“I think that today, the priority is that we return to a political solution, that we stop delivering weapons to fight in Gaza,” Macron told broadcaster France Inter. “France is not delivering any,” he added during the interview recorded early this week.

Who is “we” here, if France is already not delivering weapons?

Israel had time to get its jets into the air so I wouldn’t be too surprised if evacuated hangars were not a high priority for the missile defense system.

I disagree with you, because a modern human could offer the people of the distant past (with their far less advanced technology) solutions to their problems which would seem miraculous to them. Things that they thought were impossible would be easy for the modern human. The computer may do the same for us, with a solution to climate change that would be, as you put it, magically ecological.

With that said, the computer wouldn’t be giving humans suggestions. It would be the one in charge. Imagine a group of chimpanzees that somehow create a modern human. (Not a naked guy with nothing, but rather someone with all the knowledge we have now.) That human isn’t going to limit himself to answering questions for very long. This isn’t a perfect analogy because chimpanzees don’t comprehend language, but if a human with a brain just 3.5 times the size of a chimpanzee’s can do so much more than a chimpanzee, a computer with calculational capability orders of magnitude greater than a human’s could be a god compared to us. (The critical thing is to make it a loving god; humans haven’t been good to chimpanzees.)

I don’t think you’re imagining the same thing they are when you hear the word “AI”. They’re not imagining a computer that prints out a new idea that is about as good as the ideas that humans have come up with. Even that would be amazing (it would mean that a computer could do science and engineering about as well as a human) but they’re imagining a computer that’s better than any human. Better at everything. It would be the end of the world as we know it, and perhaps the start of something much better. In any case, climate change wouldn’t be our problem anymore.

The article compares coal and natural gas based on thermal energy and does not take into account the greater efficiency of natural-gas power plants. According to Yale the efficiency of a coal power plant is 32% and that of a natural gas power plant is 44%. This means that to generate the same amount of electricity, you need 38% more thermal energy from coal than you would from natural gas. I’m surprised that the author neglects this given his focus on performing a full lifecycle assessment.

Natural gas becomes approximately equal to coal after efficiency is corrected for, using the author’s GWP20 approach. GWP20 means that the effect of global warming is calculated for a 20 year timescale. The author argues that this is the appropriate timescale to use, but he also presents data for the more conventional GWP100 approach, and when this data is adjusted for efficiency, coal is about 25% worse than natural gas.

I’m not an expert so I can’t speak authoritatively about GWP20 vs GWP100 but I suspect GWP100 is more appropriate in this case. Carbon dioxide is a stable gas but methane degrades fairly quickly. Its lifetime in the atmosphere is approximately 10 years. This means that while a molecule of carbon dioxide can keep trapping heat forever, a molecule of methane will trap only a finite amount of heat. This effect is underestimated using GWP20.

Edit: Also the Guardian shouldn’t be calling this a “major study”. It’s one guy doing some fairly basic math and publishing in a journal that isn’t particularly prestigious.

a full-scale total war in the middle east, possibly even beyond that

Who else would enter the war on Iran’s side? It doesn’t have any powerful allies among the other Middle Eastern countries, which rightly perceive it as an ideological rival and a would-be regional hegemon, and its proxies appear to be doing as much as they can already.

I think Iran is vulnerable because it overplayed its hand. Thus a war now may be better than dealing with Iran as a nuclear power later.

Despite media speculation, Israel is not currently planning to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities, according to four Israeli officials, even though Israel sees Iran’s efforts to create a nuclear weapons program as an existential threat. Targeting nuclear sites, many of which are deep underground, would be hard without U.S. support. President Biden said Wednesday that he would not support an attack by Israel on Iranian nuclear sites.

I wonder what the strategy here is, given that the USA also wants to prevent Iran from having nuclear weapons. Is the implication here that the USA will not enable an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities as long as Iran doesn’t actually try to build a bomb? How confident are Israel and the USA that Iran can’t build a bomb in secret? Is there a way Iran could retaliate against an attack on its nuclear facilities but not against an attack on other major targets?

Doing things like this when you’re certainly being recorded is a great idea. Wait, hold on…

The IDF is saying no Israelis were wounded. I’m seeing reports of explosions in populated areas, but the people there would have had time to get to shelters. I’m hoping that this has been like the April attack, but I think we can’t know with confidence until enough time has passed to see the full picture.

