Day two, more explosions in Lebanon. It turns out that Israel has been swapping the lithium ion batteries in all sorts of consumer goods with duplicates that contain half lithium ion and half plastic explosives with a remote detonation trigger. Motorcycles, washing machines, and rice cookers are exploding all over Lebanon today. This has massive consequences for the worldwide appetite for western electronics and consumer goods. This will have massive reverberations as companies and governments move to protect themselves from any exposure at all to western supply chains. This means audits and new procurement procedures that will make a subsequent embargo on Western goods that much easier to accomplish politically and administratively.
They also got home solar systems so people's houses are burning down and blowing up
Translated:
Israel's Pager Attack - A Sophisticated One-Times Shot With Little Effect
Yesterday's terrorist attack by Israel against Hizbullah in Lebanon was quite sophisticated.
Back in February Hizbullah had urged its affiliates to avoid smart-phones, which can be controlled by foreign intelligence services, and to instead use pagers to receive text messages and alarms when necessary.
Israel must have recognized that suggestion as a chance to infiltrate the supply chain for these communication tools.
It somehow managed to manipulate pager shipments to Lebanon some of which would be acquired by Hizbullah and its affiliates. Yesterday specific encoded messages were sent to the manipulated pagers. Some moments later they started to blow up. Eleven people were killed and some 4,000 were wounded.
Not all people killed or wounded were members of Hizbullah. Pagers are also used by emergency and volunteer services. Western media avoid to call this attack a terrorist operation. But just ask yourself how they would describe the attack if this had happened to the other side of the conflict.
Pagers are not an exclusive means of Hizbullah. The attack was indiscriminate. The explosions happened in many situations of daily life - during visits in shops (vid), in driving cars in the middle of traffic, near to bystanders including children.
The pagers were sold under the brand name of Gold Apollo, a Taiwanese company specialized in such devices. But, according to the company, the devices sold in Lebanon were manufactured under license by the Hungarian company BAC Consulting KFT.
Lowkey writes:
The CEO and founder of BAC is Cristiana Arcidiacono-Barsony, who describes herself as a strategic adviser in internal affairs with international experience in the Middle East.
According to her academic profile she studied at SOAS and LSE universities in London.
The above points to an MI-6 involvement in the affair.
Elijah Magnier reports (vid) that the delivery of the pagers had been held up for several months by customs in a Middle Eastern country. The time was allegedly used by Israeli services to dismantle the devices and to replace their original Lithium-Ion batteries with ones which included explosives and birdshot to create a maximum of damage. The electronics of the devices were manipulated to trigger delayed explosions after the pager received a certain coded message.
This very sophisticated operations must have cost millions and must have involved a quite large number of specialists.
It would have been ideal for Israel to trigger such a mayhem as part of a general attack on Hizbullah. It would have increased Hizbullah's time to implement its defense plans.
To trigger the attack outside of a large scale war context is a rather limp maneuver. Most of the wounded will soon recuperate and return to their duties.
Israeli officials claim that they triggered the operation because some Hizbullah members had found out about the explosives and would soon alarm their leadership. It was thus a 'use it or lose it' situation.
That though does not sound plausible to me. How would Israel know that Hizbullah members found out about it? If they had so why would they not immediately inform their command of the imminent danger?
It is more plausible that the Netanyahoo government used the attack as a means to silence it critics which demand an all out attack on Hizbullah. The Israeli military and Netanyahoo know that a war with Hizbullah would be theirs to lose.
Now they can say: "See, we are already doing something very very serious ..."
But that wad has been blown for little effect. It was a one time shot. They chances to repeat such an operation are close to nil.
Tomorrow Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah will publicly offer more information about the incident and its possible consequences.
almost every country in the world imports the transformers they use for their power grid
think anybody's thought to pop them open and check for remote detonated micro-explosives over the last 5 years? Or is that now a sword of Damocles hanging over every country's power grid
In this video today, you can see Lebanese electronic shops were already starting to take everything apart when Israel set off the walkie talkies. At least one, maybe two, in the pile bottom left went off while the two guys were sorting through the radios and pagers. Luckily, they weren't touching them or anything, but it does show that already people are starting to work the problem.
