I’ve seen reports that important people inside Iran have basically been electronically airgapping themselves and only communicating through physical notes transported through on-the-ground messengers so as to counter this strategy.

Paul Von Ripper totally vindicated 24 years after Millennial Challenge 2002

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK YOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU Nvidia! AMD! Intel! OpenAI! Google!

Just a little personal anecdote here - always was a big Intel/Nvidia guy, always had a Geforce in my PC.

My laptops were all Intel, and of course the performance was always so-so.

Happened to buy a AMD/Ryzen Laptop on Black Friday, really cheap (500 Eurinos), didn’t think it could play any games - but OH BOY was I wrong. The cheapass Ryzen graphics chip has no problem running Israel Engine 4 games WHILE IN ENERGY SAVE MODE. Really blown away, and pretty sure any Intel equivalent in the price range COULD NOT do this. My next PC will be AMD.

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You radical tankies love to paint pictures of economic doom and gloom - and yeah okay, 20% of oil and gas production might be gone for years, and it will hit the less fortunate the hardest.

But there is a sort of bright side - and I haven’t seen this mentioned anywhere so far - which is, global CO2 emissions are almost guaranteed to go down his year (because of shortages) and will also almost certainly stay lower over the next 3-5 years, as many countries will actively search for renewables to replace at least part of their existing fossil fuel infrastructure; again mostly out of necessity. Right?

It’s quite possible that this war did more to switch societies around the globe to renewable energies than any other measure (save for China, of course) at a time when it really mattered.

Iran may have just just locked in a double victory for us and our Queen - less Zionazi influence AND less CO2!

Oh it was just a coincidence, I just really had to write that down. Hope no-one was offended by the, uhm, crass language! These thoughts were lingering in my head since June last year. Thanks for mentioning it again though!

However on the topic, I find it hard to imagine that anyone would do the 5-6 hours trip from Israel to Iran more than once a day. Seems like bad propaganda. Twice maybe, if you really want to push yourself, but over several days…? Come on. There are physical limits to a human body, right?

By the way if anyone here wants to read more serious work on the topic of Nazis and drugs, I would wholeheartedly recommend this book:

It’s quite recent (came out in 2015), not too long (250+ easy pages) and even though it’s a translation from the original German, the unconventional writing style of the author comes through well enough. If you’ve read Rob Citino’s works on the Wehrmacht - where he often writes like a sports reporter would write about the Battle of Kursk - it’s not quite the same style, but in a similar league. The author often tries to evoke a deeper psychological connection between war, drugs, and aspects of imagined Nazi superiority and whatnot. I was entirely surprised by just how common meth use was in WW2 Germany, how all the big Nazi figures were absolutely aware that drugs gave Germany an edge over its enemies (at least in the first couple years of the war), and just how many Nazi leaders were doing rather large amounts of the stuff (or other drugs lol). If you liked Breaking Bad, have done any kind of upper drugs, or just enjoy discovering aspects of WW2 history you had not thought about yet…pretty good book then, yeah. Can post some example pages if anybody’s curious.

how about :araghchi-smirk: though

Very off-topic, but which of these alternatives do you guys like using the best?

Just personal experience here - I quit YT premium some years ago, then went with Nadeko for like 6 months. It became unusable after that, maybe mid-2024 or so.

Switched to brave browse and now I get to enjoy regular Youtube without ads on my phone, it’s almost a 95% hassle-free experience with brave.

Do you want the honor of posting this in c/emojis, comrade?

Oh wow, he made it all the way to SNL?

Hadn’t heard fom him since 2021 (no access to US TV). Generational run huh.

me looking at Trump administrations officials discussing possible US ground deployments like:

Yeah I’m as baffled as everybody else. Who is making these clips? Some 35yr old WH staffer?

Who’s the audience here, millennials? Anyone under 30 is guaranteed to NOT comprehend all these movie references, right? Are there any zoomers that have actually seen the OG gladiator? Do Boomers/GenXers understand the GTA San Andreas “Here we go again…” from the other clip?

I don’t understand. Who comes up with content like that, who greenlights that shit? It is all AI insanity? Many questions.

Sorry for the somewhat offtopic non-Iran content, but I just have to share this funny video with my fellow newsheads.

Remember how folks back in 2020 were trying their best to do these Trump impersonations? I think Chapo had some guy on who was doing some almost perfect, nonsensical Trump ramblings on his Twitter. Well, in 2026 there is a challenger in town - and it’s the big guy, German chancellor Friedrich Merz himself!

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/57NDD2y0dPk <- this is a 30 seconds youtube short, you should be able to watch it without any ads.

Freddy Fucknuts - as we call him in Germany - is talking about immigrant numbers or something, and then he accidentally drops what I would consider at least a 6/10 Donald Trump imitation. Pretty good accent for a German, too, I was completely surprised. Probably all those years at BlackRock senior management that taught him that.

