Comments on: Now just about everyone is saying that Iran’s nuclear capabilities were dealt a very serious blow

By: richf

richf — Sat, 28 Jun 2025 13:58:45 +0000

When dealing with the Middle East, always remember the words of Buffy “Slayer” Summers, to Dracula :
“Don’t you think I’ve seen your movies ? You ALWAYS come back”.

By: Miguel cervantes

Miguel cervantes — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 18:37:41 +0000

I was referring to this in the other thread

https://www.nytimes.com/1992/03/08/magazine/building-saddam-hussein-s-bomb.html

By: Barry Meislin

Barry Meislin — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 18:14:26 +0000

Related (“…touched a nerve…”)?

https://instapundit.com/728779/

By: iowaan

iowaan — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 15:31:32 +0000

i wonder if he believes himself.

By: miguel cervantes,

miguel cervantes, — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 15:05:15 +0000

yes there isn’t a homonym problem in spanish, that I can recall

I think my opinions about John Kerry are pretty clear,

his accountability for his part in the Winter Soldier blood libel, has never come,

is it partially self hatred on his part that drives him to be an Arabist,

By: Niketas Choniates

Niketas Choniates — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 14:56:55 +0000

@AesopFan:That’s mostly because English words come from so many different sources, with adjusted spelling to drop out any “furrin” sounds and letters, and inserted into the corpus of the language without further ado. The oddities reflect the history of the acquisition.

If you know what language an English word came from it’s not so hard to consistently spell English. But you pick that up by osmosis, actually writing out and remembering all those sets of rules would be a lot of work.

There’s a widely spread impression that words SHOULD be spelled phonetically as a matter of logic, but it’s just a prejudice and certainly plenty of other languages don’t. In spoken French, for example, lots of letters are not actually pronounced and many words have different spellings on paper but the same pronunciation. Some languages don’t have written vowels. Irish seems to be made as difficult as possible to spell on purpose and like French most of those letters are not used: “Caomhanach” for example is pronounced like “Kavanaugh”.

Chinese and Japanese have systems which you can’t really describe as “spelling”. Chinese uses symbols for everything, some of which indicate a pronunciation in some situations and the rest of the time not. Japanese has a system of written syllables they use only for foreign words, another system of written syllables they uses sometimes for some Japanese words, and an old-fashioned Chinese system for most words.

Then you have Italian and German that have really regular phonetic spelling.

By: Niketas Choniates

Niketas Choniates — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 14:27:49 +0000

The Fordow thing was just a bunch of people who had no idea what bomb damage SHOULD look like weighing in on how the bomb damage at Fordow didn’t look like what they expected.

By: richf

richf — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 14:06:56 +0000

“It’s bizarre to me just how common this particular error is.”
It’s not the only one; “There”, “Their” and “They’re” are often treated as if they were interchangeable.
I blame spell-check programs, which can’t deal with homonyms. They can tell you if you’re using a valid word, but have no way to know if it’s the RIGHT valid word.
I could have typed “know way to no” in that sentence and it would have been totally fine.

By: AesopFan

AesopFan — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 05:43:56 +0000

@ miguel – thanks for the link, but can anyone explain where Blum got the pictures of the inside of Fordow?
The Iranian government is certainly not releasing them.
Does Mossad have operatives that can do that?

By: AesopFan

AesopFan — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 05:26:29 +0000

Ace also notes why CNN’s source was so bad.
https://ace.mu.nu/archives/415422.php
Update: CNN’s Big “Scoop” Came from… Iranian Sources Passing Iranian State Propaganda

Heck of a job, CNN!