@Pluto's Republic

how intelligent is it to want to live some place where all the neighbors hate you and want to kill you?

From the beginning Israel could have lived in peace with the Palestinians, but instead it’s been on a path of ethnic cleansing and getting America to remove every country’s leaders that they thought could threaten them. That’s all the war of terror was, not going after some terrorists that were actually ours and Israel’s creations and cannon fodder.

Great point:

By staging this demonstration for NATO and Western war puppeteers , Iran was of major service to its ally Russia: it depleted the supply of air defense rockets available to their Western enemies. Since these rockets are very expensive, in short supply, it is the economics of Iran's operation that is the most significant factor.

Not only that….

You might think that the US economy is infinitely huge and could make up the shortfall, but then there's the debt death spiral to keep in mind: a pile of debt the size of a third of the US economy needs to be rolled over during the coming year and the entire US defense budget is about to be eaten by the interest on the national debt. Anybody who thinks that the US can still be a reliable ally to anyone ... is not intelligent.

But America doesn’t have the skilled people or factories to ramp up its supplies of creating more weapons or materials to build them. Defense companies have been making more expensive, harder to use and less effective weapons because they make the stock holders more money. Plus instead of putting the money back into the company they have been buying back their stock. You’d think that the oligarchs would have been smarter than they have been.

Something to keep in mind.
But Iran does have Hypersonic missiles.

I took notes the last time Iran retaliated against Israel. I found the following comment from Dmitry Orlov very useful. Knowing the details of the incident really smooths out the apprehension.

April 16, 2024 — It's Tuesday after the Sabbath on which the Iranians launched their big air attack on Israel, in response to Israel's unspeakably rude destruction of the Iranian embassy in Damascus, Syria, and the world is still waiting for Israel to counter the counterattack. Counterattacking Iran would be a smart thing for Israel to not do and Jews do have a reputation for being intelligent... but not so much the Israeli Jews — because just how intelligent is it to want to live some place where all the neighbors hate you and want to kill you?

The Americans pretty much spelled it out that they consider the Iran's retaliatory attack to have satisfactorily concluded the incident. (Lots of Iranian drones and rockets were successfully shot down with US and allied help.) The US isn't looking for another round of retaliations because the exercise cost them an arm and a leg, and depleted their missile inventories. The Israelis are claiming some preposterously high intercept rate — unachievable using any conceivable technology. That's good enough for the Israeli public, I suppose, but certainly not good enough for Israeli military planners, whose job is to handle reality, not propaganda and military fiction.

The Iranians are claiming that what they wanted to get through did get through — which is probably true — making their attack a valid demonstration project: Iran can launch such attacks on every day that ends in 'y' for the next several years without any economic strain and without asking Russia or China for help.

The Iranian response-attack included a large number of Shahed drones. These carry around 50kg of explosives and enough gas to fly 1500km. They are very cheaply made, most of the expensive bits being the electronics. The airframe is cast out of styrofoam, the gas tank is a plastic bottle and the engine is a cheap little Chinese two-stroke with a service life of just a few hours. They are rather slow-flying (under 200km/h), don't fly very high, and tend to bob and weave rather than follow a straight path, especially if the wind is a bit gusty.

Ironically, this makes the wobbling Shahed drones very hard to shoot down with air defense systems. The first thing an air defense rocket does when launched is soar to some reasonably high altitude — a few thousand meters — and then try to find and lock onto its target. At that point the target is a minuscule dot creeping slowly against the background terrain. Its radar signature and thermal signal is obscured by moving cars and buildings below. The rocket then aims down and accelerates toward the drone as it weaves about in its uncertain path. The rocket tries to explode close enough to the drone to hit it.

Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't, but it's hard to determine which it was because the final act of the Shahed is rather similar to it being shot down: it cuts its engine and drops out of the sky like a rock, detonating its payload on impact. (Incidentally, the Russians launch continuous swarms of identical drones over the former Ukraine, to deplete the Ukrainian inventories of defensive Patriot missiles.)

Iran also fired some old-fashioned ballistic rockets, which can be shot down with more certainty. They are powered during just the initial portion of their flight, after which point they follow a predictable ballistic trajectory, determined by gravity, inertia, and air resistance, making them easy to target. The Iranians have some ridiculously huge number of such rockets stowed in caves here and there. They are not that useful for accurately hitting targets but they are effective for depleting Israel's supply of air defense rockets, which are very expensive and in short supply.

Lastly, Iran fired just seven of their new Hypersonic rockets, of which zero were shot down, and all hit their targets. There are only four countries in the world that have succeeded in mastering Hypersonic missile technology: Russia, China, North Korea and Iran. Only one country in the world has the ability to shoot down Hypersonic rockets: that is Russia, using its S-500 missile defense system. Neither Israel, nor the US, nor their allies, could have shot down any of these rockets; they are simply too fast.

