#TERRORISM

[siryouarebeingmocked]

I love how nothing you've said is about the actual definition of terrorism, which is "political violence or threats, especially if it's intended to cause fear".

Which, um, most of Luigi's defenders say was his motive.

Also, "AllLivesMatter" was never really a thing. It was a minor slogan your side blew out of proportion to sneer at your critics and ignore what they actually say. I've seen a lot more BLMers whining about what ALM supposedly means than anyone unironically using it.

In fact, I don't think I've seen a single person.

And it wouldn't be inconsistent with ALM to want a murderer to be punished to the fullest extent of the law, even if you think he was doing it to save lives (somehow)

You can't hold up Luigi as some sort of big, important martyr, but also say he should be treated like any other criminal.

Especially if, like OP, you're ignoring the actual charges.

Also, terrorists are human, by definition. There are no animal terrorists. As far as I know.

And the terrorism charge isn't the one with the death penalty. How many school shooters get federally charged in the first place?

We both know you - and OP - don't want him to be punished at all. All of this kvetching about the charges is just point-scoring.

The #AllLivesMatter degenerates love the two-tier style of justice and complete disregard for children.

[eyeonpalestine]

Roshdi Sarraj, the photographer who took this widely shared picture of Israel's destruction of Gaza, was himself later killed by an Israeli airstrike.

[acepumpkinpatrick]

ISRAEL JUST BOMBED YEMEN!!

Israeli airforces bombed Al-Hudayda city, igniting petroleum refinery facilities and killing almost 70 people so far! (X) (X) (X)

It is also said that they were aided by Italian airforce (X)

[aheeheemwhimper]

this guy is triggered by #darkwoke

[theonion]

Putting the nation on alert against what it has described as a “highly credible terrorist threat,” the FBI announced today that it has uncovered a plot by members of al-Qaeda to sit back and enjoy themselves while the United States collapses of its own accord.

Multiple intelligence agencies confirmed that the militant Islamist organization and its numerous affiliates intend to carry out a massive, coordinated plan to stand aside and watch America’s increasingly rapid decline, with terrorist operatives across the globe reportedly mobilizing to take it easy, relax, and savor the spectacle as it unfolds. Full Story

[antifainternational]

"The basic (colonial) double standard of the Israel Palestine 'conflict' is that any Palestinian violence justifies any Israeli violence, but no Israeli violence ever justifies any Palestinian violence, and once you see it, you'll never stop seeing it." - Aaron Bady

[afusionoffandoms]

[severeprincesheep]

If only people showed this kind of energy every time Islam made yet another terrorist attack.

please don't forget that this ceasefire is just a reprieve from the ongoing genocide. we need to continue boycotting companies supporting the israeli occupation and show our solidarity towards our fellow humans in gaza. please please continue to care about all of this till the state of palestine is liberated.

gaza has faced a lot of damage in the last fifteen months. the sewage system has been destroyed. houses have been flattened forcing people to live in tents. hospitals are barely able to function. schools, offices, businesses, parks and so many other things have been turned into rubble.

it is crucial to help palestinians rebuild gaza during this ceasefire. i request you to support my friend alaa rebuild her home and provide her children with a roof. her fundraiser has been verified.

please help my friend rebuild her home

[politijohn]

Source

Source

Source

[bsof-maarav]

Diversity win: this antisemitic mob is multicultural

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Battery rationality

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/06/shoenabombers/#paging-dick-cheney

After 9/11, we were told that "no cost was too high" when it came to fighting terrorism, and indeed, the US did blow trillions on forever wars and regime change projects and black sites and kidnappings and dronings and gulags that were supposed to end terrorism.

