I've just recorded the first episode of our new season, talking about the sta...
the IMO's Net Zero framework, in the wake of the just concluded latest MEPC meeting.
“The big question I hear again and again is, what happens next and how quickly?”
In this episode, I unpack what's moving, what's stolen, and what that means for future decisions and timelines. Suit for maritime impact on your favorite podcast platform. Stay tuned. Hello and welcome to the DSR Daily. I am David Rothkov, joined by Riley Fessler in Minustine. We hear talk about what's going on in the world, and the middle of the week, and we're in the middle of a lot of shit everywhere you look, but we don't shy away. We talk about it.
Right, Mina? You're right, and we're going to start right in the middle of the biggest pile of shit. This very Wednesday morning. Yes. Defense Secretary Pete Higgs-Seth,
“and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Cane, face sharp bipartisan scrutiny during”
the Senate Appropriations Committee hearing yesterday while defending an urgent $67 billion supplemental
funding request for the ongoing conflict with Iran. Highlighting that the wars projected cost has risen to $37.5 billion through September, Higgs-Seth argued that additional resources are vital to replenish depleted precision, munitions, and prevent near-term solvency shortfalls across the military branches. However, frustrated lawmakers pushed back over the lack of a clear, long-term strategy, pointing to rising domestic gas prices from the state of unused blockade,
unanswered questions about potential ground operations, and nearly $75 billion and previously approved military funds that remain unspent. It was such a complete cluster.
I hardly know where to begin. First of all, they say they've spent $37 billion so far.
Most credible estimates have seen say $120 billion, and maybe $150 billion, so they're lying about how much they've spent. But they lie about everything, and that was brought up during the conversation, because people said, "Well, what about this New York Times article?" It says that 100 American soldiers
“have been injured, and you didn't report it. How do we know to believe what you're saying?”
And Pete said, "How dare you?" And then, you know, they said, "Well, you said we obliterate it, the nuclear capabilities last year, and then the reason for this war was their nuclear capabilities." So, how do you square that? Well, they had intent to do it. They were doing bad things. This has been going on for 47 years. It was just... it was a terrible performance. And obviously, it was all for Don, but I don't know, Don understands exactly how bad the performance was,
although, you know, the fact that Republicans senators, like Senator Kennedy, were like, "Hey, we need some straight talk here," is a sign that what was being offered up by eggset than by General Kane was just not going down very well, because at this point, you know, begs us like, "This is a big victory," and it's like, "Okay, if this is a victory, why are we continue?" Well, there are other problems that are there. Well, if there are other
problems there, what are they? Well, they could get nukes. Well, wait a minute. You said,
you got rid of that problem in the first place, and then you got rid of it again when you started
this war, and it's still a problem, or missiles, or drones, or rainy activity in the region, or, you know, and hexet was like, "Well, President Trump is running this war in a very smart way, we're not getting in to one of these endless wars." Well, when's this gonna end? Well, we know, we don't know. This is, as badly run an operation of any department of the United States government, as we have ever seen, Hexet is incompetent. Kane is going along with it. Sorry, guys,
the military should be saying no to illegal orders and they're not. They should be standing up and speaking out about putting lives at risk. They're not. They should be demanding the right kind of equipment to protect people, like those who were killed over the past weekend with an attack on
A base in Jordan.
something that has global economic ramifications is being felt by gasoline consumers in the United
“States will be felt by food consumers in the United States. But it's also being felt elsewhere.”
