What is fair competition in this context? What a fucking lib

As clausewitz says, matters of geopolitics are always decided final destination, fox only, no items

https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/southkorea/politics/20260903/cheong-wa-dae-denies-report-of-possible-troop-deployment-to-hormuz

Korea’s presidential office on Thursday rejected a report claiming the government is considering sending troops to the conflict-stricken Hormuz Strait.

I wish you had been covering the freedom convoy in Ottawa a few years ago comrade

yes, and it is particularly corrosive in conditions where a steel surface is wetted and then dried repeatedly (i.e. waterline of a ship). saltwater corrosion is also worse/faster when it is higher temperature, like 30-60C. obviously the ocean isn’t that hot, but it gets sun. a big metal plate in the gulf sun constantly getting exposed to seawater then drying off is about as bad as it gets as far as a corrosive environment for steel.

yeah right they’ll be allowed to get wholesome swastirinos. say what you want about the finnish air force, but they have higher entry standards than the US navy

And that symbol the finnish air force is literally still “phasing out” isn’t a Swastika because it isn’t from the swasti region of Germany, its actually a good luck symbol and the guy who introduced it was just goering’s brother in law

65 billion barrels, and Venezuelan Acting President Rodríguez announced they would yield 290 billion in revenue. That’s 3.2$ per barrel.

That’s $4.4/bbl

A while ago a labour deadender I know was trying to tell me that the UK supreme Court being transphobic in 2025 was just an administrative change, but here we are

One Patriot battery can only cover a limited area: for example, a small military base but not a whole city. One alternative could be France and Italy’s SAMP/T NG air defense system. France has promised to speed up the delivery of the system — the upgraded version of the current SAMP/T — to Ukraine, which the manufacturer says is better able to counter ballistics. The new iteration, however, has not yet been battle tested and the current version of the SAMP/T has a smaller range than the Patriot. While U.S. and European militaries have warships that can serve as mobile air defense, they may be too far from a target to protect it and could risk getting sunk.

So one patriot battery covers a limited area, therefore one alternative is a system that covers an even more limited area than a patriot

the videos from this are shocking and brutal. don’t go seeking them out.

It’s a biblical phrase but has commonly been used to describe the Canadian economy

Nobody drinks from the hose anymore either

Critical minerals is a very y wide ranging and not concrete term. It is distinct from rare earth minerals. Critical minerals basically means “anything geopolitically important”, which in times when pesky materialism rears its head, means just about everything. The Canadian federal government has designated a whole including materials with low value add (coal, iron ore, phosphate, sulphur), medium value add (copper, nickel, manganese, cobalt, aluminum, things that can be exported as metal or as concentrate), and high value add (rare earth concentrates, high purity oxides). Canada makes a huge amount of the former, a fair amount of the middle, and not a lot of the latter at all. It is incorrect to portray Canadian mining companies as getting everything from abroad. A ton of shit comes out of the ground in Canada and exported abroad.

Yes mining companies headquartered in Canada own a lot of mines abroad, especially in the global south (especially LATAM), and plenty of materials go from the global south to world markets through Canadian domiciled companies. However, there are also a lot of resource projects in Canada that export materials/concentrate/metals from within Canada outside.

Those projects are also often executed in Canada with the same kind of disregard for environmental and indigenous issues. That said, I continue to be surprised by the level of domestic support for rapacious resource extraction, including among local communites and even some indigenous communities. Canada’s domestic history is as “hewers of wood and drawers of water” and that history remains alive today.

Does anyone have policy tensor’s substack? They posted an article on increasing accuracy of missiles and bombs that looks interesting.

Carney is a competent liberal imperialist. He has a sense of geopolitical realism and has done enough banking work to know how the economy actually functions. He is a counter to trump in that he recognizes that things are going off the rails with trump and would rather people pump the brakes.

The Iran war and the walled hydrocarbon garden that the US is building for the west and vassals is in Canada’s interest to Carney because it increases the importance of Canadian barrels of oil. That’s why he has spoken in favour of the war on Iran. However, he is not so stupid as to underestimate the danger of American maximalism from trump and co.

For a long time I’ve explained that the “right-wing turn” in Latin America is, at its core, an alliance from above between the US govt & organized crime groups.

this is a very important statement

• iran is a huge country and very mountainous
• satellite surveillance and associated image processing resources are not infinite. a high res satellite can cover a swath something like 10-20km wide per pass and iran is a couple thousand km by a couple thousand km
• high res spy satellites are in low earth orbit and do passes over an area. satellites that look down on an area live are in geosynchronous orbit which is much much higher, meaning live coverage is lower resolution, not able to live track vehicles
• loitering surveillance planes like the MQ9 reaper are able to track individual vehicles, but they keep getting shot down by iran and can’t overfly the country safely
• missile launchers look like a cargo truck. iran is a country of 90m people, so there’s probably something on the order of 0.5-1m normal cargo trucks in the country. who knows how many launchers there are, but my guess is maybe 0.5-1% of cargo trucks in the country (2500-10000). how do you distinguish between a launcher truck and a truck filled with other cargo?
• during this war, the US and israel have flown something like 20,000 sorties on about as many targets, including all the other shit they’ve targeted, like naval targets, bases, tunnel entrances, and of course schools, civil infrastructure
• flying a sortie from US carriers/israeli airbases is something like several hours to and from Iran, each way. that is a long time to maintain a lock on a specific vehicle even if you spot it, and if you lose sight of it, you will probably lose it in a warehouse or tunnel or shed (see the scoot and shoot tactic)

tldr material reality doesn’t allow for what you’re describing, the math doesn’t math

join us in the newsmega if you want to learn more, tervell is a great poster there

I also like the post-USSR pre-911 American action movie genre because the bad guys are more often bad elements of American society instead of racialized bad guy countries. Like in the rock, the bad guys are US marines that have gone rogue. That is inconceivable post 911.

That movie is basically a cartoon. It’s so much fun. The rock is my favorite cage action movie from that era but con air is also great.

Something I really appreciated watching con air recently was how it’s dominated by practical effects. Like they actually blew up a casino in Vegas for the finale. All that shit would be computers now.

Do you have a link to it?