Piercing the Veil

Way back in the mists of time, in the autumn of 2005 when this blog was still in diapers, there was a minor kerfuffle about the virtues and vices of blogging anonymously.

Since the sort of people who start blogs do so because they tend to have opinions on frickin' everything, it was no surprise that lots of people had opinions on the topic.

It's popped up here and there since then in various online spaces where I participate, like forums and certain corners of social media.

I'm pretty ambivalent on the topic. I don't blog anonymously because for me there's hardly any point in it. I've gone by my government name all over the web since the days of dialup but I respect that other people may not want to and, to rifle through Thomas Jefferson's desk drawers for an appropriate aphorism, it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. You want to blog anonymously, knock yourself out.

But I do think it's chilling that one thing LLMs seem to be good at is sussing out anonymous posters and tying them to their wallet name via language use analysis.

Anonymity ain't what it used to be.

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Meme Dump!

War News...

• IRIS Dena, an Iranian frigate, has been torpedoed and sunk by US submarine off the coast of Sri Lanka.


• White House arranges evacuation of some social media influencers from Qatar.


• The Royal Navy is dispatching the HMS Dragon, a Type 45 destroyer, to assist in the defense of Cyprus from drone and missile attack.

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Hump Day Memes!

History Repeats Itself

During World War Two, the Hawker Typhoon and its successor, the Tempest, were vital to the interception of German V-1 "Buzz Bombs" due to their high speed capabilities at low altitudes.

On Sunday, a Royal Air Force Eurofighter Typhoon operating as part of the joint UK-Qatari Typhoon Squadron shot down an Iranian drone, probably a Shahed, headed for Qatar.

Qatar operates two squadrons of the jets themselves, and Qatari Air Force Typhoons claimed two Iranian Su-24 Fencer "Aardvarkski" fighter bombers, which would be the first claimed air-to-air kills of the current dust-up.

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Sauve Qui Peut

The UK has approximately twenty-thousand citizens... expats, tax refugees, tourists, and civilian workers ...in the Persian Gulf nation of Qatar is trying to scheme up a way to evacuate that many people.

The US State Department has issued a travel warning to US citizens for numerous nations in the region.

We've shut down consular services at the embassy in Doha and evacuated government employees and dependents. Like the UK, we also have about 10,000 American citizens in Qatar, but with commercial airline service disrupted, they're kinda on their own, per this professor at Georgetown University's campus in Qatar.

Meme Dump!

Glub.

Iranian navy vessels at Bandar Abbas are looking a little worse for wear.

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Monday Morning Memes!

Epistemic Crackup

The universality of always-on broadband internet connections in our pockets really kicked off an experiment in Epistemological Choose Your Own Adventure and, friends, it's not going swimmingly.

The proliferation of AI-generated imagery and video has absolutely turbocharged it. Social media was awash by yesterday afternoon in AI videos of varying quality claiming to show a burning USS Abraham Lincoln sinking. (You know, the one the Houthis claimed they sank last year.)

Can't wait to run into the CVN-72 Truthers in the wild later this year who claim that the Iranians actually sank the Lincoln and the Deep State is covering it up.

War News...

• Three F-15E Strike Eagles got engaged by friendly SAMs over Kuwait, according to CENTCOM. All the Mudhen crews ejected safely.


• In Congressional briefings, administration officials contradict the narrative that we had intel that Iran was preparing a strike Epic Fury was preemptive.


• Dwindling weapons stockpiles could hamper operations.


• Oil prices rising, gas prices will inevitably follow.

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Tab Clearing...

• CENTCOM denies IRGC claims about striking the USS Abraham Lincoln with four ballistic missiles, saying they didn't even come close.


• "This war brought to you by Draftkings Sportsbook..."


• Maersk avoiding shipping routes in the Red Sea and Persian Gulf less than a month after resuming normal Suez traffic.

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QotD: Moderate Killbot Edition...

Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten on the Anthropic v. DoD slap fight...

Needless to say, I support Anthropic here. I’m a sensible moderate on the killbot issue (we’ll probably get them eventually, and I doubt they’ll make things much worse compared to AI “only” having unfettered access to every Internet-enabled computer in the world). But AI-enabled mass surveillance of US citizens seems like the sort of thing we should at least have a chance to think over, rather than demanding it from the get-go.

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LOL. Also, LMAO.

Seems Tucker Carlson is big mad.

