Susie Wiles: Gotta do something about gas prices
Trump advisor: Let's lie about it.
Wiles: Tried that
Advisor: Say gas prices are going down?
Wiles: But they're not
Advisor: OK, berate media to say up is down.
Wiles: Gas station signs
Advisor: Have we tried asserting things that aren't true?
RUSSIA GETS:
-Higher oil prices
-Reduced US economic pressure
-Bogged down US military
-Air defense assets not sent to Ukraine
US GETS:
-Indefinite war in pursuit of undefined outcome
-Weaker economy
-Frayed international partnerships
-Combat deaths
Evidence piling up that the Trump regime thought Iran is Venezuela, and the Maduro operation—which needed some luck to go as smoothly as it did, and didn’t actually advance US national interest or improve anything for Venezuelans—was easily repeatable in the Middle East.
This was not very smart.
🧵Feels like shouting into the void, but it is essential to note that the Trump/Rubio gutting of the State Department and blowtorching of US diplomatic capacity and credibility is an accelerant to this spiraling war and will seriously undercut US/allied efforts to pick up the pieces after. 1/
In just six days we’ve gone from “Iranians take over your country” to “we’re open to talking with the new leadership of the regime” to “I want to pick the new leader” to now “unconditional surrender”.
A “concept of a plan”, indeed.
www.bbc.com/news/live/ce...
First they came for the trans people, and I said nothing because I wasn’t trans. Then they were like actually I’m pretty sure you are trans and I said no I’m not and they went okay well show us your penis then and I said what no get out of my face and they said that one’s a girl get her
Operation Air Defense Interceptor Storage Space Clearance Fury
Our warfighters at the Department of War won't be held back by political correctness saying their warmaking activities are "war."
In this house
We believe
That love is the smell of locally sourced sustainably produced gender fluid napalm in the morning
It smells like victory
I too remember the earlier, woke wars. tons of spent microaggression munitions strewn about everywhere, friends crying out for God as they were slowly cancelled...look, if you weren't there, you'll never understand
I don't know, and it's clear the president doesn't know either.
Credit where it's due
"Unconditional surrender" is what the Union got from the Confederacy, what Putin demands from Ukraine, and what Trump thought he got from Venezuela, so that's what the US is demanding now from Iran. It sounds tough on TV, you see.
Thankfully American voters rescued the country from a low unemployment, rising real wages, declining inflation economic nightmare.
Then I guess they didn’t enough
The anti-drone lasers that have recently caused so much stupid kerfuffle at the Mexican border are *specifically* intended to take down drones at a much lower cost than missile interceptors.
Wonder why we haven’t heard anything about the U.S. using them in the Gulf against Iranian drones yet.
You know how American intelligence was pretty excited to do to the USSR in Afghanistan what Soviet intelligence did to the US in Vietnam?
How many economic reports can come in under expectations before the expectors adjust their expecting?
Absolutely. Removing Maduro changed little, since the rest of the regime is intact. The destabilization and resource theft could make things worse.
But the operation grabbing Maduro went relatively smoothly. And the White House wrongly assumed that meant other operations would too.
Worse than the worst War on Terror drone strikes. By innocents killed, worse than multiple of the worst drone strike errors combined.
They got lucky in Venezuela. There was tactical skill too, of course, but if the rest of the regime didn’t want to play ball, if Maduro dodged it, if a lucky shot or accident killed US troops, etc.
Trump and Co. were really feeling themselves after Venezuela, and thought Iran would be easy too.
"Vance now spends every day of his life agitating for a society that sees the people he loves most in the world as undesirable foreigners who should be forcibly deported."
My latest for @theunpopulist.net
In the worst drone war errors the US accurately hit wrongly identified targets. A wedding party in a group of vehicles, for example. But in those terrible instances we could go back and figure out exactly who made what informational errors and why.
The LLMs are a black box. They can't explain it.
Yeesh. Epistemic quicksand.
Did you read the original article? I don't have a Washington Post subscription.
Hoovering up info that's outdated as well as relatively current and not knowing the difference is an unsurprising AI error. If the change was relatively recent, there's more old info, and the system lacks the judgment to find and emphasize the new.
This is exactly why we need humans in the loop.
Why bomb a school?
Could've been aiming at something else and missed. But it looks like this missile hit the intended target. Except the target selection—perhaps by an AI system called Maven that uses Claude—was based on outdated information.
Target suggestions are one thing. But no human review?
Iran is not Ukraine, but the United States is acting more like Russia.
@jilldlawrence.bsky.social on the uncomfortable comparison:
Good plan, there’s no way that the US would ever betray Kurds who fought on their behalf, or that Turkey would be upset by and seek to frustrate any US-backed Kurdish forces, or that an invasion from Iraq would trigger Iranian nationalist opposition. None of those things have ever happened.
