hula-hoops; skydiving; heroin; ultra high heel shoes; crack; raves; skateboards; date rape drugs; whatever will wreck the enemy which cannot be traced back to you
long time rumors that back in the 1960s/70s the USSR had funded the bombers -- there'd been a phase when each week there was a different group setting off a bomb -- who ere advocating for various causes without much success or notice till they started setting off bombs
my personal paranoid notion?
don't ask
]]>Not entirely random. Kate is married to William who is the heir to the throne. The current king is 76 and has cancer: in Russian terms he's fixin' to die soon. (Russian leaders almost never make it to 80.)
So this is shit-stirring wrt. the personal life of the probable next head of state of the UK in the immediate future. So totally not like, for example, Russia shit-stirring wrt. the personal life of the son of the current and probable next head of state of the USA, namely Hunter Biden.
I strongly suspect that when Steve Bannon said his strategy was to "flood the zone with shit" he was parroting a line he'd been fed by Vlad's KGB homies.
]]>Don't need to "cause glitches" ECDIS systems actually issue helm commands. The ship can be steered on a specified route. And one ECDIS ran on Windows.
]]>Baltimore bridge collapse could lead to record insurance loss, says Lloyd’s boss: "Bruce Carnegie-Brown says disaster could cost billions and result in largest single marine insurance loss ever."
Reminder that Lloyd's Names face unlimited liability. So all your premiums (not just shipping) will skyrocket next year.
]]>Don't need to "cause glitches" ECDIS systems actually issue helm commands. The ship can be steered on a specified route. And one ECDIS ran on Windows.
ECDIS: Electronic Chart Display and Information System
]]>Who already suffered emotional trauma (as a teen) when his mother died.
When I get news about a loved one (family/friend) who's just been told they have cancer this immediately brings back very vivid memories. This is not an unusual or differently-wired-brain reaction: memories of events that evoked very strong emotions tend to get 'fixed' more strongly and for longer.
]]>This book deserves a reread - gives a useful perspective on how/why people are susceptible to media sh*tstorms.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/dec/13/thinking-fast-slow-daniel-kahneman
]]>Prior to Pearl Harbor, there were a lot of open fascists, like Charles Lindbergh, pushing for US isolationism. After we were attacked physically, they quickly learned to STFU.
In US politics, our Speaker has a one seat Republican majority, and Marjorie Taylor Greene just us in a motion to unseat him. If one more Republican steps down prematurely, the house goes democratic, along with the senate. Johnson may well switch his working loyalties to the democrats sooner, simply to keep his job.
Does this strike you as a good time for Russia to physically attack the US? All we have t do is flood Ukraine with aid to retaliate.
Speaking of aid, the US military is building a floating pier off Gaza right now, so that aid ships can dock and deliver supplies straight to Gaza. It’s going to take a couple of months to build, and Israel has to cooperate, but this is underway.
What’s Australia doing to help the Gazans?
]]>I was wrong. They had 90 seconds. There was no way they were not going into the water. Actually less unless they were monitoring police frequencies which they likely were not.
All this talk about how they must have had no safety training is just bashing BS.
From the New York Times - Here is a transcript of audio from a Maryland Transportation Authority Police channel, revealing how officers responded to the mayday call and successfully halted traffic.
1:27:53 a.m. Speaker 1: I need one of you guys on the south side, one of you guys on the north side, hold all traffic on the Key Bridge. There’s a ship approaching that just lost their steering. So until they get that under control, we’ve got to stop all traffic.
1:28:09 a.m. Speaker 2: (inaudible) I’m en route to the south side.
1:28:13 a.m. Speaker 3: (inaudible) I’m holding traffic now. I was driving but we stopped prior to the bridge, so I’ll have all outer loop traffic stopped.
1:28:25 a.m. Speaker 1: 10-4, is there a crew working on the bridge right now?
1:28:29 a.m. Speaker 4: (inaudible)
1:28:35 a.m. Speaker 1: Got it.
1:28:37 a.m. Speaker 4: Want me to stop traffic along this side right now?
1:28:42 a.m. Speaker 1: Yeah if we could stop traffic, just make sure no one’s on the bridge right now. I’m not sure where there’s a crew up there. You might want to notify whoever the foreman is, see if we could get them off the bridge temporarily.
1:28:58 a.m. Speaker 4: 10-4, once the other unit gets here I’ll ride up on the bridge. I have all inner loop traffic stopped at this time.
1:29:17 a.m. Speaker 4: Once you get here, I’ll go grab the workers on the Key Bridge and then stop the outer loop.
1:29:27 a.m. Speaker 5: C-13 Dispatch, the whole bridge just fell down! (inaudible), whoever, everybody, the whole bridge just collapsed.
1:29:35 a.m. Speaker 6: 10-4. Dispatch is direct.
1:29:35 a.m. Speaker 4: That’s correct. (inaudible) First time.
1:29:48 a.m. Speaker 1: Do we know if all traffic was stopped?
1:29:51 a.m. Speaker 4: I can’t get to the other side, sir, the bridge is down. We’re going to have to get somebody on the other side in Anne Arundel County, M.S.P. to get up here and stop traffic coming northbound on the Key Bridge.
1:29:51 a.m. Speaker 5: C13, I’m holding all traffic northbound.
And then there's the one I don't understand AT ALL: how the hell do you run a ship this huge with a crew of 23 (the Edmund Fitzgerald had 29), and of those... 10 were officers, and there was one Sri Lankan electrician.
]]>So is mining a harbour, or shooting down a civilian aircraft, or any number of activities that countries have done while insisting that they are entirely in the right and not at war.
Leaving aside the legal definition (which has a loophole big enough to sail a carrier task force through), it comes down to real-politik — is the act serious enough to provoke increased hostilities?
This is asymmetric: acts that powerful countries do regularly would be considered acts of war if targeted against them. So the weak face the task of choosing acts that are serious enough to get attention (and possibly action) without being so serious that they get flattened.
Circling back to my original post, this would make a decent technothriller plot, because the attitudes in technothrillers (at least when I was reading them) were still rooted in the Cold War.
Doesn't have to be official policy, either. How many times has someone here posted comments about something done by an American official only to be told by Americans that that official's actions don't represent the entire country? Politics in the real world is messy. Politics in technothrillers isn't.
Do I believe this was an attack? No, not really. (Even if accidents are increasing, as SFReader wondered about, I think the relentless elimination of safeguards and redundancy in quest of every-higher profits is likely the cause.) But if I was a better writer I would have a Jack Ryan clone discovering and thwarting a plot to cripple the Free World — which would net me enough money that I could hire Charlie to write the third novel in the Halting State trilogy, as well as a sequel to Glasshouse. :-)
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