Back in the imperial core, we all got to play the home edition of the "no price is too high" War on Terror game. New, extremely invasive airport security measures were instituted. A "no-fly" list as thick as a phone book, assembled in secret, without any due process or right of appeal, was produced and distributed to airlines, and suddenly, random babies and sitting US Senators couldn't get on airplanes anymore, because they were simultaneously too dangerous to fly and also not guilty enough to charge with any crime:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/20/damn-the-shrub/#no-nofly

We lost our multitools, our knitting needles, our medical equipment, all in the name of keeping another boxcutter rebellion from rushing the cockpit. As security expert Bruce Schneier repeatedly pointed out back then, the presence of (for example) glass bottles on the drinks trolley meant that would-be terrorists could trivially avail themselves of an improvised edged weapon that was every bit as deadly as 9/11's box cutters.

According to Schneier, there were exactly two meaningful security measures taken in those days: reinforcing cockpit doors, and teaching basic self-defense to flight crews. Everything else was "security theater," a term coined to describe the entire business, from TSA confiscations to warehouses full of useless "chemical sniffer" booths that were supposed to smell out bombs on our person:

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2010/01/airport-scanner-scam/

Security theater isn't just about deploying measures that don't work – it's also about defending yourself against risks that don't exist. You know how this goes: in 2001, Richard Reid – AKA "The Shoenabomber" – tried to blow up a plane with explosives he'd hidden in his shoes. It didn't work, because it's a stupid idea – and then we all took off our shoes for a quarter-century:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Reid

In 2006, a gang of amateur chemists hatched a plan to synthesize explosives in an airplane toilet sink, scheming to smuggle in different reagents and precursors in their carry-on luggage, then making a bomb in the sky and taking down the plane and all its passengers. The "Hair Gel Bombers" were caught before the could try their scheme, but even if they had made it onto the plane, they would have failed. Their liquid explosive recipe started with mixing up a "piranha bath" – a mixture of sulfuric acid and hydrogen peroxide – that needs to be kept extremely cold for a long time, or it will turn into instantly lethal gas. If the liquid bomb plot had gone ahead, the near-certain outcome would have been the eventual discovery of an asphyxiated terrorist in the bathroom, lips blue and lungs burned away, face down in a shallow sink filled with melting ice-cubes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_transatlantic_aircraft_plot

The fact that these guys failed utterly didn't have any impact on the dramaturges who ran the world's security theater. We're still having our liquids taken away at airport checkpoints.

Why did we have to defend ourselves against imaginary attacks that had been proven not to work? Because "no price was too high to pay" in the War on Terror. As Schneier pointed out, this was obvious nonsense: there is a 100% effective, foolproof way to prevent all attacks on civilian aircraft. All we need to do is institute a 100% ban on air travel. We didn't do that, because "no price is too high to pay" was always bullshit. Some prices are obviously too high to pay.

Which is why we still get to keep our underwear on, even after Umar Farouk "Underwear Bomber" Abdulmutallab's failed 2009 attempt to blow up an airplane with a bomb he'd hidden in his Y-fronts:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umar_Farouk_Abdulmutallab

It's why we aren't all getting a digital rectal exam every time we fly, despite the fact that hiding a bomb up your ass actually works, as proven by Abdullah "Asshole Bomber" al-Asiri, who blew his torso off with a rectally inserted bomb in 2009 in a bid to kill a Saudi official:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdullah_al-Asiri

Apparently, giving every flier a date with Doctor Jellyfinger is too high a price to pay for aviation safety, too.

Now, theatrical productions can have very long runs (The Mousetrap ran in London for 70 years!), but eventually the curtain rings down on every stage. It's possible we're present for the closing performance of security theater.

On September 17, the Israeli military assassinated 12 people in Lebanon and wounded 2,800 more by blowing up their pagers and two-way radios whose batteries had been gimmicked with pouches of PETN, a powerful explosive. This is a devastating attack, because we carry a ton of battery-equipped gadgets around with us, and most of them are networked and filled with programmable electronics, so they can be detonated based on a variety of circumstances – physical location, a specific time, or a remote signal.

