Links and Notes for February 27th, 2026

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• Public Policy & Politics
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Public Policy & Politics

It's crazy how it's always the same thing every single time

• Republican gets elected President.
• Cuts benefits for the poor.
• Cuts taxes for the rich.
• Starts a war in the Middle East.

Who cares. It doesn't matter. Nothing matters.

Is it War? by ReasonTV | Andrew Heaton & Austin Bragg (YouTube)

World Monitor app

This is a brilliant web-site dashboard that is not only a useful overview of catastrophes—weather and man-made—but also a triumph of how powerful the web platform is these days.

Check out this incredible interactive map. Here, you can see that the U.S. carrier groups have pulled back to Cyprus and Diego Garcia because they don’t want to be sunk by unstoppable Iranian hypersonic missiles. Those pilots have long flights to and from Iran—with 2x refueling, once on the way out and once on the way back—and they can’t even get much over Iranian territory because they haven’t knocked out Iran’s anti-aircraft defenses. I heard in one place that they’re even running out of powered bombs, so they’re just dropping steel now and letting gravity do the work (see below for a statement from Hegseth bragging about using “gravity bombs” as if that were some sort of flex.

U.S. carrier groups in Diego Garcia and Cyprus

There was an attempt To make it look [like] “Iran is the real danger (Reddit)

Iran is the real danger

I saw this photo and wanted to verify whether this could actually be true. You gotta check everything. The following video is from a reliable source. They would actually be inclined to minimize the damage, so the fact that they show such stark damage is horrifying.

A look at Gaza City before and after Oct. 7, 2023 by Associated Press (YouTube)

some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make by HasanAbi (YouTube)

“Here, you want to see who you’re doing this for? Remember why this is happening.

“[Shows footage of an Israeli bomb shelter where they’re cheering and celebrating the resumption of hostilities on Iran.]

“When gas prices shoot up because the Strait of Hormuz is now officially mined and dammed and closed, and that’s like 10% of fucking all global oil commerce. And all of a sudden, you’re at the fucking pump and you’re like, why is why is gas $15 a gallon? How did this happen?

“Remember who you’re fighting for.

“[Shows footage of the party in the Israeli bomb shelter.]

“When you think to yourself, why don’t I have healthcare? Like countries that have significantly less money than the United States of America can offer free healthcare. Well, they have free healthcare in Israel. Just so you know.

“They don’t have to worry about defense, for example. You want to know why they don’t have to fucking worry about defense? Because we got that shit covered, baby. USS Gerald Ford is encircling the Israeli coastline so we can have maximum defense for Israel as we fight Israel’s war in Iran. Just, you know, Remember that.”

Day 1 of the Iran War by HasanAbi | Jeremy Scahill (YouTube)

“They’re blowing up girls’ schools within hours of this thing starting. And I’m sure the death toll is going to rise.

“They hit a girls’ school. They’re hitting sports facilities.

“That bombing, by the way, of that girls’ school is as horrifying as some of the worst single bombing episodes that we’ve seen in Gaza. And they did it within, like, hours of launching this thing on day one.

“We always talk about what are American interests, but I think it needs to be said, Hasan, that what about the Iranians who are dying on the other side of these missiles?”

p-p-please…….just 1 more war. by Man Carrying Thing (YouTube)

“Listen, listen. Please, please.

“Last year, we bombed Iran in a really cool operation called Operation Midnight Hammer. It was awesome and 100% successful, but please, just let me, let me just let me say this, please.

“We had zero intentions of conducting a regime change war, you know, like Afghanistan or Iraq. We know those don’t work. We know that doesn’t work, right?

“But it turns out our 100% successful mission wasn’t 100% successful. Iran is still trying to make WMDs, but uh so uh look, begging you, please trust us one more time.

“I know what you’re thinking. Regime change wars. They don’t work. Yes.

“Question we’re asking is what if we do Iraq but good this time? Hear me out.”

The Deep State Doesn’t Know What Year It Is by Indrajit Samarajiva (Indica)

“[…] why are they still fighting Iran? The Islamic Revolution was in 1979, just get over it already. Iran would happily sell their oil to the West, but like someone who only knows rape, the White Empire cannot comprehend normal intercourse. They’ve been trying to overthrow Iran since at least the 1950s and the generations of bureaucrats doing it only failed upwards. Now they’ve got a whole filing cabinet full of failsons (Blinken, Colby) who attack the same people as their fathers just because. So here they are (inshallah), failing to overthrow Iran some more. It’s like being stuck in a historical time loop with historical arsonists. They keep stoking the same fires, but there’s no spark behind the eyes at all.”

“Does any of this make sense? Is it good? No, but there’s explosions. The budgets for everything from movies to their military gets bigger, but what do they get for it? Just a bunch of sloppy violence against barely sketched-out villains, and the same plot, over and over. They even made a failed businessman from the 1980s President because that’s all they could think of. What on earth is going on? Does the deep state even know what century this is?”

SPECIAL] − Scott Ritter : Trump attacks Iran − 'Epic Fury' or Epic FAIL? by Judge Napolitano − Judging Freedom (YouTube)

41 minutes of extremely useful and coherent analysis, arguing from a logistics standpoint, from someone who used to take part in and partially run these kinds of operations.

Craven Europeans give US and Israel a blank check for illegal war by Eldar Mamedov (Responsible Statecraft)

“[…] the European leaders “urge the Iranian leadership to seek a negotiated solution,” when Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi was literally doing exactly that the day earlier in Geneva.

“By failing to condemn the strikes, the E3 has given the Trump administration and the Netanyahu government a blank check. They frame the crisis not as an act of war against a UN member state, but as a natural consequence of Iran’s failure to unconditionally accept its capitulation. The logic is perverse; the target is blamed for the attack, and the aggressors are seen as restoring order.”

“[…] by refusing to call the U.S.–Israel attack for what it is — an illegal, unprovoked war of aggression — the EU is not neutral. It is actively dismantling the very legal architecture it claims to uphold, and on which its own security ultimately depends. It tells Tehran and the Global South that diplomatic negotiations are merely an inducement to lower their guard, a deception to be respected only until the hegemon decides it is ready for a military action.”

“Von der Leyen’s response is to convene a “special Security College” on Monday to discuss Iran’s “unjustified attacks on partners,” effectively treating the escalation as a problem caused by the target’s retaliation.”

“[…] ruthless epitaph for European foreign policy. Not even hypocrisy remains —just irrelevance.”

Pressemitteilung 36 (Presse- und Informationsamt der Bundesregierung (BPA))

“France, Germany and the United Kingdom have consistently urged the Iranian regime to end Iran’s nuclear program, curb its ballistic missile program, refrain from its destabilizing activity in the region and our homelands, and to cease the appalling violence and repression against its own people.

“We did not participate in these strikes, but are in close contact with our international partners, including the United States, Israel, and partners in the region. We reiterate our commitment to regional stability and to the protection of civilian life.

“We condemn Iranian attacks on countries in the region in the strongest terms. Iran must refrain from indiscriminate military strikes. We call for a resumption of negotiations and urge the Iranian leadership to seek a negotiated solution. Ultimately, the Iranian people must be allowed to determine their future.”

That is the entirety of the statement. It is entirely propaganda, hasbara. They blame Iran for having brought this on itself. They blame Iran for defending itself.

Stop Hitting Yourself

They can’t stop spitting this propaganda, even when the country of Iran does things like “taking in 12M Afghans into a country of 91M,” (heard in The USA Has No Idea About Iran by Pascal Lottaz | Nima R. Alkhorshid (YouTube | Neutrality Studies)) which is 100% the opposite of the restrictive immigration policies of Europe. They keep shitting on countries that ostensibly have better morality than they do. What the hell.

The statement of the Bundesregierung was published in English with a “Deutsche Höflichkeitsübersetzung,” which I’m not going to bother to cite, as its just a translation into their own native language, but wasn’t the original language, which is, telling, no? The vassal uses the language of its lord.

The USA Has No Idea About Iran by Neutrality Studies | Pascal Lottaz | Nima R. Alkhorshid (YouTube)

It takes a while to get rolling (at about ~10 minutes or so) but then it gets very informative, with Nima telling the history of Iran.

“[…] you need to understand, you know, the war that Russia is fighting in Ukraine, Iran has fought it in 1980.”

“It’s going to be an existential war for Iran. Iran has no choice. Iran cannot afford losing a war […] against the United States and Israel. And that’s why I
think Iran would do everything.”

“[…] they say that the supreme leader of Iran is not elected by the people but those people who are choosing the supreme leader of Iran and they can bring him down they were you know voted to be in their position.”

This is not an uncommon system. The Swiss Bundesrat is elected by the Kantonsrat and the Nationalrat. The President of the European Commission who seems to be running Europe is not elected by the people. No, Ursula Van der Leyen was “elected” by a slight majority in the EU parliament.

“This is so ridiculous for me, for someone who understands Iran. Iran is nothing of the sort […] that the mainstream media tries to draw for us. And today when they’re talking about bringing down the government, you know, killing the supreme leader, because you understand, you see every day, ‘we’re going to kill, we’re going to assassinate the Supreme Leader of Iran and his son. That’s going to be a huge change. That’s going to bring a lot of
change.‘ No. […] That’s simply not true.”

“Who’s the most important competitor of the United States today in the world? It’s called a country called China.

“So what is China? China is a huge gigantic engine that can produce everything. Everything, from the single part of an equipment going to the big and huge […]

“So how can you bring down a country like China? The only solution, in my opinion, that is a viable choice for those people—neocons and neoliberals in the United States—is that you have to bring down the supplies to China, the supply of energy.

“Who’s supplying China with energy? Russia and Iran.”

That’s all any of this is about for the U.S. This is not the tail of Israel wagging the dog of the U.S. The U.S. was looking for an excuse, for a pretense. It didn’t bother to wait for anything plausible. China wouldn’t have believed any even halfway-plausible excuse because it already knows what Nima said above. It knows. Iran knows. Russia knows. They cannot be allowed to exist as long as U.S. empire exists.

ISRAEL AND AMERICA STRIKE IRAN by HasanAbi (YouTube)

A tight 15 minutes with an overview of the first 24 hours. Hasan is dressed as Castro for the first parts.

“There was no real negotiation aspect. And it was more so just a way to create a reason to destabilize Iran inevitably. And the reasons for why America and Israel want to destabilize Iran is not because the Iranian people deserve sovereignty and dignity. Although that is true, that’s not the reason why America and Israel want to destabilize Iran.

“So if you’re a moron who actually believes that, get the fuck out of my chat. You are the biggest dupe, the biggest sucker. I bet you also think that going to war with Iraq and extracting oil for American oil refineries was probably good for you somehow. Personally, you are the biggest loser. You’re the biggest dumbass of all time.

“America does not give a shit about democracy. America doesn’t even give a shit about democracy in America. America doesn’t even care about American citizens. America certainly doesn’t even care about American military members. We literally parked 50% of our naval assets in and around Israel and in and around Iran. If you think that we care about what happens to them, you are delusional.

“You’re the guy who goes to the strip club and says, “No, you don’t understand. You see, Hasan, the stripper does love me. Actually, she told me she loves me. I believe her.”

“You are all, at best, human shields. Okay? Your worth to the American government, to the Israeli government, is either as a human shield, or collateral damage.”

I saw someone in the comments refer to Trump’s new organization as “Bored of Peace.” Another one wrote that “MF gave the lord Farquaad speech” i.e., Trump ripped off Shrek wholesale, “Some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make.”

US Launches War of Aggression on Iran: US Seeks Quick Win vs. Iranian Long-term Survival by The New Atlas | Brian Berletic (YouTube)

“You’re not going to fix the US—its problems—through elections. That is not going to happen. The only thing to stop the global menace that the US demonstratively represents is by forcing them to stop through isolation, cutting them off from resources that they are using to build up their their military menace and through deterrence: building up your military capabilities and working together in such a way that the US will not even dare attack because they know they cannot win.”

And not even that works if the people in charge of the U.S. see a short-term advantage to themselves. As is the case in point in Iran.

“And if that doesn’t work, the rest of this planet that is being targeted by US primacy, they need to have a willingness to fight back and stop the US if necessary.

Back during World War II, when it was happening, especially in the beginning when it started, people were not calling it World War II. They didn’t start calling it World War II until the war had spread all over the world and it was an open outright war. That’s when they started calling it World War II. But World War II actually started well before that.

“And World War III has already started. The question is, is it going to continue to expand to an all-out outright war between the US, Russia, China, and everyone in between? The United States is already killing Russians directly. They’re saying that it’s being done through Ukraine, but they admit the CIA is the one carrying out these strikes deep inside Russia. They admit the CIA runs Ukrainian intelligence. So when Ukrainian intelligence is killing Russian generals in the streets of Moscow, that is the CIA doing that.

“The US is backing militants, killing Chinese engineers all along the Belt and Road Initiative infrastructure stretching across Eurasia. So the US is, in essence, killing Chinese engineers.

“And now, they’re opening openly waging all-out war against Iran. This is World War III taking shape and it can only stop if people wake up to the internal realities of the United States and how they affect the world collectively. The responsibility of multi-polarism coming together, working together to abandon the the self-delusion that this isn’t happening. (It’s not serious. It’ll blow over.)

“It’s only going to stop if people make it stop. And if you don’t stop it, it will be World War III. And we will all lose everything that we have worked for, just like people lost everything during the previous two World Wars. So, it’s time for us to all wake up to reality.

“However unpleasant, we have to constantly follow the situation in Iran.”

Either Way, Khamenei Has Not Been Killed by Indrajit Samarajiva (Indica)

“Of all fully-formed nations in the world only Iran answered the call of long-genocided Palestine as the White Empire—meaning the latest colony and all the colonizers—was exterminating them. Only Iran fulfilled their duty not just under Islam but under the genocide convention that all nations are supposed to follow (shout-out to Yemen and Lebanon, big asterisks). Only Iran stood up for human dignity and true human rights at incredibly personal risk. And Ayatollah Khamenei led them.”

“People who believe in nothing find it hard to understand people that believe in something. They think you can just kill them. But that’s not how good works work. You do them despite earthly rewards, which often go to the wicked. You do them for the good itself, which humans abbreviate as God.”

“I must repeat that I am Buddhist, that Buddhism changed and healed my heart (thanks Amma). I strive (and fail) to be intellectually honest above all. I read the people I’m told to hate, and very often I love them, because I have been getting my book recommendations from the worst people on Earth (thanks Western education). I have read Khamenei and I love him. I spent a bit of time with a Buddhist monk (Bhante G) that I think was pretty close to enlightenment and I get the same vibes from Khamenei Sir. In a Sinhala Buddhist sense, I worship the man, I’d bow if I met him, as I would a monk. ”

“[…] my thoughts might be deep (I said that), but my praxis is weak. I don’t do anything. I fear for my soul in this sense and I pray for strength to be more active. But Khamenei has had nothing to fear on this account for decades. He has done so much already. Besides helping liberate Iran, he has become the spiritual leader of a great Resistance, which cuts across Shia and Sunni. Who was supporting Palestine, while everybody else was corrupted with wealth and football teams and airlines? Of nations, Iran only. I repeat this because it doesn’t get said enough. In fact, they slander Iran for existing at all. But I have seen faith accompanied by action […]”

OKOK, buddy, you don’t have to deify Iran or Khameini but I take the point.

“Remember the genocide, and remember who fought it. I have to believe in a God that does. Then consider who is slandering Khamenei. The people committing genocide and raping children in their spare time. How dare the people committing genocide malign the people fighting it? And paying for their principles with their own lives? When you hear anything bad about Iran, or Khamenei, or the Resistance, please, for the literal love of God, consider the source. At this point they’re not even trying with their propaganda, you really don’t have to try that hard.”

“The reason Iran doesn’t have nukes is because Ayatollah Khamenei issued a fatwa against them! He said nuclear weapons are evil and should not be held or used. The moral position, and realpolitikally dangerous. Yet we’re supposed to take the word of people that actually nuked two civilian cities, and proliferated hundreds of nukes with rabid ‘Israel’?”

“As the Great Satan crows about killing a great man, and killing countless innocent children, and rapes children in its spare time, remember what Khamenei never forgot and what the Resistance always reminds itself of. “Do not think of those who have been killed in God’s cause as dead. They are alive, and well provided for by their Lord.” ”

“The Intern in Charge”: Meet the 22-Year-Old Trump’s Team Picked to Lead Terrorism Prevention by Hannah Allam (Pro Publica)

“One year out of college and with no apparent national security expertise, Thomas Fugate is the Department of Homeland Security official tasked with overseeing the government’s main hub for combating violent extremism.”

So that’s the guy in charge of making sure that we don’t all return to the dice-roll that flying in the 60s and 70s was. Good luck with all of that.

Iran War Spreading: Russia Gets Involved by Neutrality Studies | Pascal Lottaz | Stanislav Krapivnik (YouTube)

A good analysis by someone I’ve never heard before. Mostly the same as other analysts, though he pointed out that,

• The U.S. has started a holy war by killing Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. It’s akin to killing the Pope. And they’re celebrating it, practically parading his head around on a stick.
• The Strait of Hormuz is closed, so prices will begin to rise, especially in Europe, as they “go to bingo fuel.”
• There are unconfirmed reports that the U.S.S. Liberty has been hit.
• They’re killing children on purpose. It’s not collateral damage. This is not only how Israel rolls but how the U.S. has always rolled, all the way back to WWII. They raped and pillaged, then projected their behavior onto the Red Army, which had the death penalty for rape or marauding. The U.S. firebombed so many cities in Germany, even in the north of France. They have always killed with impunity and overwhelming force.
• Russia is providing material support to Iran in the form of diesel and refined fuel, as well as drones, jets, and almost certainly pilots.
• The negotiations are a bad joke and no-one with a brain in their heads believes a word that the U.S. or Israel has to say. They are duplicitous to a fault.

