Doctor Ted Postol’s analysis on the US bombing in Iran:
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… and to add some spice, the chief negotiator was assasinated in Israel’s ‘pre-emptive attack TM’.
I guess the ‘pre-emptive’ comes from pre-empting the rest of negotiations.
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Curiously, in that press release the CIA repeatedly says that it doesn’t know anything directly. Even our national program for spying on other countries is outsourced! Just what is the CIA using all of its funding for? Maybe it’s time to rehire Jack Ryan out of the retirement home.
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A question that keeps coming up for me: Once the bombs exploded underground, what happens to all that gas? Where does it go? If indeed the materials were there. Thank you.
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What do they say the road to hell is paved with?
The thing about women voting in the long-house en masse, is men cannot be forced to participate in it, especially if there is nothing to gain.
That’s fine. You don’t have to be interested in them, but you’ll still get them. My opinions are mine and I should be allowed to speak them here.
I’m also not interested in disingenuous and false memes. I can create me own meme,
Countries attacked by nation state terrorist incidents since the Iranian Revolution in 1979
Iran - ----------------------------------- - USALebanon *
Israel *
Iraq *
Syria
Germany *
Argentina *
Yemen
Bahrain
Saudi Arabia *
India
Kenya
Denmark
France
Albania
Netherlands
Thailand
United States
Cyprus
Azerbaijan
Turkey
Pakistan
Afghanistan
Kuwait
Qatar
Morocco
Sudan
Bulgaria
Panama
. The ones with the asterisk include deaths with US Citizens.
According to your meme, the USA is a bad country with evil intentions, destabilizing nations. According to my meme, Iran is a terrorist supporting nation, trying to destabilize governments and cause civil disruption, death and destruction.
I’d say the USA is a country that I would support and at least offers a chance for freedom and prosperity. Iran, not so much. No freedom, no prosperity, not much good at all. Just a fanatic Islamic Theocracy. Iran or Persian is an ancient civilization that has been colonized by an Arab religion with an extreme end of the world Islamic interpretation. I know I will support the US.
You’ll still get my opinions and comments when I have time to go over the video minute by minute.
The US is the largest country in the world and has a history of being the world policeman. It’s just the way it is. maybe not all the conflicts were good or useful but this meme you present is biased and not fair in the least.
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I think since October 25 is still celebrated in Grenada as a freedom type holiday because we attacked by bombing and overthrowing the government Cuba had established a few days earlier by their sabotaging, bombing and attacking the original Grenadan government, I’d definitely scratch that off the list. I’m pretty sure the American medical students at Grande Anse Beach in the midst of becoming Cuban prisoners on 26 October, 1983 would also agree and would agree even if Iran had saved them. Doesn’t justify our kabuke Iran attack but makes me question some of the others on the list.
I can’t agree with your take on things, Allen.
These are not mutually incompatible perspectives. I don’t like either and I don’t think I should choose one over the other. But also, I think your overall perspective is rooted in the past and needs to be updated. The world is in constant rotation, and the peoples of the world are also not locked in a particular social, economic, moral, or political moment in time. This is no longer the world of the 1970s, when I came of age, and the dynamics in play on the world stage as well as in each country and region of the world have changed. With it, our perspectives must change or we fall into irrelevance at best, and become dangerous at worst.
For me, accounting for processes in play, rather than grabbing a moment in time as timelessly emblemmatic, requires outlining trajectories in play that point toward the emerging future. What is being left behind, what is being carried forward, perhaps with innovation, and what is being birthed? Those are the things that I try to discern, and that inform a lot of my positioning and commentary on PP. Here, also unasked for, are my perspectives on what’s changed and where we’re headed. It’s only an outline, responsive to yours, and brief.
The first sentence is arguably true - I have also not given up on the US offering at least a chance for freedom and prosperity, although it appears to be a dimming hope, at least for awhile. I believe (and hope) the current trend toward oligarchic dominance and eventual dictatorship - the fate of every democracy before ours once they have reached the stage ours has reached, when populism replaces democracy - can reverse. And it just might, if certain minority trends gain more support before the oligarchs fully clamp down. But, I am in no doubt that we are in a perilous state and on the brink.
The two short sentences about Iran are not correct; objectively not correct. There is freedom and there is prosperity in Iran. It is not the full individualized freedom of the US and West in general, but if our post-modern libertinism is the standard for personal liberty, there are good arguments for governments and the majority of their societies to not want it. A great many countries are “conservative” in the sense that they don’t want the excesses and decadence of the West. They risk, however, becoming too restrictive. We, in contrast, have succumbed to the risk inherent in maximizing individual sovereignty - which is the weakening of the self-limits and personal discipline that make society possible in the first place. Self-abnegation of any kind is only possible where moral and ethical guidance is upheld and at times enforced by society - culturally and legally.
We can argue about where the balance should reside, and we should argue it because that keeps the system from becoming rigid. But the fact is that any human society is going to oscillate between the poles. As I see events, Iran is no longer the tightly-controlled society of the 1980s and '90s; and the US is no longer maintaining the moral perspectives and ethical boundaries of the 1980s and '90s. Both are moving toward greater individual freedom. In my long-considered perspective, the more conservative-to-midroad position Iran is approaching is better for human flourishing than what we in the West have moved into. They are building toward a balance of individual expression and social expectation, we are destroying (arguably have destroyed) the counterweight of social expectation, leaving us to our basest impulses as individual expression devolves into immediate gratification of the senses. Our way always leads to madness. And the evidence all around us illustrates the lesson - which history knows, especially (but not only) religious history.
