No_one
Underemployed Slav. Likes playing Factorio.
User ID: 1042
Iran's assumption seems to have been that by permanently remaining n steps away from having nukes (n varying according to the current political and diplomatic climate), you get all the benefits of being a nuclear-armed state without the blowback of going straight for them. But no, you need to have the actual weapons in your arsenal, ready to use at a moment's notice.
It's entirely possible Iran ALREADY has the weapons in their arsenal.
But the weapons are militarily and strategically useless for Iran in this particular situation.
Why they probably have them:
Between how much time they've had to develop them, and that the half-ton of 60% HEU could have be easily boosted to weapons grade by removing the third of lighter uranium atoms from it (it'd only take days), it's nonsensical to believe Iranians do not already have nuclear weapons. Making an detonating an implosion uranium bomb is something the Chinese managed in 1963 or so. Today, with supercomputers it's not hard at all.
This is obvious but it's obviously not talked about because then the normies would get hysterical, even though a nuclear bomb is not particularly destructive, and even the maximum of 15 20kt bombs isn't particularly destructive either. (Israeli cities are not made out of wood nor would burn as readily as Japanese WW2 ones). Nor are so dense. If Iranians wanted to have their country H-bombed, they could gravely hurt Israel by killing ~20,000 people with each bomb, tops.
Something tells me they're not the wholly irrational frothing at the mouth fanatics we're being told the are.
But they, probably correctly, calculate that if they nuked an Israeli air-base, Israelis would H-bomb all of their major military sites and production facilities. They're probably working on hydrogen bombs, but have not conducted a test yet.
No, really, what do you think they could do with these bombs if they declared they have them?
Militarily, the only possible 'clean' target are US carrier groups. US doesn't want to invade, nor could it invade. Unless it were attempting a full scale conquest of the country, this wouldn't happen.
Israeli airbases are mostly in populated areas areas, each strike would cause collateral damage. Israelis do not have the resources for a sustained campaign, so why strike them? They're going to give up. If Iran used them on Israeli military infrastructure, their own military installations would get glassed much more thoroughly.
Obviously, even if they had the bombs, they'd keep them secret, locked up in a bunker and work on producing hydrogen bombs and ICBMs and enough of a tunnel network to guarantee survival of a second strike capability.
Announcing that they have the bombs would
- feed Israeli narrative
- not actually provide them with the required capability to deter anyone
- cause normies in Israel/West to demand an actual end to Iranian nuclear program
the only upside would be boosting national pride.
No_one
2d ago
I'm skeptical of the accuracy and/or probative value of the psychoanalyses of the people involved, more generally, and it's unclear if it's Psmith's own interpretation or him relaying that of the original author
A foreign policy guy I sometimes reply to recommended to me that I read this book. So I picked it up. Couldn't finish it.
The whole thing seems like an exercise in exculpatory back-scratching, ..all these fine people, operating on the best intentions, reasonably well informed fucked up.. a story they really need now because the then neoconservative view - that Americans have the right to intervene whenever they need to preserve US primacy and interests - came to dominate the entire foreign policy establishment and it'd simply not do to allow the monumental failure of the conquest of Iraq to keep spreading bad smell.
What I remember about the time seems different. More along the lines of 'the war was a pet project of very specific people (PNAC alumni), they were saying they'd invade Iraq in october of '01 before they even got the dodgy evidence they needed to sell that war.
No_one
4d ago
Christ, women must hate her with a burning passion. @Sloot is hitting the nail on the head there. They envy her because she, despite her manifest flaws, age, and rough looks, she locked down the second richest guy in the world. Who is, by most accounts of people who reported to him, one of the most terrifying, ruthless and capable nerds out there. No doubt he smells fakers and gold-diggers before they round the corner. Yet this plastic bimbo somehow got him.
least comfortable in his marriage
Going by the charities his ex-wife keeps donating to, she must be either trying to get back at Bezos or is a liberal NPC. I'm not sure how happy one might be with
No_one
4d ago
Cooking is simple. Just read the instructions, then do it. 2/3rds of recipes can't really be messed up in a truly bad way either.
I keep hearing about these guys I can't cook, but looking at my parents I'm pretty sure "can't cook" is just calculation. "If I never learn to cook she can't ask me to cook."
I started cooking for myself as soon as I lost access to subsidized meals. It wasn't difficult at all. Pretty much every single guy I've ever lived with could also cook. Not that big a sample, sure, and they were mostly engineers, but still..
No_one
7d ago
So... even though the twin studies can't really be proven, despite two decades of intensive, worldwide research focus and ungodly amounts of funding, he still argues they are "mostly right."
80% of the people whose job theoretically is to determine the validity of twin studies are psychologically invested into finding them not true.
If twin studies are correct and most outcomes are due to 'lack of abuse' and 'genetics', as theorized by people such as fascists or authors of the 'Nurture assumption', then the bulk of policies liberals like are going to be found wanting. Scientists are generally left of center (won't punch left) and sometimes hard left (Gould, for example, who probably falsified evidence in the Morton case or was deliberately sloppy)
I have little confidence that these studies are being carried out by impartial parties and in good faith.
I'm pleasantly surprised that Scott said this much.
No_one
3d ago
I doubt most even know that- mostly they just hate her because of where she got and how she looks.
No_one
4d ago
What if NEET preferences are just born from someone jerking off to sexy NEET photos as a kid? Or maybe their mother was untidy and a bit of a slob? Maybe some of them really just want desperation, but I'd not underestimate the variety of male ideals that seem to range from furries, thru catgirls to robots. Someone being into girls who are a little slobby seems .. reasonably normal.
No_one
10d ago
Good, interesting write up.
However:
It was an explicit break from the premise of the DNC as a neutral leadership institution for democrats anywhere.
Were the claims by Sanders supporters that DNC essentially sabotaged his chances to win primaries in '16 plain lies?
I have a hard time believing in 'neutral' institutions in the first place.
No_one
14d ago
” It’s such a clownish statement you would never believe it actually came out of someone’s mouth, but it did.
You live in clown world. A CRS insider published a book bragging how he and his colleagues have been secretly stage managing race riots, race controversies and so on, in confidence from everyone but maybe some senate committee and president since 1962.
Yes, they only tell congress what they want to tell congress, and they're not subject to FOIA. Book was published in 2020 or so.
Most everyone assumed this crap was managed and CRS was even mentioned because they're not that secret, but e.g. knowledge of this book only came up in 2025.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56253400
In short, it's a clown world so I'm not sure why you're surprised people act like clowns.
No_one
4d ago
Mackenzie looks odd. She's got a very long neck, her hips are narrow. If she had a nice figure like Sanchez, even a less bouncy natural one and a proportional neck she'd be pretty attractive, but she's really a scarecrow.
No_one
7d ago
Iain McGilchrist comes across to me as a religious mystic and obscurantist. Yes people find it exceptionally easy to delude themselves for entirely explicable reasons (see e.g. Hanson & Simler's book) and science is hard, but entirely mechanical phenomena can create incredible complexity without major problems.
McGilchrist is very ready to make sweeping conclusions that veer into outright hallucinations (metaphysics etc).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Matter_with_Things
In Part III, "What Then is True?", McGilchrist asks and attempts to answer the question "what is truth?", before turning to a wide-ranging exploration of the nature of reality: the coincidence of opposites (the idea that at a deeper, higher or transcendent level, apparent opposites may be reconciled or find union); the one and the many; time; flow and movement; space and matter; matter and consciousness; value; purpose, life and the nature of the cosmos; and the sense of the sacred. McGilchrist further argues that consciousness, rather than matter, is ontologically fundamental.[5]
That all seems like someone who doesn't understand that 'believing you are the center of the universe and somehow matter' is an adaptive psychological mechanism you'd expect to find in any vital organism, but unlikely to be actually true in the sense that 'the universe came into being to create humanity'.
No_one
16d ago
The Left has individuals with TV, radio, or podcasts, but they really don’t support each other. Raechel Maddow doesn’t tell the same story as Ezra Klein who doesn’t tell the same story as Thom Hartmann.
No? I recall everyone and their mother calling J.D.Vance, the seemingly most normal guy in politics, ever, weird. There is clear coordination. Back during Trump's first campaign, there was a minor scandal that pretty much every major media sent a high ranking guy to some Clinton event to coordinate campaign messaging.
Also, the TV and newspapers pretty much belongs to the democrats. Not that anyone except those who await death pays attention to legacy media (, but the left has something like 75% of the TV and 90% of the paper market, at least.
No_one
10d ago
Iran's victory condition is avoiding civil war, preserving their strategic forces and forcing Israel to accept that Iran also has nukes.
Israel isn't Russia or US, it has limited resources. Iranian victory is possible.
No_one
6d ago
Drug prohibition is a crime against humanity!
I see people out there getting absolutely wasted on kratom, acting like lunatics, wasting huge amounts of money on it, not washing, being aggressive, getting in fights. Maybe drugs should be legal for people who are not idiots.
No_one
3d ago
Only ever saw one guy using it. Young guy, 20-something. A place where I worked part time, one of the temp workers loading the containers. He stank, literally stank so bad I could smell him - I have somewhat impaired sense of smell. Apparently he washed very rarely.. and this was summer.
Later I learned he was homeless, living in a tiny garden colony hut he broke into and even though he could have washed, he didn't. Everyone hated him because he acted aggressive, sometimes talked to himself, kept pacing all the time, was unreasonable... and stank. About every hour he'd mix a kratom drink using a lot of various powders he had there and then drink it. I guess because the labor force situation being what it is, he kept working there for several months.
Once caused a fire alarm because he lighted up a joint or cigarette in the toilets, but the place was so shoddily run they didn't know who was the culprit and he got away with it. Not sure what caused the company to blacklist him eventually.. probably got in a fight with someone.
I really don't think his was 'initial high'. As far as I know, he was persistently agitated this way, which, even more than the smell, caused others to hate him. Maybe he was mixing something else into those drinks though.
No_one
10d ago
My interpretation is that Israel is short on interceptors, Iranians are short on missiles bc Israelis almost certainly bombed exits of tunnel storages and possibly generally short. Rumor is Iranian air defenses rallied and made striking Tehran harder.
Both sides have refrained from truly damaging strikes so far. E.g. Israel didn't hit oil terminals at Kharg island, Iranians didn't hit turbine halls of the five Israeli power plants.
American bombing effort, if it wasn't fake (smaller yield bombs dropped) almost certainly failed to destroy Fordow enrichment facility which was engineered to absorb such damage.
Iranians want to withdraw from the NPT and are reportedly more avid than ever for a nuclear program. So, if Israelis are truly dead set on dismantling that, they're going to have to continue bombing until Iran turns into a failed state.
Can they? Do they have the munitions, spare parts etc?
No_one
7d ago
Has anyone ever described the motivation for watching fights, or what people get out of it ? I greatly respect anyone who is crazy enough to get into such a fight, unless they're obviously crazy and unprepared.
But watching the fight itself is completely different to being in a fight, which to me is a very exhilarating experience judging by serious grade school fights or some kinetic sparring I've done a few times.. but that's sadly too risky and I generally prefer to avoid doing it- especially the 'real' fights with hot blood. There's just nothing there, sure it's somewhat more interesting than the fake fights in films, but it's only a very 'academic' interest.
Clearly, that's not other people's attitude so I'm wondering what's going on.
If people healed like in computer games, I'd probably be very much into MMA, but we sadly don't.
No_one
5d ago
Alcohol is way too widespread to really ban, in addition relatively easy to make at home.
"How Czech Republic managed to get its Ministry of Justice investigated for money laundering of cca 4000+ bitcoin from a darknet drug marketplace"
“It was so ultra-legal that it couldn’t be more legal,” the justifiably former Minister of Justice Pavel 'Don Pablo' Blažek. [1]
Finally, some a bit 21st century news. I put this into CW and not 'fun' because 'populists might benefit'.
In march of '25 , the Ministry of Justice in Czech Republic accepted about $40 million gift in the form of 864 bitcoin. I briefly remembered the news item: MoJ is selling bitcoin in auction.
Now, the justice minister has resigned, the ministry is being investigated for money laundering, the minister is being investigated for abusing his position and Tomáš Jiříkovský, who gave the gift is missing.
The timeline, so far, seems to be something like:
2013/3: Tomáš opens Sheep Marketplace (SM) opens. Initially scarcely used and amateurish, it gets a lot of users after Silk Road collapses.
2013/10: Silk Road closes. People flood to SM
2013/12: SM hacked, 5400 client bitcoin stolen according to its admins. Real amount is unknown, possibly up to 96,000.. Tomáš closes the market and pockets the rest of the bitcoin clients had there.
2014-2016: Tomáš runs 'Nucleus', another darknet marketplace. He tries to launder the stolen money and attracts NCOZ (kind of like Czech FBI without counterintelligence duties).
2016/4/12 Tomáš is arrested by the Czech police.
2016/4/13 Nucleus marketplace stops responding and again, client bitcoin go missing. It's obvious Tomáš was running Nucleus. Police never investigate him for this.
2018: Tomáš is sentenced to 9 years for drug trading, embezzlement and illegal weapons to 9 years. His electronic devices areconfiscated. State intends to wipe it to prevent the perp from benefitting from the proceeds of a crime. The perp's lawyers contest this.
