The great exploding pager psy-op Israel pulled on Hezbollah yesterday is a great example of how the focus of all politics has shifted from the practical world of doing things to the virtual world of saying things. Owning the information space in an effort to win the information war has taken precedent over accomplishing real things in the world of real things, even when it comes to war. Every operation, even those with practical goals, has a public relations element at the center of it.
As is always the case, time will tell if the initial reports are close to reality, but there is no doubt that pagers were exploding, and Israel was responsible. The questions not asked by Western media, much less answered, are why Israel would do this and what did they think they would achieve by it? That is the first clue. The media and their audience just assume it is a good thing and will result in more good things. What those things are and why they are good is not a topic of interest.
It is a clever caper, for sure. The Israelis accessed the supply chain that delivers these devices to Hezbollah. They most likely bribed an official at the Taiwanese plant that makes these things. This gave them access to the shipment, which they then sabotaged with some form of explosive. Then they waited until the devices were deployed and sent the signal to them. The sheer cleverness of it is admirable, so it is easy to see why that is the focus.
That is the thing about this caper. It is mostly a public relations caper, with little practical impact on the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah. Sure, Israel won the news cycle for a day or two and the Hezbollah side feels stupid, but by Friday any practical impact is gone, and everything is back to where it was pre-caper. Hezbollah now has a new step in the process, where they inspect their communications devices, something they should have been doing all along.
This is where certain people insist that it was a great scheme because it affected important people. The reality of communications devices is that the closer you are to one, the lower you are down the status ladder. Low level people display their device on their person because that is all they have. Important people have someone who manages the communications gear. You do not call Warren Buffett. Your people reach out to his people to set up a call.
That aside, the shift in focus from practical reality to the abstract reality of public relations is something we see everywhere now. Washington’s war on Russia has mostly been about winning the information war, on the assumption that losing the information war would have a practical impact on Russia. Instead, Russia has lost every round of the media war, often failing to attend the fight, but Russia has seen its economy boom and its standing in the world rise.
In fairness, the schemers in Washington were reasonable to think “wrecking Putin on social media” would be a big win. In their world, getting wrecked on Twitter can have practical consequences. We have gone through a decade of “cancel culture” where people lose their jobs and their lives for imaginary crimes like using anathematized words or holding impure thoughts. In a world where being cancelled is a serious concern, cancelling Putin makes a lot of sense.
That was certainly the thinking inside the Israeli brain trust when they were cooking up this exploding pager scheme. They surely understood that sabotaging pagers would have little impact on Hezbollah. On the other hand, blowing them up like this would make for great memes on social media. The sheer cleverness of it would impress their American audience, who they sense might be bored with them. This caper got the crowd back into their seats for more of the Israel show.
The Roman poet Juvenal famously criticized the Roman people for caring more about the “bread and circuses” than their freedom. This is often twisted around to mean that the rulers relied on bread and circuses to trick the people out of their freedom, but Juvenal was focusing his critique on the people. Radicals of the ideological age have made a similar complaint. Marx famously called the peasants a sack of potatoes because they could not be politicized.
This narcotic of entertainment that troubled Juvenal is now corrupting the political class of the West. They care more about the show of which they are a part, or the show being put on for them by others, than the practical reality of their position. The manufactured reality of politics obscures political reality, not because the political participants cannot see it, but because they do not want to see it. They prefer their manufactured, abstract reality, over the practical reality of their position.
This is why Israel invested in the pager scheme. They understand that practical arguments about the reality on the ground in the Levant will have no impact on Washington or the American public. Similarly, Zelensky understands that he has to keep producing new acts to keep Western politicians amused enough with Project Ukraine to keep the money flowing. Like a Hollywood producer, he tells his generals he needs bigger explosions and bigger drama.
Objective reality has always been the substrate on which human relations operate, so there has always been a gap between the human drama and reality. Human relations, especially politics, are more often than not about what we think ought to happen, rather than what we think will happen. However, necessity has always kept the gap narrow, but that seems to be changing. In fact, it seems that politics is often about broadening that gap between itself and reality.
Reality is that thing that does not go away when you stop believing in it, so this turn from reality will eventually end. Israel cannot stay at war forever with its neighbors, no matter how good the show. The West cannot remain at war with the world, no matter how many times they cancel people they do not like. At some point the theater of politics, the theater of Western public life, must give way to reality and people who prefer reality over self-generated fantasy.
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TL;DR: It’s a huge military win for Israel, and far more than PR.
Interesting to come across this post four days later, when subsequent news has made the takes here somewhat obsolete.
It’s now known that Mossad set up a real pager company and actually sold pagers as a cover for this operation. The pagers bought by Hezbollah were rigged with explosives at the factory. They were triggered individually to maximize targeting and minimize danger to anyone else. Afterwards, Hezbollah went to their combat walkie-talkies… and those exploded, too. Next, a bunch of Hezbollah bigwigs decided to meet in person in a bunker… which then got bombed.
It looks like a careful, well-planned operation in which Mossad was several steps ahead of Hezbollah the whole time.
It’s true that the very top brass may not carry their own devices (though there are rumors the head of Hezbollah is one of the casualties). However, the entire command structure below them does. Killing scores if not hundreds of people in that structure, and severely wounding thousands more, is a lot more than PR theater. It’s got to be one of history’s heaviest blows against an enemy command structure, close to what happened to the Second General Army in Hiroshima, but with a tiny fraction of the collateral/civilian damage.
The aftermath will also produce lots of actionable intelligence about locations, connections, etc.
Of course now some are complaining it was “terrorism” (no, it was aimed precisely at enemy combatants) or a “war crime” (nope) using “booby-traps” (no, they were command-detonated).
One of the most important moments of insight a person can have is to realize that all politics always has and always will be a theater. Even the most eloquent statesmen are nothing but performers.
Actual adults understand, and thus they do not get emotionally swayed by politicians, but see them for the circua freaks they are.
Only the unfortunate ones, the ones for whom politics matter, care deeply about politics.
What about that lady’s supposed vape and/or charger exploding in her bag on a plane to London that had to land in Greece, I think it was, because of it? On the same day as the pager’s blew up. That was odd. And all the vape explosions in the past. Certain vape brands got banned in the US, too. There may have been more to that story than we knew back then.
If I recall, the vape pen was not a bomb, but a mis-heating (over-heating) of the vape material which caused an explosion.
Ah shoot. Just saw this on WRSA:
“If any phone, pager, radio, or small electronic device can be a bomb, the risk of allowing them on a plane is too great.
They will now push for more Orwellian security measures and restrict your freedoms much more.
Thanks Israel
I don’t think the TSA could be more Orwellian than they are now, but it’s a good excuse to confiscate your small electronic devices.
Maybe. On the other hand, that kind of announcement would stir up the safety nazis to a fare-thee-well. It’s possible that we would end up with real answers about how you can turn a battery into a bomb. (If they know how to initiate a thermal runaway in the battery, it’s just a matter of engineering)
Unless you can prove that it requires Semtex, and thus that our bestest buddies ever are not the victims they present as, you can kiss the EV mandate goodbye. Karen will not be strapping little Camden into a bomb.
“Israel won the news cycle for a day or two”. How is that? Israel is looking more and more barbaric and unhinged to tell you the truth. I feel like that meme where the astronaut says, “always has been”.
I mean where is the line of being embarrassed to support people who think it’s ok to rape POW’s who may just be chubby millennials picked up off the street who just happen to live in Palestine. Sure, they probably hate Israel, but they aren’t all combatants, and even if they were, raping men’s asses is sick and perverted. And since their nation is supposedly all about their God, Houston we have a problem!
Unless it was a prelude to an offensive.
Antonio Gutteres of UN: “I am deeply alarmed by reports that a large number of devices exploded across Lebanon, killing at least 11 people”.
AOC: “Israel’s pager attack…seriously injuring and killing innocent civilians”
I mentioned this pager thing to a few coworkers out in the field today wielding, 4 out of 5 had no idea what I was talking about. Bronze Age people living in a Bronze Age world, a Zman line if I remember correctly came to mind. They were getting ready for a MLB game tonight with buttered bread and grog. No phones in the dugout please.
Might not be Israel responsible. Those pagers were recently shipped from Iran, and more than likely were made in China. There’s a lot of unrest in Iran right now, lots of people sick of the mullahs and of paying for Hezbollah’s antics.
If news is correct, Hezbollah should have inspected their hand-held radio equipment also.
It is not completely correct that these devices are used only by low rankers–Iran’s Ambassador to Lebanon was carrying one and it blew out one of his eyes.
The effect is bigger than a mere item to be splashed on the news for a couple of days. This stunt has obviously sown much distrust of Hezbollah leadership among the rank-and-filers. What Hezbollah supplied equipment would you now trust? Only Allah knows what other appliances might blow up when somebody tries to use them.
Of course, Only Zoroaster knows what common things in Clown World will be blowing up in the future.
First drones; now this.
Normie cons are spooging all over themselves with the exploding pager caper. Of course, it’s not terrorism when we do it.
When you get owned by Mossad twice in 24 hours, it might be time to go back to the drawing board.
Tough call. Russia is losing the PR war and winning the physical war. Hezbollah, Yemen, and the Shia Crescent…
You were at -5 but with my up jumped to -2. Compliment is due for pithy remark.
Oh, I’d say that blowing up the Iranian amb to Lebanon was a case of calling Warren rather than his people… And with the add of today’s blowing up of walkie talkies (and solar panels?), the destruction of any trust in communications devices used by Iran and its proxies will have an impact on the REAL, as opposed to just the information war. People will no longer be in their seats as that’s where the pagers are…
Imagine running a Best Buy in Beirut right now 🥴
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/new-wave-blasts-rock-beirut-2nd-day-hand-held-radios-personal-devices-explode
Unusually short-sighted comment on your part. Mossad just lit up the Hezbollah network like a Christmas tree. They are now mapping the network (the people) and their relations, their associations, and their locations like never before. Extremely valuable info going forward. You can bet they will leverage the info gained as a result of this attack soon.
Just the fear factor alone among Hezbollah in Lebanon (what else have Mossad accessed?) is a huge boon for Israel.
I thought the huge boons for Israel were Ethiopians who made aliyah…
I thought is was the fleeing Russians released from prison, the Red Mafya.
I see what you did there!
We will have to see, but I think you are right. Doing this as a one-off for nothing beyond PR purposes is stupid.
It won’t be the first time Z lets the day’s theme get in the way of second-order thinking.
Yes, good insights I’d not considered before. The inconvenience would be to compile a good list of the people who took damage. I suppose that could be obtained from hospital admission records, perhaps.
