Author: VD

Very Bad Business

I’m extremely skeptical, but it is now being reported that Israel actually manufactured the exploding pagers and walkie-talkies that injured more than 7,000 people in Lebanon:

The Israeli secret service didn’t just tamper with the deadly Hezbollah pagers — they made them from scratch, having set up a complex web of shell companies across Europe, it was claimed today. Initially it was suspected that Mossad had managed to intercept and plant tiny bombs in a shipment of the pagers headed for the Iranian-backed terror group in Lebanon after thousands of people were injured and dozens killed.

But now it appears that the Israelis set up front companies across Europe to manufacture the pagers themselves, embedding small amounts of PETN explosive inside, ready to be detonated by a coded message. Israel has neither confirmed nor denied any role in the explosions, but 12 current and former defence and intelligence officials told the New York Times that the Israelis were behind it, describing the operation as ‘complex and long’.

First, this strikes me as damage control. People are quite likely concerned that their Apple and Android smartphones can be blown up, and it would make sense that the World Economic Forum types would want to squelch any question of the integrity of the global supply chains as rapidly as possible. I think it’s much more likely that the manufacturing process was infiltrated and the explosives were inserted without the knowledge of more than a few people at the factory. But it could still be as bad as a software attack on an intrinsic vulnerability of lithium-ion batteries, for all we know.

Second, this is arguably more destructive in the long term to the Israeli economy than the whole Boycott Diversify Sanctions movement has been. Even a die-hard Zionist might well want to avoid any Israeli-linked hardware device going forward.

Imagine when they move onto cars…

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The Economic Decline of Germany

The suicidal decision to increase energy prices is now causing centuries-old German breweries to shut down:

The decline of the traditional German brewing industry shows no signs of slowing down. Recently, several breweries have filed for bankruptcy or closed permanently, resulting in the loss of centuries-old brewing traditions.

The latest victims are the Gambrinus Brewery in Weiden, Upper Palatinate, and the Gesellschaftsbrauerei Viechtach, about 100 km southeast. Both are located in the Bavarian border region with the Czech Republic, an area often described as structurally weak. The nearly 100-year-old Gambrinus Brewery filed for insolvency on Friday at the Weiden District Court due to unpaid bills and outstanding wages. The brewery’s decline is attributed to rising costs, pandemic-related sales losses, and internal issues, with current production at around 15,000 hl, half its peak output.

On Thursday, it was announced that the insolvent Gesellschaftsbrauerei Viechtach would close permanently after nearly 500 years, ceasing production. Despite intensive negotiations, no investors were willing to continue operations. Remaining employees have been let go, and the Viechtacher brand will continue to be produced at the nearby Hofmark Brewery in Loifling, located in the Cham district of the Upper Palatinate.

Last month, the 672-year-old Karmeliter-Bräu from Salz near Bad Neustadt an der Saale (about 75 km northeast of Würzburg) permanently closed its doors. The brand and distribution rights were acquired by Oettinger Brewery, one of Germany’s largest brewery groups, mainly active in the entry-level segment. It is speculated that the brand, named after a monastic order, will be used to establish the group in the higher-priced segment, similar to other well-known brands like Trappist, Augustiner, Paulaner, Franziskaner, Benediktiner, and Kapuziner.

In addition to various external and internal factors, the wave of brewery closures is also due to declining beer consumption in Germany. Recent figures show a significant drop in sales in June 2024 compared to June 2023, with a total decrease of 11.2% or nearly 1 million hl. The Federal Statistical Office reported that beer sales in June 2024, at 7.77 million hl, were the lowest for June since the Beer Tax Act was revised in 1993.

Prosperity is never a given. This decline, and in some cases, inevitable collapse of various societies is the direct result of the national elites being subverted and converted to false and foreign ideologies that promote dyscivilizational dysgenics. Diversity is not a strength, it is a fatal cancer to every society, as is readily observable in the histories of every fallen empire. The migrants are no better for the Germans than the Spaniards were for the Incas, or than the Arabs were for the Byzantines. In the end, it’s not the armies that eradicate a human society, but the women and children who normally follow them and eventually replace the native genetics with their own.

