AltMaarri [they/them]

Every single logical argument says that use of a nuclear weapon is farfetched if not outright impossible

Maybe but I’m starting to think we might be closer now than at any time during the cold war, including the missile crisis. At the time the possibility of nuclear armageddon was on everyone’s mind, and both sides had nukes.

Right now the empire is dying, has been deeply humiliated, is led by insane people, and there is no way out of the current situation that doesn’t involve them losing face. And it’s even worse for the entity - I don’t think they’re even capable of stopping at this point. For both, there is a (fucked up) argument to be made that this is an existential crisis. I truly hope I’m wrong but as this goes on and it becomes clear that nothing will work I do see them using a nuke.

Happy to be proven wrong but “dirty bombs” have never made sense to me. Radiation isn’t magic, and even using a lot of irradiated dust, a good dispersal mechanism, and using stuff like Cobalt, I doubt it would stay effective beyond a few hours. More at the center if it’s blown at ground level I guess. It would freak people out but ultimately I doubt it’d kill or even affect that many people. Even considering using it inside public transport or similar, you could do something more effective with far easier to obtain payloads, starting with chemical ones.

And all of this wasting in the process extremely valuable and hard to produce/obtain fissile material.

It would make for the perfect false flag to justify a nuclear strike though. You could parade “scientists” to explain how chemical markers found in the attack show the material has come from Iran, etc. the whole shebang.

Could this just be market manipulation again?

Why not. It seems to, amazingly, still work.

I imagine there must be all sorts of market shenanigans going on in the background too. If I remember correctly Iran also said a few weeks back they were aware of US firms manipulating oil futures markets.

The Haifa refinery is still burning. Unconfirmed reports that so are NG processing plants from the UAE’s ADNOC at Buhasa and Asab.

I imagine this may be in retaliation after the recent attacks on Iranian energy infrastructure that resulted in blackouts.

Good article, outlined by Naked Capitalism, about the modern US forces’ military and industrial capabilities and the fact that many of the assets being forcefully and explosively decommissioned by Iran simply cannot be replaced:

America’s Military Is Never Coming Back From This

I also really like the tone. A few quotes (the whole article is good, really):

People talk about how Iran is a ‘second-tier military’ but they ain’t Iraq and this ain’t Desert Storm. This is Desert Shitstorm and Iran is not just a peer military to ‘America’s’, they are demonstrably superior. Just look at the scoreboard, which isn’t school massacres but military targets. Behold, then, ‘American’ airframes burning in the sun while Iran’s rockets are safe underground. The White Empire stood astride the Middle East like Colossus, but now they lie there in a wreck, colossal morons.

What I want you to understand is that the US military is never coming back from this. There are no modern replacements for these refuelers and control systems. The NGAS is a render and the E-7 Wedgetail was cancelled. They simply don’t make ‘em like they used to anymore. As the meme template goes, “My father is a builder. We were in [Prince Sultan Air Base] I asked him what it would cost to build [an E-3 Sentry] today. I will never forget his answer… ‘We can’t, we don’t know how to do it.’”

The White press keeps saying these planes are worth millions or billions which is missing the point. They cannot make these planes anymore, these assets are effectively priceless.

‘America’ certainly cannot rebuild their ground-based radar in the Gulf, that’s all returned to the rare earths whence it came from. For example, Iran has turned the FPS-132s in Qatar into First-Person-Shooter 404. […] These radars are never being rebuilt because even if ‘America’ could (they can’t), they would need resources from China (they won’t), and permission from Iran (they don’t). It is pointless talking about the dollar value of these assets, as the White media does. This is like calculating the dollar value of Mona Lisa after rolling, smoking, and roaching it—Da Vinci is dead, his paint was discontinued lead, and it’ll just get lit up again. These radars are never coming back again, and they can’t be bought in colonial cash. The only currency in the Strait of Hormuz is yuan, that USD is in the past.

This reads like text carefully built in the hope of confusing tweet-analyzing trading algorithms.

I believe this too. We were hearing about a few Chinese tankers going through with Iran’s assent long before his mention of this “gift”.

Dune Syfy-channel miniseries best Dune

Agreed a lot. It has all the warmth the villeneuve ones miss (all his movies are cold and soulless imo, though beautiful decor I guess), the soundtrack is incredible, it doesn’t take itself too seriously, and all for what I imagine barely reaches the catering budget of the recent movies. It also gets better and better as it goes on - from cringeworthy moments in the first ones to long stretches of non-stop awesomeness in the Children of Dune ones (with remarkable casting too for these later ones). Really impressive.

The mother lode in question

Ansarallah has announced this week end (article is larger and mainly about Witkoff being stonewalled) that “a zero hour” could be declared soon:

“All options are on the table,” Al-Bukhaiti told RT Arabic. “If we are compelled to use the Bab al Mandeb card, we will use this in a flexible manner by targeting all the countries involved in the aggression against Lebanon and Iran.”

They might close al-Mandab, on top of - I imagine - hitting the entity.

You know who I miss, and who’d make the picture complete right now ?

Also, talking of Ansarallah, they recently published this absolute banger (though it does include AI imagery).