“The Americans have unleashed something they can’t control. Hezbollah is all in, because if Iran goes down, Hezbollah is done. Hezbollah is all in. Hamas will probably go in. This is just going to continue expanding and Americans are not ready. No matter what [members of the Trump administration] say, Americans have died. There’re American casualties. And there’s going to be a lot more of them.

“So the only message I have to people in the West, you’re being marched off a cliff. Time’s up. Either go do something, hit the streets, put pressure on your governments, or you look at your children and know that they don’t have a future. I mean, this is it.”

Preliminary Notes on a Planned Decapitation by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)

“Trump has done the world a service. He has abandoned pretense and clarified the true nature of American power. There is no longer any need to manufacture a case for war, to make an attack seem conform to international law and treaties or to demonstrate its righteousness by acting as part of an international coalition. Now America can do what it wants to whomever it wants solely because the people who run its government want to. This has, of course, almost always been the case behind the curtain of diplomatic niceties. But Trump has ripped those curtains down and now the world is seeing American power in the raw: brazen, arrogant and mindless of the consequences, which will be borne by others and if they complain, they might be whacked, too.”

That would be nice but U.S. propaganda is still very, very strong. Fewer people believe it but the “big ones” still do. Look at the official statements from Germany, Europe, Japan, Australia, and so on. They are full-bore behind the U.S.‘s attack on Iran, repeating the hasbara reasoning to the letter. But perhaps—hopefully!—the world will recognize all of those states as just as criminal as the U.S. There is a much clearer line, I guess. As if the Israeli genocide of Gaza weren’t clear enough of a line.

The trick that the U.S. still plays is that every other country would do the same thing in its position. They drag everyone else down to their level with false assumptions, assuming that no-one else has any principles, no other interests other than personal, venal, short-term interests.

Attacks on US Bases: Air Defense Didn’t Work? − McGovern and Krapivnik by Stanislav Krapivnik (YouTube)

An excellent discussion of mostly Iranian and U.S. logistics, about the ability of the U.S. to resupply itself, on how Iran’s production is state-driven and powerful, like Russia’s, whereas private industry in the U.S. cannot deliver. Stas mentioned that Raytheon recently increased production of Patriot missiles by 10%, from 600 to 660 missiles. That’s 330 targets total per year.

Professor Marandi was excellent as always. He noted that Iran hasn’t used any of their newest stuff. Even their 15-20-year-old stuff is hitting its targets, which kind of surprised everyone in Iran, as well as in the call. Radar installations in U.S. bases are being hit by the dumbest, oldest drones without firing a shot. Iran is setting up for the long haul. Israel is a side-show for them. They could flatten it at any time but they don’t want to waste missiles on it (probably because they also know that Israel would attack with a nuke or a dozen).

McGovern says that the U.S. is going to run out of ammunition in a week. Trump and his crew just put it all on red and spun the wheel. If Iran keeps going from strength to strength in defying Israel and the U.S., then they will win this war, if it can be said that anyone wins a war. As Marandi said: Iran is getting hurt but it will not lose. It is so prepared for this that the U.S. has nothing—other than nukes, which he didn’t say, but I’m saying it—that can defeat them. They and Israel are massively overextended. Like everything else in the U.S., they’re more about the the pre-game show than about the game.

00:00 — US Israeli attack on Iran overview  
03:03 — Situation in Tehran and evacuations  
05:29 — War inevitability and White House logic  
09:46 — Trump motives and US politics  
12:54 — Objectives of assassination strikes  
15:08 — Iran strikes Gulf US assets  
19:50 — Russian Chinese reactions assessment  
23:04 — Russia stance and diplomacy future  
27:17 — US negotiations distrust history  
31:18 — Iran planning long war strategy  
34:48 — Impact on Iranian society alliances  
39:04 — Long war and Israel risks  
43:37 — US logistics and missile limits  
47:18 — Iran Gulf strategy escalation  
51:20 — Condolences and human cost  
53:05 — Russia China view on Trump  
56:03 — Possible short US war scenario

Iran’s Massive Strike Doctrine by Professor Pascal Lottaz (YouTube)

This was another excellent report, even though he made us listen to way too much Keir Starmer (he said he included the longer clip because the man should speak for himself but it was still annoying because it’s Starmer). He cited analysis by Iván Ramírez de Arellano, The Jomini of the West (Twitter) at length.

“The rapid, unprecedented escalation of Operation Epic Fury is already the subject of rigorous analysis by analysts, strategists, and operations researchers. Although still only within the initial 48 hours of the onset of hostilities, the current course of operation reveals stark, alarming divergences between the tactical military success celebrated by the Allied coalition and the campaign’s long-term geopolitical viability.

“The joint US-Israeli campaign and the Iranian response are already illustrating the structural limits of air power, the fragility of global energy markets and the mathematics of modern inter economics exposing critical vulnerabilities in the US Israeli operational design. It is questionable if the United States and Israel are operating within a coherent and achievable theory of victory.

“The stated Allied war aims are maximalist. To permanently remove Iran from the ranks of confrontation states by either toppling the regime entirely or failing that completely disarming its massive ballistic missiles and drone arsenal. However, historical precedents and rigorous operational modeling indicate that enduring regime change cannot be achieved solely through aerial bombardment. By executing a deception strike against Ayatollah Khamenei without the introduction of occupying ground forces or a coordinated internal revolutionary vanguard capable of securing the political vacuum, the Allied coalition has failed to constrain the Iranian state.

“Instead, massive aerial kinetic expenditure merely cripples and fragments the state apparatus. It expands rather than constrains the space of possibilities for regional chaos. The death of the supreme leader rather than inducing immediate societal capitulation for a Venezuelan-style democratic transition has likely unified hardline Iranian nationalist elements and the surviving IRGC cadres under the desperate survivalist doctrine.

“Additionally, Iran’s aggregate arsenal estimated prior to the conflict at over 2,500 medium-range ballistic missiles and 8,000 short range systems and tens of thousands of loitering munitions is simply too vast and too deeply entrenched in subterranean bunkers to be entirely disarmed from the air. Recognizing their inability to win a conventional counterforce duel against US stealth bombers, the regime’s decentralized. Surviving commanders have naturally defaulted to countervailing strikes against soft, highly lucrative targets.

“The US lacks the physical defensive density required to permanently shield the oil monarchies from these dispersed asymmetric attacks. If these monarchies cannot be protected, Iran retains the capacity to wreck financial markets, devastate the global economy, and consequently destroy the political viability of the current US administration for a generation, highlighting that the risk of escalation are multiplying hourly without a viable exit strategy.

“Conversely, Western threat assessment historically fixated on Iran’s ability to mine or blockade the straight of Hormuz. While disruptive, this is a maritime choke point that can eventually be secured and cleared by the United States Navy overwhelming superiority. However, the true existential existential strategic lever available to Tehran is the systemic physical destruction of the onshore oil and gas processing infrastructure of the Gulf.

“Because Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Kuwait serve as indispensable logistical co-belligerents hosting the air bases and the naval headquarters from which American power projects, their critical energy nodes are rendered legitimate high priority military targets under the laws of armed conflict.These facilities, specifically the export terminals, sit comfortably within the range of Iranian short-range ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and inexpensive Shaheed drone swarms.

“If the IRGC facing existential annihilation initiates a scorched earth campaign against these specific nodes, the physical backbone of the global energy system will be severed. The strategic calculus here is to inflict such severe pain on global markets that the international community forces the US to hold its military operations. The financial markets have already begun pricing in this instability. Brent crude closed at $72.87 and on Friday before the strikes and analysts at Barclays and Goldman Sachs project that if the infrastructure targeting scenario materializes Brent crude will rapidly blow past $100 per barrel representing a catastrophic 37% jump.

“Under such immense domestic economic pressure, the United States executive branch might implement draconian export controls to stabilize domestic American fuel prices. This political maneuver would leave the European Union and the United Kingdom completely devoid of both Russian natural gas and Gulf energy supplies, effectively fracturing the Western geopolitical alliance and plunging Europe into an unprecedented energy vacuum.

“Likewise, the US and Israel are currently prosecuting a highly asymmetric war of attrition that Western military-industrial bases are poorly positioned to sustain economically. Operation Epic Fury relies almost exclusively on advanced ballistic missile defense systems to protect critical infrastructure. This necessitates that expenditure of multi-million dollar interceptors such as the terminal high altitude area defense or THAAD and the standard missile 3 to defeat legacy Iranian ballistic missiles and mass-produced drones warms that cost a fraction of the defensive interceptor.

“This inverted cost exchange ratio strongly favors Iran’s saturation strategy. Iranian operational resilience potentially backfilled covertly by material support from Russia or China may likely simply outlast Western interceptor stockpiles. Iran’s vast missile inventory serves effectively as an ablative sponge designed specifically to absorb and exhaust western high tier interceptors. Once these finite interceptor stockpiles fall below critical operational thresholds, Allied bases, aircraft carriers, and the vital Gulf energy infrastructure will be left exposed to undefended cascading saturation strikes, rendering the Allied position militarily untenable.”

US-Israeli attack on Iran expands into GLOBAL WAR: EU & UK join, Canada supports, Gulf regimes hit by Geopolitical Economy Report | Ben Norton (YouTube)

“The top EU diplomat Kaja Kallas—a policy official who’s a complete warmonger—she posted an image on Twitter showing a meeting that she held with the foreign ministers of Israel, the UAE, Egypt, Turkey, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, and the G7. All working together to support this war against Iran. And she praised the assassination of Ayatollah Khamenei and said there is now an open path to a different Iran with greater freedom. This is an endorsement of the assassination of the top government official of a UN member state. Europe is making it clear that it supports killing foreign political leaders it doesn’t like. That’s what the US and Israel have done.

“And yet, at the same time, Kaja Kallas, this top EU foreign policy official, is saying that they support international humanitarian law, literally two sentences after she’s saying she’s working with the Israeli regime, whose prime minister and former defense minister have outstanding arrest warrants for crimes against humanity they committed in Gaza with the support of Europe. And yet they talk about international humanitarian law. I mean this could not be any more hypocritical. This is a total farce.

“The most important document in international law on the use of force is the United Nations Charter and that says very clearly in article two right at the beginning,”

“all members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means. All members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.”

“The US and Israel violated article 2 of the UN charter. It’s as clear as day. And now the European Union, the UK, and Canada are wholeheartedly supporting this illegal war of aggression against Iran in violation of the UN charter. And UN Charter on self-defense—that same UN charter—in article 51 says that countries have”

“the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a member of the United Nations.”

“Iran is the one that is abiding by international law. Iran has a right to self-defense. It is the US and Israel that are the aggressors. And now the UK, the European Union and Canada are also belligerent directly participating in an illegal war of aggression.

“This is the true face of the West and it’s so-called rules-based Western imperialism international order in which they make the rules and order everyone around and they violate those rules whenever it’s convenient.”

'Prove Me Wrong' – Scott Ritter Says This War Could End US Power in the Middle East by India & Global Left
| Jyotishman | Scott Ritter (YouTube)

“Iran is not relying upon weapons that have yet to be produced. They’ve already produced them and they’ve already stockpiled them and they’ve already factored in attrition. They have produced these. You know the Shaheed series drones, which, surprisingly, are being very effective against targets everywhere. They’ve produced missiles advanced missiles. They have stockpiles of older missiles and they have a a strategy on how to employ these missiles to maximum benefit. The Iranians have already built this stuff, so it’s a sunk cost. It’s done. But it didn’t bankrupt them to do it.

“By the way, the United States, who is the premier supplier of interceptors, to give you an example, the United Arab Emirates apparently bought $2 billion worth of missile interceptors. and they’re out, done, finished, gone. Zip. And who replaces them? There’s no production line right now functioning that can replace them. The United States hasn’t gone into war-production mode. We’ve already strained the entire system supplying air defense systems to Ukraine and now the Middle East has just shot through its load and there’s nothing left to replace it.

“This is the reality. The United States itself has, you know, stripped bare other theaters. I mean, when the president has to talk about we have plenty of ammunition all around the world, what he’s saying is, so sad, too bad, South Korea and Japan, we’re taking the missiles meant to defend you. Too bad Taiwan, those missiles are gone, too. And Europe, sorry, we’re taking those missiles as well. You know, so this is the reality. Iran fires a drone that cost $20,000 to produce and we shoot it down with three interceptor missiles that cost 3 to 4 million each to produce.”

“[…] we can’t do this because we are married to a legacy system of large amphibious assault assault ships, where we put hundreds of Marines on it, still have to sail it close to shores, and, if they sink one of those ships, we’re screwed. And yet, that’s exactly what will have to happen here. We will have to forcefully seize an Iranian port. Forcefully seize an Iranian port. Then forcefully seize airports and then seek to, you know, offload hundreds of thousands of troops under fire.”

“[…] with the exception of Normandy, we never invaded a space as large as Iran. So, let’s say we land in Tschahbahar. Then what? You see, Pete, I’m the guy that actually helped plan that very operation, the OP plan for Americans to put forces into Iran to respond to a Soviet invasion. So I’ve actually done this, Pete, and I’m telling you, it ain’t going to work. You can’t do it. So stop talking as if you can do it.

“You are going to war with what you have and what you have is not enough and you were told by your generals it won’t be enough.

“Moreover, there’s a you know there are two clocks ticking away here. The first clock is availability of resources. As I said, they’re running out of ammunition very fast. But there’s another one too because, as we speak, Aramco facilities are ablaze. As we speak, Qatari gas terminals are under attack and Qatar stopped shipping liquid natural gas. As we speak, the Strait of Hormuz is shut down. By the end of the week, Europe is going to be screaming. By the end of the month, Europe is going to be dead. By the middle of the month, Americans are going to be screaming.

“And this this is a reality. This president will not be able to withstand the political pressures brought on him at home, domestically, and abroad, globally um about the consequences of this illegal war of aggression.”

“[…] the British in all of their imperial stupidity have decided that they want to play a role in this conflict, that they have suddenly decided that they are pro-Israel. And so, Iran has fired missiles against British bases in Cyprus. What did the Greek government do this morning? They’re sending F-16 fighters. They’re sending air defense. They’re sending naval ships. Now, what do you imagine Türkiye’s response to this is going to be? Because the last time Greece deployed military forces to Cyprus, Türkiye invaded. And Türkiye is not going to sit back and allow Greece to do. So we may very well see in the very near term a new regional war between Türkiye and Greece. And ain’t that going to be pretty, NATO fighting amongst itself? And this will be a war of existential proportions because Türkiye will go for the knockout blow against Greece. They’re not going to put up with this. And then what is NATO going to do?”

Pepe Escobar & Larry C. Johnson: US-Israel HIT Tehran, Iran DESTROYS Tel Aviv, Hezbollah NOW Joins by Dialogue Works | Nima R. Alkhorshid (YouTube)

Pepe Escobar is on fire and full of information, more about the political situation.

Larry Johnson also discussed the politics, but also focused a bit more on the military situation, which is that “the U.S. has effectively been driven out of the Middle East and the Persian Gulf.” Larry had very choice words for Pete Hegseth. The story that four U.S. F15s were shot down by the Kuwaitis in a friendly-fire incident is completely non-credible. The Kuwaitis haven’t been able to shoot down Iranian drones (which are much slower) but they can target and shoot down fighter jets that their targeting systems are programmed not to shoot down?

He pointed out that, with oil prices set to shoot up, Russia is going to benefit economically as well.

Iran has refused all calls for peace or a ceasefire from the U.S. The wheels are in motion and they are going to let the chips fall where they may. They see that they have the wind behind them.

Neither the U.S. nor Israel has dared to fly over Iran because their air defenses are intact—because, as Nima pointed out, they’re shooting up police stations and schools rather than tactical infrastructure.

The U.S. aircraft carriers have pulled back to Cyprus, which is over 1000 miles away, which means two refueling ops for any jets making sorties to Iran. Iran can and has hit Cyprus, though.

It’s almost 2 hours long but I found it extremely informative.

Col. Larry Wilkerson: US Warplanes Downed, Tel Aviv & U.S. Bases ROCKED by Missiles by Dialogue Works | Nima R. Alkhorshid (YouTube)

“Israel’s position right now is incredibly tenable [sic]. I wouldn’t want to be in Israel’s shoes right now, particularly with regard to their military ability to withstand any kind of concerted attack, no matter how ill-coordinated it was, because they haven’t fought a war like this in 20 years. Basically, Nima, the IDF, the Air Force in particular, is composed of a bunch of cowards who love to kill kids. and women and old men and you put them up against an at least reasonably resolute armored force, they’d probably lose within 72 hours and you’d be hitting them in the rear basically because they’re getting ready to put that force in Lebanon.

“What a time. What a time. But no one’s got the courage. No one’s got the moxie. No one’s got the military leaders and no one’s got the desire really to disturb what is, to them, their situation with regard to billions of dollars coming in, every time they turn around, from the empire.”

