Is it legal to rehearse or practice how to interact with border guards?
I don’t need to explain why someone could be deeply anxious interacting with US border officials… it should be obvious to anyone with half a brain. And since looking anxious is a sign that you could be concealing things, thus drawing more attention from border officials… Coaching on how to handle an experience and avoid that anxious spiral and minimise the risk for such travellers… But I’m curious if this is legal. Or if it is legal, would it be construed as evidence of intent to deceive should a traveler do this and wind up being investigated in such a way that it turns up that they have undertaken such practice?
It's 100% appropriate and in fact highly recommended to prepare oneself when seeking admission since the admission process can be stressful. Preparation here doesn't mean deceit; it just means being truthful but well prepared, not being caught off guard.
Yeah, lithium ion is pretty dangerous and not to be fucked with… but actually we do allow filling up cars in private residences… You can just go get a fuel can or extra tank of your choice, fill it up at a station when fuel is cheap and keep it at home for a cheap top up to avoid having to go out of your way for cheap gas on those days when your low but not going near a gas station with good prices… no laws against it at all here in Australia and we’re a crazy nanny state so I’d be surprised if it was illegal somewhere else… except maybe California, where the fuel can is probably illegal to own if you don’t put a warning sticker about possibly causing cancer on it or something ridiculous like that.
In genuinely morbid moment of being nerd snipped… I wonder if the ordinance dropped per square meter on Gaza is higher than the ordinance dropped be square meter on Vietnam… which was famously bombed so hard that detailed maps needed to be updated in order to accommodate how heavily cratered parts of the country were with heavily cratered hills and slopes literally shifting like a form of mechanical erosion by bombing.
Vietnam has an area of 331,000 square km. America dropped over 5 million tonnes of bombs on it over a ten year period.
That's 1.51 tonnes/km2/year.
Gaza has an area of 365 square km. Israel dropped over 85,000 tonnes of bombs dropped on it over one year [0].
That's 232.88 tonnes/km2/year. Over 150x more.
Don't forget! Gaza is one of the most densely populated areas in the world - about 50 times more densely populated than 1970 Vietnam. 50% of whom are children.
So, Israel dropped 150x the bombs per year on Gaza, an area 50x more densely populated. Proportionally, Israel's bombardment is 7,500 times worse than Vietnam, on an area that's fully half children.
This last year has delegitimized the West's claims to any moral high ground, ever, far, far more than we yet realize.
Vietnam is a slightly misleading comparison here I think, because big parts are jungle (counting the whole area downplays the severity of bombing significantly).
If you compare heavily bombed WW2 targets, you see similar/higher bomb loads, like 4000 tons for Dresden over 3 days (<10 km^2), or ~18000 tons for the Leuna works (synthfuel refinery, <20 km^2, within 1 year).
> counting the whole area downplays the severity of bombing significantly
That's fair, I think.
Dresden was horrific, and ought to be formally acknowledged as a war crime. Still, I don't think you can say it was worse than what is happening to Gaza, from any perspective except maybe in horror per day. They are similarly sized, but Gaza is more densely populated. If you had the terrible choice between nearly 4000 tons over 3 days, or 85,000+ tons over 14 months, I think I know what you would choose.
I would also point out that global awareness of what was happening in Dresden was many orders of magnitude lower than awareness of Gaza's bombing, and the military 'justification' far worse.
Leuna works was a key strategic target with a 13 square km area; I wouldn't see it as an appropriate comparison.
I'm unsure about the justification angle for strategic bombing in general.
I honestly believe there is not enough honest consensus globally (or even within the US/EU) to declare this off-limits-- given the choice between strategic bombing (with large collateral damage) or breaking resistance one-MG-nest at-a-time by throwing your infantry at it, basically every modern nation would make the same decision I believe...
In my view, what makes the current situation particularly bad for Gaza/the Hamas side is that their goals are not limited to their own freedom and independence-- a lot of them want Israel/Jews gone in general, a position that deprives them of much international support and protection (especially western) that would otherwise be in fairly easy reach.
Basically, Hamas is a clear underdog/victim from a military power perspective, but they have made it very clear (October 7th) that if the positions were reversed, they would drop bombs immediately themselves. This costs them a lot of international sympathy; Israel would never have gotten away with this without the October attack.
Thank you for taking the time to do the grim maths…
Also, holy ** I thought it was bad and probably going to be maybe 10-25 times higher… based on the utter devastation I have seen in satellite imagery… but over 150 times more…
The proportionality math for population density is just… ghastly.
I appreciate the thanks... Looking at the horror honestly does take a toll.
Still, I'm glad you asked. It's better to have perspective on these things.
For anyone who wants to visualize what 85,000 tonnes of bombs looks like, it's about 5.7x the nuke dropped over Hiroshima (Hiroshima is 2.5x bigger than Gaza, and was 16x less densely populated than modern Gaza in 1945).
This comparison also helps put Vietnam into perspective - 333x Little Boy over ten years.
