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

The Israeli spy agency Mossad allegedly intercepted Hezbollah’s shipment of new pagers months ago and rigged them with high explosives — resulting in the stunning attack on the Lebanese terror group Tuesday, according to a new report.

Mossad agents reportedly placed Pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN), a highly explosive material, inside the batteries of the pagers, sources told Sky News Arabia, according to a translation from the Times of Israel.

The devices were then detonated by an external signal that caused the batteries inside to overheat, the sources added.

* * * * * * * *

Imagine the long-term implications of this. Hezbollah nutcases will never again feel comfortable carrying a pager or cellular phone. At a minimum, the terror group will have to change its buying practices; it appears since Mossad was able to intercept one shipment and load the devices with PETN, they were placing mass orders from a single source. Smart money says that if they keep using pagers, they won’t do that anymore.

There’s always a way around things like this, but now Israel has Hezbollah reacting to them rather than the other way around, which is never a bad situation to be in.

Ace of Spades adds: Hundreds of Hezballah Terrorists Hurt By Online Hate Speech and Israel Remotely Detonating Their Pagers But Mostly by Israel Remotely Detonating Their Pagers.

My only reservation is that any brilliant cover operation can usually only be executed once. You rely on the target not even knowing that your exploit is even a possibility. Once you execute the exploit, your ignorance-based advantage is gone. Hezballah and all other terrorists now know to check their electronic devices regularly.

As with killing the Hamas leader in Iran with a bomb slipped under his bed, Israel is burning through a lot of the covert op tricks it’s been slipping up its sleeve for decades, and these tricks will be unavailable (or at least, less reliable) in the future.

Still, this is a pretty existential fight and I guess Israel doesn’t want to go down holding any of its arrows in its quivers, unused.

This Saturday’s Power Line Week in Pictures will no doubt contain many images assembled from today’s endless amount of social media memes inspired by the exploding pagers.

This exchange should come with its own rim shot sound effect:

UPDATE: Israel “just created an incredibly dense and *up-to-date* social graph of an entire terrorist network, across Lebanon as well as neighboring countries. It is incredible what they just did:”

OPEN THREAD: Tuesday’s groovy.

KAMALA HARRIS SUGGESTS SHE WOULD BE OPEN TO EXPLORING REPARATIONS FOR SLAVERY:

Kamala Harris has suggested she would be open to exploring reparations for slavery if she wins the White House.

The US vice president said the country needed “to speak truth about the generational impact of our history”, citing the legacy of redlining policies and Jim Crow laws as well as slavery.

Ms Harris made the comments during an interview with reporters from the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) in Philadelphia, an organisation Donald Trump also addressed last month.

Asked if she would use the executive powers of the presidency to create a commission to study reparations, she signalled her support for the idea.

“We need to speak truth about the generational impact of our history, in terms of the generational impact of slavery, the generational impact of redlining, of Jim Crow law,” she said.

Related: Kamala Harris is a descendant of an Irish slave owner in Jamaica. Hamilton Brown, from Ireland’s County Antrim, was paid equivalent of €11m in compensation by British government to free slaves after ban.

SPACEWAR: War game reveals Chinese attacks on communications could paralyze Taiwan.

MSNBC: Kamala Must Lie about Being a Liberal and Pretend to Be a Moderate, Just Like Tim Walz Did.

Oops: MSNBC said the quiet part out loud.

Hayes Brown, an MSNBC writer and editor, wrote a new column today, entitled “What to make of Kamala Harris’ move to the center.” It’s an eye-opening observation and/or admission from the Democratic Party’s base. As you likely suspect, the Radical Left views the 2024 presidential election differently than Team MAGA: It’s not about making America great again, but tricking Americans into voting for a candidate who’s out of step with the voters’ ethos, goals, fears, and priorities.

And the role model for Kamala Harris’s trickery? None other than Tim Walz.

“[Kamala’s] attention is now fully on barnstorming the purple areas of swing states,” Brown wrote, “focused less on appeasing the progressive base of the party than on winning over whichever voters are still making up their minds about how to vote in November — or if at all. The result has been a campaign that’s burning through the fuel the base provided when she became the nominee.”

Alas, the only way to attract the middle, it seems, is to forego the wackier, more controversial positions of the Radical Left. In Brown’s mind, it’s a risky tradeoff.

“The goal is to convert that [progressive] energy into enough moderate votes to eke out a win against former President Donald Trump,” Brown noted. “In the process, she has steadily shed the stances she took when vying against 19 other candidates to court the progressive left in 2019.”

