I have never been to a country where the wind blows at plus 60kph for months at a time (Wexford). I don't think I have ever been there in the last 20 years where the wind has not been howling, the potential for Wind Power there is insane.....
Some speculation....I think the long term plan here is Iran launching Shadeeds from the back of a pickups into the gulf states every few days until it wears out both Gulf and American missile defense. 100's of Drones every week targeting Refineries, LNG Gas terminals, Data Centers, Hotels, etc, just like the Russians do to Kyiv every night. The only thing that can stop it will be a ground invasion.
Russia and China have the USA right where they want them unless there is a regime collapse (highly unlikely) or a ground invasion (more likely). The Gulf States will be exhausted and the USA will be ground down defending them.
There is also a supply route through the Caspian for China and Russia to bolster Iranian defense. Is the USA willing to invade Russia to stop it?
This is much bigger than most Americans can comprehend at the moment, no one has ever won a war with just an air assault. Iran is twice as big as Iraq, and Israel and the USA have thrown everything they can at it short of a Nuclear bomb and it is still standing.
> the long term plan here is Iran launching Shadeeds from the back of a pickups into the gulf states every few days
The long-term outcome is Iran’s domestic drone production gets decimated. If America, meanwhile, gets to field test its new anti-drone kit, from gun- and laser-based platforms to kamikaze drones.
> only thing that can stop it will be a ground invasion
Of course not. You blow up the factories and inventory. Ukraine was prohibited by Biden for ages from striking inside Russia, to where the drones and missiles were being made.
> There is also a supply route through the Caspian for China and Russia to bolster Iranian defense. Is the USA willing to invade Russia to stop it?
The pressure point on Putin is tasking the Coast Guard with seizing Russian shadow-fleet tankers again.
> no one has ever won a war with just an air assault
No one has ever effected regime change with just air power. America could absolutely achieve a war aim with air power alone once Hegseth gets around to defining it.
> The long-term outcome is Iran’s domestic drone production gets decimated.
That is impossible without committing to boots on the ground.
> Of course not. You blow up the factories and inventory.
Where are the factories? Where are the stockpiles? If they don't show up on satellite imagery, how do you find them? Boots on the ground. If they're hidden underground or beneath a mountain, how do you blow them up? Boots on the ground.
> No one has ever effected regime change with just air power. America could absolutely achieve a war aim with air power alone once Hegseth gets around to defining it.
The reason he hasn't gotten around to defining a war aim is that there is no legitimate war aim. Netanyahu wanted to blow shit up and the Pentagon foolishly followed along instead of telling him "you're on your own".
> That is impossible without committing to boots on the ground
Why?
> Where are the factories? Where are the stockpiles? If they don't show up on satellite imagery, how do you find them? Boots on the ground
Same way we found Khamenei. Slowly attriting that production base (together with Iran’s economy) is something America can do from afar for a while. Bonus points if Iran’s neighbours get pissed off enough to start seizing buffer territory with their own boots.
> there is no legitimate war aim
Of course there is. It’s regime change. We just haven’t committed the resources to accomplishing it.
I wonder if people started to lose their jobs, would that bother them?
I suppose there are also security concerns. Could he put a lot of pressure on NATO and Spain's membership which would certainly cause a lot of pain. I know Spain is far from Russia and all but he could refuse to sell them any parts and weapon systems.
Just saying, why poke a pile of shit and then get it all over you. Trump is temporary and best to just quietly wait it out, unless you want to smell like shit.
To be fair, in addition to waiting it out, I would also be careful not to be an active participant in an illegal wars and/or possible war crimes within the scope domestic laws of Spain and international law. Not to mention in history books.
> I wonder if people started to lose their jobs, would that bother them?
I'm sure losing their jobs bothers anyone, but my might is they won't assign it to Trump.
If Trump behaves badly threatens Europe and then countries don't let him use bases, who's at fault? Trump.
In fact people might lose their jobs and assign it to the chaos created by Trump. He doesn't care, of course, my point is if people don't assign it to their own politicians, then the trade thread isn't effective.
The damage is very serious and it won't be fast or cheap to fix. But not "decades." A lot of the people doing damage are susceptible to corruption prosecution. The non-corrupt True Believers are too stupid to avoid being turned into cartoon villains.
> Trump is temporary and best to just quietly wait it out, unless you want to smell like shit.
Everything is temporary in this life. All the harm that Trump could do, too. So I don't think we the Spaniards should get involved in this "Epstein Coalition" illegal wars. Remember, all Trump's threats are temporary, as you said.
