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956 Worldwide

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Everything posted by 956 Worldwide

  1. Of course they have computers. We already know this. That’s how we win.
  2. Literally no one was debating whether this was an impressive, carefully coordinated and technically astounding mission. Then Trump made a Truth social post accusing people of downplaying it and badmouthing the pilots and now we are all debating it. Gotdamn, read up on reflexive control and maintain cognitive hygiene. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflexive_control
  3. Needs to be said bluntly that this is absolutely insane. CIA director tweeting blurry photos of a press release (why?) to satisfy a demand from POTUS. “Great sources at the CIA report that the emperor had clothes on and moreover they are the most fashionable clothes ever.” In real time we are watching the dismantling of the most effective and powerful national security apparatus, from intel to diplomacy to influence to defense, that has ever existed. By choice by bored people who elected the most boring and venal man alive.
  4. Makes me almost stroke out. There is not much about the Valley to attract an outsider; even less now that the citrus groves are gone and summer is hotter than it once was, as impossible as that seems. We have one state football championship. We have the cheapest houses in the country. We handed over a place of stark but real beauty. Home to shorebirds and pelicans and rattlesnakes and redfish. We were told the rich man would put us on the map. And he did. He blew up his rockets and showered the shorebirds with debris and closed the beach and the world knows where we are. Damn if that isn’t the story of the Valley.
  5. The truth on this is that Japanese intentions, the need to drop the bomb, and the motivations of Truman are bitterly disputed by extremely credible historians and specialists 80 years later to say nothing of the fog of war and politics HST had to work through at the time. Anyone who is dogmatic on this is arguing from ideology. It’s also extremely true that the planners who dropped the bomb had no clear understanding of the long-term fallout (ISWYDT) aside from “big boom.”
  6. Gotta be real dawg; rambling, conspiratorial, and incoherent is the right’s brand now.
  7. The really interesting countries for proliferation purposes are in Asia-Pacific and MENA, not Europe. And the EU is not a real security actor. I’ve got a long post here that I won’t reproduce but the bottom line is that allowing Iran to have a nuke is likely more harmful for proliferation than targeted U.S. strikes.
  8. All the update means is that it got announced before it can be spun.
  9. The MOP entered service (2010s) well after the B2 and was basically designed for the Iran problem. It was always intended to be integrated with the B2 although B-52s have dropped it in testing. Actual information about the B2 payload is highly classified but the 40k number you read is likely not a weight constraint on the airframe but a constraint on how many munitions of the type in existence at the B2s service entry will fit inside the internal bomb racks.
  10. The most transparent administration is history is (checks notes)…barring the public from accessing government archives.
  11. Will be a while before the full picture emerges and also we will likely need them to first dig out and then do collection to confirm the condition of centrifuges and where/whether some of them were moved. A single DIA assessment that leaked this early deserves massive grains of salt. Its a real fucking terrible problem that the highest levels of the admin have announced what they want to hear from future analyses. That will poison the process.
  12. In Texas, capital murder is the most serious charge and murder is what would be “second-degree” in many states but is a first-degree felony. The DA is not wordsmithing good. LOL at chainsaw announcing that of course this won’t be fair.
  13. I agree with most of this except that I do not think that this shattered non-proliferation. If Iran deploys a bomb, that will be more of a threat to non-proliferation than limited strikes against clearly defined nuclear targets. The question of B2 effectiveness is a bit of an open question. China and Russia have a large, dispersed, three pillar deterrent and we know about it. There isn’t a critical hardened site like Fordow except for their actual strategic commands and if we are targeting those, the B2s are not deploying conventional weapons but are operating in their nuclear strike role. It would be fascinating to “know what Russia and China knew” as this was taking place and that’s something that will be pure speculation. For Russia and China the capability of the strategic bomber and support package itself is more interesting than the performance of the MOP.
