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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • where they spoke about the “high-tech arsenal of the United States” during the operation in Iran, they used video of the Ukrainian interceptor drone STING from the manufacturer “Wild Hornets”.

    Was genuinely skeptical of this being a pure Ukrainian invention, given how much tech has been crossing the border from the NATO states. But… fuck me, I can’t find anything to suggest this isn’t 100% home grown. I’m sure if you got your hands on the tech specs, you’d find some kind of cross-over (not like Ukrainians invented VR googles or remote telemetry and I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if folks outside Ukraine were involved in the design). Past that…

    I do wonder how secure this technology is, if its something you can gin up with a 3D printer. Like, are there Sting specs out in the wild at this point? Or is this something they keep under lock and key?



  • “For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”










  • Reminds me of the old (apocryphal) story of Stalin, FDR, and Churchill debating what to do with the Nazi officers’ corps after their defeat.

    "The German General Staff, [Stalin] said, must be liquidated. The whole force of Hitler’s mighty armies depended upon about 50,000 officers and technicians. If these were rounded up and shot at the end of the war, German military strength would be extirpated.” When Churchill angrily declared he would be no party to such mass retribution, the President quipped that he would act as mediator, and suggested the compromise of shooting only 49,000. In heat, Churchill left the room. Stalin himself fetched him back, assuring him it was all a jest.

    The tendency to treat enemy soldiers as honorable adversaries while foreign civilians are resources to be exploited or speed bumps to be flattened is extremely fascist.

    What separates Hitler and Hegseth isn’t their army’s treatment of survivors of a military operation, but their view of their targets as military or civilian. Hegseth knows he’s targeting civilians and treats them just like a German military commander would treat other civilians.