we have.
Big news: Glenn Greenwald is just the fucking worst:
Retweeting this gem, he comments,
And: if getting dirt about your opponent from foreign officials is immoral or treasonous, why was it OK for DNC representatives to be trolling around Ukraine, working with foreign officials to get dirt on Manafort & Trump because Ukraine favored Hillary?
A prediction: his ego will not allow him to stay out of Brazilian politics forever.
I have placed in the flickr pool (remember it?) some pictures from the Trump demo, along with a demonstration that there are assassins for Jesus operating in town, and a picture of my mother dithering between two time machines.
Of all the languages I've learned, the only one I regret is Japanese Cat. Today's lesson has been the phrases for "I have been sick again. Clean it, human";
and
"There is a bit you missed. Are you no use at all?"
How do you know it isn't the same machine in two different time lines?
Anyway, because apparently seeing movies is a thing I should do, I didn't just dump the family off at the theater and leave. Instead, I saw the Teen Titans movie. My favorite part was when they played "Take Me On."
When you could have been seeing the Pittsburgh layer of STBY.
73: What's the place between two timelines, where both are simultaneously visible, then?
76: Outside a Circle K in San Dimas, California.
||
Someone on Twitter has probably beat me to the punch on this, but anyway:
A committee has recommended that the city of Austin consider changing its name, so it no longer commemorates Confederate Stephen F. Austin. Name changes are a difficult business. It occurs to me, though, that there are a ton of people with the surname Austin and the easiest thing would be to officially rename the city after one of them: like, to take only the most obvious example, philosopher J.L. Austin. You could erect a statue of him in front of the state capitol, complete with illustrative quotes from "How To Do Things With Words" making it clear how and why the name of the city of Austin has, in fact, changed.
How would you rename Austin?
|>
This is definitely an interesting idea and could be expanded. Everything with Lee in the name could be redesignated as being named in honour of Harper, Spike or the great Sir Christopher. Anything called after Jackson could be attached retroactively to Janet, Samuel or Jesse. Fort Bragg, obviously, commemorates the physicists William and Laurence. And the Daughters of the Confederacy would be restricted to women with a provable link to the Mi'kmaq, Maliseet, Passamaquoddy, Abenaki, or Penobscot nations.
A vetoed CA bill that would have banned all public uses of Confederate names had to make city names an exception, because of Fort Bragg. Maybe we could be the city-renaming pioneers.
Renaming Austin for that reason is dumb because Austin is named after Stephen F. Austin, who died in 1836 and was in no sense a Confederate. The Republic of Texas was pro-slavery (as was Austin) and pretty horrible, so I'd be in favor if delegitimizing its memory, but good luck with that in Texas. Plus you'd probably have to rename Houston (though Houston was a pro-slavery Unionist).
Why bother the whole lot will be flooded soon.
Soulja Boy just stole my joke on Twitter and I have never been happier in my life.
At some point we'll be out of Confederates and need to move on to slaveholders. (lk's link notes that the city report has a "lower tier list of 'assets for secondary review'" that seem to fall into that category.)
Maybe the intermediate step could be people who worked to expand slavery to more regions through public or private efforts - so including Andrew Jackson, Stephen Austin, Stephen Douglas, Franklin Pierce, and possibly settlers like the namesake of Barton Springs, but not the Founders (just yet).
King County, WA, did exactly this a while back. Originally named for the moderately problematic William Rufus King, they simply declared that now they were named in honor of the Martin Luther King and changed the county logo to a picture of MLK.
Why didn't they just name themselves after King William Rufus? Much less risk of controversy all round.
Virginia ought to think a name that stops shaming the single, female sovereigns who didn't let themselves be constrained by the social roles of the time.
What's wrong with having a state called "Elizabeth" or "Betty"?
Acronyms are another possibility. A.U.S.T.I.N., H.O.U.S.T.O.N. There's a T for Texas in both...
Per 83: After US The INundation
I'm not saying this is the only line or necessarily has to be the right one, but for me the line for renaming should be people primarily associated with slavery/the confederacy with special attention to post-civil-war naming deliberately designed to slap black people in the face. So, tear down confederate memorials or massively contextualize them, no Calhoun College at Yale, rename the Jefferson Davis highway, no more schools or forts named for Confederate generals. But going after places named for people who were slave owners but not primarily because of their association woth slavery and not post-Civil-War feels wrong unless we're going to as liberals adopt actual communist conventions and do things like rename San Franciscop Cesar Chavez City.