Carlson, a long-time Trump supporter, said the attack on Iran is "absolutely disgusting and evil." He also suggested it will have a significant effect on Trump's political movement, saying, "This is going to shuffle the deck in a profound way."

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Strange Timing Explained

A lot of assets were still moving into theater, dependents hadn't been evacuated from Naval Support Activity Bahrain and other facilities that were within an easy chip shot of Iranian Fateh launchers across the Gulf, and the attacks were launched in broad daylight... this was obviously something launched on the fly rather than a preplanned zero hour.

Via Matthew Ford, author of War in the Smartphone Age and other books, the Israelis had, in addition to having hacked one of the most popular apps in Iran, gotten intel that Khamenei and other high-ranking Iranian government officials would be meeting in a specific place at a specific time, so that's why the snap launch of a decapitation strike.

EDIT: According to an NYT piece, CIA's trying to claim credit for the intel.

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Meme Dump!

His loss is no loss...

One of the most clear cut cases of misdemeanor murder I've seen in a while. The world's a better place without the decedent in it.

Iran has, of course, vowed retaliation, but their conventional options are pretty slim. Boy, what a time to have gutted our domestic counterintelligence and counterterrorism establishments and re-tasked a huge chunk of federal LEOs to chasing down roofers and hotel housekeepers in Bumfuck, Iowa.

Desultory missile tag continues across the Persian Gulf, a mob tried to storm the U.S. consulate in Karachi, Pakistan, and Oman reports a tanker was hit off their coast in the Strait of Hormuz.

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From 24 hours ago...

That's a lot of big sky iron in one place all at once. Six E-3 Sentries... (mislabeled as E-3Cs, when ours are all E-3Gs) ...at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi. That's something like roughly a third of our AWACs fleet right there.

It's out of SRBM range for most of Iran's arsenal, and I don't know what their MRBM fleet is looking like after our last round of bomb tag with the Islamic Republic.

We're gonna wind up burning up a year's worth of ballistic missile interceptor production in the next couple weeks, I bet.

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Meme Dump!

"Epic Fury"? YHGTBSM.

On Saturday, Mr. Trump announced that “major combat operations” were underway in Iran. The Department of Defense has called the strikes “Operation Epic Fury.”

Did they poll middle school Call of Duty players for the operation name? I miss the good ol' days when we named them after strippers, like Odyssey Dawn.

I sweartagawd we are only about two steps away from

Official Pentagon spokesman PubliusMaximus1488 announced that “We’ve totally mogged Iran with Operation Based Bombmaxxing. We’d like to thank the best president ever for making America great again.”

Fundamentally unserious people.‪

PS: Boy, these tweets aged like fine milk, didn't they?

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"ISI what you did there..."

Relations between the neighboring countries have deteriorated recently over Pakistan’s accusations that the Afghan government is harboring the Pakistani Taliban, known as Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan.

So Pakistan's casus belli is that the Afghani Taliban are sheltering, arming, and training the Pakistani Taliban... which if you know anything about the history of the Taliban is some world class irony.

"Actually, Pakistan is the name of the doctor. The creature is called Pakistan's monster."

Fighting The Monster GIFfrom Fighting GIFs

Tab Clearing...

• An app that warns you when it thinks smart glasses are nearby.


• When you're finally over the effin' snow.


• Jim Grey encounters enshittification.

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Last Memes Before the Weekend!

Didn't we just leave this party?

Mike Huckabee, the US Ambassador to Israel, is urging embassy staff to hop any flight they can get out of the country, and pronto.

Those wishing to leave “should do so TODAY,” Mr. Huckabee wrote in the email, sent at 10:24 a.m. local time. He urged them to find a flight out of Ben-Gurion Airport to any destination for which they could book passage.

The embassy’s move “will likely result in high demand for airline seats today,” he said in the email, a copy of which was reviewed by The New York Times. “Focus on getting a seat to anyplace from which you can then continue travel to DC, but the first priority will be getting expeditiously out of country.”

For a guy who ran on a platform of not getting us into any foreign wars, this president sure does seem to enjoy getting involved in them.

Also, remember when we "obliterated" Iran's nuclear program? Everybody from Al Jazeera to CNN does. Now we need to re-obliterate it or something, I guess.

Meanwhile, Pakistan and Afghanistan are basically in an actual shooting war now, if a largely desultory and remote controlled one thus far.