…I dunno, y’all…seems like a few bits of the region more or less said they heard iran on the we’ll quit it if you will thing but overall it sounds more like we escalated into the weekend rather than shipping being on the move before monday…&…it is now “streets literally burning & desalination plants being targeted” fucked up…& it is hard to comprehend quite how fucked up that actually is…even if you can imagine those parts there’s probably something else you’re forgetting while the price-per-barrel number does the upward spike & someone tries to explain the desalination thing works kinda like it did in gaza on account of the scale is bigger but the water-shortage-to-begin-with/not-enough-fresh-potable-sources parts are broadly analogous so if you fuck those up you pretty much guarantee some stuff over there in the section we used to be clear about being war-crimes…& bibi just throws the odd “he’s great” into his statements & somehow everyone keeps talking about this shitshow like the US is in the driving seat & the dotard has the wheel & hegseth is in the turret & they have all the bang-sticks…but…even as far gone as orange-is-the-new-old-white-house might be…seems pretty clearly this isn’t even a little bit in any of the interests he can declare so it looks like devil’s own puppet show…forget the hells angels…the shit seems like satan’s muppets?
Turns out, the Haber Bosch process working best with piles of cheap natural gas means that all the fertilizer is now made in like three places
…as it happens…I kinda did, at that…not least because a bunch of people talked about it a whole lot back when the world tried to adjust to the doing of a thing on a massive scale that turned out to highlight the precarious nodes of the global supply chain as part of the calculus to determine who had to leave the house when nobody could leave the house on account of the things that weren’t doctors or nurses that needed to still be operating for those to be able to do anything about all the sick people…but…yeah…that part is also not looking too clever…maybe now he fucked all the ones farming soy he wanted to make it up to them by making sure no arable farm go unfucked?
it’s fascinating how most presidents don’t have a button to lower prices, but donald john trump has created USS Enterprise levels of buttons for generating inflation
…I mean…yeah…ok…I see what you’re saying…but also inflation is sort of a derivative effect of a lot of stuff that doesn’t operate on a nice linear percentage scale…arguably the part where the buttons getting mashed move the inflation needle to the extent it looks like that has its own button is considerably more concerning than talking about it through the lens of the inflation “discourse”…that…serves us poorly…like…not trying to ding the specific comment or the person that made it…just…I dunno
New footage analysed by Bellingcat shows two of the world’s most wanted crime figures, Christy and Daniel Kinahan, appearing openly at a mixed martial arts event in Dubai, despite US sanctions and multimillion-dollar rewards for information leading to their arrest.www.bellingcat.com/news/2026/03…
my absolute favorite “explaining things doesn’t work” example is the greatest thread in the history of forums, an epic argument between grown adults about the number of days in a weeknarrated beautifully here by @jonbois.bsky.social
…it is generally understood that one of the miscalculations made in vietnam was failing to grasp in advance the impact of embedded journalists with cameras being able to file stories that went to print as fast or faster than the official line could be composed
We’re a week in. Do we really still need to explain the Strait of Hormuz?
…so…the part that doesn’t show up goes about like this
Absurd timeline we live in where the de facto leader of Iran is responding to an official USG account by quoting a now famous Nasrallah line which has sort of become a meme
For context he’s not doing a timeout, in the video this still image is from he is saying “you will enter our land vertically and you will exit it horizontally”.
…meanwhile
This happened. The print interview was edited in ways that feel very jumpy, but I got to say some things. Like: Maybe changing the world is more like caregiving than it is like war. Too many people still expect it to look like war. [and then there’s a crazy jump-cut w/out transition.]
I gave a short talk about the "Carrier Bag" essay by Le Guin at an event for the @longnowboston.org picnic last summer, and it seems very much like the stories + violence issues here. The first tool probably wasn't to bludgeon dinner or each other, but the story of a sack just doesn't reach.
I love that essay so much. Cited it here. And the carrier bag is, as LeGuin points out, also about the fact that dinner is quite likely what the gatherers, not the hunters, brought home.
“Trump is not in control of the Iran War. Netanyahu is, and Kushner is his lackey.”Whether or not you fully agree with that statement, this piece is a must-read to understand better the influence of the Kahanist movement on current events and the push for “Greater Israel”:
…but we aren’t getting the worst of the immediate picture on the ground
Inspired by ProPublica’s new database, I created a visualization of the nearly 400 LLCs that make up Trump’s business empire. That and more in this week’s newsletter. Read! Free!www.howtoreadthisch.art/where-trumps…
I’m sure Iranians will be very open to a leader chosen by the people responsible for this.
BREAKING: The US has bombed Tehran’s main refinery and burning oil is now flooding down the streets into the city’s sewers.This is a vision from hell, unleashed by the US tonight.(🎥 Vahid Online)
This is what Pete Hegseth mocking rules of engagement looks like.
Iran’s people were facing a horrible shortage of water before the war began. If we are destroying desalination plants and setting fire to Teheran we are committing unfathomable crimes.
It feels like another tipping point is being crossed rn… back-&-forth refinery strikes, Tehran in flames. Trump demanding unconditional surrender, de facto boasting of bombing Iranian desal. US & Israel are pushing Iran to fire everything it has at the region’s weakest links. Unimaginably dangerous.
The Gulf states & Israel depend on water desalination to live. If Israel & US break the taboo of bombing vulnerable desal infrastructure, they risk catastrophic harm.
Percent of drinking water from desal: Israel: 80% Kuwait: 90% Saudi Arabia: 70% Oman: 86% UAW: 42%
People are like “He just did it because it pays well.” Yeah, and that’s literally the same reason all the centrist politicians you dislike did all the jobs you find disqualifying, too. Up to you whether you find “lobbying for an HMO” or “being a mercenary” a more alarming form of selling out
I think if you’re OK with Graham Platner working for Blackwater, you have officially lost the moral high ground required to yell at anyone else for working for a military contractor or being in the military ever again
Like sorry you gotta choose!
Since imo working for Blackwater is Pretty Bad. No one is out there press ganging innocent young boys with innocent tattoos into working for them, and all
It’s a LOT of money, though. I knew somebody who went from making $30k a year shooting video for the Army to $1,000 a DAY working as a contractor in Iraq. Dumb guys generally don’t know about the stuff Blackwater did.
