We know what’s coming and we are prepared.
— 🇮🇱/🇵🇸/🇱🇧/🇮🇶/🇸🇾 17th day of the war, October 23rd status update and major events:
– Heavy airstrikes on Gaza at night. Still a huge lack of food, water, medicine and electricity. Hospitals are expected to be out of power within 48 hrs.
– Sporadic rocket attacks by Hamas and PIJ took place on cities like Sderot, Ashkelon and others. Very small.
– Throughout the day, Hezbollah carried out at least 3 attacks with ATGMs against IDF targets in settlements near the Lebanese border. Today's activity on the northern front was significantly less intense than the previous days, possible even the least we have seen since the first few days of the war.
– The amount of officially announced Hezbollah martyrs has risen to 32.
– As a response to Hezbollah attacks, the IDF carried out artillery shellings, drone strikes and airstrikes on Hezbollah positions in Lebanon, but much less than previous days.
– The Islamic Resistance in Iraq carried out attacks on 5 U.S. occupation bases in Syria with suicide drones. They first struck Al-Tanf, Al-Rukban and Al-Malikiyah in the afternoon, and then Al-Omar oil field and Al-Shaddadi base in the evening.
– IRGC-affiliated planes started using Khmeimim airbase in Syria for the first time.
– Hamas released two elderly female prisoners for humanitarian reasons.
– Limited Israeli raids and incursions took place in the Gaza strip to the East of Al-Maghazi camp.
@Middle_East_Spectator
🇮🇷🚫🚢 My analysis of the Strait of Hormuz over the last 24 hours.
If the tankers use the Iran route, they are dominantly Iran-related. If the tankers use the Oman route, they are not, and never sanctioned.
I have heard from ship owners that most tankers cannot use the Iran route because the EU has not lifted sanctions on IRGC. Using the Iran route would risk sanctions, making the Oman route the only viable option.
With more conflict going on between IRGC and the US, the visible AIS data on Oman's tanker route is going to go dark again, which means Iran will have to keep escalating in order to completely halt flows.
For the US, the fact that the Oman route might be blocked presents it with a big ultimatum: either the US escalates or gives IRGC control of the Strait of Hormuz. Logic says there's no way that would happen, so escalation will continue.
Given that Trump has made it obvious that he does not want to escalate, I fear that the IRGC would just keep escalating until ...
🧠 🇺🇸 🖨 Meta introduces Brain2Qwerty v2, a non-invasive brain-to-text decoder with real-time sentence decoding from brain signals. It achieved up to 78% word accuracy in tests and builds on research published in @Nature. Training data included 22,000 sentences from 9 participants using MEG devices. Meta is open-sourcing the training code for v1 and v2, and a partner is releasing the v1 dataset.
📎 AI at Meta
📝 🎥 🎬 What is notable about Citizen Vigilante is that it drags the vigilante genre kicking and screaming from the 1970s to the 2020s. | Millennial Woes
The average liberal instinctively bristles at the tropes of classical vigilante cinema - “soft judges”, “nanny state”, “timid policing”, “moral decline”, “criminal parasites living off hard-working decent ordinary people” - but they long ago came to accept the genre as a necessary sop to right-wing idiots. I think the attitude was: “Let them have their trashy bread and circuses, if it keeps them docile while we remake their world around them.” After all, the tropes referred to realities that were incidental, not fundamental.
But today there are new realities, which today’s liberal cannot stand to see acknowledged because this strikes at the core of his worldview. These realities are fundamental, not incidental.
The first reality is that diversity has, far from improving White societies, degraded them in ...
📵 🇺🇸 👤 US to implement Digital ID if "KIDS Act" passes in the House today
Buried inside the KIDS Act are provisions that will push online services to verify all users’ ages, require government-directed moderation policies for online speech, and even create new rules about private and encrypted communications. While supporters continue to claim this bill protects minors online, its requirements come at the expense of privacy, free expression, and the ability of people of all ages to use the internet without revealing sensitive data.
Supporters of KOSA have said the bill doesn’t require age verification. And technically, the KOSA section of the bill does say that KOSA shouldn’t be read to require age verification.
Throughout the KOSA section of the legislation, special protections, controls, messaging settings, and parental tools are required whenever a website or app “knows or should have known” a user is a child (defined in the bill as anyone under 13) or a teen (defined as ...
