I wouldn’t totally count out the recognized government of Yemen. Not on their own merits, they long ago lost the majority of Yemen’s population to Ansar Allah’s control and almost got wiped out by the STC (UAE-backed South Yemen separatists) earlier this year before Saudi Arabia intervened…

But, to have Saudi Arabia and much of the rest of their world diplomatically in their corner is a really great benefit that can hardly be overstated. In the aforementioned case when the STC almost destroyed the recognized government in a rapid offensive, the Saudi intervention resulted in not only the gains being reversed but the STC itself being formally dissolved all of one month later. They have quite a lot of weight to swing around.

Now, that’s NOT to say Saudi Arabia can just push Ansar Allah around like that, they’re on a completely different level than the STC. Ansar Allah, despite the small appearance on the map, is basically a state level entity with like three quarters of Yemen’s population under its control (the number they control is not terribly far behind Saudi Arabia’s own population!) and much of that population are in rugged mountains. Not easy to dislodge fighters from highly populated mountainous terrain where the population sees you as an intruder! That became abundantly clear in the last conflict where the last real coalition momentum was instead put to taking the coasts and the siege of Hudaydah. The idea being, if you can’t directly challenge Ansar Allah in their mountain fortresses as they are, instead cut off the supplies they need to wage war so their logistics fall to pieces as without access to the sea they are totally surrounded.

The problem with that however is that with the tens of millions of people densely packed in north Yemen who now require a huge amount of foreign aid, disruptions to that flow of aid like say from putting the giant port it mostly flows through under siege risks massive famine. With the intervention attracting tons of controversy due to terrible airstrikes in civilian areas on like hospitals and schools and increasing notoriety of Saudi Arabia also from things like the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, there was tremendous international pressure being placed on Saudi Arabia to back off or be made a pariah.

However… it is not certain that Saudi Arabia would face similar pressures if they undertook similar efforts to choke off Ansar Allah these days. This is not really as humanitarian minded a world as it was even eight years ago, for one. For two, Ansar Allah has through the attacks on Red Sea shipping against many different countries burned up a lot of the patience it may otherwise have been afforded by countries that previously objected to the Saudi intervention. Now, they must balance how strongly they would want to object against such measures morally vs. the damage that halts on Red Sea shipping or explosions on Saudi oil infrastructure do to their own economies.

Also, now Saudi Arabia may have some more allies up its sleeve in such an endeavor depending on how the fighting goes and if Ansar Allah continues to attack outside of Yemen’s boundaries.

Pakistan’s Defence Minister Khawaja Asif said any attack on Saudi Arabia could activate the recently signed Mecca Joint Defence Agreement, days after Yemen’s Houthis launched a barrage of missiles at the kingdom.

“If there is unprovoked aggression, or a spillover of whatever is happening in Yemen into Saudi Arabia, definitely the Mecca agreement will become operational,” he told Pakistani media outlet Geo News on Tuesday night.

“There should be no doubt about that. We are bound by the terms and conditions of this pact, and … we will honour them in case there is a need.”

Previously Pakistan outright proclaimed no interest in the matter and stayed back. Them and Turkey could add quite a great deal of diplomatic or military weight and limit escalation with Iran (Iran is fine at yeeting missiles across the waves to whoever but is not really interested in antagonizing countries with powerful ground forces directly bordering it). Plus the US itself though with zero interest in providing ground forces may well be willing to actually supply other forms of help given that Ansar Allah is aligned with Iran and the present situation with Iran is deeply embarassing to the US and they would really rather not having more of Saudi oil and refined products getting knocked out or made inaccessible to the global market.

The attacks are too big for Saudi Arabia not to do something to not look like a punk that will take anything on the international stage… competing with that though, Saudi Arabia does not want to give the appearance of local instability to investors, and getting directly involved in a war doesn’t help that sentiment. And getting too involved also makes the recognized government of Yemen look like total puppets which is not very helpful for Saudi Arabia’s interests.