In everyday German politics, Merz comes off more like an oafish buffoon most of the time, he’s tall and lanky and often blurts out inappropriate stuff without thinking - you wouldn’t think him capable of imitating Trump like that.

Enjoy!

Excellent analysis, this is spot on.

Just wanted to do a little elaboration on a couple of points, mainly from my experience - I was 19 at the time and had just started to read The War Nerd column in the eXile (ah, those were the days!).

First of all, you have to remember the context. In '91 Iraq had just fought a bloody years-long war with Iran, they had a lot of hardware and some experience using that equuipment, even though command was very top-heavy and centralized - the old Soviet model (at least that’s what many people said back then and since, always seemed plausible to me). So yeah, at least theoretically they were in a somewhat good starting position. But then again the US onslaught was just insane and much bigger in numbers and mass then today. I won’t look up the numbers, but it was 500+ US aircraft at least, and like Tervell said, the distances involved where much shorter. You could take off and bomb Iraqi targets within a hour as a US pilot.

Fighting in '91 was quite rough at times. Iraq had Mig-25s and SAMs that actually engaged and shot down US aircraft. Iraq fired Scuds into Saudi and Israel - much smaller than what we saw last week, but it was a factor to consider for US planning and weapons use (much like today, interceptors failed and bombing launchers was much harder than imagined at first). The coalition had to do weeks of preparatory bombing, with 100s of aircraft. There is a YT channel that does these map-based visualizations and they have several videos on the air war, with representative aircraft counts (just search “operations room gulf air war” and skip through the videos to get an idea) - it’s just insane seeing the sheer mass of US strike packages flying into southern Iraq and Baghdad, like dozens of aircraft flying in from three different directions and on a very small part of the Iraqi map, so to speak. I’m not gonna link it because they tend to be on the US propaganda side a bit too much for my taste - but I guarantee you they can’t do that in Iran now. Too much distance, too much territory to cover, just not enough aircraft.

Terrain was different, too. Kuwait and southern Iraq is mostly just desert, and all these US weapon systems never, ever found a better environment to work in than the Arabian desert. Anytime the war moved to cities, Iraqis might put up a fight and US forces had a much more difficult time (e.g. Battle of Khafji in '91, Battle of Nasiriyah in '03). At the same time, these desert actions featured a lot of friendly fire - totally not unlike today. Back then people joked that the biggest enemy of British combat troops was the USAF/the US Army missile defence corps. Compare that to Iran - endless mountains, endless distance, and all these nice IRGC tunnels; Iraq had no tunnels at all.

Couple thoughts on the ground effort: You have to remember that the US Armed forces were at their absolute peak, maybe ever. You had all that cold war equipment, a huge standing army, and constant training for that Fulda Gap tank action everybody assumed for decades back then. There was probably never a better time for coordinated air campaign-ground warfare pushes from a US perspective, and it showed. Even though, they still took months dismantling the Iraqi Army from the air first. The ground package in '03 was smaller - like Tervell said, they mostly just did a tank rush straight to Baghdad, shooting up everything along the way - and the US forces still needed like 3 weeks for basically 400 miles of desert highway.

A little graph on US troop strength to illustrate my point:

And finally, speaking of distances, one thing I haven’t seen talked about a lot is just how far away Iran is from Israel. Imagine you’re flying an F-35 mission out of Eilat AFB or whereever. You take off, refuel over Iraq, and then you fly towards Tehran or central Iran - roundabout two hours until you’re even on station (!). You have to piss your pants around that point - no toilet in an F-35 - and now you have to fly around two more hours playing whack-a-mole with Iranian targets. Oh, and then it’s two more hours back to Israel, piss yourself again on the way, and those go-pills you just popped to stay awake really make you want to poop like, soon-ish. But nooo, you still gotta refuel first, and then the landing part…are we really to believe that every American pilots performs flawlessly under these circumstances? I’d rather believe that like at least half of them fly into Iran, try to shoot their load ASAP to fly home again and take a well-deserved dump in a real toilet. Who cares if you just hit 5 tractor-trailers, half of whom are out of service anyway. Just get the fuck home, you have to do it again tomorrow anyway because there’s not enough planes. Add to that the duress of flying over a hostile country, at night, with alarms and warnings from all you super-duper F-35 EOTS going off constantly, and whatever dozen subsystems you have to watch all by yourself… six hours of pure stress in a cramped F-35 cockpit. Yeah no, I fully believe this air campaign is completely different from '91 and '03.

In '91 you take off from a carrier, fly into southern Iraq for 30 minutes tops, do your 1-2 hours on station and fly back again. Might not even have to piss your fly-diaper once, and the biggest challenge is keeping your head straight from all the talk you hear on the 10+ radio nets coordinating 200 coalition aircraft covering 100 square miles or something. And even back then you had plenty of evidence that US pilots just wanted to over-bomb any target they saw and fly the fuck back ASAP.