Every Tesla could be a clandestine carbomb.
What about several hundred car bombs going off at all once when they decide to activate the EVs?
Bomb found in ambulance
Meanwhile the Western press is running with absolutely nauseating angles to provide cover
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I will die unless someone helps me, and nobody is helping me. So I will die. This is as simple as that. Many many people are watching me die, and nobody is helping me.
I have retained legal counsel to try to get the medical treatment I need, but I need help paying for the physician experts who will be generating an alternate medical record for me to challenge Kaiser. Please consider helping me.
It looks like he's got a dysfunction in blood pressure regulation so he's had to take calcium channel blockers and he's not clearing fluids through his kidneys as he should
Or congestive heart failure... I think he lost his ACE2
So there's parts of your body that must maintain a high blood pressure, like your kidneys, and parts of your body need a consistent blood pressure, like your brain, and it needs to be maintained throughout many events such as rising and laying down. ACE2 regulates these zones.
ACE2 receptors are also what COVID targets to enter cells. There's a lot of them in your vascular system and in the sensitive organs for reasons mentioned above. So COVID infections basically ablate your reservoirs of certain types of cells that express ACE2. So blood pressure.
The police have gone insane they do this thing where they start telling you open lies about what has transpired and to characterize actions and behaviors and do a thing called psychic driving to distort the memories and perceptions of everyone on scene. It's their training.
There is no way for you to comply. You will be turned into a slave.
There is no way for you to comply. You will be turned into a slave.
I'm following the saga of some guy who watched them bury a bunch of chickens at a small poultry farm and he's dug it up and is pulling out as many as he can for his deep freezer
He dug down until he hit bird now he's in a race against time. It's frozen outside so he can just pitch them onto the ground for now but they've got to come up before they can be frozen like this. He's using two hay hooks to haul out bird carcasses and fling them out of the pit. It's messy work.
He is letting them cure in the open air to chill down then loading them up in his truck and taking them back to his trailer which has a barn behind it with a bunch of deep freezers he slowly acquired over the years to preserve game, none though since the poultry farm moved in...
In China, money is a public utility. The state owns the Central Bank of China. In every Western country, the federal reserve and its equivalent are not owned by the state and exist solely to make sure commercial banks are healthy. They play an outsized role because no one understands what a bank does, and Wall Street keeps it that way.
When your central planners are the same people that want to introduce debt into your economy, and therefore own productive assets that your people create, it’s no surprise that the few people that go into banking end up making lucrative amounts of money, that on paper, looks like it’s generating wealth. All it’s doing is creating overhead and suffocation as all of those loans means that another person actually owes the bank something.
The only reason a revolution hasn’t already happened is because of nonsense terms like “inflation” being used to obfuscate the reality of how things are working but it boggles my mind that we live in probably the most extractive system ever invented since feudalism, well eclipsing the exploitation of classic industrial capitalism because atleast there, you could strike against your exploiters. Where to even begin striking at the banks?
I really dislike the term quantitative easing, because it's another jargony word that Finance has used to make it seem like what they're doing is more complicated/esoteric than what it actually is. It might be easier to think about it in terms of "giving the banks money".
It might be helpful to think of the Western economies as centrally planned by the banks. When people talk about "free markets", this is ultimately just either an illusion or convention. In reality, what we have today is a very top down economy centered around banking, and the products of banking is...debt. Think about what a bank does - they literally generate debt via the form of loans.
This isn't well known, but nearly 97% of the money generated in a Western economy is generated out of thin air by banks.
What this means is that effectively ALL of the money in a neoliberal economy is created by commercial and private banks. But think about what a bank actually does - they have the ability to generate loans electronically to claim on top of an existing asset. Said another way, a banks role is to claim assets and introduce debt into an economy.
