Trump: "We have a thing called a war, or as they would rather say, a military operation. It's for legal reasons. Because as a military operation, I don't need any approvals. As a war you're supposed to get approval from Congress. Something like that. So I call it a military operation."

Two new videos have emerged showing the deadly strikes that hit an IRGC compound, as well as an adjacent girls’ school, in Minab, Iran. By geolocating and verifying the footage, Bellingcat found two waves of attacks, occurring hours apart. www.bellingcat.com/news/2026/03...

God I hope she's real

Israeli airstrikes and ground operations over the last month have largely cut off southern Lebanon from the rest of the country, depopulating dozens of towns and damaging key public services that are a lifeline for the residents who remain reut.rs/3O0SCGJ

The boat strikes are still happening, and SOUTHCOM is now referring to them as “applying total systemic friction”

850 Tomahawks fired puts the Iran war just ahead of the March-April 2003 Iraq invasion, during which the military fired 802 Tomahawks. Somewhere between 3,000 and 4,500 Tomahawk in the arsenal before the war…curious whether that’s more or less than in 2003 (when no one was expecting a China war).

Over the objections of top Army leaders Hegseth strikes 2 Black and 2 female officers from one-star promotion list www.nytimes.com/2026/03/27/u...

Platner describes seeing Marines burn dead insurgents’ bodies. He was in 3/8 Marines in Ramadi in 2006, meaning his first deployment a year earlier was likely 3/8’s 2005 one to Karmah, outside Fallujah, which began in January after the Nov-Dec 2004 second battle of Fallujah had just ended.

I was unaware of this but dug around and found multiple good citations that, yes, the Iraqi security council, which is chaired by the fairly US-aligned PM, did authorize the PMF to respond to US strikes by exercising their right to self defense. www.reuters.com/world/middle... Seems important.

Impossible to know the numbers since CENTCOM is not announcing them—or even to be certain that these are US strikes and not Israeli ones—but it seems a US strike campaign against Iraqi PMF is heating up. Two strikes in two days on a PMF base in Anbar, and yesterday a strike was also reported...

“Bovino made a surprising claim…He identified his race as Native American and his tribe as Cherokee. He testified that he had identified this way since he was 8…but said he was not registered on any official tribal rolls. To reward top performance, he said, he gave out tomahawks.”

This article argues, briefly, that the post–Abraham Accords realignment of US military partnership with Israel from EUCOM to CENTCOM in 2021 helped push the US toward eventual war with Iran by linking CENTCOM’s post-GWOT planning and priorities more deeply to Israel’s. Highly plausible.

New prehistoric ape just dropped

“Someone decided to compress the kill chain. Someone decided deliberation was latency. Someone decided to build a system that produces 1,000 targeting decisions an hour and call them high-quality. Someone decided to start this war. Several hundred people on Capitol Hill are refusing to stop it.”

When Intelligence Fails: A Legal Targeting Analysis of the Minab School Strike at www.justsecurity.org/134350/legal...

“It’s no secret, the military wanted it more than anybody”

correspondent on cnn portugal: these missiles can't reach portugal but *faint smile* they CAN reach spain

New: Iran has been laying traps and moving additional military personnel and air defenses to Kharg Island in recent weeks in preparation for a possible US ground operation there, sources say Gulf allies are warning of significant US casualties if US moves forward www.cnn.com/2026/03/25/p...

Since the start of this decade, Israel has not prosecuted any citizens for killing Palestinian civilians in the occupied #WestBank. Full-blown impunity & the reason why states like Canada must issue sanctions for Israeli leaders & support #ICC investigations: www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...

If you want to read about where these Iran-backed Iraqi Shiite militia groups came from and the horrible things they did during the Iraqi civil war and US surge, check out Michael Gordon's THE ENDGAME. They've splintered, grown, and changed their image but 2005-8 Baghdad was their primordial soup.

What I’m getting from this NJ Transit PSA campaign is that we wouldn’t know human trafficking if we saw it, so I guess either we should report everything we see because we don’t know what we’re looking at, or just keep our mouths shut because we don’t know what we’re looking at

Iraqi Shiite militia logic: Targeting a medevac and caring enough about it being a war crime to blur out the Red Cross to conceal it (and thereby make clear you know it *was* a war crime), but not enough to simply not release the video evidence to the world 🤔

Fascinating that the attacking group blurred out the red cross indicating that it’s a medevac bird (you can still tell from the winglets and nose bump that it’s an HH-60M)

“What do you mean silly? Now that’s real news, not like this politics slop!”