That would almost be a fair point if it weren’t for the fact you had to qualify it with “dumb guys”. Like shouldn’t we expect Senate candidates to have an above room temperature IQ or…?
He seems pretty dumb to me. I used to cover politics in Georgia and there are some STUPID motherfuckers in high office. I mean, I’m not in Maine, but I wouldn’t vote for him in a primary.
…given the leverage in the GDP stakes that the big boxes you can see from way high up & are very much mostly made of not-people but the sudden terminal crashing of which for more than seconds of which cascades across the planet faster than a meme…if you were looking to bloody uncle sam’s nose those might be starting to look like a strategic glass jaw…& now all the AI teams are on team mil-tec
hazing and gang initiation are very similar activities that produce similar outputs
this contrarian pick-me bullshit needs to be addressed. I was hazed by what most would deem a “pretend” frat: no house, Ivy League campus, nerdy kids. They didn’t hit me, which I suppose is good. But that restraint allowed them to give themselves permission to do anything else up to that line.
…by way of a thing that wouldn’t entirely not make sense for someone to be out there trying to do
Thing that really gets my goat is the way people are eager to fund this bullshit but you need eleven layers of analysis and a ton of collateral if you want to open a small grocery store in a food desert.
Experts have begun to question the AI startup’s path forward amid surging financial needs and no profit plan.
…could play the cascade game in a different way that might seem more like an immediate cataclysm to people who are basically chill about how all this seems to be going…as an imaginary banana for scale kinda deal
There's something deeply obscene and broken about the fact that Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth are bombing elementary schools in an illegal war of aggression, and there's still a sense among the opposition that it has to be explained in terms of gas prices in order to get American voters to care.
this new york times headline stopped me in my tracks. I am stunned. They posted this on the same day trump lied about bombing a girls’ school. And this isn’t even an op-ed. This is supposed to be news. These people desperately want to be doormats to power. My god. I am at a loss for words.
…the “deal” these people think they get because of their knowledge of the “art” of those being other than they present & maintaining the pretence being part of the meta-deal…is that the money moves the way the deal says & whatever happens is simply framed as being in accordance…but this isn’t stiffing the contractors after the work is done & pocketing the proceeds…tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars have piped their way into the “first family” until “america first” really seems to have meant “once you call us the first family everything that’s ours is ours & everything’s that’s yours is ours & the parts that aren’t nailed down we take & anything left we burn to cinders before we shit all over it”
…I…dunno as showing the first two really makes anyone feel better of a sunday morning when you maybe just lost an hour’s sleep to daylight savings…but…the scale of the stupid is probably hard to truly comprehend…epic as it seems to me I’m just about certain I haven’t seen its edge…the *impact* of the stupid, though…pretty sure that part’s gonna be hard to miss…& yet…overall the bet seems to literally be that they can keep their shitshow on the air & massage their narrative like they’re the CPR administration…&…I don’t actually know as they can’t pull that off with anything up to an electoral plurality of people…so one of these days I probably will accidentally kick myself of the top of one of these slippery slopes & wind up so off-piste I really do go off on what you might mean by the term “epistemic crisis”
I'll put money down that this did not happen this way. I know it's edgy to think we'd do that – and Hegseth makes it easier to believe b/c he's a teenager crowing about death – but gonna say that I know many of these folks and it's just not how it works.
…this thing you can imagine would map perfectly onto the caricature-level-villain the guy clearly is such that it would be “in-character” in a dramatic narrative that has to load up the lay-it-on-thick with a backhoe or the audience might think he was the good guy…is not the same as “this right here would be ockham’s pick”…that stuff goes in that mix…right along with “trust me, bro – you parse shit…very possibly poorly…but not knowing what the term means in no way means you don’t do it at all & you even do at least some of it well enough you aren’t dead already…which…dumb as your ass is & annoying as you are…is frankly the sort of miracle that made us need sayings like that boy lives a charmed life“
I thought this was a parody of what he actually said but it’s a direct quote
The story of the mid-2020s in a nutshell. People thought it was OK to let Trump take power again because someone somewhere would rein him in. They were catastrophically wrong.
I think this might be the dumbest shit I’ve ever seen. what kind of democracy are you even describing here? what’s the theory of change if people aren’t accountable for the performance of their campaigns?
This argument really hits different when you live in the South. Sometimes the voters are wrong because the bad people in your state or congressional district outnumber the good people.
Quotes and replies turned off, but it might be helpful to know which bluesky natsec libs are under discussion here…This is not a large group, maybe a couple dozen large accounts tops, and I have absolutely no idea which of them this is referring to. Feels windmill tilty, unless I missed something.
god give me the confidence of Hudson Institute guys arguing that Tehran is the first domino against Beijing
Noah was born on a placid island of blissful stupidity in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that he should voyage far. His takes, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but someday…
…two things do not happen with the war game that isn’t a game…one is that it never really ends…in that if war is merely politics pursued by other means then politics is merely war conducted by a different set of rules for engagement…at least at the level of nation states…sometimes…in a federal state…at the state level of nations…& the other one is it doesn’t fucking reset to the parameters you started with if you rage quit & try to start over…I liked it better when I felt safe in assuming the people commanding armies & navies & air forces &…maybe even space forces once those were about the orbital bits the others have got pretty used to having access to…came off like they…fucking got that part…at some level…even if they put sassoon in a fucking mental institution for saying something saner than circumstances would let them call that at the time
He also thought Japan’s Pearl Harbor attack was just an opportunity seized because the IJN just happened to be near Hawaii.
Amazing how the ball knowers on here were like “they’re going to run out of military targets in a week” and they immediately start hitting economic/civilians infrastructure on day 8
“The DOGE employees did not appear to question ChatGPT’s judgments, and continued hunting for unacceptable projects.”
In identifying grants to eliminate, DOGE employees also searched for terms like “BIPOC,” “tribal,” “ethnicity,” “gender,” “equality,” “immigration,” “citizenship” and “melting pot.”
“A majority of the two dozen grants deemed “craziest” related to L.G.B.T.Q. subjects.”
