@ChrisO_wiki Let me know when Goldman executives sell their yachts.
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John A. Boudet
26.5K posts
John A. Boudet
@JohnBoudet
| Lawyer | Fan of science, reason,1st Amendment, college football, and great writing. Politically homeless. Likes and retweets aren’t necessarily endorsements.
USA Katılım Nisan 2012
395 Takip Edilen717 Takipçiler
1/ Goldman Sachs analysts report that the biggest oil crisis in history is about to hit globally, with profound and highly destructive consequences. A new report asks ""Are We Running Out of Oil?", and concludes that the answer is yes. ⬇️
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John A. Boudet retweetledi
NATO is in far bigger danger than anyone realizes. And the reason has nothing to do with defense budgets.
The real danger is psychological. It’s cultural.
Europeans didn’t just free-ride on American security for 80 years. They built an entire identity around the idea that they evolved past the Americans protecting them.
That identity is now the single biggest obstacle to Western survival. And the darkest irony is: we helped build it.
After World War II, Europe wasn’t just economically shattered. Its culture was in ruins. The cities, the universities, the concert halls, the museums. Rubble.
The Marshall Plan rebuilt the economy. But culture wasn’t a priority. Not at first.
Then the Iron Curtain dropped. And suddenly culture became a weapon.
American diplomats, academics, artists & scholars flooded Western Europe. We funded their universities. Supported their orchestras. Rebuilt their museums. Promoted their intellectual life.
Not because European culture needed saving for its own sake.
Because Eastern Europeans were struggling for Maslow’s mist basic needs.
We needed the view from the other side of that Wall to be intoxicating.
So America built Western Europe into a showcase of self-actualization. Art. Philosophy. Cafe culture. Long vacations. Universities where people studied literature instead of surviving.
We were manufacturing jealousy.
And it worked. The Wall came down.
But here’s what no one accounted for.
When you give a society self-actualization on someone else’s tab long enough, they forget it was a gift. They start believing it was organically theirs.
And when they look at the country that funded it all, a country busy building aircraft carriers and semiconductor fabs and shale fields instead of reaching the Maslow’s pinnacle.
An overweight American in a ball cap who can’t tell Monet from Pissarro. Who eats fast food. Who drives a truck. Who builds strip malls instead of piazzas.
And to a culture trained in aesthetics but stripped of strategic awareness, that American looks uncivilized.
So the arrogance takes root. And once a culture decides another is beneath them, they stop listening.
Americans say wars are sometimes necessary: crude.
Oil is the backbone of prosperity: unsophisticated.
Kids build companies in garages that reshape the planet: crass.
Wall Street finances the global economy: vulgar.
Europe has no world-class technology sector. No military capable of strong defense. No energy independence. No AI capacity.
What Europe has is culture. The culture we paid for at the expense of us reaching Maslow’s pinnacle.
For decades that was fine. We funded the museums, protected the sea lanes, and tolerated the sneering because the arrangement worked.
Then Europeans stopped keeping the contempt private. They started saying it to our faces. In their media. In their parliaments. At every international forum. “Americans are stupid.
Americans are violent. Americans are a threat to democracy.”
We could have moved the Louvre to NY. We could have built a Venice here. We could have stolen your best artists, designers, philosophers and more… like your conquering armies did for centuries.
Instead we funded them. And all we asked for in return was to let us visit.
You don’t have the military to defend your borders. You don’t have the technology to compete. You don’t have the energy to heat your homes without begging dictators.
What you have is an 80-year superiority complex FUNDED BY AMERICANS, protected by American soldiers, and built on the false belief that self-actualization is civilization.
It isn’t. Civilization is the ability to sustain itself. By that measure, Europe isn’t a civilization at all. It’s a dependency with better wine.
That’s not a threat. It’s a weather report.
Build a Navy. Or don’t. But stop lecturing the people who made you “better than us”
Our “crudeness” our “stunted liberal education” our “ugly strip malls” are because we sacrificed our culture to support yours.