The disproportionate retaliation against Spain, I think, is out of fear that the US face consequences. The Trump-Epstein cabal would be quickly over if a united European Union actually put some resistance or threat that affected the bottom line of American companies: "push the petty dictator out, or we stop trade with the US"... billionaires would suddenly start funding progressive think tanks.
But I digress... It's nice to fantasize about having elected leaders finally find their balls.
The strange part from my point of view is that it's so obviously heretical from inside the system.
They have Amos, which reasons out the problems of wishing for the Day of the Lord, and I don't understand how they can ignore it. Internalizing this idea should rather lead to a profound dislike for destabilizing the world, push the Day of the Lord as far into the future as it can be, to save all the people who can be born. I can understand how one can be a madman for a while, when one is full of grief. That's fine, but when one returns to normality one should realise that not destabilizing things is a moral duty.
You don't have to be religious to figure out that theological indoctrination is a great way to de-legitimize courts, laws and norms of civil society in your favor.
The intersectionality of the American military industrial complex, the Republican Party and fundamentalist Christianity go back much further than Hegseth. When Bush talked about a "new crusade" after 9/11, who do you think he was signaling to? That wasn't just awkward phrasing.
The only real difference between then and now is that the current administration is run by groypers and trolls who don't care about kayfabe and aren't capable of subtlety.
Not exactly the "Armageddon" part. It's a little more complicated than that.
Hegseth's preacher is part of a partial preterist and postmillennialist group. They believe apocalyptic prophecies like the Great Tribulation and Armageddon were largely fulfilled in 70 CE when the Romans destroyed the temple in Jerusalem.
They are a reflection of the electorate. If you don’t want crazy and incompetent, don’t vote for it. If you get what you voted for, don’t be sad about it, it’s what you voted for. Regime change will come with time, but it’s going to suck for a while because of this governance failure mode.
> If you don’t want crazy and incompetent, don’t vote for it
We have less of a problem with crazies voting for crazies than non-crazies not voting. Because if the crazies can find compromise with someone approximately as crazy as them while the non-crazies are either too lazy to turn out or unable to get out of stitches because the less-crazy candidate disagrees with them on two issues, the crazies win.
Even if you have no moral red line whatsoever, that decision was still certain to lose millions of votes in swing states... Because millions of voters do have morality, even in America.
America's problems are far bigger than whether people vote or not. The insanity is thoroughly bipartisan. Look at the Democrats giving Trump standing ovations while he talked about military action in Iran last week!
It's just a matter of degree: Genocide, or genocide+. ICE, or ICE+. Do you want your fossil fuel subsidies massive or ginormous. Techno-feudalism, or turbo techno-feudalism.
Those aren't sane options. It's not sane to accept them.
The idea that we could elect Democrats and "push them left" "once the fire was out" was thoroughly disproved shortly after October 7th - if not before then, when Trump's insurrection prosecution for was slow-rolled; or when we decided that the correct legal procedure was to let Garland sit on the Epstein files for 4 years.
So... Maybe diminishing one half of the problem as 'insane', but not the other half because it's slightly better, is doomed to failure. Either way the crazies win.
A fair position if the electoral system weren't a complete shambles. When gerrymandering is openly used as a weapon by the only two parties, it's pretty clearly not working.
Of course, change is impossible without a complete dissolution of governance in the US.
~89 million eligible voters did not vote in the last presidential election. “Fuck around find out”, and we are at the “find out” stage. This was a collective choice.
So if you didn’t vote, or you voted for this, you voted for this. Enjoy the ride.
I can understand why someone would choose not to participate in an unrepresentative electoral process.
Here in the authoritarian hellhole that is the Commonwealth of Australia, showing up to the voting booth is mandatory. We also have preferential voting, and in a few jurisdictions we even have proportional representation.
What percentage of those eligible voters do you think would've mattered? For example I lived in WA and voted, how much do you think my vote mattered over an entire red county of 100 people voting for Trump?
Our electoral system is designed to disenfranchise the most populated areas.
More voters 55+ will have died in a year (~2M/year) since he was elected to office than was the margin of victory. High single digit percentage points of eligible voters who did not vote. Ahh, well, it is what it is. We take the world as it is, not as we wish it to be.
Trump got less than 50% of the vote, and less than a third of eligible voters voted for him.
The real issue is that the two parties have created a situation where you cannot vote for a viable candidate.
Case in point: approximately a dozen democratic senators have come out in support of the war. Like, if you don’t want to intentionally bring about the apocalypse/nuclear holocaust, and you live in those states, the only way to avoid voting for those things is to not vote.
You can try getting your incumbent kicked out in the primaries, but that’s a dangerous game in swing states. In your case (WA) you absolutely should vote in the primary for the farthest left democrat possible.