That’s one potential mitigating factor, but they were also using large bombs like 2000 pounders on targets that I’ve not seen any reputable military commentators agree as justifying such a large bomb…
like the typical comment are things like before and after satellite image comparisons and taking it at face value the claimed target exists for the sake of arguing the point… and they would say things like “that building needed 1000 pounds max and that’s probably overkill, you would probably want to just use two 500 pound bombs one on the first pass, and one on the second if it was still standing, heck I’d probably have argued for three 250 pounders bombs with penetration aids and have flow the sortie in a staggered pass so after each drop the next pilot can confirm if the target is still standing and drop theirs if necessary, but using a 2000 pound bomb is nuts on a target that size, they have air superiority and significant ground control to ensure minimal SAM risk from MANPADS, if I had suggested a sortie like this when I was a [whatever their rank was/is], it would have severely hurt my career due to how recklessly wasteful I would have appeared”
And that kind of commentary came up a lot in certain circles. Not even arguing the validity of the targets like the whole “hidden bunker under every second building” stuff… just legitimately tactical assessment of construction typical of the region, the cumulative seismic and shock load damage from prior nearly weapon detonations, and the honest appraisal that it was extremely overkill to use bombs that size… it was morbidly educational in a way.
Sadly I suspect this will be the case… I don’t hold much hope on this whole thing actually ending… but I do have a glimmer of hope that they may have reached a tipping point due to one of the many slowly shifting parts of this tragedy… no idea what the tipping point is from the outside but it does kinda have the vibe of “maybe this is going to fall apart if they keep pushing”
Advisors can be in government… if it’s a government department even an advisory one, it’s part of government… and thus its employees are in government.
It’s currently just in name only. But that is likely to change soon in some form yet to be revealed when the new government is sworn in.
So legally it isn’t in government yet, however as it is officially part of the elected governments plans, you can make a sensible argument that it is part of the incoming transitional government that has been elected and while having now power due to not being sworn in yet, is indeed part of government by nature transition teams and the president elect having status in government by way of things like security briefings and other rights and privileges normally only held by the incumbent government like increased security protection…
It would be like saying a government in exile (a well established precedent of history) isn’t a government and none of the people in it are in government…
It is not going to become an actual part of the federal government, as a new agency, unless Congress makes it an agency. And if they do, then Musk likely would not make the transition to head it as that would involve too many conflicts of interest for him (at least if we still consider laws as things that matter in this country, that is definitely a concept that's quickly being discarded by both the elected leadership and the electorate so you may be right).
Ok, I’m really not sure why the simple answer isn’t getting across here.
His position as co-head of the nominal “department of government efficiency” only exists due to the legitimacy it has been granted by the recognition granted to it by the incoming administration… otherwise we would all be calling it some variety of the first buddy’s pet think tank and arguing over if the incoming administration would even pay attention to it or not… that is a government granted position of power, a position that it is pretty hard to argue is not part of the government that grants it legitimacy… therefore making it a position in government… even if it’s unpaid and advisory… it’s still practically in the government if not legally (for all the conflict of interest reasons you highlight)…
I’m not trying to make a civics or political science case here… I’m talking politics as the exercise of power by government upon the governed… he is currently having breakfast lunch and dinner with the incoming president, making arguments and shaping the cabinet, and contributing to the transition team… he’s involved with government… he’s “in” it.
They in all likelihood, have already started… to some extent…
Given the geopolitical context it’s extremely unlikely that they were willing to make a statement, even as vaguely shaped as the whole, “nato or nukes and we choose nato” thing was… in essence, why mention nukes are a possibility if you don’t think you can realistically build them?
And this makes a lot of sense, because Ukraine was at the heart of a lot of the most sophisticated work done in the Soviet Union, and as befits their legacy as the birthplace of both nuclear weapons and nuclear power in the Soviet Union, they were (prior to the invasion and war) the 7th largest user of Nuclear power in the world by total output at 13 gigawatts, and they are only beaten by France in terms of how much of their national energy production is powered by nuclear at 55%… they have retained a significant nuclear industry and they were even considering starting up domestic nuclear fuel fabrication prior to the war, which is indicative of them being able to do a lot more than just “run a nuclear power plant”, coupled with their domestic uranium reserves and the wartime entrepreneurial spirit they have brought to the entire field of drone warfare… I don’t doubt that someone somewhere in the government had a thought one day cursing about the failure of their allies to follow their obligations under the Budapest Memorandum, and decided to get some pretty smart people to work out just how hard it would be to get back their nuclear capability. With such a significant nuclear industry, getting plutonium and just skipping all the difficult uranium enrichment stuff would be comparatively easy for them.
And from prior published research on the matter of nuclear proliferation, it’s not as hard as a lot of people would likely presume… in 1964, the USA commissioned the “Nth Country Experiment” which can be sort of summed up as “we took 3 brand new phd physicists with no idea how to make a nuclear weapon, and timed how long it took them to work out how to build one without letting them peek at any of the classified info on how the existing nukes were built, they have to do the work from scratch with just public info and their brain smarts” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nth_Country_Experiment … from scratch with, significantly less information than we all have available to us online today, if took the three of them 3 years to do. Ukraine has all the modern public information you or I have access to, likely a not insignificant amount of leftover classified information from the Soviet era, even if it’s just oral history and the spotty memories of long retired experts who were involved in building Soviet era nukes… and as recently demonstrated in the new domestic tactical missile and long range drone development efforts they have the capability to stand up domestic production of complex weapon systems… I think they know exactly how long it would take, they have a timeline, they have a rough idea what it would look like and they probably have a list of potential delivery platforms from their current arsenal… they just probably haven’t started actually, “making anything”
Well that’s kinda awesome to see, at long last it’s coming out of the development pipeline and now there are legitimate solid state batteries in consumer available products…
Interesting to have a more complete picture of how this kind of YouTube scam works, with all the little differences between the normal and the music half of YouTube pointed out clearly along the way.
