Once upon a time, I accidentally created a folder named “~” in my home folder (the company provided scripting framework would inconsistently expand variables, so the folder had a ton of stuff inside it).

I ran “rm -rf ~” and only panicked when I started to wonder why it wasn’t taking too long.

Good news is that it only managed to get halfway through my local checkout of aosp before I stopped it. Bad news was that it nuked most of my dotfiles.

The original article smelled wrong when they claimed to have broken AES. Thankfully, Bruce Schneier is far more authoritative than I ever will be and gives a short and succinct list of links to debunkings of this.

On the one hand it’s a factual article about events that are clearly true. On the other it’s sensationalized and making a mountain out of a molehill.

The quality of the discussion on this article is bottom of the barrel “I hate Israel and you should too”.

The lawmaker in question is Moshe Saada, number 28 out of 32 MKs from Likud (Israeli elections fix an order for each party, and legislative seats are awarded by that order).

He gave an interview on Channel 14, which is generally regarded as extremely right wing in Israel. Ahmad Tibi, number 1 on the Ta’al list, was the one who called him out for the statement:

MK Moshe Saada, Likud ,is trying to get on the shameful list of people in South Africa’s lawsuit against Israel at the High Court in The Hague. Stupid and criminal words

Moshe Saada said this in response to the article:

I understand that there is a “journalist” who took a sentence I said in an interview and took it out of context with a lack of integrity, just to light a little fire, divide a little more and sow hatred. Those who watched the interview can hear that I repeatedly said that Hamas must be destroyed. The time has come for the media to also move forward from 6.10 and realize that it is time to unite around the fight against the enemy who seeks to destroy us, instead of constantly engaging in attempts to slander elected officials

The full interview is here on youtube (In Hebrew, no translation available).

He only said it once in a 13 minute interview and every other instance he’s talking explicitly about Hamas (L’hashmid Ha’Hamas). I’m guessing it was him searching for a word to include both Hamas and PIJ, but that might be too generous. But anyone thinking this is an official policy of Israel and that’s the way forward is delusional - almost every country on Earth has extremist members of their legislature.

all of the fucking Israelis who support him, because a lot of them do

I can read just fine. you’re just coming off murdery.

Just how many people do you want to kill? The 120 on Likud’s parliamentary list? Their 100k registered members? The 1,115,049 voters who voted for them in the last election? Or just the 15% of Israelis who think Bibi should stay as Prime Minister after the war is over?

You make it sound like Hezbollah are good guys. They’re terrorists.

Palestinians rejected every offer of peace they’ve been given and made up excuses along the way to perpetrate terrorist attacks. If they truly wanted peace they could have had it a dozen times over by now. But Palestinian suffering is a convenient excuse for antisemitism - using antizionism as a shield (“I only hate those jews over there, and anyone who happens to support their ongoing existence”)

I’ll just call you genocidal. You’re advocating the violent death of a large group of people based on their national origin and political belief.

So you don’t think there’s any possible peaceful solution? Only the violent destruction of Israel?

Even though this will elicit a response from them I don’t think they will fire an overly large barrage. 5-10 at a time every hour for a few hours will probably get the response they’re looking for. This wasn’t a Hezbollah member, but they need to save face after drawing the line in the sand - so they’ll launch something “easy” but serious enough to make it look like they’re doing something.

If they drop a residential building in Tel Aviv it would run the risk of an immediate and extreme escalation.

From the AP article:

U.S. officials had previously pointed to classified intelligence, obtained independently from the Israelis, to offer support for Israel’s raid.

The US and UK (possibly more, I lost track at some point) have been running surveillance flights over Gaza for pretty much the entire duration of the war. There are plenty of eyes on Israel’s military operations and ways to gather intelligence inside Gaza.

NYT themselves came to the conclusion that al-Shifa was used for military purposes based on Hamas’ own propaganda. It’s always been a question of how central it was to Hamas’ operations.

Do you believe that Israel needs to be violently destroyed? Because it kinda sounds like that’s your position.

I’m going to go a step further and say that the vast majority of Israelis would not agree to attacking civilians in general, and certainly not like this. This is a pretty clear attempt to “poke the bear” which is never a good idea. Even the most hawkish Israelis wouldn’t want to preemptively open another front in an already complex war.

AP have the most comprehensive coverage of the document, which is not publicly available. Two sections in jump out to me:

“The U.S. Intelligence Community is confident in its judgment on this topic and has independently corroborated information on HAMAS and PIJ’s use of the hospital complex for a variety of purposes related to its campaign against Israel,” the assessment states. It continues that it believes the groups “used the al-Shifa hospital complex and sites beneath it to house command infrastructure, exercise certain command and control activities, store some weapons, and hold at least a few hostages.”

And

The U.S. believes that Hamas members evacuated days before Israel raided the complex on Nov. 15 and that they destroyed sensitive documents and electronics before Israeli troops entered the facility.

The article didn’t mention that they had been deployed since May, and I had thought they were deployed directly from Norfolk in October. That makes a ton more sense.

There are basically three reasons they would withdraw the CSG:

1. They believe the situation is sufficiently stable and withdrawing the CSG will not encourage Iranian backed groups to escalate too much.
2. They want to signal to Israel that ground operations need to wind down within days.
3. This is part of regular deployment changes and a replacement force will be deployed to the eastern Mediterranean Sea.

Given the US were running 24/7 surveillance flights over Gaza, 2 is highly unlikely and there would be other signals like the State department sending that signal.

Option 1 is similarly unlikely given the regional escalations.

Which leaves option 3. Which makes tons of sense and shows military doctrines that are similar - Israel is rotating 5 brigades of reserve troops out of Gaza.

My prediction is that Hezbollah will take a day or two with far fewer rocket launches on Israeli civilians, and then around Jan 3 or 4 they will launch a much larger salvo to test the US response. Hamas already jumped on this, launching 20-some rockets. I haven’t seen an explicit Houthi response yet, but the Eisenhower is closer to them than the Ford so I don’t think they’ll pay close attention to this beyond some saber rattling.

It is unknown how much uranium they have enriched to 90%, but the IAEA have confirmed that at least 280kg have been enriched to 60%, and Iran is producing an additional 9kg per month from these facilities. I’m not overly familiar with how long the enrichment process will take to go from 60% to 90%, or even if it is a different process than their existing one.

But the jump from having sufficient materiel to having a functional physics package is extremely short and not at all complex - it’s taught in AP Physics classes and well described on wikipedia.

Point being that they are potentially mere months away from having nuclear weapons.

Intel, whose investment will be over five years, will pay a corporate tax rate of 7.5% instead of 5% previously. The normal tax rate is 23%, but under Israel’s law to encourage investment in development areas, companies receive large benefits.

Usually these types of grants are never a good investment but the increased corporate tax rate alone covers a third of the grant (9b yearly taxable revenue at 2.5% over 5 years comes out to 1.125b).

I think it’s more likely they were spread through the various Telegram “news” channels and then picked up after verifying the source or at least the video/images - checking for language/location/time/that they actually show what was claimed.

To be 100% clear: are you saying that it’s a fair call that they are separate concepts, or are you saying it’s a fair call that Israel should be destroyed?

The original reporting this is coming do appear to be in Gaza, but are unattributed as to who filmed them. It’s also unclear if these videos were reported locally first and picked up, or if they were sent directly to N12.

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