Quadruple amputee cornhole professional jailed on murder charges

The chron tracks some of the biggest and most unprecedented data / archival losses from 2025. To be honest, after compiling each entry, it was staggering to see just how much we’ve lost and fought for this last year. www.shafr.org/passport-apr... @passportshafr.bsky.social @nsarchive.bsky.social

These two young men should be junior enlisted MI kids in an S-2 shop somewhere where they can’t hurt anyone

oh shit oh fuck I don't have nearly enough Robux to bribe these ICE agents.

New: Dennis Coyle, a US citizen imprisoned in Afghanistan for more than a year, has been released, weeks after the Trump administration declared the country a state sponsor of wrongful detention. www.cnn.com/2026/03/24/p...

Israeli defense minister says Israel military will control depopulated "security zone" in Lebanon south of Litani River: www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_ent...

From this headline and photo combo I thought for the moment that that heron was suing (I’ll never get used to the stylistic replacement of “fishermen” with “fishers,” which I’ve read grates on even a lot of women fishermen…an “eel fisher” just sounds way more like an eel-catching critter to me)

Does this guy think Iran is in Arabia

A post on Instagram appears to show that Hegseth’s SECDEF coin (given out to service members he meets and wants to informally recognize or reward) has the “Jerusalem Cross” of the crusader kingdom of Jerusalem on it—which Hegseth also famously has a tattoo of

seeing a lot of speculation this is for carrying out HEU but the evidence equally supports trying to Pluck khamenei jr like we did maduro

A flight-tracking account notes 35 C-17s flying out of airfields including those used by Delta Force (Bragg), SEAL Team 6 (Oceana), two of the three Ranger battalions (HAAF and JBLM), and the 160th SOAR. Looks a lot like staging JSOC in case it’s ordered to do the uranium recovery mission in Iran.

The mad scientists at Cadbury have invented a Cadbury Creme Egg cluster munition

Seems like ICE agents have been ordered to go unmasked at airports. So, a good time to photograph as many of them as possible, so details like tattoos or how they arrange their pouches or patches can be matched to faces later after masked abuses.

The stuff they do with punctuation in movie opening text is wild What is the em dash doing in here

Scratch that, I forgot about the USS Ashland. She was the first ship the U.S. developed with a well deck to launch landing craft from inside the ship. She was the only one built but saw service in the Central Pacific. But the Ashland could not launch aircraft.

It’s nice that there’s a tv channel now where I can watching nothing but X Files all the time, but it would be better if it was two channels, one with monster episodes all the time and one with alien conspiracy episodes all the time

Right. Lots of speculation on this site all week about what the Marine Expeditionary Units headed towards the Persian Gulf might do, most of it pretty unhinged, so this thread is MEU 101. I'll keep adding to it as necessary.

Grok is this real? *gesturing at mutant hybrid of Ripley and a xenomorph*

Israeli assassination strikes targeting Sidon family with possible tenuous connection to Jama'ah Islamiyyah (www.thenationalnews.com/news/mena/20...) and al-Manar editor (www.thenationalnews.com/news/mena/20...) seem to suggest Israeli military reaching deep into its target bank for people to kill.

The Lamentation of Christ, by Andrea Mantegna, 1470-74, 📸 by Rich Storry

NEW: Gregg Phillips, a top FEMA official overseeing disaster response previously said "bitch" Biden “deserves to die,” pushed election conspiracies — and claimed once he teleported to a Waffle House. “Teleporting is no fun...it was real.” More here: www.cnn.com/2026/03/20/p...

Both times Hegseth has said that that "today will be the most intense/highest volume of strikes yet" against Iran, on March 10 and March 13, the number of CENTCOM strikes actually fell well short of the 1,000 it executed the first day (and probably also short of the 600-700 daily average March 6-9)

Obviously the whole war seems unnecessary, but within the context of that war, parking an MQ-9 over every nuclear site to strike any earthmover that comes near its rubbled entrances seems like it would be well worth the cost in MQ-9s—esp. sparing manned aircraft that job.