Dozens of pro-Scottish independence accounts go dark after Israeli strikes

I suppose this illustrates that I don't have a particularly clear idea of what Bibi and his cohort do want in specific material terms beyond 'Set fire to every country that funds or houses Hamas, Hesbollah, etc.'

So imagine a man so hell-bent on preserving the security of Israel that he prompted the stochastic assassination of the guy who signed peace accords. Now imagine that for more than 20 years, he's been running on "I keep you safe." Imagine that he's been riding this grift for so long that his gravy train is leaking into the press and he's been legit indicted for bribery and corruption.

Now imagine he's suddenly responsible for the worst failure of security in the history of the nation, and responsible for more deaths than any tragedy since the War of Independence in 1948.

Your first instinct is likely "dude's chum." But then you remember how countries rally around their leaders in times of strife.

Netanyahu has postponed a reckoning. If he lands this plane correctly he can sail off into the sunset without going to jail but anything short of "I made you safe again" and it will not only be bad for Netanyahu, it will be bad for Likud.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_Benjamin_Netanyahu#Trial

Israel is proud of its conscript army and its tradition of service. That hinges on Israel's successful defense of its borders. Pacifying Lebanon or Syria is one thing; hopping a plane to Iran is quite another.

Okay, "tangible advantage or benefit for anyone other than Trump." But what tangible advantage or benefit would Trump derive from boots-on-ground in Iran? He's not a man of firm philosophical standing, but "isolationist" is something he gets called a lot more than "imperialist." There would be heavy political cost to deploying troops anywhere they aren't needed for humanitarian aims and considering how sclerotic and ineffectual the Iranian regime is, why fucking bother?

Do we expect retaliation? As I said, I expected retaliation after Soleimani and it effectively never came. Shit, I think the world expected retaliation after Nimr al-Nimr and it came in the form of memes. There was a time when the Iranians were enthusiastic and skillful practitioners of terrorism but that time is clearly past. If they were gonna pop off they woulda done long since.

As far as workshopping a regime change, it serves the same purpose as "bombing is good tho", something they definitely need to do considering Trump ran on isolationism. Besides which the right-wing think tanks have long been at "wall it off and it will collapse on its own" with Iran, even before the Soviet Union did exactly that (and long, LONG before Syria did exactly that). The argument is basically that the tree is about to fall anyway, why rush at it with an axe when you can sit back, crack open a Busch Light and watch it fall.

Operation Enduring Freedom cost about $2.3T. Trump ain't big on numbers or statistics but he definitely listens to prices. I guarantee you he asked how much a MOAB cost.

"Great" enemies must be exactly that - "great." Let's suppose we were dealing with a Khrushchev-era USSR - beating us at spaceflight, rolling up non-aligned states, possessing a(n apocryphal) "missile gap." The Communists were definitely Godless and the John Birch Society made great hay with it. But even then, it wasn't apocalyptic it was "must be defeated."

We're not dealing with a Khrushchev-era USSR tho. We're dealing with a country that lost control of its own skies in three days, whose navy is principally equipped with outboard motors, which has been throwing shit with a CEP on the order of hundreds of meters at a country the size of New Jersey. You can't pop off at their nuclear weapons program between rounds of golf and still argue they're "great."

Besides which, evangelicals are going extinct. I know they occupy an outsized place in your universe but other than the Charlie Kirk millennial incels, every demo is down. So on the one hand, you look like a chump calling an enemy "great" if you can push them over without so much as a congressional hearing. And on the other hand, the number of people willing to listen to "because Jesus said so" has never been so low as now.

If there IS quantifiably MORE resistance than pre- Afghanistan and Iraq is it actually enough to stop Gulf War 3? If the coequal branches of government were functioning that way I might be tentatively able to think that would be enough.

Fucking lol we were hella better off 20 years ago and the Dems still rubber-stamped the invasion of Iraq. If Trump wanted boots-on-ground in Iran we'd have boots-on-ground. But what would be the point? Iraq was all about mobile weapons labs and dumb shit like that; we're three days past "we took off from Elmendorf and within twelve hours the Iranian nuclear program was a smoking ruin." is it a smoking ruin? Does it matter? The only thing keeping us from doing it again is we don't currently have the inventory of MOABs (or whatever they're calling them these days). The first time you violate a nation's sovereignty is a problem but after that, it's just a job. Prolly won't even make the news, tbh.