So yeah, hope I could offer some additional points to your excellent question. Iraq had a solid military in '91 but they just couldn’t go up against the US empire at its all-time power peak. 2003 was a smaller war, and an exhausted Iraq faltered under a somewhat comparable air onslaught, and he US still managed to fumble the overall war effort. Iran is different, the US empire is visibly panting, and the geographic aspect of a war that at this point is entirely waged from the air is quite possibly as disadvantageous for an US air campaign as it ever was.

Thanks for the exhaustive reply, it is always appeciated. My post was not nearly as analytical, I mostly would like to know - why didn’t Trump just seize Greenland outright, like he seemed to allude to in so many ways? Is this just to keep the appearance of a sort-of-unified West?

The militarization of Europe is going to break the EU apart. The Maastricht criteria simply does not allow the EU to increase their deficit spending on military while maintaining its current economic advantage. So it will be austerity and recession, which will further push the region towards militarism (think 1930s Germany).

Mostly agree here. While declining, the US seems to be bent on expanding power within its sphere of influence, and Europe will be squeezed further. This has been going on for years at this point, i.e. EU GDP remaining pretty much flat since 2008, while US GDP doubled it that time. (the usual caveats of GDP as economic power always apply of course)

Following that, Europe will be coerced to de-industrialize itself and play the role of a net importer for American goods - essentially reversing the position between the US and the EU. Trump will get to boast about reducing trade deficit, dollar depreciation against the euro, and the partial re-industrialization will allow the US to placate the growing dissent and suppress the rise of populist sentiment against the establishment, all while maintaining its global financial hegemony.

Seems plausible as well, just these points: US exports are pretty much just oil/gas and weapons right now, aren’t they? So far, we have seen very little of any re-industrialization going on. The tariffs have achieved almost nothing here. And all these US policies are beginning to alienate Europeans - surely this cannot continue forever without breaking some links, however much Washington wants to push this line? Is this part of the reason why they didn’t go 100% all out for Greenland? And of course I can easily see Europe fall in line after another Democrat takes power. They loved Biden more than anyone and happily let themselves be sleepwalked into the Ukraine disaster.

Feel free to elaborate, like I said it’s appreciated.

To understand history, we must start with class analysis. The root of all these problems came from the contradictions of the American capitalism itself - which is to maintain its global hegemony while years of de-industrialization have exacerbated wealth inequality and worse, the entrenchment of social class. The dream of “temporarily embarrassed billionaire” is evaporating right in front of most Americans, especially after the 2008 crash.

Probably good to always keep in mind, yes.

well at least he’s not coked out this time.

he was 100% clear over and over that he wanted to annex Greenland outright.

Yes I’m also very surprised by this turn of events. Is this all just old man dementia, is it the years of burger sauce catching up where he can’t focus on any issue for more than a week?

Why all the noise on Truth Social, all the frenied announcements by so many officials, only to back down now? Why did thousands of Twitter chuds post all these Greenland AI memes for weeks, are they just satisfied like so?

I realize again that going by Alexander Mercouris analysis in this case might not have been too smart on my part - after all, this guy predicted the fall of Siversk basically from July 2022 onward, any week now! - but it really seemed as if Trump and half his cabinet wanted to annex Greenland and the Euros would not have been able to stop it, right?

Or maybe this compromise is just like the Gaza ceasefire and will be exploited much more by one side, ie Trump.

I think Russia is counting on this to force on an eventual re-alignment of Europe towards Russia and away from the USA.

Yes, lovely idea - but there are no Russia-friedly politicians in power anywhere in the larger EU countries to make this a reality. The entire EU establishment is solidly anti-Russia at this point and will be for years - especially once the disaster in Ukraine becomes more visible in the future.

I actually don’t think Europe is going to this time.

If Trump really wanted it, he’d just have to say “give us Greenland or no more US energy for you”. Europe would be dead in the water.

We are experiencing a very cold winter right, gas storage is as low as it ever was. No more Russian gas, it’s the US or bust. And the funniest thing is, this was entirely self-imposed - they got rid of evil Putler gas while saying, “we don’t want to be extorted by RuZZia in the future”, even though Russia, of course, never did that. Trump the bully just needs to “use energy as a weapon” and it’s over, lol.

Right now? This whole thing is too useful for generating nationalist sentiments in Europe.

They might certainly try, but this is already a defeated nationalism. Russia will wreck Ukraine this year - they already have - and it will be a huge disaster for Europe. One for the history books for sure.

At the same time, Trump might take Greenland, there’s certainly no stopping him if he really went for it - sanctions, troops, nukes, won’t matter. Europe will get a nationalism born out of defeat, with half the world laughing at them for years (not that they haven’t earned it!).

This can’t be good.

Still a little sceptical of Will’s ultimate motives - I mean, he’s a “housing policy analyst” or whatever - but you cannot deny that Comrade Stancil is committed.

Here he is following ICE vehicles for several minutes, presumably honking the entire time:

https://xcancel.com/adamcurtisbroll/status/2012524117430280601

Somebody invite this guy to Hexbear please!