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“Just take out the Ayatollah, how hard could it be?”

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“move fast and break shit” and “how hard could it be?” are the received wisdom of MAGA conservatism

WaPo’s “your Starbucks order offends the unifying conformity of days of old” ragebait piece reminds me, one of the great joys of the open internet is the digitization of public-domain primary documents,

and would it shock you to learn in 1722 there were a lot of ways to prepare hot chocolate

This 2008 paper assumes that the Iranians would be the ones to commence hostilities and also that the US would have some sort of allied coalition

Oops.

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Simpsons meme featuring Homer pleading with Montgomery Burns to trust Fidel Castro’s promise that he will examine and then return a $1 trillion: “Mr. Burns, I think we can trust the president of Cuba.”

So far as the reporting/focus about Iranian drone and missile capacity, it’s just what was the most proximate concern at the time

Now that the Iranians are apparently doing some amount of sea mines, there’ll be new reporting/focus on that

Idk, I could only guess, but I don’t think they thought about the consequences

They riled themselves into a “f ck it, just do it and be legends” headspace

According to this paper, traffic in Haiphong Harbor was halted with just 30 to 40 sea mines

The goal isn’t necessarily to destroy ships, it’s to make them afraid to transit and to drive insurance costs up

And as a political attack narrative, the fact that Platner keeps being being asked about the tattoo suggests it has the characteristics of some sort of permanent mark

Luckily, Trump’s “step in the right direction“ olive branch is credible because he’s so consistently honest

also if I were to hazard a guess, on balance, Trump posting about it probably makes it slightly more likely they'll do it

even after today's CBS scoop, I was mildly skeptical they'd actually lay sea mines, but now it seems clear they're at least strongly considering it

She also says civilian vessels like fishing boats could be easily equipped to lay the simpler design mines

She concludes it wouldn't be hard to imagine several hundred laid, and notes that in 1972 the North Vietnamese were able to halt sea traffic in Haiphong Harbor with just 36 mines

A SCENARIO FOR IRANIAN MINING OF THE STRAIT Based on the above information, it is hard to predict exactly how many mines Iran could lay undetected. A scenario with some straightforward, though not especially creative assumptions about Iranian readiness, capabilities, coordination, and stealthiness might read as follows: • If 2 of Iran’s 3 Kilos were operational, they could together lay 4 minefields, each containing 48 MDM-6 mines, for a total of 192 mines. This would require 8 total mine-laying sorties, meaning that each Kilo was able to reload its torpedo tubes 3 times at Bandar Abbas without arousing suspicion, and that the timers on the mines in the initial minefields did not malfunction and go off before the later minefields were seeded. • Iran could lay these 4 minefields at the mouth of the strait, the narrowest portion, east of the Tunb Islands, directly south of Larak Island. The mines would be laid not only in the two shipping channels but across the buffer zone and the areas immediately outside the channels. • Iran could use its 167 smaller surface craft (its 36 fast patrol craft inshore, 37 patrol boats, 40 patrol boats inshore, 14 Hovercraft, and 40 Boghammars) to lay mines at night in the channels to the west.45 • If each of the 167 small craft were able to lay 3 mines on average, a total of 501 additional mines could be laid. These craft would lay the older variety of moored contact mines, such as M-08 mines. This is a stylized scenario. For example, it is questionable whether Iran could coordinate all these activities in a single major operation without risking fratricide. It is unlikely Iran could ensure that all of its smaller vessels were simultaneously seaworthy. On the other hand, it is also unlikely Iran would rely

Talmadge's estimate assumed mining would happen with submarines and/or under cover of night w/o counterfire or already lost assets, bc she assumed the Iranians would be initiating hostilities, not that it would be mid-hostilities

Wouldn't be hard to imagine a situation where they decide the risks may be worth it, or that they just want to inflict retaliatory damage

(Talmadge's 2008 paper assumes in every hypothetical that a military conflict would be initiated by the Iranians, but, whoops)

the stove. how she beckoned.

projections from 1991 In 1991 Iraq laid 1,157 moored contact mines across several mineªelds. In response, Operation Candid Hammer took more than a dozen U.S., British, French, and Belgian MCM ships from approximately March 1 until April 20 to clear 907 Iraqi mines off the coast of Kuwait.50 Of the 1,157 mines, 3 detonated under the U.S.S. Princeton and the U.S.S. Tripoli, leaving 1,154 mines. Operation Candid Hammer apparently cleared only 907, or 78.6 percent, of the original mines. The 31 days of March plus the 20 days of April mean that Candid Hammer took about 51 days. I was unable to determine the exact number of ships involved in the operation, but a conservative estimate of each ship’s capabilities would take the reported “more than a dozen” to mean at least 15. If 907 mines were cleared by 15 ships in 51 days, then 17.8 mines were cleared per day in total, with each ship on average clearing 60.46 mines over the course of the operation and each ship on average clearing 1.18 mines in a single day.

APPLICATION TO THE STRAIT OF HORMUZ Despite differences in the details, the 1991 and 2003 cases both suggest that reopening the strait could take the better part of a month. Additionally, the United States had three advantages in the 1991 and 2003 operations that it would not enjoy in the strait scenario outlined above. First, both operations occurred in areas smaller than the strait. Second, the Iranians probably can use inºuence mines that are much more difªcult to clear than those used by the Iraqis. In the scenario posited earlier, 192 of the 693 mines were MDM-6 influence mines. Depending on how much longer these take to clear, the United States could be facing additional weeks of MCM operations. For example, if it takes twice as long to clear influence mines, then the 192 influence mines would add 8.66 days to the time it would take to clear 80 percent of the mines based on projections from the 1991 case, and 7.9 days to the time it would take to clear 80 percent of the mines based on projections from the 2003 case, for totals of 39.7 days and 36.3 days, respectively. It could easily add days to the time it would take to establish a Q-route. Third, in both 1991 and 2003, the United States and its allies had the relevant assets in theater at the time that the mine-clearance clock started ticking. Whether in the future the United States would have allied support, much less actual allied assets in the region, remains open to question. In both 1991 and 2003, allies probably provided roughly half the relevant assets. Presumably they would have an interest in doing so in the future as well. But if the United States had to go it alone, operations could take significantly longer.

This paper from 2008 estimates sweeping Iranian-laid sea mines from the Strait of Hormuz would, generously, take 1 to 2 months, but probably longer

direct.mit.edu/isec/article...

Of Iran’s 2,000 mines, about half were purchased from Russia when Iran acquired its 3 Kilo submarines.39 It is hard to do more than guess at Iran’s specific stocks of different kinds of mines and which type(s) it would use in the strait. The strait is relatively shallow, and the currents are strong, meaning that drifting mines could be flushed easily from the shipping lanes and/or come to pose a danger to Iran’s own forces. Indeed, Iranian mines found in the western gulf during the 1980s apparently began their lives as moored mines farther east but broke free of their chains in the rough waters. It is a reasonable assumption that Iran would have sought to acquire moored or bottom mines to use in the strait if at all possible. In the past Iran has used the North Korean-manufactured M-08 moored contact mine, which is based on a 1908 design. The U.S. Navy caught the IRGCN red-handed laying such mines north of Qatar in 1987. One blew a hole in the Kuwaiti supertanker the Bridgeton in 1987, another in the hull of the U.S.S. Samuel Roberts frigate in 1988. (Neither sank, though they required extensive repairs.) The M-08 has a 115-kilogram charge, is meant for use against surface ships, and can operate in depths of 6 to 110 meters, making it feasible for use in the strait.

TIL Iran has deployed sea mines that were designed in 1908

bibliotekanauki.pl/articles/194...
direct.mit.edu/isec/article...

Looks like Gorka’s dissertation

The Hernandez v. Mesa case (no US cause of action available for 15 year old shot and killed by CBP where bullet was fired from US but crossed into Mexico) is also like wtf level of impossibly bad

"the law is too awful and incomprehensible for people to even believe that's how it works" does seem like it is an impediment to legislative correctives

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and the far-right is positively delighted by the Gulf Arab states' aristocracies and subjugated migrant labor class

A fun pub trivia fact is because of the order in which the House and Senate took up and voted in the resolutions, the last country against whom the United States declared a state of war was the Kingdom of Romania

(see page 4855, Resolution 321)
www.congress.gov/77/crecb/194...

with the bizarre MAHA beef tallow craze, they seem to hardly care at all that the product is saturated fat going into deep fried foods bc their priority is just to supplant "industrial" oils, and they don't conceptualize rendering of animal fat as a form of "processing" (bc it's just vibes)

As colloquialisms, "junk food" and "ultraprocessed foods" seem to diverge slightly, that ppl often (but not always) use "ultraprocessed" to emphasize "artificialness" apart from healthfulness

it's evident, eg, in the way the MAHA lunatics are pushing "natural" products like rendered beef tallow

"In the days after a rifle bullet glanced its way past Donald Trump's near Butler, Pennsylvania, Mr. Trump did not turn to his typical means of communication. There were no illegible all-caps Truths about the attack in the Pittsburgh exurb where Mr. Trump had rallied. There were no red-faced rants."

What was the last time a regular non-opinion piece led with a sneer about Donald Trump's social media habits?

"Ultra-processing" is a colloquial shorthand in the same way "junk food" is, like it's helpful to quickly communicate a very broad concept,

but "ultra-processed" is not meaningfully useful for a lab developing a reliable and precise scientific question

I don't think skeptics of "ultra-processing" framing object that certain additives might be harmful, it's that the ultra-processing concept obfuscates underlying hypotheses

the question should be properly confined to "is additive X harmful in quantity Y?" not "is ultra-processed food harmful?"

„Look lets not get too worried, just wait 48 hours I’m sure Wyoming went for a walk and will be right back, but if Wyoming is still missing come back and we’ll write up a missing state report “