[Townhall] The body of prison inmate and convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein was discovered on the morning of August 10, 2019, in the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in Manhattan.
Despite U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr quickly ruling the questionable death a suicide, there have been continuing suspicions that Epstein was murdered.
As the release of his extensive files demonstrated, Jeffrey Epstein was extremely connected throughout the world. There were many powerful people with a motivation to kill him so that their involvement in his illegal activities would not be revealed.
One person who does not believe Epstein committed suicide is famed forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Baden, former Chief Medical Examiner in New York City. Baden has performed more than 20,000 autopsies in his storied career. He said, “The autopsy findings are much more consistent with a crushing injury caused by homicidal strangulation than caused by hanging by suicide.”
Baden noted that Epstein had three fractures in his neck. He said that individuals with “even one fracture, we have to investigate the possibility of a homicide.” Baden has never seen a suicide with three neck fractures, nor has such a case ever been referenced in “findings in textbooks.”
Dr. Baden was a witness to the autopsy at the request of Mark Epstein, Jeffrey’s brother, who also believes that he was murdered.
Recently, in the trove of Epstein documents released by the Department of Justice, a video was discovered from the Metropolitan Correctional Center. In the corner of the video footage, a blurry “orange blob” is seen going up the stairs to Epstein’s floor at 10:39 P.M. on August 9, 2019.
The FBI speculated that the image could have shown an inmate or a correctional officer, but no definitive answer has ever been provided. Instead, the image could have been the murderer accessing the stairwell to kill Epstein. No one knows for sure because the video cameras outside of Epstein’s cell were conveniently not working.
However, video from the nearby “officer station of the ninth floor L tier wing” was included within the massive release of Epstein files. According to reporters Gabrielle Fahmy and Shane Galvin of the New York Post, this station was just “a short set of stairs” away from Epstein’s cell.
The video from 3:15 A.M. on the morning of August 10, 2019, shows the MCC prison guards assigned to Epstein, Tova Noel and Michael Thomas. Instead of checking on Epstein and the other inmates every 30 minutes as was required, the guards were sleeping, surfing the Internet, “writing on a piece of paper, walking back and forth and talking on the phone.”
Along with searching online for furniture, Noel made several searches for the “latest on Epstein in jail.” The last search occurred just minutes before his body was discovered.
Noel and Thomas falsified records to indicate that Epstein’s cell was checked. They were fired for “misconduct and poor job performance,” but criminal charges against them were dropped.
One issue that must be investigated is new reports that Noel made 12 questionable cash deposits from April 2018 to July 30, 2019, just ten days before Epstein’s body was found. The last deposit of $5,000 was the largest amount and the overall total was $11,880.
Possibly, these cash deposits helped Noel purchase a “$62,000 2019 Land Rover Range Rover,” which is an expensive vehicle considering the average salary for an MCC prison guard was $52,481 in 2019.
It should also be noted that Noel moved to the “Special Housing Unit,” which included Epstein’s cell on July 7, 2019, “just weeks before his death.”
Hopefully, these issues will be examined thoroughly by Republican House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (KY-1) and his colleagues. Comer said that Noel has been called to testify before his committee on Thursday, March 26. He said if she does not appear, “I’ll subpoena her” because “We’ve got a lot of questions to ask.”
Since the prison guards were preoccupied with everything but doing their jobs, the exact time of Epstein’s death has never been determined. This is just one of many mysteries in this perplexing case. Assistant U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche said the problems were due to “dishonest” prison guards who did not check on the inmates.
Another problem is how the case was managed by the Department of Justice, which transferred the Epstein death investigation to the Office of Inspector General, which lacked “prosecutorial powers.” Unfortunately, this transfer prevented “the examination of Epstein’s death as a murder.”
According to an investigation by The Miami Herald, “As a result his cell was never considered a possible crime scene that would, under normal circumstances, be examined by experienced criminal and forensic experts who would take fingerprints, blood samples, and other evidence. One thing that got lost…was that the piece of fabric that Epstein allegedly used to hang himself was never identified.”