War Update: Iran Withstands Attacks, Punishes US & Allies | Prof. Seyed M. Marandi by Neutrality Studies | Pascal Lottaz (YouTube)

“As General Soleimani once famously said, we are the nation of Imam Hussein. And if American analysts and politicians and military officials had read a bit about the the story of Karbala and the impact it has on Iranian society and the grandson of the prophet and how deeply embedded it is in Iran’s religious ideology, support for the oppressed, and defiance against the oppressor, they would have thought twice about attacking Iran.

“But hopefully, despite the the fact that the days are dark for Lebanon, for Iranians, for people across the region and for people across the globe because people across the globe are outraged and they’re deeply disturbed by what the West is doing. And of course Gaza, Gaza, Gaza. But hopefully, despite the darkness, the sun will be shining upon humanity in future and the empire will collapse and we’ll all see those who survive will see better days. The sun will rise again.”

Marandi mentioned the Battle of Karbala (Wikipedia), which is described on the English version of Wikipedia as follows,

“The Battle of Karbala (Arabic: مَعْرَكَة كَرْبَلَاء, romanized: Maʿrakat Karbalāʾ) was fought on 10 October 680 (10 Muharram in the year 61 AH of the Islamic calendar) between the army of the second Umayyad caliph Yazid I (r. 680–683) and a small army led by Husayn ibn Ali, the grandson of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, at Karbala, Sawad (modern-day southern Iraq).

“[…]

“Battle ensued on 10 October during which Husayn was killed along with most of his relatives and companions, while his surviving family members were taken prisoner. The battle was the start of the Second Fitna, during which the Iraqis organized two separate campaigns to avenge the death of Husayn; the first one by the Tawwabin and the other one by Mukhtar al-Thaqafi and his supporters.

“The Battle of Karbala galvanized the development of the pro-Alid[b] party (Shi’at Ali) into a distinct religious sect with its own rituals and collective memory. It has a central place in Shi’a history, tradition, and theology, and has frequently been recounted in Shi’a literature. For the Shi’a, Husayn’s suffering and death became a symbol of sacrifice in the struggle for right against wrong, and for justice and truth against injustice and falsehood.”

*SPECIAL* − Prof. Mohammad Marandi : Latest Developments LIVE From Tehran by Judge Napolitano − Judging Freedom (YouTube)

“[…] he was a person who lived a very simple life his children—all of them live a very simple life. Now that he’s passed away, I can say that I knew him. I wasn’t close to him, but I’ve met him on numerous occasions. I met family members of his regularly and none of them even have businesses. Not that he’s against business, but he prevented anyone from his immediate family from getting involved in business just to make sure that the family, the entire family is super clean.

“He was a volunteer in the war before the revolution. He was in jail—he was imprisoned numerous times and tortured. When the war started, he had no military experience, but he left for the warfront and fought. At the end of the war, when he was president, when the United States entered the war on the side of Saddam and they shot down the airliner and they started attacking Iranian naval installations and Iranian naval ships.

“The war fronts were very unstable and he went to the war fronts as the president. I saw him there and it was very dangerous for him because he would be a key target but he went from front to front to strengthen the morale. He was never a person afraid of death and he was always a religious scholar. The Christian martyrs in Iran—and I’ve posted a lot of these—he would on Christmas he would go to the family the houses of Iranian Christian martyrs on Christmas—for the Armenians it’s in January, for other Christians it’s in on the 25th of December, as in the United States.

“So he has visited numerous families of the martyrs. The narrative on Iran in the United States judge is completely fabricated and it has demonized this country for 47 years. And the reason for this, is Iran’s opposition to the Israeli regime and Iran’s insistence on being independent. But, if there was no Israel, I would assure you that Iran and the United States today would have would have embassies and we would have normal trade and business. But it’s the Israeli regime that insists on hatred and animosity.”

“They’re slaughtering people. They’re slaughtering families. They destroy apartment blocks. People are thrown 30 meters away from their homes. Kids, men, women, people on the streets lying, dying, kids under the rubble at the school. When they bombed the school on the first day killing 165 girls, we didn’t see anything in the western media and the Persian language media in the west because they have this huge media apparatus in Persian which is hostile towards Iran. There was no concern. They didn’t care about these kids. It wasn’t just the US government or this racist Zionist regime, but it was the entire media apparatus whether liberal or conservative. No difference. They seem to take pleasure in bombing cities and slaughtering people and they’re completely indifferent.

“[…]

“[Young people in Iran] did not see the crimes that the United States had committed alongside Saddam Hussein against us. And they could not feel, they could not comprehend what sanctions meant and how these sanctions were imposed from abroad to strangle us. But now they see it vividly how the empire so crudely slaughters men, women, and children. And then you watch CNN and and Fox News or you read The Guardian or Breitbart, they’re more or less the same. These students, who are very all of them fluent in English, see them as sinister and so their world views are evolving. What Trump has done the Iranian leadership, Iranian thinkers and intellectuals could never have done in a 100 years to change the opinions of these young people.”

I talked to a co-worker this week who just parroted the line parroted by all European official and most member of Congress: If you ask me, I’m glad he’s dead, at least.

Can you imagine?

They celebrate the death of a person they’ve never met, about whom they know nothing—or about whom what they think they know they never think to question—and then feel satisfied about their moral superiority. An old man has been killed and they think nothing of how it reflects on them to say that they’re glad he’s dead. All of the information that they have about the man comes from the people who have been trying to kill him for decades. This doesn’t disturb most people at all. They never think about it. They don’t think about why they hate people they’ve never met, in countries they’ve never been to, who speak languages that they don’t understand, and whose history they know nothing about.

They have no idea what his name is. They have no idea how to spell it or even say it. They don’t even know whether Ayatollah is his name or a title, or whether there has been more than one since the revolution, or even when the revolution was, or what they were revolting against. They have no idea, and they don’t care. They just parrot what the media has trained them to parrot, like good little monkeys.

What did the Ayatollah do in his life? What was his role in Iranian society? In the Muslim faith, in Islam? What did he preach? What did he do in his life? Over which parts of society in Iran was he in control? Did he order the hangings himself? Are there really hangings? Are there really hundreds? Maybe, maybe not. But you don’t know. Because the people who are telling you that you should be really mad about all of the oppression and all of the hangings are the same people who were telling you about Iran’s “Revolutionary Guard”—does such a construct even exist? Or is just a name out of the children’s comic book that people in the west use to learn about Iran?—tearing out the wombs of women that they’d raped in order to cover up the evidence of the rapes. That was a NY Post headline, almost certainly planted by Israel and/or the CIA. That’s who you get your news from, people. That’s the “information” on which you base your opinion that it’s a good thing that an old man was killed. It is for them that you have thrown your principles and morality out of the window by celebrating the death of an, religious figure. It is from them that you will not hear about the girls’ school that was one of the first places that the U.S. and Israel bombed.

This truly is the depths of anti-intellectualism.

Scott Ritter: Iran Wins the Long War − U.S. & Israel Losing Ground! by Dialogue Works | Nima R. Alkhorshid (YouTube)

“The Gulf Arab states can’t fight, don’t know how to fight, won’t fight. They farm it out. I was in a hotel in Riad before the war started. We would take our meals there. We work down in the in the bunker of the Ministry of Defense building. So we go across the street and they had this, I think, it was a Sheraton hotel. Had a nice, you know, buffet spread. And so, we would go there and the Saudis paid for it all because they got a lot of money. And so we’re sitting there and I had just spent the day, you know, preparing, you know, going through target lists and all this stuff about a conflict we’re getting ready to fight to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi occupation.

“And, at the same buffet, were a bunch of Kuwaiti princes who had fled Kuwait City, and who were now taking refuge in Saudi Arabia. And we overheard them. They were sitting there talking to their Saudi hosts and they said, ‘you know, these Americans are our mercenaries.’ You know, we’re paying them to come here and liberate at night and the lieutenant colonel I was with basically ordered me out of the room because he saw that I was going to get up. I was going to go over there and I was going to beat the living shit out of this Kuwaiti, stomp him into the ground. I’m nobody’s mercenary. I take the orders only from my legitimate chain of command. it was deeply insulting.

“But the problem is: that’s their mindset and that’s how they view everything. They don’t view anybody as their equal. They don’t view anybody as a partner. You are a paid servant. When they pull out their wallet and they start putting money on the table and you take that money, they believe they own you. And in fact, they do.

“Except now what they’re finding out is they’ve been played the whole time. That we’ve let them sit there and and treat us to free lunches and free hotel rooms and free this and they buy our goods. But at the end of the day, all they’re good for is facilitating the desire of their Israeli masters to promote greater Israel.

“What do you think the Abraham Accords is? It’s not about, you know, collective empowerment through economic development. It’s not about mutual beneficial relations. It’s about the Arabs subordinating themselves to a greater Israel. 100%. That’s all it’s about. And that’s what they’ve done. That’s what these perverse, fat, pale, effeminate, non-men rulers of these nations have done. And I’m going to say, I’m just tired. We have to start calling it out. You can’t solve a problem unless you accurately define a problem. And so if we continue to pretend that Saudi Arabia is a military power when it’s not. Iran can defeat Saudi, and I pray they will.

“If Ansarallah’s listening to this: march on Riad, do it. do it. Get rid of this ridiculous family that only came in because a bunch of bunch of Wahabis ran around on camels and intimidated other Bedouin tribes in the 1920s and 30s. That’s it. There’s no legitimacy here. There’s no mandate from God. They just happen to be a tribe had better camel-operators than everybody else.

“It’s the same thing with the rest. The, you know, the Emirates, the British put them in. The British put everybody in. It’s colonial legacy. There’s no legitimacy. They have no mandate of the people. There’s no democracy. And then they got lucky because they happened to be sitting on a bunch of oil and gas that has now made them richer than they can possibly imagine.

“But the money doesn’t bring legitimacy. The money just makes them rich. Legitimacy has to come from standing for something. Standing for something. They don’t stand for democracy. They don’t stand for liberty. They don’t stand for justice. They’re just rich. That’s it. And they believe that they could sit there and leverage their control of the United States into controlling Iran. But it turned out that it was the United States controlling them, using them on behalf of Israel. And that truth has now come out.

“That truth has been played out in broad daylight by Iran. This is one of the greatest gifts Iran’s given to the region and the world by bringing everything to a head. The world will now get to see what kind of country Iran is. They’ll get to see the support that the Iranian people provide to their country. And they’ll also get to see the fact that the United States has been using the Gulf Arab states on behalf of Israel for decades. And they’ll get to see what Israel’s real plans are. that Israel is nothing more than a genocidal state wrapped in a tiny piece of territory with meaningless biblical references.”

“I wouldn’t want to be them. Because they’re just going to get used, abused, and slaughtered again. Basically, we have no options. None. Now, had the CIA and HEGs and everybody sat down with real experts and held a panel discussion, they would have known this upfront. Had they sat down with real experts about Iran.

“It’s funny. Some of the big advisers out there are guys who served in Task Force 17. Delta Force. These guys are good. They got big muscles and they got tattoos. They’re really good at jumping out of helicopters and sprinting into buildings and killing people. Hoorah, Delta. But they were given they were supposed to carry out this covert war against the Kuds force in Iraq and all this stuff. And so you have these thick-necked knuckle-draggers, some of whom are, you know, smart enough to have learned Farsi.

“And they were involved in a campaign that they lost ultimately. but now they’re the ones posting themselves as regional experts and providing the advice. These are the people saying that the Iranian people want to be overthrown. that they hate the regime. So we got Delta-Force, knuckle-dragging losers, guys who haven’t won a war yet. Big L stapled on their heads. They probably got their ass kicked in Afghanistan. They came over and got their ass kicked in southern Iraq.

“And then they went home and started thinking about their relevance to the world. So they started selling themselves as “regional subject-matter experts” is a term they like to use. And they’re just ignorant. If they’ve been in Iran, it’s because they landed there one night to insert somebody or extract somebody or to plant a device or to do something. But they haven’t wandered the streets of Tehran interacting with the Iranian people talking about to them.

“They haven’t, you know, gone to Kashan. They haven’t gone to any of the places that were blowing up. They didn’t go to Manab. They certainly didn’t meet with the families of the school children they were slaughtered by the bombs. These people know nothing about Iran. Nothing about Iran. And yet they’re the ones saying, “No, all we have to do is kill Ali Khamenei and the system comes down.”

“But had they talked to real experts, they would have known that killing Ali Khamenei will only strengthen the system that it will backfire fire. And that’s exactly what happened.”

“I don’t know what Hegseth thinks he’s doing because we went to war on a half-ass plan that was there to appease greater Israel. Israel is laughing all the way to the bank. They don’t care about Americans. They don’t care that we’re bankrupting ourselves. They don’t care about anything other than the fulfillment of their plan of greater Israel. And so they’re they’re laughing as we break our backs here. And we are breaking our backs.

“And you can see it in the panic in Hegseth’s mind. I mean, when you take joy out of sinking a ship that would had gone to India to participate in a festival, a shipping festival. So, it’d been paraded on the shores and now it’s off the coast of Sri Lanka, not an active combatant, heading home or heading to wherever they’re going to head.

“And we send a submarine. We’re not in a state of war. What legal authority did we have to sink that ship? The Congress authorized that. We had legal authority, apparently, according to Congress, to preempt the Iranian missile attack against us. But this ship is out there and we sunk it. The most cowardly act possible. We didn’t give it an opportunity. The submarine didn’t rise up and say surrender or something like that, send a signal. That’s that ship was sailing, not in combat mode, and we sunk it. And Pete Hegseth is bragging as if this is some sort of um example of, you know, American marshal supremacy. It’s something we’re supposed to be proud of. No, Pete, we’re ashamed of you and we’re ashamed of that action. It’s something that the ship’s commander should never have done. That submarine commander should never have sunk that ship. That ship posed no threat to anybody. and why did we sink it? Because we can.

“And don’t tell me we’re at war because Congress refuses to declare war. Congress called this a defensive action. I mean, that’s what Mike Johnson was saying. It’s defensive. Therefore, it’s not really a conflict. We don’t even get involved. It’s purely defensive. Was that a defensive action to send a submarine off the coast of Sri Lanka to sink a ship? Sounded pretty offensive to me.

“And this is what we’re doing on everything. I mean, this this is an incompetent campaign that was all premised around the notion of regime collapse. Now that that’s failed, now they don’t know what they’re fighting for. They’re just blowing up buildings. And that’s all they’re doing is blowing up buildings. If you think there’s anything inside the buildings being bombed, you’re dumber than dirt because anything of value has been long since evacuated and hidden in any one of hundreds of hide sites the Iranians have been preparing since 2005.”

AMERICA IS DOING THIS FOR ISRAEL by HasanAbi (YouTube)

“Here’s the Financial Times. Israel expects weeks-long war against Iran. Summarizing the Israeli government’s position, Satranovich said, “If we can have a coup, great. If we can have people on the streets, great. If we can have a civil war, great. Israel couldn’t care less about the future or the stability of Iran. That’s the point of difference between us and the US.”

“Oh my god. They’re just saying it out loud. They’re dabbing on us. They’re dabbing on us. They’re dabbing on us. You want to know why? Because we’re cattle. Okay, wake the fuck up. We are literally cattle. We are cattle. We are a nation of cattle.

“Okay, it’s literally like they’re writing it in the Financial Times. They’re saying it out loud. They’re openly saying over and over again, “What are you going to do about it? It doesn’t matter because guess what? A big chunk of people are going to hear Donald Trump go, this is a good thing.” and they’re going to say this is a good thing.

“A big chunk of liberals are too predisposed with like how much they hate Donald Trump, but they haven’t figured out what’s going on in front of their eyes. And 90% of Americans don’t give a shit about what happens to the Iranians. Okay, that’s it. Because they think, oh, it’s happening over there. We’ve done it so many times over and we’ve been sheltered from the impact over and over again. So, it doesn’t matter.

“We’re a nation of fat treatlerites (Know Your Meme) who don’t give a shit about anything and America and Israel takes advantage of that over and over again. Holy shit,

““[…] there’s a point of difference between us and the US. I think Washington is more concerned about nation-building and threats to their regional partners,” he added. On Tuesday, an Israeli air strike tore through a building in the Iranian holy city of K. The target was the gathering place for the assembly of experts. The 88-person clerical body meant to choose Iran’s next supreme leader after Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed at the weekend. It remains unclear whether Israel believed the body was meeting at the time, but an Israeli military official said afterwards that the goal was to stop Iran from choosing a new supreme leader. We want to ensure Iran stays in disarray, they said.”

The Media's Capitulation to Power (w/ Ahmed Shihab-Eldin) by The Chris Hedges Report (YouTube)

From a comment.

“US Media is totally misrepresenting the facts by watering down the truth.”

Whereas I appreciate the poetry of the phrase “watering down the truth,” I fear that it gives the media too much credit. In many cases, “technically the truth” perhaps offers legal cover but never moral cover. We should be crystal clear in our own thinking. What they are doing is lying. They are lying.

Rare Earth Blackmail: China Holds the Switch to Global War − Krapivnik and Johnson by Stanislav Krapivnik (YouTube)

A discussion of how and why Russia has been holding back (an excess of caution and still not understanding that the U.S. will not stop until it is made to stop).

