Rafrangofer

En bluesky y mastodon con el mismo alias

[José Luis Tivi @eltivipata]

Seré el Grinch de las bodas pero... Te casas, me pones en el compromiso de asistir a tu boda porque somos amigos, pero tengo que pagar no sólo mi comida sino también dar un regalo "decente"... No lo llames "invitar" a una boda, entonces, si yo me pago la asistencia + regalo.

[Hanky 🍷 @Hanky_solo]

Un país que logra echar a la mamarracha de Ayuso a media visita tiene todos mis respetos y mi admiración. Queridos amigos, ¡Que viva México y que vivan vuestros coxones y vuestros xoxos!

[Camarada Volodimir 🇧🇦 @OriolanoChill]

🟥European regions that implemented covid protocols in nursing homes to save exclusively those who had private medical insurance.

⬜What?

[Patrick Elrick @PatrickElrick_]

¿PER-DON?????

[El Padre de Brian @ElPadreDeBrian]

Os asombrais mucho de cómo los estadounidenses han podido votar a un chiflado como Trump. Pero los argentinos han votado a Milei y los madrileños a Ayuso.

[��𝙖𝙫𝙞𝙙 𝙈.𝘼 @Lostinpit1]

Segunda vez que lo borran, tercera que lo subo.
Esto es Israel.

[Alberto Lavín @laviincompae]

Cómo de cabrón fascista tienes que ser para ponerle a tu empresa el nombre de la bola mágica que utilizan los malos de El Señor de los Anillos para espiar a los buenos y tiranizarlos.

[Marco Foster @MarcoFoster_]

Seth Meyers reminds us how batshit crazy the last 3 weeks have been: Trump fired AG Pam Bondi. He posted a meme of himself as Jesus then said he thought it was a meme of himself as a doctor. He said the Pope is weak on crime. A MAGA podcaster said Trump is under demonic influence. Pete Hegseth read a fake bible verse from Pulp Fiction. Kash Patel thought he was fired because he got locked out of his computer. A FEMA official claims he once teleported to a Waffle House. Lindsey Graham was seen at Disney World by himself. RFK Jr. cut off a dead raccoon’s penis on the side of the road. Kristi Noem’s husband has giant fake balloon boobs.

[rabbitholebot @rabbitholebot]

What a time to be alive, it's like the collapse of Rome, but with memes.

[Very Brexit Problems @VeryBrexitProbs]

The European strategy for dealing with Trump is now basically the same as dealing with a drunken gobshite at the pub.

Don't bother arguing. Just pick up your pint, move to another table and get on with your evening, comfortable in the knowledge he'll either piss himself and pass out or get barred.

[Kim Dotcom @KimDotcom]

To European leaders,

I’m a European. I care about Europe.
Donald Trump has maneuvered himself into a lose / lose situation. There seems to be no off-ramp out of his Iran war. If Trump escalates further you have to immediately react. If he folds you have to expect the end of the petrodollar and the end of USD as the reserve currency.

You must make instant peace with Russia and partner with Russia and China for your energy and economic needs. You must abandon the US. It does not care about you anyway as shown by its selfish actions in Iran and Ukraine. Ask Russia and China for help with the Middle East. Join the multipolar world.

The US will go into a depression that will become a global economic crisis. You will only survive with the help of Russia and China. You must say no to Israel and its Jewish billionaires. They are ultimately responsible for this disaster and must pay. Make sure your media is independent again.

Let Ursula go. It’s also the end of Macron, Starmer and Merz. They must go for their miscalculation of the situation. The UK should immediately rejoin the EU and take part in the actions above. Now is the time to pivot. Otherwise Europe will go down with the US.

[Elvin Calcaño @elvin_calcano24]

Estamos presenciando, en vivo y en directo, el colapso del imperio estadounidense. Trump pasará y vendrán los demócratas a intentar arreglar las cosas. Y algunas podrán recomponer. Pero ya nadie confiará en Estados Unidos sabiendo que cada cuatro años puede llegar a la Casa Blanca una cosa como la que hay ahora. Y he ahí, pues, donde radica el derrumbe de lo que sostiene todo imperio en el sistema-mundo EE.UU incluido: la confianza. Sin confianza no hay como establecer hegemonía, esto es, que los otros te sigan por convencimiento en tanto asumen que representas un bien. Eso no volverá para EE.UU. Y lo destruyó este populista de ultraderecha que ganó prometiendo hacer a Estados Unidos grande nuevo (mega sic). Tiempos de ver para creer.

[CangurSediciós ✯☭ 🇨🇺🇵🇸🇪🇭🇱🇧🇷🇺🇨🇳🇷🇸🔻🦘 @CangurSedicios]

Hostia puta, que se saben los chistes de Gila 🤣🤣🤣🤣

[dart @poordart]

I sucker punched a guy yesterday, i broke his nose and tried to take his money

He first blocked my punches, and then he started to beat the shit out of me

I offered to stop the fight but he didnt accept it, so he clearly became the aggressor and i'm the victim ☝️

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

So, if I got that right, here's the narrative:

- A US F-15E fighter jet got shot down over Iran, despite Trump saying 2 days beforehand in his nationwide address that Iran has "no anti-aircraft equipment. Their radar is 100% annihilated." (https://t.co/3pnVUGxHyV)

- The plane's weapons systems officer - a "highly respected Colonel," according to Trump - ejected from the plane and got "seriously wounded" (still according to Trump: https://t.co/jUbGiGk9uM)

- He still managed to "hike up a 7,000-foot [2.1km] mountain ridgeline and hide in a crevice" in the Zagros Mountains, despite his wounds (https://t.co/ECTqgUFOZ3)

- U.S. MQ-9 Reaper drones started killing all "Iranian military-aged males believed to be a threat who got within three kilometers of [the American's location]" (https://t.co/86aZgrsXGT)

- To retrieve him the U.S. managed to seize an "abandoned airport," 200 miles deep inside Iran, near Isfahan (https://t.co/rOpRm3mqt9), which happens to be where Iran's largest atomic scientific center is located (https://t.co/jQfmg4zI8t)

- They landed two MC-130 military transport planes in that airport (https://t.co/k0mU0wqnvU) in an operation involving "hundreds of special forces troops and military personnel" (https://t.co/ECTqgUFOZ3)

- Both MC-130 planes got "stuck in the sand" and the U.S. destroyed them themselves "to prevent them from falling into Iranian hands" (https://t.co/k0mU0wqnvU)

- They deployed "three new aircraft to extract all the U.S. personnel" on the ground (https://t.co/k0mU0wqnvU)

- There are videos circulating online of "heavy clashes" with presumably Iranian missiles raining down in Kohgiluyeh County, in the Zagros Mountains during that night (https://t.co/VCeTzcC1vt)

- Iran sent pictures of the aftermath at the "abandoned airport" and it's a sight of utter destruction, with US plane and MH-6 helicopter parts scattered all over the ground, still smoking (https://t.co/mDpYT9qsKC). Iran claims they are the ones who in fact destroyed all the aircraft.

- Meanwhile a second U.S. plane, an A-10 Warthog, also crashed on Friday near the Strait of Hormuz according to two U.S. officials speaking to the NYT (https://t.co/lFs4zERw2t). In that instance too the lone pilot was apparently "safely rescued."

- In all this, after the multiple planes and helicopters destroyed or shot down, the documented heavy clashes, the "hundreds of special forces troops and military personnel" operating deep inside Iran, not a single US soldier was reported killed "or even wounded" (according to Trump: https://t.co/rCgrl6vMpT).

- And the 'highly respected Colonel' this was all for? No name. No photo. No interview. Nobody has spoken to him nor knows who he is.

So to sum up: anti-aircraft equipment that supposedly didn't exist shot down an F-15 (and, apparently, an A-10 Warthog the same day). A seriously wounded man climbed a 2.1km mountain. The US seized an airfield 200 miles inside a country it's at war with, next to one of its most strategic nuclear sites, and deployed hundreds of troops all apparently unimpeded. Lost two planes to "sand" and destroyed their own helicopters. Videos show heavy clashes, missiles raining down - but not a single person got "even wounded". And the man at the center of it all? Nobody knows who he is, completely anonymous, zero pictures, but Trump says he is "SAFE and SOUND." And so is the rescued A-10 Warthog pilot, who also remains anonymous.

Trump concludes this all proves the US has "achieved overwhelming Air Dominance and Superiority over the Iranian skies" (https://t.co/rCgrl6vMpT), despite the whole episode only happening because Iran shot his planes out of the sky.

Basically, the only thing that's "overwhelming" here is the audacity of the storytelling...

[Alon Mizrahi @alon_mizrahi]

This is from 2 years ago. I think it's aged gracefully

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

Time has a new article out in which unnamed sources assert that the Pentagon was caught totally off-guard by Iran’s aggressive retaliation against the US-Israeli onslaught which began last month, reporting the following:

“Key Trump officials, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, were surprised by the barrage of retaliatory attacks Tehran launched against U.S. and Israeli targets across the region, including in countries long assumed to be off-limits: Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar, a state that had both harbored Iran’s terrorist proxies and served as a conduit for backchannel diplomacy between the U.S. and Hamas. The response shattered the assumption that Tehran would confine itself to performative retaliation. In internal deliberations before the war’s launch, Hegseth had pointed to Iran’s muted reaction to Trump’s past attacks as evidence that calibrated force could impose costs on Tehran without triggering a broader war. Hegseth ‘was caught off guard. There’s no question,’ says a person familiar with his thinking.”

It’s so wild how we keep seeing reports that Iran’s retaliation caught the US off guard. For all the years I’ve been paying attention to this issue I’ve been reading experts and analysts saying if the US attacks Iran, Iran can close the Strait of Hormuz and strike US bases and the energy infrastructure of US allies in the region.

A few examples:

A 2006 Oxford Research Group paper titled “Iran: Consequences of a War” warned that Iran has numerous options at its disposal in the event of a US attack, and that the “most significant of these would be any possible retaliatory Iranian action to affect the transport of oil and liquefied natural gas through the Straits of Hormuz,” adding that stopping Iran from doing this “would be difficult if not impossible to achieve, leading to a fear of attack which alone would have a formidable impact on oil markets.”

A 2007 Cato Institute paper titled “The Iraq War and Iranian Power” warns that “Iran possesses the largest ballistic-missile inventory in the Persian Gulf — missiles which can reach Israel, Saudi Arabia and US military bases in Iraq,” and that “experts argue Iran could also use the ’oil weapon’: blocking the 34km-wide Strait of Hormuz and conducting submarine and anti-ship missile attacks against ports and oil facilities in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other Gulf Cooperation Council states.”

A 2012 NPR article titled “Can Iran Close The World’s Most Important Oil Route?” features then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff acknowledging that Iran absolutely can block the Strait of Hormuz, saying Tehran has “invested in capabilities” which specifically enable them to do so.

A paper from the Columbia Center on Global Energy Policy and the Center for a New American Security titled “IN DIRE STRAITS? IMPLICATIONS OF US-IRAN TENSIONS FOR THE GLOBAL OIL MARKET” warns of a potential scenario “that includes damage to Gulf oil infrastructure and a temporary closure of the Strait of Hormuz.”

These weren’t a bunch of keffiyeh-wearing peaceniks making these assessments, they were deeply entrenched swamp monsters entirely loyal to the US empire. They opposed war with Iran not because it would be an evil act of unforgivable mass murder, but because it would be bad for the imperial power structure.

Trump’s former national security advisor John Bolton recently tweeted that other administration officials had warned the president to dismiss Bolton’s urging to attack Iran because of the easily foreseeable consequences of that war, saying “In 2018–2019, I made the case for regime change in Iran as often as I could. Voices in Trump’s orbit often cited Iran’s capacity to close the Strait of Hormuz as a reason against regime change. Trump has been fully aware this is a possibility, and yet did not prepare.”

I have zero military training or expertise — on military matters I’m just some schmuck with internet access — and yet nothing Iran has done has surprised me. It’s playing out exactly how the experts warned it would play out. There’s no way any literate, thinking person didn’t see this coming; when they say they didn’t, it’s because they’re either lying or amazingly stupid.

Trump’s war machine is either made up of liars, morons, lying morons, or (most likely), an eclectic mixture of all three.