Russians really like raping.

Russian values? I assume he means rape, murder, theft and rape.

Yes, deliberately going after civilians when there is no nearby military target would be terrorism. Attacking a member of a military organization’s chain of command is a legitimate target.

From what I have read, this war keeps dragging on because Israel can’t agree on what to do after the fighting stops. Hamas obviously hasn’t been destroyed and Israel either can’t or won’t do what is needed to destroy them, yet they don’t want to agree to a cease fire either.

A lot of people in this sub don’t seem to understand what the definition of terrorism is. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it is the use of violence against civilians for political aims. Hamas is a paramilitary organization, let’s just call it an army for ease of discussion. There is currently an actual shooting war going on (no cease fire) between Hamas and Israel. Members of an army’s leadership are legitimate targets during times of war.

Now, attacking an army’s leadership in a third country (I’m counting Gaza as country 1 and Israel as country 2 for this discussion) can have big, negative repercussions for the country that does the attacking in the 3rd country. However, this assumes country #3 is trying to remain neutral. Iran is anything but a neutral 3rd party in the conflict. They have armed and trained Hamas for decades as well as threatened to destroy Israel many, many times over 40 years. For Israel, there was no real downside to killing that Hamas leader in Iran.

I may be mistaken. I’ve done some Googling. Wikipedia tells me that Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Yemen declared war on Israel when it was founded in 1947. It ended in an armistice (basically a cease fire). In later years, Algeria and Morocco attacked Israel along with others. In 1979, Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel, it was the first country to do so. Jordan did so later, but I am not sure when. All of those other countries still are technically in a state of war against Israel. I don’t see any mention of Iran being at war with Israel in the past, so I don’t think Iran is technically at war with Israel.

Both Hezbollah and Iran are both at war with Israel and have vowed to destroy Israel many, many times.

I believe there are two possibilities: either an Israeli agent snuck inside the house and planted the bomb or they were able to ‘turn’ someone who has access to the house and convince them to plant the bomb. Either way, it doesn’t look good for the IRGC. Heads will roll, perhaps literally.

Venezuela has access to the internet for their 21st century experiment with socialism and it hasn’t turned out very well.

Emails and Web Browsing work almost instantly around the world, but solid economic data that a central planning agency needs to use to make decisions takes time to gather. This it the core of what Broton33 talks about when he mentions the “lack of perfect information”. As an example, US businesses make extensive use of the internet, yet despite this, the US Government routinely has to revise the economic data it gathers, months and sometime years after the original surveys. Gathering accurate and timely data is hard. Gathering all the information you need is impossible. If you want to learn more, then do a Google search using the terms “Economics Perfect Information”.

As to destroying the planet, yes things are getting warmer, but the free market and the profit motive is also producing technologies that will help cool the planet.

“But from the perspective of a coherent story in a coherent world, ignoring the success in terms of sales, it was cobbled together without a plan, and it shows. It wasn’t until maybe order of the phoenix that she had a plan for how the story would end, and she had to do a lot of hand waving to make it happen.”

“But she wasn’t a good writer. She was mid tier at best. So the eventual success of the series got beyond her abilities. While the last book was much better overall than the first few, it still relied on shoddy world building”

Excellent explanation. The first HP book is excellent. It really sucks you in. After book 4, the quality declines and they become slogs to get through.

This simplest explanation is that JKR isn’t a very good writer. She came up with an idea “I’ll give hard working and ambitious Hermione a time travel device so that she can take more classes in the same amount of time” without thinking deeply about the implications of allowing time travel to exist in the universe of Harry Potter.

House Elves were one of the things that made me realize that JK Rowling was something of a hack. I found it odd that Hermione was the first person in the wizarding world to ever point out that House Elves were slaves and were being treated very badly. In the thousands of years that wizards and wizard schools had existed, no one ever protested the treatment of House Elves? Not even the ‘Good Guys’? Everyone just accepted this over the centuries??

And then she does almost nothing with this potential plot point…

That is a big leap from slide 2 to slide 3. As Broton33 says, one central authority will never have perfect information across the entire market and thus will not “maximally optimize each supply/demand connection”.

Centralized planning has been tried many, many times in the past 100+ years and it has failed miserably every time. Computers and the Internet won’t make it work any better, if tried again in the 21st century, either.

I think the DEA is the only entity at the Federal level that cares about marijuana. Drug warriors are gonna drug war.

The article is light on details, but I am assuming he was a draftee in Vietnam, which means he served for about 2 years. You become eligible for a military pension after 20 years of service. I’m not sure what you mean by “we’ll past social security” - ‘well past social security’ ? If so, He is totally eligible for social security. The catch is, your SS benefits are based on what you contributed when you were working. Again, details are scant in the article, but it sounds like this guy didn’t have many high paying jobs during his lifetime.

Removed by mod

I like the cut of your jib, good sir (or madam).

I found the first part where the guy was digging in the rubble, then later searching the tunnel to be inconclusive. I couldn’t tell who or what was going on.

However, the second part, where the guy is handcuffed in his underwear, surrounded by soldiers, then later on it looks like the same guy being herded through a building… that doesn’t look good. Someone below mentioned a possible prisoner swap. I don’t think prisoner swaps are handled like that.

Does he “claw” the towel? By this I mean he reaches up to the towel and stretches, resting his front paws on the towel, then flexes his claws so that the catch into the fabric of the towel. Then, when he is done stretching, because his claws are embedded into the towel, pulls the towel down?

Wasn’t access to the Hamas tunnels found in a hospital early on in the invasion of Gaza? Also, didn’t the director of said hospital admit to being a member of Hamas?