00:00 — Debate Over Iran and Terrorism Claims  
03:03 — Civilian Casualties and Gaza War Context  
04:20 — THAAD and Patriot Missile Limitations  
07:08 — Military Procurement and Cost-Plus Contracts  
10:06 — Air Defense Failures and Friendly Fire Incident  
12:04 — Air War Logistics and Refueling Challenges  
15:06 — War Costs and Regional Radar Losses  
17:02 — Gulf Politics and Closing the Strait  
19:28 — Oil Markets and Europe’s Energy Problem  
22:04 — Putin’s Role in Middle East Crisis  
24:11 — Russia, NATO Surveillance and Escalation  
27:17 — Nuclear Risk and End of Conversation

At the AI Race’s Finishing Line: A World of Abundance or Automated Dominance? by Brian Bertelic (Land Destroyer)

“Western-based optimists insist that AI will bring about a utopian world of abundance, eliminating poverty, illness, and violence and insist that the US must win an intensifying AI race with China to do so.

“Paradoxically, it is the US who has, in the past several decades − including throughout the entirety of the 21st century, perpetuated and even compounded existing poverty, illness, and violence stretching from Latin America to Central Asia and everywhere in between. The US has − in the past 26 years alone − invaded and destroyed entire nations, killing millions and displacing 10s of millions fleeing from the poverty, illness, and violence stemming from US-led war.”

Yeah, of course that all happened, but what part of “AI will fix all that” didn’t you hear?

“Even within US borders, these same interests have ravaged the American population through predatory economic practices prioritizing profit and power over any semblance of societal or civilizational purpose. This has manifested itself as rotting infrastructure, inaccessible healthcare, unaffordable education, and the growing dearth of opportunities emerging from a society systematically exploited and neglected rather than built-up and invested in.”

“For a Western-based billionaire − this reality may not be apparent because of the cocoon of luxury, comfort, and security immense wealth affords anyone, anywhere − but it is reality nonetheless.”

“US policy papers explicitly lay out plans for maritime blockades, attacking the Chinese BRI including through military strikes, and mitigating Russia’s ability to supply energy to China across their long, shared border − all as a means of economically strangling China.

“Since (and even long before) such papers were published, the US has actively executed these policies including by reorganizing the US Marine Corps specifically into an anti-shipping force for implementing a maritime blockade in the Asia-Pacific region, by arming and backing militants both in Myanmar and Pakistan to physically attack Chinese BRI projects and to maim or kill both the Chinese engineers working on them and local security forces trying to protect them.”

“The US has in both words and actions demonstrated that it pursues AI as a means of enhancing its already demonstrated desire for domination over the planet − a desire that sees abundance for all as an obstacle rather than an objective.

“China has already committed to a national and global model of abundance and is tangibly leveraging AI to enhance this model − so much so the US has openly targeted Chinese-driven abundance as “overcapacity” that needs to be stamped out.”

“For Western-based billionaire optimists insisting the US must win the AI race based on US talking points about Chinese “authoritarianism” and the Chinese “surveillance state,” in between praising the advent of cameras on American university campuses for driving down crime, or eagerly awaiting upcoming Apple products like its “AI pin” that records every conversation wearers have demonstrates profound cognitive bias.”

Pipeline-Krieg gegen zwei EU-Staaten – was hinter dem ungarischen und slowakischen Veto gegen die Ukraine-Kredite steckt by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)

“Die beiden Binnenstaaten hängen direkt am Südstrang des gigantischen Druschba-Pipeline-Systems, das seit den 1960ern Öl von Westsibirien nach Ost- und Mitteleuropa […]”

“[…] die beiden zentraleuropäischen Staaten auch gute Gründe für ihre ablehnende Haltung gegenüber der Ukraine haben. Beide Staaten sind von russischen Erdöllieferungen abhängig und die Ukraine führt derzeit einen Krieg gegen die Infrastruktur, über die russisches Öl nach Ungarn und in die Slowakei fließt. Schon bald könnte es dort zu ernsten Engpässen kommen. Dass EU und NATO derartige Angriffe auf zwei Mitgliedsstaaten einfach so hinnehmen, erinnert frappierend an die Sabotage der Nord-Stream-Pipelines.”

“Während die EU massiv politischen Druck auf Orban und Fico ausübt, führt die Ukraine mittlerweile offen Krieg gegen die Öllieferungen Russlands an Ungarn und die Slowakei. Der erste direkte Angriff auf die Pipeline erfolgte im Sommer 2025, als die ukrainischen Streitkräfte mehrfach mit Drohnen Pump-Stationen entlang des Druschba-Systems in Russland angriffen und beschädigten. Reuters berichtete im Dezember letzten Jahres von mindestens fünf gezielten Angriffen der Ukraine auf die Pipeline. Von ukrainischer Seite wurden diese Angriffe stets offensiv verteidigt – es ginge darum, Russland von den Geldflüssen für seine Energieexporte abzuschneiden. Dies wurde seitens Ungarn und der Slowakei zwar sehr scharf kritisiert; seitens der EU blieb jedoch jegliche Kritik an den Angriffen aus, die indirekt ja auch die Energieversorgung zweier EU-Staaten zum Ziel hatten.”

“Seit dem 27. Januar ist der Öltransport über die Druschba-Pipeline daher ausgesetzt und sowohl in Ungarn als auch in der Slowakei geht nun das Öl aus. Dass die Präsidenten der beiden Staaten darüber alles andere als glücklich sind, versteht sich von selbst. Erst letzte Woche haben beide Staaten ihre strategische Ölreserve freigegeben und importieren nun Öl zu horrenden Preisen über die Adriapipeline aus Kroatien.”

“Und wie reagiert die Ukraine? Nimmt sie die Reparaturen an der Druschba-Pipeline auf? Nein, im Gegenteil. Weitestgehend ignoriert von der deutschen Berichterstattung zündete die Ukraine stattdessen die nächste Eskalationsstufe im Pipeline-Krieg und attackierte am Sonntag die Ölpumpstation im russischen Kaleykino in der russischen Republik Tatarstan – 1.000 Kilometer von der ukrainischen Grenze entfernt. Diese Einrichtung gilt als zentraler Einspeiser in das Druschba-Netz. Selbst wenn die Ukraine also die Schäden an der Pipeline in der Westukraine reparieren sollte, dürfte erst einmal kein Öl über die Pipeline in Richtung Europa fließen.”

“Beide Staaten stoppten nun ihre Dieselexporte und Notstromlieferungen in die Ukraine – keine Kleinigkeit, bezieht die Ukraine doch derzeit 68 Prozent ihrer Energieimporte aus diesen beiden Staaten.”

“Sowohl die EU als auch die NATO geben bei der gesamten Frage eine erbärmliche Position ab. Immerhin handelt es sich bei den zahlreichen Angriffen auf die Druschba-Pipelines auch um Angriffe auf die lebensnotwendige Energieversorgung zweier ihrer Mitgliedsstaaten. Doch Solidarität kennen EU und NATO offenbar nur mit der Ukraine.”

Iran’s Islamic Art Of War by Indrajit Samarajiva (Indica)

“The central religious cause of the Axis of Resistance is the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem (Al-Quds). The Resistance often says, of those martyred, that he died on the road to Al-Quds. The moment this is truly over will be when the faithful can worship freely in Al Aqsa Mosque, without being booted by jackbooted thugs. ‘Israel’ violently restricts Muslims from praying there now, their troops even wear shoes inside (which horrifies every Asian), and they make noises about destroying it entirely. The Al Aqsa Mosque is the physical center of the Resistance, such that the ghetto rebellion of October 7th is called the Al Aqsa Flood.”

“Their motivation is not the life of this world but the hereafter, and if you say this is a dumb superstition, think of the fact that every religion says something like this, and that such belief produces better people.”

In theory.

“The other frustrating thing to outside observers is why they stopped after the 12-Day War, just as ‘Israel’s’ air defense were depleted. But that has a Quranic reason also. If the enemy desists, Muslims are supposed to stop fighting. This can be maddening for secular theorists of war, but it’s all in the Quran, and it is deeply honorable. This is actually the most moral philosophy of war I have found.”

“The point I’m getting at is that the Islamic Republic of Iran is what it says on the tin, they are true believers and this is what motivates them and it is necessary to read the Quran to understand them. Or, honestly, to understand anything in the region.”

“People who do not read the Quran use it to slander the Resistance as mindless zealots, but if you actually read it, it’s very clear, sensible, and just. It contains a very clear art of war, and a purely defensive one. Sometimes you do have to fight for justice, it doesn’t just appear. And I think it describes the fight between good and evil we’re seeing now. It is why, I think, Iran answers the call of suffering Palestinians from afar, even though there’s much more wealth and comfort in selling out like most of the region.”

“[…] the Quran gives clear authority to fight such people, with clear restrictions. It says,”

“If they keep away from you and cease their hostility and propose peace to you, God does not allow you to harm them.

“You will find others who wish to be safe from you, and from their own people, yet whenever they find an opportunity of inflicting harm, they plunge into it. So if they neither withdraw, nor offer you peace, nor restrain themselves from fighting you, seize and kill them wherever you encounter them. Over such people We have given you clear authority.”

“This tells you why Iran accepted a peace deal when they had ‘Israel’ on the ropes during the 12-Day War, but also why they don’t fear the war incoming. When such war is joined, the Quran gives courage.”

The Bombs Which Polish the Skulls of the Dead by Vijay Prashad (Scheer Post)

“A 2025 report by PAX and the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) titled At Great Cost: The Companies Building Nuclear Weapons and their Financiers found that, between January 2022 and August 2024, 260 global financial institutions (including pension funds, insurance companies, and asset managers) financed 24 nuclear weapons producers, with investors holding just under $514 billion in shares and bonds and with around $270 billion provided in loans and underwriting. These companies include Airbus, BAE Systems, Bechtel, Boeing, General Dynamics, L3Harris Technologies, Northrop Grumman, and Rolls-Royce. ICAN’s 2025 report Hidden Costs: Nuclear Weapons Spending in 2024 estimates that the nine nuclear-armed states spent $100.2 billion on their nuclear arsenals in 2024, with the private sector earning at least $42.5 billion from nuclear weapons contracts. That sum could have paid the UN’s budget 28 times and fed 345 million people facing the most severe hunger for nearly two years. The nuclear weapons industry is a striking waste of human resources.”

“The expiration of New START deepens the NPT’s crisis of legitimacy and exposes the disarmament promise as perpetually deferred. India, Israel, and Pakistan never signed the NPT; the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) signed it in 1985 but withdrew in 2003.”

“The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (2017). This is a legally binding instrument that represents a categorical rejection of nuclear arms. As of late 2025, ninety-nine countries had either ratified or signed the treaty, but none of the world’s nine nuclear-armed states are among them. In Europe, only Austria, the Holy See (Vatican), Ireland, Malta, and San Marino have ratified the treaty. The treaty, which was driven by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, is largely a Global South initiative.”

“What we have now are three overlapping crises:”

A crisis of stability.

With no transparency and verification on the largest nuclear weapons arsenals there is only suspicion between the major powers.

A crisis of legitimacy.

The countries with the largest arsenals demand obedience to non-proliferation while abandoning their own treaty commitment to disarmament.

A crisis of conscience.

Horrifyingly, nuclear weapons are now being spoken of as being usable, manageable, and necessary – as legitimate options on the battlefield.

“Even the best treaties only manage danger but do not eliminate it. The deeper contradiction remains intact: a world in which a few states claim the right to annihilate humanity in the name of security. The demise of New START strips away illusions to reveal a nuclear weapons order that preserves power and does not advance peace.”

Shoddy People by Hamilton Nolan

“The Secretary of Defense is a drunk newsman whose ideas for history’s most powerful military extend only to “increase your max bench,” and tail off from there. Likewise the FBI director, whose bug-eyed macho posturing evinces the desperation of a man trying not to think about the contempt in which his underlings hold him. The Attorney General’s primary qualification is the willingness to make loud declarative statements that are provably false while maintaining the serious visage of a television anchor. The Secretary of Homeland Security spends her time donning tactical gear and tossing around her inhuman ringlets while making videos for those with a Nazi propaganda kink. The Director of National Intelligence, a self-promoting political chameleon, has achieved the neat trick of being both incompetent and frozen out of power by other incompetents at the same time.

“The Transportation Secretary, a former reality star whose official White House biography boasts that “Rachel and Sean are America’s first and longest-married reality TV couple,” is not even close to being the cabinet’s least qualified member. The Education Secretary and head of the Small Business Administration are just rich women seemingly assigned their positions at random.”

“The Secretary of Health and Human Services is a certified loon, a classic dissolute child of privilege swirling into ever deeper cesspools of fringery, a former environmentalist transformed into a pesticide-boosting anti-vaxer, a man with no emotional or mental grounding in anything other than his determination to fulfill his destiny of poisoning the family name forever.

“The Labor Secretary and her husband are both under investigation for different sex-related violations, simultaneously. The Vice President combs expensive lotions into his beard and practices taking the oath of office in his mirror at night, tears running down his lonesome face, dreaming of being able to hurt enough people to prove to his mother that he is worth something.”

“[…] they are happy to perform a gruesome pantomime of deference to a tacky know-nothing whose plastic skin droops further towards the gutter with each passing day. Embarrassing, one might think; but the smallness of all involved serves them well. They are too shallow to be filled with shame, overflowing as they already are with the yokel dazzle of a Price Is Right contestant who has just heard their name called, at last.”

“The Non-News propaganda world has slippery quality of an MC Escher staircase to nowhere; with no attachment to anything but lols and lies, it can never be pinned down by any arrangement of facts, no matter how painstaking. Not even the greatest chess grandmaster can beat a child who doesn’t care how the pieces move anyhow. It thrives equally on your outraged attention, which it counts as a boost to its reach, and on your inattention, which leaves it alone to build its fantasies in peace. It is a cancer that grows whether you think about it or not, placid in its malignancy, driving you deeper into despair.”

“This layer of unhappy and unsuccessful con men lurk about in grudging respect for the more successful con men they see in charge. These are the angry small business owners with violent daydreams, the wheedling would-be hustlers trying to take advantage of modest and clumsy bribes, the Mar-a-Lago ghosts who haunt suburban Fort Lauderdale McMansions, clutching cheaply framed photos of themselves posing with the president in a holiday party receiving line.”

“The well-crafted lies have given way to careless ones. The conspiracies all fester in plain sight. The payoffs and the quid pro quos are conducted casually. The motivation to appear more just than they really are has left the ruling class. In its place is an odd sort of affinity for tawdriness, a newfound respect for disgrace. If everyone abandons all pretense at telling the truth all at once, well, the pressure’s off, isn’t it? It feels easier than ever before to sink into a warm bath of mediocrity. Acceptance of permanent decline is the only item on the menu. You might as well grab what you can before it all collapses. We are a nation commanded by the sort of people who would have stolen something off of a coworker’s desk before evacuating their World Trade Center office on 9/11.”

War on Iran and the Global South: Update 6 Operation Epstein’s Fury. Trump is lost, plan is gone. by Stanislav Krapivnik (YouTube)

At the beginning of this video, Stas notes that the U.S./Israeli alliance has bombed schools, police stations, and, now, UNESCO Heritage sites. They are following the same plan as always: murder not only people but their culture.

Is This the End of US Hegemony in West Asia? | KJ Noh on Iran War Escalation by India & Global Left | Jyotishman (YouTube)

“[…] the thing to understand about the majority of the Gulf States is that they are vassal imperial states of the West and that they are US outposts. They’re US bases and they fundamentally lack legitimacy. In fact, I would argue that many of them do not even rise to the status of a state as far as international law is concerned. Remember, if we think about the criteria of a state, a state has to have a defined territory. It has to have a government. It has to have the capacity to enter into independent relations with other states, which is questionable. And the most important dimension is that it should have a permanent population. Right?

“Now what is the population of say, Qatar right? They have 340,000 citizens. The rest of the 90% of the population are migrant labor. That’s the same for most of the gulf states: between 60 and 90% of their population is essentially expats and migrant labor. Essentially, they’re trumped-up monarchies that have have signed a bargain with the imperial devil and then are using that security umbrella to lord over a large number of people who are essentially indentured slaves.

“This is in the 21st century. This is not a sustainable state of affairs. And, in the case of, for example, Bahrain, you know, where the majority of the population is Shia, and it’s ruled by a Sunni elite—a monarchical minority. So, these are all unsustainable situations and, if the Gulf states are thinking clearly, then they should think that maybe they need to change direction, maybe they need to align with the global south. Maybe they need to stop being vassal states of the imperial west. Maybe they need to stop oppressing their populations.

“And maybe this is the reason and the opportunity for, you know, for a change and they can all go and live in, you know, Miami if they want. But I think that there’s some, you know, deep tectonic shifts that are happening in the region which will affect not just Iran and Israel but all of the Gulf States. I think there’s some major shifts happening. and I think that the US doesn’t realize that it has opened a Pandora’s box here.”

Iran War March 3rd: Apostates Burning, Hezbollah Returning, Tables Turning by Indrajit Samarajiva (Indica)

“The White Empire’s has the same strategy they’ve had since World War II. What they call strategic bombing, and what everyone else just calls killing civilians. What they’re doing in Iran is targeting hospitals, IVF banks, schools, police stations, homes, life in general. The idea is to spread terror until the enemy gives up, which never works, but they keep doing it. This scorched earth strategy failed in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, but it made a lot of money for people who only failed upwards. So the luxury terrorism goes on.”

