AltMaarri [they/them]

And their previous conversation

Do you remember that military-dolphins-in-the-strait story, the one that was even addressed in a press conference by Hegseth ?

Well here is a very funny follow-up. This is apparently the level of competence one can expect from Iran’s “experts” in the US media:

Remember the “Iran Expert” on WSJ Claiming Iran Is Using DOLPHINS with Mines in the Hormuz?

🇮🇷 WSJ’s “Iran Expert” Thought Iranian Submarines Nicknamed Dolphins Were Real Dolphins

The Iranian Navy has MINI SUBMARINES nicknamed “Persian Gulf Dolphins” by their own officers. Admiral Shahram Irani confirmed they sit on the seabed in the Strait of Hormuz and track hostile vessels.

That is a documented submarine program with a nickname. A metaphor. Basic military terminology.

WSJ put this story out warning America about actual dolphins with explosives because they saw one word and stopped reading.

The people who cannot read a military dispatch are the same ones explaining this war to 300 million Americans.

That Tocqueville quote comes to mind.

Zelensky appears to be threatening to attack the 81st Victory day parade in Moscow, including foreign delegates that would go there

In response, Russia’s ministry of defense has said that if this were to happen, they would launch a massive retaliatory strike towards the center of Kiev:

The Russian Defense Ministry warned local civilians and the staff of diplomatic missions in Kiev of their country’s plans to launch a massive retaliatory strike on the city center if Ukraine goes through with Zelensky’s threat to attack Moscow’s Victory Day parade on 9 May. This was followed by Russia announcing ballistic missile tests from Kamchatka from 6-10 May. Shortly afterwards, the Russian Foreign Ministry reiterated the Defense Ministry’s warning, thus ensuring that the world is aware of it.

The Kyiv Post (no idea how reliable that is) is reporting that the EU said afterwards they will not evacuate delegates from Kiev

western chauvinists probably just didn’t think Iran could master precision strike

I think they assumed you need the overpriced stuff the MIC is selling to do that; like space grade inertial measurement units and image processing running on hardened ASICs and whatever else overengineered shit they peddle. But turns out this is the smartphone age and you need barely more than a sub-dollar accelerometer and getting GPS coords from time to time to get that kind of precision.

A good article on NC about it

Maybe that has changed with DNMs. Direct manufacturers like the Dr Seuss guys sell online directly even to consumers in large-ish amounts. Including as a liquid.

With that being said I have no idea if they qualify as “large” distributors.

Still the main prior, unsurprisingly.

I’m sure you know that but the fact ergot is pointed as the source of various weird goings on in history is highly unlikely - it’s almost certainly a myth. It doesn’t work in terms of dosage. Mind you I’m still personally convinced that whatever they did at the height of the Eleusinian Mysteries (which your article mentions) involved a strong psychedelic - it just wasn’t ergot.

They’re apparently seeing 50/60km fiber spools on the frontline in Ukraine now.

They mean add your own LSD. Outside of collectors (they genuinely exist, though rare), those blotter sheets would typically be used by people buying the LSD in bulk from manufacturers in liquid form, and infusing it into the blotter paper. Often, though not always, by resellers.

Also the instructions to synthesize LSD are public, they just involve thousands of dollars worth of lab equipment and a good theoretical and practical knowledge of organic chemistry.

The best example from the series for me (also fictive):

Working there and not shouting “Jaffa, Kree !” from time to time at my coworkers would be difficult.

No doubt you’re preparing a report for schoolwork. I guess you could go to a website like this and fetch the data from their controller. Like this [careful: 4MB json file]. Check the format, I just did and it is trivial; though of course who knows how complete their list is.

At first glance they’re using the mapbox API which should make it slightly more complex but they also included their features in this file; again after a quick glance only, you won’t get the barrels per day you see on the website itself without going through their mapbox calls though.

You might have to anyway to distinguish refineries from other features (such as those points and lines).

Not sure at all but the video on the first one that hits looks fuzzy enough to be a radio drone, too, not an optic fiber one; and it doesn’t look like there are any countermeasures against it, either - that’s a clean video feed right up until the end.

Supply chain security must be a nightmare

Most likely it’s completely exploitable

I hope there will be a locally runnable coding AI in the future

Mind you there already are; they keep complaining they’re “six months out of date” but frankly I’m finding models like these run locally to produce very close results to the latest models from the ongoing circus.

That’s based on limited tests out of curiosity mind you because regardless of where you run them it’s important to remember that the technology doesn’t work. That is, it cannot do even a small fraction of what they’re trying to sell it for (at a loss, too). Even for coding it’s mostly shit. These are credible-sounding-text completion machines, without any understanding of anything. Outside of propaganda and entertainment, the actual viable use cases are few and far between.

like, get shitfaced and yell obscenities at fictional characters on TV type of stuff

At this point there might be some neurological damage (Korsakoff/Wernicke or similar).

If you know alcoholics (or are one yourselves) make sure they complement themselves with B1 at least.

We need an ALF emoji (though I liked the one you used even more)

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.