In my town there are multiple yard signs "Childless Cat Lady for Harris." I've seen a "Childlress Dog Dads for Harris." Today I saw a bumper stick with a picture of a cat that said Harris+Walz.
Left is leaning hard into that and, well, it fits.
That actually happened to one of my best friends. His mom died when he was very young and his dad came out while he was in middle school. He was uber Jewish socialist leftist through highschool and into college when he had a mental breakdown, took a semester off, and when he came back, he was like a new man. Literally. Devout, fiscally and socially conservative, married a nice girl, two kids, he's a big Trump supporter now, etc.
He gets along with his dad (though I notice they don't visit often..), but it was a huge change.
Ahhh, ok, that helps explain it.
There are vtuber Only Fans??
Archive link from what u/RondoOBlongo posted:
I don't think there's any way to trick archive.is? The archive was made in 2021, and twitter.com shows the current user string, regardless of what was on the original tweet.
I've got no dog in this fight, but the tweet archive seems legit.
Plus she can say shit like this that makes me think she isn't that pc lol.
So what am I watching here? I'm not sure I've ever felt so old, lol. I don't understand this video.
the most plausible theory with the pagers is as following: they set up a fake company in Hungary, they buy pagers and such from Gold Apollo, they stick explosives in them, do some advertising in Lebanon as being the cheapest bestest around, then presumably just guess which shipment is going mostly to Hezbollah and send the bombs over. couple mohammedans blow up, couple little girls blow up, couple doctors blow up, all the same to them.
Partly, but I think you're missing some key parts. i think it's more likely that they used human intelligence and agents within Hezbollah to set up the purchase and it was done in such a way that it was certain the booby trapped pagers were going to Hezbollah. That explains the seemingly very low civilian casualty rate (maybe 4,000+ explosions, and a handful of civilians, including two children from what I am reading).
Additionally, for the pagers and walkies to have been modified this way, you should also immediately suspect that this means similar attacks have bugged or other compromised the communications themselves.
The attack maimed many Hezbollah members, but I think the bigger issue is the communications disruption. Hezbollah can't trust any of its technology and any of its network. They have to assume they have been totally compromised.
THe end result will make things harder for Israel, so my guess is Israel will something large soon.
You underestimate how evil our government is.
I really don't! And yes, I agree about Epstein island. If not CIA, Israel was certainly involved.
Assuming Israel didn't steal the idea from said three-letter agencies to begin with.
They did.
Mossad is one of the best intelligence agencies in the world, in part because they play for fucking keeps. America has done some absolutely insane stuff, but we are still generally more limited in what we can do.
A very typical Mossad operation involvings entrapping agents. For example, target a wealthy Egyptian businessman with a lucrative business deal using shell companies. Set up a meeting somewhere public. Have the businessman meet with someone--could be a male prostitute, a known Jew/Israeli, someone with Iranian ties, whatever, someone this person would not want to be associated with. Show them signing documents, shaking hands, exchanging money, whatever, and record and get photographs of the whole thing.
What, this rich Egyptian dude doesn't want his pictures meeting with a male prostitute made public? He doesn't want pictures shaking hand with an Israeli government agent shared with the Egyptian government? etc.
Now he's controllable, and every single thing you get him to do, you record, and you gain even more leverage over him.
This is really the typical method of operations for all intel agencies, but Mossad is particularly good at it.
CIA, KGB, everyone has, for many decades, intercepted shipments of electronics and other products. The French intelligence agency bugged all of the business class seats of all Air France airplanes so they could spy on international businessmen discussing deals and then share that information with French corporations. (And when I say intercept, this can be done at any time from production to delivery.)
That's exactly what the CIA did to the Iranian centrifuges. That was a multi-country operations involving multiple levels of companies that were controlled or infiltrated by intelligence services.
Blowing up thousands of pagers and walkie talkies remotely is one of the more audacious things I've ever heard about it. I personally feel like it was pretty fair. Hezbollah considers themselves fighters, so I think they're a fair target.
I wasn't going to say it, and his "Early Life" section (and subject tags) on Wikipedia are surprisingly scarce. But yes, he was Jewish and attended Yeshiva college. His obituary is clear, and the donation organization are Jewish and Israeli.
I absolutely should have included John Money in the list of hacks and frauds pushing an agenda.
This is what. happened:
https://www.simplypsychology.org/rosenhan_experiment.html
A groundbreaking study that "proved" clinical diagnoses were unreliable. Guess what the author and the study were fake and gay.
https://gwern.net/doc/psychiatry/schizophrenia/rosenhan/2023-scull.pdf
David Rosenhan's academic fraud has done inestimable damage to the world.
I've seen the Tolkien Edit, and I'm a fan. It's definitely a bit jarring at times, but it's very watchable.
