Very cool photo from the latest eruption in Iceland

fuck parking lots amirite?

So, the yanks put on a fake Ukrainian moustache and attacked Russian territory with ATACMS missiles in clear violation of russian red lines. Then the British put on another fake Ukrainian moustache and attacked a Russian presidential command bunker with Storm Shadow missiles.

Then Russia responded by firing an ICBM against an Ukrainian arms manufacturing plant in Dnepropetrovsk (the first time in military history that an ICBM has been fired in anger?). Ukrainian air defences were unable to stop the ICBM.

I saw some westoid "expert" say that firing the ICBM was "irresponsible" since it could have scared the yanks into a nuclear exchange. That might be but I think this sends a very clear message to the west. I hope they get it.

I wonder what other messages Russia has prepared.

With Russia's missile strike last night involving an ICBM or IRBM with a conventional payload, there has been a lot of talk about the potential nuclear threat or nuclear capabilities. Which is valid of course, such weapons usually carry nuclear warheads.

However, I managed to find this interesting quote from 2012 from Sergey Karakaev, commander of the Russian strategic missile forces, on the development and construction of Conventional Prompt Strike (CPS) or Conventional Prompt Global Strike (CPGS) weapons. Such weapons are intended to deliver a precision guided conventional weapons strike anywhere on the globe, within an hour from launch. It is a capability that the US in particular has been pursuing since the Bush Jr administration, first looking to convert a Trident SLBM to a conventional payload, and then on the development of hypersonic weapons. This caused tensions between Obama and Putin in 2013. Anyways, here is the quote from Sergey Karakaev from 2012.

In addition, according to Sergey Karakaev, commander of Russia's Strategic Missile Forces, a liquid fuelled rocket, with its greater payload potential, will allow Russia "to realize such opportunities as the creation of high precision strategic weapons with non-nuclear warheads and a practically global range".

Russia can create non-nuclear, high precision weapons based on intercontinental rockets in the event that the USA also works on designing such a weapon", Karakaev points out.

• Source - Space Daily, 31 December 2012

It seems as if Russia has demonstrated this capability. This existence and deployment of this potential CPS system by Russia changes a lot of calculations around escalation in a potential NATO - Russia conflict.

From videos and pictures of the strike, which I'll post below in a spoiler tag, we can see six seperate re-entries into the earth's atmosphere, and each re-entry contains multiple submunitions, based on screenshots of the video, about six submunitions per re-entry event. So six re-entries with 6 submunitions each, for 36 hits total. That's quite a payload if it came from one missile. If being the keyword.

to employ 5 thousand people we need 31 gw of power 😥

It seems Chinese LLM models have caught up to western ones, even though they have inferior hardware. Also they say they're going to open source it.

DeepSeek’s first reasoning model R1-Lite-Preview turns heads, beating OpenAI o1 performance

https://venturebeat.com/ai/deepseeks-first-reasoning-model-r1-lite-preview-turns-heads-beating-openai-o1-performance/

Is there a good summary any of you all have regarding how badly Javier Milei and his government have fucked things up in Argentina (so far)?

A bloomer take on the recent news of China issuing USD-dominated sovereign bond to Saudi here.

Am close to illiterate on finance and economy but how solid is his first hypothetical scenario of China issuing ~100 billions of bond? Also, doesn't it changes the whole question of re/de-dollarization ?

Friendly Fire Incident

‘Closer to the caste’ – Milei slams his own vice-president

President Javier Milei opens up on relationship with Vice-President Victoria Villarruel, declaring in an interview that she has “no influence on decision-making” in his government and doesn’t take part in Cabinet meetings.

President Javier Milei has laid bare his dissatisfaction with Vice-President Victoria Villarruel, declaring that she has “no influence” on decision-making in his government and criticising her proximity to business leaders and politicians. Milei let rip at Villarruel directly in a television interview, stating that she had “decided not to participate” in Cabinet meetings and implying that their relationship is at its worst moment.

In the past, the La Libertad Avanza has refrained from criticising his second-in-command, but for the first time, he challenged her directly. “We have the relationship that is needed institutionally to fulfil our roles,” Milei said when asked about their relationship during an extensive interview with the LN+ news channel.

“Villarruel has no influence whatsoever in the decision-making process. She does not participate in Cabinet meetings. She decided not to participate. She has long since decided not to take part in Cabinet meetings,” he revealed. “In her vision, in many of the things we do… she is closer to the red circle, to what she calls high politics, and what we call ‘the caste,’” declared Milei.

It’s not the first time that reports of tensions between La Libertad Avanza’s top two have emerged. Earlier this year, Villarruel described Milei as a “poor little ham” sandwiched between herself and his sister, presidential chief-of-staff Karina Milei – whom he describes as “the boss.”

