Chris Ntokos

[Murray Rothbard @MurraySuggests]

The Iranian navy, which has been destroyed eight times, has apparently closed the Strait of Hormuz again, because the United States, for the seventh time, won the war that wasn’t a war, so now the United States has to open the Strait of Hormuz that was already open before the not-war began.

The not-war began because Iran had uranium that was totally, completely, beautifully obliterated, so they can’t build the nuclear bomb they weren’t building, which is why the United States had to start the not-war it definitely didn’t start.

Now the United States, which has nuclear weapons, is threatening to use nuclear weapons to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons, because nuclear weapons are far too dangerous for countries with nuclear weapons to allow other countries to have.

If the United States saw the United States doing what the United States does in other countries, the United States would invade the United States to liberate the United States from the tyranny of the United States.

[Glenn Diesen @Glenn_Diesen]

"Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind" - George Orwell

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

If governments were actually doing their job, this Palantir document 👇 wouldn't be a manifesto they proudly boast about, but a clear sign of the urgent need to purge its software from the public institutions it has infiltrated.

What are they saying, essentially?

They basically promote a clash of civilization worldview in which there exists a "they" - the supposed enemies of Western civilization, whose cultures the document codes as inferior - and a "we" who must stop indulging in decadent restraint and invest massively in AI weapons and defense software (which conveniently makes Palantir's product catalog the civilizational cure).

Look at point 4 for instance. They write that "the limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software."

It all rests on a pretty massive assumption: that coexistence is impossible. Why would "free and democratic societies" (by which they obviously mean Western-style liberal-democracies) need to "prevail"? Why can't they simply coexist with other civilizations or political systems out there?

Nowhere in the document do they defend this assumption: it's simply asserted as the starting condition of the argument.

But it's the entire ballgame: if civilizations and political systems can coexist - as they largely have, imperfectly but recognizably, throughout history - then the entire case they make in the document evaporates.

In fact one can argue that, studying history, the big problem was not that civilizations couldn't coexist: it was that, from time to time, one of them decided that others were inferior, threatening, or standing in the way of its rightful expansion - and acted accordingly.

So many catastrophes and so much human suffering in history trace back not to the fact of plural civilizations, but to one of them deciding it could no longer tolerate the others.

The problem, in other words, has almost always been exactly the worldview Palantir is now selling. Their manifesto isn't warning against the cause of some of the worst periods in history: it's arguing for reviving them!

Or take point 15: they explicitly call for the re-armament of Germany and Japan, and an end to "Japanese pacifism". Basically undoing one of the foundational settlements of the post-WW2 order.

I mean, think about the insanity of this for a second: a private company - unelected, answerable only to its shareholders - is casually proposing to overturn the security architecture of two continents. A settlement that took a world war, and tens of millions of dead to establish.

Why do they propose this? There is obviously a commercial motivation: a remilitarized Germany and Japan are massive new defense-software markets.

But the more troubling answer is that point 15 fits into the ideological project the rest of the manifesto lays out - a civilizational contest requires a consolidated Western bloc, and pacifist members are a liability in such a contest.

So taking a step back we now have what's the most influential defense-software company in the world, with its code deeply embedded in all the machinery of Western states - intelligence agencies, militaries, police forces, welfare systems, border controls - openly outing itself as an ideological project.

They're effectively saying "our tools aren't meant to serve your foreign policy. They're meant to enforce ours."

Because, worryingly, that's what they CAN do. Palantir software is all about basically telling states: "these are your threats, these are the people and groups to watch, these are the patterns that matter, these are the targets that warrant action."

For instance the DGSI - the French intelligence services - use Palantir (see: https://t.co/3YJk88k4QY): do you honestly think the software is warning them about, say, the NSA tapping the phones of French government officials? About the weaponization of US extraterritorial law against French companies? Did it warn them about the AUKUS ambush that cost France a sixty-billion-euro submarine contract? Obviously not.

And that's exactly what the manifesto is saying. They've positioned themselves as advocates of Western civilizational unity, so their software can't undermine it. The ideological position and the product roadmap have to align, or the whole project falls apart.

This makes their software not only deeply dangerous for the world as a whole but also, almost by definition, for any country using it. When it comes to your security as a state, it is primordial you base yourself on truth as opposed to ideology. The entire point of an intelligence agency is to tell its government what is true, not what your so-called "allies'" defense contractors would like you to see.