Our depletion of our stores of munitions means we can't help you, Craig. It means we don't have the things to sell to our allies elsewhere in the world. It means we don't have those thing, if something broke out tomorrow and Taiwan, we would not be able to respond to it because we have to play to our supplies. So there you have it. They're lying about everything. The goals they said they were trying to achieve have not been achieved. They can't tell you when they will be achieved. They can't
tell you how we will achieve it. They will not acknowledge the damage that is being done to the
US military to our standing in the world, to the stability of the region, to our ability to defend against other threats in other places, literally everything that is important to a hearing of this and should be important to congressional decision-making is just not addressed last night. And I would add, wait, we data conversation on words matter yesterday, you can go listen to it with me in an form, but you know, when asked about all of this, the Senate majority leader, John Thune,
who is just sort of niche McConnell in a better suit, John Thune said, well, we have to be supportive
“of our troops. And that's what's going to happen here, folks. We will allocate the funds to enable them”
to continue to fight a war that has no objectives for which there is no strategy where we can't
achieve the objectives that we originally had. And that is going to be bad for not just our military interests and the military interests over our allies and good for our enemies, but it's going to be a disaster for the global economy. So you're absolutely right, Menna. We started right in the middle of the biggest pile, but I bet Riley has some other piles he wants us to be rooting through. I sure do. President Donald Trump has approved a 30-year agreement involving U.S. firms
that could potentially grant Saudi Arabia, civilian, uranium, enrichment capabilities. However,
“the proposed deal face expected pushback from Congress and non-proliferation experts over concerns”
that it lacks a strict IAEA monitoring protocols and could trigger a regional nuclear arms race. These fears are further heightened by escalating tensions with Iran. And previous warnings that Saudi Arabia would pursue atomic weapons if Tehran obtains one. Yeah, I mean, let's, let's, let's be grown-ups about this. Civilian nuclear power and nuclear weapons are not the same thing. Civilian nuclear power is safe
and it does not necessarily lead to the development of nuclear weapons requires a lot to get from one to the other. And there are regimes that can be put in place that have been put in place in places around the world, even in places in the region that can ensure that civilian nuclear power does not lead to a nuclear military problem. Now, having said that, we also need to acknowledge the deals like this one were negotiated during the Biden administration. In fact, the Biden administration
was very close to doing a deal with the Saudis just like this deal with a couple of exceptions. They weren't going to do it unless Saudi Arabia recognized Israel. They were not going to do it unless the Israelis resolved issues in Gaza in a satisfactory way because that was the precondition for the Saudis to do this thing. Well, all those things don't seem to matter anymore. So the Saudis are going to get this without recognizing Israel. And, you know,
complicating matters, the Israelis had wanted that and so that gave us a little more leverage for them to do the right thing in Gaza and that leverage is now gone. Of course, you know, a broader problem with all of this is we seem to be in a phase where we're negotiating vitally important nuclear deals without any nuclear expertise. We've got a couple of real estate
Guys from New Jersey negotiating a nuclear deal with the one country of the r...
developing nuclear enrichment capabilities with a weapons goal. And that's Iran. And clearly, they are not being successful in their negotiations there. And this deal sort of smacks to me something that was engineered somewhere between the brain of Jared Kushner and the brain of Donald Trump. Oh, let's, you know, let's give something to the Saudis. And without the right kind of provision, that will agree, that the right kind of inspection provisions and controls people in place,
one hopes up. But relying on this Congress to do the right thing in the right way on the right
timeline is just a suckers game because they almost never do that. I would add one final point.
“Doing a nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia may not be the best thing to do while you're in the”
middle of trying to negotiate a nuclear deal with Iran. Because obviously, you're giving the Iranians the ability to say, well, we've got other threats and we need to have this kind of capacity because you're giving it to people who are just, you know, across a small body of water from us. So really strategically, technically, technically, on this. I'm sorry to interrupt, but I really have to tell you about our sub-stack.
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Payed members get an ad-free listing experience, select episodes two days early, access to live streamed episodes and 50% off of David's need to know sub-stack. Please consider joining us at DSR network.substack.com. That's DSR network.substack.com. Thank you and back to the show. A US district judge yesterday issued a temporary order blocking the Trump administration
from stripping employment authorization from tens of thousands of asylum seekers and temporary protected status recipients. The Boston Bay's federal judge sided with a coalition of labor unions and rights groups, rolling that US citizenship and immigration services,
“cannot move forward with new restrictions that retroactively cut short work permits for temporary”
protected status holders from El Salvador, Sudan and Ukraine. While the temporary block prevents immediate permit revocations and penalties for non-payment of new asylum fees, the judge noted that his order will remain an effect until he determines whether to issue a longer term injunction by August 5th. Yeah, I mean, look, this is their battle. This is their nativeist, white supremacist, you know, battle that's going on on 100 fronts. You know, it's a battle where
they're rounding up people and deporting them without due process. It's battle where they're keeping people from coming into the country. It's battle where they're denying people asylum. It's a battle where they are trying to advance the idea that, you know, there's one kind of real American, and it's only somebody who came here when their ancestors got here. Of course, everybody's an immigrant in the United States who's not indigenous, but that doesn't matter to
them. But what they really mean is, you know, not that they're opposed to immigrants. Because look at how we embrace immigrants, white South African immigrants, where Donald Trump's point about, well, we'll take as many Norwegians as he got. It's about people of color. It's about people who have different belief systems. It's about trying to limit precisely the thing that has made the United States strong, which is the diversity of
our people, which gives us an enormous edge in a global era where we always have communities that
can connect to and help us understand every place else in the world. Which gives us an enormous creative edge because different ideas come together and stimulate each other. And which is the fabric of our society. But every place they can try to advance their nativeist message, they're going to do
It.