We’ll see probably quite a lot of updates in the time to come but anyway my prediction is that the recognized government of Yemen does not entirely crumple quite so easily (at least, not without a strong intervention shortly thereafter putting it back on life support again).

There is an evil invasive plant called Sida rhombifolia that invades local habitats and is obnoxious to pull over here. Guess what shape the leaves are

edit: Acalypha rhomboidea is on the side of justice here though

Reminder that oil is refined before it is made into products such as gasoline. If say a refinery gets blown up, that can make refined products like gasoline much more expensive due to less supply and simultaneously lower the price of crude oil because with less refining there is less demand for crude oil.

The price of crude oil going in to be refined is important because if that is crazy expensive then generally so will be products that are made from it but there are some other factors at play

They have a lot of brain and nose real estate dedicated to processing such smells for useful information and also stronger stomach acid and enzymes in the digestive system to make ingesting poop much less threatening for a typical dog vs. the average person. So they typically benefit from such investigations whereas people would get not much info from such behaviors but would be way more likely to get some awful disease. Better for us to have a body that says “uhhh don’t do that” whereas they have instincts that tell them to go right on ahead.

The US baby boom is not really meaningful on a global scale

The Russian Cyrillic name “Путин” is transliterated differently in French, among other reasons if it were written as “Putin” like elsewhere it would be pronounced very similarly to a curse word in French.

The situation has not been developing well for the Sahel coup belt countries. They were hoping that with Russia’s Wagner group (now rebranded as Africa Corps) on their side they could operate with much looser rules of engagement that would allow them to crush groups like ISIS and JNIM for good. Unfortunately, while that is good for aura farming video compilations, it has also pushed many livid citizens upset at their treatment over to the anti-government forces and strengthened their hands. One of the few good things they have going for them is that at least JNIM and ISIS are too busy knife-fighting each other to fully capitalize on their growing strength vs. the governments.

By credibly warning that he intends to close the airspace he can make airlines think twice about flying in Russia in general and near Ukraine in particular, likely damaging the Russian economy even without actually lifting a finger. Who knows how serious he is

I wonder what was promised to Chevron to change their minds. Companies are usually pretty hesitant to throw around billions of dollars into a country that has previously seized similar investments, and the pay-off is a sour crude that is more difficult to refine and not as desired so they can’t command that high of a price. There’s a reason why Exxon-Mobil is quoted in the article as saying that Venezuela is un-investable, despite that pissing off Trump. And one of the other links in the article was saying Venezuela could require more on the order of one hundred billion dollars to get to four million barrels a day (which is roughly the peak production they once enjoyed) so in light of that seven billion while enough to be a giant risk for an individual company it doesn’t come close to rejuvenating the industry for Venezuela either barring wild success on a slim budget.

Maybe it’s like a play for the cameras. Say some words and Trump can throw around his favorite words like deal and billions, cash in on whatever approval that nets you, then quietly curtail much of the money some years down the line when Trump is out of office.

Apparently these particular drones were found on a tarmac or field from what other reporting is saying, so they were probably snuck in rather than directly flown in.

In upstate New York one of my college friends borrowed my car and was driving around with it. My car had a Norwegian flag decoration on it and some guy pumping gas at a gas station mistook it for the Confederate flag, pointed at it and said, “yeah the South will rise again!!!” while my (Asian…) friend was also filling up. When she got back she had a lot of questions for me about what kind of flag it was since she wasn’t familiar with the Norwegian one.

Never ever seen a Nazi flag in person and I’ve lived in the Deep South for about a decade. Confederate ones are super common though, albeit less so than just a few years back.

Kind of surprised that he’s still giga-popular given the massive war in Tigray a while back and the partially related issue of vast swathes of rebel control in Amhara, Oromo and Tigray areas but then again a couple years of 9% GDP growth can smooth over a lot of problems I guess

So I think it’s accurate to say that the US unintentionally ushered the current regime into power by putting in an unpopular puppet dictator to replace an elected leader who was popular with his people (Mossadegh).