Sure, she’s lying and flip-flopping like mad, but it’s for everyone’s good that she does so, so we’ll look the other way when it happens. Dan Rather could not be reached for comment:

PREHISTORIC LOVE NEST? We May Have Found Where Modern Humans And Neanderthals Became One.

MAKE AN EXAMPLE: FBI Visits Man Over Social-Media Post, Regrets Choice.

A CULTURE OF HATE: Imagine, if you will, that Senate Democrats scheduled a hearing on hate crimes and civil rights with a special focus on racist hate crimes. In the middle of the session, a right-wing protestor disrupts the proceedings and shouts, among other things, “fucking blacks!” I have little doubt the MSM would be screaming about it for weeks, including front page headlines and ponderous essays about the purported right-wing culture of hate.

Well…

Today, Senate Democrats (reluctantly) held a hearing on antisemitism and other forms of hate. As Ted Cruz was speaking, a protestor, apparently from Code Pink, came to the floor of the committee room and shouted, among other things “fucking Jews!” I only know about this because someone send me a private IM. No media outrage, no headlines or even coverage in the MSM, and of course, no ponderous essays about how the left has created a culture of hate.

UPDATE: For that matter, if it was a right-wing type who had shouted “fucking Jews” today, and had interrupted a Democrat instead of Ted Cruz, we’d never hear the end of it.

A BIDEN ADMINISTRATION LIE EXPOSED BY KAMALA HARRIS?: The Biden administration has consistently stated that any holdup on weapons shipments to Israel were either routine bureaucratic delays, or to ensure that humanitarian concerns were addressed. Today, when asked by journalists unsympathetic to Israel what she would do to pressure Israel into a ceasefire, she replied that she was “entirely supportive of” “the pause on 2000 lb bombs” to Israel to gain “leverage.”

HMM: New Research Reports Lifelong Benefits of Statin Use in Older Adults, Even for Those Without Heart Disease.

LOL! New Jersey’s Twitter Account Wins the Internet With Possible New State Motto.

I’ll allow it; as somebody who grew up in New Jersey, this seems very much on-brand for the state.

IT’S COME TO THIS: Delta Air Forced to Remind Flight Attendant Hopefuls That They Have to Wear Underwear to Their Interview. “Along with wearing underwear, Delta has also taken the time to remind applicants that they must maintain their personal cleanliness and hygiene and that fingernails must be clean, neat, and trimmed.”

JAMES PETHOKOUKIS: Degrowth: a shrinking argument: The ideology of societal collapse is collapsing.

Easter Island’s collapse is meant to serve as a stark warning to readers about the consequences of unsustainable resource exploitation. . . .

“Chilling.” “Haunting.” Oh, and wrong, it seems.

A new study published in Nature refutes Diamond’s theory of Rapa Nui ecocide. Researchers analyzed genomes from 15 individuals who lived between 1670 and 1950, using remains from France’s National Museum of Natural History. The genetic data revealed no evidence of a strong population collapse before European contact. Instead, there was steady population growth from settlement until the 19th century. The study also found signs of a population bottleneck when the island was first settled around 1200 AD, followed by consistent growth. As one of the researchers put it, “There’s no strong collapse. We’re quite confident that it did not happen.” An outside expert said the analysis “serves as the final nail in the coffin of this collapse narrative.” . . . So what else do the degrowthers get wrong? Quite a bit, it turns out. . . . Degrowth research is pretty shoddy, actually.

Indeed.

A LOOK AT Tesla’s Robotaxi.

TRUTH:

Woman. Y’all wouldn’t even let us keep the BOY SCOUTS https://t.co/Tar4ggli6U

— Oilfield Rando (@Oilfield_Rando) September 17, 2024

WHEN HEROIN HIT JAZZ: Fascination with a deadly drug ravaged a generation of great American musicians.

In postwar America, an epidemic of heroin addiction swept the world of jazz. Greats who developed a habit included John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Miles Davis, and Charlie Parker. Nowadays, jazz has an ambivalent reputation as “America’s classical music.” Americans under 40 are likely to consider it PBS stuff that not even their parents listened to—their grandparents, maybe. In the early postwar years, jazz had a different reputation. The music defined the counterculture, an identity powerfully reinforced by its association with heroin.

Drugs wrecked many jazzmen’s lives. Contrasting with the current addiction crisis, fatal overdoses were rarer, as the product was weaker. (In every year since 2009, more Americans have died from drug overdoses than car crashes.) But the older epidemic was catastrophic, too, when measured in terms of stifled promise.