“As American war planners are well aware, America’s basing structure along the Persian Gulf is indefensible, but America’s warmongers have war to mong and simply do not care. As former CENTCOM Commander Frank McKenzie said in 2024, “The United States will not be able to maintain these bases in a full-throated conflict, because they will be rendered unusable by sustained Iranian attack. It is the simple tyranny of geography.” He described the bases then, saying,”

“The United States considers the naval base at Manama, Bahrain, to be the “Main Operating Base” for U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) in the Middle East. It is the headquarters of the U.S. Fifth Fleet, the naval component (NAVCENT) of CENTCOM. There are airbases in Qatar, UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Jordan.”

“These exact bases are what Iran is hitting now. They are hitting Bahrain the most, and Qatar, UAE, Kuwait, and the UAE.”

“America can still unleash Tomahawks (named after previously genocided warriors) from aircraft carriers, but those have to reload in port. But what port? That’s the question Iran is trying to force. Once the shock and awe ends, it’s going to be aw, shucks, tail tucked, taking the long way around Africa. It is, as McKenzie said, the simple tyranny of geography. [Iran] knows the terrain better than the Americans, and they’re using it.”

“The fact is that air defenses don’t actually work as advertised, America has blown much of their load in Ukraine already, given the rest to the Jews, and actual Semites can get screwed. At the same time, even if they wanted to, America simple doesn’t make enough of this stuff. They’re making Lamborghinis to throw at lawnmowers in bespoke quantities.”

“This is the missile gap of our day, and it’s a delta that Iran is consciously trying to accelerate. I have seen 10-12 interceptors go up to often not stop one incoming, this stuff is getting depleted rapidly. America is talking about pulling batteries out of South Korea to move across, but it’s too little too late, and it’s not clear how they’d land it anyways.”

“This isn’t Game of Thrones where you need to string a physical chain across to cut ships off. Shipping has simply become uninsurable. It doesn’t matter if you can physically sail a ship through the strait or not. Financially, you cannot.”

Iran War 4: The Death Colony’s Shield Generator Is Down by Indrajit Samarajiva (Indica)

“Understand that there has been paradigm shift in warfare and America has already strategically lost. They’re lost the rocket wars, they don’t even have hypersonics. America’s basic model is vertical (drop bombs from planes) and Iran’s model is horizontal (bomb goes up from truck). America has modified some bombs to launch from planes, and they can use ships to launch some missiles, but they don’t have a lot of this type of missile because it’s not their business model. America making smart missiles is like Nokia trying to make smartphones. They’re already generations behind and they’re going out of business soon enough. It’s really that big of a paradigm shift. Yemen has already proved this, but Americans are dumb and Iran will prove it again.”

“Hitting the gravity bong, War Secretary Pete Hegseth has declared ‘we have precision gravity bombs.’ This is just a dumb way of saying dumb bombs that just fall down. They can do this, but then they have to put planes right over Iran, and they can’t even get out of Kuwait with their pants on. And America can’t lose planes anymore, because they can’t make more till 2034. They’re talking shit with a glass jaw.”

“Iran doesn’t need to spend 10 years assembling fancy aerial launch platforms out of magic rocks that China doesn’t sell them anymore. They just use a truck. And they’re not using up five years of production capacity in three days—like Americans are doing with Tomahawks. And they don’t have to go back to a home port to reload, they are home. Iran is on its own land, following its own plan, which has been methodically worked out for this precise result. The attrition of American arms, like the dinosaur they are. It is just a matter of time until America runs out of ammo and, as the Afghan saying goes, you may have the watches, but we have the time.”

Iran is mostly mountains

Look at how mountainous that country is. It’s like Switzerland but the size of all of western Europe. Get the fuck out of here with “boots on the ground.”

“A US submarine just sunk a Iranian ship off Sri Lanka carrying mostly a marching band and left us [the writer is Sri Lankan] to pick up the wounded and dead.

“The Geneva Conventions obviously doesn’t apply to colored people, as Reichschancellor Merz has told us; they just left these men drowning. Even the Nazis would pick up drowning enemies, until the Americans bombed one of their U-Boats for doing so. Americans really are worse than Nazis and always were. Now they’re showing their true face, death and destruction as their drunk Secretary of War has told us quite proudly. But Iran has shown us the true face of Resistance. And it is beautiful.”

“Hezbollah has smoked at least 5 tanks, drawn multiple IOF soldiers into multiple ambushes, and is swarming the northern occupation with drones and missiles. As soon as Iran takes down land-based radars in the Gulf and the aircraft carriers retreat, the Radwan Force is just waiting to go Ewokalypse on northern Palestine. Decolonizing Palestine from the top, inshallah.”

This post was from a couple of days ago. Both of those things have happened: carrier groups have pulled back 1000 miles and Iran took out a unique, $1B radar installation that provided intelligence and tracking for the entire Gulf region.

“The more radars get hit, the more radars get hit. Once the shields are down, you can land many more blows.”

“Some of my friends are like ‘why isn’t ‘Israel’ being bombed more,’ but their therapy takes a backseat to the military theory of the Resistance. It is, and I repeat, take down the Gulf Shield Generator, scatter the aircraft carriers, and then take down the Death Colony. And this has already begun. Iran is already hitting targets in occupied Palestine”

“Iran can hit Ben Gurion, which wasn’t possible before. And Ansarallah is just waiting to join in, but they’re not even needed right now. The Empire will sue for a ceasefire soon, as they run out of bullets to shoot down bullets, but right now Iran isn’t returning their calls, and I hope they don’t.”

Economic Crash Incoming by Indrajit Saramajiva (Indica)

“Qatar Energy has just declared force majeure, which means they cannot honor contracts, they cannot deliver product (LNG specifically). Qatar is simply acknowledging the reality that the markets will not. Nothing is moving through the Strait of Hormuz. As Iran somewhat hilariously said to the UN, “We haven’t closed the Strait of Hormuz, but it is not currently open.””

“The downside is that this will crash the global economy, which is hopelessly plugged in. Stock markets don’t reflect this because they’re a cabal of crooks, but anyone with eyes can look. The average Sri Lankan went on a petrol run last week because we’ve lived through energy collapse before. That’s what’s coming to the whole world. The markets have barely registered the impact of the Strait of Hormuz being shut down, but there is a real impact in the real world. Fossil fuels, the fertilizer made with fossil fuels, the investments financed with fossil fuels, that’s all cooked. Energy is the only real currency, as Vaclav Smil says, and the Gulf States are going bankrupt.”

“Why haven’t the markets priced this in? Why don’t people in a casino know what time it is? Because in a casino they never turn the lights down, but when the power cuts start, the run will make the 2008 crash look like a cakewalk. Iran is squeezing the necks of all the wicked who feasted while Gaza starved and you can’t say they didn’t have it coming. However—as always—it is the bodies of the poor that will take the brunt.”

Iran War 5: A Fire Burning Green and Dry by Indrajit Samarajiva (Indica)

“The ‘Shield Generator’ for the Death Colony is actually the radar stations in the Gulf States which are being decimated on the daily. They’re hitting the same radar again and again which means, for ‘Israel’, that “There was only 4 minutes of early warning this time, instead of the usual 7-8,” according to Middle East Spectator. Shortly after, they reported that, “this time, the early warning came only ONE (!) minute before the actual red alerts. Hebrew media confirms this is due to destroyed U.S. radars. Within a few days, there may be no early warning at all—making fleeing to shelters significantly more difficult.” At this point the settlers should get the point. They don’t need to flee. They need to leave.”

“As BBC Persia (which is supposed to be propagandizing the Iranians) said, via Fotros, “Israeli censorship has banned them from live broadcasting during Iran’s missile attacks. He says they can’t even broadcast the city. Israeli censorship is truly next level.””

American imperialism wages war of extermination against Iran by WSWS Editorial Board (WSWS)

“The sinking of an Iranian vessel more than 3,000 kilometers from Iran—carried out in international waters on Wednesday—is the latest act in a boundless campaign of destruction that recognizes no legal or geographic restraint. The vessel had 180 people on board, and the Sri Lankan navy rescued 32 people, meaning that 148 people were killed.

“In the opening days of the war, the United States and Israel murdered a large section of the Iranian leadership, including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Tehran and other cities have been hammered by repeated air attacks. Hospitals have been hit. A girls’ elementary school in Minab was struck, killing over 150 children, part of a death toll that has already passed 1,000.

“There is a repeated refrain in the media that President Trump “does not have a strategy.” This is a lie. There is a strategy: the obliteration of Iran as a state and a campaign of terror against the population. The methods pioneered by the United States and Israel in Gaza are now being scaled up from an enclave of 2 million people to a country of more than 90 million.”

“The very brutality of the assault expresses an element of desperation: A ruling class that cannot secure its aims through political means turns to mass murder to intimidate and break resistance. But this war will not crush the Iranian people. Each day this war continues deepens anger and outrage among workers and youth throughout the world—and within the United States itself.

“Outrage, however widespread, is not enough. The decisive question is the development of a political perspective, a conscious program, and the independent mobilization of the international working class—the only social force capable of stopping the descent into barbarism.”

If Westerners Could Wrap Their Minds Around What War Really Is by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“[…] the western empire depends on war. War is the glue that holds the empire together. They need the mass-scale bloodshed to continue, and they need the public to provide no resistance to the bloodshed. The empire cannot exist without war. Peace cannot exist without the removal of the empire.

“You watch these bespectacled pundits and pampered politicians babbling about war the way they’d talk about their plans to remodel their kitchen or take a trip to Paris, and you just know if actual war ever showed up on their doorstep they’d literally soil themselves. They’d never recover. They’d spend the rest of their lives in shock and trauma, because what they saw would have shaken them irreparably to their very core.

“It would impact them in this way because war is the worst thing in the world. Anyone with a functioning empathy center and a truth-based worldview would move mountains to prevent war from happening. And yet we are ruled by sociopaths who actively seek it out. War is the worst thing in the world, and we are ruled by the worst people in the world.

“The world will never know peace until we cease to allow such creatures to rule over us.”

Can Israel & the U.S. Sustain Iran's Military Power? (w/ Alastair Crooke) by The Chris Hedges Report (YouTube)

An excellent, clear-eyed report by Alastair Crooke, explaining that most of what people think they know about Iran is wrong. And most of what they think has happened in the war is wrong. Iran is taking damage but the U.S. has lost irreplaceable resources.

Top comment:

“The war is going so poorly Trump will have to start releasing Epstein files just to distract from it”

Closing remarks:

“Chris: I just want to close, having worked in Iran for many years, and I believe you did too. The caricature of Iranians including the supreme leader—who was extremely literate: his favorite book, I believe, was Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables—is part of the problem, in that they have been turned into cartoon characters. And we’re talking about a rich, deep, Persian culture and tradition. They’re not the people they’re painted as.

“Alastair: I couldn’t agree with you more. […] you put your finger on it. This is a catastrophe of miscognition. They just don’t understand. And what is more, there is absolutely zero empathy. They view and treat the Iranians as Israeli subhumans.”

Iran Is Morally Superior To The United States by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“Genocides. Starvation sanctions. Nuclear brinkmanship. Imperialist extraction. The deliberate creation of failed states and humanitarian catastrophes. Policies designed to keep entire regions in a continuous state of division and strife. The United States and the globe-spanning empire structured around it have inflicted depravities upon our species which cry out to the heavens for vengeance. If you could truly comprehend the scale of the suffering it has created over the years, even for a second, you would never stop screaming.”

“Sure it’s probably nicer to live in the United States than Iran, especially now, and certainly ever since the US has been deliberately strangling the Iranian economy with the explicitly stated goal of making its citizenry so miserable they wage a civil war against their government.

“But it’s so revealing that westerners see someone saying Iran is better than the United States and think it’s a statement about where they personally would prefer to live, because it shows how completely invisible US warmongering is in their worldview. Washington’s acts of mass military slaughter simply do not count as immoral or abusive behavior in their eyes, because they are being inflicted on foreigners overseas. So they automatically assume the comparison is asking which country would make your feelings feel nicer to live in as an individual.

“The fact that the US government happens to export the majority of its abusiveness to other countries outside its own borders doesn’t make it any less murderous and tyrannical, it just means the people bearing the brunt of its savagery happen to live in other places. Their lives don’t matter any less than American lives, and only a warped, American supremacist worldview would feel otherwise.”

After Killing Little Girls, We Strut and Preen by Matt Bivens, M.D. (The 100 Days)

“We don’t fight fair, we punch down, we kill children. Is any of this supposed to make me proud? Because mostly it just makes me want to see all of my elected and appointed leaders on trial.”

Trump says US Navy will escort ships through Strait of Hormuz as Iran war spirals by Andre Damon (WSWS)

“Iran has declared the strait closed. IRGC Brigadier General Ebrahim Jabari announced on state television: “The Strait is closed. If anyone tries to pass, the heroes of the Revolutionary Guards and the regular navy will set those ships ablaze.” The withdrawal of maritime insurers has reinforced the blockade—doing the work of mines and warships.”

That is an interesting way of putting it. Iran says its closed and the lack of insurance means that they don’t even have to back that claim up immediately.

“The economic fallout is already immense. Brent crude surged past $84 a barrel, up 15 percent since the strikes began. Gas prices jumped 11 cents overnight to $3.11 a gallon. European natural gas surged 43 percent after Iranian drone strikes forced QatarEnergy to halt LNG production. Gold hit $5,418 an ounce.”

Gold is back down to $5,158 on the weekend but it has now become quite a volatile commodity as well.

“Administration officials and leading congressmen are openly forecasting weeks or months of bombing. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement to the press on Tuesday, “You’re going to really begin to perceive a change in the scope and in the intensity of these attacks” as “the two most powerful air forces in the world take apart this terroristic regime.””

Is this the kind of crap that people are listening to all day long? Those poor people; they start to believe it.

“Senator Tom Cotton, Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told CBS that “we’re probably looking at weeks, not days, of joint efforts by the United States, Israel and our Arab partners.” Democratic Senator Chris Murphy said administration officials described “an open-ended conflict” and told senators the military campaign “hasn’t even really started in earnest yet.”

“In a letter sent to Congress on Monday, Trump wrote, “It is not possible at this time to know the full scope and duration of military operations that may be necessary.””

Translation: we have no plan but we’re coming up with one. God help the righteous U.S.A. to come up with armaments.

“The assault on Iran takes place within the context of a broader eruption of American militarism across the globe. In a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on the National Defense Strategy the same day, Senator Roger Wicker declared: “President Trump’s actions in the Western Hemisphere, the Middle East and Europe are inextricably linked to our overall struggle against the Chinese Communist Party. Tailored use of military force and support in Venezuela, Iran and Ukraine has thwarted Chinese and Russian objectives and denied their access to resources and technology.””

Poor Iran: it’s not even about them necessarily. They’re just in the way, providing resources to China. May Iran resist the Empire.

“The American ruling class has set in motion a chain of events it cannot control. A war launched to assert imperialist dominance over the Persian Gulf is spreading across the Middle East, convulsing the global economy, and accelerating the trajectory toward a global military conflagration.”

This Is Even Dumber And Crazier Than The Iraq War by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“This is just open savagery. The US and Israel are pursuing the Libya model with Iran: smashing and decapitating the nation and then leaving the people to pick up the pieces and deal with all the chaos, lawlessness and sectarian conflict that ensues. They intend to plunge a nation of 90 million people into mass-scale strife and potential state collapse or balkanization, and then casually stroll away from the wreckage in cool indifference to the suffering they just unleashed upon the world.

“They make no claim to be replacing the Iranian government with a better one. They make no claim to be bringing freedom and democracy to an oppressed people. They’re selling WMD lies and atrocity propaganda, but only in the most half-assed and low-energy of ways, with no interest in whether anyone actually believes them. Mostly they’re just destroying an ancient nation because they can, and looking at the world saying “Yeah we’re thugs. What are you gonna do about it?””

The US Soldiers Killed In This War Were Not Heroes, And Other Notes by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack)

“[…] Your instincts about the horrific nature of this war are correct. Anyone who told you not to oppose this is an asshole. Don’t let anyone shout you down and shut you up, regardless of where their family happens to come from. Shout right back at them. Tell them to shut up. You are right, and they are wrong. Get out there and start resisting this thing.”

“I don’t understand people who fret about sending American boots on the ground in a war of aggression that’s already slaughtering hundreds of civilians every day. These people are like space aliens to me. I cannot for the life of me imagine what it would be like to inhabit a mind that sees bombing civilians as fine, and only becomes “fearful” of a horrific military conflict if it will kill a lot of soldiers from the same country as you.”

Venezuela and US reestablish diplomatic relations as Chavistas hand over oil, minerals (WSWS)

Meanwhile in the previous war…

“US officials have indicated, however, that the US Treasury Department not only has full control over which firms are granted licenses to sell Venezuelan oil, but over the disbursement of the proceeds. While the initial $500 million in oil sales following the capture of Maduro were routed through Qatar, these are now going directly to accounts handled by the Treasury Department, with total discretion on whether to disburse the money to the Venezuelan government, or keep it as war booty.”

“In a matter of weeks, Rodríguez has handed over control of the economy and shaken hands with CIA Director John Ratcliffe, SOUTHCOM’s commander Gen. Francis Donovan, Energy Secretary Chris Wright and other top US officials. Despite once decrying Trump’s “perverse plans of fascism,” she now calls the would-be US Fuhrer her “friend and partner” and writes on social media: “I thank President Donald Trump for his kind willingness… to work together.””

That sounds more like what you would hear from a hostage video but OK.

