Locking in the gains and taking time to reload and refuel before round 2.

The cease fire was broken on day one when USA blockaded the ports, Iran demanded ships pay tolls for passing through the strait, and Israel and Hezbollah never got the memo to stop shooting at each other.

‘Negotiating’ in those conditions is performative at best.

Maybe the “Epstine didn’t kill himself” people will have something to say about that.

Changing USA’s constitution requires a 2/3’s vote in both House of Representatives and Senate, plus ratification by 3/4’s of the States (i.e. 38 States).

Right now, neither side has the numbers to pass a constitutional amendment.

Republicans control 28 states, Democrats have 18, and 4 are split.

At the Federal level, the House and Senate are both close to an even 50/50 split.

Moscow’s puppet president is starting to feel the noose tighten. When his term ends, so does his legal immunity and likely his freedom.

sloppy/paste

The other side also gets to vote for when the war is over.

As the wars in Ukraine and Iran have shown, its impossible to stop 100% of drone attacks and drone manufacturing.

Cargo ship insurance companies will have a vote too regarding when the Strait of Hormuz is “open”.

“Cultivating strategic depth for Israeli regional hegemony” is what they’ll call the invading and colonizing.

Rods from God deliver the energy of about 12 tons of TNT.

For comparison:

The British used 12 ton “Tallboy” bombs, carried by Lancaster bombers, in WWII against submarine pens.

The “Little Boy” nuke delivered the energy of 15,000 tons of TNT.

Some modern ICBMs carry 10 warheads, each of which delivers the energy of 475,000 tons of TNT.

One benefit of dropping a tungsten telephone pole from orbit is that there’s no good way to stop it, because its just a chunk of metal moving very fast. Hitting it with a missile might scratch the paint, but won’t significantly alter its course.

The main drawback is the expense of getting them into orbit. Falcon 9 can lift 2 of them if the poles are cut in half to fit under the fairing, at a cost of about $70 million. That does not include rocket engines, fuel, and targeting computers needed to get those 2 tungsten rods out of space and onto target.

aka hydrogen ash

IDK, I think we’ve seen adequate evidence that a lot of people out there are unswayed by facts and logic, and many of the ones who can be reasoned with are vulnerable to sophistry, sealioning, and other bad faith propaganda/debate techniques.

Even an informed public seems incapable of making good decisions.

AaAaAa

“It was Biden that shit in my pants!”

Yeah. Solid oxygen crystals with naked protons tunneling through it.

KSA has given up on trying to defeat the Houthis, and now wants to buy them with a promise of revenue sharing from the oil fields that were recently captured by UAE-backed STC.

KSA hopes they can reduce the frequency of attacks against their oil infrastructure and economic diversification mega-projects. They’re betting that the cost of the Houthi attacks that will still be launched against them, plus the cost of the bribes aimed at reducing the frequency of those attacks, will still be less expensive than a full ground invasion of Yemen.

Furthermore, KSA is racing against the global trend away from burning oil for energy. They need to diversify their economy while oil is still valuable, and a ground war would halt that progress because investors won’t want to put their eggs into an exploding basket.

So KSA is willing to act against members of their own anti-Houthi alliance in order to prevent a UAE-sponsored break-away state from metastasizing on their border - a break-away state that would control the oil revenue that KSA hoped would buy them a temporary reprieve during this fragile economic moment.

Its been done - link goes to a PDF of the study:

Patients with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) frequently report episodes of interidentity amnesia, that is amnesia for events experienced by other identities. The goal of the present experiment was to test the implicit transfer of trauma-related information between identities in DID. We hypothesized that whereas declarative information may transfer from one identity to another, the emotional connotation of the memory may be dissociated, especially in the case of negative, trauma-related emotional valence. An evaluative conditioning procedure was combined with an affective priming procedure, both performed by different identities. In the evaluative conditioning procedure, previously neutral stimuli come to refer to a negative or positive connotation. The affective priming procedure was used to test the transfer of this acquired valence to an identity reporting interidentity amnesia. Results indicated activation of stimulus valence in the affective priming task, that is transfer of emotional material between identities. r 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Its also central to the plot of Schlock Mercenary

Yeah, the chemistry of the medium changes over time to contain more metals. I wonder how much, or how fast the chemistry of the accretion disk changes too?

comms beep

Bridge: “Bridge to Jordi.”

comms beep

Jordi: “Jordi here, have you tried turning it off and on again?”