Caught on Kremlin camera: Putin reads his daily intelligence briefing. By Hal M. Brown

 

I don’t think I need to explain more why Vlad was cracking up for the umpteenth time since Trump was reelected beyond posting this CNN article from yesterday: More than 100 National Security Council staffers put on administrative leave.

Whether this in particular was a Putin plan or not is impossible to determine. If it was, pour another shot of his favorite vodka for him the celebration when Putin and his pals put this Google News search on a TV screen:

I don’t know if Putin watches MSNBC. If he does, this is what he’d have seen on The Weekend today:

While we can’t prove that it is true that Trump and Putin are conspiring together for mutual benefit, it isn’t a lunatic conspriacy theory to suggest that this is at least a somewhat plausible explanation for much of what Trump has done to undermine democracy here. It also would be one explanation as to why the war in Ukraine rages on.

Do you have a few extra rubles? You might consider betting on how long it will take for Trump to do something that really makes Putin laugh. Apparently the Russians are a betting people. Consider how many betting websites they have.

You can place your bet and play this. 

Addendum: These are some of the comments to the Rawstory article about this. One of them posted a link to the Russian national anthem as I did:

There are other comments suggesting Trump is in cahoots with Putin.

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Why the f*ck is Musk advertising Starlink on Salon? By Hal M. Brown If he was trying to troll me, I took the bait.

 

The best website to read my essays on is Substack, here.

I was reading “There's more film and television for you to watch than ever before — good luck finding it” on Salon and found it jarring to see the ad shown above for Starlink, one of Elon Musk’s companies. It popped up, literally popped up onto my laptop screen as it replaced another ad.

The ad was on the side so as you read down the article it remained there, but it also was between sections in the article.

I looked at several other articles but it seemed to be only on the one about streaming video.

Regardless of whether it was elsewhere in Salon I wondered who in their marketing department thought readers of this progressive anti-Trump and anti-Musk website would be in the market for Starlink, let alone click on it the ad to learn more about it.

They managed to sucker a click from me because I was curious about it and thought it might be a good topic for a Substack if I couldn’t think of anything else.

This is what the the first parts of the website look like. Here’s the first page I saw when I clicked. (You can enlarge the following images by clicking on them.)

Then scrolling down:

The Starlink device works because Musk, as of April 2025, had 7,135 Starlink satellites in orbit, with 7,105 of them operational. SpaceX plans to deploy a total of up to 42,000 satellites in the future. (Reference Wikipedia) For it to function you have to point the device at the sky.

“Streaming, video calls, online gaming, remote working and more are now possible in even the most remote locations thanks to the world’s most advanced internet system.”

Here are two more:

I won’t add more screen grabs since the photo of the cybertruck is a good one to end on. If someone thinks the cybertruck is the cat’s meow in aesthetic design maybe they will be the type of person who wants to buy Starlink. If you want to see the rest of the website you will have to give it a click here.

This is marketing aimed at a domestic American market for use while doing things like camping or traveling, not for Ukrainians using it to communicate vital military information. 

I can speculate that Musk, assuming he is involved in this advertising initiative, figures it is worth it to see if there are enough MAGAs willing to spend a premium for the kind of internet connectivity it provides. I seriously doubt a non-MAGA would want to do anything to add to Musk’s wealth.

I don’t know whether or not anyone realized that putting an ad on Salon was akin to advertising salmonella in a supermarket commercial. It is quite possible that nobody considered who would see the ad and that an algorithm search for website articles about streaming video. The word streaming appears 23 times in this story, including in the subtitle. 

With Starlink you can watch streaming video in the wilderness.

It makes for a better story if I assume that Musk himself approved the ad in Salon as a way of trolling us liberals. That would make sense if he’s into such marketing minutiae. If this is the case, he reeled me in. 

Consider me trolled.

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All that glitters: Trump's self-aggrandizing clownish PR stunt, his glorious Golden Dome, is worse than a budget breaking waste of money. By Hal M. Brown You don't have to be a military expert to figure this out. I'm not one. However, all you need is common sense to see this.

 

Trump says he wants to build a dome of gold1 to make us all feel safe from a nuclear missile attack. Of course, gold is his favorite metal, because it glitters and he thinks it proves how great he is. In fact, not only is it a weak metal, but isn't even the strongest. Tungsten is. If he wanted to use a name to outdo Israel's Iron Dome he should have called it the Tungsten Dome.

This is nothing more than the most expensive self-aggrandizing PR stunt in history. It is also dangerous and not for the reasons some have put forth saying it would cause potential enemies to develop ways to thwart it.

This aside, even if this defense sytem actually worked as promised it seems highly unlikely that any country with nuclear missiles is going to attack us that way.

I doubt any country is going to waste their resourses to build a comparable system. Consider how large Russia and China are.

I find if difficult to believe that either country would want to spend the huge amounts of money it would take to design and build such a system.

What enemies, even countries without ballistic missiles, will be will be donig is working on both their defensive and their offensive cyber capacity. Some may also be working on bio-warfare. Diseases can be introduced into the United States by infected human carriers or diplomats or others smuggling in vials of toxins.

DOGE has cut cybersecurity staff (see “Chaos continues in D.C.'s cybersecurity job market” in Axios). DOGE already accidentally cut and later restored Ebola research, but I have no doubt that there are other deadly infectious diseases that can be weaponized and that those studying ways to combat them could have their funding cut.

Trump has already done so much to make us weaker from cutting foreign aid to ruining our relations with former allies. Now with this Golden Dome siphoning off resources best used for other forms of defense he is doing even more.

This isn’t out of the Project 2025 playbook. This more sounds like those calling Trump “Putin’s puppet” weren’t just being paranoid.2

Another possible reason he may want to have this built is to use the early attack warning capacity so he has more time to hustle into the White House bomb proof bunker along with Laura Loomer or some other young woman who thinks he’s a young Elvis incarnate, and possibly the White House chef (aka Ronald McDonald). He also has a rudimentary bomb shelter at Mar-a-Lago (reference).

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Footnotes

1

Like the golden dome on top of his Perchance AI created clown head, the Golden Dome for missile defense will end up so thin it is unlikely to stop enough missles to make a difference.

2

We might call Putin the Trumpaler in homage to the Rumanian ruler Vlad the Impaler. He was said to have strengthened his government by brutally punishing his enemies. His full name was Vlad Drăculea and Bram Stoker dervived the name Dracula from him. (Reference)