I mean this is just another way of saying that Foreign Policy is functionally just a domain of intra-elite coordination and contestation
with love to many of my mutuals, i don’t really feel this “hip progressive national security revolution” thing is going to happen. because it has the same problem that conservative intellectuals have with their base — who don’t want to be all that intellectual
honestly there is an overlap between this fairly nascent prog nat sec clique and YIMBYism in a focus on elite persuasion, just the former has (1) very little formal organizing (2) lacks a clear base to benefit from what they're selling.
I do think NatSec clique for good or ill is struggling with the fact that society says it's bad to be a PMC academic and good to be a cool counterculture marginal type.
Staff at the nation’s largest Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility have placed bets on which detainee will be the next to die by suicide, according to new reporting from the Associated Press based on 911 calls and detainee accounts.
It says something about Israel that the capital of Lebanon is still more diverse than every single city in Israel after 30 years of sectarian civil war
Oh look it’s like a third of your neighbors when you live in exurban Texas
I picked 3 books for the following subject areas-strategy-statecraft-alliances/coalition warfare-operations/doctrine-seapower-airpower-amphibious warfare-logistics-leadership-civil–military relations-coercion and nuclear strategy
If you are more interested in pure military theory (fundamental nature, principles, and conduct of war) or military literature (what's it like to be a soldier), good news, @gravitysra1nbow.bsky.social already has you covered (we have some overlap: arms/influence, soldier/state, On War)
I would also add that for this list I was trying to go for: affordable, accessible, and readable (some subjects are slow reads because that is their nature), I was already pushing it with the subject areas I did pick so I do not have stuff on COIN, RMA, Armor, ethics, law of war, or procurement
Thank you for this. Let's say that you have the time to read one book on military. What would you recommend as the best overview, whether on this list or not?
Face of battle by John Keegan, on operations/tactics by @bafriedman.bsky.social or Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control by joseph Wylie
I get that Van Riper is an asshole. Even in the 90s he was a famous gaping asshole. So I regret to inform you the lightspeed motorcycle, missile bigger than the boat "Van Riper cheated to win" stuff is cope.
Offline for the weekend except but had to post this review essay, which looks boring and starts with two pretty mild reviews before abruptly pivoting into an absolute bloodbath, name-checking accountability sinks along the way. Gift link.www.nybooks.com/articles/202…
sticking this one into my ‘translating big numbers between Chinese and English is inherently hard and you have to triple-check every figure you see in the original’ file
Here's a Hudson event discussing a very serious report about a very suspicious $500M air conditioner*www.hudson.org/events/inves…* A very obvious translation error that got it 1000-fold wrong, but people who don't care about facts don't notice these things.
It's an archive link to the request for bids – archive.is/bfoTD – originally archived by a then-anonymous conspiracy theorist on Twitter. The original URL was still up for a long time but it's more effective to pretend that it was censored.
Sen. Roger Marshall eventually published the report — www.marshall.senate.gov/newsroom/pre… — there are some other errors of this type as well as many more substantial but less absurd errors.
For comic relief I recommend Sen. Marshall's 3D video timeline linked in that press release (it's David Baltimore that won a Nobel and unfortunately he did give one dumb "smoking gun" quote)
this is because Chinese uses different units: it counts in ten thousands for big numbers too (and one hundred millions for really big numbers). a million, for instance, is “one hundred ten thousands.”
Korea uses the same number system, and back when I was an editor at an English-language newspaper in Korea, the reporters constantly had a rough time converting big numbers.
I’ve met like one person who can do it in their head with perfect accuracy; most of the time you need to write it down on paper to check.
It's doubly frustrating because the many ways FDD and other advocates of a regime change war on Iran were wrong could be seen in advance. And were.Here's me in 2018 explaining why they were badly wrong. I was hardly the only one who saw it and said so.Now events have played out as we warned.
Iran regime change advocates got what they spent decades pushing for—the US to launch a big war to collapse Iran’s government—and they’re still not happy.Because what they pushed for years was a fantasy of a smooth, easy regime change war that gets everyone to tell them they were right all along.
I think if Obama were prosecuting this war against Iran his approvals would be at 5%
This guy is the smartest employee at FDD and yet he’s basically a walking lobotomy victim.
Democratic voters would disapprove of the war because they by and large aren’t mindless drones who suddenly love war in the Middle East just because it’s their daddy doing it and not the other one’s. We have a good example of what happens when a Dem supports unpopular war in MENA actually.
And that was without direct American involvement by way of US soldiers doing the bombing and dying.
And yeah as some people mentioned in the replies even put aside Biden on Gaza, Democrats who supported the war on Iraq got pilloried. And rightfully so.
Everything the Iran hawks of “Foundation for Defense of Democracies” said was wrong.Diplomacy can’t restrict Iran’s nuclear program.Wrong“Maximum pressure” would get a “better deal,” with Iran capitulating.WrongThe Iranian regime is brittle and will quickly collapse with a push.Wrong again
I would argue they knew exactly what they were doing, which was deliberately sabotaging needed public works programs by offering snake oil they never had any intention of delivering.
i understand that rural democrats frequently have to run against the party and don’t even begrudge them that, but the idea that rural america gets left out of big, national democratic infrastructure initiatives is just typical rural grievance mongering
Sassoon’s protest, “A Soldier’s Declaration,” written on June 15, 1917:
I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the War is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it. I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe this War, upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purposes for which I and my fellow-soldiers entered upon this War should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible for them to be changed without our knowledge, and that, has this been done, the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation.
I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolonging those sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust.
I am not protesting against the military conduct of the War, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.
On behalf of those who are suffering now, I make this protest against the deception which is being practised on them. Also I believe that it may help to destroy the callous complacence with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realise.
[Read before the House of Commons, July 30, 1917, printed in The London Times, on July 31, 1917 (ironically — perhaps appropriately — the first day of the Third Battle of Ypres, Passchendaele).]
…&
I know that I shall meet my fate Somewhere among the clouds above; Those that I fight I do not hate, Those that I guard I do not love; My country is Kiltartan Cross, My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor, No likely end could bring them loss Or leave them happier than before. Nor law, nor duty bade me fight, Nor public men, nor cheering crowds, A lonely impulse of delight Drove to this tumult in the clouds; I balanced all, brought all to mind, The years to come seemed waste of breath, A waste of breath the years behind In balance with this life, this death.