We are also learning that there were bags of evidence destroyed in the days after Epstein’s death. An analysis by The Miami Herald revealed there were “people shredding documents” in the immediate aftermath of Epstein’s death. It is unknown what was in the “bags” of documents, but it was reported to be “unusual volumes of materials.”
One correctional officer reported to the FBI that he had “never seen” so many “bags of shredded documents…put in the dumpster at the rear gate” of the prison. The “bags” of documents were shredded and removed before federal agents reviewed their contents.
What was in those “bags” of documents? Additionally, there is no video, no hanging noose, no prison guards performing their duties, mysterious Internet searches, questionable payments, and ample motivation to kill Epstein.
Also, the world’s most renowned forensic pathologist believes Epstein was murdered. Yet, if Americans do not believe the official “suicide” narrative, we are labeled “conspiracy theorists.”
This case has been poorly administered from the beginning. It is not a “hoax,” it is now the story with unending questions. However, the first question that needs to be answered is “Who killed Jeffrey Epstein?”
The generation born between 1997 and 2010 is the very first generation who did worse in school than the generation before them, according to a top neuroscientist.
And shockingly, they are proud of it.
“They’re the first generation in modern history to score lower on standardized academic tests than the one before it,” Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath, 43, told The Post. “And to make matters worse, most of these young people are overconfident about how smart they are. The smarter people think they are, the dumber they actually are.
“They underperformed on basically every cognitive measure, from basic attention, memory, literacy, numeracy, executive function and general IQ.”
Horvath recently testified to the sad facts before Congress, telling a panel of lawmakers that Generation Zers, who followed the Millenial generation, blew up humanity’s proud academic record — the wrong way.
So what happened that caused an entire age group to bomb test scores?
Horvath, who studied reams of data from standardized academic tests, told Congress that Z’s struggles stem from the fact that they’re the first generation to grow up with constant screen time. And it’s no substitute for real learning.
“More than half of the time a teenager is awake, half of it is spent staring at a screen,” said Horvath, who’s taught at universities around the world, including Harvard and the University of Melbourne in Australia. “Humans are biologically programmed to learn from other humans and from deep study, not flipping through screens for bullet point summaries.”
But digital devices, called educational technology (Edtech), take up most of their brain matter during class time and homework.
Then, students spend their hours away from the classroom consulting with their personal arsenal of phones, tablets and laptops where they scroll through TikTok captions and fire off snippy Snapchats in between eyeballing summaries of classic literature — instead of picking up a book and actually reading it.
Learning from screens has turned them into skimmers, said Horvath. And without the heavy lifting, even beautiful minds can turn to mush.
“I’m not anti-tech. I’m pro-rigor,” said Horvath, who wants schools to limit the amount of screen time for students and go back to the good old days when kids had to crack open a book and pull an all-nighter to pass a test.
“A sad fact our generation has to face is this: Our kids are less cognitively capable than we were at their age,” Horvath told the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Technology. “We have been standardizing and measuring cognitive development since the late 1800s.
“Every generation has outperformed their parents” said Horvath. “Until Gen Z.”
And it’s not just happening in the US.
“Across 80 countries, if you look at the data, once countries adopt digital technology widely in schools, performance goes down significantly,” said Horvath, who is also founder of LME Global, a Arizona-based group that bridges research and classroom practices to improve academic outcomes.
“Any time tech enters education, learning goes down.”
Looking ahead, he said he hopes for new policies in which schools are forced to pull back on tech in the classrooms and give the upcoming kids, Generation Alpha a better chance at becoming brainiacs.
However, the time spent in social networking reduces the time available for education
Facebook
Tik Tok
Instagram
X
Etc.
a voluntary block of these sites for 2 hours each evening would perhaps turn the game around
Posted by: Lord Garth ||
03/24/2026 9:17 Comments ||
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#3
Most of the tests for these attributes are verbal, whether written or oral, so a decrease in literacy (can you say smart phone?) will be reflected in a decrease in most of these measurements. Now the decrease in memory... that's a real issue. Likely for the same cause... 30 second attention spans mandated by the cell phone world.
Here are the 14 best value burgers and chains, per the study.