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@ramizarchi1144 @joshiamitabhevo Good question dumbfuck. How could an elite, ultra-fit airman equipped with an emergency survival pack coupled with years extensive survival training survive a whole 48 hours?
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@joshiamitabhevo How come the pilot survived 2 days in a hot desert without water, food, and that too after ejecting from the aircraft
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Something about this F15 crew rescue doesn't add up. Why would one need C130s (carry 60-70 troops) for rescuing one or two aircrew and maybe a few troops whose helicopter got shot down during the rescue. It looks more like spl forces were in a temporary base with C130s etc. 1/3
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I got into trouble snorkelling in a strong current and had to be rescued by the lifeguard. But had an otherwise perfect day in Queensland with @novemberflood, @mark_ledwich and friend S.
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What could possibly be the military rationale for this.
There isn’t one.
Alireza Akbari@itsalireza_akb
B1 bridge in Karaj has been hit in US-ISRAELI attacks. This bridge is reportedly the "highest bridge in West Asia."
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@shanaka86 Whenever I see someone use the term “double-tap,” I know I’m dealing with a propagandist.
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JUST IN: On April 1, President Trump promised to bring Iran “back to the stone ages where they belong.” On April 2, aircraft struck the B1 Bridge on the Tehran-Karaj northern bypass, one of the tallest highway structures in the Middle East and a centrepiece of Iranian civil engineering. The bridge was hit twice. The second strike landed while rescue teams were operating at the site of the first. At least two civilians were killed. Multiple were injured. Video footage shows smoke rising from fractured concrete, bridge sections falling, and emergency workers running from a structure that was still being bombed as they tried to save the people the first bomb buried.
The IDF issued an unusual statement: “The attack on the highway bridge in Iran was not carried out by Israel.” The denial is specific. It names the target. It does not say who did carry it out. It does not say the strike was wrong. It says Israel was not responsible for this one. The phrasing invites the question it refuses to answer. If not Israel, then who? The United States has not commented. No tanker support from Souda Bay, Ben Gurion, or Prince Sultan has been confirmed for this specific operation. The strike happened. The attribution remains contested. The bridge remains damaged. The dead remain dead.
This is the moment the war changed category. For five weeks, Operation Epic Fury targeted military infrastructure: naval bases, missile factories, air defence networks, command bunkers, the IRGC Aerospace headquarters, the Isfahan missile city. The targets were uniformed. The justification was strategic. The phrase “precision strike” appeared in every briefing. The B1 Bridge is none of those things. It is a highway. It carries commuters between Tehran and Karaj. It was under construction as part of Iran’s northern bypass project. Its destruction does not degrade a single missile launcher or sink a single fast-attack boat. It degrades the ability of nine million people in Tehran to move.
Trump’s “Stone Ages” rhetoric was dismissed as hyperbole when he first used it. After the B1 Bridge, it is becoming operational. If the campaign extends to power plants, desalination facilities, and transportation infrastructure as Trump has threatened, the distinction between degrading the IRGC and degrading Iranian civilisation collapses. A country without bridges, without power, without clean water is not a country whose military has been defeated. It is a country whose population has been punished. The Geneva Conventions distinguish between military objectives and civilian objects. A highway bridge serving a metropolitan population of 15 million is not ambiguous.
The double-tap compounds the signal. Striking during active rescue operations is a pattern condemned by every international humanitarian law framework. Whether the second strike was deliberate or a targeting error, the footage exists, the rescue teams were visible, and the timing between impacts was short enough that responders had not yet left the site.
Iran will use this. The footage is already circulating on Iranian state media, Al Jazeera, and across social platforms with millions of views. The bridge is a symbol now. Not of military defeat but of civilian suffering. Every frame of falling concrete will be played alongside Trump’s “Stone Ages” quote until the two become inseparable in the global narrative.
The war was supposed to end in the stone ages. The stone ages just arrived on a highway bridge between Tehran and Karaj.
open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…
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@TheFungi669 @MalcolmNance Where exactly did Marco Rubio say that “your parents must be US citizens?” That has never been his position.