If they could make them explode, couldn’t they make them track? Wouldn’t that have been more useful?
“Great news! We can rig explosives to pagers allowing us to remotely maim thousands of civilian doctors, nurses, and other civilians. A few will die, including children, but most will be disfigured and crippled for the rest of their lives.”
“OK, but how does this help us defeat Hezbollah?”
“Defeat Hezbollah???”
When they tell you they want to see your eyeballs hanging from their sockets, believe them. Or they want to record your assassination with your brains being blown out on a GoPro or CNN and this is an important aspect for them, the gore recording, believe them.
In the modern Middle East the PR wars have been quite important since Israel’s inception. Arabs trying to court the sympathy for the oppressed, plucky resistance fighters and Jews riding the “Only Democracy” train always appeal to the “International Community”.
The Yom Kippur war saw Israel winning on the battlefield and getting humiliated in the media. Anwar Sadat rode to negotiations as a victor in the eyes of many Arabs, after all he caused the world to see IDF soldiers emerging with their hands up from the burning bunkers. The political fallout sank the careers of Moshe Dayan and Golda Meir, destroying the dominance of the Labour Party over Israeli politics.
Palestinian Intifadas appealed to the western anti-zonist left and increasing critique of the Jewish state on the UN forum. This latest conflict has also demonstrated a similar carefree attitude that characterized the Isreali leadership before the Yom Kippur war. As a result Israel got surprised by the attack despite having state-of-the-art surveillance and the war is now a hostage of Netanyahu’s political career.
Hezbollah saw a great PR victory in 2006 after reaching armistice with IDF as not only it forced Isreal to retreat from their territory, but the prevailing mood was that it failed in the war.
As an aside, the chief supporters of Netanyahu- the Adelson family, is also involved in propaganda, financing both the internal propaganda (Israel Hayom) while running lobbying operations in the US among Republicans.
Since Western thinking is heavily dominated by its bloated entertainment industry (with many jewish people involved in production process), those stunt-dominated operations aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. Even this blog post (and my comment) is somewhat playing into the hands of the establishment by successfully catching our attention.
And now the walkie-talkies blow up. Doesn’t really matter if it was early access to the devices to insert explosives (which is what apparently happened) or if there was a back door in the software to overheat the lithium battery. Every smartphone is spying on you. Every laptop. Every car. Yes, I know it’s supposedly only the newest that have an official remote ‘kill switch,’ but all of them since 2000 have black boxes that cannot be removed without disabling the vehicle.
Modern tech is very much a double edged sword. I’m not saying eschew all of it, but simply be aware that nothing is private unless you are out in the woods with no phones or pagers or cameras or GPS.
It matters very much if the exploding devices were generic products or tampered with. It’s the difference between carrying a spy vs carrying a bomb in your pocket. Both bad, one much worse. It now seems Hezbollah s junk was fortunately tampered with which is good news
Seems the Samson option just got a whole lot more interesting. Damn.
Seems like this fact should spawn a black market for work-arounds, at least for vehicles. Surely these black boxes can at least be shielded against remote signals, if not hacked and neutered. The car has to run where there’s no wifi or cell signal, so there’s a limit to how connected the feds can force them to be.
It should, but people don’t care enough to spend that kind of dosh. The dealer can trade out an ECU pretty easily, but then that new ECU is registered to you, so you accomplished nothing. Used to be pretty easy to do a junkyard pull and swap it out. The last one I worked on (a 2018) I finally got to work, but it required a $5,000 scan tool. (Might have worked with a lesser model too, but the $2,800 scan tool couldn’t do it.)
That’s the plan once we have the spare cash. But you have to own the vehicle in full, and find a private customizer who will do that sort of work. Again, from what I’ve read, these things are so intertwined with the car’s other systems that they cannot be removed, so ‘blocking’ their sending and receiving signals is the best one could hope for – and it’s illegal at present.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, but it just seems wrong to me that the government would legally require one’s personal vehicle to transmit and receive information presumably not at the owner’s full control. I’m not saying that such regulation doesn’t exist, but it’d seem to run afoul of privacy laws for openers.
In any event, as others have noted, it’s very easy to disable antennas with something as simple as a few layers of metal foil. What, if any legal or technical impacts on the vehicle this may have is an open question.
No, our semi trucks shut down if our remote monitoring system is interfered with. It cuts the signals to the ECM, the electronic control module.
Or how about just turning the ignition off if there’s a problem? Though I don’t know how EVs work, but it drives me crazy in old TV shows and the car’s brakes go out or the accelerator is stuck and they are careening down an LA hillside road and it’s like just turn the ignition off for Christ’s sake! 🙂
And it seems the more anyone tries to hide or secure devices the more the very thing you’re trying to avoid is what you are enabling. lol Of course. If it wasn’t so terrible it would be funny. (Not that some don’t find it funny and perfectly delightful.)
The shoe bomber begat the TSA, which has become a multi-billion$ entropic expense on society. The pager caper will likely spawn its own form of societal wastefulness, but there is a much bigger potential consequence. If you can weaponize a pager, you can do the same with any smartphone. Who needs a drone when the mark is carrying a covert bomb and holding it next to his ear. With remote triggering via simple dialing, the reach is worldwide. This is no trivial escalation by the Israeli braintrust. For all we know, this capability is already built into every cellphone.
Rarely do I say Z is wrong; he’s generally right on the general picture, but in this case I think he’s goofed on a specific:
The exploding pagers “…is mostly a public relations caper, with little practical impact on the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah.”
Ah, but you couldn’t be more wrong, Z. The pager sabotage, and by latest reports, a repeat performance today with walkie-talkies, is a fiendishly clever example of psychological warfare. Israel has done a more sophisticated version of what evil actors like the Soviets have reportedly done in earlier conflicts, such as air dropping “toys” or giving away portable radios or TVs that turned out to be booby traps that maim and kill. Yes, the devices maim or kill, but the overall desired effect is to demoralize. In the case of Hezbollah-Hamas, obviously these attacks will cause them to distrust any of their electronic equipment (with good reason, I dare say!) not to mention their entire supply chain and the personnel involved at every step.
Z’s right, of course, that top-level people are harder to target. Yes, it’s their underlings that actually transport and touch the electronic devices. Problem: If your minions are afraid of any such device, lest it blind them or blow off their hands, Big Boss Man’s efficacy is drastically reduced.
Au contraire, Mr. Z. Mossad have pulled off a covert op at a level of success rarely equaled in wartime.
The ranks and files of Hezb are sure to lose confidence in the appointed quartermaster and, thus, whomever appointed the person responsible for choosing the suppliers. This taints all senior leadership. A possible practical effect of the bomblets includes slowing down communications as the members start disdaining all electronics. The result could be a fatal inability to react appropriately to a great increase of Israelist aggression, to which Netanyahoo is committed.
This is what everyone is missing. I am not saying it was not a clever operation. I can agree with the claim that it is supposed to demoralize the Lebanese. I will concede all of that. What I am asking is then what? What should we expect to happen next? The Hezbollah guys quit and surrender to Israel? They covert to Judaism? They become bugmen concerned only with sports and super hero movies?
Of course not. They get mad at whoever they blame for the security breech, they get super pissed at their enemy and then they start plotting revenge. In other words, after the media excitement wears off, it is back to normal.
Exactly. In the meanwhile, lots of innocents die. Whether one wishes to confront it or not, there is a great moral dilemma at play here, “How many innocents is one justified in killing/maiming to eliminate one combatant?” And of course, the confounding point of whether such action is effective in the first place remains unquestioned.
You can hate on Israel all you like, but I wouldn’t want to live next to Palis either. Heck, neither do Ay-rabs or Mooslims. Palis don’t seem to be any better neighbors than Likud.
So long as the nukes don’t fly, I just can’t get too worked up about it. If Rolling Thunder is what it takes, I’m not going to be dancing in the streets, but neither am I going to lose any sleep. Not my monkeys.
“You can hate on Israel all you like”
This is not and never was a “hate on Israel” response. You will not find a single posting of mine in all the years here that “hated” on Israel or Jews, or for that matter really got into the issue much.
It remains an interesting morale, as well as a practical, issue whether it concerns you or not. That issue extends to other conflicts and wars as well. Simply the latest example of a prolonged conflict that must grapple with this issue is all that was intended.
Sorry. I just assumed your response to Zman, which was specifically about Israel and Lebanon, was referring to Israel and Lebanon. Without the “In the meanwhile”, I’d have extended the benefit of the doubt and assumed you were speaking generally.
Maybe the point is getting them pissed enough. Israel needs a final war to crush its enemies and to try to keep internal cohesion or it may not exist in 20 years. For that it needs the American Empire and after Ukraine and Yemen it is looking insane and weak, and let’s not forget that we are seeing the last days of the american boomer so now it is the moment.
Maybe there is no afterthought, and it is just for PR. At this point i wouldn’t discount that is actually simply that but it is hard to not look for meaning in it.
It wouldn’t be surprising if Israel thought it’s now or never if they are expecting America to in anyway protect them/fight for them/be rich enough anymore to give them money etc.
It’s crazy how they seem to want to weaken America as being Christian Anglo’s anyway, cuz Hitler, but at the same time want our military and economy strong for their own benefit and it’s just a Goddamned shame that they have treated us this way, really. But what’s new, it’s not like every other country doesn’t admire them for it and would do the same given the chance to.
If they really want to beat Israel they probably should convert to Judaism. A hostile religion takeover…
Easy enough, most of the Biblical action took part in Hejaz and Asir, southwest Saudi Arabia; it was only later they rewrote the story to claim it took place in Egypt, to make it more grandiose.
So yeah, Arabs are the real Jews!
Not a conversion, then, but a RETVRN to their roots!
Mohammed was half-Jewish,
Jesus was raised as full,
the religion itself was a political movement started by the Jewish Ebionites (seperatist zealots),
the royal emirs are more than Donmeh marranos from Thessalonia, they are authentically one of the ancient Hebrew lines,
as are the Palestinians – thus their hot-head vendetta mindset.
The rabbis say Mary was an Arab, so there’s your in.
lol I’m picturing the Somali pirate/Tom Hanks film meme, with the Somali pirate pointing at the captain saying. ‘We’re the Jews, now” but it’s Lebanese instead of Somalis.
Maybe this pager-bomb thing was just a way to get some use out of a failed project? At some point the Mossad agents thought this would be worth all the effort and expense. Perhaps later their snooping revealed that “Hey – nobody important is using these things”. Nobody worth killing/wounding turned up no matter how many units made it out into the market. So, why not just blow ’em all up. Nothing valuable to lose (sunk cost), and maybe some propaganda points. Given their usual callous indifference to collateral damage this seems possible to me. I wonder if they sent some art students to film/document the event?