1. Whataburger ($1.66) from Whataburger
2. Cheeseburger ($1.91) from McDonald's
3. All-American Smash ($1.96) from Smashburger
4. Cheeseburger ($1.99) from Burger King
5. Dave's Single Cheeseburger ($2.21) from Wendy's
6. Deluxe Single ($2.22) from Culver's
7. Cheeseburger ($2.27) from Shake Shack
8. Original Cheeseburger ($2.38) from Dairy Queen
9. Big Cheeseburger ($2.39) from Carl's Jr.
10. Jr. Jack Cheeseburger ($2.45) from Jack in the Box
11. Sonic Cheeseburger ($2.46) from Sonic
12. Cheeseburger ($2.91) from In-N-Out Burger
13. Cheeseburger ($3.13) from A&W
14. Little Cheeseburger ($3.59) from Five Guys
"Whataburger's signature sandwich weighs 3.56 ounces and costs $5.92, making it bigger and more expensive than the regular burgers at nearly every U.S. major chain," NetCredit wrote.
"But at $1.66 per ounce of meat, the Whataburger is the best value major chain burger in the land."
[BBC] Field Marshal Bernard "Monty" Montgomery died 50 years ago. In 1968, he told the BBC about the Battle of El Alamein, and his German counterpart Erwin Rommel, the "Desert Fox"
.
"In defeat, unbeatable; in victory, unbearable." In one remark, Winston Churchill captured the infuriating brilliance of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, the brains behind the celebrated November 1942 victory at the Second Battle of El Alamein. Seen as a turning point in World War Two, the battle in North Africa inspired another famous Churchill quote: "Now, this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."
By the time of the general's death on 24 March 1976, aged 88, the now Lord Montgomery of Alamein had enjoyed a long and sometimes controversial retirement. A prickly character unafraid of stirring up trouble, in his memoir he had dismissed General Dwight D Eisenhower, his old supreme commander and future US president, with the typically arrogant: "Nice chap. No soldier." In a moment of self-awareness, he once joked: "My business, as you know, is fighting – fighting the Germans or anybody else, too, who wants to have a fight."
#8
Ref #5 - Always wondered, if Bletchley Park was reading so much of Germany Army traffic, and Market Garden was so crucial a strategic effort, why were they unaware of the two SS Panzer units undergoing refit and resting in the Arnhem area when the British 1st Airborne Division landed on September 17, 1944, the 9th SS Panzer Division Hohenstaufen and the 10th SS Panzer Division Frundsberg.
#9
Montgomery was a very good general who fought an intentional set piece battle. Attrit with artillery and then force breaks in their lines with infantry and armor. He saw combat in WWI and a succession of assignments to command from battalion to army group.
What most people don't recognize is that Montgomery commanded the only large, overseas force of the actual British Army. He could not afford to be decisively defeated, England could not replace those soldiers. With the exception of India, which sent 2 million volunteers to war, all the other Commonwealth countries were not heavily populated. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1342260/wwii-mobilization-by-country
As for Eisenhower, he was a very good planner, good at choosing the right person for the right job and had a true gift of getting people to do what he wanted and getting people to work together despite any differences. Through no fault of his own, he never commanded in combat (neither did Bradley).
#10
^^^ wiki cite:
General Omar Bradley (1893–1981) was a pivotal U.S. Army commander in World War II, known as the "G.I.'s General" for his focus on soldier welfare. He commanded the II Corps in North Africa/Sicily, led the First Army during the D-Day invasion, and commanded the 12th Army Group—1.3 million men—across Europe.
History.com
History.com
+2
WWII Command and Key Actions
North Africa & Sicily (1943): Bradley served under Gen. George Patton, leading II Corps to crucial victories, including the capture of Bizerte.
D-Day and Normandy (1944): He commanded the U.S. First Army, directing the landing at Omaha and Utah beaches, followed by the breakout, Operation Cobra.
12th Army Group: He led the largest body of American soldiers ever assembled in the field, sweeping across France and Germany.
Battle of the Bulge (1944–45): Bradley played a key role in turning back the German counter-offensive.