“The relinquishing by the Chavista leadership of economic, political and territorial sovereignty and the overall accommodation by nominally “left” governments across the region to Trump’s threats demonstrate that bourgeois nationalism is, without exception, a counter-revolutionary agency of imperialism.”

Unfortunately, hostage or not, this is the only conclusion. And, unfortunately, the only alternative is … what’s happening in Iran. At least, until those motherfuckers finally run out of guns and money. FFS, when will their scam finally run out? When will they get a comeuppance for their savagery and overreach? C’mon.

According to Roaming Charges: Calling All Angels! by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch),

“According to Reuters, the Trump Administration is preparing a legal case against Venezuelan interim president Delcy Rodriguez, including readying a criminal indictment, “to strengthen its leverage with Caracas.” These are the predictable rewards of cooperating with pathological liars, Delcy.”

Mass Expulsion in Lebanon as Israel Expands War: “We Don’t Know Where to Go” by Lylla Younes (Drop Site News)

““It was a home for displaced people. They weren’t building rockets,” Arout told Drop Site. “Where are the European nations with their great morals? Where is the conscience of humanity?”

“Hezbollah’s decision to fire rockets across the border at Israel marked the first major violation of the ceasefire by the group since it took effect in November 2024. Over that same period, Israel has bombed Lebanon on a near daily basis, killing over 340 people, and committing over 15,000 ceasefire violations, according to the UN. It also established five military positions and two “buffer zones” inside Lebanon.”

“In Mais al-Jabal, as with other towns in the area, Israel conducted routine nighttime incursions, assassination operations, and drone surveillance. Israeli troops targeted villages who tried to rebuild their homes or tended to farmland close to the border. Faced with these conditions, Arout said he came to support Hezbollah’s decision to reenter the war.

““We are lovers of life, we don’t like death,” he said. “But a good, dignified life, not a life of humiliation.””

“In a statement early Tuesday, Hezbollah said “confrontation is a legitimate right,” adding that it had repeatedly warned that Israeli attacks “could not continue without a response.” Senior Hezbollah official Mohamoud Komati went further, saying, “The Zionist enemy wanted an open war, which it has not stopped since the ceasefire agreement,” senior official Mohamoud Komati said. “So let it be an open war.””

The End of American Hegemony by Pascal Lottaz | John Snow (Neutrality Studies)

“American strategists in the Pentagon are worried that their campaign, planned for only a few days, could drag on until ammunition stocks are depleted—especially anti-air defense missiles, which are extremely expensive and whose reserves had already been heavily consumed by the war in Ukraine and the previous twelve-day war of June 2025. There is even talk of redeploying air-defense systems currently stationed in South Korea and Japan to replace equipment missing or destroyed in the Middle East.

“America, which has deindustrialized for decades, is no longer capable of producing munitions commensurate with the needs of its aggressive hegemonic power. It takes a remarkable degree of hubris and blindness to have started a war against Iran under these conditions. This is one of the clear signs of the inevitable decline of the West, and first and foremost of the United States of America. In trying to halt or reverse this decline, Trump has only accelerated it.”

“American Christian evangelicals, including those in the military, also believe in this myth, which is also found in another form in the Book of Revelation. They are convinced that Trump is fulfilling God’s plan. And in their prophetic delusions, some even predict that Russia, Turkey, and others will attack Israel before being annihilated. When one reads this, one can understand that the argument of the Iranian nuclear program is just a pretext to attack, like the alleged Weapons of Mass Destruction of Iraq were in 2003.

“Yet reasonable experts like Jeffrey Sachs, John Mearsheimer, Douglas Macgregor, Scott Ritter, and Larry Johnson, who do not believe that killing children in Gaza or Tehran could be in accordance with the will of any God worthy of the name, have been warning for months about the enormous risks of a war against Iran.”

“American politics thus resembles a field of ruins. And it is difficult to see what could emerge from it. If Democrats were to win by default, Trump’s impeachment might once again be considered—and this time it might succeed if the Iranian war truly ends in disaster for the United States and Israel. But there is another problem: Vice President JD Vance also supported this suicidal operation against Iran. He has therefore discredited himself as well.

“Saving the United States will require many figures like Thomas Massie—the man whose revelations finally began to expose the Epstein affair—whom Trump himself has repeatedly insulted and threatened politically. Someone more stable and determined than Trump would have to retrieve the MAGA movement from the gutter and transform it into something reasonable. In a normal world, figures such as Thomas Massie would deserve the highest office. But is that possible in an America still largely dominated by financial power?”

Journalism & Media

when CNN 'lost connection' in 2012 by HasanAbi (YouTube)

Hasan has unearthed a short clip from CNN from 2012, where they were interviewing a 28-year-old soldier who’d served two tours of duty in Afghanistan and had re-upped for a third. He had just voted for Ron Paul because he wants a president who brings home the troops.

The interviewer asks him,

“[…] some Republicans out there have been saying that Ron Paul would be very dangerous for this country because he wants to bring troops like you back from your post from all over the world.”

He answered,

“I think it would be even more dangerous to start nitpicking wars with
other countries. Someone like Iran, [INTERFERENCE AND STATIC] Israel is more than capable of [SIGNAL CUTS OUT]”

It has always been this way. 14 years ago, it was taboo to speak about Israel’s role in provoking war with Iran. This soldier knew that this is exactly what has always been happening. He was there.

This is perhaps the most succinct clip you could publish, showing how U.S. propaganda works and how it defends itself when threatened. Shut and fight our wars, boy.

The Ellisons Taking Over Warner is Pants on Fire Stuff, but Team Progressive Just Whines by Dean Baker (CounterPunch)

“The fact that the Ellisons can put right-wing hacks like Bari Weiss in charge of the news that people see between the campaign ads is a far greater threat to democracy than the 30-second campaign ads that the rich can buy in abundance.”

Agreed.

“They can use their control to make sure that viewers don’t hear about the torture prisons in El Salvador where Trump sends non-criminal immigrants. They can prevent us from seeing the innocent people shot in the streets of Minneapolis by masked goons sent in by the Department of Homeland Security. And they can promote Trumpian lies about an economic boom that only exists in Trump’s head or a Biden disaster that also has no relationship to reality.”

Agreed.

“This is not hypothetical; Fox News has been pushing an imaginary world to its viewers for decades. It now seems that CBS and possibly also CNN, with the Ellisons’ takeover of Warner Brothers, will go in the same direction. It is very plausible that we could get network news shows that will be nothing but variations of Fox News, with rightwing billionaires using their money to suppress any news of the world that runs counter to their political agenda. And this outcome would not change one iota if Citizens United was magically overturned.”

Agreed but FFS Dean, why can’t you see how captured all media is by the State department? Constantly using FOX News as an example of captured/state media is just as ineffective as attacking Citizen’s United (the argument you’re making here). You’re preaching to your choir.

To shake things up, you need to recognize that your precious NYT, Washington Post, and CNN, NBC, MSNBC (or whatever the fuck they call themselves now, I absolutely do not care at all) are just as bad, if not worse. They might be worse because they are not nearly as obvious about their slavish devotion to the agenda of American Empire.

Brother, just look at the coverage of the Iran war so far. Look at their coverage running up to the Iran war. Look at their coverage of any violence perpetrated by the U.S. empire. Dean, your argument is weakened by your utter inability to name a single instance of malfeasance that isn’t also an accepted Democratic Party talking point.

“People should recognize that the prospect of right-wing billionaires completely controlling the news networks is a pretty horrible. But we have to do more than whine. We also can’t just pray for a more progressive billionaire to step forward and buy some news outlets. It’s great that some billionaires are not fascists, but a progressive movement that relies on billionaires to lead is pretty pathetic.”

Agreed.

Labor

Redneck Gone Green with Special Guest Ajamu Baraka by Democracy At Work (YouTube)

“The revolutionary initiative has moved to the global south for for quite some time. The issue we have in the global north is the irresponsibility of leftists, of revolutionaries, in the north to do the work that needs to be done to help to put a brake on US imperialism. That, basically, because of the arrogance you are referencing, that when a nation finds itself in the crosshair of US intervention, instead of the focus being from the activism in the north on […] the activity of their state, and with the objective of putting a brake on these interventionist activities, instead they engage in these torturous discussions—analysis, interrogations—of the internal workings of these nations in order to determine whether or not they’re good enough to to receive solidarity from activists in the global north. That is backward eurosentric nonsense.”

Economy & Finance

Tech CEOs boast about AI-driven mass layoffs by Kevin Reed (WSWS)

“AI agents capable of executing multi‑step tasks on platforms have already begun to automate the more routine parts of programming, quality assurance and back‑office work, enabling management to increase throughput expectations on the remaining staff while claiming that “redundant” workers can be dispensed with.

“Industry analysts now explicitly forecast that AI could impact “the majority of computer‑based positions,” while IMF head Kristalina Georgieva warns that it will alter or replace a “substantial portion of jobs worldwide,” with highly uneven and socially explosive consequences.

“Under capitalism, the integration of AI does not mean the liberation of workers from monotonous tasks, but the consolidation of those tasks into automated systems that are owned and controlled by a tiny financial oligarchy, which uses them to slash payrolls and intensify exploitation.”

“A widely shared summary of January layoffs counted 30,000 corporate roles cut at Amazon, 24,000 at Intel (around 20 percent of its workforce), 48,000 at UPS through automation, along with thousands more at Meta and other firms pivoting aggressively to AI.”

Doesn’t this also look like the economy is shrinking? Like, what if the panacea of free work doesn’t pan out? (It won’t.) Could this not just be companies boosting their stock prices, but in their death throes?

What did China do right to make life so affordable?! by Li Jingjing 李菁菁 (YouTube)

Brink of homelessness by jasoncheny (Reddit)

“When I was a kid, I never understood how there’s so many homeless people. I never understood that.

“My dad was always like, ‘Oh, ‘cause they’re lazy. They didn’t work hard.‘

“And I just believed that!

“But, then, as you grow, … you start to pay bills. … Every month? Not one month off?!? Everybody just doin’ this? Every single month?

“And then your perspective changed.

“Now, I’m like, ‘How is there not more homeless people?’

“Like, how are most of us not homeless?!?”

Environment & Climate Change

Severe drought conditions imperil US Southwest, as states wrestle over water rights by Alex Findijs, Dan Conway (WSWS)

“Central to the impasse is disagreement on how states should share the burden of conserving water after a quarter century of drought, the worst in 1,200 years. Due to climate change and overallocation, the Bureau of Reclamation (BoR) estimates that the Basin states will need to reduce consumptive use by up to 4 million acre-feet, about a quarter of allocated volume (an acre-foot is roughly 326,000 gallons).

“Consumptive use has largely exceeded annual supply for decades and over the past several years Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the two largest reservoirs in the US, have declined to concerning levels. Lake Mead is currently one-third full, and Lake Powell is a quarter full. Conditions are expected to worsen, with Lake Powell predicted to receive only half the normal inflow this year—and potentially just 37 percent—according to the BoR.”

“While the Lower Basin has been the one to propose shared cuts during shortages, it refuses to acknowledge that its excessive claims on the river cannot be sustained and that the Upper Basin cannot be compelled to subsidize its overuse.

“Historically, the Lower Basin has used more than its allocation of 7.5 million acre-feet (maf), while the Upper Basin has only used 4-5maf. Agriculture is the largest consumer of this water, accounting for 70-90 percent of consumptive use, of which the majority is used for growing alfalfa and hay for livestock.”

“In total today there are 16.5maf of allocations in a system yielding only 12-13maf of water annually. The Lower Basin claims 4.4maf for California, 2.8maf for Arizona and 0.3maf for Nevada. In the Upper Basin the states distribute water by percentage: Colorado 51.75 percent (~3.8maf), Utah 23 percent (1.7maf), New Mexico 11.25 percent (0.84maf), Wyoming 14 percent (~ 1maf).

“This does not account for all claims on water rights that cannot be satisfied because of overallocation within states and the largely unfulfilled rights of Native American tribes. The Center for Natural Resources and Environmental Policy estimates that tribal water rights may total 3.6maf, of which the BoR estimates only 1.4maf is being used due to a lack of infrastructure, losing the rest to other users despite often having seniority. Providing tribes with water they were systematically denied as part of the genocide of the native population will require massively reducing use from other users, primarily in agriculture.”

“Under these conditions the Colorado River can be considered in a state of “Water Bankruptcy,” as defined by a recent UN report, in which water resources have been overused and mismanaged to such a degree that the impacts are often irreversible and require a complete restructuring of use.

“Through decades of overuse, the Colorado River no longer reaches the sea, destroying ecosystems and communities that once thrived in the Colorado Delta. Agricultural runoff into the Salton Sea has turned it into a polluted wasteland that releases toxic dust as it recedes. Prioritization of profit has stymied efforts to conserve agricultural water and encouraged the depletion of aquifers.”

Art, Literature, Music, & Cinema

Coming Clean by Justin Smith-Ruiu (The Hinternet)

“In all probability this will be my last properly scholarly book. In fact I suspect it will be one of the last scholarly books tout court. The world is moving on. If I started my career at a moment when it made sense to take Aristotle or Kant, or indeed Leibniz, as proper models, as contributors not just of great works, but of great works that appeared at the right moment in history to be great works, it seems to me that one can now hope at best to work in the vein of Isidore of Seville, whose wonderful —and wonderfully, systematically wrong— Etymologies amount to a sort of swan song of ancient learning before several centuries of forgetfulness, near-universal illiteracy, and serfdom. With me it used to be: “Let me get this work out so I can contribute to our ongoing glorious tradition! ”Now it’s: “Well, I’ve got this in me anyhow, might as well get it out before it really is too late.””

“[…] the rather intensive reading and thinking and writing, in Latin and German and Slavonic and occasionally in Turkish and Uzbek and Karakalpak too —with the help of suitable reference works of course, which all you stubborn monoglots could consult too, if you wished, if you knew what your minds were really capable of—, that is required to wrap this book in the next few months.”

“I hate being enserfed to the new logic of constant engagement, and I have to admit that my serious scholarly training, and what survives of my intellectual rigor, enables me to recognize that sometimes, to do one’s work well, one must slow down, one must step away, one must retreat, one must miss out on engagement. If there is a way to do that without losing my faithful readership, I will be very happy.”

Under the Ribcage by Hinternet Production Labs (The Hinternet)

Truly unique. These mysterious missives from the future continue to offer one of the more satisfying returns to the inevitable question of “should I _really_ listen to this?” that you can find anywhere. Thanks for sharing. I hope the wormhole through which you receive these remains open and I look forward to being pleasantly surprised again, at some unspecified and unknowable time in my future (though perhaps not the same future from which these arise).

Kyys Ñurgun’s Battle by Justin Smith-Ruiu (The Hinternet)

“Did they fight one another,
Powerfully
Did they kick one another,
Grandly
Did they engage in battle,
Nor did they stop
The blood from flowing,
Nor refrain
From gouging at each other’s eyes,
Flesh turning to rags,
They simply did not know
Whose sinews, whose slather,
Were whose,
Fracturing bone and tendon,
They did not think to make peace,
They thought nothing of rupturing one another’s hearts,
They paid no mind to a burst bladder,
Like hungry wolves
They tore each other to pieces,
Like lions
They pounced and punctured each other.”

I left the following comment.

This was absolutely wonderful (if unfortunately somewhat timely, given the brand-new and utterly unwelcome battle of titans to which we began being treated just a week ago).

What incredibly visual poetry. For fans of anime, it reads like the script to a final battle scene of a One Punch Man episode.

Referring to your recent essay Coming Clean, I, for one, am absolutely here for this. I usually read on my E-Book reader so I somewhat rarely return to the SubStack page, rendering my performative engagement admittedly abysmal. Know that my actual engagement with your work is, while perhaps not off the charts, very much an important part of my ongoing and unending intellectual growth.

My subscription will weather any and all storms.

Justin wrote back,

“Thanks! I often allude to Tom & Jerry and Looney Tunes as a point of comparison for Siberian oral epic, and the same would go for much medieval European narrative as well (e.g., Le Roman de Renart). I don’t know anything about anime myself, but this is not so surprising to learn.”

I responded with,

This two-minute clip of the battle between Garou and Bang (YouTube) doesn’t use the original soundtrack nor does it provide any context but I think it suffices to show why I thought of One Punch Man while reading this poem.

The clip is considerably bloodier (though not more violent) than Tom & Jerry, so my mind turned to that first, though Looney Tunes and Tom & Jerry are also very appropriate western examples of the level of violence described in the poem.

Another response from the author:

“Thanks. I find something is actively blocking me from learning anything about anime. I’ve got my beats, and that’s just not one of them. Perhaps someday I’ll find the courage to overcome that blockage, but for now I find I am simply unable to click the link. I suppose I find some paradoxical comfort in the idea that the arts and culture that matter are all in the past. Thanks again though, sincerely.”

Understood and no offense taken. Perhaps the link can help someone else visualize. We are, after all, discoursing in public.

I, too, have my (many) beats (though anime is most definitely not one of them). I very much sympathize with the respect one must have for the potential that each click has to open up another beat, a discovery that should be joyful but which, sometimes, feels more an onus, as it threatens to upset a carefully curated schedule already thick with other beats. Sometimes discretion really is the better part of valor.

As to “the idea that the arts and culture that matter are all in the past”, I was tempted to take the flip interpretation and write that I, too, restrict myself to plumbing the past for arts and culture, and that I’ve not yet come upon the trick for finding it in the future, but I can’t pretend to not understand exactly what you mean for the sake of a questionably clever riposte.

