More Russian Cannon Fodder

Amid rumors of a new mobilization, senior Russian officials have spent recent months trying to open accounts at foreign banks and move their assets abroad, Bloomberg reported, citing documents it had obtained.

According to Bloomberg, draft office employees are doing the same, and advising friends and relatives to leave Russia.

Given the willingness of Putin and his generals to feed thousands upon thousands of poorly-trained soldiers into the abbatoir that is his war, I wouldn't discount the rumors.

This is Probably Not Good

The US has deployed weapons in space, the US military has confirmed, in an extraordinary public announcement that analysts warn will accelerate a high-risk arms race with Russia and China in Earth’s orbit.

The US secretary of the air force, Troy Meink, said Washington had active “on-orbit” weapons, meaning they had been deployed and were circling the globe.

“Today, we continue to ensure we remain ready to meet the challenges of evolving threats wherever they exist,” Meink said on Monday at the annual Air, Space, Cyber conference. “This is why the United States now has, on-orbit, space-control weapons.”

Meink said he would not go into the “specifics” of the weapons. However, a US Space Force spokesperson said space control could refer to “employing kinetic [combat] and non-kinetic means to affect adversary capabilities”.

The statement added that “these capabilities can be employed for offensive and defensive purposes”.

Screw AI, we're getting closer and closer to a situation where a civilization-ending war can happen because of a single mistake or misreading of data. Situations where someone doesn't have time to think or reflect or cross-check and just reacts because the risk of not doing so is seemingly too high.

And we don't exactly have the most stable person with his hand over the red button.

Counterpoint: Maybe the Iranians Aren't That Smart

I said this yesterday, but then this happened.

Bluesky is back online after a roughly 24-hour DDoS attack disrupted services, with the Iran-linked 313 Team claiming responsibility and no data breach reported.

What a slick move by a bunch of morons. Bluesky is, in case you're unaware, a liberal alternative to Twitter/X. The percentage of active Bluesky users who oppose Trump's stupid war is probably well over 90%.

"Muwahaha, we took down a website that oppposes our enemy, the Great Orange Satan. Praise Allah!"

Fucking imbeciles.

Airpower Does Not Win Wars

Exhibit 1: Iran.

U.S intelligence agencies have assessed that further strikes on Iran aren’t likely to achieve any progress with regard to the U.S.’s war aims, a new report finds as the Trump administration approaches Congress to ask for $87 billion more to fund the war.

The Washington Post reported on Monday that intelligence analysts have “concluded that Tehran and Washington are, for now, stuck in an indefinite limbo between peace and war” that would not be resolved with further strikes. The report, largely prepared by the CIA, finds that there is little reason to believe that Iranian officials will be impacted, nor will further strikes change their positions at the negotiation table regarding provisions on sanctions or the Strait of Hormuz.

Which leaves invasion, conquering and occupying Iran, which would require more infantrymen than the U.S. has, "infantry" being taken to mean trigger-pullers in all branches. And that assumes that nobody gets killed along the way. Which isn't going to happen. But if it does, the Demented Draft-Dodger will be the second GOP Yellow Elephant/draft dodger to send thousands of America's youth to die in a quagmire on the Asian continent.

Trump has chosen to get into a wrestling match with a tar baby. Almost everyone outside of the circle of the Senile Old Blohard and Pretty-Boy Pete can see that reality.

The Strait is Closed

And this is why.

A very short take: On any chartered ship, the vessel's insurers, the terms of the charter and the say of the ship's master control. None of them answer to the Senile Orange Fat Traitor.

Ukraine's Long-Range Oil War

Ukrainian Special Operations Forces (SSO) have struck the Omsk Oil Refinery, Russia’s largest oil refinery, in what they described as the deepest long-range strike carried out by Ukrainian forces since the start of the invasion.

The refinery, in the Siberian city of Omsk, processes over 21 million tons of oil annually.