Nor is Iranian society poverty-struck. They have had a hard go of it because of the imposition of Western sanctions, but they have slowly built an economy beyond the reach of those sanctions, and with the advent of BRICS they are seeing increasing prosperity. They have a middle class, and a well-educated population, and that, too, is growing. We are significantly responsible for the last 50 years of economic stagnation in Iran which, let’s be honest, we have imposed in an effort to produce the kind of straitened conditions that could have led to popular uprising and the overthrow of the regime we officially despise. That hasn’t worked. When it was a real threat, Iran’s rulers clamped down. As the threat from sanctioning has lessened, so have the internal strictures. I think that less sanctioning from the large Western markets would encourage Iran’s liberalizing trajectory, and so would be our best strategy for introducing change to the country. Unfortunately, neocons seem driven by the need to exert power, which manifests as punishing any who resist their often whimsical rules.
The US is not the largest country in the world. By landmass Russia is larger. By population China is. For some while the US had the largest economy, but China has surpassed the US by a little bit, and it is China that is producing the STEM graduates, and organizing the country’s wealth to continue building their economy. We have dissipated both. China has created 400 million new middle class citizens over the last decades, and intends to more than double that to 900 million by 2050. The US middle class is shrinking. China’s economy is expanding and modernizing, ours is declining and is increasingly stuck in yesterday’s cutting edge tech. This is what Nvidia’s CEO has been warning - the edge is going to China and we are, and will continue to be, hard pressed to produce competent workers and researchers to catch up.
I’m also increasingly doubtful that the US has ever functioned as the world policeman - unless we grant that police forces rightly and justly have the power and permission to dominate populations in order to extract wealth and resources from them.
Yes, we provided an “umbrella” for regularized international trade, and many countries benefitted from that, but over time many countries - particularly in the Global South - found that the benefit mostly accrued to the few in positions of authority and local power who toed the US line. And then they only got the table scraps left after the US had cleaned the plates through our international corporations’ extractive activities. We have been running something more like a global company town, and the ruinous financial arrangements have been getting worse for those indebted nations the longer the system has run. It is only the rise of near peer countries like China and Russia, and the rise of the BRICS alliance they have created, that is permitting the colonized to begin imagining a different, better world order.
At the same time, the Western oligarch class is turning its rapacious eyes inward, destroying the lives of its own citizens as it’s losing dominance across the globe.
The wars in Ukraine, Israel-Iran, and soon, according to Hegseth’s recent speech in Shangri La, arriving in China-Southeast Asia where you live, are efforts to arrest the changes in play; to arrest the growing freedom of countries and regions worldwide. These are not police actions, they are colonialists putting down of a building (I think unstoppable) rebellious spirit among their restless colonies.
The world is moving toward more freedom and a more equal distribution of global wealth and resources. It will inevitably be chaotic for some decades. We westerners could make it an easier transition if we were to help rather than hinder, but that would require us to live less hedonistic lives and our privileged flesh quails at the thought. I think we will become ever more resistant, until we break as a consequence of our own rigidity, because we are no longer a sufficiently disciplined moral and ethical people.
One day we will be again. But for now, and until we achieve a new motive force, we are headed in the wrong direction and the world will gradually but steadily move us to the sideline of history.
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Ever watch the TV series, Breaking Bad? Cash based, “legitimate” businesses are used to put money back into the SWIFT banking system.
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Local tire shops also seem to fit the “car wash” bill. Of course, the biggest cash business is a pot shop as a front for something else.
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Arent there “legal ways” to do it also… have bank in country with less regulatory handle, do that magic print, move that money around in SWIFT, voila get USD that are shadily created. Some central bank somewhere gets to write “lost dollars” off balance sheet.
Cash is only good way to be sure it is not tracked. Even then there are bill serial # and potential powder trackers (classic color bomb but Im sure there are variety of these nowadays). Having a business is great way though. Most western countries have double standard for private citizens and companies. Companies are way less scrutinized. Just pay taxes, it usually goes under radar.
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Maybe it’s money laundering.
But also, folks looking to invest $ often end up in franchises which can be very profitable. And those franchises go through fads.
A couple years ago “boba tea” was the hot thing… tons of franchises sprang up around north DFW. last year or two it’s been car washes. 
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The GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) has inertial guidance, along with GPS. It utilizes a GPS-aided inertial navigation system (INS) to achieve high precision in targeting. The bombs get GPS locks far from the targets, and can switch to inertial any time jamming is encountered. Womp rats don’t have a chance.
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Is INS precise enougth to ping sequential bombs down the same hole from 30,000 feet?.. I doubt it.
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- Navigation-grade INS: These are the most accurate systems. Even after 10 minutes of operation in a GPS-denied environment, the gravitational model was a larger contributor to error than sensor performance. High-accuracy INS products can achieve position accuracies of up to 0.01 meters.