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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After Action Report

The Based Book Sale reports a successful campaign:

The latest Based Book Sale completed with Amazon reporting a total of 152 Kindle Free E-books and 1748 Kindle Paid E-Books sold to based readers. That doesn’t include sales authors made themselves or through channels outside Amazon, so the actual totals – judging by the reports authors have been sending me – are significantly higher.

Top authors included Vox Day, John C. Wright, Edward Gibbon, David Herod, Robert Kroese, L. Jagi Lamplighter, Michael F. Kane, M.D. Boncher, Edgar Rice Burroughs, G.K. Chesterton, J. M. Anjewierden, Travis Corcoran, E.E. “Doc” Smith, Hans G. Schantz, David Lindsay, Richard Nichols, Milo James Fowler, Jacob Calta, and Robert E. Howard. That’s quite a remarkable line-up, and highlights the Based Book community’s interest in both modern-day masters and the great creators of old.

I saw many participants’ tweets promoting the sale come across my feed. And we got an excellent boost from Vox Day, Liberty’s Torch, and Anonymous Conservative.

Thanks to all the authors who participated, to Hans for setting it up, and most of all, to those of you who took advantage of the sale to check out new books and new authors. It’s efforts like these that provide the foundations for the alternative platforms that are so desperately needed. I’ll check Amazon later today to determine the delta between books reported to the sale and books actually sold.

Now, let’s get some reviews up there for all those books!

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SG PSA

From the SG devs:

SocialGalactic is in the process of moving servers, as of now. Service is functional, but may be spotty for the next 24 hours or so, and we do not guarantee that all posts and/or images will be carried over from more than 24 hours PRIOR to this post.

Another Assassination Attempt

It appears Clown World isn’t confident it can execute another election steal:

Former President Trump narrowly survived yet another assassination attempt after a sniper with a scoped AK-47 rifle got within a few hundred yards of him as he played golf at his West Palm Beach, Florida club on Friday.

It is the second time a madman armed with an assault rifle has tried to kill the 45th president in two months.

Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw said the suspect had taken cover near a chain-link fence between 300-500 yards away from Trump, but conceded, “with a rifle and scope like that is not a long distance.”

Law enforcement sources told The Post that the suspect is 58-year-old Ryan Routh of Hawaii.

He had set up a GoPro camera on the fence with the apparent intent of recording the shooting.

A Secret Service agent first spotted the suspect as he stuck the barrel of his rifle through a chain link fence on the outskirts of Trump International Golf Course West Palm Beach South. The agent, who was a golf hole ahead of Trump, opened fire on the suspect — who then fled the scene, Bradshaw told reporters Sunday night.

It’s a very good thing it wasn’t the Secret Service detail from the last attempt on duty. At this point, why not lock it down? Trump doesn’t need to be out exposing himself to the public in order to win.

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He Had it Coming

A horrific case of lethal lutrinaphobia in Washington:

Horror erupted at a Washington marina when a child was dragged off of a dock and into the water by a territorial river otter.  The unnamed child, who was taking a stroll with his mother on the dock, was suddenly dragged off by a river otter in a rare attack at Bremerton Marina in Kitsap County on September 12.

The mother bravely fought back to get her child out of the water once they resurfaced. But the otter was unrelenting and bit the child in the arm as they were lifted into the air. The otter continued to chase them down the dock until they were out of harm’s way.

I think we all know that the “unnamed child” was obviously to blame. No otter would ever attack anyone without severe provocation that absolutely required action. It was clearly a case of justifiable assault, and what a tragedy that a noble otter should be hunted down and executed for merely defending himself and his territory. #TeamOtter

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The Slow Death of Suburbia

As a Generation X suburbanite, I was given the opportunity to grow up with one of the more idyllic childhoods ever known to human history. But the unique factors that made the American suburb possible in the first place have been systematically eliminated, thereby rendering them, like the USA itself, unsustainable.

Visit old neighborhood for the first time since 2009. 30% of the houses have been on the market for 5 years. Average age has doubled, nobody who grew up there can afford to live there. Aunt gets emotional talking about the lack of kids in the neighborhood on Halloween. House across the street is a revolving door of Indian immigrants with vehicles and garbage on the lawn. Was my hometown just unlucky, or has the upper middle class suburb died a slow painful death in the past 15 years?

Unfortunately, the Boomers who raised their children in the suburbs were never committed to those communities the way people who grew up in small towns and city neighborhoods were. The suburb was populated by transients; the homes were never designed or intended to be handed down over the course of generations, nor, for the most part, were they. Everything from property and inheritance taxes to reverse mortgages and Boomer consumption patterns militate against the survival of the suburb in America.

Contra the lies of the Hellmouth’s urbanites, Suburbia was a wonderful place to live, even if it was a consequence of American atomism and the geographic dispersion of the American family. But it’s hard to imagine much of it lasting another 70 years.

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