#arms dealers

[kropotkindersurprise]

September 11, 2024 - Anti-war activists disrupted an international arms fair in Naarm (Melbourne), Australia. Twenty cops were reported injured in the clashes. [video]

[allthecanadianpolitics]

A journalist was barred from entering CANSEC, one of the world’s largest arms and weapons ‘defense trade show.’ The organizer stated they did not want to see headlines like, “War mongers gather in Ottawa” and get questions like, “how do you feel about killing children?”

This year, CANSEC only granted access to select, friendly media. Organizers wanted to avoid reports that are critical of war and those profiting from weapons sales that kill millions around the world every year. 

This despite the event’s sole purpose of showcasing and blatantly doing business in service of war and global conflict.

Every year since 1998,  hundreds of arms dealers, weapon manufacturers, foreign government representatives, Canadian ministers, surveillance manufacturers, and military officers have come to Ottawa to attend CANSEC. 

Full article

Tagging: @politicsofcanada

[skjam]

Movie Review: Lord of War

Movie Review: Lord of War (2005) directed by Andrew Niccol Yuri Orlov (Nicolas Cage) is not the protagonist’s real name. He is a Ukranian immigrant (as a child) who grew up in a rough neighborhood infested with gangsters. On day he witnessed a mob hit, and came to the realization that he could make steady money selling weapons to people. But not just a legitimate gun shop, no, the real money was…

[porterdavis]

I'm re-upping this #longread story from Rolling Stone in 2011 about how two American kids became the world's biggest (illegal) arms dealers. With a new war (Ukraine) and a recalcitrant West only grudgingly shipping armaments there, I'm sure there are present-day 'middlemen' busy filling orders for the Pentagon and Kyiv sub rosa.

Since Ukrainian forces are reduced to using Soviet-era weapons, there are doubtless people scouring warehouses in places like Uzbekistan, Albania, and Romania looking for ammunition.

Business opportunity!

[seyisandra009]

The Arms Dealer's War: A Pacifist Perspective

As I scrutinise the global landscape, my heart grows heavy. The conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East are just the tip of a blood-soaked iceberg. Amidst the chaos and destruction, one group thrives in the shadows – the arms dealers.

As I scrutinise the global landscape, my heart grows heavy. The conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East are just the tip of a blood-soaked iceberg. Russian forces continue their relentless assault on Ukrainian soil, while the cycle of violence between Israel, Iran and its proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah, seems never-ending. Amidst the chaos and destruction, one group thrives in the shadows – the…

[madlovenovelist]

Book Review – ‘The Lost Soul of the City’ (#1 S2 Nameless) by Dean Koontz

Re-booting a series for a second season. Genre: Thriller, Mystery, Horror No. of pages: 109 A gun. A mission. No memories. Nameless is back to hunt down an architect of chaos in #1 New York Times bestselling author Dean Koontz’s return to a landscape of hard-won justice. In a forgotten Cold War bunker, a cold-blooded arms dealer counts his cash and watches from a distance as cities collapse…

[dosesofcommonsense]

Do the math. Is 10,000 per 1 million really that rare?

Data on 2nd and 3rd trimester abortions

[feckcops]

‘War is back. People want to stock up’: inside Europe’s biggest arms fair

“A body convulses on a table, with broken bones poking from a stump of torn flesh below the knee, one arm gruesomely peppered with gunshot wounds, as men in military uniforms look on approvingly. ‘He bleeds, he moves, he breathes, he has a pulse,’ says the smiling sales rep. ‘His eyes even react to light. We have a canine version too, which barks and whines – and it comes with interchangeable injured limbs.’

“I am perusing the medical zone of Defence and Security Equipment International (DSEI), Europe’s biggest arms fair, which takes place every two years in the Excel convention centre in east London. It is a sprawling supermarket of modern warfare, where the world’s armies come to buy the latest AI-guided missiles and tanks, inspect giant warships moored in the Royal Docks, and queue to take a turn sitting in the cockpits of fighter jets ...

“‘This year feels much busier than usual,’ one bomb salesman tells me, standing by a gleaming rack of cone-shaped warheads, polished like trophies in a glass cabinet. ‘It seems war is back in a big way. People are looking to stock up.’ Whereas attendees of this great murderous bazaar may once have felt sheepish, they now proudly march through the entrance gates with their heads held high ...

“At the Israel pavilion, one company is promoting its ‘high-penetration wireless communication for indoor robotics and drones’, showing videos of drones swooping through bombed-out buildings, looking for prey like a swarm of deadly mosquitoes. Brazil features a stall offering ‘ammunition, bombs, rockets and fuses’, with a bowl of complimentary sweets, while a rifle company in the US section tries to lure punters with a free calendar of busty models draped across its anti-aircraft guns. (‘It’s been approved by all our female staff,’ the man at the desk assures me.) ...

“‘They all have onboard AI cameras,’ says Maj Matthew McGarvey-Miles, lead of the army warfighting experiment, a flagship programme where the latest technology is developed. ‘They can identify targets and track them automatically’ ... The nature of these unmanned weapons – and the kind of remote fighters the army is looking for – is having a knock-on effect on how the physical controls are designed ...

