Zoraptor

Some allowance made for the obvious losing of voice, but he certainly sounded drunk or similar. Really though, what was the point of that? It was the political equivalent of your 'outspoken' uncle having a rant after one too many Christmas sherries. Nothing new, nothing genuinely important and the only people who'd be impressed are people who are already impressed; everyone else verges from appalled to incredulous. At this point those impressed are likely to be the sort of person who'd applaud Trump eating a boiled egg because it's Trump doing it Be interesting to know if he was using a teleprompter or not. Guess he must have been in part since he wouldn't have had war lengths right (?, well they didn't seem miles off as they would have been if he was just making them up; also didn't mention Afghanistan there) but how on earth it was handled for all his weird digressions and circular sentences I don't know. Unless he actually sat down and wrote it all out, which seems... unlikely. I personally particularly liked him singling out all the Gulf states for praise for all their help, then very next sentence wondering why the Iranians were attacking them and saying that was proof of how dangerous they were. Good thing for him Trumpists aren't renowned for critical thinking.

If Trump really wants to leave NATO there are ways he can, irrespective of what the law says. Like invading Greenland or Canada. Invading a NATO member is a pretty effective way to destroy the alliance without having to do anything formal about it. Usually you'd think it's bluster to try and get them to help him out, but there has been an awful lot of very similar bluster from him in the past year(s). You might also have thought the issues with Iran might have tempered Trump's military adventurism, but it's Trump. If anything his self created crisis seems to have convinced him even more that the Euros are simply weak rather than not willing to bail him out of a pot of hot water he willingly jumped into. And the weak deserve to have their lunch money stolen. (Ultimately, it's the problem of von der Leyen, Rutte and pals completely misjudging things and folding like a napkin to every bit of early pressure. You might think you're 'building up credit' or similar by signing massively disadvantageous trade deals or financing Ukraine's weapons instead of the US or agreeing to up your military spending to ludicrous levels or agreeing to buy overpriced LNG but all evidence is Trump simply doesn't see the world that way. He sees you as a serf who should fight in his armies and be hung upside down and shaken to make sure they haven't got some coins hidden from the taxman. And of course as a serf, you don't really own anything except the stuff your lord lets you have...)

Iran will pretty much 100% blow it up themselves, if it looks like the US is going to seize it. At that point, why not. Hence the 'set american troops on fire' threat. That's the Russia 1812 comparison, Napoleon simply could not comprehend that the Russians would burn down Moscow to deny it to him and was convinced they'd negotiate. Indeed, he was convinced of that even after they'd burnt it down which is why he sat in the ruins for 4 weeks twiddling his thumbs. Blowing up desalinisation plants and power stations is certainly the easier option in the sense that it can be done and would have an effect. But even Trump would likely baulk at being remembered as the guy who depopulated the middle east out of pride. The best option/ approach would be to not be in this position in the first place. No good answers now, no one wants to bail him out, and Trump isn't handling it well. Best option may actually be to just declare victory and leave the mess to others (which as of now he seems to be suggesting; then again a few hours ago it was something different) and that is still an awful option.

Hard to see how that could be done. If you go by what the US claimed earlier it's mostly sitting under tons of rock, after all. Going to fly in some excavators and backhoes on a Globemaster you land on some back country Iranian road? Yes, that is answered in the article, but taking up to weeks to set up a temporary airstrip in the middle of Iran would seem to have one or two minor potential problems associated with it. Even if they don't think of Dien Bien Phu they could always think about Hostomel. And for below, Russia in 1812 or the USSR in 1941. Kharg Island makes more sense. Not much sense either, since it's near inevitable the Iranians would blow all the oil infrastructure up themselves if the US tried to seize it, and then it's just a very hot flat rock. (I actually wondered what had happened to Hegseth yesterday, since he seems to have disappeared. Then I saw an article saying that they seem to have given up on doing briefings about two weeks ago)

There is no border weirder than Oman and the UAE. Two Omani enclaves*, one with an Emirati enclave inside it. Whoever came up with that must have been taking the mick. The most likely scenario for Trump using a nuke is so he can claim he's 'destroyed' any Iranian nuclear material. By distributing it and a bonus amount over a large area of Iran, but still, it's Trump. Tactical nuke, not a strategic one. Plenty of people around who think they're fine [for their side] to use, and it's very likely Trump and Kegseth are two of them. Which is why it might be an actively good thing if Trump is bored. *as demanded of a true pedant: one is technically an exclave, since it borders the sea. Quoting myself as I forget to mention: also rather begs the question that if that AWACS is just 'damaged' what other stuff labelled as 'damaged' is, well, missing the equivalent of a third of its fuselage and all the equipment essential to its role. Labeling that as 'damaged' is actively damaging to PR, since it's very obviously destroyed to all practical purposes.