William Butler Yeats, “An Irish Airman foresees his Death” from The Wild Swans at Coole. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1919.
…there might be tunes?
22 Comments
…ok…so…I’m sorry & everything…but…pathetic as it is…it was that or…just to take one element of it to play a role almost all of them could have in an arguably more useful but certainly more rigorous fashion…since the whole point of a good chunk of the efficacy of this exercise on my end is a preventative from me burning the time that any of those would take…& very possibly even deserve…but about which my options for providing meaningful input to anyone doing anything meaningful about are about as high as them reading this & knowing it was me that did the typing part
…the scale of the misread required to think that the…floating assets, let’s say…that kier dispatched…to the places those are on a bearing to bring their shit to bear upon…is a tardy attempt to make up by trying to get gung ho after the hoes have blown everything in sight to kingdom come…is a genuinely staggering admission of quite how unqualified that individual is for a position that assumes the title of the commander in chief of the largest & most advanced military arsenal in the history of history…on its own…which…it could not less be if it tried so hard it had to do the thing in the mic drop at the end of the four yorkshiremen sketch that goes “we used to get up in the morning at half-past-ten at night, half an hour before we went to bed – eat a lump of freezing cold poison – then work 28 hours a day at t’mill…and pay t’mill owner to let us work there…and when I got home our dad used to murder us in cold blood – each night – and dance about on our graves, singing hallelujah.”
…but…like the sketch says…you tell that to the young people of today…& they won’t believe you
…so…maybe nobody will believe this…but…I think I’m done making it worse…before the part with the tunes, anyway…for today, at least?
I did read all of this. But I’m basically at the point now where I simply can’t process all the insanity. It’s too much too fast. I can’t even muster coherent conjecture or commentary. These assholes are going to destroy the planet.
…so…I go back & forth with our @myopicprophet about potential apologies owed to various parties by various others over various things…mostly in pursuit of humor…but…part of the problem for me is that most elements of the stuff it feels like I want to make screaming about from rooftops the new cool when in reality it makes me sound like I’m losing my shit…run to between one & four-plus decades of agglomerated “& for why…” backed up under considerable pressure not to leak out in ways that would upset people I know who I happen to think don’t deserve to feel like that would be something to take personally
…so…one of the ones the jury is both sort of still out on but also very much resembles the horse that used to take up the void in the stable while everyone argues heatedly about the design of the lock on the door & why that failed to restrain it…is myo being pretty clear that mostly the people saying they wanted to hit up a mulligan for MAGA fully didn’t get it but even the ones screaming bloody murder about project 2025 were well short of how bad the parts they were imagining the bad parts were compared to how bad those looked if you actually looked…& people tend to the view that not-knowing-but-worrying is the upper end of how-bad-could-it-be because how-bad-it-is+imagination=how-bad-it-could-be is sorta how that gets calculated on the fly while you think you’re thinking about something else…with the corollary that nobody was prepared for how far it would get out over its skis or how big of a mark that could already set like a scar before you had any shot of getting the patient on a table to attempt to triage the fucker
…I err…much as it seems absurd as anything else at present…towards a belief that at some level the imperatives of unavoidable reality insert themselves & those are implacable in much the way the markets can stay irrational longer than most can remain solvent…except they DGAF about solvency or recognize the existence of markets…because reality’s imperatives are non-negotiable & the sort of baked in you can’t get out…so I think the parts that clearly aren’t reversible are very much all the sorts of problems those look like…but the parts that are looking like they’re larger than life & badder than bad are both smaller & entirely more vulnerable than they keep telling themselves & each other for as long as they can maintain their bubble
…how else to explain the existence of palmer luckey?
…so…yes…they are…but…also we already were & even without them all the gearing up for making sure everyone can kill everyone they think might need killing if they find their back up against a steep enough wall…would continue to fuck the carbon curve even if you culled the full cast of principal culprits in the US power structures governing that one way or another in full yeet-into-the-sun ways…doing otherwise requires an overhaul of how we look at all manner of things much more fundamental than the one we at times appeared to flirt with admitting was visible during the lockdown…& this is how that turned out…so…doing “the same thing” & expecting a different result…yadda yadda
…I dunno…myo thinks he owes me the apology I think I owe him & it might be a whynotboth.gif deal…but…I’d prefer to find a way to do the transcode into “both? both. both works.” without literally attempting some sort of treatise/monograph/dissertation/jerk-off-motion-inducing thing about epistemic crisis until the ambient levels of eyeroll reach life-threatening proportions
…but…like…there’s one I couldn’t find before I self-imposed a moratorium of adding to the cursed post that was about the supply of metals (iirc?) to the US as a pie-chart…& about 1/3 came out of the places this all means it won’t be…& 2/3 or so of the balance was just labelled “canada”…could have been steel…could have been aluminium…might have been some whole other construction industry input…but those proportions are about right along with the remark it came with about how the tariff war thing is paying its dividends?
…like…these aren’t the one I had in mind but all the same the point kinda stands?
We can't make these weapons without materials and such from other countries (computer chips, RAM, rare earth metals etc) all things we have less access to now due to Trump's tariffs and supply chains moving AWAY from the US. And they will cost even more. We are LESS safe then before the war.
Trump’s global trade war is choking off U.S. access to rare earths, tariffs, retaliation, and broken alliances mean we can’t source the metals we need for defense, energy, or tech. Strategic autonomy demands cooperation, not isolation. This is sabotage disguised as strength resulting in weakness.
[16 Oct ’25]
Canada supplies over 70% of America’s aluminum imports while serving as the main overseas steel source. Recent trade shifts, however, challenge these volumes as global rivals seek larger roles. travelculturelife.com/us-manufactu…
Waking up an hour late far away from home, @splinterrip‘s Sunday DOT provides the comforting warmth of knowing that the world is still shit and music is still tonic. Soothing.