A Germany full of Germans is an economic powerhouse. An area of 357,022 square kilometers in the middle of Europe populated primarily by German-speaking Turks, Arabs, and Africans will be neither German nor an economic powerhouse. This is not rocket science.

The dirt is not magic. The ideas are not material. People will always live according to their own natural preferences. The transplantation of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants to the New World is what made America what it was in the place of the American Indian societies that preceded it. Neither geography nor ideology nor language nor even religion are determinant in the end, as genetics ultimately and always dictates the destinies of nations.

As the great Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld has written, immigration is war. To be more specific, it is war on the native people and their culture.

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Clown vs Clown

Now that the upcoming Japanese leadership struggle has begun, I previously observed that Shinjiro Koizumi was clearly a clown. Now it’s apparent that another leading candidate is as well:

A senior US State Department official has said that it is “too early” to talk about building a NATO-style bloc in Asia, after Japanese Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba called on Washington to discuss the matter in more depth.

Ishiba, who is a leading candidate to succeed Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, called last week for the creation of an “Asian version of NATO” by “uniting” its various security arrangements in the region into a formal defense pact. “At least we should deepen our discussions on this topic,” he said.

Speaking at a conference in Washington, DC on Tuesday, Assistant US Secretary of State for East Asia and the Pacific Daniel Kritenbrink shot down Ishiba’s suggestion.

“It’s too early to talk about collective security in that context, and [the creation of] more formal institutions,” Kritenbrink said, according to Japan’s Nikkei newspaper. “What we’re focused on is investing in the region’s existing formal architecture and continuing to build this network of formal and informal relationships. And then we’ll see where that goes.”

One would think that after 70 years of US military occupation, signing up to play the role of Ukraine to China’s Russia would be the last thing that any Japanese politician would support. And yet, here we are. Clown World already set up an Asian NATO called SEATO, which collapsed in 1977, but now that China is posing a serious challenge, they’re having the Japanese take the lead on reviving it.

The Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) was an international organization for collective defense in Southeast Asia created by the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty, or Manila Pact, signed in September 1954 in Manila, Philippines. The formal institution of SEATO was established on 19 February 1955 at a meeting of treaty partners in Bangkok, Thailand. The organization’s headquarters were also in Bangkok. Eight members joined the organization. Primarily created to block further communist gains in Southeast Asia, SEATO is generally considered a failure because internal conflict and dispute hindered general use of the SEATO military; however, SEATO-funded cultural and educational programs left long-standing effects in Southeast Asia. SEATO was dissolved on 30 June 1977 after many members lost interest and withdrew.

It may well be that none of the leadership candidates are free of clown control, as I’m skeptical of both the female candidates, and particularly the young Digital minister. Which suggests that if Japan is going to break free and join the sovereign nations in the next ten years, it won’t be through the LDP.

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Shots Fired

Mike Florio takes a very serious and very public shot at Panthers’ owner David Tepper:

And the incoming quarterbacks have more power than ever before. Their money is the source of it. They have earned plenty. They have (or should have) banked a lot of it. They can make it clear to the Panthers, privately or if need be publicly, that they won’t sign a contract with the Panthers. That whoever is drafted by Tepper’s team will sit out for a year, live off his NIL money (and possibly earn more of it), and re-enter the draft the next time around. That’s how it works. If a player is drafted and doesn’t sign a contract, he re-enters the next draft. If he does it again, he can pick whichever team he wants after the next draft…

It’s high time for incoming quarterbacks to take a stand when it comes to being forced to play for an inept organization. And there’s always strength in numbers. The Panthers should be the first target for a collective “no thanks” by the top prospects.

Florio tends to be a little too inclined to tell other people what they should do for my liking. But for once, his inclination toward interference in the business of others is both justified and sound. David Tepper always looked like he’d be a disaster as an NFL team owner and a disaster is exactly what he’s turned out to be. In fact, it wouldn’t be surprising if there are more influential NFL figures speaking through Florio’s voice here.