What's more, PETN-gimmicked batteries are super easy to make and effectively impossible to detect. In a breakdown published a few days after the attack, legendary hardware hacker Andrew "bunnie" Huang described the hellmouth that had just been opened:

https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/2024/turning-everyday-gadgets-into-bombs-is-a-bad-idea/

The battery in your phone, your laptop, your tablet, and your power-bank is a "lithium pouch battery." These are manufactured all over the world, and you don't need a large or sophisticated factory to make one. It would be effectively impossible to control the manufacture of these batteries. You can make batteries in "R&D quantities" for about $50,000. Alibaba will sell you a full, turnkey "pouch cell assembly line" for about $10,000. More reputable vendors want as little as $15,000.

A pouch cell is composed of layers of "cathode and anode foils between a polymer separator that is folded many times." After a machine does all this folding, the battery is laminated into a pouch made of aluminum foil, which is then cleaned up, labeled, and flushed into the global supply chain.

To make a battery bomb, you mix PETN "with binders to create a screen-printed sheet" that's folded and inserted into the battery, in such a way as to produce a shaped charge that "concentrat[es] the shock wave in an area, effectively turning the case around the device into a small fragmentation grenade."

Doing so will reduce the capacity of the battery by about 10% or less, which is within the normal variations we see in batteries. If you're worried about getting caught by someone who's measuring battery capacity, you can add an extra explosive sheet to the battery's interior, increasing the thickness of a 10-sheet battery by 10%, which is within the tolerance for normal swelling.

Once the explosive is laminated inside its (carefully cleaned) aluminum pouch, there's no way to detect the chemical signature of the PETN. The pouch seals that all in. The PETN and other components of the battery are too similar to one another to be detected with X-ray fluorescence, and the multi-layer construction of a battery also foils attempts to peer inside it with Spatially Offset Raman Spectroscopy.

According to bunnie, there are no ways to detect a battery bomb through visual inspection, surface analysis or X-rays. You can't spot it by measuring capacity or impedance with electromechanical impedance spectroscopy. You could spot it with a high-end CT scan – a half-million dollar machine that takes about 30 minutes for each scan. You might be able to spot it with ultrasound.

Lithium batteries have "protection circuit modules" – a small circuit board with a chip that helps with the orderly functioning of the battery. To use one of these to detonate a PETN-equipped battery, you'd only have to make a small, board-level rewiring, which could deliver a charge via a "third wire" – the NTC temperature sensor that's standard in batteries.

Bunnie gets into a lot more detail in his post. It's frankly terrifying, because it's hard to read this without concluding that, indeed, any battery in any gadget could actually be a powerful, undetectable bomb. What's more, supply chain security sucks and bunnie runs down several ways you could get these batteries into your target's gadget. These range from the nefarious to the brute simple: "buy a bunch of items from Amazon, swap out the batteries, restore the packaging and seals, and return the goods to the warehouse."

Bunnie's point is that, having shown the world that battery bombs are possible, the Israelis have opened the hellmouth. They were the first ones to do this, but they won't be the last. We need to figure out something before "the front line of every conflict [is brought] into your pocket, purse or home."

All of that is scary af, sure, but note what hasn't happened in the wake of an extremely successful, nearly impossible to defeat explosives attack that used small electronics of the same genus as the pocket rectangles virtually every air traveler boards a plane with. We've had no new security protocols instituted since September 17, likely because no one can think of anything that would work.

Now, in the heady days when the security theater was selling out every performance and we were all standing in two-hour lines to take our shoes off, none of this would have mattered. The TSA's motto of "when in trouble, or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout" would have come to the fore. We'd be forced to insert our phones into some grifter's nonfunctional billion-dollar PETN dowsing-box, or TSA agents would be ordering us to turn on our phones and successfully play eleven rounds of Snake, or we'd be forced to lick our phones to prove that they weren't covered in poison.

But today, we're keeping calm and carrying on. The fact that something awful exists is, well, awful, but if we don't know what to do about it, there's no sense in just doing something, irrespective of whether that will help. We could order everyone to leave their phones at home when they fly, but then no one would fly anymore, and obviously, no one seriously thinks "no price is too high" for safety. Some prices are just too high.