Actually CCC would probably be LA. San Francisco would be Steve Jobs City or Smugberg.
Regicidia. They can even keep their motto.
I would rename Austin either "Awesome City" or "Betelgeuse."
Call it Ho Chih Smugburgh and charge an emigration tax.
San Jose has a street named Woz Way.
Are the parking bays the wrong width, so 95%of vehicles don't fit?
In America, we don't park in bays.
So it's drive different? This one street running through the town where everyone drives on the left?
It was going to be "Different Drive" but that would have been too interoperable. They'll change it in a couple of years and everyone will call that genius.
Call it Ho Chih Smugburgh and charge an emigration tax.
This is very similar to Hunter S. Thompson's manifesto promise - if he was elected sheriff of Aspen, he promised to change the name of the town to "Fat City, Colorado". Anyone who was living there simply because it was a nice place to live would be unaffected; anyone who was there for brand reasons or to boast about their house in Aspen would leave.
I think that's how Clint Eastwood became mayor of something called "Caramel."
I'm so glad that Bigfoot erotica will make this news cycle.
IKR. It's not caramel, it's not Camelot, it's not a camel. Welcome to Typo, CA.
I would just compulsively spraypaint squiggly red lines all over. Then Clint would shoot me.
Some people possibly wouldn't have that problem.
Someone left my caramel out by the sea.
Americans like it salty, right?
I'm more of a "chocolate and peanut butter" kind of American.
I've had different ideas about (re)naming my city at the heart of the heart of it all. One is to keep the same name, but declare that the city is now named after the director of Home Alone. Maybe we could replace the huge sculpture of the explorer/slaver with a similarly huge sculpture of Macaulay Culkin in his iconic pose from the movie.
Alternatively, changing the name to Thurber would be kind of cool.
Columbus should be renamed after its most famous resident, Tom Poston.
Or Dwight Yoakham, if we're not requiring it be somebody born there.
"Woody, Ohio" has a nice ring to it and has the advantage of higher local name recognition than Christopher Columbus, who, let's face it, never won a Rose Bowl.
Also, more potential for jokes in bad taste.
You could go third-world style and officially rename places but not actually follow through and relabel all the physical stuff, so no-one notices.
And let's be honest, third-world is basically your vibe these days.
I have just found the story behind 111 and good grief.
Pittsburgh has been doing that since before America was a third world country. Or maybe they relabel all the physical stuff, but I just never noticed? Anyway, it is good to honor Roberto Clemente by naming a bridge after him, but it lacks the utility of calling it by the name of the street that crosses the river on it.
128: You work and strive for white supremacy and you're still a standard Republican conservative, but you draw one Bigfoot with a huge penis.....
Though I guess naming it after Clemente does help you know which bridge goes to the baseball stadium, just like the Rachel Carson bridge tells you which way to the poisoned birds.
The Andy Warhol bridge takes you to the Andy Warhol museum, too! And the David McCullough bridge...is historic? Probably.
Honestly, I never knew 132.1 before now.
Andy Warhol bridges have no nature of their own, they just mimic other bridges.
134: It's really amazing how he captures the uniformity and familiarity of mass production.
I was 100% aware of those bridges and 134 was totally a straight line.
Everybody is aware of those bridges, but how many people know about the dog penis collection in the Warhol Museum?
136: Presumably there's a German word for when someone online assumes that there's only one level of a joke and explains a second level that seems serendipitous but was actually intended. Sorry.
138: And presumably there's another German word for when the first online person explains that actually there was only one level to the initial joke and the second person's explanation was in fact an excellent serendipitous addition which made the first person literally bellow with laughter like a randy sea lion.
137 I only turn out for a Bigfoot penis collection.
I COLLECT THOSE FOR SCIENTIFIC REASONS. YOU MAKE IT SOUND LIKE THERE'S SOME SORT OF PORNOGRAPHIC MOTIVATION BEHIND IT WHICH IS 100% NOT TRUE. #NOTALLBIGFOOT
141: Does this mean that they are more than one of you? If so, you need to personalize your pseud.
GOOD POINT, WELL MADE.
It's not that Opinionated BigfootMA is scared of humans, it's just hiding from Alan Dershowitz.
56
Do you have any path to promotion or interesting lateral moves? Is anything changing in ways that will impact your duties, even slowly?
Thanks for the encouragement about the ITIL stuff. (Just to clarify if anyone else is in this industry, "ITIL" is a real thing, but is not the actual thing I hate, I'm just using it as a placeholder rather than spending another 500 words describing the thing I hate.) As for improvement, two things come to mind.
First, I've begun organizing the ITIL stuff much better. I think this will help both mentally and materially, i.e., a big part of the ITIL job is organizing and tracking a bunch of different ITIL assignments at once. I receive weekly snapshots of their status and I've been relying on those, but I've realized recently that I need something much better. And second, there have been two new writers hired in the past couple months. I was never the only writer in this office, but was the only person working on ITILs for a while. I think/hope any new assignments can go to them. One of them already has, at least nominally.
Can't give them existing assignments until I get organized, though. The problems are (a) this effort to get organized is a pain itself, and (b) I feel like I have to keep it to myself until it's done. That isn't entirely rational. My supervisor is a reasonable enough person that she wouldn't fire me just because I haven't been organized enough until now. Three or four ITILs came to management attention recently, and in each case it turned out that the problem wasn't my fault, or at least wasn't mainly my fault, so that bodes well for the others. But I don't want to deal with people finding out about the problems, and I'm not sure how much help I could get anyways, because a lot of the history is in my own email archives. To summarize: not fun.
People -- and whoever makes temporary signs on some New Jersey highways -- often refer to the bridges between Philadelphia and New Jersey by their first names only: Walt [Whitman] , Ben [Franklin] , and Betsy [Ross].
It's probably also a person that makes temporary signs.
126. So I looked up Ladysmith as an example. It seems that the new name is Emnambithi, but no one really uses it. Until it was rolled up into the new Alfred Duma municipality even the website was Ladysmith.
OT: I'm trying my best to remain to remain surprised that case was brought by the owner of a company called "BMX Stunt Shows".
Returning to the topic of "WTF", for a second, I just discovered Uncle Croc's Block. Look it up on Youtube if you haven't heard of it. This eclipses even Captain Nice in the "This was on TV?" boggling department.
A Field Guide to the Street Names of Central Cairo
||
Question for the Mineshaft. It seems I am stuck, psychologically, on the verge of rage-quitting my job. I really shouldn't quit my job this week, or even this year. (Assume that I'd forfeit a significant amount of money on top of salary -- not exactly true, but the complicated situation is more or less that.) I took a sick/personal day, my first of the year, to calm down, but I'm still full of rage. Other than therapy, I'm not sure what to do. Have any of you successfully walked yourselves back from the brink of torching important bridges like this? Have you found any catharsis? Have you tricked yourself into seeing the good and life-affirming parts of a hated job/organization?
I've told my boss I'm planning to leave in March next year, so the end is in sight. Being unable to stand even one more fucking hour is a separate problem.
|>
Just half-ass it. Have you considered commenting here a lot?
137: I didn't know that, though I recommended the place anyway to friends who will be driving up before I can. I'm probably up for dinner/drinks at 7 or later on Saturday August 11 if any of you are game.
154.1: It's not in the public display. You should tell them to ask at the desk.
155.2: Sounds great.
Other than therapy, I'm not sure what to do.
Does that mean you're preëmptively ruling out therapy or already doing it?
My son was allowed to pick out how own cell phone case. He picked one that's got a holster clip. I'm trying not to think less of him.
154: Alas, I'm almost certainly going to be out of town--my father's going to have an operation that'll prevent him from doing much, so I'll be watching over my parents late that week and probably the weekend. In the unlikely event I'm in town I'd love to meet you, but I really doubt I'll be there.
160: Sorry to hear that for your and their sake much more than mine. I'm sure I'll manage to run into you eventually!
152 Sorry to hear that Marge, I don't have anything really constructive to say to your situation since in my case I took up heavy drinking which I don't advise (though fortunately for me that situation and my heavy drinking have passed and things have gotten a lot better here).
Thanks all. "Half-ass it" is basically right, but the devil is in the details: I have to half-ass it without being at risk of paying for the consequences. If I could very promptly do a mediocre job of everything, that would be ideal. Might be too late for that, though, since a number of projects have been dragging on for years.
I mostly work remotely, and one problem is that my tolerance for pointless yet expected trips to the office is at an all-time low.
Barry, that's actually pretty reassuring... I wasn't sure if you were just grimly enduring in silence or if things had turned a corner. Really glad to hear it's the latter. Maybe I just need a job like yours where you get to ride an oryx to work or whatever, so it's worth putting up with the nonsense.
Therapy is ongoing and hasn't solved this problem yet, but I'll keep trying... therapists often know things about defusing pointless anger.
I'd imagine knowing there is an end to this in sight might help some. March is not that far away.
The Intercept has learned of a previously unreported episode that stoked the UAE and Saudi Arabia's anger at Tillerson and that may have played a key role in his removal. In the summer of 2017, several months before the Gulf allies started pushing for his ouster, Tillerson intervened to stop a secret Saudi-led, UAE-backed plan to invade and essentially conquer Qatar, according to one current member of the U.S. intelligence community and two former State Department officials, all of whom declined to be named, citing the sensitivity of the matter.....
Qatari intelligence agents working inside Saudi Arabia discovered the plan in the early summer of 2017, according to the U.S. intelligence official. Tillerson acted after the Qatari government notified him and the U.S. embassy in Doha. Several months later, intelligence reporting by the U.S. and U.K. confirmed the existence of the plan.
The plan, which was largely devised by the Saudi and UAE crown princes and was likely some weeks away from being implemented, involved Saudi ground troops crossing the land border into Qatar, and, with military support from the UAE, advancing roughly 70 miles toward Doha. Circumventing the U.S. air base, Saudi forces would then seize the capital.
Read the whole thing
Meh, "The Intercept" though.
The Saudis and the UAE were going to invade and annexe the home of CENTCOM and the Fifth Fleet, were they? And steal its $320 billion sovereign wealth fund? Sure they were.
And how would that second bit even work? The QIA isn't a huge Scrooge McDuck pile of money in a vault in Doha. Even if there were Saudi tanks sitting on its lawn, the QIA would remain under the control of the legitimate government of Qatar, even if it were in exile. Any transactions that the Saudis tried to put through of assets located outside occupied Qatar would simply be refused unless foreign governments agreed to accept the annexation which I think would be unlikely.
167.1 They've gotten a lot of things right in their reporting on the blockade, and this confirms a number of things I've heard and read elsewhere.
167.2 Circumventing the U.S. air base...
They're stupid but they're not that stupid. Minor point but the Fifth Fleet is currently based in Bahrain though that may change (Qatar has recently offered to revamp some naval installations so to make it possible to base the Fifth Fleet there).
167.3 Agree entirely, I balked at that too.
I hope Tillerson is writing his memoirs.
Good point on the Fifth Fleet - my mistake.
Al Udeid isn't just CENTCOM though - it's also a major QAF base! So they'd be trying to invade Qatar having ruled out in advance any sort of offensive counter-air operation!
this confirms a number of things I've heard and read elsewhere.
I'd be interested in reading that. This is the only report I've seen on this and I am pretty sceptical, but if there are reports elsewhere as well that would be interesting.
it's also a major QAF base! So they'd be trying to invade Qatar having ruled out in advance any sort of offensive counter-air operation!
Yeah, I'd often wondered about that too.
I'll try to remember where I heard about it before. The only details I can recall are that there was a joint KSA/UAE plan and that Blackwater/Academi had trained about 15,000 troops for the invasion. I think it was in either the NYT or the WP. Also that Tillerson and Mattis were instrumental in halting it. The stuff here about Qatari intelligence learning of the plan and sounding the alarm and the confirmation from US/UK intel is new to me.
Here's one, confirmation via Sheikh Sabah of Kuwait who was trying to mediate a settlement, other details too: https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2017-10-29/qatars-emir-warns-against-military-action-in-gulf-dispute
171: I thought the mercenary-trained Emiratis were fighting in Yemen? And ISTR there've been huge numbers of American contractors in KSA doing training and security for decades.
173 They are, this was a separate force that they'd raised, though I imagine they're fighting in Yemen now.
172 I read more as the sheikh saying "we don't want a war, it would be terrible" rather than "they were definitely planning a war and then got persuaded not to".
There's other details there too (I think that's an extract from a longer Bloomberg article). There was also other reporting about the invasion.
