One, watching the rolling campaign of exploding Hez electronic devices I cannot help but think about the wisdom of checking the sourcing of critical components of civilian and military infrastructure. Given current Chinese military and strategic doctrine, I would think twice about using a Huawei broadband router.
Two, surprise, surprise, the Fed is going to do a rate cut. Who had that on their bingo card, less than 50 days before an election? Note that it won’t have much of an effect on the economy before November, but the news of the cut and the resulting short-term bump in the stock market will crowd out any negative news about the economy. Once again economic and fiscal policy yoked to short-term political objectives.
The story within the story is that the “best economy ever” needs to be goosed.
Three, one of the issues that’s driving the high-stakes nature of this election is something no one is talking about, control of the archives. Politicians and bureaucrats may lie to you, they may eventually destroy the records (see: Hillary and the Hard Drives), but what records do exist rest on some elements of truth. It is those elements that are keys to the kingdom of the Deep State.
You can think of the Kennedy Assassination files or stuff at Langley, but it could be even something as mundane as records at the State Dept. dealing with Iran or NAID and COVID. What were the Twitter Files but the release of archival material from the private side detailing government censorship? There’s a lot of stuff they really don’t want to see the light of day,
The counter-argument to this is that Trump was already president and nothing happened then, so why should we expect anything now? Yes, Trump is on his Revenge Tour, but things really escalated when RFK, Jr. endorsed him because it is this guy who has built his whole public persona on uncovering conspiracies.
Whatever Trump’s intent, the Deep State and DC in general see this as entering the Thunderdome part of the election, two enter but only one leaves.
Orwell pointed it out first;
It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.
Similar records suggest that ‘red guards:” also had many young women leaders
A recent article in The Spectator deals with the rise of the “Keffiyeh Karen’s in the workplace
https://thespectator.com/life/rise-keffiyeh-karen/
In regard to the compromised electronic gear, two links:
One from Powerline which deals with in part some of the logistics that might have been involved. Pretty remarkable stuff. I had suspected that not only was the shipment intercepted en-route was replaced in total.
Also regarding the security of China-sourced devices, see this from Stephen Bryen, “Korea Gets Rid of Chinese Security Cameras at Military Bases
I read that the Hungarian government has denied that any such factory exists, that the supposed supplier was a trader only. This would align with the pagers being a well known Taiwanese brand. Hezbollah probably bought them from Mossad which would make it easy to apply a little customization en route. Hezbollah is used to paying multiples of usual prices to get around sanctions. Probably Mossad made a decent profit on the deal.
MCS: “Probably Mossad made a decent profit on the deal.”
That would be fun. But my guess is that — using however many witting or unwitting cutouts — Mossad offered Hezbollah an amazing deal, a real “Low Bid” from a new supplier who was seeking to get into the market. Hez honchos realized that, for their budgeted amount, they could purchase many more pagers than they had expected, and put those pagers into the hands of their most loyal supporters. Who could say no?
And then the supplier said — I could give you a good deal on encrypted radios too.
If a deal sounds too good to be true it probably is
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2024/09/more-on-operation-grim-beeper.php