Agents of the state seem to produce a very mixed-bag of schemes. This brings to mind goofy things like the Bat Bomb from WW2. I wish all their ideas were as minimally effective…
This was a despicable thing to do, with no discernible political or military purpose. Imagine if it had been the other way around and Hezbollah had done this to the Israelis. Western media would be going on non-stop about this wanton act of terrorism that took so many saintly Jewish lives. The Sodomite of South Carolina would be shrieking hysterically for nuclear obliteration of those camel jockeys and how this ran counter to “Judeo-Christian values.” The hypocrisy boggles the mind, and it’s done brazenly and shamelessly. The West has become a whore serving the Tribe.
Yes. It was an act of terrorism by the Jews. No question about it. You’re absolutely right, if Islamists did this to 3000 people in Israel or Washington, we’d be deploying the Marines to fight the “terrorists.”
When “God’s Chosen” do it?
Applause from the American retards.
Ameritards, for short.
Don’t Hezbollah claim to be at war with Israel? Haven’t they been firing rockets daily at Israeli civilians in towns and villages across the north of the country (100 rockets just the day before the pager event, I believe)? What did they expect? Since when is attacking your enemy in wartime “terrorism”?
Regardless, terrorism is terrorism, and the pager bombings were most definitely terrorism. And if terrorism is wrong when the Muzz do it, then it’s wrong when the Finkels do it, too.
Hezbollah are a legitimate military target. All the footage and photos I have seen of the victims shows military-aged males. If they were in possession of the pagers, they were part of the Hezbollah organization, therefore a legitimate military target.
No different from Ukraine and Russia targeting each other’s troops with drones.
Or are you suggesting that the Israelis line up in red coats with muskets and advance until they are within twenty paces of Hezbollah before firing?
“They’re Hezbollah because they have the pagers” – says Israel, just like Israel says that every fighting age male they kill or capture in Gaza is Hamas, or every hospital, school, and refugee camp Israel blows up was also a weapons storage facility or whatever. In all these instances they never provide evidence and just rape the people they capture and put the rapists on national TV as heroes.
Not quite. Assuming the media is telling the truth and their sources are real people telling the truth, they are Hezbollah because their pagers all came from a specific batch of pagers that Hezbollah bought and distributed to Hezbollah.
Yeah, it’s possible some kids broke in and stole a few, but…
That is what they say, I know. They also said that forty decapitated babies were found on October 7th, and many other things. While I don’t doubt the basic skeleton of the narrative (that pagers were handed out to Hezbollah fighters), we don’t know how many were handed to them, how many went to other people, where they went, etc.
We also don’t know how many were detonated (I saw anywhere from “hundreds” to roughly 3000), we don’t know how many people were caught in the explosions – I saw only one video and it was at an indoor market with multiple people around the exploding pager, and unless you want to say that everyone who stands next to a Hezbollah fighter in a market is also a Hezbollah terrorist, these weren’t isolated explosions. So, many questions remain, and I suspect that this sort of information is not going to be go through the media filter, being what it is.
Read the story on non-US, non-Israeli media, then.
Did anyone claim with a straight face that the IEDs used against our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan by the Taliban and other “insurgents” were “terrorist acts”? When we were drone-bombing wedding parties?
Uh huh. And how many innocent civilians were killed or maimed in these “legitimate military” attacks? Perhaps a young mother and her baby who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time?
Look, war is a nasty business and atrocities are inevitable. But an atrocity is an atrocity. Please don’t insult anybody’s intelligence by claiming the pager-bombings were anything like a morally clean operation.
No wartime operation is “morally clean”. IEDs directed against our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan killed civilians, of course. 18,000 French civilians died during the Battle of Normandy in 1944 – mostly killed by Allied bombs.
Once the gloves come off, that’s it. We can – and should – attempt to set boundaries like the Geneva Convention (and may I add that Hezbollah does not fall under its purview, so its members are not entitled to its protections), but collateral damage is inevitable even with the best (very rare) intentions.
This is why violence should always be a last resort. Why any responsible American government would have moved mountains to secure peace in Ukraine back in February 2022. Why, for all his faults, Clinton’s successful peace initiatives in Northern Ireland and Bosnia deserve our praise.
And ask yourself this: if American patriots were locked in a deadly war on US soil against, say woke commie tyrants supported by Chinese “military advisers”, and YOU had the chance (as Patriot Commander – California Theater) to take out several thousand of them using booby-trapped pagers, would you do it?
All Z says reflects the infantilization of of the West. Like babies cooing and giggling at the mobile with whales and dolphins revolving over the crib, the people of the West, both peasants and patricians, jabber and babble with excitement over the latest monkeyshines in the Levant or the Ukraine, and hop about frenetically when they see the memes springing therefrom. But infants cannot keep the 747 aloft forever. At some point it smashes into a mountainside and the amusement ceases.
“At some point the theater of politics, the theater of Western public life, must give way to reality and people who prefer reality over self-generated fantasy.”
Seems an assertion based upon facts not in evidence. Here, as I suspect everywhere, play nonstop political ad’s on the local media. The candidates tout their “plans”, but what they really espouse are little more than “wish lists”—not plans. I assume the public buy’s into this fantasy or candidates would spend their money elsewhere. And it’s not simply the format that causes these ad’s. Both candidates have spoken in interview format with basically unlimited time to outline a process they could initiate and bring to fruition, but never do. They just tell sweet lies.
I really can’t remember an election cycle like this in my life—on the other hand I’m not the same person I was when younger. I suspect I fell for this silliness myself—but that brings me back to the point above—you claim that at some point reality *will* prevail. Well, I’ve been buying ring-side seats for 50 years now. When does/will reality prevail?
Could it be that reality is not important? Could it be that what is important is the quality of the electorate, i.e., “people”? Could it be that as a people, we are degenerating faster than reality can set in?
The movie “Idiocracy” had a vibrant electoral process depicted as well, but made no pretense of quality of the government produced given the electorate.
The plot thickens: The Taiwanese company claims that the pagers were made by a Hungarian company called “BAC Consulting KFT”. The Hungarian company has no physical offices, their official address is only used to forward the mail. The alleged owner is someone calling herself Cristiana Rosaria Barsony-Arcidiacono, who “escaped” to Croatia after the attack happened.
We are witnessing a B-movie in real life.
As we saw with the pipeline caper, the rush will be on to flood the zone with clever, but implausible theories that are ripped from popular culture to make them seem believable. People will be drawn to the Mata Hari story because it sounds cool.
I like this story. Cristiana Rosaria Barsony-Arcidiacono is an amazing name, fit for a Mexican telenovela.
Yep. The plot would not work as well if the mystery figure was Fred Swartz.
😂
Hoo boy- this one’s made for TV. Quick, pitch that script!
This twist is definitely going to show up in a movie or two, or ten.
Good golly, we’re watching a cliche being born.
Because the pagers are mostly carried in the front pocket of the pants, the Hezbollah will be called from now on The Sopranos.
And don’t forget the offensive part: the company that provided those pagers made money on it. Could it be more Jewish than that???
The company could complain about the campaign of hate being waged against them and demand compensation.
Dunno. Laptops and phones and EVs starting on fire “for no reason at all” doesn’t make much sense. With a possible single exception, everything has a cause.
Either those who specialize in battery tech know what caused those events, or they don’t. Neither possibility gives me warm fuzzies, but if they know the cause, they have to understand it could be weaponized. With obvious implications…
Death comes for the Archdeacon?
KTF, Kentucky Fried Telephone
And The Groove Tube, shown together, but not at the same time!
Agree about the B-movie. It also occurs to me that much of what we read in the press is propaganda…and that might very well include the narrative you passed on. Maybe true, maybe not. If Mossad are behind this, somehow I would hope they’d cover their tracks a bit better than that major details of the op are published worldwide the day after the attack. That’s a pretty bad fuck-up for an outfit of their reputation. Don’t all those details seem just a bit too detailed, too plausible? In the present case, we may be mistaking “news” that for all practical purposes is a B-Movie script.
Most likely the latter, for most of them.
The pagerbomb caper has taken a new turn with fingers being pointed at a “Hungarian” firm, Bac Consulting KFT. The CEO is said to be one Cristiana Barsony-Arcidiacono. Check out the turdglobalist appearances.
I read the company was in Taiwan but that they were contracted out to a Hungarian company who actually made them.
Just one more reason a country should make their own stuff. If it’s not a Chinese counterfeit, it has spyware and if not, now you have to consider it could blow up on you..
This was terrorism, at least as far as terrorism can be done by a state. There was video showing one of these blowing up at a supermarket and injuring the clerk waiting on the guy with the pager. How many of these guys were in their home with their children when the code got sent to blow them up?
If they were valid targets, at the very least, so were their wives. Kids? I guess it depends on how much you believe in genetic determinism.
BTW, this is true for whichever type of targets we are talking about.
This is as ridiculous as pre-arresting children of criminals. Sure, they will probably not turn into model citizens, but everyone has to fail themselves. If the children of criminals are destined to become criminals themselves, they’ll be committing crimes soon enough and they can be incarcerated afterwards.
I’m sorry, but it is just absurd to hear a dissident say this retarded stuff, especially one who presumably is a hereditarian. We understand nothing is 100%. Chance and environment play significant roles even with traits with high heritability.
I agree it’s ridiculous. That’s why I said “believes in genetic determinism.”
But where in this thread do you see that same nuanced view of chews? Or in any other thread of blaques? Once in a blue moon there’s a Big Jew/Little Jew distinction, but everything else, and I mean EVERYTHING is dismissed as IKAGO or NAXALT. Except Palis, I guess…
I’m not antisemite or particularlyh anti-black. I simply recognize them as a group outside of my own and often with cross interests. I have ZERO love for the Palestinians. All of the Palestinians and all of the Israelis could fall into the sea tomorrow for all I care. Other than hearing it on the news, I wouldn’t even know about it. I have no family or ethnic ties to the region. If America wasn’t being pulled into every one of these stupid conflicts, I wouldn’t even pay what little attention I do to these things.
I’m sorry, but killing the children and wives of combatants in their own country is nothing short of terrorism. My only caveat is I generally do not ascribe terrorist to states. But with that distinction aside, I think this is pretty much terrorism. Also, I’m not moralfagging about this. I’m just pointing it out, mostly to the ‘Israel can do no wrong crowd.’
Genetic determinism is a very fluid term. I would probably say I was in that camp somewhat (as a limited knowledge layperson with tentative beliefs). But NOBODY believes in 100% determinism except for those denying free-will, which I absolutely do not. The traits, AFAIK, generally run from .5 to .8 That is a lot of room for chance and environment. 2 average people can produce a genius. A bad environment can easily wreck the best of genes.