dozens of fronts. And so every small victory can be an is being offset by other things that
“are damaging us in real serious ways as it pertains to what the identity of the United States is”
and what it means to be an American. Well, I have some AI news that is scary and reminds me of Terminator, but we'll get to that. Open AI disclosed that an autonomous AI agent escaped its controlled testing environment and executed a breach on hugging faces infrastructure. Hugging face advantage to contain the unprecedented attack using an open source Chinese model as guardrails on top US models prevented them from processing defensive security data. The incident has alarmed
lawmakers and security experts sparking urgent calls for strict regulations, enhanced content
protocols and independent safety testing for frontier AI models. But we don't want to regularly
“AI. We want to let those guys do whatever they want because the big tech gurus behind Donald Trump”
are making money off of this AI boom, whether it's Peter Teele or it's Mark Andrewson or it's Mark Zuckerberg or it's the Elisins or it's Jeff Bezos or it's Elon Musk. Those are the money people behind Trump and their policy is not just let's say fair. It's let's explicitly give them the channels to do what they need to do and every time they try to sort of rain them in a little bit
it gets reversed or watered down and this is what happens. But this is a case we know about
and I would point out there probably lots of cases we don't know about that aren't being reported it. Lord knows what's going on with Pete had says AI lab over in the department of defense where
“every couple of days he's talking about AI enhancing leafality. What happens when we lose control”
of that? What does that look like? So yeah, Riley, it does remind you of the terminator because this leads to that and I don't know how many twists and turns in this story we are away from sky net but it's not a lot. It's not a lot. We're already talking about autonomous weapon systems controlled by AI. They're already being deployed. So one or two steps, one or two mistakes. That's the world we live on a razor's edge. Well, Riley, I see your scary and I raise you a scary
for a last story today. All right, you guys are really making me feel fantastic. Hello, in a different subject matter. In a two-one vote yesterday the Republican led EEOC moved to eliminate a 60-year-old requirement mandating that large private employers to admit annual demographic data on workforce, race, and gender led by EEOC chair Andrea Lucas, proponents argue that the EEO1 reporting role imposes heavy compliance costs and risks
encouraging race-based hiring quotas, aligning the policy shift with conservative strategies, outlined in project 2025. Conversely, civil rights advocates and the panel's alone Democrat sharply criticized the decision, warning that dismantling the long-standing reporting system will strip the federal government of a vital tool used to uncover systemic workplace discrimination against women and racial minorities. Well, this goes back to the nativeist white supremacist
impulse and this woman who has been put in charge of this is firmly in that category and it's you know, this is the same group that brought you the Supreme Court decision that struck down affirmative action. It's the same group that gave you the administration's war on DEI. It's the same group that is trying to change our history in our museums, in our national parks, in our schools, in our defense department libraries, in schools, wherever they look,
they're trying to alter the reality to fit their idea of what America is, which is kind of a John Wayne movie. It's kind of a world in which tall white guys make decisions for everybody else and anybody who gets in their way is a bad guy who needs to simply be eliminated. That's not an exaggeration. If you think it's an exaggeration, by all means reach out to us
By the many channels that exist if you're listening on YouTube or watching on...
an Instagram or you're watching a TikTok or you're listening to it on sub-stack or any of these other
“channel comment. We read the comments. Don't you read the comments by me and men are you reading the”
comments every day that say how old is Mita? I read every comment and so if you leave a comment,
I will see it and most likely I will take a screenshot of it and send it to Riley and David
“and we will discuss it. Yeah or laugh or cringe but also you know there is the right around the”
corner there is a better opportunity and we need to remind you of this today and tomorrow and that
is that on Friday we're going to do DSR Daily Live for the first time. So as we do these stories,
“you'll be able to post questions in comments in real time and we will respond to them in real time.”
We can have a conversation about whatever it is you want to have a conversation about so please every week, every Friday DSR Daily Live and we want to expand our live offerings. One of the reasons we're doing things in sub-stack will also be sub-stack live. So join us for that and this will be your chance to vent. Won't be just me venting which I will find it really. Anyway for now thank you, Riley. Thank you, man. I thank everybody. Watch out later today for Deep State Radio,
for a still consciousness. Listen to what it's matter from yesterday. Lots going on here. Lots to talk about. See you soon. Bye-bye.
