The cat is out of the bag. After months of denial, it is now conventional wisdom that Germany — and Europe more generally — faces deindustrialisation due to the end of cheap Russian piped gas. “Germany’s Days as an Industrial Superpower Are Coming to an End,” reads a headline on Bloomberg.

From London to Berlin, Western governments do not have a serious economic growth plan. Media outlets have started to admit this grim reality because there is no longer any point in denying it.

Privately, Americans shrug their shoulders and hint that this means they will no longer face competition from Europe. But watching the economy of your most dependable ally — not to mention a key trade partner — implode is not cynical Machiavellian statecraft: it is folly. American leaders talk about creating a new economic bloc which only includes “democratic” nations, only to dismiss the destruction of the European economy. It is obvious to everyone except the truest of the true believers: America has no strategy either.

America’s negligence of its core ally will likely lead to electoral tremors across the continent in the coming years. There is every chance that Europe will drift away from American influence and start to build pragmatic relationships with other countries. The big question is where this leaves Britain, which has much closer ties with the United States than the rest of the continent. It is a question that British leaders will have to ask themselves seriously moving forward.

I have no opinion and am just seeking clarification as an admin who occasionally gets complaints that I’m unsure how to address.

Thanks!

cc: @[email protected] (the most active [email protected] mod)

Edit to add an example edge case: DuckDuckGo is proprietary, but is anyone going to argue against its promotion? Isn’t Proton Mail similarly only FOSS on the client side?

Two months before Hamas attacked Israel, the Pentagon awarded a multimillion-dollar contract to build U.S. troop facilities for a secret base it maintains deep within Israel’s Negev desert, just 20 miles from Gaza. Code-named “Site 512,” the longstanding U.S. base is a radar facility that monitors the skies for missile attacks on Israel.

On October 7, however, when thousands of Hamas rockets were launched, Site 512 saw nothing — because it is focused on Iran, more than 700 miles away.

The U.S. Army is quietly moving ahead with construction at Site 512, a classified base perched atop Mt. Har Qeren in the Negev, to include what government records describe as a “life support facility”: military speak for barracks-like structures for personnel.

Though President Joe Biden and the White House insist that there are no plans to send U.S. troops to Israel amid its war on Hamas, a secret U.S. military presence in Israel already exists. And the government contracts and budget documents show it is evidently growing.

Some examples:

• Android
• Alpine: Alpine Linux is built around musl libc and busybox
• glaucus: A simple and lightweight Linux distribution based on musl libc and toybox
• Chimera (alpha stage): Chimera uses a novel combination of core tools from FreeBSD, the LLVM toolchain, and the Musl C library

Israel was founded on lies. The lie that Palestinian land was largely unoccupied. The lie that 750,000 Palestinians fled their homes and villages during their ethnic cleansing by Zionist militias in 1948 because they were told to do so by Arab leaders. The lie that it was Arab armies that started the 1948 war that saw Israel seize 78 percent of historic Palestine. The lie that Israel faced annihilation in 1967, forcing it to invade and occupy the remaining 22 percent of Palestine, as well as land belonging to Egypt and Syria.

Israel is sustained by lies. The lie that Israel wants a just and equitable peace and will support a Palestinian state. The lie that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. The lie that Israel is an “outpost of Western civilization in a sea of barbarism.” The lie that Israel respects the rule of law and human rights.

Israel’s atrocities against the Palestinians are always greeted with lies. I heard them. I recorded them. I published them in my stories for The New York Times when I was the paper’s Middle East Bureau Chief.

TL;DR: Flatten the buildings and then use upgraded American bunker buster bombs, which may or may not be able to penetrate deep enough. And then ultimately, “The Israeli hope is that Qatar and Egypt will take the refugee crisis off its hands.”

In other words, Israel’s Final Solution to the Gaza Palestinian Question is ethnic cleansing.

The systematic destruction of the remaining buildings in Gaza City will start within days, the Israeli insider said. The bunker-buster JDAMs could come next. Then, in the planners’ scenario, I was told, the Israeli infantry will be assigned to mop-up operations: searching out and killing those Hamas fighters and workers who managed to survive the JDAM attacks.

The major issue for the Israeli war planners is a reluctance, despite the mobilization of more than 300,000 reservists, to engage in a door-to-door street battle with Hamas in Gaza City. One veteran of the IDF, who served in a high post, told me that half of the Israeli Army has been engaged for the past decade or more in the protection of the increasing number of small settlements scattered in the West Bank where they are bitterly resented by the Palestinian population. “The Israeli planners don’t trust their infantry,” the insider said, nor their willingness to go to war but what could be a disastrous lack of combat experience.

“…where you start out as a respected genius and end up being a janitor who gets into fights.” — Bryne Hobart

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