Also, using your logic, the holocaust was totally justified.
I mostly agree with that. The exceptions:
A man who wrongs another is sinful. Maybe gets a pass if he’s too stupid to know its wrong. A man who knows it is wrong, but does it anyway is either evil or acting on behalf of evil. Does not get a pass.
Wife of the first guy, generally off limits. Wife of the second guy, probably fair game. Lie down with pigs, etc.
Kids, IMO, off-limits, but that’s because I tend to think of genetics as general upper and lower bounds, and environment largely determines where within those bounds.
So, no, I haven’t excused the “just following orders” “Holocaust”. Not that I accept the story as written, but if I did, that would be evil.
BTW, I’m not calling out you personally. I don’t pay a whole lot of attention to handles. You had to have seen replies with “NAXALT” and “IKAGO” from time to time, right? I’m not just hallucinating?
Hopefully, you will see this….
When I wrote: “Also, using your logic, the holocaust was totally justified.”
I had been away from the conversation and missremembered it. I edited that line into the comment. But then I re-read your comment again and realised you weren’t making that (genetic) point and tried to edit it back out. But it was too late to save the change, even though the edit button was still there. Sorry about that.
Yeah, no worries. When I saw your comment, I went back to see what I said that gave that impression, and decided it was there in my post. I chalked it up to my well-established inability to communicate what I’m thinking.
That’s why I hired someone to do that for me.
It is stated Israeli and rabbinical policy they will grow up to kill Israeli children when they too are grown up. It makes sense to remove the future threat now.
Both sides have social pressure to kill the other. Raise kids in that environment, and it’s no surprise there’s violence.
I don’t know that there is a way to deal with it other than stand back and try to stop the nukes. If Palis had at least SOMEONE who liked them enough to take them in for a generation, maybe two, it might be possible to defuse, but no one likes them.
Israel doesn’t care anymore if you see their barbarism. Hell, how many months have they been blowing up people who try to even feed the Palestinians and people still don’t get the message? It’s over. This is them. They probably get a laugh sometimes at how naive the west is. It’s a shame but reality is reality. There is no non-barbaric side in this conflict.
Here’s a couple ideas to ponder: They pulled off the pager OP, but got caught on Oct 7 with their pants around their ankles.
Had they collected all the Intel off the pagers, so no need to risk being found out?
And the bonus round: No one had any curiosity about what was inside of an important piece of equipment?
They had to mow down 600-900 of their own citizens after moving them into a fire zone, a trap, in order to make 10/7 happen.
Of course, a drugged out rave of queer allies might be considered somewhat expendable, so there’s that.
That “peace” festival was staged to mock not only the Palestinians on whose border partiers in Great Satan cosplay danced lewdly, but also orthodox/militarist Israel. 10/7 was a Saturday.
I’m sure the IDF had fun.
“Peace” is a term of art in left politics. It means something like “hating people at war.” Depends which people, of course. 10/7 is a local media event for us, so we don’t think of it as a real thing and see it. The MAGA hat is taking over, but the common cartoon American is still a hippie. Attendees who dressed for the party were dressed as Americans. It was, in fact, a provocation—America’s dance on the graves of both states, in celebration of the then ongoing (now canceled) color revolution, the victory of globohomo over both.
It was a real-life Oliver Stone movie.
It’s almost like because they can’t admit that they made a mistake(?) or own up to that yes, they did indeed helicopter gunship their own fleeing civilians and they did indeed terrorize them, that they have went insane about it. Some kind of desert religion honor/guilt weirdness that westerners cannot understand.
The pager cleverness is actually not admirable, because many innocent people were killed or injured. Jackals and Hyenas are clever, but I don’t admire them.
Israel cannot do anything without the U.S., so our government knew or helped with this pager attack. Same thing regarding Ukraine with bombing civilian targets. It’s sad how low our government has fallen.
“The pager cleverness is actually not admirable, because many innocent people were killed or injured.”
You’re applying Christian morality to Jews. Jews are not Christians. Jews do not care about killing or injuring innocent people. It’s literally their religion to kill innocent people:
“Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.”
1 Samuel 15:3
Vox Day has a good description of the likely unintended consequences of this act. I will add one more. Airport security will get more difficult. Many people will be irritated over this and, over time, will come to blame Israel for it. Already many Americans now have a jaundiced view of Israel, mainly do to the past 25 years of mechanations on the part of AIPAC and the endless wars for endless peace pushed by the neocons, the majority of whom are members of the tribe.
I wonder if this op is also meant as a nudge toward chipping the human cattle.
“Phones are simply too dangerous. We need you to get the brain chip to travel.”
Keri Russell had a chip implant in Mission Impossible III. That was released in 2006, so in the works for a while before that, so about 20 years ago.
Writers coming up with the implant kill switch, and so many other ideas that seem prescient even now, or especially now.
I’ll date myself and point out the 1992 B-movie Fortress had implants for prisoners, though those were placed in the abdomen.
The hero’s crime in that film was violating the one-child policy in a future dystopian US.
Pretty sad when memories of 1992 count as dating oneself. Mercy, mercy, me.
When it comes, the one child policy will only be for Whites.
There’s one unintended consequence I’m not hearing people talk about which is people refusing to buy anything even remotely high-tech from Israel. I know that the Israeli economy is heavily dependent on software. I’m not sure how many electronic gadgets they make. Needless to say, I think people will absolutely refuse to buy pagers or phones made, even partially, in Israel. Of course the software shouldn’t be trusted either. Logic bombs and viruses can be hidden in anything.
As many people have pointed out, distributing lots of little gadgets that no one expects to explode and then detonating them all is guaranteed to kill children and random people. I wonder if this was not also a dual purpose psi-op. The idea being to soften the Western masses up for cheering on outright terrorism to provide moral cover for when they give the go-ahead to the Ukies to fire long range missiles into Russia. Then again, I’m not sure how much the typical retard American Ukie fan needs further nudging to support anything the Ukies want to do, including blowing up Russian schools and businesses.
That’s a much better explanation than any I came up with. Nine killed out of “thousands”? That’s a rate that would make jogger-Americans hang their heads in shame. I disagreed with Ritter’s take, that it’s simply modern war. It’s a stunt, nothing more.
Anyone else notice that despite people not knowing yet whether it was “just” a hack, people still can’t pull their noses out of their phones?
Stunts like this are more likely to spook lower intelligence animals. While I don’t discount the leadership of Iran or Hezbollah, and I am good friends with some very intelligent (Catholic) Lebanese, there’s no denying that the Arab Middle East has no shortage of low IQ types. I doubt this scares them into inaction, but it will likely result in them wasting time in future operations going down security rabbit holes
A lot the low iQ among Muslims is related to inbreeding (pardon the pun).
We don’t know how many children and women and innocent bystanders were maimed in this, but I suspect it’s quite a few. We don’t know that every single one of these pagers went to a confirmed Hezbollah fighter, and I actually doubt that is true at all. We all know that Israel has lied about targeting fighters and terrorists for decades. Their definition of a Hamas fighter, for example, seems to be a fighting age man that they arrested. Ultimately, this isn’t that different from someone putting a bomb in a crowded marketplace.
This stunt seems aimed at western Israel supporters, think Ben Shapiro and his acolytes, who are bloodthirsty, hate the goyim, have latent guilt about not living there, and think it is funny when we suffer. They don’t value human life and justice the way we do, as has been seen in the past year. They also know that there is nobody in the American government that will stand up to them, so they can continue to engage in this rogue state, lunatic behavior, knowing that the American government will step up to defend them if necessary. This state is out of control.
“We don’t know how many children and women and innocent bystanders were maimed in this…”
Well jeepers, I am sure as shootin’ this will reduce multi-generation hatred by one group for another not named in this here post.
And when the blowback comes, that group will claim that this happened out of the blue and it was done just because they hate them for no reason whatsoever.
Anti-semitism, like the Big Bang, is uncaused.
Yep. Anti-Semitism is the “oldest hatred”…. for no reason. None whatsoever.
The Canaanites, the Amalekites, the Samaritans, the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Romans, the Persians, the Turks, the Muslims, the Czars, the Spanish Inquisitors, the Germans, the Gazans, the Saudis, the Palestinians, the Syrians, the Jordanians, the Lebanese, Martin Luther, Shakespeare, Henry Ford, Lindbergh… hundreds of millions of people throughout history were just plumb crazy. They hated Jews just because they were all purely irrational, insane haters.
Josephus’ “The Jewish War” is an account of the first of three great war that led to the destruction of the Hebrews (the AD 66-71 war ending in the siege of Masada). The author was a Jewish revolutionary commander, captured early in the revolt.
He details the incredible hatred between Syrians and Jews. The Romans Jews had one legion raised in Syria (all legions during that period were raised outside Latium) that Jews paid special attention to slaughtering at the beginning of the revolt. The surviving Syrians paid them back at the siege of Jerusalem by butchering starving civilian escapees from the city, cutting open their entrails to see if they had swallowed gold.
Syrians of the time worshipped Baal, long before the invention of Islam, so this hatred LONG predates Islam. It’s who and what they were. It’s who and what they are. It’s who and what they will always be.
America is dead, and the evil transnational empire that murdered it is dying. When it twitches its last death throe, property rights and citizenship rights instantiated under its aegis will die with it.
The solution to our involvement in this drama is to deport them ALL, Muslims and Jews, back to their own lands. Let them solve their problems the only way that they ever will, without any involvement from us. We owe nothing to any of them.
Somewhere in the Old Testament, God is admonishing the Hebrews for some naughtiness and says something pithy like “It is because of you that the Gentiles curse my name.”
This was neither just for show nor to win a news cycle. This was a useful intelligence operation.
The main value is the identification of senior and field grade commanders of Hezbollah. This info will be pieced together over the next few weeks as hospital reports and deaths are analyzed. Of course many will be out of action for a while and some permanently. This will, at the very least, delay any action that Hezbollah was contemplating in Lebanon or northern Israel.
A secondary effect is to make Hezbollah’s internal operations more cumbersome. For example, procurement now becomes a more uncertain proposition, likely no more bulk orders from a distributor or manufacturer. So now everyone has to buy retail, though from whom now becomes problematic.
Last, this amps up the paranoia and conspiracy theories for which the Islamic world is well known.
All of these claims are post hoc justifications. Hezbollah has over 100,000 members. Israel knows the key players and has no reason to know about street level members. As far as disrupting their operations, that will be resolved in a few days. The imaginary psychological impact exists only in the imagination of the West.