Mossadegh was very popular initially, and remained so through the end in urban strongholds of support. But especially as time went on he was opposed in rural areas which then held the bulk of the population of the country, and there was slipping of support even in urban areas as the economic pain of the British sanctions mounted over time that caused his political strength to weaken as the promised gains from nationalizing the oil did not materialize. So against this backdrop of declining support Mossadegh undertook increasingly bold measures to ensure he could still enact his preferred policies, which stepped on many toes. In the 1952 elections of the 17th Majlis he literally went “STOP THE COUNT!” and halted the elections after the votes were tallied for 79 members, the minimum quorum for the parliamentary quorum to be met. That was because the places that were quickest to have the votes tallied were the urban areas where he had most support, so the longer he waited and the more votes to come in the stronger he expected the opposition to become. He increasingly ruled with emergency powers, alienated former allies like Ayatollah Kashani, and eventually went so far as to stage a rigged referendum to dissolve the rump parliament after deadlock and resignations in the Majlis threatened to derail his ability to enact his agenda. By rigged I mean like it was not a secret thing at all, you had to go to a different tent to cast a no vote than you did for a yes vote so it was obvious if you were dissenting and in the urban settings there were armed mobs and security forces surrounding the polling stations with signs calling people traitors if they weren’t voting to dissolve so it was a pretty intimidating environment to publically disagree in. Outside of those urban bases of support, the rural areas were not even provided ballots under the excuse that counting their votes would take too long in the urgent national situation. Many people voting in the affirmative were also permitted to vote multiple times. In these circumstances the opposition boycotted the elections and unsurprisingly the yes vote to dissolve the Majlis won by >99.9%.

To be clear I think it was wrong for the US and UK to interfere in Iranian politics like that but there’s a reason they so easily found support for the coup and fertile ground for riots and protests against Mossadegh; his former popularity had very much faded by that point outside of his most ardent partisans.

The shah was also a great deal more popular at the outset of the coup, only to also blow it but much more disastrously in later years. He too would become increasingly authoritarian and undertake measures like establishing SAVAK in 1957 (which was prone to torture and assassination) and banning all opposition parties in 1975 which didn’t do him favors in public opinion. And unlike Mossadegh who at least was able to hold onto support in urban areas, the Shah ended up alienating more or less everyone. The monarchy’s traditional support base was in the conservative countryside, not so much the cities which had been the strongholds of Mossadegh’s support. But the shah wanted to create a modernized and centralized secular state, a goal at odds with those of the bulk of his supporters. His “White Revolution” was supposed to make an independent royalist powerbase from peasants given land from land reform, enfranchised women from secular reforms and so on while also taking the wind from the sails of left wing urban groups like Tudeh that hated him by enacting measures they supported. It wound up backfiring because it pissed off the landed elites and clergy that had previously supported him, but didn’t generate as many independent enriched royalist farmers owning their own land as hoped for. Many peasants got plots too small to be effective and while familiar with physically working the land were still often illiterate and didn’t know how to navigate buying seeds and equipment and so on that their landlords had handled in the past. They weren’t helped by stretched government which was embarking on all sorts of vanity projects in dealing with the changed circumstances and could not compete effectively with the farmers who could and so had to sell out their land and go to the cities for work. With the flood of labor coming in the wages could be set low and so those new workers wound up poor and disgruntled; urban poor often had to rely on the charity networks established by the clerics to survive. With the clerics now pissed off at the shah, that previously supportive element of the shah’s powerbase flipped to being hostile yet due to the new urban networks actually grew in power rather than becoming marginalized by the secular reforms as intended. And for the previous urbanites, while their interests were generally helped out by the reforms they were nevertheless put off by all the political repression and violence and the bad memories of the coup and so were not that enticed back into supporting the shah. So the shah found himself basically isolated domestically and in respects to foreign ties he had burned bridges. The West was mad that the shah was asking OPEC to keep or raise oil prices high which was helping to fund Iran’s many projects, and there was a big push for human rights which made supporting Iran look awkward with SAVAK’s crueler activities being widely publicized so that also put pressure on the relationship. Even the west didn’t really back the shah’s government by the end when they viewed its fall as inevitable and tried to pivot unsuccessfully.

