War is easy. You just make sure you don’t get shot. I’ve spent the last 40 years not getting shot.

How to win a war against Iran:

1. use weapons to attack them
2. don’t let their weapons attack you

This has real “if I were Hitler I simply would have invaded Britain” energy. Purely vibes based analysis that ignores the material conditions and objective reality of the situation.

Saying “use bunker busters on Natanz” makes it sound simple. Just like “manage fallout diplomatically” makes it sound like a single embassy flunky could do it over a weekend.

The reality is that if the US knew where every radar installation was and flew a flight of B21s in a crazy serpentine way to avoid detection and managed to drop dozens of Bunker busters, it probably wouldn’t impact the nuclear program at all. And within 10 minutes every oil field on the Arabian peninsula would be in flames. It’s hard to “diplomatically manage fall out” after Iran single-handedly destroys every Gulf Nation economy. I think they should have nukes, I want them to have nukes, but when you can utterly destroy everyone around you with conventional warheads just by targeting their oil infrastructure, it’s a bit of a moot point.

If “decimating Iran’s nuclear program” were simple, it would have been done already. NATO is not squeamish about conducting an attack like this. The reason it hasn’t happened is because everyone knows military intervention in Iran would make the war in Iraq look like the US SMO in Grenada.

I feel like the only proper response to this is to laugh and tell the crybaby you will be posting their address on the MS13.com fourms.

The problem is airfields and airbases are stupidly large targets that can absorb a lot of damage.

Hit the fuel storage or otherwise soft targets and you can cause massive damage. But when it is 70% empty space you need a lot of 50m holes to have the effect you want.

The real win here is not material damage. It is morale. If one missile can get through, 50 can. If a couple dozen flights can be delayed, the whole airport can be shut down indefinately. If any Israelis felt it was safe to fly out of their settler colony, they are rethinking it now.

Patching a 50m hole in a taxiway only takes hours. Convincing British airways that hundreds of millions of dollars of planes are safe after this attack, and they should keep their normal routes in place, much harder.

Oh look, another liberal that didn’t pay attention to this conflict until 2022.

Wasn’t there to talk during Trump’s first admin that most bridges in DC aren’t strong enough to handle a tank?

I think it would be hilarious to watch an Abrams drop into the Potomac live on TV.

Hot take, but in a fight between John Fetterman and depression, I’m going to give my critical support to comrade depression.

Jira can already be programmed to annoy me about open issues that have not had an update in a couple days. Program it to message me at inconvenient times asking me stupid questions about the project that I’ve been working on for 2 years, program it to deny me a raise, and you could replace half of the middle managers at my company.

How can you trust grok to tell you if something is woke, when grok itself is woke?

Dunning-Kreuger hits medical doctors and engineers the hardest.

I used to work for a civil engineer who was convinced that climate change was fake. While he was having to take rising sea levels into account. While he knew firsthand that the instances of 100-year storms had increased beyond what was statistically considered normal. He was still convinced that God would not allow humanity to alter the climate.

Specialized knowledge in a narrow field, can turn people into the biggest idiot. The humility it takes to be an expert in something but still listen to others, is beyond a lot of people. This is made even worse by fields like medicine and engineering that require a massive amount of ego to begin with.

Anyway, here is Wonderwall

More than half of U.S. adults (53%) now express an unfavorable opinion of Israel, up from 42% in March 2022

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/04/08/how-americans-view-israel-and-the-israel-hamas-war-at-the-start-of-trumps-second-term/

Warning shots are dangerous, that bullet will fall and in a densely populated area God knows who it will hit. I don’t blame the officer for not firing into the air.i do think that was a perfect opportunity to pull out a baton or a Taser. And I would even understand pulling his pistol to force the lynch mob to comply with his orders to back off.

I do not use the term lynch mob lightly, and find it hard to think of a more fitting description.

STEP AWAY FROM THE LAITHE!

Your timeline might be closer to the truth, we will know if the Chud Contingent begins accepting the reality of climate change in the next couple years. When Fox News starts blaming hurricanes and migrants on a changing climate it is gonna get dangerous very quick.

You would need bipartisan acceptance of anthropic climate change and IDK if that is gonna happen in the next decade, not after 50 years of oil funded propaganda. I think we will need to be well into the “find out” phase of climate catastrophe with crop failures before the average Red State politician acknowledges the reality of carbon emissions and is willing to sign onto any substantive mitigation efforts; but Republican politicians skew younger and younger people see this as a major issue, so it is possible.

My greatest fear with climate change, is not just that we will continue to crank up the thermostat, but that when things get bad enough it will be the US that unilaterally decides to pump sulfur into the stratosphere, put tons of microplastics up in the sky, or any of the other hair-brained mitigation ideas that have been put forward.

I have deep reservations about any of those ideas even if done in a multilateral way, carefully, backed with rigorous research, and buy in from every country on the globe. But that’s not how it will happen. It’s going to be some Democrat in 2075, when we’ve already seen four degrees of warming, trying desperately to save corn harvests.

Obligatory Parenti “most countries are rich” quote:

Yep, plus IIRC Texas passed something, and several cities straight up passed legislation saying “we officially DGAF about weed”

The last one, cities saying they will not enforce laws on pot under like 2oz, was struck down by Texan courts really recently and The legislature is probably going to close The THCA loophole.

I love living in a state that is going full fash on the border while measles and whooping cough run rampant, and they defund public schools, but their highest priority is stopping me from enjoying a little reefer after a long day at work.

Should we worry about hundreds of uncapped wells leaking methane into the air? Should we do something about the state having to pay Bitcoin miners so they don’t mine Bitcoin and crash our grid? Should we maybe start putting out PSAs about vaccination so that young children don’t die of preventable diseases like it’s the 17th century? No. Dan Patrick has decided that the greatest threat to my fellow citizens is someone getting stoned and watching classic Simpsons episodes.

eat me

This oral fixation is psychologically fascinating.

The Cannabis laws in Texas are an absolute joke right now, I can walk 10 minutes to a local vape store and buy an ounce of “THC-a Hemp” that is completely indistinguishable from flower in a legal state. The only difference being that Texas is almost wholly unregulated, and The state is unable to collect extra tax revenue.

The legislature has made this one of their highest priorities, and it’s probably going away. For now though, there’s a very good chance that whatever was in those Easter eggs is actually perfectly legal under Texan law.