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Marco Rubio: “Just because you’re born on U.S. soil doesn’t make you a citizen. Your parents must be U.S. citizens.”
Grok: “Marco Rubio was born in Miami in 1971. His parents became citizens in 1975. Rubio is a beneficiary of birthright citizenship.”
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@KhalidAlMans_ @MalcolmNance This is clarifying. Perhaps the US should continue bombing Iran until the irredeemable ayatollahs are completely obliterated.
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@MiamiHerald What a screwed up headline. Journalism has become complete trash. Or maybe it always was.
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Nancy Guthrie Update: Body Found in Scottsdale Canal Prompts Death Investigation miamiherald.com/entertainment/…
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@McFaul @MalcolmNance Because that’s where the nuclear scientists are.
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The word "communist" has lost all meaning in MAGA world. Let's fix that.
What communism actually is:
• State ownership of ALL means of production
• Abolition of private property
• No free markets
• Single-party authoritarian rule
What US Democrats actually support:
• Capitalism with regulations
• Private property rights
• Free markets with safety nets
• Multiple parties, free elections
Communist parties in US Congress: 0
Socialist parties in US Congress: 0
Democratic Socialists (Bernie-style): ~5 out of 535
The Democratic Party would be center-right in most of Europe. Biden and Harris are capitalists. Always have been.
But you call everything you don't like "communism" because:
1. You can't define it
2. You never learned political science
3. Fox/OAN/Newsmax told you scary words = Democrats
4. You're in a cult that requires an enemy
"Do your own research" means YouTube videos.
"Communist" means "thing I don't like."
"Patriot" means "person in my cult."
The states with the worst education rankings vote the most Republican. That's not a coincidence.
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Tampa, FL just hit its lowest migration level on record.
A net 1,539 people left Tampa's metro area in 2025 - the first decline ever recorded going back four decades.
Worse yet - birth rates are plummeting, and the area now has more deaths than births.
This is happening due to a dramatic affordability crisis in Tampa, St. Petersburg, and Clearwater. The entire metro became very expensive during the pandemic, and locals can't afford it, so they're leaving.
The only saving grace for the Florida Bay Area was international migration, which kept overall population growth slightly positive at +13,000.
However, this was also the lowest level in nearly 40 years.
Access migration data by state and county for your area at reventure.app.
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@kmbiamnozie This is partially true, but westerners seem to not know shia history, since the death of prophet Mohamed PUH and coup against Ali, the shia are surviving hostile regimes, they are under hunting from 1400 years, so all of this resilience is an accumulation from this experience!!
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The most difficult subject in War School was Iran, you know why? No one, even my Professors who were former intelligence operatives couldn’t tell Irans military strategy.
Militarily, Iran did what no country has done. The decentralization of it Forces, a well organized a formidable units with its own brain around defense. You can embed the CIA and Mossad as much as you want in Iran, but there’s a place where everything stops.
So let me give you a little lesson about Iran, It is Not a country. Not really.
More like a living labyrinth, designed not to win wars the way empires do but to outlive them.
You see, in the grand theaters of war, where men like Napoleon Bonaparte chased glory and where doctrine is etched into polished marble halls, Iran chose a different scripture entirely.
They studied collapse.
They watched the fate of men like Saddam Hussein, a towering army, centralized, proud and decapitated in weeks. They watched Libya. They watched Afghanistan. And somewhere in the ashes of those fallen regimes, Iran asked a far more dangerous question:
“What survives when the head is cut off?”
And so, they removed the head.
No single brain. No single nerve center.
Instead, a thousand smaller minds, each capable of thought, of violence, of continuation.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is not merely a military force. It is a philosophy with weapons. A hydra. You don’t defeat it, you inconvenience it.
Cut one arm, another recalibrates.
Silence one commander, ten more adjust without ceremony, without pause.
No dramatic funerals in the command chain. No operational paralysis.
