Trump_is_Mentally_fit

Assad’s prospects began to deteriorate, almost unnoticed at first, amid the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah in the aftermath of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack. By decimating Hezbollah’s leadership and destroying much of its military capability, Israel undermined an essential pillar in Assad’s security infrastructure. Syria’s other benefactors, Iran and Russia, had become distracted meanwhile by problems elsewhere, including Moscow’s war against Ukraine.

Washpost: Amid a rebel offensive that stunned the Syrian regime and led to major losses of territory, the 42-year-old man leading it made a surprising strategic decision: He used his real name. In an official message Thursday after its fighters entered Hama, the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) Islamist militant group shared a message that was signed Ahmed al-Sharaa — the birth name of a rebel leader better known by his nom de guerre, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani. Get concise answers to your questions. Try Ask The Post AI. The move marks a broader shift for Jolani. Once a shadowy figure who rarely showed his face, Jolani served time in a U.S. prison in Iraq before becoming the commander of an al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria’s brutal, multipronged civil war. Even now, there is a $10 million U.S. reward for information that leads to his capture. But in recent weeks, Jolani has become the public face of the most successful rebel advance in Syria in years, credited as the driving force behind a stunning offensive that captured Syria’s second-largest city, Aleppo, from forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Good point on the land lines. Maybe Israel played some sort of role in helping initiate this. And Anything that reduces Russia’s reach is a good thing, especially if it hinders their submarine operations

With that DNA they can get a pretty good idea of all his racial and ethnic traits which might lead them in the right direction or help eliminate false leads.

---- In October, SpaceX successfully “caught” Starship’s first stage, Super Heavy, proving the massive system can be reusable. That suggests a dramatic drop in launch costs and could make Musk’s dream of a Mars colony a reality. “Big step towards making life multiplanetary was made today,” Musk celebrated on X. It was a big step as well toward the Pentagon realizing its plan to build a rocket transport system that can shuttle troops and weapons to Asia within 90 minutes if a war breaks out with China. The Air Force awarded SpaceX a $102 million five-year contract in 2022 to develop such a system. Bingen, the former Pentagon undersecretary, said it can take two to three weeks to resupply forces in the Western Pacific through traditional methods. This delay has figured into Washington’s concerns that Beijing could invade Taiwan, a geopolitical flash point, so quickly that the United States would not have time to come to its defense. “How do you deliver supplies to a heavily denied environment? One way to do that is launch a rocket with the equipment and munitions you need, and have it land in a contested operating environment,” she said. One dilemma there, however, is how to ensure a rocket cargo shipment flying downward is not mistaken for something else — say, a nuclear ballistic missile. “We would not want to create confusion,” Bingen said. “These would be space launch vehicles, launched from very different locations from where we launch our nuclear missiles.” Starship rockets could also potentially enable the U.S. military to head off a brewing war by rapidly assembling a show of force overhead, Henry said: “I can show a potential adversary … do you really want to go to the next level? Hopefully, they take their toys home, and we bring ours home.” Peter Klupar, former director of engineering of the NASA Ames Research Center, said executives and officials are still getting their heads around how the Starship breakthrough will change technologies as we know them. “People are behaving like it’s 1999, and the cost of lift is $100,000 a kilo,” he said. “We’re headed to a place where the cost of lift is going to be $100 a kilo.”

You think they catch him? If they have his DNA I'd guess that eventually they will, but who knows. Maybe he fled the country