I started thinking about all this last week, when I was in New Delhi to give a keynote for the annual meeting of the International Cooperative Alliance, which was jointly held with the UN as the inauguration of the UN International Year of Coops, with an address from UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres:

https://2025.coop/

When I arrived in New Delhi, my hosts were somewhat flustered because Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi had just announced that he would give the opening keynote, which meant a lot of rescheduling and shuffling – but also a lot of security. I was told that the only things I could bring to the conference center the next day were my badge, my passport and my hotel room key. I couldn't bring a laptop, a phone or a spare battery. I couldn't even bring a pen ("they're worried about stabbings").

Modi – a lavishly corrupt authoritarian genocidier – has a lot of reasons to worry about his security. He has actual enemies who sometimes blow stuff up, and if one of them took him out, he wouldn't be the first Indian PM to die by assassination.

But the speakers and delegates gathered in the hotel lobby the next morning, we were told that we could bring phones, after all. Because of course we could. You can't fly people from all over the world to India and then ask them to forego the device they use as translator, map, note-taker, personal diary, and credit card. Some prices are just too high.

They took a lot of security measures. Everyone went through a metal detector, naturally. Then, we were sealed in the plenary room for more than an hour while the building was sealed off. Armed men were stationed all around the room, and the balcony outside the room was ringed with snipers:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/54165263130/

We were prohibited from leaving our seats from the time Modi entered the room until he left it again, despite the fact that the PM was never more than a few steps from the single most terrifying bodyguard I'd ever seen:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/54164805776/

And yet: the fact that we were less than two months out from an extremely successful, highly public demonstration of the weaponization of small batteries in personal electronics did not mean that we all had to leave our phones at the hotel.

After that, I'm tempted to think that, just possibly, security theater's curtain has rung down and its long SRO run has come to an end. It's a small bright spot in a dark time, but I'll take it.

[siryouarebeingmocked]

I'd object on the grounds of whether the label is accurate.

Cartels do actually commit violence to discourage government responses (including cops), which makes it political.

But I'm still not comfortable calling them terrorists.

Anyway, here's the actual article. Says the sanctions could harm US businesses that unknowingly do business with cartels. Or are even extorted by them.

Because cartels are also into agriculture and tourism, and have their fingers in a lot of Mexican economic pies.

>The terrorist label could also push big parts of Mexico’s economy further into the shadows, where cash is used instead of electronically traceable transactions, making it harder for investigators to examine the cartels’ financial structures, Mr. Teichmann said. [...]

>The terrorist designation would also hurt American companies that are firmly north of the border but rely on Mexican labor. The designation is so broad and vague that ranches in Texas or farms in California could be swept up by the penalties if their employees send remittances to family members in Mexico who are involved in organized crime.

>If money transfer companies like Western Union also stop transactions to Mexico over worries about properly vetting Mexican clients, it could affect the remittances the country relies on. That would be devastating for the Mexican economy, which received $63.3 billion in remittances in 2023, nearly 5 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.

>The foreign terrorist designation could also pave the way for the United States to deploy forces inside Mexico against criminal organizations without the Mexican government’s consent, as it did in Afghanistan and Syria.

>But Afghanistan was occupied by the United States, and Syria’s government lost control over much of its territory in recent years. That gave Washington some cover under international law for the American military to deploy troops and launch special-forces operations to kill or capture terrorist leaders in those countries.

The article isn't actually about the bad stuff that could happen to the cartels, but the people who might be collateral damage, and the knock-on effects.

Pic unrelated.

[matan4il]

I'm still in shock.

Our Holocaust museum has just released a statement mourning the death of my colleague, Alex Dancyg. That's how I just found out that he and another hostage have been confirmed as having been killed months ago in Hamas captivity, and their bodies are still held hostage.

