Messages

https://www.ft.com/content/be122b17-e667-478d-be19-89d605e978ea

This will bring down the economies of the world," Kaabi said. "If this war continues for a few weeks, GDP growth around the world will be impacted. Everybody's energy price is going to go higher. There will be shortages of some products and there will be a chain reaction of factories that cannot supply."

https://x.com/Jonathan_K_Cook/status/2029610790878150696
Before its attack on Iran, the US had spent years trying to starve its people into an uprising, just as Israel blockaded and starved the people of Gaza for some 16 years on the assumption that they would be encouraged to overthrow Hamas. The strategy failed in both cases.

 Why? Because it ignored the simplest of facts: that the people being abused are human beings, who will always choose freedom and dignity over degradation and subordination.

 Now led by the nose into a humiliating war of attrition with Iran, the US is lashing out like a "mad dog" – just as Israel did in Gaza after it was humiliated by Hamas' one-day breakout from the concentration camp Israel had created for Palestinians there.

Hegseth's "no rules of engagement" means the US is now open about the fact that all of Iran has been turned into a free-fire zone, just as Gaza was. Which explains why one of the first targets of the US and Israeli strikes was a primary school where more than 170 people were killed, most of them children under the age of 12.

 According to reports even in the rightwing Telegraph newspaper, US and Israeli attacks have already created an "apocalypse" in Tehran. Essential civilian infrastructure is being targeted, such as hospitals, schools and police stations. Residential areas are being carpet-bombed, and food and medical supplies are rapidly running out.

 Rubio has vowed that much worse is to come. The US has evidently been captured by the depraved logic of the Dahiya doctrine, which Israel developed in its repeated attacks on Lebanon and further refined over two and a half years in Gaza. The Dahiya doctrine goes much further than simply the idea of asymmetric warfare inherent to attacks by a stronger party on a weaker party.

 Under the doctrine, civilian casualties are no longer unfortunate "collateral damage" from strikes against military assets. Rather, the civilian population are treated as no less legitimate targets of attack than military infrastructure. For Israel, the Dahiya doctrine grew out of an acceptance that there were no meaningful war aims that Israel could achieve in its battles against the Palestinians it ruled over or against Hizbullah's resistance in Lebanon. Israel was unsatisfied simply with pacifying the Palestinians. It knew they could not be pacified indefinitely, given that it had no intention of ever arriving at a political settlement with them. The fabled two-state solution was purely for western consumption; it never had any meaningful constituency of support in Israel. Rather, Israel's goal was to use overwhelming and indiscriminate violence to terrify the Palestinians into ethnically cleansing themselves from the region, as had partially occurred in 1948.


Similarly, in Lebanon, where the Dahiya doctrine was first developed, the goal was not to reach a political accommodation with Hizbullah through a show of force. Hizbullah had made clear it would never resign itself to watching the Palestinians erased from their homeland. The goal was to wreak so much pain on Lebanon that other religious sects would turn on Hizbullah and plunge the country into protracted civil war, leaving Israel free to get on with the expulsion – and now genocide – of the Palestinian people.

 Under the Dahiya doctrine, Israel implicitly acknowledged that it was not fighting simply against militants but against the wider society from which those militants were drawn. It had to accept that there could be no victory, no surrender, assessed in traditional military terms. So what it had to do instead was leave a smouldering ruin.

Time and again, Israel has used massive firepower on civilian infrastructure and residential areas to break the will of a society – to drive it back into "the Stone Age", to use the terminology of Israeli generals – so that the population would expend their energies on survival rather than resistance. This is what Hegseth and Rubio are now declaring as Washington's war aims in Iran. A wilful, savage demonstration of mass destruction to no purpose other than the demonstration itself.

https://x.com/DanMKervick/status/2029050785829462132
Dan Kervick
@DanMKervick
Hard to imagine the World Cup going forward as planned now.

https://x.com/academic_la/status/2029972848341827887
Shaiel Ben-Ephraim@academic_la
Intelligence reports indicate remarkable resilience from the Iranian regime despite devastating bombing: 1) Iran restructured to survive decapitation strikes, decentralizing leadership so replacements step in immediately when someone is killed. It's working. 2) Power is distributed across 31 regional units, one for each province, that are trained to operate independently if central communication is severed.

3) No significant defections, no popular uprisings, security forces still functioning. 4) The more it bombs the population, the more people will be determined to resist. This has improved the position of the regime vis-a-vis the population through what is known as the "rally around the flag" effect." Even populations who despise their leaders tend to close ranks when under foreign bombardment.

5) The involvement of separatist groups in Kurdistan and Baluchistan has united many Iranian nationalists who are opposed to secession. Many Iranians who oppose the clerical government are equally opposed to the fragmentation of the country, allowing the regime to frame all dissent as foreign-backed "treason".

 6) The economy in Iran survives. Iran has refined its use of a "shadow banking" network and a "shadow fleet" of oil tankers to bypass sanctions and maintain essential revenue. It has also increasingly utilized a multibillion-dollar cryptocurrency ecosystem to safeguard economic activity and fund operations in real-time. 7) The oil crisis that the war has sparked has given the regime hope that it can outlast the US and Israel while causing them real economic damage. Iran cannot win this war. But it can outlast the US and Israel. It's betting its population can endure more pain than American allies and the global economy can.

https://x.com/Jonathan_K_Cook/status/2029612094019060064
Trump's illegal, unprovoked attack on Iran is not a winning strategy, either militarily or politically. It is not even a failed strategy. It is the morbid pathology of a cult. Which explains a flood of complaints over the initial days of the war from US soldiers about their commanders. There have been at least 110 so far, according to reporting by Jonathan Larsen on Substack. In one to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), a non combat-unit commander told non-commissioned officers that Trump was "anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth

Now the Orange piece of sh1te wants the Kurds to fight and die for him and Cuntanyahu!

the Kurds have taken up arms to fight for outsiders 8 times and been shafted 8 times.

The only friend the Kurds have is the mountains.

US Senate votes to block attempt to curb Trump's war powers

https://news.sky.com/story/iran-latest-trump-tehran-israel-strikes-us-drone-live-sky-news-13509565?postid=11198682#liveblog-body

Basically the Donald can do whatever the f@+k he wants now.

Cuntanyahu was running out of road politically until October 7th occurred (how convenient for him) and since then he has been untouchable and like DT doing whatever the f@+k he wants.

The Albanian PM had previously referred to the 3 major devils in the world; the US, Israel and Russia.  A fair assessment I think.

It's not going well

They thought Iran was weak

https://x.com/Osint613/status/2028940578998927709
They call the Iranians lunatics

They thought that the assassination would end the regime
They thought that the Iranians would rise up.
No sign of that

If the people won't rise up they need a ground invasion. Iran is 90 million people. They don't know the country. A ground invasion could need 500,000 soldiers or more.

Support for the war is 27%

And the Trump goons are gobshites.
https://x.com/EdwardGLuce/status/2029388692142363074

Edward Luce@EdwardGLuce
Sometimes the broiling sea of imbecility gets too much. Wave upon wave of cretins
Edward Luce@EdwardGLuce
doesn't come from the masses

What defensive strikes? You started it but suddenly its defensive strikes. America starts all this shit cause there a few thousand mile away, but all countries in the region with US bases taking the shit.

Heard Trump talk about these Iranian terrorists  last night.  You start dropping bombs on Iran , but they're the  terrorists.

Makes sense.

In the last few months Iran has killed up to 35,000 of its own civilians. Not a few, not even a hundred. 35,000. More than the population of Newry.
Killed for having the gall to protest an authoritative regime run by a religious nut job who has been in power since the 80s.
Yes they are terrorists. To say otherwise is just being deliberately blind.
People are letting their hatred of trump lead them to some really silly conclusions.

35,000 was war propaganda.

https://www.ft.com/content/437130e7-ed4e-4919-8bf3-ac38c2eed6af
. And just 27% of Americans supported using military force against Iran, according to a YouGov poll last week.

https://x.com/YouGov/status/2028519860716622204
By 49% to 28%, Britons are opposed to the US military action against Iran


Angry wife of soldier
https://x.com/CassandraRules/status/2028295752103952500/

They have no exit plan.

https://www.irishtimes.com/sport/gaelic-games/2026/03/02/hurlings-rule-book-has-been-left-behind-by-the-modern-game/

But when there are half a dozen players or more hunched like a workman over a manhole, how is a referee supposed to decipher who made the first illegal contact? In those situations, nobody is making a shoulder charge, hip to hip, which is the only physical tackle defined in the rule book. But everybody is doing something to shift somebody else out of the way.
Of the roughly 30 unpenalised infringements in Sunday's game, none of them are tagged to rucks. Going down that route would be pointless. In hurling the ruck is a modern intersection between common practice and accepted practice. It is not accounted for in the rule book, even though it is one of the key sources of primary possession in the game now. Instead, it is refereed by precedent. Going into a ruck, players know what they can get away with. Referees are just inclined to let them at it.
In hurling, the contact zone has been transformed by how the ball is moved and minded. In the 2010 All-Ireland final there were just 48 attempted stick passes; by 2021, according to data collated by Gaelic Stats, there was an average of 153 stick passes per game. Over the last five years those numbers have not dropped.
Most of the passes are short or mid-range and designed to go to hand. That is where the rules have been left behind. For generations, possession was transacted in hurling by putting the ball into dispute. The original emphasis on hitting the ball as far as possible, as quickly as possible, stretched the pitch. Most contests for the ball were one-on-one duels.
In that environment hooking, blocking and flicking the ball off the hurley were clean and dynamic ways for possession to change hands. Those skills, though, have been marginalised to one degree or another. In Nowlan Park on Sunday there were three clean blocks and a handful of effective hooks. Players are so conditioned to recycle the ball in tight situations now that throwing it up and swinging hard is the last thing on their minds.
In the history of the game, the ball has never spent more time in players' hands. From that starting point, players are more encouraged than ever to run at opponents and break the tackle. But what kind of tackle are they breaking? It is not a foul to meet an incoming player with an outstretched arm, but it is a foul as soon as that arm makes a holding motion.
 
Cork's Alan Walsh catches the ball on the way to scoring a goal. Photograph: Inpho
Most players will not be stopped by that kind of contact, and because they can usually break through, the referee will ordinarily not blow for a foul. "The tackle that a fella is breaking, is it a legal tackle? Probably not," says one former intercounty referee.
But in that kind of contact zone the risk for the player in possession is to be accused of charging. When a player is bottled up now, he is invariably penalised for overcarrying, regardless of how he has been manhandled in the maul. Has somebody been dragging at his arm trying to dislodge the ball? Probably. Taking their cue from rugby, "use it or lose it" has become the governing principle in those situations.
That's not in the rule book either, but it has become accepted practice.
The way the game is played now requires a lot of consent. If players weren't prepared, or physically conditioned, to absorb hits and carry on the game would descend into anarchy. More than that, players don't expect full protection from the rules. Fouls now are blended into the sauce of a hot dish.

On battleship hill
https://youtu.be/bz1D4_lHl5s

Iran nuclear bomb Netanyahu
https://x.com/OwenShroyer1776/status/2026811589391696344

Angry wife of soldier
https://x.com/CassandraRules/status/2028295752103952500/

Children killed
https://x.com/GlobeEyeNews/status/2027723810586366181

Jeffrey Sachs.
https://x.com/DrJillStein/status/2028197952699642235

Chasing cars
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GemKqzILV4
@janicewilde5807
3 years ago
When I had breast cancer I decided if I didn't make it I wanted this song played at my funeral. Instead 13 years later it was the first dance at my wedding. Will always be one of my favourites.

Peter Canavan's input is trending on twitter

https://x.com/ballsdotie/status/2027833498178863467

Gael go smior

Amhrán na bhFiann
Ní fhágfar faoi tiorán ná faoin faill

We won't bow to tyrants or slaves

I'm not sure what some of you want from a leader.

But it does seem that the no.1 sitting in the background and holding handing with everyone is important to some.

I'm not sure what some of you want from a leader.

A leader should be anle to tell the truth and read the room