Just continuity.
And then there’s the illusion, the one that keeps intelligence officers awake at night.
You can penetrate a system, yes. The Central Intelligence Agency has. The Mossad certainly has. They’ve turned assets, intercepted signals, even reached into places once thought untouchable.
But Iran doesn’t build for secrecy alone.
It builds for betrayal.
Every layer watched by another. Every agent suspected before he proves loyal. Every corridor lined not just with doors but with mirrors.
You think you’re inside the system until you realize the system anticipated you long before you arrived.
Now, about the dead.
Spies, operatives, assets: men and women who stepped into that maze believing tradecraft could save them.
Some vanished quietly. Others, not so quietly.
Iran has made examples of those it accuses of espionage, broadcasting confessions, staging executions, sending messages carved not in ink but in consequence.
But here’s the truth no agency will print:
The real number? The real cost?
Buried.
Because in that world, numbers are not statistics, they’re vulnerabilities.
You see, my friend, most nations prepare for war.
Iran prepares for endurance.
It doesn’t ask, “How do we defeat our enemy?” It asks, “How do we remain when they have exhausted themselves trying?”
And that, that is a far more terrifying strategy.
Because history has a peculiar habit of remembering not the strongest, but the last one standing.
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@kmbiamnozie Oh no! Decentralized independent warrior culture? No actual country? Like say, American Indians?
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US @SecRubio told G7 the US is NOT expecting the Strait to re-open 2 traffic as usual by end of war. "After this thing ends...one of the immediate challenges we’re going to face is an Iran that may decide that they want to set up a tolling system in the Strait of Hormuz” 1/
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@HistoryBoomer How can you possibly claim that the war has no clear goals? 1) Eliminate Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons; 2) Degrade Iran’s ballistic missile program; 3) Stop Iran from exporting terrorism through proxies. May be hard to achieve, but not hard to understand.
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I see people dunking, but
a) 98% haven't read it.
b) We've destroyed weapons and killed leaders, but they keep getting new leaders, and they still have weapons to close the straits. When does victory happen? They may collapse tomorrow, but if not, how long will this go?
I'm not making predictions. But I'm a citizen, and I see my country carrying out a war without clear goals, and I wonder where it will end. Trump owed Americans a major speech to clearly explain why we were spending blood and treasure in Iran, but that never happened.
The Economist@TheEconomist
A month of bombing Iran has achieved nothing. Will Donald Trump escalate, or talk? For now, at least, the advantage lies with the Islamic Republic. Register for free to learn why econ.st/4bPYtXk
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@jemelehill What if the Rooney Ruke required interviewing at least one Catholic for every coaching vacancy before being permitted to hire a non-Catholic? See the problem Jamele?
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So just to be clear: Florida is trying to challenge the NFL on the Rooney Rule when there are 3 Black coaches in the NFL, two Black offensive coordinators, and four Black general managers.
This is out of 32 teams.
It seems like the system has worked swimmingly well for white guys, so … what’s the issue?
Attorney General James Uthmeier@AGJamesUthmeier
Professional sports are a visible example of a merit-based system, but through the Rooney Rule, the NFL requires its teams to use race-based hiring practices. We are putting Commissioner Roger Goodell on notice: the Rooney Rule violates Florida law, and it must stop.
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@SarahTheHaider @thomaschattwill @Musa_alGharbi There has never been a time when hot-bodied spring breakers were preoccupied or even conversant with the nuances of US foreign policy. Thankfully.
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@thomaschattwill @Musa_alGharbi You all have this completely backwards, and I will die on this hill. 🪦🪦
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A lot of the problems in the world right now can be explained by this video. For one thing, it’s a big reason why the US government is so unaccountable to public opinion. These are *college students.* A significant amount of the country is totally checked out and comfortable enough not to think it matters.
New York Post@nypost
TV reporter finds the dumbest spring breakers in America: ‘Who the f–k is ayatollah?’ nypost.com/2026/03/24/us-…
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