…it’s not the sort of service I feel entirely comfortable being thanked for…but…still very much appreciate the sentiment…along with the possibility that the tunes still buy me some goodwill towards the downpayment on the welcome I might otherwise wear out until you can’t even see it was there to begin with?
…hope the hometown brings all the mojo required to put some mustard on that…even if you aren’t a kendrick fan & you just mean the good hot dogs per home rules
Ok I’m going to compartmentalize the horrors for now and talk about the asshole bitching about rural connectivity programs and democrats not doing anything affordability.
The RDOF program was federal fucking infrastructure started under the Biden administration and the key detail here is that it was for fiber infrastructure in rural areas. RDOF was actually going reasonably well.
Rural areas didn’t get landlines without massive federal infrastructure investments, either.
Then fuckers in this administration decided “if you get govt money, everything you use needs to be made in America” which is a lovely sentiment if there are factories making those supplies already at scale to support this, but there fucking aren’t here.
So yeah, it basically scuppered the option.
…for a place that so much of the internet is sort of about in so many ways…it sure is weird how shit a deal the US consumer gets most everyplace for the actual hookup…mobile or fixed…fibre or otherwise
…so…yeah…I at least kinda get it…that could run a 100,000 words or so & still sound like it was in search of a sensible workable solution there’s a visible path to from where the not so much standing start as fully hobbled cart horse is waiting to be upgraded to self-hauling via recursive wizardry?
One of the stupidest books on warfare is probably Starship Troopers. Why? Because it assumes that sophisticated logistical chains and mechanics/technicians take away from valuable fighting troops. It’s the other fucking way around. Sophisticated logistic chains and ample supplies of trades/mechanics/techs enable technologically sophisticated fighting forces to fight long distances and keep them alive.
1 F-15E Strike Eagle (2 crew) needs 1500-2000 people supporting it, but it can destroy a lot more than a WW2 bomber wing of B-17s (11 crew per aircraft and 60 B-17s per bomber wing) and 10000 men supplying logistics despite the fact that you have a very long logistical tail.
The IJA and IJN didn’t give a shit about logistical tails and they starved most of their troops by design.
…I…kinda…like the book for what it was…which is considerably less than was made of it for the most part right up until what was made of it was a movie that was like a silver screen vindication of many of the things I felt as a reader it spoke clearly to the author finding too inconvenient to allow on the page in order for his writing abilities to afford the option of taking the narrative the places he wanted to force it…for the most part the book says entirely more about both the author’s shortcomings & the flaws in the axioms he tried to derive a hypothesis from…& people who want the hypothesis not to be a pipe-dream…they like to point to the fallibility of the author’s articulation rather than admit the possibility that the axioms are adulterated versions of the thing they’re claiming to be?
…so verhoeven did a fun job of caricaturing the implied context in the shape of the civilization you back into imagining given the premise that the axioms working out per the hypothesis is a going concern & then try to run with that…& the live action version with a special effects budget & a sense of humor can give that legs that endure like the duracell bunny compared to a dead kinda-pretty-bigoted dude with more chips than shoulders to have ’em on
…on the other hand…compared to anything from the way the samurai version worked to the arthurian to the OG freebooting pirates to the ancient greeks & their city states & back & forth up & down the historical chain…the basic principle isn’t so original, really…it’s presented like a binary deal to gatekeep enfranchisement as a two-way street…& the obvious abuse is to entrench & fortify minority rule that kills everyone when the head of the snake rots…but the theory is that if you can demand [measure that in turn demands taking the duty implied by what that means you’re asked to determine] such that [100% of polity know in their bones the weight of the actions they take & why they’re worth the cost] then maybe that could be better than “basically a majority won’t understand the question put to them & the size of the twin slices that either will gull the fuck out of a mark quicker than they even knew they wanted to & the willfully-seeking-to-remain-uninformed “spread” that occupies the determinative margin such that it gets pareto-compliant fan-service in all matters pertaining to campaigning” as a way to decide that stuff…isn’t that different to the we-all-got-skin-in-the-game ladder that transferred its fealty up the chain to the places where if heads roll kingdoms fall…&…even executed by heinlein…that’s usefully instructive about enough to not be mad it exists…like ender’s game & orson scott card…I wouldn’t object to the thing being on a reading list at a miltary academy…in & of itself…it’s what that academy expects its cadets to see in it & what it might feel the need to do about making what parts clear if they weren’t on their own…it being a good/bad entry on the list turns entirely on that part…well…for me, anyroad?
…it is underappreciated how much of the sun tzu thing is “please remember people eat & food comes from places that aren’t trays the servants carry from the kitchen you never enter”
…or what some of alexander the great’s tutors attempted to impart
…so…yeah…if you only care about the tip of the spear & not whether the guy who was supposed to make the rest of it ate in the last week…you’re…gonna have a bad day on the field
As for Meol. I’m not shocked that they didn’t know what the fuck they were doing with the hyperloop because they’re NOT FUCKING ENGINEERS.
I don’t know why the media keeps harping on his “engineer” skills. He only took one year of Engineering Physics at Queens before he fucked off to Murrica. ONE YEAR DOES NOT AN ENGINEER MAKE especially first year but that’s the fucking media for you. Most of the stuff we learned in first year is the same as the general Science Student. No much different at all. Where the rubber meets the road is the 2-5th years and the long years of working as an engineer. Not working in some Sillycon Valley startup drinking Red Bull and fighting with your idiot younger brother.
He never worked on a infrastructure project or even a basic construction project. That’s a lot of skills and work that need to be learned and not just simply done via MS Project either. It’s tough work dealing with that shit… I know in part because one of my friends is a tort lawyer who makes a lot of money suing engineers over the mistakes they made.
Fuck Musk.
If there was an easier better way of doing complicated headache filled shit like major construction projects then I’m pretty sure someone would have thought of it long before Meol was an ache in his pedo daddy’s balls.
I think it was here that someone posted months ago about how stupid the hyperloop project was because of all the fucking sinkholes in that part of the country??
Funny enough, I’m not surprised. It’s one of the few things I know about construction. The reason why things can get big and tall or go deep underground is because of clay. Not much clay in the US SW (sand mostly or sandy loam.)