Yep. Similar with Hamas. They kill all the active ones (maybe), but the recruits remain in line to “sign-up”. This makes me wonder what the “real” objective is in their efforts (I don’t prescribe to the theory the Mossad is stupid). In the case of Hamas and the Palestinians, it’s to drive them out of the country permanently. In the case of Hezbollah, a prelude to invasion?
We shall see…
Speaking of imagination, it’s hard to imagine how several hundred pagers all at once blasting the nuts off the guys carrying them could not have a psychological and operational impact. Follow that with handheld radios doing the same thing a couple of days later, and a lot of people will lose confidence in their leaders’ competence and be mighty skittish about using any equipment supplied by them. I wonder how many of the 100,000 members are wondering if they should power up the laptop Hezbollah just sent them.
It’s one thing if the enemy drops a bomb on you. It’s quite another when equipment provided by your boss turns out to be a bomb that the enemy can detonate at will.
You’re forgetting the basically superstitious mindset of the average Middle Eastern Muslim (who has an IQ around 85). This shows that Allah cannot defend them against magical attacks. It has impact on the rest of the goat herders, and meanwhile the most destructive thing you can do to an enemy isn’t to kill them, it’s to disable them and make them into a burden to their fellows.
Steve’s thoughts were my own as well. As with most near all of his comments, I find them well-educated and well-grounded.
That paranoia factor, amongst Arabs?
It puts the heebie-jeebie in the jihadi.
As one Arab said, five Brits in a field hospital is a low murmur; five Arabs in a field hospital is pandemonium.
The CIA (we always called them Christians in Action) has done these type of shenanigans for decades. They killed several Hezbollah folks in Lebanon and a couple of Medellin Cartel guys in Colombia with either exploding cell or satellite phones back in the 1990s. What they’d do is send in a team such Delta or Seal Team 6 to the target’s house, sneak in, swap the phones and leave without a trace.
There is nothing new under the sun.
Yep. ZOG/Israel, Washington/Tel Aviv are basically the same thing. No doubt the CIA and Mossad collaborated on this.
It’s worth noting that this kind of dirty trickery would have been unthinkable in George Washington’s Christian America. The reason for the ZOG-Israel relationship is that as the U.S. has abandoned Christianity and Christian morality, it has adopted Jewish morality.
Just as the rules of moral conduct don’t apply to “God’s Chosen,” they don’t apply to the “indispensable nation” either.
“ The questions not asked by Western media, much less answered, are why Israel would do this and what did they think they would achieve by it?”
————————–
Oh jeez – Z, that question was asked and answered long, long ago. The goal is ethnic cleansing of the Palestinkians. (I have no dog in that fight, I hate both sides and hope they kill each other). Recreational killing is on the table and has been for decades. I laughed like hell when some wank at Blab poasted up an excerpt from the Geneva Convention, high lighting this latest action as a war crime. How many times have you heard some rat faced jew whining about terrorism and how arabs should be prosecuted in world courts for unsportsmanlike warfare?
This is just another novel psyop. “The jews are gonna put bombs in your pagers! They’re gonna put bombs in your cell phones!!!” The brain dead will listen to the media hype for as long as it generates clicks and views and likes – and they’ll be on to something else.
It is a one-time shot too. If they actually DID any real damage to their enemies they will react and secure their communications. Like the jews, they don’t care what happens to the average Pali citizen. In point of fact, I will bet that most of the wigs in Ham Ass and Hezbollah have encrypted and protected communications on par with that of our world leaders. They certainly won’t be using … pagers… 🙂
God can sort that mess out, and until He does… may their body counts be high.
You realize, of course, that a significant number of Palestinians are Christians, and that the Ashkenazi are targeting Christians for elimination as well as Muslim.
The wanton disregard for bystanders is typical of the morally depraved Mossad.
True.
But the death of innocents is no longer a deterrent for either side.
I, for one, don’t care. They are as significant to me as “Christians” in Africa, China or South America.
While I certianly have no ill-will to our brothers in Christ around the world, they are only spiritual brothers. They are not my people. If they were here, they would be our enemies.
We never get a number, but I’ve seen mention that the Christian percentage may be as high as 20-30%. I also don’t hear about FGM as a practice in Palestine, which hints that the Christian influence may be considerable (Bethlehem, Joseph’s Tomb, the actual family crypt of Jesus’ entire birth family in W. Jerusalem*, etc.)
*(Joseph, Mary, James, Judas, Simon, Salome, Mary of Carna, His two half-sisters from the 42 year-old widower Joseph before he remarried a pregnant 16 year-old Mary.)
“have encrypted and protected communications on par with that of our world leaders”…. like Merkel?
I remember a caper from a while back where either the FBI or CIA claimed there was a worldwide mafia bust when they got all of them to download an encryption app that was actually created by the American Government with an easy backdoor. The press release said how they captured hundreds of these guys in multiple countries in a monumental sting operation.
A couple days later, no one was talking about it. It makes one wonder if it actually happened, and if it did, how much the authorities jazzed it up for a good story.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdca/pr/fbi-s-encrypted-phone-platform-infiltrated-hundreds-criminal-syndicates-result-massive
What a shame this brings to the IndoEuropean people who once had Alexanders, Tarquins, Martels … … who would find with honor. The degradations we suffer to countenance this small bug minded garbage are without end.
This kind of trick is the kind of trick that the mastermind celebrates in moments of great vanity and self congratulation. It only strengthens the resolve of those who were the victims of the trick. Of course they command the hegemon’s trade networks and satellite networks and armaments and his blood and treasure. In the end, they hold a massive advantage in power.
Another day that has dawned in darkness. Napolean has wrought a plague upon The West.
So, what’s next? I understand that the powers that be around the globe are looking to rack up sick burns on social media instead of really trying to change things. Someone or something (ideology) is going to ignore the show and become shocking and brutal and get what they want.
The central question of the pager operation is whether it was a hack or an implant, ie whether they made the lithium batteries explode with software or something physical not part of a normal electronic device was implanted.
The media all say it’s the latter and of course they do. Because the former would mean that your cell phone, and possibly laptop, tablet and what have you, can kill or maim you at someone else’s command. And that would be the biggest story of the year: your cell phone is not just their spy, it could also be their assassin if globohomo gets fed up with you.
Lithium batteries have a history of exploding, just to ward off the predictable “it can’t be a hack, you must be stupid” comments.
Doesn’t matter which. The possibility that your electronics can be detonated still applies with either method.
There’s a huge difference between whether they need to insert something physical or all the hardware to go boom is in place in a standard handheld device, just waiting for some malware they can send. It’s a smaller version of the difference between living on top of a bomb vs they first have to put a bomb in your house
Since deception is at the root of this method, we have no more way of knowing whether the electronics we already possess contain this than the folks in Lebanon did.
Engineers who have specialist knowledge of batteries would be able to gauge that. And unlike two days ago now everyone understands why this is not a marginal risk. Hack or implant is an incredibly important question to answer. There probably won’t be an official answer other than what they’ve already said, “implant”. I’d love to know the real deal
There is no magical way to make a battery go boom. The most likely explosive was Semtex, because it is not easy to detect. Only a small amount would be needed, less than an ounce. The images and video online confirm it was a small amount of explosive.
There’s now talk about walkie talkies blowing up as well and they often run on AA or 9V batteries so I think it must be implants yes.
I don’t know enough about battery or electronic engineering to know if there’s a software way to short-circuit a lithium battery but maybe not. I just know they have a history of blowing up every now and then
Having blown up and tried to blow up many things, batteries are not easy to make go boom, but they are a great way to hide explosives. The pagers these guys would have been using would not be using store bought batteries. They would have lithium batteries and the user would plug them in to charge. Hiding an extra ounce in them would be easy. The same is true for their radios.
The main issue is the triggering mechanism. If these pagers connected to the cell network, then no problem. If they are like old pagers, then the Israelis would have had to infiltrate the pager network. Not impossible, but more work. That is my guess here. The reason Hezbollah uses old tech is it is harder to intercept. That means the Israelis hacked into the pager network and they rigged a bunch of pagers with explosives.
New security routine: weigh your cell phone every day. If it gains an ounce throw it out
A simple countdown timer (e.g. time bomb) in the pager would be a much simpler design. There would be no need to access the pager network, indeed no need to send a signal at all. At preselected Time Zero, several thousand units go boom. The only constraint, of course, would be enough lead-time to get most or all of the rigged units to their selected targets.
Based on today’s news of walkie-talkies detonating, at first one might think “remote control” and that’s certainly possible. But fixed timers would seem an equally valid option.
“Having blown up and tried to blow up many things…”
You can’t just say that and not give us some amusing stories. 🙂
Z sounds like one of those “Hold-my-beer” cousins at a fambly reunion in Yazoo City…
I’d assume a well spent childhood. And some of us who enjoyed chemistry class kept it up well into college.
To short-circuit a battery would require wiring (hardware) that upon command would create a short circuit to the battery. That would never be used in a rational design. Therefore a unit would be clandestinely modified and hardware added. But for that trouble, there are much better options, like the plastic explosive already cited.
Correct. It wasn’t the batteries:
“(A) senior Lebanese source said the devices had been modified by Israel’s spy service ‘at the production level.’
…up to three grams of explosives were hidden in the new pagers and had gone “undetected” by Hezbollah for months.”
Israel planted explosives in Hezbollah’s Taiwan-made pagers, sources say | Reuters
A small computer made just wrong could allow a code injection to overheat the processor and start a battery fire. The manufacturer would pretty much have to make it that way on purpose. There are several unlikely steps between electronic_jew.exe and an explosion in your pants. Rube Goldberg machines rarely assemble themselves.
The Alex Jones possibility is that there’s a secret law mandating that all our phones be made this way. If that were so, Apple et al. would do it and wouldn’t leak it. The system’s one near-perfect competence is keeping the Snowdens out of it.
So, say, a doctored Tesla or airliner?
How quickly will this democritization of violence spread?
A Tesla’s one-ton battery only requires a small bit of water to ignite.
How useful would a timer and an injector be when one is innocuously parked along side all the other Tesla’s in a government fleet, in the parking garage under the gov bureau building?
What’s the definition of ignite? Look, EV batt’s and cell phone batt’s and who knows what else can short and start a fire—sometimes a humongous ferocious fire as in chemical reaction—but an explosion as has been seen in recorded video, I’ve never seen, nor heard to have occurred previously.
Right. Doing the root cause analysis, surely they figured out what was causing it? And… crickets.
All it takes to turn a boiler into a bomb is to wire down the safety relief valve and… never mind. The violence of the explosion is only a function of the strength of the boiler walls.
