It's an effective strategy by Ansarallah; whether the missile is intercepted or not, I'd imagine it's still going to be an unacceptable risk to pretty much all airline companies. All they need to do is fire a missile there every week or so.

the style of military campaign that we invested hundreds of billions of dollars into and made our main focus due to its relative inability to be directly countered by insurgent forces is no longer working

let's instead try the style of military campaign which we have repeatedly and embarrassingly eaten shit doing every single time we try it, up to and including the present day

we have to do this instead of not dropping thousands of tons of bombs onto literal infants, we have literally no other choice

Makes me wonder what the point of the ceasefire even was, from the Israeli side especially but also Lebanon's side. Like, I'm sorry, the West has proved itself agreement-incapable for centuries. Fool me once, shame on you. fool me five million, six hundred and forty one thousand, five hundred and four times, shame on-- you can't get fooled again.

It's why some commentators saying things like, to paraphrase, "There's a new system of warfare that America is using - they've turned even diplomacy into a weapon of war" - it always makes me scoff. There might be something there about how Israel has been uniquely targetting journalists and medical workers when those people have usually been allowed a significant degree of protection - prior to 2023, the idea of just straight-up firing at and killing somebody in a very visible PRESS vest, regardless of whether they're on the enemy side, would have been seen as pretty abhorrent and the domain only of universally-agreed-to-be terrorist organizations like ISIS (at least, universally agreed outside of Western intelligence agencies) - but diplomacy has been a subsection of warfare for thousands of years. It's how you do violent atrocities, ethnic cleansing, backstabbing deals, etc if you don't physically want to get blood on your hands. Diplomacy is and has always been a critical part of domination.

Interesting observations:

• The reason why the Israelis did not blow everything all at once was to use the second wave as a threat towards Hezbollah to try and get them to give in, which they did not do
• Hezbollah's communications and command were not disrupted by the attack, at least not critically
• Hezbollah's strategy in a war with Israel will likely be to "allow" them to make gains into their territory in order to destroy their formations in known territory with prepared ambushes and such; they will not try to defend the border. The doomers are really gonna have a bad few weeks when they see that Israel's reached X miles in Lebanon. Please keep an eye on your local doomers and make sure they're doing okay during those difficult times.

Latest report from ASPI, who produced that widely talked about report early last year about how China has taken the lead in 37 out of 44 critical technologies that they track, or about 84%. They have expanded their scope this year to 64 technologies, in which China leads 57 of them, with the US leading the other 7. Just 20 years ago, the numbers were essentially reversed.

ASPI notes that, in the US, "private-sector research is increasingly concentrated in US technology giants"; back 20 years ago, the technological lead was spread across several more (typically US-based) corporations, but now only the largest corporations/monopolies truly matter when talking about the private sector. Massive Chinese corporations do not play nearly as big a role in this regard. In the public sector, US institutions like NASA still matter greatly, but the Chinese Academy of Sciences is an absolute colossus, by itself leading in 31 out of 64 technologies.

China is the top player in the following categories of technologies:

• Advanced information and communication technologies (7 technologies)
• Advanced materials and manufacturing (13 technologies)
• Energy and environment (8 technologies)
• Unique AUKUS‑relevant technologies (3 technologies)

China is only mostly the top player in the following categories of technologies:

• Artificial intelligence, computing and communications (China leads 5/6, with the US coming out ahead in Natural Language Processing, presumably due to ChatGPT)
• Defence, space, robotics and transportation (China leads 6/7, with the US coming out ahead in small satellites, presumably due to SpaceX)
• Quantum technologies (China leads 3/4, with the US coming out ahead in Quantum Computing)
• Sensing, timing and navigation (China leads 8/9, with the US coming out ahead in Atomic Clocks)

The competitive field is:

• Biotechnology, gene technologies and vaccines (4 for China, and 3 for the US; the US leads in vaccines, nuclear medicine and radiotherapy, and genetic engineering)

I count 14 technologies in which China is bigger than every other country put together.

Other findings were:

• India is gaining in a variety of fields, but is still quite far from being the top player in any particular technology; their best shot for a top spot in the next few years is biofuel research.
• The UK is falling fairly quickly, though they have made a couple gains in things like electronic warfare.
• If you consider the EU collectively (as some hilariously did for the Olympics) then they are still quite competitive and even take the lead in two technologies (small satellites and gravitational force sensors). In the EU, Germany is ranked first, then Italy, then France.
• South Korea is doing much better than Japan.
• Iran has gained significantly over the past 20 years in defence-related technologies; now in the top 5 of eight technologies, when around 2003, it struggled to reach even 17th place in a single technology.
• The combined power of AUKUS can just about match China in some technologies (like adversarial AI), but still trail China in others like advanced robotics.

is it bad that I saw this tweet's image and was like "with a bit of cropping, this would make a great hexbear emoji"?:

If we're going by "the funniest outcome always happens" rules in the US election, then honestly, I think the funniest thing that could happen now is that Biden continues to run for a second term and then wins against Trump. Can you imagine the internal battles between the people currently doubting Biden and wanting Harris to come along and save them, and the Biden True Believers? "No, no, I never said I thought Biden would lose in my article back in July, I just thought he would have a lower chance than Harris! I'm still good!" Dozens of staffers and journalists fired in the Malarkey Purges.

then Biden probably enacts Project 2025 as a pre-emptive compromise for more money for infrastructure spending, and then that spending is blocked by the Republicans anyway, the libs praise Biden for reaching across the aisle and giving the Supreme Court a 9-0 conservative majority, and then the Heritage Foundation has to invent some even more insidious Project 2029 where Trump is gonna make orange face dye mandatory and makes incursions onto golf courses punishable by execution because they're running out of ideas about how to make America even more fascist

well, I'll fucking be. that Indian elections analysis I posted last thread really did have credence

obviously Modi will still be made leader for a third term and the NDA will keep an overall majority but that was already baked in, that was virtually no universe where that didn't happen, so meaningfully reducing the BJP's margins especially to the point where they have to rely on coalitions to push things through is the next best thing, and that seems to be what's happened if trends hold. looks like reactionaries have made big inroads in Kerala though, so that sucks

India's stocks have been hit hard by the election results. I hope those Indian billionaires are taking a mental health day and doing some self-care and that the people they love are checking in with them right now

it will be so incredibly funny if Trump's polling numbers go up after all this.

chuds freaking out because their beloved leader, the most innocent man who has ever existed, was imprisoned by the woke communist dictator Brandon, while the libs are freaking out even harder as their election prospects continue to sink despite - maybe even because of - putting Trump in prison. I thrive on schadenfreude, so watching both sides eat shit is really

This got lost because of all the things happening, but there was also a car ramming attack today in Ra'anana, a little north of Tel Aviv, in which 17 Israelis were wounded and one was killed. It's being called a terror attack in the Western media, obviously. With that, plus Yemen's attack, the withdrawal of a division from Gaza, and now Iran, it's not a great day for imperialists overall.

If Yemen sinks an aircraft carrier then I, a uselessly monolingual Brit who did terribly in language classes, will do everything I can to learn Arabic

I have intelligence from a very trustworthy source that Hamas was responsible for blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline