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Friday the 13th Forum
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22 responses to “Friday the 13th Forum”
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Trump is shooting his mouth off in ways that show Iran its path to winning.
Here is how little weak countries beat big strong countries at war, merely by persisting:
“Link1”
“Link2”
Link1:
Carl von Clausewitz famously wrote that war is “a contest of wills.” Not a contest of bombs. Not a contest of slick Pentagon graphics or dramatic night-vision footage on cable news. A contest of wills. The side that demonstrates greater resolve over time wins.
Which brings us to Operation Epic Fury, the Trump administration’s strike campaign against Iran and its proxy network.
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Third, and this is where the Clausewitzian alarm bells start ringing, the administration keeps telegraphing that the war will end soon. The president has repeatedly suggested that once the strike packages are finished, things will wrap up.
That is wonderful news if you are sitting in Tehran.
Because if your enemy publicly announces the war will end shortly, the obvious strategy is to hunker down and wait.
We have seen this movie before.
When President Obama announced the troop surge in Afghanistan in 2009, he also announced the withdrawal timeline. The message to the Taliban was crystal clear: survive the surge and the Americans will leave.
So the Taliban did exactly what any rational insurgent movement would do. They hunkered down in Pakistan and waited us out.
Iran’s leadership understands this dynamic perfectly. They have been playing the long game against the United States for forty years. Waiting out American political attention spans is practically a national sport in Tehran.
Link2
In the early commentary surrounding the conflict with Iran, much of the language was confident, almost casual. The assumption was that American technological superiority, precision strikes, intelligence dominance, and overwhelming firepower, would allow the United States to move quickly and decisively. It would be a short war. We would impose our will, break their capacity to resist, and move on. But wars do not end when one side decides they should. Wars end only when both sides agree the war is over.
Wars, despite the best efforts of the well-intentioned international community, do not have referees.
That reality creates an entirely different strategic logic for the weaker side. Much like the overmatched fighter in the ring, Iran does not necessarily have to win outright. For now, it simply has to avoid losing. Every day the conflict continues becomes a success.
Every time you click on a link to see what happened in the Iran War today, it is a victory. Because this was a war of choice, where “we have the watches, but they have the time.”
The objective shifts away from decisive victory and toward endurance. The weaker side slows the tempo, absorbs punishment, provokes mistakes, and drags the stronger opponent into a contest of time and pain tolerance. It is the geopolitical version of the dirty fight. You make the stronger opponent work at a pace that erodes his advantages. You frustrate him. You provoke overreach. You force him to expend resources and patience while the clock of American public opinion keeps ticking.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/03/12/kc-135-crash-iraq-iran/
4 dead after U.S. Air Force refueler crashes in Iraq while supporting Iran war
The KC-135 tanker, which had a crew of six, was involved in an apparent accident with another KC-135. The other aircraft landed safely, officials said.
Four service members died after a U.S. Air Force refueling aircraft crashed in Iraq on Thursday while supporting operations in Iran, military officials said.
Rescue efforts were still underway for the remaining two crew members, U.S. Central Command said, after an apparent mid-air accident between two U.S. Air Force KC-135 tanker aircraft.
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@charontwo: For now, hunkering down is simple.
But I assume the Taliban is why Pete Hegseth keeps spouting his deranged, Branniganian ideas about manly men sacrificing themselves in a manly war with no rules or constraints, because one way to counter the wait-it-out strategy would be deploying ground troops willing to cow occupied towns through whatever means necessary. The far right is convinced that if you just do enough violence to people they consider sub-human or NPCs, you will win. Sadly, Trump and his goon squad are obviously itching to act on that feeling and make all of this a thousand times worse.
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Here is how little weak countries beat big strong countries at war, merely by persisting
Considering what’s at stake for Iran’s regime and for Trump & co., the incentives to just take the punishment are quite a bit bigger for the Iranians.
Same stupid mistake that Putin made with regards to Ukraine. Except that Russia is willing to take considerable punishment as well, something that Mr. TACO almost certainly won’t.
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@charontwo: I keep thinking Trump can’t get any more childish and embarrassing and he keeps proving me wrong. For the millionth time – if Joe Biden, or any other POTUS, had said a tenth of the dumb sh*t that comes out of Trump’s mouth every day, their political career would end and a team of mental health professionals would be assigned. (And Jake Tapper’s head would explode.)
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“unlimited ammunition” is not consistent with other reporting.
“plenty of time”? – remains to be seen.
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DONALD TRUMP’S WAR IN IRAN has shocked and confused people around the world, including foreign officials. One reason might be that many of these people learned English before Trump came to power. In Trump’s war, words no longer mean what they used to mean. Here’s a guide to some of the president’s language.
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Check out segment 2. here:
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/trumps-huge-complete-very-strong-victory-iran-getting-costly
So: SpaceX will have most of its stock locked up, but the new rules the Nasdaq adopted in order to lure SpaceX onto the exchange will rush it into the index and inflate its post-IPO price.