Idk for this case but in many authoritarian countries anti-corruption is often a nominal goal while the real target is something else that may not sound as noble… even while targeting legitimately very corrupt people.

The whole ruling clique may easily be skimming from wherever they can (so long as it’s not too egregious or clearly harmful to the goals of their leadership) as one of the perks for being up there which is an easy way for leadership to buy loyalty of subordinates. That also makes those subordinates “dirty” since their leadership that watched it happen has great evidence to cite if for whatever reason they are not satisfied or impressed by the underlings who partook. Then those lower people can be cracked down on (even legitimately!) for corruption even if their real crime in the eyes of the government was on dissenting about a certain policy or the like. Tasty carrot as bait to partake and later fear of the stick of exposure and punishment.

Uselessness can be useful for a different context. For example, the Carolina Sandhills National Wildlife Refuge is flourishing today in part because on account of the sand it was considered agriculturally useless land that farmers struggled to do anything with during the Great Depression. So it was easy for the government to buy out the stakeholders and begin protecting and recovering that special ecosystem.

In the case of pine plantations, they are quite useful to people because they fairly passively produce a vast amount of wood that the owner of the land can sell at their leisure.

However, in the course of optimizing the pine plantations for economic benefit, the benefit to the wildlife is reduced. More densely packing the trees means that you have more wood growing in the same area rather than leaving unused space. But in doing so that means less sunlight hitting the ground. That energy goes to making more wood rather than to supporting the groundcover, and the groundgover is the more important of the two for most animals.

Exactly lol you called it

Land that has no buildings on it is not necessarily in a natural state… there are grades to “undeveloped land” with some having much more ecological value than others. If I look at the side of the road by the local interstate yes there is technically a “forest” but it’s mostly like loblolly pine plantation with the trees densely packed to each other to maximize the amount that can be cut and invasive privet growing in what little space remains between them. All those leaves trunks and stems in close proximity choke out the sun reaching the ground (preventing forbs, legumes and grasses that need that sun from growing and making food for the rest of the foodchain) and puts impassable woody thickets between the pine trunks that block most anything from moving though the area unless they can fly or climb above it.

Looks wild enough to the uninformed but ecologically useless to the majority of animals adapted to what was once open and parklike easily navigable longleaf pine savanna with insanely diverse groundcover supporting many animal diets and providing shelter.

Given enough time to shift production over and train up people, certainly.

The Ukrainian Armed Forces was small prior to 2014 but they grew it substantially after Russia snapped up Crimea and sent the little green men to fight them in the east which is part of why they were much more prepared for the renewed invasion efforts than they had been eight years prior. This is not to say that Russia stands a chance against NATO but it is to say that Ukraine presently has a very large and powerful army even compared to leading European powers at this point. Zelensky said France presently has about 200k men in the military while Ukraine had at that time some 980k men in the military, and Ukraine are spending many tens of billions of dollars on the military also.

I live in a rather xeric sandhills environment with blazing sun and this year has had more drought than typical, so indeed a good number of my less well adapted or more poorly positioned plants have been crisping up. Even so, summer is a season of fruiting and growth for many. Ex. partridge pea barely germinates at the end of spring. It was July-early August for it to blossom gloriously, mid-August for the cloudless sulphur caterpillars to appear en masses to devour those blooms and leaves, and at present the caterpillars are undergoing metamorphosis while the partridge pea bereft of blooms now pushes out the eponymous pea pods. Beautyberries have only just now turned their delightful purple color, the black-eyed susans grew in the spring but did not flower until the summer. I can’t take a step anywhere without the grasshoppers fleeing and despite the dry conditions there are tree frogs taking shelter in the shadows of my house’s siding and toads singing, anoles basking in the force of the sun.