a neil gaiman defender contests a response of 'no' to a link to a substack, and is told 'I see that like Neil Gaiman, you don't understand that no is a complete sentence'
you want to see a murder
oooh big problem there. trump is stupid and stubborn and the costs, as always, are borne by someone else.
In Persian culture, killing somebody’s entire family with TLAMs is seen as a grave insult
How many people stupidly took a liar, known bigot, pedophile and sociopath at his word and seem genuinely shocked almost a decade in that he's never even remotely true to it is the most embarrassing part of this societal downward spiral. Americans sold their country for magical beans.
What does saying "I'm anti-war" when the candidate/president is pro-fascist? He promised a revenge tour, has openly idolized and sought out alliances with dictators who routinely engage in violence against their own people. Why did they think this outcome wasn't probable?
Turns out ‘no rules of engagement’ proclamations paired with massacring little girls is not a popular image
🎙️ I was thrilled to rejoin @weisenthal.bsky.social & @tracyalloway.bsky.social on the Odd Lots podcast to discuss the historic and ongoing disruption of traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, through which ~20% of the world's oil flows
This is it. This is the big one
open.spotify.com/episode/2rl8...
This crisis will continue to get worse until normal traffic through the Strait resumes, and, at this stage, even if the conflict ended today and tankers ramped back up to 100% Hormuz flow, it would still takes months to return to anything resembling normality.
I'm not an alarmist, but I am acutely alarmed
This is the scenario you would propose as a thought experiment to understand how shocks like this would ripple through the global crude and refined products markets (spoiler: EVERYTHING BREAKS)
It's educational, but it's terrifying
the Forever Wars are still underused for tragicomedy, honestly, but 'Arabic interpreter gets deployed to Afghanistan' is a good starting premise
how is this level of illiteracy possible? surely senior officers in the US military either know from self-education or learn from on-the-job training that ethnic identity, religious affiliation, and language fluency are different?
who thinks every Christian speaks Aramaic like Jesus did?
If you thought China was selling a lot of batteries and solar panels before, you’re going to love what happens next.
One of the things that really trips a lot of analysts, including ones with real skin in the game, is that they refuse - absolutely refuse - to accept how stupid Trump very obviously is. He has no knowledge of anything, is incapable of learning, and only remembers the last thing to happen to him.
I mean, has anyone checked there isn't actually just a big pile of ships stacked on top of each other
My lawyer brain is stuck on the provision that allowing anthropomorphic characters is contingent on their knee orientation.
Some dude at Visa is like “the fur is fine, and I agree Disney’s Maid Marian was hot, but knees are sacrosanct. The line must be drawn here, this far, no further”
That graph suggests that Iran might not *need* to mine the strait to stop oil & gas traffic. They could stop production and refining at the source regardless.
Sea mines are remarkably indifferent to begging.
"That was an order! Steiner's assault was an order!"
Dude is sundowning, being fed AI slop by his sycophants, and posting through it while the global economy hangs over a cliff and energy markets circle the drain—to say nothing of the thousands of Iranian civilians already dead.
The Hague is too good for these people.
Trump isn't concerned, since Admiral Steiner will force open the strait and bring everything under control.
The world is being set on fire by a 79 year old with a ten year old’s vocabulary whose adult advisors interact with him like he’s a hangry toddler who skipped his nap.
It’s just hitting me now that this almost certainly got back burnered because it’s not ‘lethality’
US watching a movie where a vigilante’s entire family is wiped out: “Oh yeah, time for fucking vengeance, this dude will never stop. Get them!”
US watching Iran pick a Supreme Leader who just had his entire family wiped out: “This guy is plainly going to be reasonable and fold.”
"Why won't the Iranian just give us a ceasefire when we broke our not!treaty with them and keep attacking them every nine months? Why don't they take us at our word??"
It would be super-cool if we had full-time professional staff in-place to anticipate problems and figure out how to solve problems in advance. If only it was possible.
I actually think it’s cool @mikeblack114.bsky.social has a better sense of what’s going on than the chairman of the joint chiefs, this site has the juice
“More chemistry between these two than newly weds.”
Ummm yeah he pulled a bad bitch and she loves him back what’s hard to understand?
Were trans people the only members of the military who can understand concepts like "constricted seaways are easier to make dangerous than to make safe" and "you can't just try and kill literally everything from the sky"?
Maybe no one could do enough push-ups to impress Hegseth, who probably sees planning and logistics as obstacles to lethality-maxxing.
