Cunigulus

If they're trying to drain air defense targeting a population center forces the Israelis to intercept.

They have hit targets in Iraq IIRC

I don't think their military is so crippled by these strikes and they have been preparing for a semi-asymmetrical war against the US for decades at this point. I don't worry about Iranian military strength. They can turtle up become a YemenX1000, throttling the Persian Gulf completely and there's not much Israel and the US together can do to stop it short of the use of nuclear weapons. I worry more about Iran politically, they might be weaker than we think.

Very interesting series of events. Elements of Trump administration try to wriggle out of Israeli grip, rifts start to show. Elon Musk teases Epstein reveal on Trump. Trump seems to back attack on Iran. Elon apologizes for his tweets.

Let's revisit the 'tail wagging the dog' debate in a few months. I have a feeling one side is going to have some egg on their face.

I mean, John Cena is absolutely doing this because someone in the CPC got mad at him and threatened some kind of business interest. China being aggressively touchy about things like this might be understandable, but it's not really a good thing. It's transparent and pointless. Just gives free propaganda points to the bad guys.

One of the few pleasures of the Trump administration is when their petty vindictiveness is directed towards other ghouls. Like Hegseth cancelling his meeting with Kaja Kallas after her transatlantic flight had already landed in DC, or withholding military aid already in transit to Ukraine. Sadly for every humorous instance of base spite there's another directed at the vulnerable.

That's right, keep pushing till it breaks! Keep pushing until the nothing ever happens memes are banished forever!

Damn that sounds serious if true. Artillery and airstrikes? Remember we're looking for a mention of a town called Nawa. If Israel takes Nawa it means they're probably gunning for the whole of southern Syria. If they're just fucking around near the Golan Heights and Mt. Hermon they'll leave it alone.

Assume for a moment that they know the US empire is on its last legs and China is about to ascend and break the US's grip on global finance. What would the logical next step be? If we're really going to have a multi-polar world, the US had better get its act together and consolidate a power base it can defend while it still enjoys the advantages of global hegemony. Tightening the grip on Europe, consolidating direct control in North America and the near abroad, and trying to protect and rebuild domestic industry are all sensible moves if the objective is not to justify a global neoliberal hegemony, but to survive as a separate imperial bloc among several competitors. I honestly don't see that as being much more workable than maintaining global hegemony, but if you can't beat China, you need a different plan.

Egotistical individual capitalists vs institutional capitalist minions who don't want to know that they might have to disrupt their business to prevent their wage-slaves from dying.

It's true that the Deepseek news didn't seem like it should impact Nvidia. If someone found an even richer gold vein they'll still need shovels to dig it. I think it had more to do with Nvidia as a symbol of the AI hype and the fact that it was already insanely overvalued by any metrics, even considering the most feverish dreams of AI evangelists. I would have expected the companies that invested in OpenAI to take the biggest hit.

One corrective to my understanding of Deepseek is that the algorithm to train the AI model was not made open source. They did publish a white paper with some of the theory behind it that should make it possible for people to reconstruct it, but basically only the finished model with weights is open source, and the training data and algorithm are still proprietary. This is still a big deal, but not as big a deal as dropping the whole thing into the public domain and nuking the whole upstream IP of the AI industry.

On the Taiwan tarriff angle, it is interesting. I read it as Trump being briefed on the reality of TSMC investment in the US and looking for a way to strong-arm TSMC into installing its cutting-edge fab processes in the US so we'd actually get the strategic benefit we're looking for. I just don't think Wall Street takes Trump seriously enough to make big trades on this kind of posturing, but I could be wrong.