You're not missing a ton. I reposted the important stuff. RT tends to be pro-zionist in the way they voice/write these articles so it's not like they have super great coverage. Though credit where it's due they do platform in their opinion sections anti-zionist voices at times.

Interesting. But hardly surprising. This could also be itself an influence op by the admin to attempt to influence Iran into holding its punches in the belief that there are those inside the administration trying to stop the escalation towards them and that not reacting would give them a chance to avoid a costly war with the US and meet their objectives. It's interesting that a Trump official would seek to leak to the grayzone of all places too. I suppose they have a certain notoriety but it's very interesting.

Yet another war crime by the zionist regime, but this does serve as strong confirmation that Iran still doesn't have dominance/control of their airspace and puts more doubt in my mind on the claims of shooting down f-35s. Most likely I feel the zionists have pretty good ability to operate and bomb what they want in Iran while Iran has some ability to hit back with whatever stock of advanced missiles they have that can bypass defenses of the zionists. Most likely Iran doesn't have enough of an arsenal to actually really meaningfully degrade the zionist military and is mostly doing a combination of show strikes to intimidate and frighten the zionists who are used to their interceptors mostly working and hitting actual vital infrastructure in response to the zionists doing the same. But I don't believe they actually have enough stock to severely damage the zionist military machine via extensive targeted strikes or say hit the zionists with a constant barrage of strikes.

What this means is when the US enters the picture they won't be able to do a damn thing other than inflict some pain on the gulf states for a while that will yes hurt global oil markets and gas prices for a while, maybe 6-12 months but that isn't the end-all-be-all if Iran is defeated. If Iran is defeated the US will have guaranteed great oil prices going forward for decades while China will be in extreme danger of very bad oil prices if not outright being denied oil in compliance with planned future US sanctions as part of an isolate, blockade, encircle, and destroy plot by the US. And China being wholly reliant on Russia who is a fair-weather friend is not good and Russia can mainly supply nat-gas anyways and if China has no other sources the prices will be increased a bit.

I think the plan is more decapitating strikes, they have assets either witting or simply fools who they can manipulate who they want to be in power in Iran after they kill off those above them. They killed off the IRGC intelligence head for a reason. If you can kill people like that and the head of the IRGC and 14 nuclear scientists it shows you can kill whoever you want and that you are methodically working your way through a chart of heads of leadership until you have eliminated enough to destabilize and plunge your target into chaos (same as Hezbollah) and at that point they throw in ISIS fighters, MEK, other groups that are western proxies and you use them and more smuggled drones for assassinations until the government has effectively collapsed or been taken over by one of your guys.

I don't think they'd be doing this and certainly the US won't join if they don't have a concrete plan for removing the current government entirely or mostly and having a more pliant one arise. Most likely the zionist intelligence penetration is as I've said before to an extreme level. They've hacked everything plus have human-int assets that means they know where all of the important figures are at least some of the time if not possibly most of the time and can kill them at their leisure.

In other words things could get very bad shortly. I hope the leadership does move to very, very, very deep bunkers like those their nuclear facilities are in and that they have good hardlines for command and control out of those which are buried DEEP as well.

I want to just put out there that I can see Iran being successfully destroyed. Done Syria/Libya style.

The west has moved a lot of things into position for this.

And frankly, let's recall Iran isn't run by pragmatic, thoughtful people who grew up in the USSR education system like Russia, it isn't run by Marxists like China or the DPRK. Iran is run by theocratic, reactionary, religious fundamentalists. Many of their religious policies like the mandatory hair-covering are unpopular with much of the younger society. That is an inherent, deep, deep, deep disadvantage in short and long-term planning, it is a problem because it makes them unpopular with their people because of their hard line on certain things. And given many young people in Iran have grown up never knowing the Shah it'll be very easy for them to slip into thinking they can make peace with the west, or that they should join the west or at least not defend the current rulers of their country. Add on the fall of Syria, the amount of jihadists they can deploy as in ISIS puppet groups, kurds, etc into Iran as their proxies to carry out assassinations, to carry out attacks, to demoralize the society and gather intelligence, it's a really sticky situation.

