visited

Because they’ve taken out a large portion of Iran’s launchers. Combine that with much of their leadership being dead or in hiding (including the Supreme Leader), you’re getting very weak responses at this point.

I honestly don’t know what the point is now in launching. If I’m the rocket guy, I’m fucking right off to the house and waiting for the new regime to take over.

That was enough

Not news, but highly important for us oldheads in the news mega. Where would you sit?

The resistance every once in a while

There are rumours that the latest missile launch from Iran was an ICBM test. Pic below.

Supreme Court decided 6/3 to ban medical transition for minors.

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/23-477_2cp3.pdf

We really have reached the point where Tucker Carlson is the voice of reason, huh

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/06/18/ted-cruz-tucker-carlson-fight-00411980

At first, Carlson launched a softball at Cruz, asking how many people live in Iran. Cruz didn’t know the answer.

“You don’t know the population of the country you seek to topple?” Carlson asked, later pressing, “How could you not know that?”

Cruz sloughed off the interrogation, replying: “I don’t sit around memorizing population tables.”

But the interaction began to get heated as Carlson got increasingly frustrated by Cruz’s apparent lack of knowledge.

“Well it’s kind of relevant because you’re calling for the overthrow of the government,” Carlson shot back, before suggesting that Cruz doesn’t “know anything about the country.”

“I didn’t say I don’t know anything about the country,” Cruz said.

“Okay, what’s the ethnic mix of Iran?” Carlson asked, prompting a pause from the senator.

“They are Persians and predominantly Shia,” Cruz offered, getting defensive as Carlson cut in to ask “What percent?”

“You don’t know anything about Iran!” Carlson said, as the two men began yelling over each other. “You’re a senator who is calling for the overthrow of the government and you don’t know anything about the country!”

Apparently Iran just fired a new missile, or one that looks new. Just a single missile, they’re testing something. Obviously was intercepted, but it was just one launch and it left some seriously pretty designs in the sky. Take a look: https://t.me/me_observer_TG/554402?single

Chinese cars and factories flooding EU market, and blows up protectionist tariff system Substack

In the US, the tariff schedules on Chinese EV’s were 100%. In Europe, the tariff rates varied, from 17% to 38%.

The EU tariffs, it was believed, were too high for Chinese companies to profitably sell cars in the EU markets, and analysts expected Chinese brands to pivot to more friendly countries.

But China’s carmakers doubled down in Europe instead, and exported record volumes of hybrid vehicles, which were exempted from the tariff systems. They also broke ground on major factory projects, which will come online beginning next year. At that time, all that production will be tariff-exempt.

Regulators in Europe face two major problems: they need mass-market adoption of new-energy vehicles if they hope to meet their strict emissions standards, and it is only Chinese cars that build at price points that will attract millions of new buyers.

But they will do so at the expense of European and American and other Asian automakers, who cannot compete with Chinese brands on price.

Good read. This is what I have been saying all along: the US is unleashing the Chinese industrial capacity to start a mercantilist warfare to kill off European industries. Expect to see US finance capital harvesting Europe like they did the USSR.

This is because exports have to go somewhere if a portion of demand is suddenly curbed, and all the exporters now find themselves embroiled in a dog-eat-dog competition to lower their costs to capture an ever thinning slice of the market.

The only way out of this is for China to expand its consumer base and create an alternative source of demand, otherwise most exporters will get killed simply for not being able to compete with Chinese products in both quality and price.

quick break from Iran for a second, update on kneecap

Kneecap rapper bailed over terror charge

Trump rebuffs Putin’s offer to help mediate Israel-Iran conflict

The US president urged his Russian counterpart to resolve Russia’s war in Ukraine before stepping in elsewhere.

“He actually offered to help mediate, I said, ‘do me a favour, mediate your own. Let’s mediate Russia first, OK?'” Trump told reporters at the White House.

Sad breakup between the two. It also signals that war is now imminent.

Maybe it will all be revealed months or years from now, but the timing in the responses of the US and Isr*el feel very strange to me. As people on this site have pointed out, the US has been positioning forces in the Gulf for months now, with all the bombers being transferred in, and then all the staff being pulled out of embassies leading up to the Israeli attack, etc. Clearly the US knew shit was about to go down.