Another bunch of refueling planes and an AWACS (! total loss, couldn't have been done cleaner with a Ginzu) appear to have been hit at Prince Sultan Air Base by Iran. This is separate from the incident a while back where half a dozen were hit, and separate from the collision (or 'collision') that killed one of the plane's flight crew. That's as much as 10% of the total fleet out of action now, and even though they're being replaced a completely unsustainable rate of loss. (one might opine that it was highly incompetent leaving a dozen or so planes in a beautiful ordered formation on the tarmac after the experiences of Russia and Ukraine... but it probably isn't. If you don't have hardened shelters you don't have them; and they're big planes. Does make you wonder if a site as well defended as Prince Sultan is getting hit what other places are as well that we aren't seeing)

If Trump really is 'bored' by his war then at least the chance of him using nukes is at least reduced to negligible. He'd be more likely to just declare victory- for the howevermanyth time- and tacitly leave the mess to everyone else. Then invade Cuba; or Canada or Greenland. Given it's Trump those ors could easily be ands instead. If he decides to send in the troops there's a decent chance he'll take the inevitable fp drone videos of marines getting gibbed very personally* indeed. At that point things may get interesting. *not on behalf of the dead soldiers of course, but because it's politically embarrassing for him and will inflame both the pro and anti war sides of his voter base

So, the 'big gift' Iran gave Trump was allowing ten ships (from friendly to Iran countries) through Hormuz. Or in other words Trump just got manipulated into admitting Iran controls the Straits. By a strategem that's barely better than 'pull my finger' or giving him a big beautiful gift of updog.

Yep. They probably thought they were safe due to Russia not targeting all the western assets that Ukraine uses- which are also legitimate targets. That rather ignores that if Russia were in a similar situation to Iran is rather than Russia is... well, she wouldn't be, due to having nukes. ie the US would be trying to explain why the Ford was atomised rather than had a 'laundry fire'. Plus of course and inevitably there's an extremely long list of all the times the west bombed 'non belligerents', targeted the economies of 3rd parties etc. Indeed, every single point is a lesson in double standards. Perhaps best summed up by quoting an expert referring to the San Remo Manual. Which is specifically not binding, but in any case says: So yeah, you can legally target neutral ships running a blockade (though the binding legal framework for it is, iirc, from the 19th century). And of course, most of the people shocked and appalled at Iran Blockading the Strait aren't shocked and appalled at, say, Israel starving Gazans or denying them water via blockade; they're just shocked and appalled when it effects them.

Hormuz is conclusively Persian in origin already, and it's already the Persian Gulf so Trump might need to make another concession. Though one suspects Trump's idea of concessions would be offering to build Trump Tower Tehran. Really Bruce, even for you that's weaker than a homeopathic dilution drink. So the sole reason the US and Israel's attacks weren't cowardly was because they were not targeting Iran's economy explicitly? Well then, who bombed the Pars gas field first, Iran or Israel? Was that to cause economic chaos or not? The US and Israel definitely attacked a country weaker than them, without a declaration of war etc. But not cowardly because they didn't attack economic targets? Until they did, and most of Trump's rhetoric in the past week has been explicitly about economic/ civilian targets. Anyway, Iran's President has released a speech I'm sure everyone will appreciate. Source (Maybe not quite the Pearl Harbour reference Trump was going for with Takaichi)

'Cowardly' usually means you don't like the person/ group involved, and nothing more. Sitting in the Nevada desert or the Negev with a PS5 controller blowing up people thousands of km away on a video screen knowing you'll never face any consequences is hardly the height of bravery in any conventional sense yet people tend to label that as 'sensible tactics' and 'not giving a sucker an even break' instead. At this point I'm just assuming anything positive that comes out of Trump's mouth means he's doing market manipulation again. Whether the markets are really really dumb or just want him to be telling the truth so much that they still believe him who knows. (I wouldn't be overly surprised if someone is telling Trump they're talking as a way to at least delay him doing something monumentally stupid until his allies have some time to prepare)

Strange as it may seem oil may not actually be the biggest potential target or threat. Most of its infrastructure is fixable in weeks to months, some of it quicker. Qatari gas with a years long estimate is an outlier. OTOH, some of the Gulf countries have 90%+ drinking water from desalinisation. It's high for Israel as well. You simply don't have weeks or months to fix that, and having 7 million people in Riyadh without water would collapse Confidence almost instantly because there would be no chance of things going back to how they were. Absolutely a war crime to target it, but it's not like either side cares about that- given destroying power plants without a good military reason to do so would also be a war crime.