  14. Of course not, they all need to be on Truth.
  15. We are very far from the status quo. Iran’s air defenses are in tatters, its combat air capabilities destroyed, its offensive ballistic missile capacity greatly diminished, its command and control network almost offline, a sizeable chunk of senior leadership dead, and it has been revealed that its main adversary completely compromised its most sensitive security apparatus. Its nuclear program is seriously damaged although still unclear to the extent. Its completely discredited in front of what proxies it has remaining. It will take years to reconstitute in any real way and its patron of Russia can’t deliver materiel in any right now. In the interim Israel is free to mow the grass if mullahs get froggy. Maybe most importantly, Iran showed the world what will happen if the Great Satan attacks its core, crown jewel: it will impotently fire missiles and warn us in advance then cry uncle. Iran took a big fat L and is basically done for a while as an aspiring revisionist power. You can think this turn or U.S. actions were not good now or in the long run but you can’t have the fantasy that nothing happened or the status quo is the same as it was. Its not quite Iraq post-Gulf War I in terms of impotence but its not too far off.
  16. This whole thing has been a mastercourse across the spectrum. Its absolutely true that we’ve learned how to stay ahead of most adversaries on the technical level, but Iran has been outclassed at every level. Israeli intelligence, cyber, and special forces were integral to making this possible and these are areas where peer adversaries will be more capable than the Iranians. And its harder to do globally. There are reports that Israel left letters under the door for key regime supporters warning them to jump ship or risk being targets. Israel has simply had dominance across most domains and could choose where to engage. And the bravura performance here strikes at the heart of the “Muslim street’s” mass neuroses about Israel. It’s more about the constant humiliation across any engagement than it ever was about Gaza or Palestine, its a primal thing.
  17. Your take was a “pudding-brained” one and I’m still not going to engage further with a pudding-brain on why. I think that labrador retrievers are generally “puddle brained” and I’d honestly prefer hearing their thoughts.
  18. Looks like the admin wants to call it a day.
  19. Posting cringe to own the libs.
  20. Theologically and in praxis Judaism and Islam are the brothers and Christianity is a cousin. That’s on everything from strict monotheistic unity, understanding of divine revelation, the overlapping relationship between legal and religious obligations, methods of belonging to the religious group, and the role of the sovereign in community of faith. Fundamentally, Judaism and Islam are both comprehensively designed to provide structure and governance to a culturally unified religio-political community in a pre-national sense. Christianity’s foundational centuries were spent working out methods on how a non-unified community of belief could survive and accommodate itself while existing within defined political entities, which expressed varying degrees of tolerance to the new group. The concept of “secularism” as it emerged from the world of late antiquity is fundamentally Christian and not shared with Islam or Judaism. Rex, your experience of Jews as more culturally similar to Christians is just a reflection of Jews as a diaspora people and Jews in the West were shaped by centuries of exchange with Christians. MENA Jews or Ethiopian Jews would strike you as much different, also because of centuries of exchange with Islam or other forms of Christianity.
  21. OK now the signal is getting fuzzy. Do not like.
  22. I’m not sure and leaning to disagree on this. I can for sure make a more compelling case that an Iranian nuke is more damaging to non-proliferation than preventing an Iranian nuke via kinetic means is. This MAY hurt non-proliferation but an Iranian bomb means a certain Saudi bomb almost immediately. There are many countries in the world for whom building a nuclear weapon would be significantly easier than it ever was for Iran and none of them seem to be racing to build them. They’ve all been able to cover their bases against regime change via a combo of alliances, conventional security, and most relevantly, responsible behavior. Nuclear blackmail and brinksmanship of the type Iran engage(d) in is useful to a certain type of regime: an aggressively revisionist, destabilizing, aspiring regional power with the conventional balance of power against it. And not many of those exist. Iran, North Korea are kind of it. Japan is not watching this and starting its program although it would be a trivial problem for them. U.S. signaling here is also important. Limited strikes and a request for direct negotiations with the Ayatollah is a clear sign of the intent of the action and a de facto recognition of the regime’s legitimacy. The far more damaging case for proliferation is Ukraine, where a nuclear power aggressively attacked a small neighbor with the explicit goal of territory and regime change, while using nuclear blackmail to fend off the world. That’s the situation that will make Tokyo, Seoul, or Riyadh begin to reassess if the U.S. guarantee becomes threadbare. Not the example of Iran. You know, the nuclear-power war of aggression that Anastasis really supports.
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