Assertively balanced takes.
Joined January 2024
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Commenter in Chief retweeted
אם כבר כולנו, מיליוני ישראלים, יושבים כרגע ערים במקלטים עם אזעקות ובומים סביבנו - בואו נגיד את זה שוב: די למלחמת הנצח. די להפקרה של העתיד שלנו בידי חבורת משיחיים מסוכנים שעושים הכל כדי לשרוד פוליטית, בזמן שכל העמים באזור משלמים את המחיר.
Commenter in Chief retweeted
An Iranian warship attended India’s naval peace exercise. International protocol required it to carry no ammunition. Returning home through a war zone, it requested asylum at a Sri Lankan port. The port authorities waited 11 hours before responding. During those 11 hours, a US submarine arrived and sank it 40 kilometers off Galle. Eighty-seven sailors are dead.
Those are the verified facts. Everything after them is a question that three governments are refusing to answer.
IRIS Dena departed Visakhapatnam on February 25 after completing India’s MILAN 2026 exercise, the Indian Navy’s flagship multilateral cooperation event involving 74 nations and 42 warships. The no-ammunition rule that governs MILAN participation meant IRIS Dena was sailing toward a war in its home waters without its weapons systems loaded. Iranian Navy personnel, invited guests of the Indian Navy eight days earlier, were on a ship that could not fight back. Indian authorities confirmed this directly: the vessel was defenceless by the rules of the exercise that India hosted.
When IRIS Dena requested emergency berthing at Galle, it was not requesting a port visit. It was requesting survival. A warship whose home country is under active US bombardment, whose navy has been described by the US President as having been entirely destroyed, was asking a neutral state for eleven hours to grant what maritime law describes as a fundamental obligation. The Sri Lankan Parliament’s opposition demanded an answer this week: why did authorities not respond in time? No government answer has been provided.
What makes the timing question impossible to dismiss is the distance arithmetic. The US submarine that fired the torpedo was operating in the Indian Ocean. IRIS Dena was stationary, or near-stationary, waiting offshore. The eleven hours of delay coincided with the window required for a submarine to close on a position from a tracking solution established when IRIS Dena departed Indian waters. Whether that convergence was coordination, coincidence, or intelligence sharing is not established by any public evidence. But the Indian Navy’s official statement, issued after the sinking of a ship that had been its guest for seven days, contained no condemnation of the attack, no reference to MILAN, and no mention of the United States. That silence is a geopolitical statement even if it is not a confession.
IRIS Bushehr, a second Iranian Navy supply vessel that participated in the same exercise, is now positioned approximately ten nautical miles off Colombo, carrying 270 crew. Sri Lanka has denied it port access. It is sitting in international waters in an ocean where the United States has demonstrated it will sink Iranian naval vessels without warning.
The question being asked in Tehran, Colombo, and New Delhi is the same question every non-aligned nation in the Indo-Pacific is now asking: if attending India’s naval exercise makes your warship a target on the way home, what exactly does India’s invitation mean?
open.substack.com/pub/shanak…
BREAKING: The last time a US submarine torpedoed an enemy warship, the year was 1945.
That just changed.
Near Sri Lanka. In the Indian Ocean. Four thousand miles from Tehran.
The Iranian frigate IRIS Dena had 180 crew aboard. It was heading home after attending the International Fleet Review in Visakhapatnam, India, three days earlier. It had just sailed in formation alongside warships from 50 nations. India’s navy watched it leave port.
A US submarine was waiting for it.
101 missing. 78 wounded. Pete Hegseth announced it live on television with footage.
Now read that geography again.
Not the Gulf. Not the Strait of Hormuz. The Indian Ocean. Neutral waters. Bordering India. Near Sri Lanka, whose navy is currently pulling Iranian sailors from the sea.
This is the part every regional war model misses completely.
The US is not fighting Iran in the Middle East. The US is hunting Iran’s navy on every ocean on earth. There is no safe water. There is no transit corridor. There is no flag that protects an Iranian hull once a US submarine gets a firing solution.
Every neutral nation that hosted IRIS Dena three days ago at a multilateral ceremony is now watching a rescue operation for her crew.
Every navy on earth just learned the same lesson.
The market is still pricing a contained regional conflict with a 4-to-5-week ceiling.