“The Special Ops have struck the largest and ‘inaccessible’ Russian refinery in Omsk. 3,000 km [1,864 miles]! This is the first strike on this facility,” the SSO said in a statement on Telegram.

That's like launching a drone from Boston and hitting a target deep in Texas. That outranges a Tomahawk.

Ukraine is carrying out targeted attacks on Russia's oil industry while the Russians indiscriminately pound Kyiv.

Happy Gettysburg Day

The Battle of Gettysburgh ended on this day in 1863. It was the high-water mark of the Rebellion of the Slavers.

163 years later, a Southern sympathizer who would have surrendered to the South inhabits the White House. No doubt he regards the Union victory as a tragedy. Fuck that guy.

The following day, Vicksburgh surrendered. The Englishmen pressuring their government to support the Confederacy gave up. Four months later, President Lincoln gave what may be the greatest speech goiven by an American president.

Hurrah for the Union!

And fuck this guy, his co-defendants, those who sent him there and those who support what they did.

One Side Plays Chess, One Side Plays “Chutes and Ladders”

Paragraph one of the MOU:

The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran and their allies in the current war, by signing this MOU, declare the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon, and undertake from now on not to initiate any war or any military operation against each other, and to refrain from the threat or use of force against each other, and ensuring the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Lebanon. The final deal will confirm the permanent termination of the war on all fronts, including in Lebanon, and other provisions of this paragraph.

So what does Cadet Bone Spurs do?

High-stakes talks between the US and Iran were expected to continue into the early hours of Monday in Switzerland, a US official said, after a tense start that saw Iranian negotiators walk out in protest at a stream of threats issued by Donald Trump on social media.

This is what happens when one side is represented by seasoned diplomats and the other side by a nepo baby, a corrupt idiot and a guy who overestimates his brilliance, reporting to a sundowner with the impulse control of a toddler. The Iranians put two poison pills in the first paragraph; our Master Negotiator-in-Chief either didn't bother to read it or was too stupid to understand what he signed.

Gentle Readers, we will be fortunate if the final agreement doesn't permit the IRGC to parade down Pennsylvania Ave.

So. Much. Winning., TACO War Ed.

A chart for your perusal:

The TACO War

So let me see if I understand this: Trump and Netanyahu started a four-month war against Iran, burning through much of America's stock of PGMs, getting some nearly irreplaceable assets destroyed, costing maybe a hundred billion dollars or more and for what?

It gets us back to the situation the parties were in before Trump threw an armed hissy fit? (Parties talking about the Iranian nuclear program.) And the proposed final deal will differ from the JCPOA deal that Trump ripped up in 2018 in no meaningful way, other than Iran gets a lot more money. $327 billion, to be precise. Trump mocked Obama for giving Iran "pallets of cash"; that's 6,540 pallets of cash.

To do that, Iran, with a population basically a quarter of the U.S. and a GDP equivalent to that of Missouri, fought the U.S. and Israel to a standstill. It showed that they have a lever to use on the global economy. The regime cemented its control.

Worse for Trump, with his near-constant statement that a deal was close over the last 100 days, has shown the world that he is an insane fabulist without a firm grasp on reality. The crap put out by him and Rubio, among others, was so unhinged that more and more of the world's leaders and media were turning to the Iranians for confirmation.

Well, one has to hand it to Trump. He worked fast. Unlike the Vietnam War, which he dodged and which took over a decade, he got America's ass handed to it in less than four months.

FLOTUS Keeps Losing

The upshot of this lengthy article in Foreign Affairs is that Trump/Netanyahu's war with Iran has spectacularly backfired. The "decapitation strikes" not only created martyrs, but they created a more nimble and focused leadership, less focused on ideology and more focused on nationalism, one with stronger backing from the Iranian people.

