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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • The second one is more like what the original razed 17th century mosque looked like. Deng was the one who gave orders to open fire in Shadian, he’s not good guy liberal here. Mao’s strategy was to yell at people to be atheist. Deng’s strategy was a religious red light district. Keep it alienated from secular society, make the mosques look like they were air-dropped from Saudi Arabia instead of having been there for 500 years, and give people the choice to be religious or Chinese but not both.

    Starting before Xi China realized that wasn’t working, especially in Xinjiang, so the new strategy was to integrate. That means less of Deng’s “laugh at this weird foreign religion” architecture and more of “respect China’s history of patriots who are Chinese first and Muslim second.”


  • “Other devices” means manually-emplaced munitions and devices including improvised explosive devices designed to kill, injure or damage and which are actuated manually, by remote control or automatically after a lapse of time.

    It is prohibited to use booby-traps or other devices in the form of apparently harmless portable objects which are specifically designed and constructed to contain explosive material.

    “Booby traps and other devices” is one legal thing, there’s no legal distinction. Pager bombs are always a war crime regardless of circumstances.




  • They don’t treat launch water, it runs off into the wetlands through open ditches. The SRBs that the Shuttle and SLS use are 100-ton bricks of perchlorates that contaminate and acidify water for miles every time there’s a launch, so treating the direct runoff is deck chairs on the Titanic. Kennedy Space Center is already a Superfund site, so they focus on things like underwater fencing to stop KSC fish full of teflon and cadmium from being eaten by normal fish.




  • alarmed social media executives warned the new administration that the Pentagon had been trafficking in COVID misinformation

    The military argued that many of its fake accounts were being used for counterterrorism and asked Facebook not to take down the content

    Sounds more like the Pentagon did tell them so they could whitelist the Pentagon trolls from getting banned. Then social media companies got nervous that the troll farm was sloppy and going to get caught by someone not under NDA sooner or later, and a new admin was an opportunity to lobby to get out of this bad PR situation.











  • China missiles filled with water, not fuel: US intelligence

    Somebody fucked up the actual story somewhere along the way. A normal problem with liquid ICBMs like a DF5 is tiny amounts of water contamination in propellant. N2O4 is meant to sit in a missile for months but if even just the humidity in the air gets in to it, it forms nitric acid and corrodes the missile. That happened to US ICBMs like the Titan II constantly and the US never reliably stopped it, they just switched to solid fuel. If contractors cut corners building a silo water contamination causing corrosion is the first thing that would go wrong. Meth heads siphoning rocket fuel and trying to replace it with water and dying instantly in a massive explosion didn’t happen.