We just observed Alex's 76th birthday yesterday, not knowing he will forever be 75 years old.

Alex was born in Poland in 1948, to parents who had survived the Holocaust. He was a peace supporter. He was a man of humor, and a lover of Yiddish. He was a husband, father and grandpa. He was a farmer with a deep connection to the land. He was passionate about learning in general, and loved sharing his knowledge generously with everyone he knew. He had heart problems and was not receiving his medications from Hamas. He was a true educator about the Holocaust, helping to establish youth trips to Poland, to teach the youth about the horrors of the genocide against the Jews that took place there, but also about Jewish life in Poland before all hell broke loose. He was an educator against the kind of hatred that led to the Holocaust. It's hard to accept that this type of hatred killed him, too.

Goodbye, Alex. May your memory be a blessing. Actually, I know it will be. You'll forever be with us. 💔

(for all of my updates and ask replies regarding Israel, click here)

[stopmakingliberalslookbad]

Principles that so-called "leftists" have abandoned since October 7th

Being against religious fundamentalism: You guys used to think that fundamentalism was a bad thing. Don't get me wrong, you still believe that OTHER religions that are fundamentalist are bad, but Muslim right wing religious fundamentalism is very much okay with you. When you express support for religious fundamentalist groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Islamic Republic, you are supporting suppression against women, LGBT people, and Jews (though the latter doesn't bother you at all). These are not resistance groups, they are terror groups.

Anti-racism: Mocking Israeli accents is suddenly funny to you. Jews aren't oppressed any more and antisemitism isn't as important as other forms of ethnic hate. It's okay to discriminate against people based on where they're from (the treatment of twenty year old Eden Golan is a particularly disgusting example). Indigeneity expires if you're Jewish. You support land back efforts for everyone but Jews. You employ the noble savage stereotype against Palestinians, because "That's just their way!" Holocaust inversion and even denial? NBD. Jews are trying to take over the world and are bloodthirsty monsters who support genocide. And the blatant tokenization is horrific. Some of you have even used the expression "Good Jews".

Being against ethnic cleansing: You bleat about the non-existent "genocide" in Palestine (and it is NOT a genocide according the the actual definition of the word), but your only solution is to ethnically cleanse Jews from the Middle East instead of supporting the two state solution.

Anti-nationalism: Jewish nationalism is bad. Arab nationalism is good. There are 22 Arab states and over fifty Muslim states, but even the two state solution in which there would be 22 Arab states, over fifty Muslim states and one Jewish state isn't enough, because Jews bad. Arab and Muslim conquest and imperialism? It's a good thing, ackchuyally!

Belief in science: Genetic studies prove that all ethnic Jews (yes, that includes Ashkenazi Jews) are indigenous to the Levant, but you guys seem to believe that we fell out of the sky. Archaeology proves that Jews were there first, but those findings are "fake" according to you.

Once again, I am asking why are you guys willing to sacrifice your principles for Palestine?

[dontmean2bepoliticalbut]

[kick-a-long]

the police aren't releasing anything official, I've seen speculation that this is gang related as well as a white supremacy domestic terror attack. I'm sorry to hear about this. I know Sweden is dealing with a historic rise in gun crime. Let's hope the government addresses the holes in the system and this kind of attack never happens again.

(it's hard to know the reason both for the rise in violent crime as well as this incident since the right wing will only blame migrants and drug traffic while the left wing won't address other factors than racism to my satisfaction. It sounds like it's probably a WS attack because the shooter attacked so many people, brought 4 guns, and the targets were older women. still, it's a heart breaking and scary thing to see violence in your backyard.)

I know tumblr is America centric, but yesterday the worst mass shooting in modern swedish history happened. It was a school shooting with over ten people dead, a lot more hurt and in critical condition. The school is a Municipal adult education, with a lot of other schools close by. Apparently videos were taken from schools nearby who heard the gunshots.

It was a horrible incident that has sent Sweden into a state of shock. I just feel like people need to know about this.