We probably should switch to multi-party proportional representation at some point.
This is the right idea. Under-appreciated is that voting in the federal general elections is the point at which you have the least effect on anything. Earlier (primaries) and more local (all those elections way fewer people go to because there are no nationally-covered races on it) is far more effective at actually affecting the world. Someone who votes in all of those and skips the federal general bubbles is a more-effective voter than someone who does the opposite and only votes for the big federal offices (and those are the only ones people will commonly shame you for skipping, which is really backwards)
I wouldn't say it's a reflection of the electorate. There's a lot of states that have been gerrymandered for years and Christians in extremely red areas have outsized voting power compared to everywhere else. Combined with the complete media capture by billionaires, the dumbest rule by fiat.
Unfortunately Christian nationalists happen to be extremely wealthy and extremely stupid.
Calling people stupid who are voting for what they want feels counter-productive.
I don't know them, and I don't see a reason to call anyone stupid. Turkeys voting for thanksgiving is not "stupid" it's normal. Turkeys do what turkeys do.
I would have said "Unfortunately Christian Nationalists want what is being offered them by this administration, are extremely wealthy and fund PAC accordingly." but even "unfortunately" is argumentative. Of course to ME it's unfortunate, but thats me.
It’s not just gerrymandering (though that is indeed pervasive and pernicious. It’s structural. The apportionment between states gives small right-leaning states outsized representation in both the house and senate relative to their proportion of the national population.
> The apportionment between states gives small right-leaning states outsized representation in both the house and senate relative to their proportion of the national population.
That's not a bad thing. The bad thing happened when the Democrats decided to alienate those areas and lost them. You may forget, but a lot of those "small right-leaning states" were solid blue until relatively recently. For instance 100% of North Dakota's congressional delegation was Democratic until ~2010, Iowa was the quintessential purple state, the Senate majority leader was from South Dakota (but unlike today he was a Democrat), and I could go on.
If Americans didn't like their system then they would change it. Isn’t that their whole founding mythos?
I don’t think hundreds of millions of Americans are continually being duped. I think they actually like the system they’ve built, and the outcomes that system produces.
So much easier said than done. We have to get our elected representatives to make the change, but it is against their self interest. If this was the only thing people considered when voting _maybe_ it would stand a chance. And honestly, I suspect less than 20% understand how other voting systems could lead to better out comes. Heck, we can’t even use the metric system!
>There's a lot of states that have been gerrymandered for years and Christians in extremely red areas have outsized voting power compared to everywhere else. Combined with the complete media capture by billionaires, the dumbest rule by fiat.
We the public should be rejecting it, but we're idiots and keep falling for 'but they're doing it!' and then undermine our own political power to 'own' the other side. We're being played for fools.
That's a ridiculous comparison. The California special redistricting was done via a voter initiative that was approved by a majority of California voters, and imposes a temporary change on the rules for drawing districts that reverts to the neutral rules when after the next census.
It was specifically proposed to counter the Texas special redistricting which was done by the Texas legislature and government with no concern over whether or not Texas voters approved (and polls show that more Texas voters disapprove than approve).
It's happening on both sides now because the Supreme Court has signed off on it for years and given all the power to gerrymandering efforts from the right. The public can't reject what is unaccountable to said public.
It really is insane that the West/World watches while Russia fires ballistic missiles and send hundreds of drones targeting civilians. Could you imagine this happening to Berlin, Paris, London and so on? No one says anything, rather they try to ignore it like it isn't happening. If Ukraine didn't shoot down the majority of these Missiles and Drones the death toll of civilians would be in the 100's of 1000's. There are videos now online where Romanians watch Russian drones fly through their territory to bomb Ukrainian cities and they don't even try to shoot them down.
Europe has turned out to be incredibly cowardly and inept while America is totally indifferent. I guess Ukrainian lives are cheap and worthless to them. It would be deserved if this war came to the Europeans in the most awful way.
I’ve heard that Amazon’s capital expenditures have exceeded its annual cash flow, leading it to borrow and cut jobs to fund AI investments. Unlike Microsoft and Google, which appear able to fund capex internally, Amazon seems to be in a costly growth race with deeper-pocketed competitors. My view, this could mean continued heavy borrowing and limited to no profitability in the near term.
I can't get any devices to understand my mother. She speaks to SIRI or Google Nest, incredibly difficult or impossible. She has to either repeat herself a half dozen times in between asking Google Nest to stop. It is a shit show just having it play a radio station. Her fingers are so dry that she can't use a tablet. My mother inlaw has had huge success with META Glasses but unfortunately my mother won't wear them. Really hoping AI can fix things and provide older folks with a way to communicate easily.