Part of that is because of the stupidity of Hegseth and Netanyahu:

According to a Bloomberg analysis, two-thirds of the targets struck in Tehran before the cease-fire were residential, commercial, and other civilian buildings. In interview after interview, Iranians described explosions that reverberated through their bodies night and day, leaving deep psychological wounds. To them, the Iranian armed forces were no longer the oppressors but the defenders. A chant heard at rallies across Iran to cheer on Iran’s missile and drone strikes captured the shift in mood: “Strike, for you strike so well.” As the Iranian philosopher and dissident Mohammad Mehdi Ardebili said in Tehran during the fifth week of the war: “In this moment in time, the Islamic Republic and Iran are one and the same. If the Islamic Republic falls, Iran falls.”

Hitting civilian infrastructure to weaken a regime has a nearly-100% failure rate going back over a century, back to when German dirigibles were dropping bombs on London and German long-range guns were shelling Paris. But ghouls like Whiskey Pete and the Zoomie goons keep trying.

Trump Threatens to Bomb Allies

Donald Trump has threatened to “blow up” Oman if it fails to “behave” in a casual aside during a cabinet meeting, as the US scrambles to reopen the strait of Hormuz.

The US president made the threat after reports of talks between Iran and Oman about jointly charging a toll for ships passing through the crucial waterway, which has been all but closed since the start of the US-Israel war on Iran.
...
In an extraordinary threat, he added: “Oman will behave just like everybody else. Or else we’ll have to blow them up. They understand that. They’ll be fine.”

Great, let's piss off all of our allies.

The Iran War Chatter (Updated)

It would seem to be this: An end of hostilities with the Iranians, the Iranians open the Strait, the US drops the blockade, $25 billion in sanctioned Iranian assets are released and the issue of Iran's uranium stockpile and further enrichment are set aside for further negotiation.

To get there, the global economy has been shaken, there will be shortages of many oil-based goods for months to come (not to mention fertilizer and helium), the United States has burned through much of its arsenal of precision weapons, precious military assets have been wasted, allies have been essentially lost (levying tariffs on them didn't help any), and its enemies have been enboldened. And for what?

In short, the United States has spend tens of billions of dollars to end up in a worse position than it was before the war started. It will be lucky if the end deal is within a mile of the agreement that Trump ripped up eight years ago because it was negotiated by Obama. So. Much. Winning.

As for the war itself, the world, not including MAGA, will recognize one point: Trump lost his war.

Which is why Trump will likely pivot to invading Cuba, so he can have a win. Or so he thinks.

Trump the Surrender Monkey

Trump is at least consistent with his message: People who are free should never fight for their freedom. They should, instead, surrender to the superior power. Ukraine, the Baltics and Poland should surrender to Russia. Taiwan should invite the Chinese Communists in with open arms.

We know which side he would have been on in 1775; he would have been arguing for King George III. On the other hand, neither he nor his spawn would have done anything, for they are all abject cowards.

He is a traitor to the cause of freedom.

Trump Takes Airline and 17,000 Jobs

Spirit Airlines, an impish upstart that shook the industry with its irreverent ads and deep discount fares, announced Saturday that it has gone out of business after 34 years.

The ultralow cost airline that once operated hundreds of daily flights on its bright yellow planes and employed about 17,000 people said it had “started an orderly wind-down of our operations, effective immediately.”

Although Spirit had gone bankrupt twice before, the company said high oil prices, which have been rising because of the war with Iran, made it impossible to stay aloft.

Make no mistake, Trump and Netanyahu are the ones who caused all of those people to lose their jobs. You might recall that a year ago, those two caused Iran's nuclear facilities to be bombed. Dimbulb Donnie claimed that Iran's nuclear program had been obliterated, but less than a year later, he felt the need to attack on the same rationale.

The price of jet fuel has nearly doubled and that drove Spirit under, because of his stupid war.

The ripple effect will spread far beyond those 17,000 employees and every last one of them who will now deal with the ramifications of sudden unemployment of Spirit's workers have one person to thank: Donald John Trump.