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Pager Terror Attacks

It is generally accepted that Israel is to blame for a mass terrorist attack that injured more than 2900 people in Lebanon.

Israel carried out a pager bomb attack that left roughly 2,800 people injured and 12 dead in Lebanon and Syria yesterday fearing that Hezbollah was on the cusp of foiling their deadly plot, a new report has claimed.

Pager devices recently introduced by the group to beef up security exploded en masse yesterday, causing chaotic scenes and devastation in Lebanese hospitals. Israel is believed to have orchestrated the attack but has not claimed responsibility. Security sources believe Mossad, Israel’s spy agency, intercepted devices en route to Lebanon months ago and attached explosives to be used when needed to cripple the Iranian proxy group.

Still, questions remain as to why the attack was carried out on Tuesday. One American official told Axios it was ‘a use it or lose it moment’ as Hezbollah were understood to be getting close to uncovering Israeli espionage.

Three US officials told Axios that Israel decided to blow up the pager devices carried by Hezbollah members on Tuesday as they feared the group was close to uncovering their operation.

A security source told Reuters that up to three grams of explosives had been hidden in the new pagers and had gone ‘undetected’ by Hezbollah for months.

One senior Lebanese security source told the news agency he believes the devices had been modified by Mossad ‘at the production level’ before arriving in Lebanon. ‘The Mossad injected a board inside of the device that has explosive material that receives a code. It’s very hard to detect it through any means,’ the source said.

Hezbollah earlier this year ordered thousands of pagers to conduct communications after leader Hassan Nasrallah declared smartphones would be more susceptible to cyber attacks by Israeli forces. As many as 5,000 devices are believed to have affected, though not all went off on Tuesday, according to the Lebanese source. The source claimed Hezbollah ordered the pagers from a Taiwanese company called Gold Apollo, but executives there said the devices were actually manufactured and sold under licence by BAC Consulting in Budapest, Hungary.

Elijah J. Magnier, a Brussels-based senior political risk analyst, later said he spoke with Hezbollah members who had examined pagers that failed to explode. The pagers appeared to receive a coded error message sent to all the devices that caused them to vibrate and beep for some 10 seconds. When the user pressed the pager’s button to cancel the alert, the explosives were detonated – a design that would ensure the pager was being held by the user at the time of the blast to inflict maximum damage.

The months-long operation by Mossad and the IDF represents an unprecedented security breach for Hezbollah, which vowed to exact revenge on Israel and continue its support for ally Hamas amid the ongoing war in Gaza.

First, this was obviously an own goal by Israel, which doesn’t seem to grasp that it is already considered to be a genocidal terrorist state by most of the world now due to the Gazacaust. The obvious probability of collateral damage, the trivial amount of military damage that could potentially be inflicted, and the indifference to civilian casualties make it a clear and obvious act of terrorism. There is no way this is going to improve the diplomatic crisis that Israel presently faces.

Second, there are three major implications in the Unintended Consequences department. One, who in their right minds is going to buy any Israeli technological product now or in the future? For all my opposition to anti-boycott laws and policies in the USA, I don’t follow the BDS movement and I’ve never had any issue with Israeli products in the past, but there is no chance I will ever buy or utilize any Israeli product that is capable of containing explosives in the future, and I very much doubt I am alone in this.

Two, Hezbollah’s leadership already wanted its fighters to stop using mobile phones. This mass attack on pagers has underlined the wisdom of the leadership’s position and will further reduce the likelihood that Hezbollah’s fighters will violate operational security.

And three, this should put a nail in the coffin of transhumanism. Only morons are going to put a chip in their hand, or in their head, in the knowledge that there is a genuine possibility that someone will have the ability to make it explode? It may even have a negative effect on device and smart phone sales over time, particularly if it is ever repeated.

These attacks were moderately successful. But they strike me as very ill-conceived and essentially non-military in conception. They are the sort of thing that Smart Boys in intelligence always concoct because they think it would be cool and clever, not the kind of operation that is conducive to actually winning wars.