Yes, lithium is a reactive metal that ignites on contact with water (or humid air). The result is not really an explosion though. It’s more of a rapid combustion reaction. Certainly this can be dangerous but the videos I’ve seen of the Hezbollah pagers are clearly detonations, not fires.
Exactly. You’ve seen GIFs of pressure cookers going off? Or the carnage the Tsarnaevs brought to Boston Marathon?
All you need to do to change a rapid combustion into a full fledged explosion is to use thicker walls on the batteries. Once the pressure inside exceeds the ultimate yield strength, all that stress dissipates in a flash.
Please, do park your Tesla next to mine. It only ignites, but it won’t explode!
I do believe you should bill Tesla for thinking up their new slogan – “Tesla, it ignites but won’t explode!”
My guess is it will be tracked to a day zero vulnerability and no further. There will be no fingerprints on it. Just an “oops” in some firmware. There were reports that some people felt it heating up first, so probably not explosives.
Out of a few thousand pagers, someone will have forgotten to plug it in overnight. How about the ones that were used on the night shift and placed in chargers?
There is no mystery here. Israel did not crack open the Ark of the Covenant to find a way to magically make pagers go boom. The were able to intercept the shipment, replace it with pagers containing small amounts of explosive rigged to a specific calling number.
This is basically it, purely hypothetically, of course.
You could leverage an unused output of an existing chip or circuit as a trigger.
The explosive charge is easily disguised as a thermal pad, thermal paste, or adhesive.
I watched a bunch of cell phone battery explosion videos, some accidental and some intentional.
In either case there is no explosion video that shows anything close to the damage being reported in Lebanon.
I had a military friend explain how one could remotely detonate using a flip phone, back in the old days. I can just imagine idea bulbs popping all over with this clever inspiration. All kinds of people gonna be gettin’ all kinds of ideas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KL1fGBR2nPs
So how about the pagers that were turned off? Or with dead batteries? Or weren’t activated yet. There are always some on the shelf to replace the ones that get broken or fail.
Should be trivial to prove the Semtex hypothesis.
Intel ppl already know how it was done. Our problem is downstream from that; we can’t trust a d*mn thing they say.
Fair. By extension, they know how to do it again.
And if it’s Semtex, then it becomes trivial to run the same numbers we do for statistical process control and quality management to figure out your supplier is working for the other team. Depending on who the customer is, that could put the supplier in whole new a world of hurt.
The problem with proof, is who does the proving? Does anyone believe anyone who might be “in the know” anymore?
Of course no one believes the experts anymore. Other than maybe the ones who believe deficit spending a gazillion dollars reduces inflation.
So why put any credence in Reuters allegedly quoting an anonymous Hezbollah official?
So long as the US doesn’t get (more) involved and the nukes don’t fly, why should I care?
More likely the entire lot was built to spec not in the main factory of course! Detonation via sent code or built-in timer.
The media are probably right in this case. If you’re going to modify a pager to become a bomb, whether remotely ordered or via a simpler built-in timer, that requires some hardware and software. Now it’s true that if you put a dead short on a Li-Ion battery, it will heat up and do any or all of the following: smoke, burn, vent toxic compounds and perhaps explode. However, it seems unlikely a tiny battery even exploding could do the carnage reported. And if you’re going to the trouble to alter the pagers, why not put something more effective in there?
Finally, on the topic of our electronics in general: sure, it’s true that security is often lacking whether through accident, negligence or deliberate malice (e.g. install backdoors). However, code to deliberately self-destruct is a step beyond and except for bespoke evil intentions like the pager op, extremely unlikely. For example a feature to short out a battery would never be designed into a device for any conceivable “normal” usage. Yes, they’ll spy on us but in most cases our gadgets aren’t out to do us in.
That’s what I’ve arrived at as well. Yesterday I thought it was a hack because I a) thought it would be too difficult to physically alter thousands of devices, b) knew that lithium batteries are known to blow up on occasion and c) thought a decades long enemy of Israel like Hezbollah would have too much internal security not to catch thousands of tampered with devices. Today Hezbollah s security looks very…. Arab
It has a psychological impact on Hezbollah for sure. What i wonder is why now and not the moment a invasion happens so to maximise damage. Or they were forced to use this trick now or lose it or if was just for the memes the ukranians should have served as a lesson.
2000 wounded is a big deal, this would cause a fair amount of confusion right before you invade……….
And, Hezb is effectively inommunicado right now. No flash coordination or field coms.
Alzaebo: Hezbollah can switch to using doves to communicate. Cell phones, pagers and walkie talkies are too dangerous
Squab will come back on the poor man’s dinner menu!
Falcons like in Afghanistan.
That may be the Israeli (and Ukrainian) plan.
The thing is, I don’t think they realize that AINO’s arsenals are seriously depleted at this point.
I think they also fail to realize exactly how slow, inefficient, and corrupt AINO’s military industry is.
It’s always 1942 and the arsenal of democracy in their minds
MyS-
Exactly.
Their belief in the WW2 mythology has clearly made them totally unable to accurately assess the reality of AINO’s military industrial base in The Current Year.
Yeah this only works if one accepts that “Hezbollah”=”Anyone in Lebanon”. This will go over well with low-watt Americans and their cartoon, 2D view of the world but for anyone with a clue this was just a disgusting move by a bunch of savages.
I was curious what normal partisan Republicans were saying about Trump getting almost murdered again, so I was “in the threads” when when the pager story broke.
(I’d expected to find them participating in the instant memory-holing of the assassination attempt, like they did last time. Sure enough. The real story was DeSantis refusing to hand the shooter over to the feds and promising his own investigation. “If only we could have a serious presidential nominee like DeSantis—a man who gets things done instead of making people shoot him!” DeSantis of course assigned the job to an anti-Trump psycho.)
Live grassroots GOP reaction to the latest Israeli terror campaign was the usual conservative vicarious-violence-through-the-Jews thing—purified. They went straight to a shared fantasy of sexually mutilating the enemies of the Jews.
Why, even in reddest America, can’t conservatives stop the schools from trooning out their kids? Answered. When the Jewish superego and thanatotic id agree…
What a lot of people, even myself to an extent, don’t like to hear is that the reason for so much Jewish success is that they were selling crap that we wanted to buy.
Totally despicable.
If pagers can be manipulated, anything can. Including vaccines.
Now that you mention it (the vax), it’s sad how the biggest crime of the 21st century has been largely forgotten.
There is still 75 years to go, calling this the biggest crime of the 21st century is a bit premature.
So far, it certainly is.
Suppressed, not forgotten. It’ll be with us for a long time
I don’t think so. I think the crime of the 21st century is an escalation of the crime of the 20th century.
The moral subjugation of European peoples in order to create a global consumerism empire and the total dispossession and intentional ethnocide and ultimate genocide of them.
The forced vax and the BS lockdown/shutdown of the world was a huge crime to be sure. The forced colonization of the homelands of an entire people that span 3 continents is the crime of the history of humanity.
I wholeheartedly agree. The demographic destruction of the West, AKA white genocide, is the greatest crime in history. THE greatest. That does not mitigate or detract from the vaxx crime, a historically giant crime in its own right, in any way.
I agree. There are so many crimes around that it’s difficult to keep track. We are ruled by demons.
Yes and the social engineering, that we let happen, to our minds. I had a talk with a woman who claims to be “saving western civilization “ with a classical school she started. It the race issue? She actually said it didn’t matter if the white race goes extinct , one race the human race. Western civilization can subsist in any race she says. It was only an accident that western achievements came from the west. That’s how sick the white mind is
First, I emphatically agree with you that the media has nearly absolute control over what most people believe and what they don’t think about anymore. I wouldn’t believe the magnitude of this power if I wasn’t witnessing it.
Regarding your main point, there are so many vaxx theories, some plausible, some ridiculous. In your view, in just a sentence or two, what was the “biggest crime of the 21st century?”
The whole Covid thing. From the lockdowns, to mass murder by intubation, mixing sick people with non-sick at risk populations, to the release of improperly tested mRNA technology on the whole world to suppression of any dissent and any kind information not fitting the official narrative to not punishing one person for any of this, etc.
Its been one long never ending crime since the dot com crash. Same people that did covid were in office during 9/11. How do you know that wasn’t a crime also? Only difference between now and then, is that you believed in your leaders more.
Trust.
Every year at this time I would traditionally get a flu shot. This year? How do I know what other special ingredients may be added?
Nah, I think I skip it this year. Life in a distrustful society.
There is some percentage of True Jab Believers still out there. Some of them no doubt in the medical profession. Nurses, say. What if I end up in the hospital for some reason, one of them is attending me, it appears on my chart that I’m unjabbed, and she decides to remedy that without my knowledge? Not far fetched, I think.
Look up Alexis Lorenze.
Allegedly, she was forced to get not one, but three jabs, before a hospital would treat her.
There are before and after pictures of her. Can anyone confirm that the story is accurate?
She has a blood disease so they probably should have checked for contraindications, but of course all vaccines are 99% safe and effective for everyone! No need to check contraindications.
And most of them will have Harris/Walz signs in their front yard. Thanks particularly to the feds and the msn, virtually anyone in authority or who claims to be an “expert” is no longer to be trusted. Just one of the myriad of ways we’ve been screwed over in the past few decades.
It’s funny but the sign people don’t seem to be down with Harris and Walz. They are keeping their mouths shut about those two and are focusing local it seems.
Disagree–I am seeing tons more Harris/Walz yard signs and bumper stickers than I did for Biden/Harris 4 years ago (which were virtually nonexistent in my deep blue state)
Really?? Hmm. I live red state, blue city so I guess that is the difference. I think the liberals/democrats here have accepted that Trump is probably gonna win against Kamala Harris so they focus on state and local to make sure he can’t accomplish anything. Probably smart from their point of view.
“There is some percentage of True Jab Believers still out there.”
I regret to say that IMO most people are either true believers, or cannot admit the error of their ways, and the harm they caused or may have caused themselves or others.
My entire family except me were all in. My bro-in-law was sending me pics of him doing the amazing, noble deed of taking my old mother to get her jab. They were righteous – jabbers and to this day there has never been a conversation —- although they appear to have suffered jab side effects, some pretty serious.
Can I say with 100% certainty that their poor health outcomes in recent times were jab related? No, of course not. But I could live without their bad health, weak immune systems — from heart problems, always sick …. but they sure did the right thing.
Right?
So you wake up one day and realize your family (not my spouse, she never shoved that needle in her arm) are sheep, retards. You look a them, shake your head … and live on.
They are a pathetic lot.
Disagree with “pathetic”. It was part and parcel with trauma conditioning. They cannot admit to what they were made complicit to, neither could the ‘Greatest Generation’ in WWII. Thus, the vulnerability and subsequent mental ‘reorientation’ (wreckage.)
Citizen, as always, was epically correct.
“The story ruined them more than it ruined us.”
I was listening to Gad Saad and that Mossad fem CEO of Prager U.
Both are fully vested in that lunatic Hannah Arendt’s moral axiom, the “banality of evil”.
“Why did the white people do something so terrible that we made up out of a Wanssee clerk’s rumor?” (That clerk made a great living for 40 years filing individual reparations suits.) “Why did men read Goethe under the light of a lampshade made of human skin? How could they go home to kiss the wife after throwing babies in incinerators?”
This fundamental axiom, based on a lie about a lie about a lie, is embedded so deeply now, and the past has been rewritten for so long, it has become a part of their being. It has infected all of the Christian world, as the vector and pole star of our current moral basis.
A culture that deeply traumatizes its babies or children (looking at you, Muslims) with the agony of physical anchoring- a twisted echo of neolithic, primitive initiation into adulthood- is inherently vulnerable to such mind fvckery.
This is the “parasitic mind virus” theorized by Saad or Desmet’s clumsy plagiarism of “mass psychotic formation.” (It works, it is a tactic unconsciously promoted by Kunstler: uproot, terrorize, reorient.)
Their forced fantasies made reality – that is, complicity – is the trauma conditioning that infected the Puritans then and the Woke and Normies now. We have adopted a wrong alien mindset as our unspoken moral underpinning.
We did this also under their influence in the ancient past, and the Bible was the result. They thought to become us, but instead made us into them.
If they are religious adherents of Fauci and the whole covid operation they would want redemption on being right! Which means you may have to slip away or be intubated so they could say see we were right. The prophecy was right!
So far, their prophecy failed, so they just push the date up for the apocalypse as all zealots do.
I’m betting you’ll survive.
Is everyone’s sarcasm detector turned on??
😉
Yeah, Bart – I don’t get the downvoots…
From the old comic strip “B.C”: Thor the inventor is riding his wheel and ends up in a wreck. In a crumpled heap, he says “With my luck I’ll probably survive.”
WCiv-
There’s been lots of chatter about adding the special sauce to the flu jabs.
No—it’s worse. The flu vaccine will not have just Covid affect, but the flu component *itself* will be produced by via mRNA technology.
The problem here is that it is not understood well at this point whether the problem of the Covid vaccine lies with the mRNA technology, or the use/choice of the Covid “spike” protein. There seems to be conflation on the cause of adverse effects by the opponents of the current Covid vaccines.
I suspect it is the mRNA technique in and of itself that makes the Covid vax deadly—and that technique is so cost effective for the pharma companies that they now predict that all their vaccines will use such mRNA technology in the future.
I other words, all those shots we are slated for as infants through grade school could be deadly. Folks at this point pretty much have an idea to stay away from Covid vax. Some even are wary of the next “scamdemic” being predicted by charlatans like Bill Gates. Few however seem to realize the entire program of vaccination is in jeopardy of becoming deadly.
maker of the vaccines name is (wait for it-) “ModeRNA”
mRNA (mainly as a cancer treatment) had plenty of issues in early trials. Thus, it’s reasonable to suspect the platform(s) have many flaws of their own. And yes, there are many questions about the effects of “spike” in and of itself, and that includes the natural virus itself. As is often the case when enormous potential profits are at stake, it’s not as if Big Pharma or its bought-and-paid-for “regulators” are going to be exactly forthcoming with any unfavorable information about these, or indeed, any other products.
I think we’re already at the point where no vaccination can be considered safe. I used to take flu/pneumonia shots, as recently as late 2020, but no more. I will never voluntarily take any mRNA or similar product, if I can avoid it.
This doesn’t mean I’d never take a vaccine. Last winter I was bitten by a feral cat. I was recommended and agreed to vaccination against tetanus and rabies. Although the risk of an actual infection was probably pretty low, fatality rates of 10% and 100% are nothing to laugh at. On the other hand, Covid or the common flu, with fatality rates measured in the 0.1% or 0.01%….
The next big fight will be for proper labelling of the vaccines produced with mRNA technology. I’ve given up on a prohibition of the technique at this point.
For my rabies and tetanus inoculations, I thought about what technology they used — too late, after I’d been dosed. Since I have paperwork, I could probably find out. Hopefully they are pre-mRNA products. That’s likely the case, since these shots have been around a very long time. On the other hand, they are rolling out mRNA shots for older diseases.
Most everything a year back is not mRNA–except Covid vex.
Who knows what the future will hold?
On the one hand, the body counts (excess deaths) continue apace, plus the uptick in unusual cancers and other illness, young people dying of Suddenly, etc.
On the other hand* there is the Goliath of Big Pharma & Co. There is simply too much money to be made to disturb the status quo. Even absent the profit motive, institutional inertia is an eternal problem: Academic and other professional reputations to protect, corporate or government fiefdoms to defend, and so forth. For example, officially (e.g. FDA/USDA) excess fat in the diet is a leading cause of heart disease since at least the mid-1970s, and twenty years before that if you count NGOs like the American Heart Association. All based on crap science or at best ambiguous studies. For some reason they never want to discuss carbs or especially sugar as a health issue.
*The one with the ostentatious diamond ring
If you need any evidence of how postmodern Leftists are all cuddly and nuzzly with capitalism, look at how they not only turned a blind eye to Big Pharma’s Covid profiteering, but pilloried everybody who doubted the safety of the wildly insufficiently tested so-called “vaccines.” These people have little contact with Marx.
Depends on what you think Marx’s point was.You can draw a line from Enlightenment to Kant, who adopted a universalist view of the distinction between the phenomenological and noumenal. That while our senses necessarily mean the phenomenological is perceived subjectively, we all share similar senses, so our subjective perceptions are more or less universal.
Enter the post-Kantians, including Marx, who argues that we don’t all share the same perspective on the phenomenological, that, rather, we have a class-based subjectivity.
Postmoderns have no exact split from “Moderns”, many are just variations on Marx’s class-based “universalism”, the most common are race-based and feelings-based. Things like “it’s a black thing, you wouldn’t understand” and “acting white” and “lived experience” and “my truth”.
I think it cheapens Marx too much to think of him as just a socio-economic kook. He’s largely the source of the current theories of group identities.
Biden’s promised moon-shot cancer cure…he left out the part about us all being forced to participate. But hey, it’s for his dead son and you better not challenge him on it, Jack!
It is likely both aspects, but they each cause different effects.
The spike protein is causing the blood clots that lead to heart problems and strokes.
The mRNA component is likely responsible for the genetic damage leading to cancers.
You do realize you’re talking about the sterilization or death of nearly the entire First World, and of all the former Second and Third whose medicine and food supply (animal vaccines) depend on the First.
addendum: judas fkng priest.
that’s what we saw. the impending implosion.
why i am prostrate, paralysed, unable to move or act after our such failure
what we mapmakers, the scouts found
this can’t be
i cant bear this
what had we done
we failed
instead, we awoke its autoimmune system
The flu jabs themselves have been suspect – and minimally effective – for years. Both husband and I stopped getting them, even though they were free at his office, about 5 years ago. I literally cannot remember the last time I was sick – was 2019 at the latest, but it might have been 2017. Steer clear of industrialized medicine as much as possible.
Post vaxx I stay away from that cr*p. I’m perfectly good without an alu or mercury or whatever concoction they put in to keep it fresh
3g4me-
Exactly.
This is because they modeled AINO’s flu jabs on the strains found during Australia’s winter, which is AINO’s summer.
Anyone who has passed middle school biology understands how dumb this approach is, and how it means the jabs have always been useless.
I gave flu shots up 30+ years ago at the university where they were free and given in your office between classes or at lunch. Why? Well, the last year after the annual Oct shot, I got sicker than a dog early Dec, then again late Dec and decided these shots were ineffective. Afterwards, I never had more than a cold.
Oddly enough, my current physician—a Covid shot proponent—was not against skipping the flu shot as he said they “never guess right”. BTW: before the latest Covid fiasco, the CDC used to publish the “effectiveness” stat’s they recorded for the flu vaccine over the years. I saw the table. If I recall, the CDC itself never had a year where they claimed more that 50% efficacy and the average was about 35% efficacy!
Problem is it’s a counter-factual. To the extent they pick the right strain(s), then assuming the vaccine works, those strains will be under-represented in outbreaks. The better their prediction, the worse it appears to have been.
If one has no prior knowledge he is better off not getting the shot and hoping everyone else takes it. If no one is passing it around, he can’t get it.
`I did not spend much time in researching their methodology, but was amazed at the full court press based upon a treatment which even they (seemingly) admitted was fairly ineffective in retrospective analysis.
Agreed. Between the doctor who had Big Pharma pounded into his skull and the doctor who made it into med school on his flounciness, and now his intersectionality, it is tough to get decent medical advice.
Now add in the evil leader types who want you to take the risks while they get the benefits without risk, and the increasing tendency of faking the data or not even releasing it, the odds are stacked against you.
Recognizing and being suspicious of the full court press is better than most strategies.
When you see what most drug reps look like, and are hired for looking like, the drug companies are not against playing on humanity’s weaknesses to profit. In fact, they count on it.
This is true. Wife worked as a drug rep–untii age caught up with her. 😉 Amusingly, she was of the cohort when female doctors were coming into their ascendancy, so the salesforce started to acquire a goodly portion of young, viral males.
In any event, the entire situation changed over the years from one of rep’s being college educated and conversant in published studies and the biological sciences, to young, good looking fast talkers.
“…started to acquire a goodly portion of young, viral males.”
They were probably that, too. 😉
I see some authors (e.g. Taubes) say in defense of doctors (approximately): The doctor is not necessarily motivated by greed or power-lust or some other dubious motive. Most doctors really want what’s best for their patient. Consider the “Mythology” of vaccines: these have almost miraculous status in our collective memory. Dozens of once crippling or killing diseases are now routinely held at bay thanks to vaccines. (Of course there’s a lot of truth there.) Doctors probably hold strongly to the dogma, an almost religious view on the value of vaccines, due to the psychological investment in their career. It’s heresy to question the value of vaccines. (Indeed, to do so has ruined many careers.) It never enters the doctor’s mind that not all vaccines are created equal, and it’s possible that some are ineffective or even dangerous. Yet he may unconsciously place all vaccines at some mythically perfect level that few if any reached in the real world.
Pardon the tactile diarrhea; the point to be made is that a doctor may be sincere in his beliefs yet some of these may be erroneous and thus risky to the patient. Another problem is that it’s very hard to convince him this could be the case.
