allergic to BS

🇮🇳 Indian films outperform Australian ones at the Australian box office.

You cannot "Welcome to Country" men and women who have already paid the ultimate sacrifice, as if they are foreigners in the very land they defended. You cannot claim diversity is our strength while paying lip service to a performative ritual whose very words exclude everyone else as outsiders to that country. You cannot claim indigenous history is to be revered while promoting the erasure of Australian history by denying its rightful recognition. Australia is a land of many unnecessary contradictions. The longer this continues and society remains fractured, the faster others, far removed from any care for either side, will take advantage for their own ends.

On July 4, 1982, Philip Habib, Ronald Reagan’s personal envoy to Lebanon, sent the following report to Washington, DC: “Johnny Abdu told me that the Israelis have now secured the agreement of Amal leader Nabih Berri to move into his area without a fight. Included would be Shia-controlled regions of southwest Beirut such as Burj al-Barajneh and Shiyyah. Johnny said he did not know the timing or exact details of the operation. These were to be worked out between Barri, the IDF, and Bashir Gemayel.” The IDF is the acronym for the Israeli Defense Forces—the Israeli army that was then besieging Beirut in the wake of the 1982 Israeli invasion. If Nabih Berri was indeed cutting deals directly with the Israelis at the time—their minister of defense then was Ariel Sharon, no less—then perhaps he should explain why he so adamantly opposes direct negotiations between the Lebanese state and Israel today. Why were backdoor arrangements by his Amal militia during the war acceptable, while formal negotiations now between Lebanon and Israel under American auspices are framed as treason?

🇱🇧🇮🇱 For years, Hezbollah's threat to Israel came with a simple mental image: a warehouse full of rockets and a finger hovering over the “launch everything” button. Crude, overwhelming, and terrifying in a very blunt-force way. That version of the problem hasn’t disappeared, it's been upgraded. Hezbollah is estimated to still have thousands of rockets and missiles, even after a war that chewed through stockpiles and an Israeli campaign that made a sport out of blowing them up. Short-range rockets for saturation, medium-range systems that can reach deep into Israel, anti-tank missiles waiting for any ground incursion, and anti-ship weapons. That alone is enough to keep northern Israel on edge, but rockets are yesterday’s nightmare. Today’s headache comes with wings, a camera, and just enough intelligence to make Israel's multi-billion-dollar defense system sweat. Enter Iran’s favorite export: drones. The kind that loiter, watch, wait, and then slam into something expensive. Hezbollah isn’t just receiving these systems anymore. It’s learning how to build them, tweak them, and mass-produce them locally. Which means this isn’t a supply problem Israel can bomb away. It’s a manufacturing problem that regenerates. Here’s how the future fight looks: Rockets go up first; loud, messy, designed to overwhelm and distract. Air defenses light up, radars turn on, and interceptors launch. Then the drones come in. Some scout, some jam, some just wait patiently for something valuable to reveal itself, and then they dive. It’s not brute force anymore, it’s layered harassment with a brain. Israel still holds the technological edge. Its air defenses are among the best on the planet, its intelligence is deep, and its ability to strike back is unmatched in the region. But even the best systems have limits, especially when they’re forced to play whack-a-mole against something cheap, persistent, and increasingly local. That’s the shift. Hezbollah is no longer just a rocket army. It’s becoming a hybrid force that blends old-school saturation with modern, Iranian-designed precision nuisance. Not powerful enough to win a war outright, but clever enough to make every day of one painfully expensive and unpredictably dangerous.