u/violentviolinz

Yes, a fund you probably never heard of, specifically for housing, exceeds the amount of outstanding mortgage loans.

The angry noise is really silly. They don't like Trump acting based on reality for once? U.S. can't handle a conflict with North Korea right now (who has mutual defense treaties with both China and Russia, AND proved it can fight and seize territory in a modern war). So bluffing is out of the question.

Of all the things happening with the US military, now is the time to lessen the temperature and not insist on fantasy.

Who really thinks maintaining or increasing the scale of the exercises is going to trick anybody? Houthis haven't even fully blocked their strait yet and Trump wants out. Provoking North Korea also is so dumb. Critics must be very anti-American or something.

>“North Korea and China would be the ones most pleased by this,” said retired Lt. Gen. Chun In-bum, former commander of South Korea’s Special Warfare Command.

And? Displeasing North Korea and China would be good for South Koreans or Americans? Now of all times? Be rational. Actually I think the current SK President is pretty rational, far as I know, probably why US tabloids quoted this bozo.

Oh, one more thing, related to why North Korea's Kursk offensive and subsequent expulsion of dug in Ukrainian forces is such an important data point for analysis.

>U.S. Army troops faced off against Ukrainian drone operators at a military exercise in Germany earlier this year. It didn’t go well for the Americans.

Ukraine's drone operators easily spotted and defeated U.S. troops and armored vehicles so quickly that they had to be “re-spawned” and sent back into the field to keep the exercise going, The Wall Street Journal said, citing an unidentified U.S. official who was briefed on the matter.

https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/u-s-and-ukrainian-forces-went-head-to-head-in-an-exercise-ukraines-drones-won-cc3663d5

>Wall Street Journal report says Tehran used the 60-day negotiating window to rebuild missile forces, empower the IRGC and prepare allied militias for wider attacks from Hormuz to the Red Sea

>Rather than placing their trust in diplomacy, they spent the past two months preparing for what they believe could be a much wider war. The preparations include giving greater authority to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, appointing veterans of the Iran-Iraq War and previous domestic crises to key positions, expanding counterintelligence operations and accelerating production of missiles and drones.

>Iranian leaders have increasingly discussed “offensive operations on enemy territory,” alarming smaller Gulf states including Kuwait. Their broader objective is to inflict enough damage to deter the kind of attacks Iran suffered during last year’s 12-day war and the continuing conflict.

>“There is also a widespread view in Iran that the main war has not yet begun,” Mohammad Hassan Sangtarash, a Tehran-based defense analyst close to the Iranian government, told the Journal. “What we have seen so far is increasingly interpreted through the lens of ‘salami-slicing’ tactics, limited and gradual escalation designed to weaken capabilities before a larger confrontation.”

>Yet the country is rebuilding more quickly than expected. Iran has restored infrastructure and regained access to missile bases at a pace that has alarmed Israeli officials familiar with the progress, according to the Journal.

>The IRGC used the relative calm created by the memorandum to coordinate more closely with allied militias across the region and prepare them for expanded attacks if necessary. Advisers were sent to Iraq, Yemen and Lebanon to discuss possible operations, according to officials familiar with recent Arab intelligence assessments.

>Around the same period, Saudi Arabia said Iran-backed militias in Iraq carried out drone attacks on Saudi oil facilities. The IRGC also warned Gulf states that their energy infrastructure would be destroyed if the United States struck similar facilities inside Iran, officials said. Iranian commanders went as far as sending detailed lists of potential targets to Arab counterparts, according to the report.

>Iran also stepped up attacks on U.S. forces. Tehran surprised Washington by launching five ballistic missiles toward Jordan during a lull in the conflict. The attack came two weeks after another Iranian strike in Jordan killed three U.S. service members.

>“We fully exploited the ceasefire period,” IRGC spokesman Hossein Mohabi told the IRGC-linked Tasnim news agency in July. “We improved our capabilities, accelerated the pace of missile production and improved missile accuracy.”

>Behind the scenes, Khamenei has also prepared Iran’s security institutions for more aggressive warfare. He recently appointed seven senior security figures to oversee military institutions and domestic suppression as part of a reorganization disclosed last week.

>Options under discussion include sabotaging internet cables in the Persian Gulf, fomenting political unrest in countries with large Shiite communities such as Kuwait and Bahrain, and potentially even ground operations in Kuwait.

>U.S. officials said that after the negotiations stalled and Iran refused to step back from escalation, Trump pulled back to see whether economic pressure from sanctions and a naval blockade would soften Tehran’s position.

>Iranian leaders, however, remain deeply skeptical of Trump’s intentions and are shifting toward what officials describe as a survival economy designed to endure prolonged pressure. People close to Iran’s senior negotiators have warned that the peace talks may ultimately prove to be only a pause before the next phase of war.

>Mehdi Mohammadi, a strategic adviser to Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf and a member of Iran’s negotiating team, described the current stalemate as “the calm before the storm.” In a social media post, he said one driver of continued conflict was a “generational project of blood revenge” over the killing of former Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei at the beginning of the war.