When heroin hit, jazz’s day was already beginning to fade. The emergence of rock and roll and Motown would soon devastate jazz musicians’ ability to earn a living. After the 1960s, there would be no more superstars on the level of Coltrane and Miles. The music ceased to develop as rapidly and successfully as it had in previous decades, much of the action shifted toward revivals of older forms, and the audience contracted. The musicians didn’t appreciate how little time they had left, and they failed to make the most of it, partly because so many couldn’t shake their addiction to drugs.

* * * * * * * *

Harlem in the late 1940s and early 1950s was a different place from the rural communities devastated by opioids in the twenty-first century. In the current crisis, widespread drug addiction is seen as an effect of decline. In Harlem back then, widespread drug addiction was seen more as a cause of decline. Numerous observers, such as novelist Claude Brown, noted the startling abruptness with which heroin overtook Harlem and jazz in the postwar period. At mid-century, Harlem was teetering, though the cultural capital that the community had built up during its fabled renaissance in the 1920s had not been wholly exhausted and was being replenished, at least somewhat, by the ongoing Great Migration. Some jazz legends were Harlem natives, such as Sonny Rollins, Bud Powell, and Jackie McLean. Those born elsewhere got there as quickly as they could. “You ain’t nothing till you come to New York,” said Coleman Hawkins, a Missourian. New York was where ambitious musicians felt they needed to be. Many also felt they needed to use.

The late 1940s and 1950s were the peak era of heroin consumption for jazz musicians. In The Making of Jazz (1978), historian James Lincoln Collier claims that as many as three-quarters of all musicians used heroin during this period. As for the rate of bona fide addiction, researcher Charles Winick, in a study appearing in the journal Social Problems in 1959, found that, of about 360 jazz musicians he was able to interview properly, 16 percent were “regular users” of heroin. Projecting that rate to New York as a whole meant 700 to 800 working jazz-musician addicts based in the city in 1955. Four out of the six musicians on Kind of Blue (1959), the best-selling jazz album of all time, were heroin addicts at some point.

In the 1970s, numerous prominent rockers became heroin addicts. It takes a special kind of hubris to think that you’ll be able to handle the effects of a drug that Miles Davis (who eventually kicked, but would have further bouts with hard drugs later in his career), Charlie Parker, and Chet Baker couldn’t.

IT’S A TERRIBLE NETWORK STAFFED BY TERRIBLE PEOPLE: MSNBC Columnist Says Routh Was Justified in Wanting to Take a Shot at Trump.

NUT FREE ZONE: Here’s Some of the Most EXPLODINGLY Funny Pager Memes Following Hezbollah Pager Explosions.

WHERE THE RUBBER MEETS THE ROAD: Big Surprise: The Tesla Cybertruck Chews Through Tires Shockingly Fast. “Electric vehicles weigh considerably more than their gas-powered counterparts, with the Cybertruck clocking in at more than 6,600 pounds. Additionally, the electric motors produce more torque off the line, which can wear tires faster if the driver lets their inner child get the best of them.”

WHAT A CREEP: Omnipresent AI cameras will ensure good behavior, says Larry Ellison.

Previously: Google CEO Eric Schmidt Dismisses the Importance of Privacy. “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

IF NOT FOR DOUBLE STANDARDS, THEY’D  HAVE NO STANDARDS AT ALL: Mainstream media, in the march to demonize Tucker Carlson, howled mercilessly when in 2020 Fox filed court papers in a libel suit saying he was not presenting “factual news, but commentary.”

“You Literally Can’t Believe The Facts Tucker Carlson Tells You. So Say Fox’s Lawyers” NPR crowed. Business Insider took the same howling path, headlining their story “Fox News won a court case by ‘persuasively’ arguing that no ‘reasonable viewer’ takes Tucker Carlson seriously.” (Note: that publication’s founder is Henry Blodgett. You know, the guy who pleaded guilty to securities fraud. A paragon of virtue and truth, for sure).

No, it’s never a good look for a media defendant to say “I was joking” ot “it’s opinion not fact,” but lawyers are obligated to provide the most zealous defense they can to their clients.

So how is it that those same people forget that a year before the Tucker case, Rachel Maddow, who said on-air that “One America Network literally is paid Russian propaganda.”

I don’t know about you, but the word “literally” means, well, literally. 

OAN sued and you’ll never guess what her lawyers argued…wait for it… “No reasonable viewer could conclude that Maddow implied an assertion of objective fact.”