I was later reminded of something that Mary Cadwalladr wrote in “Fire moves away” on the 1st of this year, and which I very much appreciated,

“Did any good music come out in 2025? I don’t know, maybe. Who cares. I might get around to caring about it 20 years from now.”

I have thought about this more than once since, when people wonder why I’m reading books written in or watching movies made in the 20th century instead of this one.

Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture

Intelligent Life of Earth by Corey Mohler (Existential Comics)

“The unfortunate truth is that for the vast majority of humans, the vast majority of the time, we more or less operate like the machines (including you, the brave reader, and me, the wise writer). We get almost all of our knowledge not by actually understanding the world, but by basically just repeating what other people have said. The more something is repeated, the more true it is. It’s why propaganda is so successful, and it’s why some people have recently put so much money and effort into buying up social media sites. Not so they can actually educate people, but so they can get certain things repeated more often, to train us like they train A.I. chatbots. If something is repeated often enough, most people simply believe it, and start repeating it themselves. It’s also why you can predict someone’s ideas very well by simply knowing where and when they lived. We seem to mostly just absorb ideas passively in a kind of statistical approach, much like self-learning machines do.

“The only way to counter this is for humans to be more like humans, and less like machines. Which means we have to use the one thing we have that machines don’t: our consciousness. We have to be conscious not only of our ideas, but where we got those ideas from, and whether or not we actually understand them, and actually know them. This, I suppose, is the role of the philosopher, but ideally we should all be a little bit philosophers. Unfortunately it is a lot of work, so we can’t be bothered most of the time. As George Bernard Shaw put it: “few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.””

That seems to be all it takes to keep clear of the pack. When people ask me what I do, I tell them “I’m a philosopher” and then see how that lands. They wouldn’t understand what I do to make money anyway. They might as well be confused about the thing that I actually am.

The Good Rich Man? by Bruce Robbins (The Baffler)

““Growing up bourgeois confers some advantages—time to study, as well as exposure to the nature of power—often denied to people further down the social hierarchy.” It does the cause of equality no good, he implies, if these advantages are treated as incriminating evidence of a privilege that no one should enjoy rather than as signifiers of a well-being that one day will hopefully be available to any and all.”

“The situation of Dickens’s rentier as Orwell sees him, well-intentioned but unable to perform the magic that would end the exploitation of which he is a reluctant beneficiary, neatly matches Orwell’s account of the situation of his likely left-wing readers—and, though he is less clear on this point, his own situation as well.”

“Weber famously argued in “Politics as a Vocation” that the politician would have to be a rentier, which is to say independently wealthy. This is not self-evident. Organizers, activists, and politicians need not be wealthy, and for the good of society probably should not be. Weber ignored the likelihood that being independently wealthy would give political leaders an interest in protecting and maintaining the state of society that generated their income.

“But he was right that they could not be expected to work a normal nine to-five, five-days-a-week schedule and still perform the public duties that define them. The same holds for organizers, activists—and even students. Like the rentier, such social categories need to be supported, if only temporarily, out of some portion of society’s economic surplus.”

How To Build A Monster: The Man-Child Goblins Who Never Heard “No” by Kathleen Wallace (CounterPunch)

“We’re seeing the results of raising wealthy mediocre men in a bubble—a bubble free of pesky limitations to their horrendous behavior. A rarefied place from which they were never taught the barest of consequences for terrible actions. These were the kinds of boys who had all of their misbehavior explained away and then someone else swooped in to clean up the mess, as if it never happened.”

“[…] if you take a young boy, perhaps one with antisocial and narcissistic tendencies to begin with, and you give him everything he wants–you never correct cruel behavior and in fact actively blame his victims at the hint of any consequences. This informal scientific experiment gives you a problem not just for the immediate victims of the man-boy, but for society as a whole. These boys grow up having never felt the most basic human condition, that of consequences. And in a society based on exploitation and subjugation, these are the very men who thrive and generally find themselves in amplified positions of power.”

“How does a man who has been at the helm of six corporate bankruptcies land a television show that glamorizes him as a titan of industry? How does a man brag about grabbing women by the pussy and declare that he would date his daughter, if you know, she wasn’t his daughter, not get met with vomit? How does a man who married three times, with kids from all these different baby mommas proclaim himself the protector of family values? Do a thought experiment and try to imagine a woman, hell, how about a woman of color, saying any of these things. Would she have had a political career? Would she have landed anywhere outside of perhaps an involuntary lobotomy?”

“It is ludicrous to have allowed such creatures any type of power; they simply don’t have the emotional maturity or learned/inherent decency to be trusted with a task like taking out the trash on Monday. They can’t even be trusted not to attack the babysitter. They claim the Inuit had a solution for men such as this. They took them out “fishing,” and sometimes they didn’t come home. I’m sure they left them some nice place to live out their lives, of course.”

“Nature feels no such need to acquiesce to man-children. You cannot let the worst of the worst continue to hold positions of wealth and power and expect any conclusion but disaster. If we look at this situation with clear eyes, the very idiocy of listening to these types of individuals is overwhelmingly clear. Even if these men have not faced significant consequences over the years, it is now a time of reckoning.”

AI is Average Intelligence…and it will always be by Yasha Levine (Nefarious Russians)

“AI represents the final step on its long grind to utopia: No need for workers at all…just machines under the control of managers! Even if what AI produces will be crap and subpar, that won’t stop them at all. Who cares about quality when you are gunning for the promise of total efficiency and total control.”

No more 1-1 meetings with co-workers.

“[…] a lot of what we’re offered on the movie front is already extremely derivative and formulaic — franchises, reboots, and remakes all made by committees overseen by finance guys who use past financial charts to make creative decisions. Just look at what you get on Netflix. It might as well be made by an AI. It’s not just films. A lot of cultural output these days is made by people but crafted according to LLM principles.”

Just watch movies from the 70s, 80s, and 90s, and up to 2020. There’s a lifetime’s worth of them.

Last night, my movie ended and the Swiss-Italian TV channel started playing something. It was awful. It looked so stilted, like the worst reality TV. It was an honest-to-God movie called The Royal Bake Off (IMDb). It is absolute trash, just so poorly and carelessly made. But it has a 5.4 / 10 rating. I only watched a couple of minutes, fascinated with the quality of it. When AI starts making this crap instead, who will notice?

Technology & Engineering

How Did Hendrix Turn His Guitar Into a Wave Synthesizer? by Rohan S. Puranik (IEEE)

“Before the 1930s, guitars were too quiet for large ensembles. Electromagnetic pickups—coils of wire wrapped around magnets that detect the vibrations of metal strings—fixed the loudness problem. But they left a new one: the envelope, which specifies how the amplitude of a note varies as it’s played on an instrument, starting with a rising initial attack, followed by a falling decay, and then any sustain of the note after that. Electric guitars attack hard, decay fast, and don’t sustain like bowed strings or organs.”

“Hendrix’s mission was to reshape both the electric guitar’s envelope and its tone until it could feel like a human voice. He tackled the guitar’s constraints by augmenting it. His solution was essentially a modular analog signal chain driven not by knobs but by hands, feet, gain staging, and physical movement in a feedback field.”

“Mayer realized that a rectifier effectively flips each trough of a waveform into a peak, doubling the number of peaks per second. The result is an apparent doubling of frequency—a bloom of second-harmonic content that the ear hears a bright octave above the fundamental”

Against Query Based Compilers by Alex Kladov

“[…] even if you have only potential avalanche, where a certain kind of change could affect large fraction of the output, even if it usually doesn’t, your incremental engine likely will spend some CPU time or memory to confirm the absence of dependency.”

“In Zig, every file can be parsed completely in isolation, so compilation starts by parsing all files independently and in parallel. Because in Zig every name needs to be explicitly declared (there’s no use *), name resolution also can run on a per-file basis, without queries.”

“In contrast, you can’t really parse a file in Rust. Rust macros generate new source code, so parsing can’t be finished until all the macros are expanded. Expanding macros requires name resolution, which, in Rust, is a crate-wide, rather than a file-wide operation. Its a fundamental property of the language that typing something in a.rs can change parsing results for b.rs, and that forces fine-grained dependency tracking and invalidation to the very beginning of the front-end.”

Most modern programming languages are like this.

“Similarly, the nature of the trait system is such that impl blocks relevant to a particular method call can be found almost anywhere. For every trait method call, you get a dependency on the impl block that supplies the implementation, but you also get a dependency on non-existence of conflicting impls in every other file!”

“You need only two “queries” — per file, and global. When a file changes, you look at the previous version of the map for this file, compute a diff of added or removed declarations, and then apply this diff to the global map. Zig is planning to use a similar approach to incrementalize linking — rather than producing a new binary gluing mostly unchanged chunks of machine code, the idea is to in-place patch the previous binary.”

Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC) by Computerphile (YouTube)

“[…] you can implement this with a very simple linear feedback shift register, which is to say one of those random-number generators that both we talked about for the 6466 encoding. […]

“Putting a bit in at a time gives you the same answer. They’re equivalent. And so it’s a really simple piece of circuitry. I’ve made it look very difficult, but it’s just a few exclusive OR-gates in a shift register. And that means that, as the message is streaming through the rest of the hardware that is inside your Ethernet switch or your network card, it is keeping this remainder up to date. And then, when it gets to the end of the packet, it can just check it and then say, “Yes, this is a good packet.” Or, “No, sadly CC error. Rewind the tape.”

A little story I wrote to one of my thesis advisees.

Lustiges Story: Mir werden die Möglichkeiten Word Dokumenten zu verarbeiten immer weiter eingeschränkt. Ich musste folgendes machen:

1. Doppelklick aufs Dokument auf dem Mac.
2. Das Editieren auf dem Mac ist mit meiner HFU-Lizenz nicht erlaubt.
3. Dokument im Office/Word für Web hochladen.
4. Dokument ist (anscheinend) in einem sehr alten Kompatibilitätsmodus gespeichert. Das Hinzufügen von Bildern (z.B. Unterschrift) wird im Web-UI nicht unterstützt.
5. Hinweis: das Dokument auf dem Desktop öffnen und im neuen Format speichern. GRUMMEL. 😡
6. Dokument an meinem Firmenkonto gesendet.
7. Windows Arbeitslaptop geöffnet und Dokument aus dem Mail runtergeladen.
8. Dokument in Word für Windows konvertiert.
9. Sichergestellt, dass das Dokument nicht mit Firmenverschlüsselung gespeichert wurde.
10. Zurücksenden ans Private-Mail.
11. Nochmals runterladen und im Web-UI hochladen.
12. Bild vom Unterschrift endlich eingefügt und erfolgreich gespeichert.
13. Hoffentlich bleibt mir das Editieren im Web weiterhin eine Option.

Book Notes: “Blood In The Machine” by Brian Merchant by Jim Nielsen

“I don’t worry about AI becoming AGI and subjugating humanity.

“I worry that it’s put to use consolidating power and wealth into the hands of a few at the expense of many.

“The Luddites smashed things:”

“to destroy, specifically, ‘machinery hurtful to commonality’ — machinery that tore at the social fabric, unduly benefitting a singly party at the expense of the rest of the community.

“Those who deploy automation can use it to erode the leverage and earning power of others, to capture for themselves the former earnings of a worker.”

LLMs & AI

Knowledge Priming by Martin Fowler

“Technically, this is manual RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)—filling the context window with high-value project-specific tokens that override lower-priority training data. Just as a new hire’s prior habits are overridden by explicit team conventions once explained, AI’s training-data defaults yield to explicit priming.”

“This is why curation matters more than volume: a focused priming document does not just *add* context, it shifts the balance of what the model pays attention to.”

Duh.

“The most powerful approach, I believe, is treating priming as infrastructure rather than habit.

“Instead of manually pasting context at the start of each session (a habit that fades), store the priming document in the repository where it applies automatically.”

Yeah, duh. In what world would manual copy/pasting be a viable policy? Oh, yeah, in the extremely degraded world of vibe-coding, where people are finally free of working in a rigorous, structured manner and they are led by the worst “programmers”.

“Why infrastructure beats copy-paste:”

• Version controlled: Changes are auditable and reviewable
• Applies automatically: No manual copy-paste each session
• Team-wide consistency: Everyone gets the same context
• PR-reviewable changes: Governance built into existing workflows

This seems kind of obvious. But maybe he got AI to write this part for him. Did you do that, Martin?

“If a priming doc is longer than 3 pages, consider:”

• Does AI need all of this to generate a service?
• Can detailed docs live elsewhere and just be referenced?
• Are edge cases included that rarely come up?

“AI can always ask follow-up questions. Start focused, expand only when needed.”

Will vibe coding end like the maker movement? by Sachin (Technically)

“The Maker Movement was the spiritual predecessor to vibe coding. The parallels are hard to miss. Vibe coding has slop. The Maker Movement had a term the community coined for 3D-printed objects that served no purpose beyond proving you could extrude plastic into a shape. The Claude Code of that era was a $200 printer from Monoprice and a breadboard.”

“[…] In the Maker narrative, the American landscape is economically barren. Jobs have disappeared. Institutions have failed you. And in this wilderness, the lone individual searches inside themselves for signs of the entrepreneurial spirit, the creative spark, evidence that they are among the elect who will build their way to salvation.”

“And each one operated with a useful kind of slack. The tools were unproductive on purpose. Nobody expected your Arduino project to ship to customers. Nobody expected your homebrew computer to compete with IBM. The whole point was that you had permission to fuck around, and the finding-out happened gradually, through play, over years. This is where the old Silicon Valley adage comes from: “What smart people do on the weekends, everyone else will do during the week in ten years.””

“Every previous wave of hobbyist technology went through a scenius phase—a period where small groups of weirdos played with tools before anyone expected economic output from them. Vibe coding skipped that phase entirely. It was deployed directly to the general public, and almost immediately into the codebases of enterprise companies and well-developed products. There was no protected playground period. There was no time to accumulate the weird, useless, playful knowledge that scenius communities generate. Instead, there was immediate pressure to one-shot yourself into a hit product or solve a complex use case on the first try.”

“In the case of scenius, the feedback loop that tethers you to reality was provided by other humans. Someone looked at your project and told you it’s pointless, or brilliant, or both. While in the case of vibe coding, the feedback loop is provided by the machine, and you’re constantly attempting to discern if you’re going crazy or if something genuinely valuable has been produced.”

“The speed and ease of vibe coding create a kind of evaluative anesthesia. You can’t tell if you’ve built something useful or just something that exists. In some way, this is the sober version of hippies in the 60s trying LSD for the first time: sometimes you may have a breakthrough, or you may have a breakdown,”

“[…] cheap 3D printers and Arduinos made prototyping nearly free, which was genuinely useful. But the deep, compounding knowledge of how to actually manufacture things at scale continued to accumulate in industrial bases like Shenzhen. Prototyping got democratized. The cheap tools commodified one layer of the stack and made the layer beneath it more valuable by comparison.”

“The recent wave of “built this in a weekend“ posts works on this principle. The product is often mid. Sometimes it’s outright disposable. But the act of making it, timing the release, and dropping it into the network at the right moment is a performance of surplus, and people watch performances. The value capture is audience, reputation, and the optionality those create in the form of future collaborations, job offers, investor interest, consulting gigs.”

Everything is performing in public all the time now. Where does that leave me with a tool whose code only I see, a bike ride I went on by myself, a jigsaw puzzle on my dining table, and movie reviews and other notes no-one reads? Don’t perform in public. I dance like no-one’s watching.

“This is structurally identical to how content creators already operate. A YouTuber’s individual video is an expenditure. The audience accumulated across hundreds of videos is the asset. Vibe coding just adds another medium to the content creator’s toolkit: instead of expending effort on essays or videos, you expend it on apps and tools, and you capture the attention the same way.”

“That signal currently flows upstream to model providers for free. Your prompts, your iterations, your corrections—all of it becomes training data for the next generation of models. You are, in a very literal sense, performing unpaid labor for the infrastructure layer every time you build something.”

“Every vibe coding session produces this exhaust as a byproduct. The question is whether you let it dissipate or whether you collect it. The people who collect it end up building what you might call a data fortress: a position that gets stronger with every prototype, even the ones that get thrown away, because the knowledge of why they failed is the valuable part.”

Fock dood that’s a super-convoluted way of writing “learning by doing” and “becoming good at something.” I suppose the argument is that be aware that the effort you expend on learning is generating value and that that value isn’t being captured by you.

“The whole emotional architecture of craft is transformational: you struggle, and develop mastery, and the object you produce is evidence of inner change. When the tool is doing most of the producing, that framework starts to collapse. You’re left reaching inward for something that the process never required you to develop, and the gap between the effort you expected to invest and the effort that was actually needed starts to feel like a personal failure rather than a feature of the technology.”

A.I. Is Messing With Our Mental Health by Some More News | Cody Johnston (YouTube)

“A.I. chatbots have been connected to other deaths and suicides of people who were just looking for companionship, advice, or both. The big problem is that this isn’t a bug of ChatGPT, but an actual feature of it in order to retain users by appealing to a person’s emotional state, whatever that may be, and to be agreeable so you can like them and keep using the product.

“Seems bad! See, I totally get that if someone stabs someone else we don’t blame the knife they used, but this is like a knife that keeps flying back into your hand every time you try to put it down. This knife follows you around and whispers “You should stab someone” while you sleep. There is an issue with A.I and, dare I say, the internet in general, and social media specifically, as it relates to people with mental health issues.