>“The Iranian nation still has many unfinished matters with Trump,” Mohammadi said. “Iran is ready for the major confrontation.”

Trump has shown how desperate he is to get out of this and Iran knows it. The debacle over aircraft carrier conditions is widely known at this point.

>Top U.S. commander acknowledges mental health issues on USS Lincoln

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/16/top-us-commander-acknowledges-mental-health-issues-on-uss-lincoln.html

Trump even just threatened to bomb Oman, a US ally.

>"If Oman gets in the way, we'll bomb the s--- out of them," Trump told Fox News

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2026/08/17/trump-threatens-bomb-oman-iran-war-us-talks/91334335007/

Early on Iran warned that the U.S. started something over which it has no control over and that it won't get to choose when and how it ends.

For example:

10 March 2026

>Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps says it will “determine the end of the war” in the Middle East after US President Donald Trump said the conflict would end “soon.” “It is we who will determine the end of the war,” the IRGC says in a statement. “The equations and future status of the region are now in the hands of our armed forces; American forces will not end the war,” the statement adds.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/responding-to-trump-irans-irgc-says-it-will-determine-the-end-of-the-war/

It was brushed off as delusional bravado. The way it is playing out currently is far closer to what Iran said would happen than the U.S.

If Iran is really intending on no longer allowing the U.S. to dictate the pace and initiative, the U.S. is going to be trapped. It will have to respond for Israel and its proxies.

The U.S. is still haunted by prolonged conflicts that achieve nothing lasting and end up with their withdrawal. They desperately don't want Iran to be a repeat, but not enough people are pointing out that they don't have a choice. Their own insistence on entangling themselves in other regions and staking their reputation on it means it's not in their hands to decide. Regardless of the various stages of 'mission accomplished', the examples of Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq all end up with a lot of American sacrifice for nothing.

Even Iraq in the end, is the same result, despite militias in Iraq attacking U.S. forces in Iraq throughout the war.

>Iraq says September 30 withdrawal deadline for US-led coalition ‘final’

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/8/12/iraq-says-sept-30-deadline-to-end-us-led-military-coalition-final

The U.S. leaves either willingly or unwillingly and what they leave behind makes the entire adventure pointless.

>Alibaba Group Holding’s open-weight models have accumulated more than 3 billion global downloads in the past six months, eclipsing Meta Platforms Inc., Alphabet Inc. and domestic peers to become the world’s No. 1 artificial-intelligence model.

>Qwen, Alibaba’s family of AI models, has open-sourced more than 460 models and its ecosystem has spawned 300,000-plus derivatives, the Chinese technology company said in an emailed statement. Google, part of Alphabet, had 418 million downloads while Meta stood at 227 million in 2026, according to popular open-source AI hub Hugging Face Inc., which published a state of open models report on Aug. 14.

>South and Southeast Asia are particularly dependent on the Middle East ​for oil, and Iran's closure of the Strait of Hormuz has triggered some of the biggest jumps in diesel prices, according to ⁠GlobalPetrolPrices, creating an opening for China, the world's largest e-truck maker.

>Diesel prices are up 48% in Sri Lanka since the start of the war and 57% in the ​Philippines, according to GlobalPetrolPrices, while the fuel is 15% higher in China, government data shows.

>E-trucks in China have gone from almost zero in ​2021 to 30% of truck sales last year, with 140,000 e-trucks sold in the first half of this year. Diesel use in China began falling last year.

>By not burning diesel, China's e-truck fleet will save the equivalent of 141 million barrels of oil this year, more than 3% of China's total and equal to all its imports from Kuwait, according to the ​Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air.

>By comparison, China's e-truck exports in the first half replaced fuel at an ​annual rate of 1.6 ⁠million barrels, the Helsinki-based centre estimates.

>China’s hypersonic weapons can now use the stars for guidance when satellite systems like GPS or BeiDou are jammed or fail, according to a project led by the Guangdong Aerospace Research Academy that passed its final expert review on Monday.

>According to a report published by the academy on August 10, researchers set out to tackle the challenge of developing a star-based navigation system that would be able to function at the extreme speeds of hypersonic flight – Mach 5 and above.

>The Arctic is emerging as a viable alternative to the world’s traditional shipping routes as melting polar ice shortens the journey between Europe and Asia and vessels seek to avoid maritime chokepoints.

>Sea Legend, a Chinese container shipping company focusing on the Turkish and North African markets, will this week launch the first regular container shipping service through the Arctic.

>The weekly service will skirt the north Russian coast on its journey between Ningbo on China’s east coast and Felixstowe in the UK. The company has branded the service the “Ice Silk Road” in reference to the Silk Road trading route that once connected China and Europe.

>The voyage will cut the usual 40-day sailing time between the two ports by about half, depending on the conditions in the Arctic Circle. The move follows a record 23 transits through the Northern Sea Route last summer, up from 15 voyages in 2024.

>Sea ice melts far enough south in summer to allow ships to pass without needing icebreaker capabilities.

>The Northern Sea Route is broken up into 28 sections with different guidelines set by the Rosatom-controlled Northern Sea Route administration depending on the varying ice conditions. The Russian state-controlled company issues permits to sail through the area.