seeing Israel get one hundredth of the agony they have inflicted upon everybody else is pure carthasis, may the debt be fulfilled in full before too long

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.

I agree with this take the most IMO. We obviously shouldn't delve into full-on "this is great, actually" copium or anything, these things should have been checked and thousands are injured (thankfully not dead), but it is objectively better that this happened now rather than in the first hour of an invasion. Every tool that is removed from the Israeli toolbox in the least harmful context (even if that "least harmful context" still involves many people harmed) is one less tool that can be used when it would otherwise do maximum damage. One wonders if a lot of the Israeli self-backpatting has a bittersweet tinge to it.

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

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

TLDR of Simplicius's article yesterday:

• Ukraine is, all of a sudden, finding significant success in hitting Russian air defence with ATACMS for some reason. Generally, how it's gone is that Russia shoots most of them down, but one or two missiles in the salvo gets through and wipes out the S-400/300 anyway. The good news is that the Russian doomers now have something to complain about again; it was deeply harmful of Russia to deprive Rybar's habitat of bad news as it's a critical part of their diets. It won't really change the course of the war necessarily, but...
• Ukraine is also taking shots at Russian early warning nuclear ICBM sites, which is, to say the least, concerning. There's been some news about Russia doing tactical nuke exercises, but Simplicius points out that in this kind of war where vehicles and troops are generally fairly distributed and not in massive parking lots all concentrated together, a tactical nuke wouldn't achieve much that a bunch of conventional explosives couldn't, outside of cities at least. And we both doubt that Russia is close to nuking Ukrainian cities. But there's an implicit threat there nonetheless, which NATO may listen to, or may not.
• Putin's been talking recently about how Zelensky is now an illegitimate ruler given the lack of elections in Ukraine, which is interesting when combined with the information that Yanukovich was recently spotted landing in Belarus. To be fair, there are alternative explanations (many high-up figures were brought there and perhaps Yanukovich was just asked to tag along due to the whole "brotherly nations" thing) but even so.
• There have been rumors/claims recently in the media that Putin wants to freeze the conflict along the current front lines and sue for peace; this has been denied by Peskov.
• There's been a fair amount of activity in rooting out corruption in the Russian army. As I understand it, none of it is incredibly major - some bribes here, a little unauthorized action there, and some punishments for underperforming commanders. But it is still a lot, all at once.
• As always, rumors of new fronts opening up. Obviously with the whole thing in Kharkov now, I find it much harder to ignore these rumors, but an invasion from Belarus still seems a little unlikely.
• Speaking of Kharkov, the Russians are now issuing Russian license plates for the region and some officials are beginning to talk about letting Kharkov decide its future and all that jazz. Significant to be sure, but it doesn't herald any imminent attempt to seize all of Kharkov IMO, especially with Putin saying that they wouldn't try to capture it for the forseeable future and the fact that there's like a single Russian division there also indicates that the intent wasn't immediate, massive territorial expansion like with the beginning of the war. Ukraine is stripping men from both Donbass and also Kherson to face Russia up there. It looks like the Kherson front has been basically terminated, with whatever tiny gains Ukraine scraped together being abandoned and the water levels raised via upstream Ukrainian dams to prevent Russia from trying anything clever.
• Generally the tempo of escalation and mutual threats between Russia and NATO continue, but this has been a theme for literal years now (I remember at least one Putin speech in like summer 2022 warning NATO), so, unlike the new front rumors, I mostly ignore these as just saber-rattling and behind-the-scenes activity that's being aired for effect until I'm given a big reason to believe them.

It's worth noting with the ATACMS thing that some of the big pro-Russian people on Twitter are stating that Ukrainian usage of ATACMS is through the roof and they've already fired an appreciable fraction of all the ATACMS ever produced (and, in typical American fashion, they make very few per year), and that Russian losses aren't so bad comparatively (I mean, they aren't, if I understand the number of destroyed systems versus the number the Russians have ever made/can make per year - which I may not understand as I'm not a military guy). Others can work out if this is accurate reporting or cope, just saying what I've saw. But Simplicius did sound fairly concerned about it in the article. Not very concerned, but fairly concerned.

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

4th most commented post of all time on Hexbear and we still have half a week to go