Iran is scheduled to play three group-stage matches beginning on 11 June, including fixtures against New Zealand and Belgium in Los Angeles, followed by a match against Egypt in Seattle.

The comments come after Iran’s sports minister, Ahmad Donyamali, said the team would not take part in the tournament following the US-Israeli war on Iran.

“Considering that this corrupt regime has assassinated our leader, under no circumstances can we participate in the World Cup,” he said.

Amazing how a six paragraph long article managed to bury the lead.

paywalled article…

Here ya go!

It’s not controversial to want to go after fraud in the system.

It’s highly controversial when the people claiming to investigate fraud are themselves doing fraud.

This is exactly what happened with DOGE, as well. Thiel’s goon squad walked into the beating heart of the executive bureaucracy to start siphoning data and cancelling checks. They’d point at something, say “Fraud!”, stop payments, steal a bunch of personal information, slander random people, fire anyone with a spine thick enough to stand up against them, and then cut themselves giant contractors’ salaries for the privilege.

Reagan had his own variation on this, most notably via Iran-Contra (effectively a massive embezzlement of foreign procured drugs and US military surplus funds), but also via Sewergate, the various lootings of Pentagon, FEMA, and HUD funds, and the mass firing of FAA agents under J. Lynn Helms. All these scandals were downwind of Reaganite claims of corruption, which his appointees were supposed to solve but instead exploited or exacerbated.

This has been true going straight back to the Nixon Administration. The conservative “we’re getting rid of the fraud” playbook is three generations old at this point. They run it, because it works pretty much every time.

People hear “fraud”, they see an AI generated image of a young black man in a pimp outfit driving a Cadillac, and they slam the “GOP Forever” button.

I just want to point out that bombing Iran has been an outspoken political view of the Republican Party for almost 40 years now.

It’s been the political view of the Neocon Wing of the GOP, specifically. After Trump’s win in 2016, a bunch of those neocons jumped ship to join the Democratic Party. So now both parties have this brain parasite of Iran hate digging through their leadership.

They used bombing Iran as a campaign ad against John McCain in the 2008 election.

Ah yes, a classic McCain banger.

Crazy that this was the most moderate voice within the Republican Party.

Epstein had extensive ties to the CIA, MI6, and Mossad, primarily through his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell’s father, Robert and his mentor, the father of Trump’s first AG Bob Barr, Donald.

This whole thing is the culmination of the political intrigues that brought the Soviet Union down 40 years ago. Trump’s people are just mopping up what’s left of the anti-colonial resistance governments.

Feels like people are leaping to whatever is in their immediate view.

Attack Iran to distract from Epstein. Attack Venezuela to distract from Epstein. Genocide in Gaza to distract from Epstein. ICE agents raiding various liberal cities to distract from Epstein. Try and fire Jerome Powell to distract from Epstein. Demolish the East Wing of the White House to distract from Epstein. Tighten sanctions on Cuba to distract from Epstein. Threaten Greenland to distract from Epstein. Greenlighting media consolidation into the hands of Silicon Valley allies. Turning over increased managerial authority to AI to distract from Epstein.

Like, you wouldn’t even know Project 2025 was a thing. Or that guys like Steven Miller and David Navarro are restructuring the socio-economic landscape of the country to impose a new national fascist regime.

Everything revolves around keeping this single dead pedophile multi-millionaire from being linked to Donald Trump, a thing that has already been happening for the better part of a decade.

The fact that “it’s kinda obvious” suggests to me that people are being distracted by Epstein.

Downside: Nightmarish war in Europe wrecking the continent worse than anything we’ve seen since WW2.

Upside: We’re getting some exciting new innovations in Meshnets.

We’ve deprecated a lot of the old TV/radio signal bandwidth in order to convert it to cellphone signal service.

But, on the flip side, digital antennae can hold a lot more information than the old analog signals. So now I’ve got a TV with a mini-antennae that gets 500 channels (virtually none of which I watch). My toddler son has figured out how to flip the channel to the continuous broadcast of Baby Einstein videos. And he periodically hijacks the TV for that purpose, when we leave the remote where he can reach.

So there’s at least one person I can name who likes the current state of affairs.

Conservative media keeps insisting he’s dead, he doesn’t exist, or he isn’t really in charge.

There was definitely a sense that you could just decapitate the gerontocracy and seize control of the country at gunpoint, much like the US managed in Venezuela, Syria, and Libya. They had Reza Pahlavi all queued up like a next generation Ahmed Chalabi. It does not appear to have fallen out like they’d hoped.

So now Israel and the US are just bombing anything in the country that looks halfway valuable, pretty much out of spite.

But the user wants a gui.

Firstly, plenty of Linux instances have GUI. I installed Mint precisely because I wanted to keep the Windows/Mac desktop experience I was familiar with. GUIs add latency, sure. But we’ve had smooth GUI experiences since Apple’s 1980s OS. This isn’t the primary load on the system.

Secondly, as the Windows OS tries to do more and more online interfacing, the bottleneck that used to be CPU or open Memory or even Graphics is increasingly internet latency. Even just going to the start menu means making calls out online. Querying your local file system has built in calls to OneDrive. Your system usage is being constantly polled and tracked and monitored as part of the Microsoft imitative to feed their AI platforms. And because all of these off-platform calls create external vulnerabilities, the (abhorrently designed) antivirus and firewall systems are constantly getting invoked to protect you from the online traffic you didn’t ask for.

It’s a black hole of bloatware.

Found out about this while watching “Halt and Catch Fire” (AMC’s effort to recreate the magic of Mad Men, but on the computer).

Doherty Threshold

In 1982 Walter J. Doherty and Ahrvind J. Thadani published, in the IBM Systems Journal, a research paper that set the requirement for computer response time to be 400 milliseconds, not 2,000 (2 seconds) which had been the previous standard. When a human being’s command was executed and returned an answer in under 400 milliseconds, it was deemed to exceed the Doherty threshold, and use of such applications were deemed to be “addicting” to users.

Isn’t it more having difficulty focusing for extended periods?

According to OP, they can’t even make it to the end of a sentence. shrug

I’d say the phenomenon is more hyperfocusing long enough to figure out the point,

and then getting frustrated as the speaker takes a long time to illustrate that point.

I definitely get feeling annoyed when someone rambles. And I get tuning out when a work presentation or a school lecture drags on. And I get feeling frustrated when a conversation or discussion is sidelined by minutiae.

But the “Um, aktuly, I don’t need to listen to this because I already know the answer” shit is extremely toxic behavior that inevitably sets people up to fail. If you’ve ever had to deal with student drivers before, it’s the way someone responds moments before they bend a fender.

Getting Overwhelmed is entirely different from Knowing The Answer In Advance.

be proven correct

ADHD is having difficulty focusing.

Hubris is assuming your inability to stay focused is some kind of precog superpower.

Annoying to deal with kids who insist “I know what you were going to say” one minute and “You didn’t tell me that!” the next. Infuriating to deal with adults who double down with therapy language.

Reminds me of an old joke.

Would people cut trees down if they could scream?

Omg, yes, absolutely. That would be the only way to shut them up.

if you’re born into a religious family initially you just adopt it

Right. Because there’s no inherent reason not to do so. And little kids tend to want to follow along with what they’re elders are doing.

Compare it to how most kids initially believe Santa Claus exists because they were told so.

Kids are told that they get presents by pleasing their parents. And then the decision making / agency is displaced onto a fictitious figure. That’s a very neat analogy for religion in the aggregate. Whether or not you “believe in Santa”, you’re still getting gifts based on your parents’ resources and generosity. If you want the newest kids’ favorite widget, you’re following the letter of the law whether or not you adhere to the spirit.

You can also participate in some church community stuff without being a member or even going to church.

If you’ve got friends/family who are members/do go, sure. Because they’re your social connection.

But you’ll struggle to join a community event if you don’t know anybody - or even when/where the event takes place. Nevermind knowing what’s in the works, what needs volunteers, what needs money, and who is in charge of leading them. The more you want to participate, the more you need to attend the religious church functions. The more you want to get into leadership, the more you need to demonstrate your piety.

Everyone is born into the world entirely ignorant. Cultures, customs, languages, and superstitions espoused by their parents, teachers, and peers are adopted as a matter of survival. And as the individual develops more autonomy, they use the information they gathered in their youth to navigate into new cultures and belief systems, in pursuit of improved material conditions.

You can be born into a Catholic family and become Atheist just as easily as you can be born into an Atheist family and become Catholic. What has driven the modern collapse in religiosity is - at least in my view - the mass migration driven by economic expansion and ecological collapse. People aren’t just waking up one day and deciding they aren’t gullible anymore. They’re being shuffled around by tidal forces and torn away from the historical cultures and infrastructure that had reproduced their families’ beliefs.

As a kid, my mom was deeply Catholic and tried to get us to attend church. But we moved several times, and after each move we found ourselves at a new church (often not even a Catholic church) with an alien congregation and divergent dogma. So what had rooted her and her sisters and parents and grandparents in Catholicism never took root with me or my sister.

By contrast, my wife’s family lived in Galveston for four generations. Virtually her entire family is devote practicing Catholics. She only slipped through the cracks because… her dad moved around a lot, particularly after her parents got divorced. Everyone else - even two of her transgender cousins - are still practicing. Churches are, at their heart, social institutions. And I think modern New Atheists often miss that fact in their quest to Own The Dumb Pious Folks.

If the US was serious about their offer

As of early 2026, the U.S. has allocated approximately $175 billion to $188 billion in total, covering military, financial, and humanitarian aid related to the war in Ukraine. Of this, roughly $66.9 billion to $69 billion has been specifically dedicated to security assistance and military aid.

That’s more than the entire GDP of Ukraine when the war broke out.

It’s been over 60

But also, we keep paying one half of America to kill the other half. That’s got a stabilizing effect

Actually, we did all those things and now America is Great Again