#11
@10 Patton despised Bradley, something he made clear in his diaries. The diaries, never meant by Patton to published were and Bradley either read those parts or it was told to him. That's relevant, because Bradley was the technical advisor for the movie Patton. I like the movie very much, but it is not entirely accurate.
A minor correction, Bradley saw a little combat along the US/Mexico border. He never commanded a division or smaller in combat, which is my definition of a combat command. His headquarters in Europe was 10's of miles behind the front line. Patton, who went to the front lines at least every other day, was very close to the front lines.
It was Patton that did most of the "sweeping" and it was Patton that broke through to Bastogne, because he and his intelligence office predicted that the Germans might attack, a view not agreed with by higher up's like Bradley.
[BBC] A mysterious 5,000-year-old decision led directly to how we still count time today.
In October 1793, the newly established French Republic embarked on an ill-fated experiment. It decided to change time.
The day, the revolutionaries decided, would now be divided by 10 hours, not 24. Each hour would have 100 minutes décimales in turn made up of 100 secondes décimales.
The time system was part of a wider revolutionary calendar which aimed to rationalise (and de-Christianise) the years' structure, including a new 10-day week. Work soon began to convert existing clocks to the decimal system. Town halls mounted decimal clocks and official activities were recorded using the new calendar.
It quickly began causing no end of headaches, says Finn Burridge, a science communicator at Royal Museums Greenwich in London, UK, home of the Royal Observatory and the place where Greenwich Meantime was established.
Redesigning and converting existing clocks proved extremely tricky. The system isolated France from neighbouring countries, while the rural population hated the day of rest becoming only every 10th day. Ultimately, decimal time lasted barely more than a year in France.
To understand how we started counting, and still count today, 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes in an hour and 60 seconds in a minute, though, we need to wind the clock back to an era before the dawn of timekeeping. Because it's the story of one of the earliest number systems that started us off on this track – and explains why this awkward system has long outlived the civilisations who invented it.
A BASE OF 60
At the origin are the Sumerians, an ancient people who lived in Mesopotamia (roughly modern-day Iraq) from around 5300-1940BC and one of the first civilisations to ever form cities. Along with many other inventions including irrigation and the plough, they are credited with creating the first known writing system. This happened to include a number system based on the concept of 60.
Hold up your hand in front of you, bend a finger, and you'll see it has three joints. Count all the joints on the fingers of one hand (not including the thumb) and you'll reach 12. Count this 12 as one using a finger on your other hand and restart the count to 12 on the first hand, until all five fingers on your second hand are used. What have you just counted to? Sixty.
This is one of the speculative theories as to why the Sumerians based their emerging mathematical system on 60, not 10 – a decision that still has implications for how we measure time today.
Ancient astronaut theorists propose that the Sumerians learned it from the Annunaki.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
03/24/2026 12:54 Comments ||
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#2
And ...
[AI] Babylonians Base 60
**Babylonian base 60**, also known as **sexagesimal**, was a positional numeral system that used **60 as its base**. It originated with the ancient Sumerians around 3100 BCE and was adopted and refined by the Babylonians, who used it for mathematics, astronomy, and timekeeping.
- The system was **highly advantageous** because **60 is divisible by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30, and 60**, making it ideal for fractions and calculations.
- Babylonians used only **two symbols**—one for units and one for tens—to represent the 59 non-zero digits, combining them in a way similar to Roman numerals.
- It was a **positional system**, meaning the value of a digit depended on its position—just like our decimal system, but with powers of 60 instead of 10.
- They **lacked a true zero symbol**, though they later used a placeholder in the middle of numbers.
- The legacy of base 60 persists today in:
- **60 seconds in a minute**, **60 minutes in an hour**
- **360 degrees in a circle**, with degrees subdivided into **arcminutes and arcseconds**
- **Geographic coordinates** (latitude and longitude)
This ancient system was so effective that it enabled precise astronomical predictions and remains in use today in modified form.
