There is also chatter (but unlikely we’ll know until they make a movie about it in forty years) that the devices weren’t meant to be used just yet, but Mossad may have gotten info that Hisbollocks were getting shaky.

Which reminds me:

“Mr. Nixon, how would you describe your testicles?”

Nixon responds:

“They’re soft, and they’re very shallow, and they make me uncomfortable.”

My latest patent.
A selfie stick for pagers.
Extra long.

Pager memes are exploding as we speak!

It’s still hard to get over the funny of the pager plot. This has to be the most jaw-dropping intel operation we’ve seen in our lifetime.
Hezbollah, worried the Israelis might hack their cell phones, switched to pagers instead. The result? 6,000 testicles blown up. What a perfectly executed operation. But how do you run a terror group when your communication system blows up… literally and you’re worried phones will be hacked?

Curious though. I wonder if getting your nuts blown off would cause the same pain as getting hit in the nuts?

Operation Lockstep: Is Phase Three Being Put In Motion?

@elonmusk

Unless Trump is elected, America will fall to tyranny.

Trump must win.

REPORT: Mossad Intercepted Hezbollah Pager Shipment, Loaded Them With Explosives

Not to mention it’s big news in Iran, though in the Iran Press it was claimed

the old pagers were collected ten days ago for repairs.

Something similar to what I’d read from an “intelligence account” on X. The Israelis didn’t want to use that system just yet but had to due to repairs on some pagers in Lebanon finding strange things inside… But that’s mere speculation…

Labor’s Housing Crisis: Stripping Australians of Homeownership – One Nation Fights Back

Trudeau Liberals lose both of Monday’s byelections in Winnipeg and Montreal

Spartan women were famous in ancient Greece for seemingly having more freedom than women elsewhere in the Greek world. To contemporaries outside of Sparta, Spartan women had a reputation for promiscuity and controlling their husbands. Spartan women could legally own and inherit property, and they were usually better educated than their Athenian counterparts. 

Where are the Spartans now? Eh?
They dead.

In few medieval societies have women exercised as much political power as in Byzantium. That the theocratic empire should be more ‘modern’ in one respect than democratic Greece or republican Rome should be taken as a warning against judging past societies by our own standards.

Where they now?
They dead.

In unrelated news, the American University of Beirut Medical Center replaced the pagers of their doctors and staff 2 weeks ago.

It could, in fact, be “unrelated news”.
The only connection might be that someone was awake to the possibility of pagers being tracked and didn’t want to be confused with Hez-Ball-less.
Or maybe they just decided to ditch outmoded pager technology for mobiles.

When I was a member of the AJA (Australian Journalists Assoc) before it became part of the Clowns and Jugglers (MEAA, Media Entertainment & Arts Alliance) we had an Ethics Committee. Any member could refer an ethics issue and have it adjudicated.
The Ethics Committee comprised members of high standing and reputation in the profession. If it still existed, the ABC and many of its of its charlatans would be destroyed reputationally.
It was quite fearsome in its power to enforce integrity. I had recourse to it on one occasion.

An assignment to Lebanon for Iranian ‘diplomats’ is more like an obituary than a career posting. Career ending. It’s where careers are buried.

God help us all if she gets in.

@EndWokeness

This is what Kamala Harris is trained to do if you ask about her economic plan:

Queer Ubermenschen

@Travis_4_Trump

JUST IN: Springfield, OH mayor Rob Rue says it would be a strain on city resources for Donald Trump or JD Vance to visit, and ask them to stay out.

Apparently, Trump visiting for one night is a strain, but he and no problem accepting 20,000 migrants into a city with 60,000 residents.

The woke politicians are a joke. Why does anyone vote for them?

This? This doesn’t make it ambiguous.

Second wave of explosions across Lebanon target Hezbollah walkie-talkies

William Christou

Explosions targeting walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah have gone off in multiple cities across Lebanon, with initial reports of an unknown number of casualties.

A source in Hezbollah confirmed that walkie-talkies used by the group were targeted in the attack. A senior security source said that the explosions were “small in size”, similar to yesterday’s attacks.

The wide-ranging attack occurred just a day after more than 2,800 were injured and 12 killed by exploding pagers all over Lebanon. Both Hezbollah and the Lebanese government blamed Israel for the attack, with the former promising a “fair punishment” for the explosion.

Pictures showed broken and singed communication devices amid scenes of destruction. The Guardian saw multiple pictures of an ICOM IC-V82 two-way radio that had seemingly exploded.

In a video, a member of Hezbollah in the southern suburb of Beirut is taking part in a funeral for fighters killed yesterday when a blast occurs somewhere on his body, knocking him to the ground and sending the crowd around him running.

Israel has not claimed responsibility for either of the two days’ attacks, but reporting suggests the country managed to place explosives in thousands of pagers bought by Hezbollah.

Knuckle Dragger at 6:59 last evening.
The whole shit show of the cover up of Andrews running over the kid on the bike is something to behold.
From the bloke inserting himself into the investigation (after maybe being instructed from on high), through the no breath test (never, ever happens)*, no statements, allowing the Hunchback to drive a clearly unroadworthy car (also evidence) away from the scene to the subsequent “nothing to see here” statements which continue to this day.
The most staggering thing about this corruption is that it was so deep-seated back then, not when Hunchback had been Premier for ten years, but when he was opposition leader and wouldn’t have been identifiable by more than 50% of Plod.
And that it continues long after he has retired.
…
* I sincerely hope this goes to Court and Plod in the box is forced to answer as to how many accidents where someone was hospitalised was the driver (or all possible drivers if they are being cagey about who was driving) not breath tested or blood tested. The answer will be zero.

Imo, Coory is far too kind in his assessment of Howard:

The final nail in the Liberal broad church?

Damian Coory, The Spectator (Aust ed.) 18 September, 2024

Weakness on the misinformation and disinformation bill could prove fatal ‘The father of the nation…’ That’s how former Deputy Prime Minster John Anderson described his former boss, John Howard, during a podcast interview last year. Mr Howard these days certainly carries the presence of the elder statesman. The stability of his time as Prime Minister reminds us of a different – and better – Australia. The days before Rudd-Gillard-Rudd and Tony Abbott-Turnbull-Scott Morrison made the nation’s top job a precarious short-term reign.

But Howard himself coined a term that could be the ultimate demise of the Liberal Party: ‘a broad church’.

‘We should never, as members of the Liberal Party of Australia, lose sight of the fact that we are the trustees of two great political traditions. We are, of course, the custodian of the classical liberal tradition within our society, Australian Liberals should revere the contribution of John Stuart Mill to political thought,’ Howard opined, during a 2005 speech.

‘We are also the custodians of the conservative tradition in our community. And if you look at the history of the Liberal Party it is at its best when it balances and blends those two traditions.’

I wonder if John Howard envisaged at the time how his broad church would look two decades later?

In marketing, there’s a different philosophical approach: if you try to be all things to all people, you’ll soon be nothing to nobody. The double negative being grammatically and logically incorrect, but (as marketers prefer) the alliteration is nice and you get the point.

Another core tenet of marketing is differentiation. People don’t make purchase decisions based on a rational analysis of all the pros and cons of a certain product versus a competitor. They make decisions on a few memorable points that instil a positive emotional response. They then post-rationalise their purchase later.

Most importantly, faced with a new product option, consumers tend not to change unless there is a compelling ‘reason’ to do so. The risk of change is usually seen as not worth taking unless there’s a potential for significant reward.

All of this, I believe, explains the failure of the Liberal-National coalition to win any of the last federal or mainland state elections it’s faced. And it points to the Queensland LNP facing a more difficult path to victory next month than should be necessary (and probable minority government) given the contempt in which a majority of Queenslanders hold the incumbent Labor crew.

Howard was a stable and solid Prime Minister worthy of fond reflection, but he betrayed the core values of the party at least twice. The introduction of one of the greatest administrative burdens ever to be placed upon small business in this land – the curse of GST and BAS – was a bureaucratic manoeuvre worthy of Mao. And the failure to introduce a pro-family policy of permitting a household to split its combined income for tax calculation purposes – something he himself had championed for many years – was a capitulation to the left’s long march to destroy the nuclear family as the basic unit of our community.

Is John Howard’s broad church sustainable? I don’t think so.

The Australia of 2024 is different. There is a sharper divide in political ideology and a geographic shift has occurred too.

This could work in the Coalition’s favour, but it will require burning down the broad church and a decisive move from a market-responding stance to a market-shifting approach.

