ABigGuy4U
20hr ago
Western countries didn’t kick up a fuss because Azerbaijan is an Israeli ally. It’s the only Muslim country Israel sells military equipment to.
ABigGuy4U
1d ago
One day I will drop my massive schizo-post on the 70 year long government psy-op to discredit clowns.
ABigGuy4U
1d ago
This may be a matter of taste. I thought the stuff with the cat, and President Compson’s meltdown about China, and all the war room stuff was hilarious. But I’ve always liked bizarre screwball humor so I may just be weird.
ABigGuy4U
1d ago
Naval mines are like terrestrial mines, they are used for temporary area denial. There aren’t that many mine strikes because most ships are steering clear of the mined areas, which are well known. Ships can avoid the minefields easily, but that funnels them into areas where they are vulnerable to short range drones and coastal defenses. The ship last week was crewed by idiots who decided to just risk running through a mined area.
ABigGuy4U
3d ago
if it has a modem on board, which it won't
After the Hezbollah pager detonation, can you really say that it won’t? I highly doubt the Mossad is the first intelligence agency in the world to ever sneak things into the supply chain for various reasons. There were rumors Intel was putting secret spying hardware in at the chip level in the late 90s.
I saw Alejandro Innauruatu’s new film, Digger. I think it’s one of the better movies I’ve seen in a while. Maybe in this decade. It’s overtly political in multiple ways, enough to talk about it here rather than the Friday Fun Thread.
The movie is about Digger Rockwell, an eccentric third generation oil company executive who cuts a rather Trumpian figure. Digger is a friend of the president, and a close enough one to make him effectively an unofficial member of the cabinet.
When one of Digger’s drilling rigs in Greenland explodes, it send a massive ice shelf (named Judy) heading towards Europe. It’s loosely based on the Thwaites glacier nightmare scenario that keeps climate scientists up at night. Digger, the President, and Digger’s reluctant head of environmental safety must try to avert the crisis. The whole thing has a tone somewhere between Dr. Stranglove and your average Wes Anderson movie. Digger and his pals unfortunately fail to stop the iceberg, and the planet is rendered semi-uninhabitable. Millions perish.
The “twist” is revealed early, about 20 minutes in. We are not watching the “real” Digger, or President Compson. We are watching a satirical stage play based on the real events, called Fossil Fools. The play premiered off-broadway five to ten years after the real events, and the big budget revival we’re seeing is about twenty years after that. Tom Cruise is Curtis Markson, a well respected stage and screen actor portraying Digger Rockwell. Markson is becoming concerned that the truth of the real man’s complicated character and legacy is getting sanded off in favor of cheap sneers.
It’s an interesting movie. On the one hand it is very much about global warming and the climate crisis. And its opinions on climate change are nuanced and deep, and wouldn’t be out place in an effort-post here. But it’s more about how people pass from living breathing people into historical heroes and villains in the pages of history books.
It also gives Cruise the chance to do a performance that is simultaneously huge and very subtle. And it’s beautifully shot movie, worth seeing in theaters or IMAX. I would have liked to have worked on this post more, but it’s rapidly falling out of theaters and I’m trying to get the word out.
ABigGuy4U
4d ago
Someday someone will be able to accelerate or set on fire EV remotely. And probably soon.
There are widespread rumors that intelligence agencies have had the ability to remotely hijack cars since the early 1990s.
ABigGuy4U
5d ago
It’s not a gotcha, but Trump is intentionally using the Arabic phrasing because in the American mind it sounds a lot harder.
ABigGuy4U
8d ago
Why do you prefer hanging, for the spectacle?
Because hanging is the traditional punishment for crimes of disloyalty.
ABigGuy4U
8d ago
This makes us no better than Al Qaeda!
I am concerned that the Trump administration will, yet again, find some way to botch the aesthetics of the occasion, reveling in low-class pandering and/or ostentatious cruelty.
That’s literally the whole point. This is supposed to be the American version of a beheading video mailed to Al Jazeera. It’s like how Trump ends his most particularly angry tweets with “Praise be to Allah”.
ABigGuy4U
10d ago
It’s a pretty obscure book, but I notice that there’s this unfortunate tendency for analysts to just kind of assume that China is eventually going to try and gobble up Russia, and it makes them overlook the numerous things driving Russia and China together.
ABigGuy4U
10d ago
That book broke the brains of both Reddit and the entire national security establishment, and it’s why they threw out Kissinger’s dire prophecy in favor of video game logic.
ABigGuy4U
10d ago
Unless it’s a false flag to justify using nuclear weapons, the FSB angle is going to be minimizing the extent and threat of the outbreak. I don’t necessarily believe the lab leak story but I think it probably is something weaponized or at least serious, because that’s that the confirmed pattern of hospital quarantines (not lockdowns, quarantines) seems to match.
It’s a gain-of-function enhanced bioweapon version of pneumatic plague. The stock version naturally has a 90% fatality rate. 77% if you can get them on antibiotics less than a day after infection. This one has probably been bred or engineered to be resistant to most major antibiotics. There’s also some indications it’s been modified to have a longer-non-symptomatic carrying period to compensate for the high fatality rate.
ABigGuy4U
15d ago
Anyone else think Florence Pugh is pretty badly mis-cast as Cathy in East of Eden? And I say this someone who thinks she’s a good actor. I guess I shouldn’t expect much from the butchers at Netflix anyway.
ABigGuy4U
16d ago
It seems like he was intent on crashing that plane, with no survivors. But I have to wonder: was getting caught part of his plan?
ABigGuy4U
19d ago
From the photos I’ve seen they seem too dark and curly haired to be either Persian or Israeli.
In one of his stings, Chris Hanson busted a man named Vince D’Ambrosio. D’Ambrosio, for some reason, decided to show up to his “date” in a full western duster and Lee Van Cleef style cowboy hat (black, of course).
Ever since then, 4chan had a running gag where they would post screencaps of the episode, with various and captions like it was a western.
Unfortunately, there are no longer enough people here from 4chan to get the joke. Perhaps there never were. That’s also why everyone thinks I’m a lunatic for ranting about Anya Taylor Joy like a dumbass.
ABigGuy4U
20d ago
Yes but that’s the way I prefer to do it, and myself and the body politic will not be talked out of our right to shop in store.
ABigGuy4U
20d ago
Yes but also how are you going to evaluate the weight of the phone, how it fits in your pocket, the brightness of the screen, how well the camera works, etc etc?
Tfw no Kurdish girlboss gf 😔
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