The Indian Ocean is now a battlefield.
Those are not the same thing.
open.substack.com/pub/shanak…
Commenter in Chief retweeted
Even Marjorie Taylor Greene is saying what many of us warned about.
If you backed Donald Trump because of her — maybe it’s time to listen now.
#EpsteinWar
#IranWar
Commenter in Chief retweeted
For decades, Iran has been reduced to headlines.
But behind the politics is a land of unimaginable beauty—palaces, poetry, sacred light, and stone cities older than Rome.
Let’s rediscover the real Iran through breathtaking places you’ll never forget 🧵👇
ALT “Nation Gate” or “Gate of all Nation” is a gate constructed during Achaemenid era by King Xerxes order. He was the successor of the founder of Persepolis, Darius.
Commenter in Chief retweeted
Huge repository of information about OpenAI and Altman just dropped — 'The OpenAI Files'.
There's so much crazy shit in there. Here's what Claude highlighted to me:
1. Altman listed himself as Y Combinator chairman in SEC filings for years — a total fabrication (?!):
"To smooth his exit [from YC], Altman proposed he move from president to chairman. He pre-emptively published a blog post on the firm's website announcing the change.
But the firm's partnership had never agreed, and the announcement was later scrubbed from the post."
"...Despite the retraction, Altman continued falsely listing himself as chairman in SEC filings for years, despite never actually holding the position."
(WTAF.)
2. OpenAI's profit cap was quietly changed to increase 20% annually — at that rate it would exceed $100 trillion in 40 years. The change was not disclosed and OpenAI continued to take credit for its capped-profit structure without acknowledging the modification.
3. Despite claiming to Congress he has "no equity in OpenAI," Altman held indirect stakes through Sequoia and Y Combinator funds.
4. Altman owns 7.5% of Reddit — when Reddit announced its OpenAI partnership, Altman's net worth jumped $50 million. Altman invested in Rain AI, then OpenAI signed a letter of intent to buy $51 million of chips from them.
5. Rumours suggest Altman may receive a 7% stake worth ~$20 billion in the restructured company.
5. OpenAI had a major security breach in 2023 where a hacker stole AI technology details but didn't report it for over a year. OpenAI fired Leopold Aschenbrenner explicitly because he shared security concerns with the board.
6. Altman denied knowing about equity clawback provisions that threatened departing employees' millions in vested equity if the ever criticised OpenAI. But Vox found he personally signed the documents authorizing them in April 2023. These restrictive NDAs even prohibited employees from acknowledging their existence.
7. Senior employees at Altman's first startup Loopt twice tried to get the board to fire him for "deceptive and chaotic behavior".
9. OpenAI's leading researcher Ilya Sutskever told the board: "I don't think Sam is the guy who should have the finger on the button for AGI".
Sutskever provided the board a self-destructing PDF with Slack screenshots documenting "dozens of examples of lying or other toxic behavior.
10. Mira Murati (CTO) said: "I don't feel comfortable about Sam leading us to AGI"
11. The Amodei siblings described Altman's management tactics as "gaslighting" and "psychological abuse".
12. At least 5 other OpenAI executives gave the board similar negative feedback about Altman.
13. Altman owned the OpenAI Startup Fund personally but didn't disclose this to the board for years. Altman demanded to be informed whenever board members spoke to employees, limiting oversight.
14. Altman told board members that other board members wanted someone removed when it was "absolutely false". An independent review after Altman's firing found "many instances" of him "saying different things to different people"
15. OpenAI required employees to waive their federal right to whistleblower compensation. Former employees filed SEC complaints alleging OpenAI illegally prevented them from reporting to regulators.
16. While publicly supporting AI regulation, OpenAI simultaneously lobbied to weaken the EU AI Act.
By 2025, Altman completely reversed his stance, calling the government approval he once advocated "disastrous" and OpenAI now supports federal preemption of all state AI safety laws even before any federal regulation exists.
Obviously this is only a fraction of what's in the apparently 10,000 words on the site. Link below if you'd like to look over.
(I've skipped over the issues with OpenAI's restructure which I've written about before already, but in a way that's really the bigger issue.)
Commenter in Chief retweeted
Ted Cruz wants to topple Iran.
Ted Cruz doesn’t know anything about Iran.
How did the West become led by such demons?
