Thousands of walkie-talkies suspected of being used by Hezbollah members have just exploded across Lebanon. These devices use a different supply chain than the pagers that detonated in yesterday’s attack. It appears these walkie-talkies, being larger, carry a significantly larger payload. Hundreds reported wounded. Edit: some early indications iPhones are detonating as well
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
There has been a third assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump. Police discovered a car bomb pre-placed near a site in Long Island where a Trump rally was scheduled to be held tomorrow. As the device was found well in advance of the rally, no one was harmed.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
The problem is two-fold:
- Even if there were explosives in the beepers, the rumor is already out there.
- Having to worry that someone put C4 in your cellphone at some point in the supply chain is pretty bad too.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
US drone strikes are a lot worse than is widely reported. Any male from 12 up in the combat zone was classified as a military target.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
Ukraine is not Liechtenstein! It is not Monaco! They have an army of 1.2 million men and women. When you figure in the aid they have something like a two trillion dollar military budget. They have a territorial area that’s equivalent to France and Germany combined, giving them significant ability to use defense in depth. They have been fighting Russia since 2014, which has given them a significant amount of combat experience that most NATO countries do not have. And those years allowed them to build up a fearsome network of fortifications and bunker systems all along the DPR/LPR border. There’s a reason they got picked to be the buffer state over Poland, and it’s not because they’re an easy nut to crack. To assume that Ukraine is the “easy mode” before having to take on the NATO final boss is foolishness.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
Will this lead to any kind of generalized panic about mobile phones and other electronic devices? There are already rumors spreading that there were no explosives in the pagers and that this is something potentially any mobile device could be made to do if hacked.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
Stockpile lots of food! Just because there’s theoretically a lot of available land doesn’t mean there’s not going to be mass starvation in the event of a nuclear conflict, for multiple reasons.
- Local and international logistical breakdown. International commerce is going to grind to a halt for several years. Maybe even several decades. Maybe even forever. Domestic supply chains will too. Even a limited nuclear conflict will likely involve targeting major rail and logistics terminals. Just because there’s food somewhere in the country doesn’t mean there’s going to be any wherever you are.
- There’s likely going to be massive food shortages after a nuclear war for several years, several decades even. The American Midwest and the Russo-Ukrainian steppe feed over two billion people on the planet. Those are going to be fallow for a long, long time. And although there’s a hundred pedants on the Motte that will fight me about this, no one really knows what large scale nuclear a war will do in the long term to the environment. Food is probably going to be tight everywhere for a while. Which leads me to...
- Forced requisitioning. What happens when what’s left of NATO starts demanding food subsidies from Australia for continued protection from China? What happens when Chinese troops roll up on the shore and announce that Australia’s food supplies are all being socialized to feed the three hundred million remaining Chinese people? You are after all the only non-irradiated food source on this side of the planet. What happens if your own government starts rationing and sends out commissars to take all the food that isn’t nailed down?
Additionally, you must acquire a leather jacket, a souped-up fast car and a sawed-off shotgun. If the rest of us Mottizens are dead, you have a moral duty to live out all our Mad Max LARP fantasies for us.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
There has been another attempted assassination of Donald Trump, this time at a rally at the Trump International golf course. The shooter, armed with an AK-74, fled after a brief exchange of gunfire with the Secret Service. Donald Trump is unharmed, and there appear to be no casualties.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
There’s a growing body of evidence that oral HPV is one of the main causes of throat and mouth cancer.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
Bush Senior’s foreign policy team was equally incompetent at handling the former Soviet Union, it just took twenty years for us to notice the consequences.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
You’re both wrong. Given the current demographic trajectory of the United States, the Queen of hyper-American cosmetic destiny is Jenna Ortega. Sorry CHUDs, you will marry the qt-3.141596 goth Latina gf. And you will be happy.
Kennedy was the first time that there had been a major conflict in goals between the newly created security organs/State Department and the President over a question of foreign policy. The conflict had already been brewing for some time: Over the course of his two terms, Eisenhower became increasingly resentful of the CIA for running roughshod over his foreign policy goals in favor of regime change to install anti-communist hardliners. Read Legacy of Ashes if you want more info on that. When Kennedy came to power, the friction between the office of the presidency and the State Department /intelligence agencies finally boiled over. Cuba was a fixation for the agencies. Getting Cuba out of the communist sphere was a huge, huge priority. The CIA never expected the Bay of Pigs invasion to work by itself. It was designed to pressure whoever was president at the time into sending massive airstrikes and possibly ground troops to assist. Kennedy screwed that up. He refused to send anything. This made the CIA absolutely furious. Cuba had now slipped into the Soviet sphere of influence permanently. Kennedy was also furious at the CIA’s attempts to railroad him, and was beginning to plan steps to limit the CIA’s influence on foreign policy. Then Kennedy’s head mysteriously exploded. As for why it never happened again, it did. It just didn’t need to be as shocking and overt. The CIA forced Nixon out of office for abandoning the Vietnam war instead of escalating it to all of Southeast Asia. Woodward and Bernstein were laundering information leaked to them by the CIA. Then they spiked Carter’s attempt at reelection for being too weak overseas. Then they installed a CIA officer, George H.W. Bush as President. Every President after that, except Trump, has had connections to the CIA. Clinton, Bush II, Obama. Mysteriously, the President always just lets the CIA do whatever they want now. Imagine that!