[Childers Coffee & Covid] Good morning, C&C, it’s Monday! Apparently, I have to do everything, since corporate media is worse than useless. So it’s time for another Iran war roundup— except this time, it’s so much bigger than Iran. We’re connecting the dots from Iran to every other major global problem. What corporate media is reporting as five separate crises —the Hormuz standoff, the Palestinian reversal, the Gaza peace deal, the Ukraine negotiations, and the European energy crisis— are actually five pressure points in a single, breathtaking strategic play. And nobody is connecting the dots. So grab your coffee.
Posted by: Bobby ||
03/24/2026 00:40 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[1809 views]
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#1
Oh they're connecting the dots, they just hate it so much because it will make Trump and the US military look good and that's unacceptable, so unless you dig, you won't find out. And they are stupid.
A 'general' reporter is someone who professes a great deal of knowledge on a lot of subjects, when all they truly know is a very little bit about those subjects.
It’s not only darkest before the dawn, but the groupthink is murkiest, and the light at the end of the tunnel might be an explosion up your wazoo. Iran’s increasingly headless Revolutionary Guard (the IRGC) whirls in its gyre of martyrdom as the last traps are sprung under it. Tell the wide-eyed houris of paradise to primp for a fresh harvest of true believers.
Looks like Mr. Trump is not chickening-out, as his detractors like to insist. Looks like somebody is already turning off the juice around Tehran, likely the Israeils. It will be very hard soon enough for the headless IRGC to tell its body of psycho-killers what to do. Individual units are probably on their own now, anyway, wondering what the other units might be doing. . . might be thinking, while also, about now, the sore-beset, long-suffering, good-and-goshdarn pissed off, ordinary Persians will discover that nobody’s in charge, and maybe, at long last, it’s their turn to act, as the lights flicker out.
On the ground, in the apartments, the cafes, the offices, the grand bazaars of Tehran, Isfahan, Tabriz, and Shiraz life has already gotten super-impossible. Whatever’s left of the government just issued banknotes in the denomination of ten million rials, worth seven US dollars. Everybody there has plenty of money. Everyone is a millionaire, but they won’t be swanning around Fereshteh Street in top hats and monocles, shopping for Hermès, Louis Vuitton, and Rolex.
In actuality, nothing can function normally anymore when the currency is absolutely worthless, including the regular distribution of food and fuel, and you know from history that revolution is always only nine missing meals away. Something will have to give.
Snipped paragraphs at the link. Aaaand the dismount:
Minutes before posting this blog, the White House announced that the US and Iran were negotiating “a complete and total resolution of our hostilities in the Middle East” and that the president would postpone his deadline for attacking Iranian power plants by five days. The diplomatic back-channels must be on fire now. Might this whole thing almost be over?
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited by Gregor Spitzen
[REGNUM] A new scandal has erupted in Germany. On the first anniversary of the creation of a special fund for investment in infrastructure and climate protection, economic research institutes have compiled a scathing report: over the past year, the fund's resources have been almost entirely squandered on plugging budget holes.
Instead of spending money on infrastructure, the government engaged in budget manipulation in order to end up spending the money on social needs.
According to calculations by the ifo Institute for Economic Research, the rate of non-targeted spending is up to 95%. The creation of the fund was carried out in a truly Jesuit-like manner.
The fact is that budgetary discipline has always been a cornerstone of the political platform of German conservatives. "Living within one's means" has been one of the core virtues of the German citizen since the Middle Ages. The excessive social spending of the government under the auspices of the Social Democrats has always been viewed with disdain by their colleagues in the CDU/CSU.
It's no surprise that the "blacks" also ran in the 2025 snap parliamentary elections with a promise to "rein in the disproportionately inflated social security system," striking their "red" competitors right in the heart. However, as experience has shown, these lofty slogans turned out to be mere elements of political struggle.
Anyone who even slightly follows the global news agenda knows that the United States has an astronomical national debt of approximately $40 trillion, which arose due to the exorbitantly inflated social debt during the Barack Obama administration.
Such massive borrowings from themselves were made possible because the US Federal Reserve itself issues the dollar, the world's primary means of payment. Germany, the driving force of the European Union, enjoys similar privileges; its central banking system controls the issuance of the euro.
Seeing the US example of the depths into which a lack of budget discipline can lead a country, Germany has been very cautious about the tempting opportunity to borrow money from itself and print the required number of euros until 2025.
