Ummagumma

[ Read all my Iran stuff. ] (Noon Eastern Time) Donald Trump is talking about whacking Iran again. On Saturday, after casting an early ballot in Florida, he said the United States was “thinking about doing it, and maybe tomorrow,” or might reach “a nice, big, beautiful agreement” instead. Today he said there would be no strike today, and that he’s weighing a deal or action to “finish them off.” On October 8 he promised no attack before the midterms on November 3. A week later he told a rally crowd in Alaska, “Wait till you see what we do to Iran.” NPR reports that American and Israeli planners have drawn up a short, intensive campaign for early November. The White House and Pentagon have plans to use the Mother of All Bombs (MOAB). Pickaxe Mountain, a deeply buried nuclear-related facility in Iran, has been named out loud. “We may have to go there,” Trump said. “We’ll knock it out fast.” Meanwhile, Netanyahu faces Israeli voters on October 27. After Trump endorsed him, he told voters...

[ Read all my Iran stuff. ] (11am Eastern Time) In October 1962 the missiles sat on launch pads in Cuba and the world waited to see whether they would fly. In October 2026 they fly every night. They come out of Yemen and fall on Riyadh, Dhahran, Abha and Medina. The Houthis are kicking ass. The Saudi-led coalition says they attacked Riyadh's King Khalid International Airport 20 times this month. The airport strikes between October 6 and 12 killed at least 20 people and injured more than 370. The important international airport is still closed. On Tuesday a Houthi missile set the executive headquarters of Saudi Aramco in Dhahran on fire. On Thursday Saudi air defenses intercepted a cruise missile over Medina, then a ballistic missile in the same area. Medina. The second holiest city in Islam. A summit between the European Union and the Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman), scheduled for Riyadh on October 24, has been postponed. Canada, Ja...

[ Read all my Iran stuff. ] (4 pm Eastern Time) The Houthis hit the passenger terminals at Riyadh's international airport yesterday. Saudi authorities report 12 dead and 309 injured, the deadliest attack on any Gulf Arab country since the war began. It was the third strike on King Khalid International Airport in a week. The Wall Street Journal reports direct hits on two buildings of the domestic terminal complex. This evening another projectile struck Terminal 4, a passenger terminal, injuring more people. The toll is still rising.  India says one of its citizens has died of wounds from yesterday's attack. The Houthis have declared Saudi airspace a zone of military operations and warned everyone away from Saudi airports, and their media chief boasted that they had shut down Riyadh's international airport. Every major player in the region (minus Iran) condemns the attack. Suddenly, the airport is the center point of this sprawling war. I wonder whether the Houthis achieved ...

[Read my AI: A Dangerous Vision series.] On September 3, Bernie Sanders and Rep. Greg Casar announced the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act. On September 16, Sanders walked Geoffrey Hinton and Max Tegmark into a briefing for senators. On September 22, Donald Trump told the United Nations that American documents, and hopefully the world's, would stop saying artificial intelligence. They would say super intelligence. The word artificial, he explained, makes intelligence sound fake. The next day Sanders formally introduced his bill. Six days after that Trump signed an executive order titled "Inaugurating The Era Of Super Intelligence." It seems we have a war over spelling and meaning at precisely this moment in human history. Look at the spelling. Sanders writes superintelligence, one word, the way the people who coined it wrote it. Trump writes Super Intelligence, two words, capitalized, abbreviated SI. One word is a more artful rendering, not necessarily better, howev...

[ Read all my Iran stuff. ] (2pm Eastern Time) As I write this, Yemen's government is attacking the Houthis along the Red Sea coast. Yemeni troops on the ground. Saudi air power overhead. Rashad al-Alimi, head of Yemen's Presidential Leadership Council, announced the offensive on television today and called it the battle for the state, until Yemen is liberated from the Houthis. The stated aim is to retake all Houthi-held territory and restore state authority across the whole country. Government forces say they are striking Sanaa and Saada, the Houthi capital and the Houthi heartland. Heavy ground fighting broke out in the Kahboub Mountains, the high ground overlooking Bab el-Mandeb, with government troops and al-Subaiha tribesmen attacking Houthi positions. The Houthis still hold the initiative. In the last 48 hours they took strategic hilltops near Taiz and cut the last supply road between Taiz and Aden. Several outlets report Taiz encircled or close to it. That is Yemen...

Read [ One ] [ Two ] [ Three ] [ Four ] In 1846, the British Parliament passed more than 250 separate Acts authorizing railroad expansion. Together they proposed 9,500 miles of new track, nearly the size of the entire current UK network, approved in twelve months of pure speculative fever. Capital investment in new rail lines hit something like 6% of British GDP. Then the bottom fell out. Shares dropped 67% from peak. Fortunes got wiped out, entire portfolios gone. Academicians call it the largest technology bubble in history by capital invested relative to the size of the economy. Roughly 90% of the track laid during those maniacal years became permanent infrastructure anyway. The money vanished but the thing it fueled continued. America ran the same play bigger, later. The transcontinental line finished in 1869. Jay Cooke's Northern Pacific financing collapsed in September 1873. Bank run. Six-year depression that no one seems to recall anymore. A quarter of American railroads d...

Almost all of western Yemen is now controlled by the Houthi rebels supported by the IRGC. [ Read all my Iran stuff. ] Note: I reference a lot of people in this post that are important to this situation. Few have ever heard of any of them. You'll have to look them up yourself if you want more details. My focus is obviously on one previously obscure man in particular. His name is Yusuf al-Madani. Almost no one outside Yemen had heard of him a week ago. Then his forces broke through the front, captured the Red Sea port of Mocha , drove down the coast and reached Bab el-Mandeb at the base of the Red Sea. A Houthi-linked estimate put their gains at more than 6,000 square kilometres. More than 2,300 square miles. Nearly the size of Delaware, taken in a few days. It was a classic blitzkrieg in the middle of a missile war. Al-Madani is the most successful ground commander of anything stimulated by Epic Fury so far. The Houthis have never publicly named the commander of the operation. ...