Kublai Khan told me that barbarians keep eating his invasion fleets so I asked how many fleets he has and he says he just builds a new invasion fleet afterward so I said it sounds like he's just feeding invasion fleets to barbarians and then his Branch Secretary started crying

Iranian big men, strong men, crying, saying, "Mr President please, please stop bombing us from your beautiful White House Ballroom that's under budget and ahead of schedule even though it should have been built in 2020 if it weren't for crooked Hillary stealing the election for Joe Biden."

The problem with this argument is that it defines liberalism as classical liberalism and leaves socialism as something entirely vague. The concept of welfare spending is not something socialism can claim as its antithesis to capitalism.

The White House seeking updates on how the Hormuz situation is developing.

Funny, though unsurprising, that Trump's issue isn't Iran running a protection racket but that he's being excluded from the racket. The ceasefire is easier to understand if you conceptualise the process not as geopolitical competition but as a shakedown attempt between feuding crime syndicates

Oman and Iran seeing Trump somehow agreed to let them collect their entire GDPs in taxes on shipping

The United States was undefeated in battle but has been stabbed in the back by 𝚂̶𝚘̶𝚌̶𝚒̶𝚊̶𝚕̶𝚒̶𝚜̶𝚝̶𝚜̶,̶ ̶𝙻̶𝚒̶𝚋̶𝚎̶𝚛̶𝚊̶𝚕̶𝚜̶,̶ ̶𝙹̶𝚎̶𝚠̶𝚜̶ Omanis

What did we learn, Palmer?

Should note that desalination plants are only a minor part of Iran's water supply and mainly matter for some small coastal communities and the Gulf islands. Meanwhile the UAE gets almost half of its water from desalination, Qatar and Bahrain even more than that

You'd think people would have learned by how hard they got rug pulled by the negotiations charade in February to not fall for it again. The war is going to last for at least a few weeks more and Trump will seize Kharg island by the end of this week, mark my words

A lot of the bad takes rn are overcorrections from the GWOT. Guerrillas can go underground and focus on the occasional raid, which renders individuals somewhat replaceable. The Iranian regime has a nation to run; there are laws to enforce, payrolls to disburse, and planning meetings to attend

The system of the Islamic Republic in its entirety, it's not that conceptually complicated. One might question the viability of such a goal but the fundamental scope of the grievance should be abundantly clear at this point

Would be very funny if after the war they'll announce Mojtaba was killed by an Israeli strike on its last day and make him some sort of mythical martyr of the war or something

Find someone who loves you as much as fluid loves filling Bolsonaro's lungs

I've just been informed we are rapidly approaching the cool zone

Someone asked ‘who talks like this?!‘ and the only other leader I can think of is Dmitri Medvedev - they could be drinking buddies

There is a lot of evidence accumulated since 2023 if not earlier indicating that the Iranian leadership is capable of some quite profound miscalculations in relation to the US and Israel. Just because the US is led by a delusional sociopath does not mean its opponents are always master strategists.

Bro can't even record a cellphone video in his bunker. I'm 100% a Mojtaba truther now, that mfer is in a coma

The discussions of regime stability keep focusing on the wrong questions, nobody serious actually expected quick political disintegration! The relevant point of analysis is how this will leave the regime's ability to deal with mass unrest and security deterioration in the coming weeks and months

The statistic for this war I'd actually be most interested in seeing tracked is not military equipment destroyed but work delinquincy rates for mid-level regime officials

Pointing to the sign

I think people are getting their timeline for when, if at all, we should expect to see major unrest mixed up. The IR will be weakest right around the culmination of the strike campaign, there is no reason to move before that. Both Bibi and RP are also explicitly messaging "stand back and stand by"

Khorramabad percs got me contemplating commercial off the shelf ballistic missile components, my regional proxies WILL have exoatmospheric strike capabilities

The entire global petrochem market right now rests on the internal battle between Artesh Major Sahakian and the intrusive thought that the Sangachal terminal is just sitting there looking submissive and Shahed-able.

WHY IS EVERY PAPER ON EARTH USING SCHUMER’S PICTURE WHEN HE LOST ON A PARTY-LINE VOTE?? THUNE IS THE FACE OF THIS, NOT SCHUMER. I MEAN, COME ON.

Imperial Security Bureau type fit

To survive US and Israeli airpower the IRGC and Artesh land forces need to stay dispersed. To counter Kurdish or Balochi incursions they will have to concentrate forces. How do you say Kobayashi Maru in Iranian?

A brief analysis of speculation over a Kurdish incursion into Iran

Yeah this is exactly the thing. Increasingly you are telling people to not believe their lying eyes when you tell them LLMs are useless. Their actual lives will directly contradict this. They will likely discount most other unrelated things you say as a result. This can’t become a left/lib dogma.

Boeing can manufacture more than 45k JDAM kits a year or 940~ a week. Between 2018-2023 the USAF took delivery of 107k new JDAM kits. I don't think they running out of things to drop on regime targets anytime soon.

Would love for WSJ or whoever is feeding them to explain what exact munitions they are speaking about here. There were 6 different articles before this thing kicked off saying the US only had enough PGMs for a 3-4 days of combat (a blatant lie).

Everything depends on overthrowing the the IR first and by conjuring up the spectre of secessionism the Kurds are decreasing the chances of that happening. They are the Jill Stein voters in this conflict

Say what you like about shadowy government conspiracies, but their habit of killing off people who know too much regardless of gender, race, colour, or creed really does suggest they are innocent of epistemic injustice, they truly respect all of us *qua knowers*.

A short- to mid-term military risk isn't the US running out of interceptors or PGMs in this conflict per se. It is the opportunity costs.

Folks, you really gotta stop doing tea leaf reading of Trump incoherently musing on his strategic options. This has proved as literally the least useful indicator of whatever was going to happen over the last two months of this conflict

Otherwise good analysts keep failing to update their views on Iranian popular sentiment, IRGC capabilities, Trump's decision making, and thinking through what no-holds-barred decapitation does to organisations whose main military experience comes from shooting unarmed teenagers in the face

I am fairly convinced at this point that a negotiated end has become very unlikely.Trump essentially offered conditional surrender to the Iranians in Geneva and possibly after they murked Khamenei but now it's going to end with either regime change or collapse, whichever comes first

Great that America has a SecDef who conceptualises the most consequential geopolitical action of his government this decade in the terms of a b-tier action movie

Again, the Prussian Disease rears its ugly head.

'there is a demon that lives underneath Downing Street and possesses every Home Secretary' remains a pretty strong theory tbh

Feels like there is a massive underappreciation of the potential divergence in Israeli and American planning. Trump thinking he could quickly Venzuela this while the Israelis are seizing a historic opportunity to induce regime change in Iran. Neither is acting on the behest of the other here!

Will likely run into same issues as previous talks: Trump's inability to inderstand Iran's system of government. Right now there is nobody to guarantee a deal past tomorrow, if at that. There is no "Vice Supreme Leader" to cut a deal with like in Venezuela

Explosions have been reported near Iran's state broadcaster and the Argentina Square area of Tehran, with blasts heard across multiple districts of the capital. #Iran

The twists and turns on this. Absolute cinema

Based on targets and public comms we're likely seeing a regime change op built on unrestrained decapitation and destruction of security infrastructure to enable a popular takeover incited by the Crown Prince. At least criticise the op on its own terms instead of defaulting to GWOT reflexes

This feels like a very overstated issue. The depletion of AD interceptors is a reasonable short-term concern but they are not like some sort of finite resource. The US absolutely has it within itself to enact defence industrial policy to accelerate the replenishment of its stock