It isn't, that's the purpose of the military censor in the first place, and always has been everywhere it's been implemented. The state controls the flow of information to stop its own people and the enemy know what damage has been done. When that is not applied they either think it's in their best interests not to, or it's too big to suppress. What do you think they were censoring in those 2000+ articles, Bibi's receding hairline? 131 journalists killed in Gaza since 2024 out of a total of 204, so a shade off 2/3s. That is excluding those killed outside Israel and Palestine by Israel though; add those in and it's over 2/3. To put it in perspective, the number of journalists killed in Ukraine over that time was 4 (four).

Wasn't really a debate, you were simply told what the situation was. On average Israel censors more than 2000 (!) articles per year. That hasn't changed. Or if you prefer, and from the last couple of weeks: "Every reporter in Israel — and every member of the public — is subject to a military censor" Their actual censorship is more harsh than that of Russia. Maybe not quite as bad as Ukraine, since at least you won't get forcibly enlisted for breaking the rules.

The contrast of Trump insisting that the Iranians are begging for a ceasefire due to their military being 2000% killed while 186% of their missile launchers have been destroyed and near simultaneously threatening to blow up all their power plants if they don't reopen the Straits of Hormuz is even more telling than usual. It's very, very obvious that he wants someone, anyone on the Iranian side to start talking to him. That he thinks they will having torn up one agreement than started wars with them twice, during negotiations, is perhaps the definition of hubris. Or stupidity. Maybe both? The Iranians, of course, have a long list of targets to hit in response. Which will really stuff up the region long term. No drinking water for Riyadh would be quite interesting, in a very Chinese (well, 'Chinese') curse sense. Would certainly be interesting to see the European reaction to the US blowing up power plants. While presumably not a war crime due to rules 1 and 2* differentiating it from Russia hitting Ukrainian power plants might be a tad difficult to get through to other people. *(1) someone we like cannot commit a war crime (2) someone we don't like cannot be the victim of a war crime

A manpad missile has very little actual explosive in it, its warhead is usually in the 1kg range, they can still look very big on a thermal camera though. There could be other explanations, like some fuel igniting, but it's probably just the warhead exploding. (It has to be man portable- it's in the name, as they say- and be able to accelerate quickly up to 5000m altitude, and that requires a lot of propellant, a rocket motor, full manoevring suite, independent targeting electronics etc. There simply isn't much room left over after all that, and a bigger wahead --> less of anything else. 1kg will usually give a plane a very bad day and it's likely a write off even if it didn't crash. By contrast a Vikhr is very very barely man portable in theory, slow, only has to maintain level flight and thus can have a 10x larger warhead)

Going to be fun times when not only can poor countries not buy oil due to being priced out, but they can't buy fertiliser either. Something like 80% of the people alive today wouldn't be if not for the Haber Process making nitrogen fertilisers cheap, and that process Requires natural gas. Next largest nitrogen fixing process produces something like 0.6% by mass (and about 0.3% by nitrogen content) of Haber. The damage to the Qatari gas field will take three years minimum to fix.

Not the example I used above, but it's mostly energy costs and loss of big c Confidence that are the approaching needle. Though really, AI is an absolutely awful idea economically on base principle (simplistically, replace jobs with AI and who is going to buy the stuff that makes the actual economy run? AI?).

Not sure we're going to have to worry about it anyway, though I haven't used an nVidia chip since 2007(?) anyway. AI always looked like a bubble, and international events look very much like an approaching needle. If that bubble bursts then they have to pay attention to their more traditional markets rather than turning it all into AI.

I really don't think they will. It isn't just the unpopularity of the war, it's the unpopularity of Trump, and of Israel. It's simply not a vote winner, and for many would literally end their careers; and the more transactional will have observed that Trump doesn't actually honour his transactions and is not a good faith negotiator. He has also systematically alienated traditional US poodles like UK/ Denmark/ Norway. All of that might go out the window if people thought sending troops would stop it since there's no doubt they'd like it stopped- or better yet, never to have happened. The general belief is that boots on the ground or ships in the sea are not going to help though, but be a perpetual drain. Might as well be a perpetual drain for the instigator. In the end, Europe can pay more for energy, if they have to*. Those who cannot are the ones who will suffer. *The EU bought every drop of lng from Russia's Yamal field last month. Unlikely to be different this month.

nVidia is an AI company now, you'll accept it or else. While most people have been using Seymore Skinner's "am I out of touch? No, it's the kid's who are wrong" for nVidia/ Jensen's reaction at least as appropriate is Kang's (or maybe Kodos'?) "what are you going to do, vote 3rd party buy AMD?". Though they'd probably be as bad, if they were in the dominant position. Hmm, pretty sure they've always had a microsoft 365/ John Deere option since near the start, if not the start, it's just the perpetual license option is now gone. Certainly there's been a tendency to remove denuvo after one or two years, and given that that costs money itself and corporations are hardly charities doing so out of the goodness of their hearts seems... out of character.