Current evidence suggests those in charge of issuing orders to make Netanyahus wishes into military reality will do so when ordered.

Netanyahu doesn't want boots-on-ground in Iran either. Israeli interests start and stop at Israeli sovereignty and the reason Netanyahu is grinding so deeply into this shitshow is Oct 7 showed that he fucked up royally at the ONE PRIORITY he kept harping on, which was "keep Israel safe." "Send a bunch of conscripts a thousand miles away for regime change" is a tough sell.

Was there any advantage? From a PNAC standpoint, there was obviously advantage.

1) It allowed the Bush administration to move the narrative from "we were caught unawares" to "Toby Keith Approved."

2) It allowed the United States to assert hegemony over the TAPI Pipeline.

3) It allowed the United States to reshape the Middle East from a disparate patchwork of treaty states to a unified American framework of peace and prosperity. Oops, no it didn't but if you don't think that was the goal you haven't been paying attention.

You can't argue that Trump will do anything for money out one side of your mouth and out the other insist that "tangible advantage or benefit doesn't enter into the conversation" out the other. It's ALL about tangible advantage or benefit. Refusing to demean yourself with empathy for your opponent's positions does not eliminate them.

Sure. Stochastic assassination is a real and driving concern. But what does it have to do with Iran? What does it have to do with end-times evangelical Christians?

This is where I lose patience with quote-unquote liberals, and I say that as a guy any political quiz will out as borderline socialist: "the sky is falling" is not a useful political or philosophical position. Shit's all fucked up. Craven nazis are running the government. There's plenty to freak out about why do you find it necessary to skip-load to a completely different argument just so you can find something to shout at me about? Oh boo hoo hoo the only credible choices are inaction and assassination, everyone on BSky agrees.

Eyes on the prize: the apocalyptic Christian fetishists want a red heifer sacrificed in a rebuilt Holy Temple. Said Holy Temple would need to replace the Dome of the Rock so... go Jews I guess? This, of course, is a cross-eyed evangelical Revelations-related read of the Book of Numbers and is subject to whim. Christian thought on the issue has a lot more to do with Tim LaHaye than it does with John the Apostle so it's pretty squishy.

Squishy as it is, it has fuckall to do with Iran. The Iran thing is Ezekeil 38-39 which doesn't say "holocaust" and actually fits the USSR better than Iran - Ezekiel 38 reads out Persia as an "ally" of Gog among modern-day Turkey, Ukraine, Ethiopia and Libya. And sure - they'll interpret it however they want. But the prophetic backing for a Left Behind War diminished greatly on October 8th, 9th, 10th and subsequent retaliatory events.

I'm not seeing boots on the ground in Iran. There's no advantage to it. I could be wrong? The amount of bizarro-ass shit since 2016 is mind-numbing. But there will be significant resistance to putting soldiers anywhere they are within easy reach of a truck bomb.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filipino_Monkey#January_2008_American%E2%80%93Iranian_naval_incident

I've certainly never been out of the armchair on this one. And definitely - never count out an ideology. But I cannot recall a time that the various paramilitary Lebanese factions have been this disordered, this powerless and this wrong-footed.

Iran is also very much in eclipse. It seems like the Saudis have a handle on all their shit, Israel is running rampant without any other nation doing much other than expressing tepid concern and their allies are decreasing in number and allegiance.

Various talking heads have been mouthing off about Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz. At this point, they have to be calculating that doing so will just demonstrate how powerless their navy is. Israel legit controlled their airspace inside a week; what the hell is their Navy going to do?

I'm not going to defend the bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities. But I am going to contextualize it.

- Prior to the fall of the Shah, Iran was the United States' biggest recipient of military aid. The F-14s the Israelis bombed were obliquely explained as "when the countries still had ties", not as in "Iran used to be our Saudi Arabia." The Iranian Revolution turned Iran into a pariah state so they couldn't get any maintenance on anything; this is one reason they suffered like a half million dead in an eight year war of attrition with Iraq.

- After the fall of the Shah, Iran leaned heavily on terrorism. The CIA and State Department will never forgive Iran for two things: (1) the marine barracks bombing in Beirut (2) the kidnapping and murder of the CIA station chief for South Asia. Mired in protracted battlefield hell, Iran responded asymmetrically.

- The traditional counterbalance of Israeli power in the Middle East was Saudi Arabia. El Al now flies between Mecca and Tel Aviv because MBS really doesn't give a fuck about Israeli power. That, more than anything, cemented his acceptance by the USA despite his big-time dictatorial moves, assassinations and power grabs - he ain't sussed with Israel. Iran? The Houthis are just another repressed minority without Iran.

The Iranian response to the aerial murder of Soleimani was milquetoast at best. Iran was Dead Man Walking at that point because what it showed was that Iran got nuthin'. Nonetheless Putin managed to convince the Iranians to convince their proxies to open conflict up wide on October 7th, thinking it would affect US elections. Putin figured he could bank on Trump, only to discover like everyone else that everything Trump touches dies.

Netanyahu, for his part, needs the October 7 war to keep in the good graces of Israelis so the longer he can keep up the conflict the longer he's in power. And since then,

- Hamas has been effectively liquidated

- Hezbollah has been effectively liquidated

- America has gone kinetic against the Houthis

It doesn't take a genius to go "if we tee up an opportunity for Trump to appear decisive and powerful he'll absolutely take it."

I don't think he has the attention span for a ground war. I think Ukraine has shown everyone that ground wars are bad TV. But fuckin' hell if I were the CIA or State Department I would be doing the following out of sheer Great Game skullduggery:

1) keep the war in Ukraine dragging along for as long as possible. Ain't my bodies and the more indebted Ukraine is the better. Meanwhile it's grinding Russia down and tying them up in a futile meatgrinder.

2) Use Russia's preoccupation to foment chaos everywhere they have an interest. Syria? Gone. Iran? Going. North Korea? Packed up and gone home.

3) Allow and encourage Israel in their genocide. It makes me sick. It makes me hopeless. It makes me stare at the horizon a lot and it gives me this tightening in my chest that I can't seem to do anything about. But the CIA and State Department have never given the first fuck about foreign genocides, particularly when they're convenient to their aims.

I've seen nobody talk about this picture:

Which, to me, is astonishing. Because everyone talked about this picture:

That's a Trump-leaked bit of IMINT out of KH-11 Block IV. demure can either back me up on this or shut me down but I'm unaware of commercial imagery with that resolution. And the resolution of those Russian bombers is... Well, here's Maxar. Here's Maxar zoomed in. I don't think you get blowups like Vasil's there unless you have some special friends. And I think Vasil's special friends want Vladimir Putin to know who's really running the show.

You drank from the firehose. I suspect you were taken aback, as I was, by how fervently the once and former US insiders were at "Iran gonna burn, yo." Two, three, four decades later and to a man, they wanted Iran to burn more than anything else on this green earth. I think you can also agree that Trump has no attention span for anything that doesn't have a place to write "TRUMP" on it. The Gray Men?

I don't think it's Senator Bloodfeast. I think Senator Bloodfeast is trying to figure out how to keep his job in a party gone populist. I think the Gray Men wanted this so bad that they went around the Russian operative running National Intelligence. Think of that! We have a Russian patsy ostensibly in charge of this shit! Who coddled up to Assad! And we STILL dropped bombs on Natanz! While the cat is away the mice will play and say what you will about Pete Hegseth, the man sure cuts a striking silhouette for a power vacuum.

I would like to make two recommendations to you. The first is this video.

That's not some random Youtuber, that's BBC 4 Storyville. It's basically 90 minutes of what happens when you let them eat cake, 90 minutes of the Iran that the very, very last of the Gray Men still remember. The "remember what they took from you" refrains are all held by people who used to be hella more powerful while everyone at "RETVRN" spent time tortured by SAVAK.

The second is this book.

Paul Kriwaczek was at that party, filming it for the BBC. He was so blown away by it that he basically went "what does history even mean" and went off to basically chart an underdog's history of Europe and the Middle East. The perspectives in it are still with me two decades later.

I think you could stand to focus on something other than current events. I know I could. And while I've got a couple dozen books on the middle east up in that list, In Search of Zarathustra didn't make it because it's much more about humanity than it is about history.

There's a whole lot of humans in Iran. And for the most part, they aren't substantially worse off than they've been since 2009. I don't know what the future holds but I, for one, have been expecting this since 2020.

Do a destination wedding and a potluck reception.

Invite the minimum to the destination wedding, invite everyone to the reception.

We had like 15 people at our wedding, on a Tuesday, on an island (because it was Beltane). We had like 100 people at our reception, on a Saturday, at my uncle's house. I think it cost us like $7k.

There's a substantial difference in philosophy and formulation between Japanese incense and anyone else's incense. I'm a long way from a connoisseur but the only counterfeit incense I've ever encountered is pretending to be Japanese. Japanese incense also has the advantage of being breakable; you can burn a half stick or a quarter stick. Either way, their oils and perfumes linger a lot less than the Indian stuff (which lingers a lot less than American stuff).

See if you can find Shoyeido. I'm partial to moss garden.

I dare you to buy myokaku.

I mean... you stop when you need gas. If you're lucky you don't need gas very often. I did LA to Albuquerque a few times. You stop for lunch in Flagstaff, at which point you're eight hours in and six hours to go.

Lessee - five stops between Seattle and Eugene would be Tacoma, Olympia, Portland... nah that's it. With double the area and three quarters the population, there's just a lot more nothing in the USA.

I would love high speed rail. Shit, I'd love functional rail. And maybe this is just grown-up-in-the-desert me, but the threshold for flying is a thousand miles, not 0-400. It's not a european situation at all - I did some work out at WSU and it was six of one, half a dozen of the other. You could go to the airport, wait an hour, get on a plane, fly an hour, get off the plane, get a rental car, drive an hour and be in Pullman... or you could start driving and be there in four hours. That's 285 miles.

There will never be high speed rail to Pullman. So there's a 10-hour, $90 train ride. There's also a 23-hour bus ride. Or, you get in the car.

LOL your map shows that Illinois (57k sqmi) is 1/4 the size of SPAIN (195k sqmi)

EU = 1.6m sqmi

Continental US, excluding Alaska = 3.1m sqmi

I'm looking at buying machine tools from a friend in Eugene. That's a hop down and a hop back up. A long day, but nothing unusual.

Also the same distance as Amsterdam to Paris.

Are US trains notably cheaper or more convenient than airlines or buses?

SOMETIMES

Are they seen as this rustic freighter of the past that ended the era of cattle drives you may indulge in Dollywood?

SOMETIMES

I'm asking because for us EU folk, the answers are unsurprising "yes, and I use them daily" and "no, they feel more modern and 'civilised' than most of the planes I flew."

kk about that

The first thing to know is that railroads in the United States were built by rich magnates through the abuse of indigenous and settler land rights.

The next thing to know is that the passenger rail network in the United States was deliberately destroyed by the next generation of rich magnates in favor of automobiles.

The next thing to know is that when the Cold War started, the powers that be figured freeways would be easier to rebuild than railroads.

The next thing to know is that passenger rail was nationalized under Nixon

So let's review: We have

- A rail network laid out 150 years ago

- Owned by private conglomerates

- Upon which a for-profit federal agency must operate

- At a profit against every other form of transportation

Is it any wonder it's often a clusterfuck?

To your first question, "are they notably cheaper or more convenient," the answer is "it depends." There are seven trips between Seattle and Portland today, each taking less than four hours, each costing less than $60. It's a lovely ride, I've done it two or three times. You can drive it as fast as 3 hours but it can also mushroom to seven depending on traffic... because once you've started down the freeway to Portland there are no alternate routes. Of course if you're my daughter that trip is free; anyone under 18 can get off in Vancouver, WA, a suburb of Portland, and be fully subsidized by the Washington State Department of Transportation.

On the other hand, there are two trips between Seattle and Vancouver today, each taking less than four hours, each costing less than $80. It's a lovely ride, I've done it twice. You can drive it as fast as 4 hours but it can also mushroom to seven depending on traffic... and there's the border crossing besides. Of course if BNSF, the freight operator, feels like running traffic you're fukt. You aren't taking a train. You're taking a bus. And now it's a seven hour ride. And the bus driver might get lost getting you to the station. And then you'll all vote on how to drive a bus through downtown Vancouver because none of you are going to fire up Google Maps while you're roaming in a foreign country.

NikolaiFyodorov's mysterious delays were probably just that - BNSF saying "who run Bartertown." Whereas Amtrak has to keep a schedule (ish), BNSF can, and will, tell you that freight will be coming through there sometime between Monday midnight and the following Monday at midnight. I say this as a certified railroad contractor - BNSF runs freight when they fucking well want to, it's their rails, eat shit. And if you're WSDOT you can say "hey bitch we're running this corridor at this time and we'll pay you not to fuck with it" but if you're Amtrak into Canada you're boned because you don't have the budget for that.

There's this idea that Amtrak is a national organization but it's more like the Hanseatic League or the United Arab Emirates. Each individual run has its own treaties and your experience sticking within one of those treaties is likely to work (Coast Starlight, Acela). Try to bridge the gap and you are exhorbitantly fucked. Amtrak knows you aren't taking a train from San Francisco to Denver because it's quick, you're doing it because it's romantic and they will charge you accordingly. You will get a sleeper car, it will take three days, and it will be priced like an ocean-going cruise. demure is absolutely right in that you aren't making a 34-hour journey you can do in two and there's no f'n way Amtrak is competing with that. Depending on how you jigger the ticket it's cheaper to fly than it is to take a bus.

To your second point, "are they seen as the rustic freighter of the past" the answer is "sometimes." As above, "let's ride the train it's romantic" has legs. Here's the hits you get if you search for "Dinner train":

"But wait!" you say. "I thought BNSF fukt wid all that!" Ahh, but grasshopper - what if you were a tiny shitty mountain town and the giant magnates gave no fux about you? Well, you built a narrow gauge railroad because it was cheaper, and you ran custom locomotives. And, coming as they do from the era of Singer sewing machines, they abso-fucking-lutely still run. Most of them have been converted from coal (not Dolly's). Most of them are effectively free. Nobody is going to build a road on a narrow gauge railbed and mostly they go to towns that have withered on the vine since the freeway system.

There are two other considerations here:

1) the United States is comparatively huge, as many have mentioned. I routinely drove two hours for car parts growing up. In college I dated a Serbian girl who drove two hours to the Adriatic coast once a year as her family's massive road trip vacation. "Road trip movies" are as American a phenomenon as Christmas movies; I can think of a couple set in Mexico and a few set in Australia but by and large, "giant desert culture" is America far more than Europe.

2) The United States rail system didn't suffer five years of targeted bombing. What's here has been here for more than a hundred years. Americans pushed European rail into modernity with the Marshall Plan; they pushed American rail into obsolescence with the freeway system.

I agree somewhat with cgod that American rail nuts tend to be kooky idealists who aren't particularly interested in how we get here, they're all about "I had a Eurrail pass when Daddy was paying for my summer abroad and it was badass why is it so hard to visit my long distance girlfriend in Poughkeepsie." Nonetheless the deprecation of rail in favor of freeways was and is a policy choice. There's a lot of money, history and ideology behind that policy choice, to be sure, but it remains a choice.

It's a fucking fishing lure. It's been a fucking fishing lure since before Blake Lemione

Since before David Levy

Since the debut of the fucking Flinstones, dipshits have been biting at the lure.

Human: Well, my boyfriend made me come here.

    ELIZA: Your boyfriend made you come here?
    Human: He says I'm depressed much of the time.
    ELIZA: I am sorry to hear you are depressed.
    Human: It's true. I'm unhappy.
    ELIZA: Do you think coming here will help you not to be unhappy?

In 1966, of course, there weren't a lot of fish in the pond so there weren't a lot of fish biting. Up until very recently, the only people exposed to fishing lures tended to be the one who tie flies for a living. But no, now here's Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg to spend literal Trillions of dollars so that more people can bite at the lure so they can make $0.007 CPM.