But then, why is the US waiting at least a whole week to step in (assuming they do), or why didn’t Israel wait a little longer to strike if the US isn’t quite ready yet? Is the US purposely letting Israel get a bloody nose as a casus belli to intervene and turn Iran into another Yemen, like they’ve always wanted? But then again, why even bother having a casus belli when no one besides the neocons/zionists in charge want to do this at all anyways? Was it all a severe miscalculation? Iran is heavily infiltrated by Mossad, so there’s no way they don’t know Iran’s military capabilities, or the fact that there were people who could replace the officials they assassinated. I guess I’m just confused. Israel is literally built off this myth about being an unsinkable safe haven–getting battered by Iran seems very damaging for stability in the short and long term. I suppose we can only wait, fog of war and all that. It feels like the whole world is waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Decided to make this a completely separate comment.

To classify Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal, there’s this graphic and document I found that might help everyone understand it better. I’m really bad at graphic design, so there’s no way I could make my own graphics. It uses five categories, explained here:

Link to the 27 page PDF document, recommend reading

As for the Iranian ballistic missile arsenal with the range to hit Israel, I’ve included not to scale graphics from the document of the possible trajectories that can be used with the range to hit Israel:

Category 1:

• Qadr
• Emad
• Khorramshahr 1
• Khorramshahr 2
• Shabab 3 (unknown if operational, quite old)
• Sejjil/Ashoura
• Rezvan extended range (used by Yemen)

Light category 2 (only for accuracy improvement, not non ballistic maneuvers or multiple re entry vehicles):

• Khorramshahr 4

Light category 3 (only for accuracy improvement, not non ballistic maneuvers):

• Emad MaRV, called Etemad.

Category 3:

• Kheibar Shekan-1/Hatem-2
• Kheibar Shekan-2/Palestine-1
• Haj Qassem
• Qassem Basir (Haj Qassem with dedicated electro optical terminal guidance)

Category 4:

• Fattah-1
• Palestine-2

Category 5, “true hypersonic” weapons:

• Fattah-2 (in prototype stage, no evidence of successful test or operation)

If you want a real world video example of how category 3 and 4 MaRV equipped ballistic missiles compare to category 1 in flight, I managed to find one video from Iran’s Operation True Promise II attack on Israel during October last year. Category 3 and 4 MaRVs are seen performing pull up maneuvers, level flight/glide phases, and final drives to the target from 0:00 to 1:03. Then after 1:03, category 1 purely ballistic trajectory missiles appear at a much higher altitude. I’ve posted it many times before, but it’s worth a watch.

Twitter link for video

Xcancel link

Important to note that with missile launch facilities in western Iran being suppressed, some of Iran’s more advanced solid fueled Maneuverable Re-entry Vehicle (MaRV) capable ballistic missiles don’t have the range to hit Israel when fired from central or eastern Iran. Haj Qassem, Qassem Basir and Kheibar Shekan-1 don’t have the range, so the role these missiles play is minimised, they’re out of the fight. Fattah-1 and Kheibar Shekan-2 have the range, Fattah 1 can use the rocket motor on the MaRV to act as a pseudo two stage missile to extend and achieve the required range, despite the stated range being only 1400km, as shown by Fattah-1 missiles being fired at Israel from Yemen, 2000+km range.

This means more of Iran’s liquid fueled older ballistic missiles like Qadr and Emad have to be fired. Iran has a lot of these, but they have long set up times, which allows them to fired on by Israeli manned aircraft with stand off weapons before launch, or even by UCAVs at Isfahan. They are also much easier to intercept once launched. Khorramshahr series missiles are liquid fueled, but require much lower set up time due to using a different kind of liquid fuel. And solid fueled ballistic missiles have minimal set up time. Sejjil is a longer range solid fueled ballistic missile, but it’s purely ballistic, no MaRV, and in limited numbers.

This helps to explain to low salvo size by Iran towards Israel, even when Iran says that they’ll deliver a massive retaliation. They also fire mostly during the night, and at dawn or dusk, to avoid observation from purely optical (no infrared) surveillance assets, like optical satellites or drones.

NYT article

Iran Is Preparing Missiles for Possible Retaliatory Strikes on U.S. Bases, Officials Say