Someone else had actually uploaded this track to YT a while back. Then about 4-5 years ago it just disappeared for some reason and no one re-uploaded it until this channel did 6 months ago (which tbf, it’s a vinyl only release from 1995, so you can basically only get it through discogs nowadays). Don’t remember how many views the original upload had, but judging by similarly old Jungle videos, I think it would probably be closer to 10k at this point if it hadn’t been taken down.

Not 100% sure, but I think it’s the Think Break. Sounds a bit weird, so likely timestretched and/or repitched. Also probably has a low pass filter over it in order to cut out the two extremely loud & high pitched peaks in the 10-20 kHz range that are coming from the shaker, 'cause those will start hurt your ears if you don’t tone them down at all lol.

This conflict has gotten me interested in learning more about the early history of Islam & how it expanded to become the dominant religious force in the middle east, but one thing I’ve inadvertently learned along the way is that Amman, the capitol city of Jordan, used to be named Philadelphia until the 630s AD. The city was originally the capitol city of the Ammonite Kingdom, but was renamed to Philadelphia after the Macedonians conquered the region, and then renamed again to Amman once the Muslims conquered it.

(I guess this is all just to say that I never really realized that Philadelphia was a Greek name and/or that I never realized that there were other cities named Philadelphia before the one in the US lol)

I tried search for it for a bit last night, but it either happened more recently than I remember (I was thinking it was sometime between 2016-2020), or it’s just been lost in the noise of all the threats Israel & Hezbollah have thrown out at one another over the years. It’s kinda frustrating looking for it, 'cause searching up anything along the lines of “Hezbollah threatens Netanyahu” just returns a bunch of articles about Netanyahu threatening Hezbollah.

Hezbollah definitely has spies deep enough within the Israeli government to at least be able to get an idea of what Israel’s planning to do.

The recruitment of espionage agents in Israel for Hezbollah is associated mainly with the Arab population in Israel, including former Member of Knesset Azmi Bishara, who was suspected of supplying various intelligence information to Hezbollah during the Second Lebanon War in 2006; an IDF officer of Bedouin origin at the rank of lieutenant colonel who supplied intelligence information to Hezbollah early in the 2000s; and ordinary residents in various areas of Israel (Kulick, 2009). However, there are not only agents from minority Arab or Bedouin groups, but also Jewish agents who have supplied intelligence information to Hezbollah as part of drug deals (see below, Criminal case 36/03 State of Israel vs. Said ben Jamil Kahmouz).

The information that the agents in Israel have supplied to Hezbollah is diverse, including the location of critical civilian and military infrastructure, orders of battle, border points, and information on IDF weapons. In addition, Hezbollah has sought to gather social information on diverse issues, including political rivalries, government systems, social struggles, social trends, and more, in order to identify strengths and weaknesses of Israeli society, military vulnerabilities, and future targets, and even in order to understand the mood in the country (Zeitoun et al., 2021; Kulick, 2009). The Israeli agents were recruited into Hezbollah service based on various motivations, including ideological and economic reasons (Kulick, 2009).

https://www.inss.org.il/strategic_assessment/intelligence-agents-in-israel-hezbollahs-modus-operandi/

Also IIRC, a few years back they posted a photo they took of Benjamin Netanyahu in his office (from the outside looking in, probably from an adjacent building), with the message basically being that they’re deep enough inside to potentially assassinate him while he’s at work.

I just noticed that at around 34 seconds into the video, the dust finally clears enough to reveal another Merkava that’s facing almost directly at the bomb guy. Imagine how insane it would be to have an enemy tank just appear right in front of you like that.

Better optics & FCS is completely fine, and even some level of AI assisted target ID could be useful (like for example what @[email protected] said with AI scanning & marking nearby heat signatures).

My problem is more that they seem to want the AI to be able to identify, classify & prioritize targets, which given the current level of AI technology & the type of war(s) Israel is fighting, seems like it would be fraught with errors. The IDF already seems extremely jumpy & prone to friendly fire incidents as is, and I’d imagine that there’s a very large risk that an AI target ID system could make that problem much worse. It’s also probably going to wind up being useless once the enemy figures out ways of spoofing it, 'cause then they can just overload the system with false positives.

Was made aware today that Israel has been working on a new Merkava model, the Merkava Mk.5 “Barak,” which at a glance seems to best be described by an overconfidence & over-reliance on technology.

Article: https://www.edrmagazine.eu/israel-starts-delivering-the-5th-gen-merkava-barak-tank-to-its-armoured-units

A first major improvement came from sights; the commander got a new panoramic sight while the gunner’s sight is also brand new, Idan Tavor underlining that these are one or even more generation ahead of previous ones. Improvements came in electro-optic performances, which provide better imaging, “but the main step forward is that they have integrated AI into those sight that have now autonomous behaviours, and are capable to identify targets and objects by themselves.”

I seriously doubt that current AI technology is going to be better at identifying targets than a well trained crew working in conjunction with infantry support who can function as additional eyes for the tank (granted Israel’s target acquisition only need be as sophisticated as to be able to determine whether someone is Palestinian or not). Best case scenario, it occasionally manages to pick out threats faster than the crew can, but I imagine the average experience using AI target acquisition is going to sifting though a lot of false positives.

The Fire Control System (FCS) has also been entirely upgraded. “The new version is faster and has better performances,” we were told, adding that the Merkava Barak is able to shoot on the move, day and night, with increased accuracy.

Being able to accurately fire on the move at both day & night has already been standard for most tanks made in the past few decades, so while it is probably an improvement over current FCS systems, I’m willing to bet it’s not significant enough to really be notable.