I worked as a soil compaction tech (measuring soil and concrete densities with a radioactive probe) for six grueling months working on the then new runway at Pearson. When you have sandy loam with no water (aka desert) it makes construction rather difficult as there’s nothing to compact (unlike clay.) It’s why the Burj Khalifa’s foundation is so wide and deep to prevent the weakness of sandy soil from toppling it over.
I couldn’t tell you the theory or mathematics of it because I’m no Civil Engineer.
Mark Dubowitless doesn’t get it. OBAMA wouldn’t have been so fucking stupid as to attack Iran over NOTHING. If Iran nuked Diego Garcia (for example) then I don’t think you could stop Obama from laying waste to Iran, but he didn’t.
As for tribalism… it’s okay for Israel to kill and lay waste to millions because they’re “different”, but not okay for them to do that to the Jews?
…the runway he successfully taxied the plane that couldn’t fly down & took off to coast at cruising altitude until fuckwits’R’us blew it out of the blue skies…was the deal was to maintain a holding pattern…that these fucks apparently never comprehended as a thing that could be maintained even as every available indication continued to surprise everyone by checking out even after iran agreed to have its lack of *new* homework certified
…iran wouldn’t get closer than “you’ll know if we make a run at it & that’ll give you a year *from then* to do what you gotta do but less than that & bibi goes off-leash with the rabid mutt brigade”
…&…everyone played it with a straight bat as far as anyone I ever get to speak to knows thus far into that part being history
…that’s the bar they claimed was insufferably low compared to where they could get if they got to go at it by their “rules of engagement are stupid, akshully” america-first principles like those are a priori truths bestowed by the one true messiah & his heavenly father
…feeling like I wanna tune fools up with a bat is the moderate position…just as long as I don’t buy a bat…& at this point…*even* if I buy a fucking bat & take it everywhere like I think my name is harley & life’s a big cartoon…just so long as I don’t actually smack a motherfucker upside the head…I’m pretty certain even all that way further down this line the harm I’d be doing on a net basis would be negligible by any metric I can fathom when you go a teeny tiny bit wider on your bigger picture…or your depth of field?
Hey everyone, if you haven’t watched the videos linked above of the fires in Tehran, just consider this the warning that it’s fucking worse in video than the screenshots indicate. I’m not saying you should or shouldn’t watch it, but fuck it’s bad. It’s so bad. It’s apocalyptic bad.
…could have threaded this under @bryanlsplinter ‘s further up but for the sake of putting it at the bottom & how you could apply it to your comment as easy as to my post the way I would having it reply to the other comment…even if it’s really about the one jimmy of the rainbow with the gravity’s pair of reading lists?
This should come with a warning that it will ruin your life.
I used this at this school I'm at to explain why I was there and everyone was very impressed by how good it was and they asked me who made it and I said "a military writer at a think tank" because "some insane person on the Internet" would probably have not helped my credibility.
Honestly @splinterrip, I thought for a few minutes about asking you to nest it behind a trigger warning or something because even the still frames are horrible.
Then I thought well, we see similar images from wildfires, so I guess that feels like I’m being too squeamish but fuck me this is so bad.
…truth is I did think about something similar…but with all the other things that aren’t equal it broadly came down to leave it out entirely &/or still feel forced to at least mention it…or leave it with embeds that hopefully don’t autoplay for anyone since I forget what if any setting I set how to make them not for me when I load the post…& hope the play button that should punt it onto another tab (or into the app if your phone rolls that way or whatever) was enough of a clue that you’d get video & it was video those people talked about that way around the still frames I was hoping I’d left that at
…still fair…& twice as fair on a day of rest…so…I probably would if you asked, at that?
…ok…so…I’m sorry & everything…but…pathetic as it is…it was that or…just to take one element of it to play a role almost all of them could have in an arguably more useful but certainly more rigorous fashion…since the whole point of a good chunk of the efficacy of this exercise on my end is a preventative from me burning the time that any of those would take…& very possibly even deserve…but about which my options for providing meaningful input to anyone doing anything meaningful about are about as high as them reading this & knowing it was me that did the typing part
…the scale of the misread required to think that the…floating assets, let’s say…that kier dispatched…to the places those are on a bearing to bring their shit to bear upon…is a tardy attempt to make up by trying to get gung ho after the hoes have blown everything in sight to kingdom come…is a genuinely staggering admission of quite how unqualified that individual is for a position that assumes the title of the commander in chief of the largest & most advanced military arsenal in the history of history…on its own…which…it could not less be if it tried so hard it had to do the thing in the mic drop at the end of the four yorkshiremen sketch that goes “we used to get up in the morning at half-past-ten at night, half an hour before we went to bed – eat a lump of freezing cold poison – then work 28 hours a day at t’mill…and pay t’mill owner to let us work there…and when I got home our dad used to murder us in cold blood – each night – and dance about on our graves, singing hallelujah.”
…but…like the sketch says…you tell that to the young people of today…& they won’t believe you
…so…maybe nobody will believe this…but…I think I’m done making it worse…before the part with the tunes, anyway…for today, at least?
I did read all of this. But I’m basically at the point now where I simply can’t process all the insanity. It’s too much too fast. I can’t even muster coherent conjecture or commentary. These assholes are going to destroy the planet.
…so…I go back & forth with our @myopicprophet about potential apologies owed to various parties by various others over various things…mostly in pursuit of humor…but…part of the problem for me is that most elements of the stuff it feels like I want to make screaming about from rooftops the new cool when in reality it makes me sound like I’m losing my shit…run to between one & four-plus decades of agglomerated “& for why…” backed up under considerable pressure not to leak out in ways that would upset people I know who I happen to think don’t deserve to feel like that would be something to take personally
…so…one of the ones the jury is both sort of still out on but also very much resembles the horse that used to take up the void in the stable while everyone argues heatedly about the design of the lock on the door & why that failed to restrain it…is myo being pretty clear that mostly the people saying they wanted to hit up a mulligan for MAGA fully didn’t get it but even the ones screaming bloody murder about project 2025 were well short of how bad the parts they were imagining the bad parts were compared to how bad those looked if you actually looked…& people tend to the view that not-knowing-but-worrying is the upper end of how-bad-could-it-be because how-bad-it-is+imagination=how-bad-it-could-be is sorta how that gets calculated on the fly while you think you’re thinking about something else…with the corollary that nobody was prepared for how far it would get out over its skis or how big of a mark that could already set like a scar before you had any shot of getting the patient on a table to attempt to triage the fucker
…I err…much as it seems absurd as anything else at present…towards a belief that at some level the imperatives of unavoidable reality insert themselves & those are implacable in much the way the markets can stay irrational longer than most can remain solvent…except they DGAF about solvency or recognize the existence of markets…because reality’s imperatives are non-negotiable & the sort of baked in you can’t get out…so I think the parts that clearly aren’t reversible are very much all the sorts of problems those look like…but the parts that are looking like they’re larger than life & badder than bad are both smaller & entirely more vulnerable than they keep telling themselves & each other for as long as they can maintain their bubble
…how else to explain the existence of palmer luckey?