And now the key point: if Iran'a seven Hypersonic rockets had carried nuclear payloads, Israel would suddenly wink out of existence. Iran, however, has a long-standing fatwa against the development or use of nuclear weapons.

By staging this demonstration for NATO and Western war puppeteers , Iran was of major service to its ally Russia: it depleted the supply of air defense rockets available to their Western enemies. Since these rockets are very expensive, in short supply, it is the economics of Iran's operation that is the most significant factor.

Military experts have estimated that the entire operation cost Iran on the order of $50 million; on the other hand, US military types have made it known that their air defense mission cost them on the order of $1 billion while overall (including the rockets expended by Israel) the price tag is likely to be somewhere over $2 billion. This makes the expense ratio 1:40 in Iran's favor. Considering that Iran's economy was 15 times larger than Israel's prior to the military action that commenced on October 7, 2023, and is 20 times larger now that Israel's has shrunk by at least a quarter, we come to the inevitable conclusion that Israel can't possibly keep this up.

You might think that the US economy is infinitely huge and could make up the shortfall, but then there's the debt death spiral to keep in mind: a pile of debt the size of a third of the US economy needs to be rolled over during the coming year and the entire US defense budget is about to be eaten by the interest on the national debt. Anybody who thinks that the US can still be a reliable ally to anyone ... is not intelligent.

Israel now knows that it can't afford to continue to counter the responses to its provocations .... and neither can its increasingly financially distressed, politically erratic and generally unreliable ally across the Atlantic. Unless Israel is committing suicide by Iran.

Regarding nuclear weapons:
The purpose of nuclear weapons is not to use them. It is to prevent others from using them. Using them is an act of suicide and suicidal people are not put in charge of nuclear weapons. These are simple and straghtforward facts. Surprisingly, most people don't get them.

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— https://boosty.to/cluborlov

@snoopydawg It's bipartisan bickering.

I remember around 1990 there were stories about Paul Weyrich and his ilk recruiting pro West politicians in Eastern Europe as part of the great rollback. But after Clinton came into office the footsoldiers in Eastern Europe were Dems, and the US took over the dismantling of Yugoslavia (a pet project for Hitler during WWII) as well as making friends of the former fascists in Eastern Europe (or their offspring). The Clintons really were Republicans after all. That's the short of it for why the Ukrainian tar baby is stuck on the Dems.

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This is a real mess as planned by Netanyahu and Republicans! Media immediately blaming Biden.

Quick…who’s president and who has been arming Israel no matter what it has done? How many Democrats have said that they are supportive of Israel?

Also too one shitlib is still peddling the Russian bounty story where they were paying the taliban to kill Americans.

@Bob In Portland Her Jamaican family roots may not trace back to Africa but to Ireland.

Irish Times July 23, 2024

Ms Harris is the daughter of Donald J Harris, who was born in Jamaica, and Shyamala Gopalan Harris from India.

Genealogical research carried out by Northern Irish historian Stephen McCracken reveals Ms Harris’s four-times-paternal-great-grandfather Hamilton Brown was born in Co Antrim in 1776, the year of the US Declaration of Independence.

Brown emigrated to Jamaica, then a British colony, and became an enthusiastic slave owner on the sugar plantations that were the mainstay of the island’s economy. He opposed the abolition of slavery across the British Empire in 1832 and went to Antrim to replace his slaves with workers from his native county.
...
Ms Harris’s father, an emeritus professor of economics at Stanford University, acknowledged his family’s slave-owning past in a piece for a Jamaican newspaper in 2018. Curiously, relatives on his mother’s side are called Finegan. President Joe Biden’s Irish ancestors are also called Finegan (Finnegan).

Candace Owen is the current lead journalist on the story. Then YouTude gave a warning regarding one of her videos and the story has stronger legs. Of course, being a staunch the potential misrepresentation has dissolved in to a communist plot by yesterday. (My thought communist wording is used to create a knee-jerk reaction to part of our population. Watched a video this summer where General Petraeus called the Neocons communists. - sorry no link)

Breaking News: Kamala Harris LIED About Her Black Grandparents | Candace Ep 71 (36.22 min)(Sept 26, 2024) covers the main hypothesis and shy she is researching within 6 min.

things will get messy fast. They can travel up to fifteen times an ordinary missile. Iran's got 'em, Russia's got even better ones. If the US gets involved against Iran, expect one of those babies taking out one of those carriers floating offshore in the Persian Gulf. I suppose there's one of them with Netanyahu's name on it too.

Things just get grimmer. Who would have thought that the insane Trump would be a plausible option.

By the way, I am seeing that people on the right are accusing Harris of doing something, some sly game with her race. Anyone know what the hell that's about?