Drone-Hunting With a Yak-52

Pretty ingenious:

Trump's War

The emerging picture of Iranian retaliation against American military bases across the Gulf suggests that the real military cost of Operation Epic Fury may be significantly higher than Washington has publicly acknowledged, with infrastructure damage, aircraft losses, and operational disruption now measured in billions of dollars.

Multiple U.S. officials, congressional aides, and individuals familiar with classified damage assessments indicate that Iranian strikes hit dozens of targets across at least seven countries in the Middle East, challenging early narratives that Tehran’s retaliatory capacity had been rapidly neutralized after the opening U.S.-Israeli strikes on February 28, 2026.

The strategic significance deepened when NBC News confirmed that an Iranian F-5 fighter jet successfully conducted a bombing run on Camp Buehring in Kuwait, penetrating layered American air defenses despite the presence of Patriot missile batteries, short-range interceptors, advanced radar coverage, and persistent regional surveillance networks.
...
Camp Buehring in Kuwait occupies a central role in U.S. military logistics architecture because it functions as a major staging hub for force projection, sustainment operations, and pre-positioned combat support for American operations across the wider CENTCOM theatre.

So how does an old jet get through layered air defense and surveillance systems to drop good old bombs on an important American base?

Mister Art of the Deal

It's obvious that pulling out of the Iran Deal was a catastrophic decision by Trump. Yet that decision got far less media and political scrutiny than the Deal itself. https://t.co/UojD3XYJim

— Ben Rhodes (@brhodes) April 25, 2026

We are were we are because that Orange Self-Inflated Moron did what Netanyahu wanted ripped up the first accord, which Iran was abiding by, to get a better deal, which he never achieved. The original agreement took years of negotiation by professional diplomats. But after ignoring things for years, he fell again under the spell of Netanyahu, went to war, and when that all backfired, he didn't send diplomats to talk to Iran. No, he sent his corrupt son-in-law and his best bud, who is a corrupt real-estate guy and, allegedly, a Russian asset, much like Trump.

And no surprise, those two idiots were who the Iranians were talking to before Trump had Whiskey Pete drop bombs because, allegedly, neither Witkoff nor Jared the Wunderkind understood how to do their jobs.

A Country of Stupid Political Elites

You would think that after Vietnam and Iraq, America would have recognized the danger of giving the president a blank check for foreign adventurism.

You would think. But with a malignant narcissist in the Oval Office, surrounded by a staff of yes-men and at least one low-wattage drunkard, there's not a single adult in the room. Not a single person to say "this is a bad idea, Boss".

As a result, historians are debating which war turned out worse for the United States than Trump and Bibi's Big Beautiful War and they're having trouble. Red Cloud's War was a defeat, but it only postponed things. The only reason that the War of 1812 wasn't a total defeat was that the British were war-weary after a generation of fighting the Napoleonic Wars.

It's time to take the keys to starting wars away from the presidency and give them back to Congress, as the Constitution intended.

Anyway, this is like Trump blockading the blockade:

It's Time to Invoke the 25th Amendment and Put Granpaw in a Home

The US president, Donald Trump, said the US Navy would immediately start blockading the strait of Hormuz and would also interdict every vessel in international waters that had paid a toll to Iran.

I don't know how you both blockade the Strait and then interdict every ship in international waters. Blockading is sort of an all-in tactic.

But let's be clear: There are no tactics. There is no overall strategy. Instead, we elected a profoundly stupid old man who operates on impulse and whatever he sees on Fox News. In just over fourteen months, he has seriously damaged America's standing in the world. We are a pariah state, like Russia, only with a somewhat better economy and, for the time being, a more competent military.

Real peace talks take time. It's not something that can be done in the amount of time that it took for Earl Scheib to paint a car and let it cure. But Trump, who is deeply ignorant and overimpressed with his own acumen, doesn't understand that.

And he never will. He is a Reverse King Midas: Everything he touchs turns to shit. He is on track to inflict the worst defeat on the United States since the War of 1812.