I wasn't that keen on Whedon as a writer, but the group of writers he used was top notch and his shows were overall, excellent. He suffered hugely retroactively from (apart from the obvious, or other obvious) being so often imitated, badly. Not least by: Marc 'Felicity and Friends' Guggenheim. Who is a colossal step down from Tim Minear as showrunner. And not just because that means a lot fewer Blake's 7 references.

Think it's fairly clear that Gabbard and Vance at least agree with Kent on substance. Even if they aren't resigning over it. A position I have some sympathy with, given Colin Powell didn't resign over Gulf War 2 either despite at very best being a reluctant supporter (and by most accounts disagreeing with it up outright until. it became clear it was going to happen whatever he thought). Gabbard's comments could have hardly been less committal when it comes for support for Trumps' position and amounted to a basic statement of fact- it was Trump's decision. Not even a whiff of "and I supported him in that decision". Vance has been practically AW(O?)L since it started. Trump's reaction to being snubbed is close to exactly what I'd expect from a class bully who has picked a fight he wants out of, and just found out that actually people don't like him and were only being nice to him because they wanted him to steal someone else's lunch money, not theirs.

'Share' (at the bottom of the newsbit) does generate a unique url which links directly to the newsbit. Seems that for some reason the forum insists on embedding it as a 'live' thread though, instead of as a standard hyperlink. eg https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cx2lr40g17kt?post=asset%3A31eeddf8-3347-4e96-8612-776d7d42dd46#post links to a specific newsbit if you c&P into a browser. If you let it be converted to an embed it shows as: BBC NewsTrump says he's 'not happy' with UK after Starmer says it...The US president repeats his call for other nations to assist in securing the Strait of Hormuz, after saying it would be "very bad for the future of Nato" if allies don't help. Of course. And you hear from them constantly because they want to talk to the media, and they're exactly the sort of person the media wants to hear from. Indeed, if you listened to the media they're the only people who exist in Iran (except those who are part of the 'regime'. Which is, in itself, biased wording). You don't hear from those who support the clerics though. They won't talk to the BBC, or CNN, or Le Monde or whoever. Who also aren't really interested in hearing from them anyway. There's always far more interest in hearing from those who reinforce what you already believe. That gives a massively distorted view, along with, well, defining a bunch of Iranian entities as terrorist so you can't show anything 'promoting' their views.

I don't think there's any realistic scenario in which Russia nukes Ukraine even if it were not as taboo. The trouble with Trump is that he's Trump. No one really knows what he'll do in a no win situation. It wasn't a reasonable decision to attack Iran either, it wasn't a reasonable decision to do so with-seemingly, and it's a pretty solid seemingly- no apparent plan for anything apart from blowing stuff up and when that doesn't work, blowing more stuff up. The ultimate end point of that 'strategy' is, well, nukes. Not really the logical end point, but we're far beyond applying logic to someone who appears to have had no consideration for how the other side might react. I don't really think Russia believed the local populace would rise, just that the Ukrainian army wouldn't fight effectively. Western media, and probably Intelligence, appears to suffer from classic Confirmation Bias. And really, White Knight/ Hero complex as well. If you watched/ read only the BBC* you'd think that every Iranian opposed their government. Because they all say they do. But, every time I see or read a BBC interview with an Iranian I remember that the type of people who would say things the BBC doesn't like would simply never be interviewed by them- they'd never talk to the BBC in the first place. People who had changed their mind post bombing wouldn't risk anything to berate the BBC knowing that they'd probably not get covered. You'd never know that from the BBC itself though. You can also see it with the Iranian women football players. They make the free choice to stay in Australia, but have to be being pressured into deciding to return to Iran. There's a fair chance they just turned on the news, and decided that actually their government was not wrong about some things. Even if they don't like their government they may well hate being used to justify attacks on their country. This is the ultimate problem with all these sort of things; you have the media- and Intelligence- talking only to the people who say what they want to hear. Since they hear nothing else from people, except state media who you can easily dismiss, you end up Believing what you want to be true is true. Personally, I also always remember the old Chomsky response to a reporter who didn't like Manufacturing Consent: ~"..if you asked those sort of questions, you'd never be employed as a reporter in the first place". *or just about any other western source really. But the BBC is handy, has a live stream and a veritable plethora of articles and newsbits talking to Iranians, and BBC 'Persian' (sic; that it isn't BBC Iran or BBC Farsi shows who it's aimed at) exists.