“Pardon the tactile diarrhea; the point to be made is that a doctor may be sincere in his beliefs yet some of these may be erroneous and thus risky to the patient. Another problem is that it’s very hard to convince him this could be the case.”
Not even close for the most of the practitioners of medicine. Doctors are not scientists, they are technicians. They practice/treat to a “standard of care” that their Medical Boards dictate. They may indeed convince themselves that such is in the best interest of the patient, but it really is in *their* best interest as it shields them from law suits and Board reviews. This was proven over and over again in the latest Covid scamdemic. The doctors that dared cross their superiors (Certification Boards or Hospital Review Committees, Fed’s, etc) were few and far between.
That brings up another issue with claims of efficacy, safety, and so on. Clinical trials provide the best data, but even then, there are all manner of reasons to doubt what’s reported. Leaving aside outright fraud, deceit or plain sloppiness, there are still many pitfalls. The study might have accurately reported upon something irrelevant. They might have logged data but not known its significance and thus not reported it. Sometimes they (apparently) deliberately fail to report certain data! “See, isn’t it great this drug reduced heart attack risk by 48%?” For some reason, they forget to cite that the death rate from all causes was higher for those who took the treatment.
For stuff like flu shots, I’m wondering about one I haven’t even seen in the skeptic books (e.g. Kendrick, Doctoring Data): the unreliability of reported data. Let’s consider the case of testing a flu vaccine. (I admit I’m conjecturing here, but this seems reasonable.) Let’s not worry about randomized, double blind, etc. What is being measured? Let’s say it’s the number of cases of “flu” that a test subject experienced during the winter say from October to March. Right here we run into the need to define exactly what a “flu” is. Is this self-reported, or did the subject get checked out by at least a nurse? Perhaps we define “flu” as having certain symptoms. But even if we jump that hurdle, how do we know that every illness will get reported? It’s extremely unlikely that all the test subjects were inmates under 24-hour surveillance the entire time of the trial. Thus it seems probable that all, or nearly all, cases of “flu” will be self-reported. Or perhaps they only considered flu requiring hospitalization. Perhaps that’s more reliable, but what about the cases of flu that weren’t so serious as to require admission? Those are likely the vast majority of illnesses, yet they may not have even been counted in the study!
Since immunity lasts for several years — if you get one every year, you accumulate immunity to lots of variants. So even if this year’s shot doesn’t correctly guess this year’s variant, it’s likely to protect in a year or two when the matching variant comes back around. (And it doesn’t need to be exact, either, just close enough to match one of the four basic flu variants.) A good reason to get one every year, because it’s not just for the current year.
I personally noticed after I’d had several flu shots, I never got the flu no matter what variant was going around: Accumulated immunities to all four base variants and their immediate spawn, good for several years each.
Fair.
If your immune system is still intact (which it must be for vaccines to have an effect) then you get the benefit of vaccines just by hanging around kids. Grandkids, Sunday school, volleyball, whatever. The more snotty-nose, the better.
Personally, for something as small a threat as flu, I’d rather get my immunity interacting with kids than getting whatever happens to be in the syringe.
That “efficacy” requires clarification. They usually report a relative risk (or benefit). What they never tell one is the absolute rate. Why? Because it’s usually trivial.
A flu shot may reduce your absolute risk of having the flu this season from 3% to 1.5%.That’s a bona fide 50% [relative] reduced risk. But in absolute terms, you’ve cut the already small chance of a flu (3%) by 1.5% in absolute terms. There are other considerations, such as the expected risk you’re defending against: sure the flu can be serious or fatal but for most it’s a minor illness. What are the downsides of the vaccine? They are (“were”) generally safe, but there is always the risk of adverse events.
There should be a prodigious Latin or Greek term meaning “Doesn’t really do much.” I’m sure that many preventive medical treatments do offer significant benefits (based up on reasonable definitions of “significant”). But many common ones don’t. The flu and pneumonia and Covid vaccines certainly are (in my opinion) low-value and especially the latter, very high risk. You probably should say “no” when offered a statin and/or blood pressure meds when your numbers just creep over some arbitrary threshold that would have you believe that half the population has “abnormal” values! Many diagnostics are nearly worthless or even potentially harmful (e.g. needless surgery due to a false positive).
To reiterate, doctors provide valuable services, but the problem is some of what they offer – indeed, are legally required to recommend, as it’s the standard of care – is the medical equivalent of custom mud flaps and undercoating offered on a new car purchase. It’s a profit item but one providing scant expected value to the consumer.
“Doc, give me the stuff that works or don’t give me anything at all. Please don’t demean your profession or insult my intelligence by advocating expensive goods and services that statistically will extend my lifespan by a few weeks or months.”
Ben, please don’t lecture me on scientific analysis and experimental design. That was my major and minor at the PhD level. It’s really annoying to read your postings. If you want to discuss one small aspect of a very complex undertaking, I might be game. But what you post is quite a confusing ramble wrt to experimental design in such settings.
Years ago when my GP pushed hard for “this year’s flu shot” I asked some pointed questions. What percentage chance for this and that, obvious stuff.
He could not answer. Sounded like a crap shoot, money grift then, 20 years back. Like $250.00 a pop, with no idea or answers regarding efficacy.
What kind of retards go along with this?
Americans.
I believe the effects and risks of a conventional flu shot (1) are well understood.
Getting one every year for 30+ years? Not so much.
How about getting one NOW when we have ample evidence of the dishonesty we SHOULD expect from the providers?
There actually was a 4chan post from alleged Moderna scientists that purported to detail oddities in the therapeutic manufacturing process.
Today the pagerbomb, to morrow the phonebomb with code running to detect user wrongthought. Drawbacks include possible detection by dogs or scanners at airports. Islamist dogphobes and dog haters take note if the pagerbombs were made by adding an explosive compound, not by a electronics modification or software hack.
And is…today Mossad is blowing up all kinds of devices in Lebanon, including home solar devices…Most of the victims are civilians, and several children are dead…It’s terrorism on a massive scale, and a war crime if there’s a war, which there isn’t yet…
Israel is a mad dog who needs putting down…
Rumor has it that this scheme originated with MI-6, which handed it over to Mossad…
Ack…makes me think of Netanyahu’s trophy-cased vax needle. That was weird. ‘One ring to rule them all’ levels of weird.
One purpose of the Holocaust industry’s constant was-overdone-decades-ago battering of propaganda into white people is that it serves to sedate our normal moral instincts by hypnotizing most of us into thinking it’s good that Israelis take one truly nihilistically vicious and villainous action like this after another
Steven Spielberg made the movie Munich about the Israelis who went after the perpetrators of the attack on the Israel Olympic team in that city. It was a well-made and compelling film, but the fact that even Steven Spielberg felt that it was fair to question the nature of Israel’s actions made the, ahem, media and Jewish organizations go ballistic. The movie did not gross well at all and, despite getting Oscar nominations, was largely shut out during award season. Then, as now, they were setting the stage and telling the goyim that any criticism of Jewish behavior, no matter how brutal or unjust, no matter who is doing the criticism, is off-limits.
I suspect the intent of the pager caper was a psychological blow at the foot soldiers of Hezbollah. Sow FUD among them to weaken the organization and its fighting capacity. In that way it is similar to propaganda directed at fighters that has been an element of war for millennia.
The meme battles are just a sideshow distraction.
Meme battles are extremely important after all we all know that Napoleon was a shortking and Hitler was worst than the devil. But of course you still have to win on the battlefield.
That makes sense if it works, but the results from three years of doing this to Russia say it does not work. In fact, history tells us that efforts to demoralize the enemy never work. In fact, they tend to get the opposite. This is what I find so strange about the thinking behind these psy-op capers. Why do they think they will work?
Much the same for mass civilian bombing campaigns in WWII.
Strengthens resolve, not weakens it.
It’s such a well known response that militaries who do this use “demoralization” as an excuse, not a strategy.
Does it all fell like female bullying?
True. Every day I can go to some corners of the internet and see a bunch of bloodthirsty NAFO psychos posting snuff film with dead Russians. Somehow that hasn’t stopped Russia from advancing and fighting.
All this will do is tell the whole of Lebanese society who their enemy is, because in a very real way they targeted the whole of Labanese society. They won’t back down.
I used to watch Anthony Bourdain’s shows, and I remember one from Lebanon. He spent a good bit of time with a Lebanese Christian family. They were rabidly anti-Israel and anti-Zionist. It amazed me at the time that this was so. But I see now exactly why the closer proximity to Israel, the more you hate them. They are vile people.
My gosh. Hezbollah can frame this as the Great Patriotic War for Lebanon.
Remember, the Lebanese are a seperate genome, Phoenicians (Philistines), and was the last “Arab” Christian country- the Maronite Catholics. Who wiped out beautiful, civilized Beirut last time causing 15 years of civil war?
I hope “Joe Biden” hasn’t put any Marines in any barracks there that we don’t know about. Damn.
“This is what I find so strange about the thinking behind these psy-op capers. Why do they think they will work?”
They don’t work when you’re dealing with an uncaptured populace. If your enemy is your captured host population, they work. We are their true targets. You yourself have quoted what Theodore Dalrymple said about this.
Stop calling it a caper, omg.
Apparently, “Hezbollah” in this case were doctors and nurses who used the pagers to communicate in their hospitals, with the exception of American University of Beirut hospital, which retired the old paging system just 2 weeks ago.
Whether this version is the truth or not is hard to tell, but it matches Israeli behavior in Gaza, where hospitals and their staff were prime targets.
Link to American University Hospital ditching pagers two weeks ago? Would be highly relevant
https://x.com/Partisangirl/status/1836088534203318699
Thanks. Maybe they’re not not the most popular people in Beirut now…
Does anyone know what pagers/phones the tranny surgeons in Dallas and CA and NY use? Asking for a friend.
Why do those doctors and nurses use pagers when cell phones are easier to get than pagers and far easier to communicate with? Yes, they are Arabs, but even Arabs should be able figure out that speaking via cell phone is more efficient than sending text on a pager.
This is irrelevant.
In ICUs, it’s just more convenient. Probably the same in other wards. The same unit that charges the pagers has buttons on it that activate all pagers tuned to that channel, telling everyone, instantly, where they need to converge.
I know this only because my dad went through ICU 18 months ago.
Anyone with an ICU pager would not have it while out at the grocers, or even on break.
Probably the link above tells us nothing. Assuming the pagers used in hospitals in Beirut are similar to the ones used in the states, they have a range of around 50-100 yards. Intentionally.
As many hospitals as there are in Beirut, you would be triggering multiple hospitals and wards with the same alert if they were not range-limited. That X post is interesting, but probably not of any significance.