Fact is the zionists have been murdering a lot of top people in Iran very successfully. Their intelligence and likely penetration of the Iranian military is extreme and an extreme problem. They seem to know where to hit down to the day or time of day to kill these people and the Iranian air defenses are not stopping them. They don't have control of their airspace, they don't have air dominance like Russia does.

Given that and nothing else besides the recent string of victories of the zionists and the US need to cement complete control of the middle east/west Asia for their coming confrontation and cold war against China I think it's very plausible. It's depressing to think about but I think they're not as strong as they present themselves as. That doesn't mean they're as weak as the zionists or US present them as but people trot out the Millennium challenge thing and that was back in 2000, Iran has suffered a lot under sanctions since then and the doctrines of warfare have changed a lot, drone warfare for example including on the seas has matured and evolved and it's possible NATO capabilities in that area plus area denial weapons would be enough to destroy Iran in a naval fight and negate the advantage of all their small swarms of missile boats. You have to remember that challenge was in an era where it assumed old school 90s carrier battlegroups with a carrier or two, destroyers, various support ships, and a few helicopters and planes. Not with that plus tons of drones operated by people in pajamas in Germany and Tel Aviv all coordinated together.

The whole "the zionist entity is on the verge of collapse" thing so repeated here honestly comes across as copium/hopium blend based off propaganda and what we would rather be true. Objectively they've scored so many geopolitical and strategic wins from Syria falling to western puppets to Nasrallah's assassination, Hezbollah's stand-down (because Syrian supply lines were cut), the pager attacks, the Gaza genocide carried out so far and opposition to that viciously crushed all across the west, etc.

Ultimately most people here are hope-casting, or doom-casting. There is the fog of war that will not lift until the smoke has cleared and by that time the situation will likely have been decided in one direction or the other. The Iranians are likely to lie about successes and downplay failures. The zionists are likely to hide the Iranian successes and downplay their own failures. I don't pay any attention at all to western imperialist propaganda "reporting" on this and haven't since the genocide flared up really as I can't stand them so I'm not really influenced by zionist claims just by the alleged facts on the ground, the history of who momentum is with (the zionists sadly), and other factors like that.

Optimism of the will, pessimism of the intellect. The west still has a lot of strength and I fear I see a grander plan unfolding successfully. China's long-game approach to non-interventionism for example means tons of western interventions and securing the rest of the world against them by coups, wars, color revolutions, "moderate rebels", etc early on in the game right now might blunt their ability for success by the time they are ready to do that and strong enough to do that. I don't know the right moves, I just know we shouldn't underestimate them and their power at this point.

I of course hope Iran brings the entity to its knees but hope does not reality make as I hoped Assad would prevail against the west and that Nasrallah would teach the zionists a bitter lesson and we can see how those things went.

Honestly they didn't live in the type of functional surveillance states that we live in. More than just technologies and techniques which have vastly improved as well as coordination the ability to hunt down enemies of the state there's also the fact the states they were in were not as shall we say functional or solid as ours. They were weakened states in some internal disarray.

For this reason I think unfortunately revolution is pretty much hopeless and impossible in the imperial core until external conditions such as the collapse of imperialism and the US dollars and an overall weakening of the US state takes place and weaken these systems of surveillance and control and oppression. Until that happens, until they start rotting, things no longer working and not being repaired for weeks type of situation they're just too strong. That or we'd need way more than the 10-20% of society that usually sides with a revolution, like 50% and at least 30% willing to take violent and coordinated action and I don't see that in the US near-term so I think rot is the more likely to come and weaken and blind them and eventually in that decay room for things happening is found.