[T]he initial Day 15 squeeze will inevitably cool off. But by waiving the seasoning period and jamming this low-float behemoth into the index immediately, you have completely corrupted the baseline. You’ve forced passive indexers to buy at the absolute top of an engineered liquidity squeeze. You have established a manipulated, artificially elevated price floor fueled by forced buying.
For the next five months, the stock will be based on a highly distorted market structure, driven in part by continued passive inflows (barring a market meltdown). And here is where the math gets truly sadistic.
Nasdaq’s proposed rules explicitly state that float figures are only updated during scheduled quarterly rebalances. And what happens when a company’s float goes above 20%? The 5x multiplier is dropped, and the company is upgraded to a full, 100% index weighting.
Guess what! The SpaceX lockup period is magically scheduled to end right before the quarterly index rebalance. Meaning that SpaceX insiders can unload while the baseline price is artificially high.
The funniest part in all of this is that Musk is pretending the IPO timing is about astronomical alignment—he says picked mid-June for the IPO because of Jupiter and Venus. But it’s really about having the lockup period end just before December 18, 2026, which is the rebalance date.
The guy knows how to leverage his wealth and he knows how to turn out his followers.
Conclusion: The QQQ (Nasdaq) ETF is one ETF best avoided.
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I have been fascinated by Havana Syndrome since the story broke.
60 Minutes aired a segment on it. Anonymous sources from multiple agencies claim that undercover DHS agents purchased a small device that emits pulsed microwave energy from a criminal syndicate in Russia.
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“unlimited ammunition” is not consistent with other reporting.
It depends very much on what ammunition is being counted. Missiles of all sorts are a problem. OTOH, the global supply of 500- and 1000-pound versions of the Mk80 bomb family seems essentially unlimited. The US manufacturer of JDAM kits for those bombs has in recent history demonstrated the ability to produce 20,000 kits per year. This is probably sufficient to strike targets within Iran as fast as they can be identified.
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Trump suggests high oil prices are a positive after bragging about low gas prices last month
PBS Thursday, March 12, 2026President Donald Trump, Bessent added in his statement, was “taking decisive steps to promote stability in global energy markets and working to keep prices low.”NBC News Friday, March 13, 2026
Trump doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground.
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What’s a terrible movie with an excellent score — specifically a terrible movie that I haven’t seen, but that’s not a really a useful selection criteria for anyone other than me. But a score that stands up on its own, independent from the film.
My hope is to really get to know that score — to expect every twist and turn of the music, and deeply love it. And then see the absolutely terrible movie utterly and incompetently play out against the music. I just think it would be a fun experience.
I got the idea in my head when Apple Music suggested I listen to the soundtrack to “Star Trek: Nemesis,” but that’s more of a not terrible soundtrack to an absolutely terrible movie that I have seen seen.
A friend suggested “Vampyros Lesbos,” and the soundtrack is excellent, but I can’t imagine this music actually really fitting a movie rather than just being layered on top to try to cover up the movie.
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As I tap this out on my little iPad, I realize that I am trying to recreate the magical experience of watching the movie “Zero Hour” — “Airplane!” is a remake of “Zero Hour” so if you know every joke of “Airplane!” then “Zero Hour” is a delightful 90 minutes of anticipation and disappointment.
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Xanadu
It has one iconic Olivia Newton John song, Magic. The album made more money in sales than the film did at the box office.
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@Gustopher: I’ll nominate 633 Squadron. Formulaic WWII movie, heroic flyers, with the requisite American hero and token Irishman, Cockney, Sikh, etc. Per WIKI, “While critics derided the wooden acting and hackneyed plot, and the use of the miscast Mirisch Pictures contract star George Chakiris (as a Norwegian), the aerial scenes were considered spectacular and with Ron Goodwin’s music remained the main attraction.” As I recall the music is largely cribbed from Liszt Le Preludes.
This was 1963, before the “wooden wonder” Mosquito bombers weathered too badly, and they were able to fly a handful for the movie. Fun for us aviation buffs. I’ve walked around one of the planes, which is now in the USAF Museum in Dayton. The Germans were reduced to the usual Messerschmitt Bf 108 (French license built per WIKI) four seat sport plane standing in for Bf 109 fighter.
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How about that? Seven in 10 Americans are right.
TL;DR: 72% of Americans think the Taco tariffs have increased prices.
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I heard about this latest AI abomination from Grammarly on Bluesky yesterday.
The gist, the app uses AI to pass itself off as experts in various fields.
Like an AI could come up with Sagan’s musings on a photo of Earth taken by a Voyager probe from very far away?
The narration always gives me goosebumps.
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@Michael Cain:
If Iranian high altitude air defence is gone (as seems likely) then the US can strike almost at will, with reasobale precision.
The question is, can the US actually fix the dispersed drone launch teams, and stocks, enough to remove the threat at the Straits of Hormuz?
If the US can open the straits, it may be able to grind down the Iranian governement.
If not, not.