A state that outsources its threat assessment to a company with an explicit ideological agenda is not gathering intelligence, it is essentially subscribing to propaganda.

The conclusion couldn't be more obvious. Every government still running Palantir software in its intelligence, security, or public-service infrastructure needs to start ripping it out, now! Lest they want to be embarked on the delusional and deeply destructive clash-of-civilizations crusade Palantir has now openly committed itself to.

[Borzou Daragahi 🖊🗒 @borzou]

Really worth watching this snippet from Iranian state television to gauge the level of sophistication of Iranian analysts, one wearing a hoodie, commenting on the war and where it’s headed.

[Patricia Marins @pati_marins64]

Iranian Fattah-1 Activates Second Motor and Defeats 12 Interceptors

In this video, we can clearly see the missile activating its secondary solid-fuel motor.
The Fattah-1 is a classic ballistic missile up to a certain point. It climbs into space on a high parabolic trajectory and re-enters the atmosphere at a steep angle.

Up to that stage, it behaves like a conventional missile. The real difference lies in the activation of the re-entry motor and the movable nozzle, which allow it to make sharp corrections, zig-zag maneuvers in the terminal phase, or simply deliver a sudden burst of speed.

Without this motor, a conventional warhead would lose more than 50% of its velocity when performing aggressive maneuvers due to atmospheric friction.

The Fattah-1’s secondary motor is a small spherical solid-fuel engine, compact enough to fit inside the maneuverable re-entry vehicle (MaRV).

Theoretically, it can burn for more than 30 seconds, counteracting atmospheric deceleration and ensuring the warhead strikes at hypersonic speeds.

However, from what the video shows, it appears it can be reconfigured for a short, powerful boost of just a few seconds, delivering intense speed in the final phase.

The developers claim that in this last stage, the missile reaches speeds above Mach 13.
Of course, there’s no such thing as a perfect system.

This secondary motor reduces the payload of the warhead due to space constraints, but that loss can be partially compensated by the massive increase in kinetic impact energy.

[Amerikanets 📉 @ripplebrain]

Another very interesting piece from the WSJ. These details have been available through OSINT sources but it's a good roundup showing how key Europe is to US operations against Iran:

- The central command center for US operations against Iran is within Ramstein Air Base in Germany (unsurprising)
- US drone operations are conducted from there as well
- American aircraft stationed in Spain have been relocated to France and Germany after the Spanish government denied the use of the Morón and Rota air bases for attacks on Iran
- Bomber aircraft sortie out of bases in the UK like RAF Fairford
- Refueling operations are based out of Aviano Air Base in Italy and Tubé Air Base in France
- Lajes Air Base in the Azores (Portugal) is serving as a major logistical hub, with dozens of aircraft stationed there at various times during the conflict
- RC-135 Rivet Joint spy planes are operating out of Souda Bay in Crete
- Unspecified "logistics and intelligence assets" are being hosted by Romania

The piece paints an amusing picture of European attitudes towards this. Keir Starmer's justification for overcoming his reticence to allow the US to base out of British facilities in the initial wave of strikes is that bomber operations are now "defensive" in nature. Merz has said publicly that this "isn't [Germany's] war," but he has no choice but to allow US operations out of German air bases due to pre-existing legal agreements. Meloni has spun Italian involvement as minor because only refueling missions are flown out of Aviano. Similarly, French defense minister Vautrin said, ���a refueling aircraft is a gas station, not a fighter jet."

These technicalities may work on the European public, but it's difficult to imagine they'll work on the Iranians.

[Policy Tensor @policytensor]

US forces have been pushed out of the region and have been operating largely from Europe.

“In recent weeks, U.S. bombers, drones and ships have been fueled, armed and launched via bases in the U.K., Germany, Portugal, Italy, France and Greece, officials say.”

This is really, really bad news for the all-important interdiction war because operating from this far means a much lower sortie rate, and therefore interdiction rate.

https://t.co/XWEJltX0Yq

[The Wall Street Journal @WSJ]

Iran is exporting more oil through the Strait of Hormuz than before the war, showing it is in control of a strategic waterway that it has closed off to the rest of the region’s oil producers https://t.co/CeZTClmHBa

[Brandon Weichert @WeTheBrandon]

The non-war-war which wasn't started by Trump but was started by Trump because Iran was about to initiate a nuclear attack on us...with nuclear weapons that were OBLITERATED last year by Trump...is ending, except it's not ending because it's just beginning...but it is ending--soon--but we don't know when, and if you question that you're a "Panican," but the only reason Trump indicated it would be ending--which it's not, but it is (not)--is because he completely panicked when he saw the oil prices exploding--which, weren't exploding, they were merely jumping up with joy at Trump having (not) started/ended the non-war-war against Iran.

^^That's the president's recent speech in a nutshell.

[Roman Elizarov @relizarov]

There’s an old Soviet joke:

A cowboy is riding for his life, Indians right behind him. He thinks, This is the end. Then a voice in his head says, Not yet. Shoot their chief. He fires from the saddle and drops him. Silence. Then the voice says: Now it’s the end.

[Brian McDonald @BrianMcDonaldIE]

Exactly 13 months ago today, the EU's Ursula von der Leyen leads the celebrations as the Baltic states disconnect from the Russian energy grid.

[Zachary Foster @_ZachFoster]

"Iran lured Jared Kushner & Steve Witkoff to peace talks, and then murdered them"

"Iran bombed an elementary school in Texas, murdering 160 school girls."

"Iran is waging a war of annihilation against New York City, whose residents will suffer from cancerous ailments for decades because the US bombed an oil refinery in NYC, turning NYC skyline into acid-oil-rain."

"Iran murdered Donald Trump"

"Iran murders 1,300 Americans in first week of war of aggression waged on the USA"

This is how the news looks like if you are from Iran.

[MW4Liberty @MW4Liberty]

Seems legit.

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

Pete Hegseth said this was "the first sinking of an enemy ship by a torpedo since WWII" (which is false, but that's beside the point), so I decided to look at what happened in WW2 and... this might surprise no-one: turns out the Nazis were more humane than the Americans.

Probably the most abject part here is that the warship had many survivors - 32 to be precise (https://t.co/bS1uARrBtf) - and the U.S. made zero effort to rescue them, despite it being required by the laws of naval warfare and simply being the honorable thing to do.

It took little Sri-Lanka, with its very modest means - especially compared to the $1 trillion US defense budget - to do the honorable thing and launch a (successful) rescue operation.

Even the literal Nazis, during WW2, rescued the survivors of ships their U-boats sank. It was considered a matter of basic honor.

The history of this is actually interesting: the Nazis rescued survivors all the way until the so-called Laconia Incident in 1942 (https://t.co/6wI251aNCv).

The Laconia was a British troopship sunk by U-156, a German U-boat, off the West African coast. Right after the sinking, the Nazis immediately began rescuing over 400 survivors, broadcasting - as was common practice - in plain English their position on open radio channels to all Allied powers nearby, so they wouldn't get attacked during the rescue.

That's when a US B-24 "Liberator" bomber attacked the submarine anyway, even though all the rescued survivors were on its foredeck. The B-24 killed dozens of Laconia's survivors with bombs and strafing attacks, forcing U-156 to cast into the sea the remaining survivors that she had rescued and crash dive to avoid being destroyed.

The American B-24 pilots mistakenly reported they had sunk U-156, and were awarded medals for bravery...

This event completely changed Nazi policy on this matter: Karl Dönitz, commander of the U-boat fleet, issued the "Laconiarefehl" - the Laconia Order - forbidding U-boats from rescuing survivors, because the risk to the submarine was now too high.

In other words, the Americans during WW2 essentially forced the Nazis to abandon survivors - from the allied side (!) - at sea.

Dönitz at least had an excuse.

[Glenn Diesen @Glenn_Diesen]

Ukraine must join NATO, as Russia would never attack NATO. Also, when Russia is done with Ukraine, it will attack NATO.

[Orikron 🇵🇹 骆培思 @orikron]

Kaja Kallas just came out in defense of the Osama Bin Laden doctrine of civilian culpability

[Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald]

The best and most surprising part of Carney's speech is that he didn't pretend there was a "rules-based international order" until Trump came and ended it.

He admitted the claim was always a fraud, but that the EU, UK and Canada affirmed the lie because it benefited them.

[Assal Rad @AssalRad]

Things like this are openly reported in Israeli media, why is it completely ignored here?

[Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald]

"Happy New Year to every Iranian in the streets. Also to every Mossad agent walking beside them..." -- Trump's former CIA Director Mike Pompeo.