Geography now maps political ideology fairly nicely. Forget the inner-city mentality. It’s a lost cause and worthy of ignoring. Focus 100 per cent on rural, regional, and suburban Australia. Grow the pie from the outside-in and you’ll not only win votes, but the culture too.

The rapid rise and fall of Scott Morrison should have been a clear lesson. The fearful trepidation surrounding every policy position as strategists nervously consulted the ‘market research’ at every turn, is a path to destruction.

At some point you have to lead. You have to sell an idea to the market.

To quote someone who had a tiny bit of success in his lifetime selling products nobody realised they needed, Apple founder Steve Jobs: ‘It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.’

Every so often an opportunity comes along to really lead. To seize a modestly popular position and expand upon it.

Such an opportunity landed in the laps of the federal Coalition this past week and was met with the lacklustre response of a church that may indeed be too broad.

The Other Side (my weekly online video show alternative to the ABC’s left wing cultural bias) has a modest 27,000 followers on X. It is unusual for any of our tweets to receive more than a few dozen likes or re-tweets.

But every now and again something hits a public nerve and generates a huge unexpected response. And this one shocked me. A post on Friday about the government’s hideous Frankenstein reincarnation of the dud Misinformation Bill garnered 77,000 views, 1,300 retweets, and 4,100 likes in a matter of hours.

Even among a right-wing-leaning sample on an atypically politically engaged platform like X, that’s a response that should alert any politician to a golden opportunity.

What was even more telling was the nature of the response. I had rhetorically posed the question, ‘So… Where is Peter Dutton and [the Liberal Party] on all this?’ I never anticipated the veracity of the response. A significant proportion of the comments were more critical of the Opposition for not doing the job of opposing, than of the government.

‘The lack of a true opposition party in this country is completely astounding. The Australian people must reject this bill at all costs,’ wrote one.

‘This bill is now so toxic it will destroy every politician that doesn’t come out and totally condemn it… That any politician thinks it’s okay to gag the majority of the population is utterly contemptuous,’ one particularly articulate commenter noted. ‘That they also think it’s okay to exempt themselves and their mates is utterly despicable. The outrage at this is palpable. Any party which makes this a fundamental part of its platform will win the election.’

‘There are many of us who have addressed [Dutton] directly asking for a clear statement in response to this bill. It’s reminiscent of the eSafety Commissioner saga. He waits and then delivers a response. It’ll be interesting, given his support of Covid vaccines, Digital ID, eSafety Commissioner, and his 16-year-old threshold for SM accounts,’ laments another.

This is a skewed sample as the market research boffins would say. True. But the quantity and quality of this reaction to a tweet from a modest independent news commentary channel, is a red flag. It’s also a flashing green light of opportunity.

The ‘moderate’ Liberal Shadow Minster for Communication, David Coleman, is astoundingly – but sadly not surprisingly – busily looking this gift horse in the mouth.

Elon Musk accused the Australian government of being ‘fascists’ with these new laws that threaten to fine global companies 5 per cent of their global revenue for breaches of what ACMA deems to be a failure to properly police ‘misinformation’.

Coleman, with all the leadership and force of a wet blanket wrapped in a lettuce leaf, told Sky News Australia he would not use the same words Musk did.

Why not?

He said merely that ‘there are a lot of problems with this bill’ and that the government was being ‘contemptuous of free speech’. Shadow Cabinet needed to carefully review the details before commenting further, his advisor told me, as he turned down an interview spot on my show (the audience isn’t small).

How about a blanket in-principle condemnation of this ghastly piece of legislation that is not worthy of any kind of consideration, but only immediate relegation to the garbage bin of bad left-wing authoritarian ideas?

The conclusions more right-leaning classical liberal and libertarian Australians can draw from all of this are stark: either this opposition is full of politically strategic fools or they actually like and want this bill to proceed. Either is a troubling concern.

‘It’s possible to imagine the ex-copper Dutton is in furious agreement with the moderates on this one,’ a former senior party figure told me this week.

Oh dear. We may now have the worst ‘broad church’ of all in play. The authoritarian bureaucratic Liberal Party left locked in a joyous embrace with the party’s conservative authoritarians.

If someone doesn’t burst this bubble of groupthink soon, the quiet Australians who see these draconian laws for what they truly are – an abomination in a modern liberal democracy – will remain tragically unrepresented by an Opposition incapable of opposing even the most obviously bad laws.

And for the Coalition many more years of opposition or, at best, minority government, awaits.