Arguably we already have that though. Magnus Carlson might not be a household name to everyone but he’s hot shit to anyone who’s remotely familiar with competitive chess. Bobby Fischer and Gary Kasparov and Boris Spassky were household names, to the point that they became important symbols and agents for national cultural struggles. The way they were talked about was closer to war heroes than people who play a game that involves moving small figurines around a checkered board. And I’m sure the top laparoscopic surgeons of the world probably feel they have a great deal more status than the average white collar wage laborer. I’ve also seen stories about internet content creators who are nobodies to the world at large, but if they walked into a comic con they would be treated like royalty.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
Immanuel Kant was a philosopher that argued that lying was impermissible in any situation, even one where the lie produced a morally good outcome.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
Judging from the diary, it seems like ideology may have been part of the reason Audrey was so unhappy and mentally unwell. But it doesn’t look like she intended the attack to be propaganda of the deed for the cause, or to strike back at enemies of the revolution. To me it looks more like the typical mass-shooter motive for an aggressively postured suicide. Elliot Rodger seemed to have considered himself to be on a crusade of personal vengeance, but I don’t think he necessarily considered it a political act. Compare both of those to Ted Kaczynski, where although he was perhaps mentally ill, he had a pretty defined ideology he was acting under and specifically intended his attacks to advance that ideology.
I think there’s also an iconoclastic aspect to it. Protestants are uncomfortable with using statues of Jesus and saints in a religious ceremonial role. A cross without a corpus is a symbol. A cross with a corpus veers dangerously close to being an idol.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
Except blocking it just made the culture-war aspect so much worse. People spent months thinking this was a highly premeditated act of political terrorism being covered up by a sympathetic politicized media, when with the diary it clearly just seems like an act of insanity by someone with serious mental health issues.
Antifa’s closet historical analogues are the Tsarist Black Hundreds, urban lumpenproletariat thugs doing violence against the working class in the service of a failed dictatorship.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
I understand why Biden wants a ceasefire: to make it all temporarily go away before the election. And I understand why some Americans want a ceasefire: because they have a very dim understanding about anything that happens outside of America. What I can’t get my head around is why a huge number of Israelis seem to want a ceasefire.
I’m not trying to be cool or overly snarky. But that generation really abused the term until it lost all meaning. Everything from socialized medicine to five private corporations telling you what you could think fell under the moniker of communism. The FBI hauling dissidents off to the gulag in the middle of the night and listening to all communications was a necessary measure to defeat communism. Obama was an Islamo-Fascist-Communist. Now the highly-regarded zoomers on R/WorldNews are copying their parents and grandparents and calling me a pinko communist because I won’t take up Ronald Reagan’s grand crusade against Russia (they conveniently forget that Russia is no longer communist). I find Kamala Harris horrifying, but calling anything she’s going to do communist is just farcical. I don’t really mind that kind of rhetoric from Trump because he’s always had a rather fluid rhetorical style when it comes to his put downs, but it becomes grating when the serious minds start trying to come up with justifications about why she really is.
Regarding paragraph 3, I would suggest Michael S. Neiberg’s War College lecture on America’s entry into World War I. Your intuition is correct, and he raises a lot of the points you mentioned.
ABigGuy4U
2mo ago
It would probably help if the people trying to teach the normies actually understood what Communism was and moved beyond a Boomeric “anything I don’t like is Communism” mindset.
I’m not 100 percent sure what Hamas expected. In my mind I boil it down to three scenarios.
- The one you outlined in your post, where Hamas expected an immediate uprising in the West Bank and an immediate response by Hezbollah and Iran.
- Hamas expected to get massive Israeli resistance and be stopped a few hundred meters out from the wall. In this scenario, Hamas was expecting a large battle where three or four hundred IDF soldiers were killed, which would justify some air strikes but not necessarily a full invasion. The current situation is the result of Hamas being victims of their own success.
- Hamas expected the exact scenario they have now, and are willing to burn themselves and Gaza just to scotch the Abraham accords and get the Palestinian question back on the table.
I suspect different participants may have had different scenarios in mind. The guys who were actually going in were probably pumped up with scenario one, while the leadership actually had in mind scenarios two or three.
IIRC it’s a liquid explosive that’s injected into the battery, so there’s nothing physical to check for.
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