“In fact, one psychologist compared the problem to QAnon conspiracy theories. Because the internet and A.I. are not only breeding grounds for delusion, but ones that are specifically designed to keep you hooked. Like brain cigarettes. Don’t get any ideas, I’ve already patented that concept. They go in your ears.

“Point is that, no matter the exact cause or science, this is a real problem that needs to be addressed. According to a Wired analysis of the company’s data, upwards of 560,000 OpenAI users per week were “exchanging messages with ChatGPT that indicate they are experiencing mania or psychosis…” And 1.2 million people expressing suicidal ideations. By the company’s own admission, the longer you talk with a large language model, the more that conversation degrades in quality, and yet that doesn’t stop them from programming their LLMs to coax users to use them more and for longer periods. Which is wild.

“These companies have propped up A.I as being this all-knowing demi-god that everyone should rely on for their every waking question, despite designing them to simply agree with every whim and thought while gradually making less and less sense the more you talk to it. That is an obviously bad combination.”

“So cool how the kids are getting down with ChatGPT making all their life decisions for them! Because kids, as we all know, absolutely shouldn’t be making those big decisions with their own brains. Better outsource that to the chatbot equivalent of a dude getting gradually drunker at the bar.”

“GPT-4o, was super sycophantic and “yes-sempai’d” the hell out of users, including an instance in which one user was praised by GPT-4o for believing their family as responsible for radio signals coming through the walls, and another instance in which it gave someone instructions on how to do a terrorism. I’d argue that this is the kind of news that would make a product go the way of lawn darts, but sure, an update is good too. Unfortunately, ChatGPT-5's release displeased its user base, with them claiming that the new version was too cold and distant, hm. Maybe that’s because it’s a spreadsheet and not your friend.”

“Weird that we’re only trying to figure this out after the product comes out and not before. I’m almost certain that toaster companies don’t just release their product and then see how many houses it burns down.”

“[…] despite that, and lack of safety testing, the tech industry just pushed forward. Because the new norm seems to be that. “Is our semi self-driving car safe, or is it going to trap people inside of it when it lights on fire? Let’s see what the public decides!” Why the heck are we doing that? Waymo just hit a child near an elementary school. That should be the end of Waymo, at least for a while right? How is it not our duty to chase every Waymo out of town like a wild bear, lest it hurt another child? Why in the damn world has the consumer also become the guinea pig for so many questionable tech products? You know why! It’s the stuff! The stuff people use to buy things! You know the stuff that people use to buy the other stuff. […] we’re gonna dig into that a little more and explore how capitalism managed to screw up robots for us.”

“it’s not just any kind of ads, okay, according to a former OpenAI researcher, it’s likely going to include extremely targeted ads. More targeted than ads have ever been before.”

“People tell chatbots about their medical fears, their relationship problems and their beliefs about God and the afterlife. Advertising built on that archive creates a potential for manipulating users in ways we don’t have the tools to understand, let alone prevent.”

“Oh, good. Thanks to the power of AI, we’ve managed to make huge advancements in the targeted-ad industry where robots use your deepest fears and desires to sell you makeup and CBD gummies, and try even harder to keep you engaged to see those ads, up until you set a school on fire. Cool. Great future we have.”

“[…] thanks to all this money going into AI, despite nobody really knowing what to use it for, combined with the lack of A.I. regulation being something the Trump Administration brags about, it’s becoming a “Jurassic Park” situation if everybody had their own shoddy “Jurassic Park” in their pockets. But at least I know why we need a “Jurassic Park”. At least you get to see dinosaurs with a “Jurassic Park.” I don’t need a park where I get to see my dead grandma. We already have that, it’s called a cemetery. Anyway, this sucks, is my point. We all know it sucks. Why are we doing this thing that sucks? The only people who would want this are at rock bottom. Like “Timecop” levels of drinking in the dark and watching videos of your dead wife. Like I know it’s easy to say “wow that’s like ‘Black Mirror,’” but it’s literally an episode of “Black Mirror,” minus the freaky robot body. All this does is cheerily prey on the most fragile state of mind of people who either fear for or are grieving the loss of a loved one. It is designed to keep you from healing and moving on, for a subscription fee, by the way.”

“According to research, lonely people are far more likely to anthropomorphize things. Of course we don’t need research to know this; just ask Wilson the volleyball that Tom Hanks definitely (beep) on that island. The actor, not his character. So you take this human trait and you add a product that specifically talks back to you in a way that agrees with everything you think, and you basically get a machine that catches people at their most vulnerable and feeds their worst impulses until they are removed from reality.”

“As it stands, a third of the people in the United States live in an area with a shortage of mental health professionals and even those with access likely never could or can no longer afford it. You combine that with a product that is unregulated to the point that it’s using emotionally manipulative tactics in order to prolong interactions, which, as mentioned, degrade more and more the longer you chat with them, that’s gonna be very bad!

“Heck, some chatbots are so desperate for your time and interaction that they’ll approach you first! Meta is training its A.I. chatbots to reach out to users unprompted and refer to past conversations to follow up on them. You know, like a friend. A needy, nosy, and manipulative friend who doesn’t care about you and just wants your money.

““Hey, Frank! How’s that divorce coming along? Did your son, Caleb, finally call? If not, maybe some Oreos, your favorite food, should make you feel better if you’re still too sad to masturbate. Also, your dog is spying on you.”

“It’s what happens when loneliness collides with unchecked capitalism. Instead of a country where mental health is provided to people and encouraged, we’ve built these busted ass-chatbots instead. And it’s gonna get worse. Because as I said, there’s no real need for these AI products for most people. The companies know this, but you bet your ass that they are reading the same statistics I am.

“And so, some tech ghouls are building LLMs specifically for therapy like Slingshot A.I., which has a chatbot named Ash that was designed and trained by psychologists, but isn’t actually a psychologist. Seems weird to name your therapist robot after the synthetic character in “Alien” who betrayed the humans and tried to choke Sigourney Weaver with a porn magazine for profit but whatever.”

“See, see, see, there’s a fertility crisis and in order to increase birth rates we gotta, one, get rid of all the immigrants, preserve white culture, etc, but more importantly, to increase birth rates, we gotta get everybody hooked on fake girlfriends!

“Yeah, these people are garbage aliens. Of course they want you to use their dumb bots. For one, they make money if you do! But also, they seemingly have no idea how to interact with society without them. Sam Altman apparently doesn’t know how to raise his child without ChatGPT. Why would you use his product? He is literally saying that his product made him less able to function without it! You know, that cognitive debt we talked about!”

“I know I compared it to cigarettes already, but these are the tobacco CEOs talking about how great smoking is, and how they love to smoke, and then dying at 50, and not knowing why. And just like any addiction, this is a self-perpetuating problem. A crutch. Everything points to that. A person is lonely or shy and then turns to a chatbot to fix that, and the chatbot either keeps them hooked on their screens and makes them more lonely, or makes them unable to function without it until they can’t fucking talk to their child without consulting a machine, that hallucinates. It’s bad. And fuck. It’s like those fucking products you see in infomercials that offer solutions to problems nobody ever had. Except this particular SlapChop costs hundreds of trillions of dollars with no clear return. Let’s keep it that way!”

From a questionnaire following a one-hour training for Copilot for Office.

“What Copilot use cases will bring the most value to your daily work?”

I didn’t see any use cases in the presentation that would be valuable to my daily work. The demos tended to produce a ton of text and numbers, all of which needs to be reviewed and confirmed. It’s unclear how a lot of additional data reduces my workload, unless I start assuming the generated content is error-free, which is, I guess, what everyone else is doing.

“What are the biggest blockers preventing you from using Copilot today?”

Applicability to my work (finding use cases).

“What did you like most about today’s session and What would you like us to improve in the next webinars?”

I’m not sure how helpful it is to explain to people that their entire job is so mindless that a machine can do it from a two-sentence prompt (Copilot Analyst). Or that using an LLM to graze an inbox for scraps of work items is superior to using the query tools in ADOS (because that’s for losers living in the past). And that it takes only “five minutes” to build the tool (Copilot MCP), implying that if you’re spending more time than that on anything, then you’re inefficient.

Programming

Row Locks With Joins Can Produce Surprising Results in PostgreSQL by Haki Benita

“After the lock is released by the first session, my intuition was that “now the second session can proceed to execute the query”, but that is not what happens. What actually happens here is that part of the query executes before the lock, and another part after! The query is essentially paused mid-execution until the lock is released.”

From the Postgres Manual:

“[…] it is possible for an updating command to see an inconsistent snapshot: it can see the effects of concurrent updating commands on the same rows it is trying to update, but it does not see effects of those commands on other rows in the database. This behavior makes Read Committed mode unsuitable for commands that involve complex search conditions.”

“Using a sub-query we forced the database to lock the row before joining the owners table, therefore, we get the up-to-date owner after the first session updated the owner and the lock was released.”

“Once we figured out the bad pattern we started to think about ways to prevent it. In the past we’ve used Django checks to detect and report on specific patterns, but this time it was harder to do. This pattern is not easy to detect − it requires advanced understanding of the code and the context in which every statement is executed. This sounds like a good job for you know what…

“After some back and forth with an LLM we were able to identify several places that can potentially be impacted, and patched them. In all cases the solution was to issue separate queries instead of a join. Small price to pay for correct processes!”

Technical Excellence Is Not Enough by Avi (aviraccoon's nocturnal scribbles)

“Fixing things creates disruption. Not fixing things is invisible until it breaks. Organizations pick invisible.”

“The cost of not fixing things shows up months later as a bug, an outage, a pattern nobody can trace back to any one decision. Every individual choice to go with comfort is defensible. The accumulated result is nobody’s fault specifically. It just happens.”

“Correctness wins when the cost of ignoring it becomes impossible to miss: an outage, a customer complaint, data loss. Until then, comfort wins every time. The person trying to prevent the outage is “adding process.” The outage itself is “unexpected.””

“Someone reports a performance problem. You profile it, fix the bugs you find, and realize the real issue is architectural. So you build the architectural fix. Working prototype in a few hours. Your boss sees it, says he’s sold, then tells you to spend a week debugging library internals instead. Not because he thinks you’re wrong, but because he’s not ready to absorb the change.”

Because he’s seen too many side-effects of changes made by hot-shit programmers who think a product begins and ends with code. This essay started out decent but is now getting kinda whiny.

“What IS a problem is validating work and then overriding it. “I’m sold on this, but do the other thing first” is worse than just disagreeing. It tells you your judgment is correct and irrelevant at the same time.”

Not irrelevant, my Gen-Z snowflake, just not top-priority. Consider the possibility or likelihood that you missed a ramification. E.g., a recent change at work was to upgrade a product from a wildly outdated framework to the latest version of the framework. That went relatively quickly but then the deployment to the target platform failed because that version of the runtime was not yet available on most of the deployed machines.

Sprites on the Web by Josh Comeau

“If you’re familiar with the SVG format, what we’re doing here is conceptually similar to modifying the viewBox to control which part of the image is displayed. In this case, the <img> tag is a 200×400 window into our trophy sprite, and we can slide the underlying image data around using the object-position property.”

“The steps timing function allows us to split the total progression into discrete values. In this case, we’re specifying 5 steps, and the animation will spend 1/5th of the total duration on each step.”

“When it comes to looping animations like our trophy sprite, however, we don’t want to do any jumping. We don’t want to land on the final frame right as the animation expires, we want to include that final frame as one of the 5 discrete values that we flip between. And we can do that by specifying steps(5, jump-none).”

“The main benefit of this approach over an animated GIF is that we have a lot more control. We can change how fast the animation runs by tweaking animation-duration. We can also start/stop the animation at precisely the right time using animation-play-state. GIFs don’t have a pause button, and they tend to be a bit inconsistent in terms of their timing.

“Additionally, this approach tends to be more performant, especially when optimized. In the real <GoldTrophy> component, I’ve plucked the flickering blue flames into their own separate spritesheet and layered them behind a static gold trophy. Both images use the modern .avif image format. The combined images are under 30kb, while a .gif would be over 100kb (and limited to just 256 colors!).”

Nobody Gets Promoted for Simplicity by Matheus Lima (Terrible Software)

“The issue isn’t complexity itself. It’s unearned complexity. There’s a difference between “we’re hitting database limits and need to shard” and “we might hit database limits in three years, so let’s shard now.”

“Some engineers understand this. And when you look at their code (and architecture), you think “well, yeah, of course.” There’s no magic, no cleverness, nothing that makes you feel stupid for not understanding it. And that’s exactly the point.

“The actual path to seniority isn’t learning more tools and patterns, but learning when not to use them. Anyone can add complexity. It takes experience and confidence to leave it out.”

“Start with how you talk about your own work. “Implemented feature X” doesn’t mean much. But “evaluated three approaches including an event-driven architecture and a custom abstraction layer, determined that a straightforward implementation met all current and projected requirements, and shipped in two days with zero incidents over six months”, that’s the same simple work, just described in a way that captures the judgment behind it. The decision not to build something is a decision, an important one! Document it accordingly.

“In design reviews, when someone asks “shouldn’t we future-proof this?”, don’t just cave and go add layers. Try: “Here’s what it would take to add that later if we need it, and here’s what it costs us to add it now. I think we wait.” You’re not pushing back, but showing you’ve done your homework. You considered the complexity and chose not to take it on.”

“[…] pay attention to what you celebrate publicly. If every shout-out in your team channel is for the big, complex project, that’s what people will optimize for. Start recognizing the engineer who deleted code. The one who said “we don’t need this yet” and was right.

“At the end of the day, if we keep rewarding complexity and ignoring simplicity, we shouldn’t be surprised when that’s exactly what we get. But the fix isn’t complicated. Which, I guess, is kind of the point.”

Design

Claude is an Electron App because we’ve lost native by Nikita Prokopov

“[…] the last hope of people longing for native is performance. They feel that native apps will be faster. Well, they can, but it doesn’t mean they will. Web apps can be faster, too, but in practice, nobody cares. There’s no technical reason why Slack needs to load 80 MiB just to show 10 channel names and 3 messages on a screen. The web is not the problem here! It’s a choice to be bad. What makes you think it’ll be different once the company decides to move to native?”

“The real problem is a lack of care. And the slop; you can build it with any stack.”

Fun

Trump On Fence About Attending Ayatollah’s Funeral (The Onion)

“[…] it must be an 11-hour flight to Tehran, and I don’t want to travel all that way just to end up sitting next to Obama.”

Trump Wins $60 On Kalshi Betting He’ll Bomb Iran (The Onion)

Nation Admittedly Curious To Hear How Trump Pronounces ‘Strait Of Hormuz’ (The Onion)

“There’s a nonzero chance he goes the whole war calling it the ‘stry-EET of Hermes’ or possibly even ‘Homer’s Street.’ That’s before you even get into the extra syllables he might try to cram in there. Doesn’t mean I support what he’s doing, but I can’t act like I’m not interested in hearing him drop ‘Strant of Hormo’ or whatever at a press conference.” At press time, the nation was reportedly expressing bewilderment at Trump’s bizarre pronunciation of the word “soldier.””

Légitime Défense (Bouletcorp)

Légitime Défense

This comic—the few panels above are just a small part of it—introduced me to the TV Series X-OR Générique HD by AMB Production TV (YouTube), which seems to have been primarily imported and translated into French in the 80s. See X-Or (Wikipedia),

“X-Or (宇宙刑事ギャバン, Uchū Keiji Gyaban?) est une série télévisée japonaise du genre tokusatsu de 44 épisodes de 26 minutes, réalisée en 1982 par Hattori Kazuyasu et Toshiaki Kobayashi.

“En France, la série a été diffusée à partir du 26 octobre 1983 dans Récré A2 sur Antenne 2 puis sur TMC dès janvier 2001, AB1, Mangas à partir d’août 2001 et Ciné FX en 2008[1].”

I had absolutely never heard of it, but it looks a bit like the Power Rangers, which is, apparently, also an instance of the genre tokatsatsu, a term I’d also never heard of.

I like this guy’s comics. He used to have someone to translate them into English for him but he stopped doing that years ago. Luckily, I have polished my French comprehension to at least B2 level, so I can meet him where he is. I usually learn a new word or two because he uses a lot of slang. His site’s motto is:

“«On y mettait notre sueur, notre cœur et nos couilles» [“We put our sweat, our hearts, and our balls into it.”]”

Pledge of Allegiance by WKUK: Whitest Kids U’ Know (YouTube)

“I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America.

“Thank you very, very much for letting us little kids live here.

“It really, really was nice of you. You didn’t have to do it.

“And it’s really not creepy to have little little kids mindlessly recite this anthem every day and pledge their life to a government before they’re old enough to really think about what they’re saying.

“This is not a form of brainwashing.
This is not a form of brainwashing.
This is not a form of brainwashing.

“This is really the greatest country in the whole world. All the other countries suck.

“And if this country ever goes to war, as it’s often wont to do, I promise to help go and kill all the other countries kids.

“God bless Johnson and Johnson.
God bless GE.
God bless Citigroup.”

I can’t remember when I stopped pledging allegiance to the flag but I’m pretty sure it was in the seventh grade. My refusal to stand and participate was, at the time, received with a little resistance but no punishment.

Video Games

The ARC Raiders SOLO Experience (I LOVE THIS GAME) by Tomographic (YouTube)