…so…yes…they are…but…also we already were & even without them all the gearing up for making sure everyone can kill everyone they think might need killing if they find their back up against a steep enough wall…would continue to fuck the carbon curve even if you culled the full cast of principal culprits in the US power structures governing that one way or another in full yeet-into-the-sun ways…doing otherwise requires an overhaul of how we look at all manner of things much more fundamental than the one we at times appeared to flirt with admitting was visible during the lockdown…& this is how that turned out…so…doing “the same thing” & expecting a different result…yadda yadda
…I dunno…myo thinks he owes me the apology I think I owe him & it might be a whynotboth.gif deal…but…I’d prefer to find a way to do the transcode into “both? both. both works.” without literally attempting some sort of treatise/monograph/dissertation/jerk-off-motion-inducing thing about epistemic crisis until the ambient levels of eyeroll reach life-threatening proportions
…but…like…there’s one I couldn’t find before I self-imposed a moratorium of adding to the cursed post that was about the supply of metals (iirc?) to the US as a pie-chart…& about 1/3 came out of the places this all means it won’t be…& 2/3 or so of the balance was just labelled “canada”…could have been steel…could have been aluminium…might have been some whole other construction industry input…but those proportions are about right along with the remark it came with about how the tariff war thing is paying its dividends?
…like…these aren’t the one I had in mind but all the same the point kinda stands?
[16 Oct ’25]
i am sorry for what i put into it but not at all for what i get out of it.
Waking up an hour late far away from home, @splinterrip‘s Sunday DOT provides the comforting warmth of knowing that the world is still shit and music is still tonic. Soothing.
…it’s not the sort of service I feel entirely comfortable being thanked for…but…still very much appreciate the sentiment…along with the possibility that the tunes still buy me some goodwill towards the downpayment on the welcome I might otherwise wear out until you can’t even see it was there to begin with?
…hope the hometown brings all the mojo required to put some mustard on that…even if you aren’t a kendrick fan & you just mean the good hot dogs per home rules
Ok I’m going to compartmentalize the horrors for now and talk about the asshole bitching about rural connectivity programs and democrats not doing anything affordability.
The RDOF program was federal fucking infrastructure started under the Biden administration and the key detail here is that it was for fiber infrastructure in rural areas. RDOF was actually going reasonably well.
Rural areas didn’t get landlines without massive federal infrastructure investments, either.
Then fuckers in this administration decided “if you get govt money, everything you use needs to be made in America” which is a lovely sentiment if there are factories making those supplies already at scale to support this, but there fucking aren’t here.
So yeah, it basically scuppered the option.
…for a place that so much of the internet is sort of about in so many ways…it sure is weird how shit a deal the US consumer gets most everyplace for the actual hookup…mobile or fixed…fibre or otherwise
…so…yeah…I at least kinda get it…that could run a 100,000 words or so & still sound like it was in search of a sensible workable solution there’s a visible path to from where the not so much standing start as fully hobbled cart horse is waiting to be upgraded to self-hauling via recursive wizardry?
It’s called – these assholes just want Starlink to be the only option for as many people as possible.
Bullshido – All teeth, no brains or ass.
One of the stupidest books on warfare is probably Starship Troopers. Why? Because it assumes that sophisticated logistical chains and mechanics/technicians take away from valuable fighting troops. It’s the other fucking way around. Sophisticated logistic chains and ample supplies of trades/mechanics/techs enable technologically sophisticated fighting forces to fight long distances and keep them alive.
1 F-15E Strike Eagle (2 crew) needs 1500-2000 people supporting it, but it can destroy a lot more than a WW2 bomber wing of B-17s (11 crew per aircraft and 60 B-17s per bomber wing) and 10000 men supplying logistics despite the fact that you have a very long logistical tail.
The IJA and IJN didn’t give a shit about logistical tails and they starved most of their troops by design.
…I…kinda…like the book for what it was…which is considerably less than was made of it for the most part right up until what was made of it was a movie that was like a silver screen vindication of many of the things I felt as a reader it spoke clearly to the author finding too inconvenient to allow on the page in order for his writing abilities to afford the option of taking the narrative the places he wanted to force it…for the most part the book says entirely more about both the author’s shortcomings & the flaws in the axioms he tried to derive a hypothesis from…& people who want the hypothesis not to be a pipe-dream…they like to point to the fallibility of the author’s articulation rather than admit the possibility that the axioms are adulterated versions of the thing they’re claiming to be?