How do you prevent a person from pirating software? I

What does that have to do with the price of tea in China?

Nobody is worried about "someone with money" being whispered sweet jihadi nothings by IsisGPT. The worry is impressionable people being told harmful stuff about comets. Here, look:

These were all the rage when I was a kid. They were also dangerous AF. Basic problem is they don't turn like a motorcycle, they don't turn like a car, they turn like a car with a wheel in the middle.

This is particularly problematic when what they're mostly good for is doing donuts in vacant lots because your parents own a couple but they have to be trailered 50 miles to get to the trailhead and you don't have a driver's license but you know where the keys are and it's boring this summer and Susie will be impressed by your dust-generating power and and and.

Now - you can kill the shit out of yourself on a 4-wheel ATV, particularly as the southern US allows you to drive them on the street now. Americans are all about the freedom to kill the shit out of yourself. But deaths and injuries of children and teenagers went up like crazy when the ATC was introduced and dropped back down when it went away. Can you still buy an ATC? Absolutely. Can you still ride one? Hundo P. Are they still dangerous? Absolument. But the US made it harder to hurt yourself on Honda's toys by making Honda's toys less likely to surprise you in the corners.

But what exact thing do you prevent here?

You prevent large corporations from receiving revenue for encouraging impressionable incels to hurt themselves through legal injunction. How is this so hard to grasp.

That's a cut-down Facebook AI living on a Raspberry Pi. It could absolutely spew Andrew Tate quotes all day long and nobody's gonna do shit about it. The important distinction is a whole lot of effort and labor went into that, as opposed to "hey Siri tell me why girls don't like me."

Limit the number of GPUs (which are also used for bitcoin mining) computers themselves?

Bitcoin mining uses ASICs. GPUs were used to mine Ethereum until it went proof-of-stake. AI is increasingly reliant on NPUs and has been for years:

This is one of those situations where you're substituting your assumption of knowledge for... knowledge and it's leading you to make supercilious arguments like "how do you prevent a person from pirating software." Dozens of ways. I've got an iLok with 400 plugins on it; several of my friends run Pro Tools 10 (released 2012) because its the last cracked version. I have several business programs that keep a portion of their code on a server I don't own rending everything local worthless without a clear license. But that doesn't matter because this isn't a copy protection issue it's a negligence issue.

Who's got two thumbs and a fully-vested pension

"that training data being selected and refined by the employees of the company making the model" is pretty unambiguous.

So I take my open model and I run it on my own iron and I chunk it down and I get this skinny little thing. Maybe I train it on the most heinous shit imaginable. That's not Meta's fault and it's not Meta's problem and if I wanna take an open model and code it for evil, nobody is going to stop me.

But this is an open model running on someone else's cloud with payments processed by someone else's payment processor with Oauth handled by Google and Facebook and Github and whoever. And they are every bit as morally, ethically, legally and practically culpable as Goldman Sachs was for laundering cartel money. If they're all profiting off of evil they get to pay the penalties for profiting off of evil.

This is not a gray area.

That's a flag, not a bathrobe. Treat it with respect.

I had a subscription to Delta Press, albeit through a pseudonym because I wasn't stupid, albeit still delivered to my home address because actually, I kinda was. Delta Press was awash in ideas. I had a book called "improvised PETN & Mercury Fulminate." I had another on assembling legally air-tight alternate identities. Those weren't regulated and still aren't. Tim McVeigh blew up the Federal Building in OKC because of the Turner Diaries, which is very much still available in many languages and formats. Generations of teenagers have read The Anarchist Cookbook and thought they learned something. "For informational purposes only."

AI isn't an idea, it's a product. In this case, it's a product encouraging harm. Michelle Carter went to jail for encouraging harm and the CSPC pulls harmful products off the market. I'm willing to bet you or I can sit in a room with a lawn dart without hurting anyone. I'm not so sure about my neighbors.

The cornet gets cued up whenever someone knows that what they want individually is bad socially. If your porn harms women your porn needs to be regulated. If your kids toys harm kids your toys need to be regulated. If your chatbot tells incels they'll never be loved unless they get $80k in surgery it needs to be regulated. Especially if you're making money at it.