hotspur

Yeah my experience with them mirrors yours. I wouldn’t claim they’re safe, or they won’t kill me, but there are multiple major ways they don’t affect me the way cigarettes did—sense of smell, lung capacity/congestion, awful smell leaching into clothes, etc.

From a harm reduction standpoint, I think they have a good use case. I don’t like nicotine gum or pouches, I want the throat hit/nicotine feeling. Early vapes didn’t really do it for me, but I kept with em to make SO happy. Then I found Nov salts and that gave me what I was looking for.

I scanned through various reporting for the same question. They tested 3 brands of cheap disposable vape (article cites there being something like 100 brands of disposable vape on the market). Pretty sure these are all-in-one units; I don't even think they have pod cartridges—so you use it and throw the whole thing out, batteries and hardware included. So they would have incentive to be the cheapest components possible and to cut corners. There’s a line in one of the articles that said something like they have worse chemicals than cigarettes which are worse than refillable vapes, suggesting these are bad, cigarettes bad, refillable less bad to some undefined degree. While they mention the vape liquid as a cause a little bit, a lot of the bad stuff seems to be coming off the hardware with heat—so like leaded wires and atomizers with bad metals on or near them.

All that to say that as per usual reporting tries to lump all vaping into this one mysterious bad category (thinking here about how that stuff with off-market internet THC vapes was used to support headlines like “vaping destroying lungs of zoomers overnight”). I doubt vaping is safe, but even so I would prefer clear and transparent info about it, and often it seems like there’s just a policy decision/agenda-driven bent to a lot of the reporting.

My guess is that if you get a larger system with better quality parts, it’s going to be safer generally than smaller/and more disposable oriented stuff.

He’s posting this picture for transparency, and because the rest of the media refuses to post it.

It can still be US calling the shots, without Trump being in the loop. Trump/America First on the one hand, and American empire/deep natsec structure on the other.

Grayzone had the article about how Radcliffe and Paudilla were presenting dubious Israel intel directly to Trump without mentioning where it came from, and it’s a well known fact that there has been deep planning and salivation over destroying Iran in the US natsec/defense world for decades. Trump doesn’t do strategy—he’s image based. He’s fine with perceived wins and perception shaping for personal aggrandizement.

It’s plausible then to think that there is a larger tension at the top of gov—America first reality tv vs neocon bloodthirst /great game bullshit perhaps that could result in Trump genuinely thinking he’d brokered a ceasefire here, while other elements simply proceed with their original plan to get into a hot war with Iran.

Because Trump only cares about image, if this proceeds he will probably come up with some bullshit to own it like he did last time.

So you have elements in US directing Israel, but not necessarily originating from the president, or Israel being the puppet master that has some hold over America so strong that the entire govt bends over backwards for it as options. The first option feels more likely overall based on simplicity, but I really don’t know.

Third option is that they’re going really deep on the kayfabe to limit liability to just Israel, but that would require a sustained and cogent effort on Trumps part to keep the charade up, and he just doesn’t seem consistent enough for that to be the case… again though who knows.

It’s a bush-era neocon from SAIS named Eliot Cohen. I don’t quite think he’s stupid enough to actually believe his argument, so he’s lying to support his real agenda, which is most likely some variety of crushing any resistance to US/Israeli hegemony in the Middle East.

I looked up the guy that wrote the “Trump was right” one and he worked with Wolfowitz and Condi Rice, so he’s got plenty of experience lying publicly to justify killing people.

This paper seems to strongly point to +3C by 2050, so yeah, we’re almost certainly going to miss 1.5.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378025000469

The Atlantic, surprise surprise, is in full consent manufacture mode. It’s so on the nose you can practically see the talking points emails…

It’s this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002

Basically a US war gaming exercise against Iran. The US did horribly, to the point that they hobbled the opfor so that the bluefor could win. The marine general who commanded the opfor did a bunch of asymmetrical warfare stuff that the Iranians might do and just clobbered the conventional forces.

I think the constant messaging about China being the next regional hegemon and regional alliances being developed to counter US hegemony leads to a false sense of equivalency. The relationship that US has with Israel, or even NATO, is not really mirrored in a real way yet among BRICS or China/Russia/Iran, etc. they have mutual interests (or grievances I guess) and incentive to cooperate to counter western trespass on their sovereignty, but they’re not at the level where they have mutual defence agreements where they will step in and get involved directly militarily if something like this happens.

China has military build up, but has not been a bellicose power yet—they mostly operate via economic power and diplomacy up to now, and so I don’t think most of their partner countries would assume they would show up with an army to support them if they were invaded.

They might send aid or military supplies or something, that would be in the realm of possibility, but feels like that might even be too direct of a military involvement for their tastes?

Man, I hope tac nukes are not in the cards. If this really isn’t about Iranian nuke program, but more about Bibi’s continued political health and the US trying to isolate China, etc, then really taking out the facilities wouldn’t matter much. Drop MOABs on Fordow and then resume the bullshit propaganda they’ve been doing the whole time…

Then again, after this, Iran has almost no choice but to get nukes, which then makes killing its program a real objective for Israel and US… we had to blow up the nuke program that doesn’t exist, but once we do it they will have to pursue it, so hence it was a good idea to blow up their program!

At least from that tweet, not much—it lists a littoral combat ship, 3-4 mine countermeasures ships and a spec ops ship or something. So utility, but not anything amazing in its own right. The announcement the tweet is replying to suggests that all of the ships are leaving port (not just the US ships) to spread out and not be sitting there at docks stationary inside range of potential attacks. Also the 5th fleet, which I assume these are a subset of, sounds like it is stationed in the Middle East anyway, so not as remarkable compared to news that, like a major element of the pacific or European fleet have redeployed into the Middle East.