Human-machine interface has also be completely reviews, adapting it to the young conscripts experience, multi-touchscreens with smartphone-like interface being now adopted. “We worked on it pretty hard for the last two years in order to make it very approachable for young soldiers who are used to their cell phones and playstations and now need to fight in a tank and we developed for them a very nice and new HMI.”

It’s like a vibeo game!!!

But seriously, what’s the obsession with making everything touch screens nowadays? Especially in a military context where you’d think it’d be useful to have tactile controls that can be operated on muscle memory during high stress situations.

There’s probably more stuff to pick apart, but overall it just feels like they’re trying to use technology to compensate for the fact that they’re frequently having to use their tanks in situations that tanks really shouldn’t be used in, namely that they’re being operated by under-trained conscripts to fight in urban guerilla warfare.

I doubt the controls for launching nukes are at Dimona tbh. It’s main function seems to be research and the production of nuclear warheads (also maybe power generation, but I couldn’t find anything saying that it’s being used as a power plant).

In terms of groundwater though, the facility does seem to be sitting right on top of the southern tip of the Mountain Aquifer. The silver lining is that the groundwater seems to flow into the area rather than out of it, so the contamination would likely be at least somewhat contained to the southern end of Israel, which is largely desert and thus doesn’t have many people living in it.

Probably not unless they somehow scored a direct hit into the reactor itself. And even then, the fuel rods are typically under several meters of water while in use, which would probably absorb a lot of the blast.

Depending on how the reactor was designed, there is a chance that the damage could somehow lead to a runaway fission reaction a la Chernobyl. But imo, the more likely worst case scenario of a direct hit (or even near miss) to the reactor is probably that the foundation gets cracked and radioactive water starts leaking into the soil, which would obviously be pretty bad if a significant amount of that can find its way into a nearby aquifer.

Second largest military in NATO

One of the largest militaries in the region

“C’mon people, we need to protest this”

:LIB:

(not that I really expected anything from him to begin with, but still)

Using “wargames” as an excuse for troop movements in the lead up to a war isn’t totally unheard of tbh. And given what going on right now, I’d honestly be surprised if Iran wasn’t using it as cover to at least put themselves in a heightened state of readiness.

Idk if Iran is directing the Iraqis to attack US bases or not, but it would hardly be surprising if they were. Qasem Soleimani (the Iranian general Trump assassinated in 2020) was a key player in helping to organize Kurdish & Shia militias in Iraq’s fight against ISIS, and a lot of Iraq’s militias have just straight up sworn allegiance to Iran. So it’s safe to say that a large amount of Iraq’s paramilitary forces would attack US bases if directed to do so by Iran.

Yeah, I think at this point if Iran attacks Israel directly (or even indirectly), then things could very quickly snowball into something that normal people will recognize as a world war. So I’d say that we’re very close to the brink, but as has already been mentioned, if WW3 comes to pass then historians in the future will probably say that it’s already ongoing and we just haven’t recognized it yet.

Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking they’ll have to do.

My only question is whether they’ll try and leave the dirty work to their allies rather than doing it themselves, so as to try and avoid a direct confrontation with the US for as long as possible. Though with the way things are going, a significant attack by an Iranian backed militia on a US base might be seen as indistinguishable from a direct Iranian attack, so it’s probably past time for trying to engage in plausible deniability at this point.

Are Iranian missiles able to reach Israel from within their borders?

Their bigger ballistic missiles definitely can, though they obviously won’t be as numerous as their smaller missiles.

Is this going to be allowed to be transferred across the Iraq/Turkey border into Syria or is this just posturing?

Who’s to say at this point. Iran does have enough allies in Iraq & Syria that they should be able to move their missiles into those countries if needed (or at least hand them off for their allies to use), but I’d imagine that the presence of US military bases in both of those countries will probably complicate things significantly.

Like I know its history but are they just watching the news for this info and memorizing it or are there books that go into detail with more modern events?

I don’t think (mainstream) news will really tell you much about military equipment, but yeah books & shit are a lot of it.

A surprising amount of the technical aspects of a lot of modern military equipment are actually public knowledge. Unfortunately this is mainly due to the fact that arms manufacturing is a for-profit industry, but the fact that companies are trying to sell their death machines means that they do kinda have to reveal relevant technical aspects of their products to the wider world for the purposes of advertising. On top of that, a lot of modern military equipment is actually quite old, or are at least heavily upgraded versions of equipment that is quite old, and so declassified information on older models of the same equipment can often give you a decent point of reference when trying to understand the capabilities of their more recent upgraded version.

So basically, historians & military equipment nerds will find as much of this publicly available info as they possibly can, and then write books, blogs posts, Wikipedia articles, etc. on whatever piece(s) of equipment they’re interested. A good example of this is The Soviet Armor Blog, which has a lot of in depth info on the history & capabilities of a lot of the tanks of the Soviet Union, many of which are still being used by Russia.

Idk what exact capabilities they have, but I would assume that all of their drones are coming from Iran, who do have some decent drones afaik.

As for why the US didn’t shoot them down, could be any number of reasons. Probably best to wait and see for the moment.

I’m assuming it’s Syrian and/or Iraqi militias, which are largely backed up by Iran afaik.

I know Iraqi resistance groups have previously said that they’d start attacking US assets in the region if the US gets involved, and the hospital bombing seems to have prompted them to start attacking US bases in Iraq, so they could also be the one launching attacks if the US bases in Syria are close enough to the border.