…so verhoeven did a fun job of caricaturing the implied context in the shape of the civilization you back into imagining given the premise that the axioms working out per the hypothesis is a going concern & then try to run with that…& the live action version with a special effects budget & a sense of humor can give that legs that endure like the duracell bunny compared to a dead kinda-pretty-bigoted dude with more chips than shoulders to have ’em on
…on the other hand…compared to anything from the way the samurai version worked to the arthurian to the OG freebooting pirates to the ancient greeks & their city states & back & forth up & down the historical chain…the basic principle isn’t so original, really…it’s presented like a binary deal to gatekeep enfranchisement as a two-way street…& the obvious abuse is to entrench & fortify minority rule that kills everyone when the head of the snake rots…but the theory is that if you can demand [measure that in turn demands taking the duty implied by what that means you’re asked to determine] such that [100% of polity know in their bones the weight of the actions they take & why they’re worth the cost] then maybe that could be better than “basically a majority won’t understand the question put to them & the size of the twin slices that either will gull the fuck out of a mark quicker than they even knew they wanted to & the willfully-seeking-to-remain-uninformed “spread” that occupies the determinative margin such that it gets pareto-compliant fan-service in all matters pertaining to campaigning” as a way to decide that stuff…isn’t that different to the we-all-got-skin-in-the-game ladder that transferred its fealty up the chain to the places where if heads roll kingdoms fall…&…even executed by heinlein…that’s usefully instructive about enough to not be mad it exists…like ender’s game & orson scott card…I wouldn’t object to the thing being on a reading list at a miltary academy…in & of itself…it’s what that academy expects its cadets to see in it & what it might feel the need to do about making what parts clear if they weren’t on their own…it being a good/bad entry on the list turns entirely on that part…well…for me, anyroad?
P.S.
…it is underappreciated how much of the sun tzu thing is “please remember people eat & food comes from places that aren’t trays the servants carry from the kitchen you never enter”
…or what some of alexander the great’s tutors attempted to impart
…so…yeah…if you only care about the tip of the spear & not whether the guy who was supposed to make the rest of it ate in the last week…you’re…gonna have a bad day on the field
As for Meol. I’m not shocked that they didn’t know what the fuck they were doing with the hyperloop because they’re NOT FUCKING ENGINEERS.
I don’t know why the media keeps harping on his “engineer” skills. He only took one year of Engineering Physics at Queens before he fucked off to Murrica. ONE YEAR DOES NOT AN ENGINEER MAKE especially first year but that’s the fucking media for you. Most of the stuff we learned in first year is the same as the general Science Student. No much different at all. Where the rubber meets the road is the 2-5th years and the long years of working as an engineer. Not working in some Sillycon Valley startup drinking Red Bull and fighting with your idiot younger brother.
He never worked on a infrastructure project or even a basic construction project. That’s a lot of skills and work that need to be learned and not just simply done via MS Project either. It’s tough work dealing with that shit… I know in part because one of my friends is a tort lawyer who makes a lot of money suing engineers over the mistakes they made.
Fuck Musk.
If there was an easier better way of doing complicated headache filled shit like major construction projects then I’m pretty sure someone would have thought of it long before Meol was an ache in his pedo daddy’s balls.
I think it was here that someone posted months ago about how stupid the hyperloop project was because of all the fucking sinkholes in that part of the country??
Funny enough, I’m not surprised. It’s one of the few things I know about construction. The reason why things can get big and tall or go deep underground is because of clay. Not much clay in the US SW (sand mostly or sandy loam.)
I worked as a soil compaction tech (measuring soil and concrete densities with a radioactive probe) for six grueling months working on the then new runway at Pearson. When you have sandy loam with no water (aka desert) it makes construction rather difficult as there’s nothing to compact (unlike clay.) It’s why the Burj Khalifa’s foundation is so wide and deep to prevent the weakness of sandy soil from toppling it over.
I couldn’t tell you the theory or mathematics of it because I’m no Civil Engineer.
If Obama?
Mark Dubowitless doesn’t get it. OBAMA wouldn’t have been so fucking stupid as to attack Iran over NOTHING. If Iran nuked Diego Garcia (for example) then I don’t think you could stop Obama from laying waste to Iran, but he didn’t.
As for tribalism… it’s okay for Israel to kill and lay waste to millions because they’re “different”, but not okay for them to do that to the Jews?
…the runway he successfully taxied the plane that couldn’t fly down & took off to coast at cruising altitude until fuckwits’R’us blew it out of the blue skies…was the deal was to maintain a holding pattern…that these fucks apparently never comprehended as a thing that could be maintained even as every available indication continued to surprise everyone by checking out even after iran agreed to have its lack of *new* homework certified
…iran wouldn’t get closer than “you’ll know if we make a run at it & that’ll give you a year *from then* to do what you gotta do but less than that & bibi goes off-leash with the rabid mutt brigade”
…&…everyone played it with a straight bat as far as anyone I ever get to speak to knows thus far into that part being history
…that’s the bar they claimed was insufferably low compared to where they could get if they got to go at it by their “rules of engagement are stupid, akshully” america-first principles like those are a priori truths bestowed by the one true messiah & his heavenly father
…feeling like I wanna tune fools up with a bat is the moderate position…just as long as I don’t buy a bat…& at this point…*even* if I buy a fucking bat & take it everywhere like I think my name is harley & life’s a big cartoon…just so long as I don’t actually smack a motherfucker upside the head…I’m pretty certain even all that way further down this line the harm I’d be doing on a net basis would be negligible by any metric I can fathom when you go a teeny tiny bit wider on your bigger picture…or your depth of field?
Hey everyone, if you haven’t watched the videos linked above of the fires in Tehran, just consider this the warning that it’s fucking worse in video than the screenshots indicate. I’m not saying you should or shouldn’t watch it, but fuck it’s bad. It’s so bad. It’s apocalyptic bad.
…could have threaded this under @bryanlsplinter ‘s further up but for the sake of putting it at the bottom & how you could apply it to your comment as easy as to my post the way I would having it reply to the other comment…even if it’s really about the one jimmy of the rainbow with the gravity’s pair of reading lists?
[…at some point I imagine the display name will drop the bombing-to-win pape reference but the rest will still work even then]
Honestly @splinterrip, I thought for a few minutes about asking you to nest it behind a trigger warning or something because even the still frames are horrible.
Then I thought well, we see similar images from wildfires, so I guess that feels like I’m being too squeamish but fuck me this is so bad.
…truth is I did think about something similar…but with all the other things that aren’t equal it broadly came down to leave it out entirely &/or still feel forced to at least mention it…or leave it with embeds that hopefully don’t autoplay for anyone since I forget what if any setting I set how to make them not for me when I load the post…& hope the play button that should punt it onto another tab (or into the app if your phone rolls that way or whatever) was enough of a clue that you’d get video & it was video those people talked about that way around the still frames I was hoping I’d left that at
…still fair…& twice as fair on a day of rest…so…I probably would if you asked, at that?