Today we have a replay of the same double standard. CNN’s Jake (rhymes with “fake”) Tapper is, along with CNN, being sued for defamation in Florida to the tune of $1 billion after he and CNN aired a wholly shoddy piece, accusing Zachary Young and his security consulting company, Nemex Enterprises Inc., of illegally profiting when helping people flee Afghanistan during the Biden-Harris administration’s f’ed up military withdrawal from the country in 2021.

The court said “CNN argues it did not intend to harm; its language was either opinion or ambiguous.”

That doesn’t sound much like “The Most Trusted Name in News.”

The facts of that case are stunning, some of which are contained here. CNN’s internal communications are an atomic bomb of Actual Malice.

If I were Young, I wouldn’t settle either.

My question is simple: Don’t any of these people own a mirror?

ALL THE VERY BEST PEOPLE HAD ASSURED ME THIS WAS DANGEROUS MISINFORMATION: Vetted Video Shows Ohio Immigrants Grilling Neighborhood Cats.

READER FAVORITE: Apple AirPods Pro 2 Wireless Earbuds. #CommissionEarned

NOT WORRIED ENOUGH TO RECOMMEND AN INEXPENSIVE FIX THAT’S PROVEN TO WORK: Mosquito-borne diseases are surging in Europe — how worried are scientists? “Figures published last week by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) show that there have been 715 locally acquired cases of West Nile virus (WNV) across 15 countries in Europe so far this year, surpassing the number reported in the same period last year and Europe’s 10-year average. As of 4 September, 51 people had died as a result of the infection.”

JOHN PODHORETZ: The Assassination Wish Fulfillment.

On Tuesday, Morning Joe’s Mika Brzezinski introduced a report on the attempt by Garrett Haake, and then when the camera returned to her face, launched into a two-minute history (read off a teleprompter, so therefore pre-planned by the show’s producer and theoretically approved in some fashion by MSNBC’s senior management) of all the times Trump has encouraged violence. She stitched together the genuinely disturbing (January 6 is “gonna be wild,” went the Trump tweet) with the jokey (Trump’s line about how he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it) and the transparently dishonest (that he supported the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville in 2017). The net result was a five-minute segment that, once again, was designed to make you think Trump was asking for it.

Let’s talk tachlis, as we say in Hebrew. Let’s talk straight. The reason so many people in this country seem determined not to consider the profound seriousness of a potential new age of assassination—a return to the destabilizing period that tormented this country and the West between JFK in 1963 and the Reagan/John Paul II attempts in 1981—is that it represents a dark wish fulfillment for so many people.

Donald Trump has refused to go away. He lost the 2020 election and wouldn’t admit it, wouldn’t stand down, wouldn’t stand for a peaceful transition if there could be a chaotic and dangerous one. And the minute the next president began to serve, he began to run again—something no one in his position as ex-president had done from within his own party for 130 years. People hate him. They revile him. They fear him. They despise him. What they would like, more than anything, is for him to go away.

A great many people, and most of the nation’s elites, secretly or not so secretly wish they could see the result sought by would-be killers Routh and Cheeks. And while they know they must pay lip service to the fact that assassinations are bad and wrong and shocking and all that, they simply cannot muster up the emotion of horror. That’s what’s missing here from the coverage and discussions of these two attempts: Horror. Because they’re not horrified.

And they should be.

This is the darkest kind of fantasy, because it can be fulfilled—and the consequences would be unthinkably dangerous for the future of this country.

Those who wish Trump gone think the future with him in it as president for the second time will be a nightmare come true. But they do not begin to grasp the nature of the future in which Trump is removed from life and history with an act of violence that—though they would be outraged at the very suggestion—would be understood by history as an emanation of their dark, raging wish. It would be “the monkey’s paw” overtaking the world.

In the New York Post, Daniel McCarthy writes: Dems’ apocalyptic rhetoric about Trump only increased after first assassination attempt.

Routh took both literally and seriously Democrats and progressives who say Trump is a threat to America’s institutions and the rule of law itself.

“DEMOCRACY is on the ballot and we cannot lose,” Routh wrote in a tweet to President Biden in April.

You can’t lose if your opponent is dead — and if democracy itself is in danger, what conclusion can a desperate man of action draw?

Instead of moderating their rhetoric, Trump’s critics only doubled down after the first assassination attempt.

Days after the shooting, the anti-Trump Lincoln Project was again comparing Trump to Hitler.

On July 19, Democratic Sen. Martin Heinrich called Trump “an existential danger to our democracy.”

As recently as last week’s presidential debate, Kamala Harris accused Trump of “attacking the foundations of our democracy.”

In response, America’s Newspaper of Record is once again doing straight up reportage: