In case you hadn’t figured it out, the kerfuffle about Iran’s nuclear program really has nothing to do with them being a threat to the US – it’s all an attempt to maintain Israel’s status as sole nuclear power in the Middle East. If Israel is not able to engage in nuclear blackmail, they’d have to negotiate with their neighbors, which is a problem, since some of the neighbors don’t acknowledge Israel’s existence.
Close them.
I wonder what Iain Banks would have to say, when he heard about this. I’d hope it would be long, passionate, and full of obscenities. [nyt]
You may recall when a disturbed Trump fan sent a bunch of fake bombs to various media people and Trump critics. [stderr]
Henry Rollins had a bit in one of his spoken word performances, in which he ridiculed a pentagon spokesperson for talking about “the bunker buster bomb.” Rollins said it quickly, like “BunkerBusterBomb” and exposed the idea of calling a deadly weapon something so silly; pentagon brass sound like kids talking about putting dog shit in a paper bag and throwing it at eachother.
This one managed to shock me a little bit, because of what it says regarding authoritarians’ view of what constitutes an acceptable claim. It manages to be worse than some of the worst/flimsiest justifications for torture that I’ve seen.
The F-35 program has been a litany of glitches and problems, many as a result of the program’s pork distribution approach.
The story is told from the viewpoint of some vaguely unknown intelligent life-forms that live a few hundred light-years from where we do now.
I had a depressing realization the other day: Bernie Sanders is not a threat to the system.
The US is now deploying its next-generation nuclear warheads. The ones that it must have designed and built while it was still under the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty it withdrew from in 2019.