UPDATE: Israel doubled down on its exploding device attacks:

Thousands of walkie talkies used by Hezbollah fighters have detonated across Lebanon, killing nine and wounding hundreds of people including mourners at a funeral, witnesses and security sources have reported. The second wave of carnage comes a day after thousands of exploding pagers used by the group left almost 3,000 people injured and a dozen dead, including civilians and children. Lebanese media has also reported that home solar energy systems have blown up in several areas of Beirut. The latest explosions this afternoon have hit the country’s south and the capital Beirut, where dramatic time-lapse video shows multiple plumes of smoke rising above the skyline in different locations almost simultaneously.

This really doesn’t bode well for devices such as the iPhone that don’t permit users to change their own batteries. How can you trust that there isn’t an ounce or two of high-explosive attached to your battery if it’s in a sealed-off department?

It’s certainly an object lesson in “build your own communications equipment” for everyone around the world.

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Loomer or Lunatic?

Milo appears to have dropped the bomb at which CDAN appeared to be hinting last week.

In fundraising emails, Laura Loomer tells her fans that she has been targeted by the FBI for political persecution. They’ve blacklisted her from owning a gun, she says, which threatens her physical safety.
But Loomer’s account misses out a critical detail: It’s not her politics, but rather her fragile mental state that prompted the Bureau to block her from possessing a firearm. Far from singling her out, the FBI has bent over backwards to gently explain to Loomer why she is not a fit person to own a gun.

For instance, a letter they sent her in 2020, in response to her appeal, delicately cited the two involuntary psychiatric holds her own father, Jeff Loomer, had placed her under in the prior half-decade. I know because I’ve seen the letter they sent her in response to her appeal. I have a copy of it in my safe in Los Angeles.

And I know because Jeff, at first reluctant to speak with me, but eventually, once again fearing for his daughter’s mental health this week, confirmed it by telephone on Friday. Jeff, evidently frightened of his daughter, spoke in hushed tones about her emotional volatility and admitted she had attempted suicide several times. “I wouldn’t allow her a gun,” he admitted.

Laura Loomer has been diagnosed at various times and by various doctors as suffering from bipolar disorder, histrionic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, and narcissistic personality disorder. Loomer’s mother, whom we are not naming today, is an alcoholic, manic depressive and suffers from bipolar disorder, in common with her daughter…

Loomer has two brothers. One is a violent schizophrenic who is permanently incarcerated in a psychiatric facility. He will never be released. The other also suffers from depression and mood disorders, and has been in and out of institutions all his life. We are not naming either brother for the sake of their privacy.

I’ve had very little contact with Laura Loomer. We exchanged a polite email or two back in 2015; she reached out to me for some reason I do not recall but probably had to do with the Trump campaign. And while I didn’t pick up anything beyond her being a garden-variety conservative grifter of the Ben Shapiro variety writ small, I was very confused by her subsequent attempt to run for Congress, given that she didn’t appear to have any substantial following of any kind.

However, whether it is Laura Loomer, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens, or any of an increasingly long list of individuals who purport to be offering advice or guidance of some kind, who listens to these people? I’ve never heard any of them say anything that is even remotely insightful or intelligent. At this point, I think it is vital to view anyone who is elevated by the media and provided even neutral coverage has to be regarded with deep skepticism, and preferably, kept at a reasonably distance.

As for the idea that she is, or ever was, having an affair with Donald Trump… let’s just be polite and say it can be safely dismissed.

The Extreme Elderly Don’t Exist

In what can only come as a severe blow to the transhumanist agenda, a skeptical researcher has determined that most of the world’s centenarians don’t actually exist.

In general, the claims about how long people are living mostly don’t stack up. I’ve tracked down 80% of the people aged over 110 in the world (the other 20% are from countries you can’t meaningfully analyse). Of those, almost none have a birth certificate. In the US there are over 500 of these people; seven have a birth certificate. Even worse, only about 10% have a death certificate.

The epitome of this is blue zones, which are regions where people supposedly reach age 100 at a remarkable rate. For almost 20 years, they have been marketed to the public. They’re the subject of tons of scientific work, a popular Netflix documentary, tons of cookbooks about things like the Mediterranean diet, and so on.