Villarruel, a hard-right conservative, made a name for herself as the founder of a non-profit organisation that denounced the crimes of leftist guerrilla groups during the right-wing dictatorship that seized power in 1976. In her public appearances, she often focuses on more traditional priorities of the Argentine right, championing cases against abortion, LGBTQ education in schools and prison terms she regards as too lax.

She's an insane piece of shit, ardent supporter of the 1976-1983 dictatorship. Her father was in the military and her only focus in life is to create a false equivalency between the guerrillas and the military who had the State at their disposal, which they used to torture, kill, disappear people and steal babies. It goes without saying she's a massive transphobe and a zionist.

Tensions between Villarruel, 49, and Milei, 53, flared too during attempts to pass legislation and presidential decrees through the Senate, which the vice-president heads. Allies of the President accused Villarruel of not doing enough to resist opposition pressure. She was also criticised for approving pay hikes for lawmakers and staff in Congress.

Many commentators say their relationship was severely damaged by Milei’s decision to hand control of the Defence and Security Ministries – Villarruel’s preferred areas of government – to his former campaign rival-turned-ally Patricia Bullrich and her vice-presidential pick, Luis Petri. “I didn’t like it,” Villarruel said previously of Milei’s decision. “But I respect it.”

The two leaders are hardly the first presidential pair to clash. Milei’s predecessor in office, Alberto Fernández, was at loggerheads with his vice-president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, during their 2019-2023 government, with the duo reportedly going months without talking.

They're not even a year into their administration and they're already ripping each other apart lmao. Not sure what they're trying to do, but institutionally it's not looking very good. This tells you a lot about milei's mental instability, because he's not well. You can't just lash out at your VP like that, there are other channels and institutions you can use if you want to purge your VP or something I guess. I mean, there will be some consequences for shit like that you know?

It makes less sense when you consider Villarruel has some commanding power within the military. If there's anything she has done lately is attend to military barracks to speak up with people, something she's not really allowed to do because she ain't CiC, but whatever, not that like it even matters. It's not that the entire military is at her disposal, I think most military men don't really pay attention to her, but some officers might have connections with her deceased father (who was in the military and achieved a high rank) and might see her as one of their own, more specifically as part of the "Military Party", an old-fashioned coup-friendly group of people whose main ideology can be loosely described as rabid anti-peronism and anti-communism and who, over the last three decades, have lost power to the more efficient compradors coming from other areas of society (business, political parties, unions, etc). In other words, the Military Party was the US' way of getting shit done in Argentina, but in the 90s the method of carrying out constant coups to steer the country at their will became less efficient than just installing civilian neoliberal governments instead and therefore the Military Party was ditched, even though it still exists.

If anything, this exposes a deeper conflict within milei's government. I think the unwanted presence of his sister in decision-making is causing a lot of harm, after all, she's an absolute nobody but has extreme control over policy. It reminds me of the late Qing Dynasty politics, when the Emperor was surrounded by insanely incompetent advisors which had to handle extremely sensitive topics like foreign policy and stuff like supressing of the Taiping Rebellion, which they did but only after a massive bloodbath. This is more or less the same, super unqualified people are taking key posts in government and are colliding with other ministers who are more or less better qualified to hold their posts. Sure, Villarruel is a nazi lunatic, but she is a professional, she doesn't belong to that band of loudmouths like the milei siblings and the many "libertarian" trolls that now occupy State institutions.

They can kill each other for all I care.

Two headlines from the website of centre-lib mainstream state media DR:

• The ICC issues arrest warrant for "Israel's" prime minister
• The terror organisation Hamas applauds arrest warrant

I fucking hate western journalism

Edit: In one of their news updates these spineless slimeballs writes that the arrest warrant is likely to "complicate the efforts to negotiate a ceasefire to end the 13 month long conflict".

walrus man bloodfeast checking-in

a difficult event in the hague

ICC woke up

russian guidance for icbm so shit they missed kiev by 1000 kms.

Weird news all around

*big brainy take, maybe iran gave them one of their thingies with shorter range

More funny shit from the failed assassination attempt against Lula da Silva, Geraldo Alckmin (VP, probably known for posting Wojak and other memes on his twitter account) and Supreme Court Judges Alexandre de Moraes (The one that fucked with Elon Musk) and Flavio Dino (Brazilian Communist Party Member and Former Governor). They were using their whatsapp group (yes, they were using this shit to plot a coup), they named their group "Copa 2022", to pretend it was a World Cup group but also because Copa sounds like Coup. Coup 2022. Holy fucking shit these people are fucking stupid, they fucking had a document with the whole coup only changing some of the names of people they wanted to kill/arrest, they left the files on the printer, and the printer was literally inside Lula's Office (which was Bolsonaro's office before). No fucking wonder they couldn't do shit, and the US/CIA was against this.

So the ICBM was there to tell NAFO that Russian ICBMs actually work. They will probably do a nuclear test as well.