Well shit. Unless there has been another miracle interception, things are going to get a lot worse now.

Are you implying that Israel’s much greater number of attacks are because they are doing really tiny attacks or something?

No, I’m just saying the graph is probably useless. Israel definitely is launching more and larger attacks, because that’s how you win a war. Ideally Hezbollah would be launching zero attacks because Israel launched the massive number of attacks necessary to cripple Hezbollah. A little red bar, then a big blue bar, and finally no red bar at all.

Israel is doing bigger strikes with less concern for civilian casualties.

Is this a joke? Hezbollah usually attacks with unguided rockets. This demonstrates zero concern for civilian casualties. Less than zero, actually, because the intent of the attacks is to cause civilian casualties. Relatively few Israeli civilians have died because Israel is successfully defending them, not because Hezbollah’s policy regarding Israeli civilians is different from that of Hamas.

A cease fire in Gaza would achieve this.

Even if that is true (and it would only be true in the short term) then Israel would still be foolish to make major concessions to its persistent enemies when it has the military power necessary not to. Meanwhile Hezbollah would be more inclined to launch future attacks because it would see that they worked.

I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make by counting the number of individual attacks. In a war, you want to be attacking the enemy while preventing the enemy from attacking you. To the extent that this chart is meaningful (and I’m not sure it is, given that it does not take the size of an attack into account) it’s just showing that Israel appears to be fighting Hezbollah effectively - Israeli victory would mean reducing the red bars to zero.

That’s what usually happens during a war… Hezbollah is effectively the army of Lebanon. The fact that Lebanon’s government does not officially call it that does not change the reality on the ground.

She’s single, you know…

Meanwhile Simba has a perfectly good mother.

Let’s put the issue of Israel aside and consider slavery in the USA before the Civil War. There was plenty of oppression but effectively no resistance. The deadliest slave revolt (for white people) involved about 60 casualties before all the slaves involved were quickly captured and executed, and this revolt was so out of the ordinary that it shocked the nation. Almost all human beings do not in fact rise up against their oppressors when they think that doing so will just get them killed. When there’s no power vacuum left by a weak central government, an organized insurgency has no room to form and so people will tolerate anything.

The idea that human nature includes an unquenchable flame of defiance may be appealing but it is simply false. Otherwise we’d see insurgents in North Korea.

You hold the common belief that insurgency is motivated by revenge, but history does not support it. The historical record is full of extremely brutal conquerors who faced little to no sustained resistance after their initial invasion. It’s harder to say what does lead to insurgency but it appears to be simply the weakness of the central government, regardless of its brutality or lack thereof. (Local cultural factors are also important but they are not decisive.) The example of the USA in Iraq is illustrative: the USA overthrew Saddam Hussein with relatively little loss of civilian life and ended his brutal practices. One might think that Americans really would have been greeted as liberators, but in fact they faced a far more persistent insurgency than Hussein ever did.

The American victories over Germany and Japan in the second world war involved massive civilian casualties, including from deliberate indiscriminate attacks against population centers. Despite this, American occupation of both countries had none of the problems that the occupation of Iraq did, and in fact the USA was able to turn both countries into strong allies during the lifetime of the people who had experienced the war. The difference seems to be that the USA co-opted existing power structures in Germany and Japan, whereas it dismantled Hussein’s power structures and then failed to rebuild its own.

One relevant example of an invader actually triumphing over an insurgency is Russia in Chechnya, where Russia was extremely brutal. Israel faces a similar challenge but with far more restrictions on its treatment of the Palestinians (despite many critics’ foolish use of the word “genocide”). I’m not sure that Israel will succeed, but if it fails then that would not be because of the reason you expect.

It disrupts the ability of Hezbollah and its allies to respond to an invasion, but it also might be enough on its own to convince Hezbollah to back down. A simple ceasefire would accomplish Israel’s objective against Hezbollah (whereas it wouldn’t against Hamas) so an invasion of Lebanon isn’t inherently necessary.

It’s good to see Israel’s intelligence apparatus function effectively. I hope disrupting the chain of command starting from the top will make a ground invasion of Lebanon unnecessary. I also hope the conclusion that Iran’s leadership comes to is that they are themselves personally quite vulnerable in the case of a direct conflict.

Must have been the wind.