"Special fund" is a fancy euphemism for government debts whose threshold has been raised to circumvent the budget rule.
In order to circumvent legislative amendments prohibiting increased government borrowing, the CDU, CSU, SPD and Greens amended the Basic Law by a two-thirds majority in the final weeks of the old Bundestag.
The decision was highly controversial—firstly, because Chancellor Friedrich Merz had assured voters during the election campaign that he was against new debt. Secondly, the vote by parliament, which was in its final days, was legally legitimate, but highly questionable from an ethical standpoint.
Following the announced results of the 2025 snap elections, it became clear that securing a two-thirds majority in the new Bundestag to push through an initiative for the CDU/CSU and SPD is a completely unrealistic task.
The government's "red-black coalition" didn't have enough votes to do this, and no one was willing to negotiate anything with the Alternative for Germany (AfD). It turned out to be much simpler to hold a vote within the old parliament, whose parties no longer represented the majority of German voters.
The debt for the special infrastructure and climate neutrality fund came with one condition: it had to be used for additional investments to repair more broken roads and bridges and invest more in climate protection.
The special fund's €500 billion credit line was available for use over twelve years. The first €24 billion was drawn down and disbursed last year.
Public debt is always a question of justice.
Downstream taxpayers do not directly benefit from government consumer spending, such as pension subsidies, civil servant salaries, or gasoline rebates, but are forced to pay for it because they must pay interest and repay the loan.
Investments are a different matter: a bridge that will stand for 50 years will benefit people who haven't even been born yet. Therefore, involving future users in funding such projects is entirely justified.
On the other hand, it would be wrong to live on credit today and leave the next generation with broken bridges and massive debts. However, that's exactly what appears to be happening with the special fund.
For example, in 2024, the German government spent €1.2 billion on expanding broadband across the country, allocating funds from the regular federal budget. In 2025, when a special fund was created, this budget line item was reduced to zero.
Nevertheless, almost €1.4 billion was spent on broadband expansion in 2025. However, instead of taking the money from the regular budget, the government now took it from a special fund. This means that investment has increased slightly, but the debt has increased significantly.
At the same time, this manipulation freed up funds from the regular budget that could be used for non-investment purposes in 2025.
Another example is subsidies for the construction and maintenance of railways: in the regular budget, they were reduced from €7.5 billion in 2024 to €0 in 2025, but now appear in the expenditure line of the special investment fund (at €7.6 billion).
And it gets worse. Investments in federal highway construction fell from €6.6 billion to €2.5 billion in the main budget, but another €2.4 billion was gradually transferred from a special fund for the same purposes.
Thus, the funds freed up in the regular budget can be used for other purposes, primarily increasing social spending. Reducing investments in the regular budget freed up €11.6 billion, for example, for subsidies to social security funds, which the government would otherwise have lacked.
In 2025, Merz justified the new debt package with the "need to renew the infrastructure that was built decades ago." SPD leader Lars Klingbeil promised investments that would "relieve the economy and stimulate growth."
However, for now, the government coalition is engaged in primitive financial manipulations instead of fulfilling its election promises.
[DeutscheWelle] The government in Berlin is under pressure to get major reforms underway. But Merz's coalition partner, the SPD, stands severely weakened following two defeats in state elections, and now finds it hard to compromise.
[RodMartin] Aid to Israel is not charity. It is one of the most profitable strategic investments the United States has ever made — and a prototype of Trump's vision for the rest of our alliances.
His support for this statement can be read at the link.
[Just The News] With Iran’s launch of two long-range missiles on Friday, putting nearly all of Europe in striking distance, the regime showed that it possesses a capability that President Donald Trump previously cited as a key justification for the U.S. conflict with the Islamic Republic after years of denying it publicly.
Iran fired the intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) at the joint U.S.-U.K. airbase on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, more than 2,000 miles from Tehran, on the same day that the British government gave the United States the green light to use the facility to launch strikes on Iran.
"IT COULD PROBABLY HIT PARIS, MAYBE LONDON," SECURITY EXPERT SAYS
Neither missile struck the base. One failed in flight and a U.S. warship fired an interceptor missile at the other, though the U.S. military did not say whether the interception was successful.
"This whole conflict changed when Iran fired intermediate-range ballistic missiles at Diego Garcia, proving that it could probably hit Paris, maybe London," Fred Fleitz, former Chief of Staff of Trump’s National Security Council during the president’s first term, told the John Solomon Reports podcast on Monday.
Besides its nuclear program, Iran’s conventional missile program was one of the primary motivations for the Trump administration’s decision to strike Iran earlier this year. In his State of the Union Address just days before the military action, the president told Congress that the regime is developing missiles that would one day be able to reach the United States.
Posted by: Besoeker ||
03/24/2026 05:37 ||
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Link ||
[1769 views]
Top|| File under: Govt of Iran
#1
IMO, the only way to change leftists' minds is by splattering their brains.
#2
If the hit London or Paris the Moslems are going to get really ticked.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
03/24/2026 7:32 Comments ||
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#3
It'll just give the europeans a new excuse to give up.
Posted by: ed in texas ||
03/24/2026 8:52 Comments ||
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#4
Norm Macdonald
@normmacdonald
What terrifies me is if ISIS were to detonate a nuclear device and kill 50 million Americans. Imagine the backlash against peaceful Muslims?
Posted by: Lord Garth ||
03/24/2026 12:38 Comments ||
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#5
Peaceful Muslims lol. Until they take control and then you'll see how peaceful they are.
Posted by: chris ||
03/24/2026 14:03 Comments ||
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[PJMedia] The showdown came as no surprise to Tehran. The Islamic Republic (IR) had long readied itself for war against the conventionally superior U.S./Israel coalition by adopting what has been called the Mosaic Defense or the Defa-e Mozaiki in Persian. It aims to win with a strategy designed to make the IR virtually unkillable. It is the product of experience in fighting Israel both directly and through proxies like Hezbollah and Hamas for decades.
The key concept of Defa-e Mozaiki is to avoid relying on a single vulnerable "brain." Mosaic, as the term visually suggests, is designed so that decapitation strikes (killing top leaders, bombing Tehran, severing communications) do not collapse the system. It relies on extreme decentralization of command and control to achieve this. Authority is pushed down to roughly 31 semi-autonomous operational zones in Iran. Each of these zones has four ways of continuing a fight, each separate from the other, which can act independently or coordinate when needed. They are the:
Regular armed forces (Artesh)
IRGC units (including Aerospace Force for missiles/drones)
Basij militia (mass mobilization paramilitary, often province-based)
Proxy networks (Axis of Resistance groups outside Iran).
Each of these four pillars has its own command, local intelligence, weapons stockpiles, missile/drone launchers, and decision-making power. Local commanders operate on broad strategic guidelines rather than awaiting real-time orders from the center. Each structure has multiple layers of backup leadership ("successor ladders") to ensure that if a commander is killed, the next in line automatically assumes control. This applies at every level. It is the product of immense thought and experience. The challenge Mosaic now faces was anticipated by Iran over two decades ago.
According to the RAND Organisation, Iran’s ‘Mosaic Doctrine’ was first formulated in 2005, when Jafari, as the director of the IRGC’s Center for Strategic Studies, identified two critical threats to the regime of the Ayatollahs, those being, “a foreign attempt to foment a ‘soft revolution’ through support of Iranian NGOs and activists and a US military attack that could topple the regime.”
The ayatollahs foresaw much, much more than even a major European government could anticipate. The leadership even had the prescience to issue what amounts to a posthumous set of orders. If the center goes silent, the survivors are to exploit Iran’s geography, flee into rugged mountains in the vast interior, disperse among the population centres, and begin prolonged resistance against superior invaders until finally they leave.
It sounds unbeatable. But every strategy has its weakness, including the Mosaic defense. Topologically, it is a scaled-up version of the classic cell clandestine structure where small, isolated groups of 3–10 operate independently of other cells and have no direct access to higher leadership or the broader network. Now the battlefield is broken up into small cells or a mosaic. This is a test of that theory, but the cell structure has limitations, some of which are.