All of these debts then get securitized. This is more jargon to say that these debts then itself become revenue-generating assets, similar to a dividend. This is the primary way in which Wall Street allows these banks to offload these debts to get even more money beyond the interest generated by the loans.
Because these debts percolate throughout the economy in this way, interest rates are how this becomes centrally planned. Think about it in this way - because banks generate money (aka debt) out of nothing, they have an incentive to continue doing it. The way they stay solvent is by having a reserve available in case a certain percentage of their depositors suddenly withdraw everything at once. This percentage of actual money they need to keep on hand changes daily.
Further, because of deregulation introduced by neoliberalism, banks itself can turn their own debts into assets and invest in other debt-securities. The thing about debt is that they grow faster than real assets or even the real economy itself. This means that all of this bank debt that is created is naturally volatile, as they are claims onto something real, and that real thing does not grow as fast as debt does. Said another way, your ability to generate income from your job does not grow as fast as the debt of taking on a 500,000 loan, due to compounding interest.
Because neoliberalism does not view this as necessarily a problem, the economy is therefore "turbocharged" by the mass introduction of this debt, which as we saw earlier, is itself income by the banks both via interest and securitization.
In a neoliberal economy, the banks are the most important part and the central planners of the economy - this is in contrast to an industrial capital structure, such as pre-1970s America and China today, where the banks role is to fund a consumer-production economy.
In theory, banks supposedly introduce value into an economy by generating loans to productive endeavors, like businesses opening a new factory and employing people. This is how industrial capitalism works, and it what allowed capital intensive conglomerates, first starting with Edison and GE, and then later Ford, to scale from cottage industries to country defining entities.
In neoliberalism, this is not the case. Industry generates more money by investing into the stock market than it could ever hope to by employing people and opening up productive capacities for the simple reason that debt turbocharges asset growth due to its compounding abilities. Further, wage growth eats into bottom lines and net income, which was solved by offshoring - the massive explosion of GDP by neoliberal economies is to take advantage of low wages and equity growth.
The neoliberal economy is run, therefore, by banks introducing debt into the economy, that debt being converted into assets by Wall Street, and industry investing into equities, not hard assets.
This is all buildup just to what quantitative easing is. Seen in this light, the Federal Reserve exists to let the banks continue centrally planning the economy and do a few things - squash wage growth, which they call as inflation targets; make sure banks don't make too many bad bets - if they do, bail them out; and keep the debt economy going.
Interest rates in theory are "levers" to pull to influence the behavior of banks in this way. But QE, which is the Federal Reserve generating debt, was first introduced the world by Japan in the 90s as a way to, no other way to say it, unfuck the banks. You see, when banks make too many bad beds, and therefore all of their shitty behavior of claims onto the economy materialize, it means someone actually becomes bankrupt. Said another way, banks generating loans means someone owes them loans. When you can't pay a loan, you go bankrupt. To not go bankrupt, what if we gave them another loan to pay off their first loan? This is the effect of QE.
So said simply, QE is generating debt continue allowing the banks to make loans, which is the engine of a neoliberal economy.
In Japan, interest rates went to 0%, and sometimes negative which is hard to really understand (effectively - the banks are paying you to spend money), but it led to a stagnation. In the US, this did not happen - why? Simply because we print the money that the world wants. Said another way, we generate money (debt via Treasury Bills) that the world needs to feed itself. So, QE led to an explosion of growth due to the US' unique position of being a reserve currency. This led to a massive explosion of the equity market due to the behavior of industry realizing they could generate more money by investing in equities than opening new factories.
This led to the economy turning into a Ponzi Scheme since 2008 when then whole thing collapsed and QE started going in earnest - to bail out the bad bets placed by banks, we have to generate more debt to pay off the prior debt, and then to bail out the bad bets placed by the new debt, we have to generate more debt and so on.