Okinawa in Japan is one of these zones. There was a Japanese government review in 2010, which found that 82% of the people aged over 100 in Japan turned out to be dead. The secret to living to 110 was, don’t register your death. The Japanese government has run one of the largest nutritional surveys in the world, dating back to 1975. From then until now, Okinawa has had the worst health in Japan. They’ve eaten the least vegetables; they’ve been extremely heavy drinkers.

The same goes for all the other blue zones. Eurostat keeps track of life expectancy in Sardinia, the Italian blue zone, and Ikaria in Greece. When the agency first started keeping records in 1990, Sardinia had the 51st highest old-age life expectancy in Europe out of 128 regions, and Ikaria was 109th. It’s amazing the cognitive dissonance going on. With the Greeks, by my estimates at least 72% of centenarians were dead, missing or essentially pension-fraud cases.

In Okinawa, the best predictor of where the centenarians are is where the halls of records were bombed by the Americans during the war. That’s for two reasons. If the person dies, they stay on the books of some other national registry, which hasn’t confirmed their death. Or if they live, they go to an occupying government that doesn’t speak their language, works on a different calendar and screws up their age.

According to the Greek minister that hands out the pensions, over 9,000 people over the age of 100 are dead and collecting a pension at the same time. In Italy, some 30,000 “living” pension recipients were found to be dead in 1997.

Regions where people most often reach 100-110 years old are the ones where there’s the most pressure to commit pension fraud, and they also have the worst records. For example, the best place to reach 105 in England is Tower Hamlets. It has more 105-year-olds than all of the rich places in England put together.

I always wondered why these extreme old people being celebrated by the media were invariably relatively poor rural people, when presumably it would be the wealthy, with their access to top-flight medical care and state-of-the-art science, who would survive the longest. But this certainly suffices to explain that particular anomaly.

Douhet Wept

There’s an amount of discussion of the potential ramifications for the Middle East of the Yemeni missile that was used to strike the Gezer power plant from 1,265 miles away.

The Israeli air defense failed to intercept the Yemeni missile primarily because it is capable of changing its course suddenly – Israeli Channel 12. The US Navy failed to intercept the missile in the Red Sea as well. Great possibility that this was hypersonic.

Yemen confirmed that they used a hypersonic ballistic missile in the attack on Tel Aviv Yemeni Armed Forces says it hit an Israeli military target in Yaffa (Tel Aviv) with a new hypersonic ballistic missile that traveled 2,040 kilometers. This is the first time that an Iranian-made hypersonic missile has been used in an attack on Israel.

No doubt this has some ominous implications for the prospective Israel-Iran war. But of far more concern to Americans should be the fact that the military force that just drove the US Navy from the Red Sea has just demonstrated the capacity to hit a target from long range. Which means that both Iran and Yemen, to say nothing of China and Russia, almost certainly possess the ability to sink the US Navy’s carriers at will from longer range than the carriers’ own air assets can reach.

We are rapidly entering the post-airpower age, which has considerable implications for the applicability of seapower. A considerable amount of strategic rethinking is now in order.

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The Retardery Burns

On Friday, BackerKit’s Trust and Safety informed us of their “final decision” that the Hypergamouse crowdfunding campaign scheduled to start that very day was cancelled, and that their platform was off-limits to us due to some unspecified associations with some unidentified badthinkers. So, naturally, they emailed us today wanting to know why we’d missed our launch date.

Hypergamouse Volume 1’s launch date has passed. How can we help?

Hypergamouse Volume 1 was scheduled to launch on 09/12/24.

Have your plans changed? Did we miss your launch? Let us know so we know how best to support you.

Have any questions? E-mail us at crowdfunding@backerkit.com or just reply to this email.

I sent them what in the circumstances can only be considered a measured response:

You banned our campaign, you morons. Did you somehow forget that? How can you help? It’s a little late for that now. We were reliably informed that your decision is final. We’re going back to our previous crowdfunding partner.

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