Cells cannot effectively coordinate large, complex, or timed operations across multiple areas or domains. Changes must slowly propagate as if by osmosis
Central leadership has a limited ability to change course in a rapidly evolving situation because it has deliberately weakened the center
Bringing in new members, sharing expertise, moving money/weapons, or scaling up is slow, risky, and inefficient. Logistics becomes a major bottleneck because each cell is optimized for isolation, not standardization. If a cell loses touch, it starves
In a word, the Mosaic defense is vulnerable to entropy. Cells can become disconnected from the broader mission, run out of resources, or simply fade away as people drift away and go AWOL. In long conflicts, this leads to organizational decay.
But the IR’s foe has not been completely idle. Learning has gone in both directions over the decades. Not only has Israel been accumulating lessons on fighting the Islamic Republic, but so has the U.S. through its support of the Kurds. Even before Operation Epic Fury, the CIA worked with Kurdish factions (KDPI, PJAK, PAK core) in the border areas. It's not their first rodeo with the ayatollahs. Now the Kurds threaten a western “second front,” stretch Mosaic Defense forces, create space for protests, and tie down IRGC units who are already busy evading air/missile strikes.
So it is reasonable to surmise the coalition has shown up with a theory of how to smash the Mosaic. From open source accounts of the war, the U.S./Israeli coalition may be applying three counter-Mosaic strategies.
The Mossad will try to take over the Mosaic. By decapitating cells in which an agent has been planted, Israel can promote itself to the top of any given unit. One day, the courier to the neighboring cell will change. Is everything still secure?
The U.S. starves the Mosaic. This is already underway through the precision targeting of IRGC, Basij, and regime assets. “On March 11, the United States and Israel conducted a strike destroying the data processing facilities of Iran’s Bank Sepah, crippling its operations… viewing the country’s banking system as a critical node sustaining the Islamic Republic. The attack on Bank Sepah suggests that this campaign may be entering a new phase, one in which Iran’s financial infrastructure is increasingly targeted with kinetic strikes as a means of degrading the regime’s resilience.”
Last but not least, the U.S. appears to be exploiting the Mosaic’s structural inability to deviate from heirloom instructions by implementing a policy of strategic ambiguity. Is Trump going to declare victory and go home? Will the Kurds invade Iran across the Zagros Mountains? Will the US Marines invade Kharg Island? Will the 82nd Airborne parachute into Tehran? Will there be an uprising in the capital? Will Washington negotiate with the Islamic State or insist on unconditional surrender? Nobody outside the top alliance circle really knows.
By remaining unpredictable, the U.S./Israeli alliance exploits the Mosaic’s biggest weakness: its inability to adapt to fast-moving situations. Washington’s lack of a publicly articulated war plan may be infuriating to the media, but it may be the single most devastating asset against the waiting network. Who wins? The Mosaic defense may yet prevail, but inherent inflexibility was always its Achilles Heel and the coalition can be expected to exploit it. It might have worked against a “proper,” predictable president. It may fare less well against the current president.
Posted by: Anguper Hupomosing9418 ||
03/24/2026 00:00 ||
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Top|| File under: Govt of Iran
#1
Insurgency requires a level of popular support that is inconsistent with subjugation and murder of the populous, I think. We will see.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
03/24/2026 6:39 Comments ||
Top||
#2
Fredrik Pohl suggested a solution to ME problems in 1981: The Cool War.
You see: “To carry out war, three things are necessary: money, money and yet more money.”
So, as long as petro-dollars (or petro-yuan) flow to ME ...
#3
An unknown is how many missiles/drones the IR still has and how well they are hidden.
IIRC, the USA has yet to render not operational the IR's facilities for loading & shipping oil out of Iran. Should that stop, the IR's income will drop a great deal. Oil wells don't matter if the product cannot be shipped away to markets. The earliest oil well drillers found that out in Oklahoma very early on.
#5
An article a week or so ago stated that Iran pretty much emptied the storage tanks on Kharg Island moved it all to the mainland, where presumably it was disperse even further. We are going out our way minimize civilian casualties and not destroy Iran's infrastructure not related to the Iranian military.
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