Calliope

It would certainly be news to the Imperial Japanese Navy and the Wehrmacht that George HW Bush and Dwight Eisenhower were fascists all along.

the Nazis so disliked the practice of humanitarian rescue sometimes practiced by the Kriegsmarine that they *explicitly banned it*

300 is ironically a very good choice, because the Hard Men Getting Hard willingly go to their deaths at the point of Persian spears for no grander purpose whatsoever.

Much like the president's approval rating, really.

I like how France looked around and said “hey if we build these power plants we won’t be as fucked if there are geopolitical issues in the most geopolitical issues part of the world let’s do that” and literally nobody else copied them.

Most of Eastern Europe has kept their Cold War-era reactors on! Meanwhile, the West decided that their (far safer) designs had to go, in spite of the fact that there have been multiple energy crunches in Western Europe that necessitated building a dependence on Russia!

The green movement's fixation on destroying nuclear power was vaguely understandable post-1986, but given Chernobyl was caused by a design flaw specific only to Soviet RBMK reactors, it's baffling that Western Europeans in particular embraced de-nuclearization.

But have you considered that Soviet-built reactors could cause the next Chernobyl if not shut dow-

Sorry, I'm getting a call about the total shutdown of all East German nuclear reactors in 1990.

Unlike the Red Sea crisis, where the solution was 'go around Africa the long way' there is no other route for these ships to take. There is no feasible alternative for a lot of this oil to move - some of it can be piped, but not most.

It's just stuck. Completely stuck.

Yeah anyone who thought they were going to immediately press a political claim or do much of anything coherent post-bombing misunderstood the situation.

As it is my hunch is the IRGC will survive this for now but the sheer level of damage meted out to the Iranian economy and infrastructure through the knock on effects of this war will have a severe impact on the material conditions that shape the regime's structural position in and outside Iran

They think India is DurkaDurkastan too, you have to get to Henan at least before they transition to Yellow Peril.

Consider the existence of Bangladesh and Indonesia, both clearly DurkaDurkastani nations on account of Islam. If you need further proof, look at Samuel Huntington's map:

no no no no no

"Double tap" is a very specific thing that basically only the Israelis and Russians do that this website has since decided should refer to any strike where you hit a target more than once, for any reason

Yes, it is. I'd expect Iran to stop firing roughly halfway through once it became apparently the US was actually serious about doing it, but nobody really knows and we aren't even a week in.

Hi. Yes. A couple of follow-ups:

1. What boots
2. From where
3. How are they getting there
4. How long are they going to stay there
5. How on Earth are you going to resupply them
6. If you're only doing limited JSOC-style capture/kill missions, who are you targeting and for what reasons

It's also that 30 percent of the entire Taiwanese stock index is coming from TSMC, which rolls all its income back into more fabs, and on and on it goes.

It's what you see in a lot of investment-driven economies: residences look awful, industrial parks are huge.

"Videos of shiny tier-1 Chinese cityscapes are unrepresentative of China as a whole" is true, but also like, the same 20 buildings with LEDs aren't even representative of tier 1 cities. The rest of the cities look something like:

Reading about Hon Hai (FoxConn) in the 1990s is fascinating because despite being worth several billion dollars the entire thing was based out of a tin-roofed shack that had a tendency to flood during monsoon season.

Remember that Iran *does* get a vote here, and while their vote may well be "destroy the global economy or die trying" it could just as easily be "inflict massive damage on the global economy but bail out when it becomes obvious this could lead to a full-scale invasion."

Self-preservation is real.

I maintain it is *very* possible that enough people in the IRGC would prefer not to be slaughtered in a ground invasion and will thus allow Trump to declare victory and go home well before it gets to that point, but it's certainly looking less likely than it did a week ago before this started.

Everything You Think You Know About Coal in China Is Wrong China’s new coal-fired power plants are cleaner than ours—and stronger on climate change.

This is *much* less true today than it was 25 years ago (when China and India were really kicking off industrialization), however the Chinese energy sector is still incredibly, massively dependent on coal it's hard to see how it weans itself off it. Good (but old) article on this here:

I honestly think these scenarios are overblown. The Iranian administrative state isn't build on the kind of sectarian patronage networks that would open it up to disintegration if the regime falls. And if it survives it will become middle eastern North Korea. Neither will see Syria style collapse

Incidentally, the (unless it's coal) thing is why China and India run on the stuff. A LNG transport ship (left) requires supercooling methane to around the same temperature as liquid nitrogen and then moving it around in immense cryogenic vessels. A coaler (right) is just a ship full of coal:

Almost everything that has to do with the production, refining, and transport of hydrocarbons is extremely complex (unless it's coal). It's why people get paid massive amounts of money to be engineers on these projects. LNG terminals and complex oil refineries cost billions of dollars to build.

So while *technically* the US is the second-largest oil importer in the world, that's not for its own energy needs as it is for China. It's as raw input to refineries which then produce more expensive oil for sale. And again, the oil being imported is coming from Canada and Mexico:

Moreover, American imports of oil don't really come from the Gulf. US refineries are easily the most advanced in the world, and they're built for heavy/sour crude. American oil *production* meanwhile is sold on the international market because it's light/sweet shale oil that fetches a higher price.

US is a net oil exporter, China...isn't. It's one of its major weaknesses. PetroChina produces gargantuan amounts of oil, but almost all of it is consumed domestically and it still imports more oil than the US and India combined.

Yep, if you're looking for "authoritarians worth compromising with" Erdogan is right at the top. Turkey is *far* more valuable than Israel, speaking strictly in cold geopolitics terms.

It’s worth noting that for all his flaws, George W. Bush didn’t frame the War on Terror as ‘Western Civ’ or Christianity against Islam or the East but as a struggle of decent peoples against a new form of totalitarianism.

Now we’re doing the full on Christian nationalist dream of war with Islam.

I've always been sceptical about claims that China could become a global power that replaces the US because Beijing never showed much interest in the strategic effort needed to take over as security guarantor in the Middle East and other global regions China's economy depends on