“We acknowledge that all New Yorkers on either side of the East River maintain there are only five boroughs, and one New York City.”

• Marco Rubio, probably

Netanyahu claimed foreign leaders who “public condemn us privately thank us. They tell me how much they value Israel’s superb intelligence services that have prevented, time and again, terrorist attacks in their capitals.” He did not say which countries’ leaders had privately thanked him.

“So Benjamin, are those leaders in the room with us right now?”

Even the US pulled their senior diplomats who’d normally be there and sent the interns instead lmao

They’re so delusional, barely breaking to the next paragraph before directly refuting themselves. Emphasis mine.

Genocide is the gravest offense known to humankind; to dilute its legal standards for ideological ends is a form of moral violence. It dishonors the memory of past victims, misleads the public about present atrocities, and obstructs efforts to avert future ones.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas invaded Israel and acted with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, Jews and Israelis, as a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such. Further, Hamas and their allied organizations took innocent people hostage and continue to hold hostages.

Thus, Hamas committed the crime of genocide and remains the only party to legally meet the requirements of the elements of the crime of genocide.

Apparently Israeli ministers and military leaders making genocidal statements, backing that up with action like blocking food and water whilst destroying medical and reproductive facilities IS DEFINITELY NOT genocide. Whereas apparently Oct7 was 100% genocidal intent, but Ben Gvir, Netanyahu, Gallant, etc somehow get a lot less scrutiny and paragraphs of hand-waving legalese. UNO revers’d.

Always follow the money: and what a surprise - another Pro-Zionist advocacy group that conflates Judaism with Zionism… and keep going and you’ll find the direct astroturf and state funding links - Israel on Campus Coalition, run by former AIPAC leaders and close with the ADL:

Israel on Campus Coalition offers a $250 grant for college students to attend a Washington D.C. Israel rally

…undercover video footage of Israel on Campus Coalition CEO Jacob Baime saying that the group’s staff would “coordinate” or “communicate” with Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs.

[An article in The Nation] accused the organization of collecting information on campuses and sending it back to the Israeli government and sharing information with the Anti-Defamation League

There’s a lot of strife inside the tech world from people who work for both big multinationals and startups, over their company’s continued dealing with Israel, and especially so with their armed forces. It’s not well covered, because tech journalism is - frankly very corporate friendly - because it relies on access to sources, and so is very subject to access journalism that self-censors and chills dissent or criticism.

Someone who joined on to work on population mapping for vaccine coverage planning, or a cloud service engineer, may strongly object to their work being contorted and sold off to enable and supercharge a genocide.

Fly high = very, very easy to spot for active radar and passive sensors. Which is why almost everything that isn’t yeeting glide-kit dumbbombs from half a country away, flys incredibly low. Like “scraping the trees” low, because hiding among the EM backscatter makes evading airborne sensors like AWACS or interceptor jets easier, and ground radar has a real hard time with that whole curvature of the earth thing.

So the Shaheds are going to be under 100m AGL elevation, which means the AA gun trucks and airburst-flak are the answer for Ukraine - so the counter is back to either dodging bullets, or dodging the defender’s location . The old Shaheds don’t, they blithely soak up Ukrainian gunfire without reaction before blowing up. These new AI powered models represent a big jump in credibility.

Swarming. Especially in areas denied by electronic warfare. Currently the Shaheds are built for cost (and sanctions) reasons, and are ‘dumbfired’ at coordinates/an object. GPS and inertial navigation fly towards the target, but it doesn’t make any decisions. Launch, set orientation, hit waypoint, next orientation, next waypoint, repeat until final attack phase.

What it can’t do is react. To anything: bad weather, Ukrainian EW/air defense, tall trees or buildings, other aircraft nearby, etc they just fly along their pre-programmed flight plan, providing any defenders with a predictable heading and airspeed to intercept and shoot at.

Add onboard autonomous AI and Russia has a lot more options.

• The camera sees/microphone heard a bunch of tracer bullets flying past? Start evasive maneuvering, diving and changing speed. Much harder to hit an approaching/leaving aircraft that is also changing speed and/or direction.
• Other Shaheds launched earlier are getting signal loss from EW or shot down? The remaining craft can send and receive that info to all the others, and re-route the pack around that area of air defense.
• Image recognition of high value targets like HIMARS or Patriot/IRIS-T allows the Shaheds to immediately ditch their pre-programmed mission, and all focus fire on that newly discovered target instead of the original hospital or apartment building that Russia was targeting.
• Data sharing among Shaheds in flight can allow more efficient use, so instead of committing a dozen or so Shaheds to a single target like a military command post to ensure at least a few get through air defense and hit it, now they can communicate if it actually has been hit or not, and refocus/divert the remaining Shaheds in that wave.

Essentially think of it as the difference between the dumbest box of rocks AI in a video game that doesn’t react, versus going player versus player online.

During COVID when nobody able to spray for mosquitoes there was a really cool resurgence - even in the suburbs. Came home from a bicycle ride late one evening, and swear every tree had Christmas lights strung up, they were chilling out and just glimmering in every branch.

I pushed the bike home that night and watched the show in the trees, a lovely coda to the day