2021: Tomáš is out due to good behavior. He starts to petition the courts, first to prevent data destruction, then to return his seized devices.
2025/1 The courts finally rule that he can get them all back.
2025/3 For no ostensible reason, Tomáš proposes to gift the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) about $40 million in bitcoin that's supposedly not stolen. There's going to be an expert witness present to attest to that it's not stolen darknet bitcoin, the transaction will be overseen by a notary too. This happens and is covered in crypto news, who are of course unaware of who is involved.
2025/5/30: this hits the news, perhaps due to Tomáš, who seems to be an ADHD guy with a vocational school degree only, making the list of richest people in Czech Republic. Revelations soon follow: the expert witness was paid by Tomáš. The wallet was opened 10 hours before the notary got there - they did not want to waste his time while dealing with the encrypted wallet. It's determined up to 4000 bitcoin were sent from the wallet to various addresses before the notary got there to witness the gift to MoJ.
2025/6 Tomáš departs for parts unknown - probably because people missing their bitcoins are are offering bounties for his whereabouts. Minister of Justice resigns. FBI gets involved.
Some important notes: most everyone involved in this case is connected to Masaryk univerzity in Brno (~750k), the second largest city in Czech lands, much hated by people from the capital.(1500K). Tomáš's grandfather was a professor there. The prime minister and the justice minister both studied there. Tomáš lived in Břeclav, a town close to it.
My suspicions: based on the lot of Czech language info I've read on this case, it looks like the justice minister ensured the courts ruled to not wipe the devices, and some of the other bitcoin were likely gifted to people backing the staunchly pro-war and pro-American government parties. The courts obliged but in their verdicts strongly protested and said the bitcoin were proceeds of a crime. Of course, this implies the prime minister knew about this too. But the it's believed is the justice minister is more influential than the PM, and claimed to be ' regional godfather',
If you want to know more, some sources in Czech:
https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoinov%C3%A1_kauza
https://zandl.substack.com/p/97-jak-tomas-jirikovsky-a-ministr
[1]: the two time justice minister is suspected of being a grey eminence / involved in many shady influence deals. https://www.idnes.cz/zpravy/domaci/pavel-blazek-ministr-spravedlnosti-rezignace-profil.A250530_165132_domaci_ikul
No_one
14d ago
In case you really, really do not get it, it's what's called 'sexual innuendo'. English has a relatively impoverished vocabulary so people just substitute whatever words seem roughly appropriate and arrange them in a way that's suggestive.
No_one
10d ago
I note with dismay the link was written using chatGPT's default slop style.
No_one
7d ago
Nobody is saying that. Nobody can even alter fifty places in the genome safely today, certainly not in a human embryo.
No_one
12d ago
Don't worry about Taiwan war.
American magazines of anti-missile interceptors are so low they'd never even get carriers in range to help Taiwan.
The war would be, perhaps, a blockade of Malacca straits and some posturing/cyber warfare etc.
Iran has everything to lose and nothing to gain by declaring nuclear capability.
Reaction to this top-level post on Iranian nukes.
It's very possible Iran ALREADY has the weapons in their arsenal.
But the weapons are militarily and strategically useless for Iran in this particular situation.
Because every current adversary already has nuclear weapons, and more of them, and could retaliate forcefully.
Why they probably have them:
Between how much time they've had to develop them, and that the half-ton of 60% HEU could have be easily boosted to weapons grade by removing the third of lighter uranium atoms from it (it'd only take days), it's nonsensical to believe Iranians do not already have nuclear weapons or couldn't have them. Making an detonating an implosion uranium bomb is something the Chinese managed in 1963 or so. Today, with supercomputers and more mature nuclear physics knowledge out there, it's not hard at all.
The 15 bombs Iran could have if we take IAEA at their word, which if used, would result in destruction of Tehran and other major cities, could kill perhaps 300-500k Israelis. It'd not destroy the country, cause it to be overrun etc.
Iranians know that if they nuked an Israeli air-base, Israelis who have more bombs would H-bomb all of their major military sites and production facilities. They're probably working on hydrogen bombs, but have not conducted a test yet. So, there are no useful targets for these bombs at all. There's no reason to say you have something you cannot even use.
Israelis do not have the resources for a sustained campaign, so why strike them? They were going to give up their campaign sooner or later.
So, in conclusion:
Obviously, even if they had the bombs, they'd keep them secret, locked up in a bunker and work on producing hydrogen bombs and ICBMs and enough of a tunnel network to guarantee survival of a second strike capability.
Announcing that they have the bombs would
the only upside would be boosting national pride.
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