I've said this before. I hated Tauriel. I'm pretty much a purist, and I thought the addition was stupid (tbf, there are many additions to the Hobbit movies that are stupid). A friend of mine had a daughter who was maybe 8-9 when the movies came out. She became a huge Tauriel fan, read the Hobbit, read the Lord of the Rings, etc. I would rather have a small bit player added to the story, a small inconsequential character who doesn't really change anything, than doing what Hollywood normally does--taking random female character and making her an empowered (probably raceswapped poc) bossbitch.
So today, I basically just ignore Tauriel.
Paddlin' the school canoe? That's a paddlin'.
Oof!
Should've seen that one!
I read this the other day. I agree, the timing is certainly suspicious.
Having said that, I did have to wonder if this dude applied for workers compensation. Is "herniated disk from eating boss's pussy" a checkbox on the form?
Technical point, but I disagree. There's a reason some of the earliest known highly organized civilizations arose in semi-arid lands. Across Turkey, the Middle East, Egypt, Iran, etc., you HAD to have things like wells, irrigation systems, dams, or you were 100% at the whim of nature and you died if there was a flood or a drought. Canals, qanats, dams, locks, etc. are just vital to life in these areas.
The German historian Wittfogel termed these empires "hydraulic empires." The government controlled water and access to water, therefore the government controlled the lives of its citizens. He also believed this is why there was such a despotic and autocratic impulse in these areas.
My kids loved the Jumanji movie. THey were also less than 10 at the time, so not exactly a high bar.
I thought it was fine. I don't remember anything terribly objectionable, and I do like The Rock sometimes.
I did too! I thought they were great!
Then I made the mistake of going to the Kingkiller reddit and seeing how Rothfuss treats his fans. Not pretty.
If he comes out with the 3rd book ever, I'll no doubt come crawling back, but I am not, personally, a fan of Rothfuss.
Brandon Sanderson is my ideal of a hardworking author who treats his fans amazingly.
I quit after the 4th leveling quest where you help a gay male couple prove their love for each other.
Yeah, that was pretty cringe. I quit before the .1 patch. It might actually be my least played explansion of all time.
Yes, his books were very popular before the TV show. I got my start reading GRRM when Asimov's s.f. magazine published the Daenerys chapters from A Game of Thrones as a novella. The first three books were absolutely some of my favorite fantasy books, but, imho, GRRM fell into a great trap.
His novels are popular for many reasons, but one of them is that they are surprising. Good, well-liked characters die sometimes. Evil characters are rewarded sometimes. Etc. I won't get into spoiler territory (hah), but GRRM and his fans got addicted to Red Weddings, and, well, how do you do better than the Red Wedding?
Turns out that consistently killing off your best characters leaves you with a bare stable. Replacing them is not so easy. His original plan had been a large year skip to give some of the younger generation time to grow up. That was a stupid idea, and it failed.
AFfC and ADwD were just painful slogs, both literally (half the books comprises characters slogging through winter snows and getting nowhere fast) and figuratively.
He's written himself into a hole, the reaction to the later seasons of the show are terrifying to GRRM, and what does he do now?
He's still not as lame and gay as Patrick Rothfuss who shits on his fans left and right!
This is pretty on point, but I'm contrarian on two points.
I really liked Battle for Azeroth. By this point in my life I'm a filthy casual. I'm not running hardcore mythic+ or raids at their peak. I'm questing, pvp, collecting, hanging with friends. To this day I think the BfA zones, music, art, and world are on point. Plot kind of dumb (I mean, it's Warcraft...any time it deviates from Orcs vs Humans it basically gets dumb), but I enjoyed the faction warfare.
Dragonflight. People seem to like it, but it just never had the right feel for me. I didn't like the characters, the plot, the zones, the quests, the music, nothing.
In terms of time played I think my lowest time played is probably Cataclysm, then Dragonflight, then Shadowlands. I stuck with Shadowlands waaay too long and now just pretend it never happened.
So far, I'm enjoying War Within, but it's early days still.
Coddling the American Mind
By Greg Lukianoff, one of the founders of FIRE (The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression).
FIRE is great. They are old school free speech absolutists. They support students and faculty members who fall afoul of wrongthink or saying something that offends snowflakes. One of the few activist organization I would support with donations.
Hah, I was reffing for a middle school sporting event the other day, and this kid I've known since he was in 4th grade or so was calling some plays. He's right at that age where he is voice has deepened a little bit, it's on the verge of cracking, and he had that EXACT same uncanny valley tranny voice. I guffawed inside.
Blame the French. With the end of European colonialism and rule in the middle east, Lebanon's borders were specifically drawn to give the Christians at most an incredibly slim majority, thus making them dependent on Europe to stay in power. It didn't work out. They got flooded out by Palestinians, Christians emigrated, and the Muslims had a lot more babies.
If the French had not deliberately gerrymandered in some heavily Muslim areas, Lebanon would still be a Christian majority country.
Lebanon has not had an official census since 1932. The Christians know their share will have fallen dramatically (maybe 30-35%), and this would mean an end to the power sharing agreement that keeps Lebanon at least vaguelly held together.