Texas National Security Review

The Covid/cancer angle got the most attention in the mainstream press, but among some of the theorists I follow on Twitter, the general take is that 5G does not really have much application as a consumer technology (do people really need to be able to download 4K movies in 2 minutes on their mobile phones?). It does, however, have numerous applications in ubiquitous high-res video surveillance, autonomous weaponry, and the like. https://tnsr.org/2020/11/the-u-s-navys-loss-of-command-of-the-seas-and…

Google is surprisingly shit today, actively pushing current events over historic ones despite search filters (weirdly reminiscent of LLM attention issues and biases to recency). I’ll see if I can find the primary ones, they are from the archives after the Soviet collapse. Secondary reading: Adrian Chen, “The Agency,” New York Times Magazine, June 2, 2015, and Peter Pomerantsev and Michael Weiss, The Menace of Unreality: How the Kremlin Weaponizes Information, Culture and Money, New York: https://tnsr.org/2022/09/whats-old-is-new-again-cold-war-lessons-for-c… Institute of Modern Russia and The Interpreter, 2014. https://css.ethz.ch/content/dam/ethz/special-interest/gess/cis/center-…

I am pretty sure in case they thought you were actually connected to actual terrorists you would be with a bag over your head and on your way to god knows where before you could say extraordinary rendition. The fact is countries detain people all the time for a variety of reasons. I am not saying it's right, it just is. In general it's a bad plan to put yourself in the hands of your opponents, especially if they are not very big on human rights and the rule of law. Hostage diplomacy is very much a thing[1]. In general though I would think for most westerners it would be rather safe to visit the UAE, I think it's fairly aligned to the west and unlikely to detain people just to make a fuss. [1] https://tnsr.org/2021/11/caught-between-giants-hostage-diplomacy-and-n…

But artillery barrages don't delivery 100% of their payload in the first round. If your building is hit with the first round, yes you'll be dead. But there will be a second, third, fourth, fifth, etc. round coming and many people could get to better, more survivable locations, before those impacted. In the book "With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa" the author talks about being under artillery fire in an open area. >"To be shelled by mass artillery and mortars is absolutely terrifying, but to be shelled in the open is terror compounded beyond the belief of anyone who hasn't experienced it." It is estimated that Seoul would have 2-4 minutes of warning of an NK barrage due to the artillery shell flight time. Having 2 to 4 minutes to get anywhere other than an open area is valuable. A NK artillery barrage on Seoul would be horrific and devastating but it wouldn't kill everyone. > One early examination of the problem, by Bruce Bennett of the RAND Corporation, finds that circa 1995 the KPA may have been capable of firing as many as 200,000 long-range rounds into South Korea on the first day of a conflict—and that even a short 3-to-5-minute artillery barrage into the Seoul metro area could cause as many as 7,500 civilian casualties—with the total fatalities rising much higher if North Korea continued the attack. An analysis from 2012 by Roger Cavazos finds that a North Korean artillery attack on Seoul could produce around 30,000 fatalities. And a recent study by…

> This is a slick visualization and agree with your point. I feel ZIRP for such an extended time period was nuts and it was responsible for the asset bubble, let weak players survive and supported more risk taking. I think it might also end up being important to remain competitive in a global market where the other economic superpower's government is willing to invest trillions into building whatever it wants and needs despite profitability[1]. Some things we want/need won't be immediately profitable, or even profitable in the long run. They might not even be things we realize we need until something unprofitable is researched and developed. Not saying that Snap is something we need, but if the US is forced to strictly rely on market forces to compete, "free" capital via low/no interest rates is a way to kind of do it. [1] https://tnsr.org/2022/12/chinas-brute-force-economics-waking-up-from-t…