Pincer at SFO, Proxies Exhausted

Trump signs a “trade deal” that’s literally blank, while his DNI Tulsi Gabbard is iced out of Iran strike prep

Jun 18, 2025

Post See new posts Conversation Thomas van Linge @ThomasVLinge Iranian regime in a nutshell: -economy sucks but a necessary sacrifice to prepare for war. -brutal repression is essential to maintain unity in case of war. -international isolation a minor price to pay in order not to be hindered in preparation for war war starts: -sucks at war Quote Aurora Intel @AuroraIntel · Jun 16 Footage reportedly documenting an Israeli Hermes 450 over Tehran. 9:33 AM · Jun 16, 2025 · 500.3K Views Thomas van Linge @ThomasVLinge · Jun 16 Those discussing whether Israel has the military capacity to commence regime change in Iran are asking the wrong question. Israel doesn't need to bomb the Islamic Republic until there's nothing left, it just needs to expose the charade behind the regime's repressive social Show more ChrisO_wiki @ChrisO_wiki · Jun 16 Also in a nutshell - spends all its money arming proxies to do the fighting - is left defenceless when the proxies are wiped out — (src)(cached)

He argues that in theory Israel could succeed by just showing that the social contract of Iran, the sacrifices made by the population in the name of national security, are a farce. Not sure how likely that outcome is though. A Plausible theory for why Israel is acting now (cached). Not because Iran is close to having a nuclear weapon, but because Iran is out of proxies to respond with. Further, one commenter argues that it really all comes back to Ukraine (cached): Russia’s war there is drawing down its forces and air-defense assets from Syria, leaving Iran with even less cover

You already heard about the Trump/Musk breakup, Tucker Carlson has lost Trump's approval now that Carlson is opposing US involvement in Israel's war with Iran. Absolutely wild to see Tucker Carlson confront Ted Cruz (cached) about attacking Iran. Reinforces the view that Ted Cruz is quite widely disliked on the Right. One comment about the clip (cached), "beneath all of his artifice, BS, and rank opportunism, an actual journalist is trapped in Carlson's brain and occasionally shows himself". Although I'm not sure I'd go quite that far myself. Seems bad (cached) for the US to be moving closer to involvement in Israel/Iran war, and I’m not wild about being in agreement with Carlson on something. Also, amazing how easy it is to make a modern political joke quite proficiently with AI. I don’t know for certain they used AI to generate this, but it’s a sign of how far we’ve come that I assume it because it looks relatively good.1

See new posts Conversation Jesse Peltan @JessePeltan I don’t think people realize just how big of an impact batteries are already having on the grid. In just a few years, batteries have completely taken over ancillary services in ERCOT. The same will be true everywhere else soon. It’s far more efficient to provide ancillary services with batteries than to keep a significant portion of thermal capacity on the sidelines. — (src)(cached)

There's a pointer to a thread with a few more graphs. Texas doesn't just have solar and wind, they've got batteries too!

See new posts Conversation Our World in Data @OurWorldInData Most of the increase in natural disasters in the late 20th century is due to improved reporting— Tracking the occurrence of natural disasters can save lives by helping countries prepare for future ones. In our work on natural disasters, we visualize data from EM-DAT, the most comprehensive international disaster database. Make a chart of the number of recorded disaster events over time — like the one here — and it looks like the number of disasters rose alarmingly from the 1970s to the millennium. This has led to many media outlets and organizations claiming that the number of disasters has quadrupled over the last 50 years. However, as EM-DAT itself makes clear, most of this is due to improvements in recording. The Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters, which builds this database, was not established until 1973, and didn’t start publishing EM-DAT until 1988. The number of recorded disasters increased due to more focused efforts to obtain globally comprehensive data and improvements in communication technologies, which allowed more events to be included, even in the planet's most remote areas. EM-DAT suggests that only data from 2000 onwards is relatively complete and comparable. The number of events before 2000 is likely to be underestimated. Note that this data does not tell us anything about the intensity of disasters. (This Data Insight was written by Hannah Ritchie.) — (src)(cached)

I have definitely heard stats about natural disasters as evidence of various things and it's interesting to learn the limits of the data!

See new posts Conversation reed @reed all 3 expansions from @waymo today — (src)(cached)

I think they still don't go on the highway. They also still haven't reached the airport, are they executing a pincer movement against SFO?, No, it's because Supervisor Peskin executed 'legislative guerrilla warfare' to stop them. For the simplest thing to do is take Waymo to the San Bruno bart station, and then go from there to the airport. Waymo recently released new accident statistics and wouldn't you know it, they continue to have an excellent safety record (cached)

Flotsam and Jetsam

– Hot mic: Trump wishes he was treated like Kim-Jong Un (src)(cached)
– NYTimes didn't do an endorsement in the mayoral primary, but they did publish an editorial that amounts to one. You can run the editorial through an AI to reverse engineer their specific, rank-order recommendations. (src)(cached)
– People are mad at Annie Lowrey for dumb reasons recently, but here’s a summary of an old article she wrote! " (src)(cached)
– It's important to update your views based on new information, it's especially important as a public intellectual to say that's what you're doing, instead of just slinking away from ideas that are not working out. Here's Darrel Owens admitting he was wrong and explaining what he's learned. (src)(cached)
– The US-UK trade deal is literally a blank sheet of paper and only Trump signed it. Plus he announced it as an EU trade deal while standing next to the prime minister of the UK, notably not part of the EU. (src)(cached)
– Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, was cut out of the meeting where the president and national-security team gathered before the Israeli airstrike on Iran. He's publicly stated he doesn't really care what she thinks about the situation. I agree with Noah Smith that it would be great if he just fired her (cached) (src)(cached)
– New reporting indicates that Trump greenlit the attack on Iran that Biden explicitly ruled out (cached) per new reporting (src)(cached)
– Russia signed a strategic pact with Iran in January of this year. But it didn't actually have any clauses about either country defending the other. And I don't know if this will surprise you, but Russia is absolutely not coming to Iran's aid. (src)(cached)

There seems to be a flaw with the railing in the top image.

Tugboat for Today

Discussion about this post