The trick about the panopticon is it's not actually good at seeing everything all the time. It's the threat of it that matters to discipline the population. In the case of the NSA/PRISM/14-eyes they have so much data much of it isn't useful in a real time sense at present. They can go back and trace things back and find connections and nail people to the wall with investigations but at present they don't have automated systems that quickly identify and find every instance of something like this. Unfortunately they're working on that with AI and I fear within 5-10 years they could be there but at present it's mostly just data that gets siloed then looked over as needed within the context of specific investigations into specific known persons and their networks of contacts and relations.

It's interesting how the US guards developments anything like this yet China just releases them to the public. I get they're trying to deter the US by showing they have technology knowledge to deter and intimidate defense/military people to prevent/delay war but I have to wonder if part of the reasoning they do this is because their spies have revealed the US already has everything they reveal like this and so it's not any advantage to the US to have a paper on how to do this new thing, more just a show "hey we have this too now".

People in industry who propagate these types of lies, who give credence to them shouldn't be able to show their faces in public. Like they should get bullied and cajoled out of any convention they try and step foot in. Just absurd because devices like these can be easily monitored. You can mirror their WAN traffic and just sit there and look for evil Chinese spying and not find it because it isn't there. I hate IT/infosec fascists. I miss the halcyon days when there was at least a more prominent anarchist hacker vibe and talk like this was held up to scorn because it was seen as coming from the same place as the demand for clipper chips.

What TPlink should do is opensource their firmware. It's a good thing to do. Though it wouldn't save them it might buy a little time, Kaspersky opened transparency centers where governments could send someone into a secured room to see their source code and ask questions and they still got banned because muh Russia bad.

Apparently a Chinese social media app that has exploded in popularity in the west due to Tiktok's imminent ban.

Things would not have gotten better without Oct 7th, there was no better history ahead where the Palestinians allowed themselves to be quietly genocided without it. It drew attention but as we've seen that attention isn't enough. In the long-run maybe the fall-out, the ICC issues and various sanctions will serve to actually catalyze a movement to isolate the zionist occupation. But we can say it has had dire consequences as well, it's accelerated the extermination and occupation campaign. Iran flinching may be looked back at as one of the biggest strategic blunders. Their flinching has not saved them, it's left them without Syria, without a way to supply Hezbollah, with Hezbollah weakened, with Hamas weakened, with their regional influence weakened, more isolated, more hemmed in from all sides. Flinching may well have doomed them to a war with the US directly that would have been devastating but as with the Palestinians the choice increasingly looks like a slow hemming in and killing which Iran chose here, their regional alliances have fallen to pieces, or striking back and risking immediate devastation. At least striking back hard would have perhaps terminally weakened the occupation entity. Their hesitancy emboldened the zionists to decapitate Hezbollah, to take a lot of other steps to put themselves in an extremely advantageous position as of this date.

Maybe there were no winning moves for the resistance.

Wow great read and some nice hopium!

I like this:

And America itself can't even show up, they're actually in the middle of a long retreat from the world, furiously throwing proxies in front of themselves and resorting to open terrorism.

It conjures up images of an old American style cartoon character whipping out things to put in front of them as they hastily backpedal.

I'd ensure Spartacus's slave revolt succeeded, resulting in Rome falling to a grand slave revolt, smothering in the cradle the pro-debtor/creditor government and empire. ~~Probably just delay it emerging later down the line but who knows.~~ But best part is this stops a lot of follow-on bad happenings such as Christianity being proclaimed the official religion of Rome, certain unifications don't occur under wartime conditions against Rome. Maybe they even implement a kind of early universal suffrage and it ends up failing but it means that 17th century enlightenment thinkers have more to chew on which means they and the French revolution see certain flaws in liberal thinking and advocate a more radical course of action leading to the US founding fathers being a bunch of, republican, class traitors and hardcore abolitionists which leads to a crumbling of the capitalist world order over time that means the German revolution succeeds and European capital is murdered off in a bloody series of revolutions ending by the year 1980. While simultaneously anti-colonial sentiment creates uprisings across the globe that further weaken capital. Thus global communism by 2040.

(Yes I know there are problems with this but let me dream)