The Gulf monarchies are unsustainable as anything other than vassal states. If they play nice with the biggest bullies, they get paid handsomely and a small fraction of them can be rich beyond reason and fly around in luxury jets with their personal organ donors.

Except now Iran is calling the bluff of the big bully, demonstrating that America and Israel won’t protect them.

Used to care for a bunch of hens. The leader hen was wicked smart.

One day, she was mad as hell. She was charging at me, screaming her head off, stopping right in front of my feet and then looking at me sideways. She started slowly walking away, and then turned around to charge at me again. She repeated this about ten times and I was bewildered.

Finally, a kid told me “I think she wants you to follow her.” So I did. She lead me to a neighbor’s house, someone who had just moved in. Finally it clicked for me. I’m like, “excuse me miss, I think my hen is filing a complaint that a new cat has moved to the neighborhood. Is your cat going to be a problem for the hens?” She answered no. So I turn to the hen and I’m like “she says it’s fine.” Hen keeps looking at me sideways for a minute and then walks back to her group.

Almond-sized dinosaur brain by the way.

It is. As a European, essentially all of Europe trusted the US until the Iran war. Proof: Sweden and Finland just recently joined NATO, and it was because we ultimately wanted to be in an alliance with the US.

But I think we finally woke up.

He’s not asking for your pity, or mine. He’s explaining why he and many other Americans are feeling helpless and are finding it difficult to mount a resistance, eventhough they know they should.

Interstingly sanctions had this same effect on the Iranian middle class. No way to revolt and replace the government when your rent is double your income.

It appears that sarcasm doesn’t translate well to text, even with aggressive use of emdashes and italics

Yes but some of them chanted Death to America – completely uncalled for – so what goes around comes around

A modest proposal if I ever heard one!

Vance, while clearly evil, is intelligent and flexible. I think that with some help he could find serious negotiators to send, and then he’d just need to make sure that there is clear communication.

To be clear, I don’t think he will do that, because he’s also a coward, but I think it is within his ability to do so.

You’re right, I should have been more explicit that I don’t count our amoeba EU leaders as people.

I’d rather see them demanding that Israel joins the NPT, but they don’t want to legitimize the existence of a genocide state by asking it to do things.

I think a lot of Europeans genuinely believe in human rights and a rules-based world order. And it would serve their interests too (in a multipolar world, having rules that apply to all is favorable to all). But they’re also cowards and want the USA to be world police and uphold this order, and it has always been convenient to look the other way as long as it was brown people on the receiving end of the Empire’s violence.

Because all sides have so much to lose, so they’ll pursue maximalist goals. The US retreating essentially means giving up the Gulf and by extension the Middle East, which is central to their doctrine of energy domination and a huge part of their leverage over Asia.

Iran on the other hand is fighting for its survival and needs to expel the US from the Gulf to ensure they can nevet attack them again.

They never cared about international law or right and wrong. It was always just a tool to bludgeon the other team with, and now that the tool is turning against them they’re dropping it like a broken toy.

I don’t think a path for deescalation exists anymore. JD Vance could maybe have taken the reigns by referring to Trump’s ill health, promised to send more competent negotiators who could meet Iran in good faith, and essentially dropped Israel to save America (or at least give it a few more good years).

But that’s a very tall order, and he just went out to claim Iran is designing nuclear suicide vests, so I guess he watched Wag the Dog and took some inspiration.

It’s Eagle vs. Cat.

https://youtu.be/5dGY0_pgkv8

They’ve made several of these, but my fave is the CGTN video with Bald Eagles versus Persian Cats.

Why watch the night sky when you can watch these new exciting ads on your phone?

I think you’re right. It’s a bit of a dance with the devil as far as your own abilities are concerned. If we could have exoskeletons that would make us 40x stronger, would our bodies atrophy in the same way, and would we accept it?

And yet, I wouldn’t argue against the objective utility of an exoskeleton.

Well, I think to most of us, language is extremely closely tied to our actual thoughts. So verbal expression is at the very least part of the thinking process.

I don’t know, maybe I’m just not faced with the abuses of LLMs the way you are? I don’t regularly experience people who clearly skipped the effort and just let an LLM do the thinking for them. (It happens, and it’s problematic, but at in my experience it’s rare.) And it’s possible that it’s just because my bubble haven’t caught up yet.