“‘The big thing now is thumb-stick controllers. So many people in the military now come from the Xbox generation, so they’re used to thumb-sticks. Gone are the days when you’d have big pneumatic or hydraulic controls.’ He hands me a controller that looks just like a gaming joypad – a deceptively playful device for something that could unleash hellfire on a pixellated target, hundreds of miles away. Nimble thumbs, it seems, will define the future of warfare. Tomorrow’s battles will be waged from the safety of a gaming chair (also on display), with the assistance of algorithms.”

[zybilna]

Some people's Lancer homebrew content really does sound like "but what if you could buy weapons of mass destruction from an arms dealing megacorporation run by a young witch in the alps who just wants to fund the search for her neighbor's cat"

[yampishna]

ACTUALLY I drew some stuff, now terraria isn't my only fandom, but I still draw it a lot

[exltwounds]

source

[spacebubblehomebase]

Enchanting as always: Carmilla~!

Human disguised Carmilla Carmine with her hair up and down in the style of my #HHStargazersAU! She doesn't play a major role or anything, nor will I focus much on the other Overlords. I'll mostly keep it between Chaggie & Radioapple, but @softholly made me curious about what Camilla would look like if I were to draw her in my story. I got the curly haired idea from one of her daughters. As for WHY she would be disguised as a human if we were to see her in my AU... Surely you didn't think Vaggie & Alastor are the ONLY angelic/demonic entities roaming the Earth now, did you? =) Question is, why are any of these powerful beings on the mortal realm to begin with? Guess we'll later find out~! XD -Bubbly💙

[inamindfarfaraway]

So in the Bible, the first ever murder of a human was committed against a family member out of hatred and envy, and afterward the killer denied responsibility for it and asked, "Am I [the victim]'s keeper?" And in Hazbin Hotel, the first ever murder of an angel was committed to protect family members out of love, and afterward the killer denied responsibility for it to keep the family they were defending safe, calling themselves their "keeper". Hmm.

[cod-dump]

*Price and Graves coming back home after Graves picked up Price from the airport*

Price: Why is Nik pouting?

Graves: I put on a animal documentary for him to watch then I went and took a nap so I could pick you up earlier

Price:

Graves: It took him three hours before he realized I put it on to distract him so I could sleep in peace

Nik, from the living room: I’M YOUR PARTNER NOT A TODDLER

Price: Why didn’t I think of doing that before? Could’ve gotten so much done without a certain distraction

Nik: JOHN

[glow-worms-are-believers]

Sawyer through (dp x dc)

Danny hadn’t meant to get lost, really he hadn’t. This was the field trip every Casper High student looked forward to, and Danny had been no exception. It had never been the plan to miss out on the Met (also known as the Metropolis Museum of Arts). Sure, he wasn’t the biggest fan of art, but this was the museum that was in all the movies set in Metropolis, the skyscraper capital of the world. And even if one excluded romcoms, that was a a whole lot. Sam, Tucker and him had even planned to recreate a few of their favourite scenes from Ferris Bueller’s day off with a few paintings.

So, yeah. Danny would so much rather be there rather than on the sketchiest street he’d ever seen, where he felt like he was about to get shanked at every corner.

“Think positive,” he muttered to himself. “I can still call for help,” he said even as he fished his phone out of his bag.

As he flipped it open, ready to call Sam, something rammed into him from the back and the phone went flying. With an oof, Danny fell to the pavement, as he lost his grip on his still-open bag in favor of stopping himself from eating cement.

As he slowly got back to his feet with a groan, he caught sight of a dark figure, hunched over his bag who immediately took off in a dash with what looked like his wallet.

“Hey!” Danny yelled as he scrambled to his feet. “Hey! That’s mine!” 

As he finally got to his feet, prepared to give chase, a voice sounded from behind.

“Freeze! MPD, turn around slowly with your hands above your head!”

Danny jumped at the noise and turned around before the voice had finished. There he found a tall woman wearing a police badge, with a gun in her hands. The only reason Danny hadn’t squeaked in fear at the sight was that the gun was trained on the floor.

“Hands above your head!” The woman said again.

“Wait,” Danny tried even as he complied. “You’ve got the wrong person.”

The woman slowly walked around Danny towards his open bag as she answered. “Oh, really?”

“I’m a student, I’m on a field trip with with my class.”

“They’re giving tours of the Suicide Slums, now?” The woman asked sarcastically, as she chanced a quick look down at the bag.

“No,” Danny tried to resist the urge to snark at the police officer. “They do tours of the met museum.”

“Alright, buddy,” the woman said. “Then how do you explain this.”

And in a smooth move, she had upended Danny’s bag onto the ground. His initial outrage was quickly replaced with shock as huge stacks of cash fell down on the busted street as if by magic.

“That’s not mine!” Danny exclaimed urgently. 

“I’m guessing this isn’t yours either?” The policewoman said as she nudged something metallic from the pile and Danny’s eyes widened as he recognized the shape of a gun. Not one of the Fenton ones, but an actual, real, gun.

“I-“ Danny started but couldn’t find the words to follow through. The blond woman sighed 

“Come on,” she said. “I’m talking you down to the station.”

[gravedigg]

Young Enver and Virgil have captivated my thoughts today. Also, I realized that I have the power to give Enver a neck tattoo so I did :-).

They probably just did a heist or smth. Gonna celebrate by trying to kill each other.