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/12/07/musk-mars-technology-us-national-security/ By Eva Dou and Aaron Gregg Amused observers have long dismissed Elon Musk’s dream to colonize Mars as unserious science fiction. But in his pursuit of the Red Planet, Musk has managed to build a deadly serious business with vast military consequences. Security experts say SpaceX has leapfrogged so far ahead in several critical technologies that it could deter major rivals like China from engaging in a war with the United States — or tip the balance if one breaks out. Others worry that it could provoke an untimely response. Musk is in the first camp. In recent days he has remarked on X that his ambition to send crews to Mars as soon as 2028 would result in “alien-level technology that is crushingly better than competitors,” along with making an oblique reference to averting a war against China. That prospect may not be imminent, but it has become the focus of U.S. defense preparations as China rises. Technological prowess is one reason SpaceX’s value has jumped to around $350 billion from $210 billion earlier this year, according to a recent Bloomberg report, pegging it as the world’s most valuable private company and most valuable defense contractor. Another likely reason: investors’ belief that Musk, the world’s wealthiest man, could find it easier to further enrich his business empire after aiding the campaign of President-elect Donald Trump. Musk has said he founded SpaceX to get to Mars. His advanced satellite system Starlink — which he has said he set up partly to fund Mars expeditions — has proved to be a killer app on battlefields for steering next-generation drone swarms and coordinating troops. No other nation is anywhere close to matching the capability. The company’s massive Starship, the most powerful rocket in history and the first reusable heavy-duty one, is likewise in a class of its own. Even as Musk has touted its potential to help humanity explore the cosmos, the Pentagon is eyeing its 165-ton carrying capacity for rapid transport of troops and gear to Asia in case of war. Gen. B. Chance Saltzman, Space Force chief of space operations, traveled to Texas last month to watch the latest Starship launch and review the company’s operations. “The Department of the Air Force and the U.S. Space Force are monitoring Starship’s progress and look forward to potentially leveraging its capabilities in the future,” the Space Force said in a statement. At an investor gathering last month, one of SpaceX’s early investors, Ron Baron, recalled SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell once telling him that “one of the only things that’s preventing my grandchildren from speaking Mandarin is SpaceX.” Shotwell backpedaled the remark on camera — “No, that was very bold of me” — but confirmed she believed SpaceX is “very important” for U.S. national security. SpaceX, Shotwell and Musk did not respond to requests for comment for this article. Todd Harrison, a space policy analyst with the American Enterprise Institute, said it would probably take China 10 years to develop a rocket with carrying capacity like Starship’s, giving the U.S. military a window of exclusivity. Gary Henry, former SpaceX senior director of national security space solutions, said he believed the next-generation military applications that can be built from Starlink and Starship will serve as deterrents that may prevent China from risking a war against the United States. SpaceX has constructed Starlink, the world’s largest satellite network with about 6,400 satellites, in just five years, unlocking new capabilities for the U.S. government in encrypted communications, surveillance and next-generation drone warfare. The recent revelations of the “Salt Typhoon” hacks, in which Chinese government hackers deeply compromised major U.S. phone and internet networks, has underscored Starlink’s value as a new airborne network circumventing traditional data “pipes.” The U.S. government has already shifted some communications to Starlink’s encrypted government service, Starshield. Although satellites are not immune to hacking either, Starlink’s equipment is manufactured in the United States, a rarity in the globalized telecommunications industry, providing less opportunity for a foreign hacker to intercept and tamper with gear. Aside from its consumer internet service, Starlink is building out a next-generation network of surveillance satellites for government use, jostling with more established players like Maxar Technologies and Planet Labs. Industry experts say the company is on track to build the world’s first system able to monitor all spots on Earth continuously in near real-time, revolutionizing reconnaissance. This is so true: “Future wars are all about drones & hypersonic missiles,” Musk posted last week on X. “Fighter jets piloted by humans will be destroyed very quickly.” ---- Some ideas about these capabilities run counter to hard-won historical insights into the logistics of land-based warfare. Earlier this year, Maj. Brian E. Hamel wrote in Army Sustainment, a U.S. Army periodical, that satellites could even be potentially loaded with cargo needed by soldiers in a war against China, ranging from weapons to food to blood transfusions. The supplies could be released at the right point in orbit, he wrote, surmounting the “tyranny of distance” and challenging the conventional wisdom that the United States could never sustain an occupation of the Chinese mainland. “The entire satellite could fall back to Earth or just eject the desired payload,” Hamel wrote. Beijing has expressed displeasure at the U.S. satellite advances as it races to build a similar system. China Military Online, a media outlet run by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, has fretted that Starshield may be able to conduct detailed reconnaissance of other nations and intercept foreign communications: “The entire Earth will be wrapped in a large web.”

Casing are the spent round and live rounds have not been fired yet? https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/12/06/unitedhealthcare-ceo-shooter-nyc-backpack-gun-brian-thompson/ NEW YORK — The masked gunman wanted for this week’s ambush-style killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was seen walking into a bus terminal less than an hour after the crime and is presumed to have escaped the city, police said Friday. Sign up for Fact Checker, our weekly review of what's true, false or in-between in politics. New York Police Department investigators also found a distinctive-looking backpack that the suspect wore during the fatal encounter and apparently tossed while fleeing through Central Park to an upper Manhattan bus station Wednesday morning, according to a law enforcement official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a sensitive process. NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny said in an interview that investigators were trying to determine what bus the suspect may have boarded at a Port Authority Bus Terminal location attached to the George Washington Bridge. Kenny described the gunman’s frantic relay uptown, stitched together from video footage, to the station more than seven miles from the shooting site. Detectives have been combing feeds from city-operated cameras and private surveillance systems around-the-clock, officials said. Kenny said his teams have not been able to get a hit from facial recognition technology that can sometimes lead law enforcement to a particular witness or suspect, making the effort even more difficult. Investigators have been mapping the gunman’s whereabouts over a 10-day visit to Manhattan during which he stayed at a hostel where he paid in cash and did not talk to his roommates, according to police. After gunning down Thompson, the suspect rode a bike through Central Park, ditched it around West 86th Street and Columbus Avenue on the Upper West Side and took a taxi uptown to the bus hub that services Greyhound, N.J. Transit and other lines. Cameras also helped police determine that on Nov. 24, the morning the suspect arrived in New York on a Greyhound bus, he spent a half hour near the New York Hilton Midtown on Sixth Avenue where Thompson died on his way to a company event. The developments in the high-profile homicide capped the third day of the NYPD’s investigation into the stunning events that transpired around 6:45 a.m. on Wednesday, launching police on a manhunt and an aggressive effort to retrace the suspect’s moves through the city’s vast network of surveillance cameras. Investigators are awaiting DNA results from items that may have belonged to the suspect, including a water bottle and a burner phone abandoned near the crime scene.

So ethanol stays, I guess. Conservative big government at work fleecing you, the consumer.

So, just to be clear, any charges, legal actions or other punitive measures that might be taken by Trump against General Milley for his high level contacts with China in those days of the 2020-21 transition would be just be totally wrong, an abuse of power and other such un-American actions, correct? Just yes or no will do

Hopefully it won't happen again. But following him up with a drunk womenizer is not the answer. Plenty of good Republicans available who are good and decent people that can do the job. Is Trump mentally challanged. Why pick so a damaged canidate? Because he is a super TV person. He lives for the TV. He's is one of those people. Childish and stuck in front of a TV all the time

That's stupid. He had cancer Sexual predators, drunks, simple propagandists should not run our military, but you could care less. Are you one of those people that spit on the troops? Ya, I showered with her, too! (She was much older) So what? Jealous?

Which episode? The Kremlin plant Paul Manafort? The meeting with Russians at Trump tower? The wikkileaks Kremlin job? Or one of the many many other episodes of the treasonous Trump Putin love fest

He sick, right? He's a much better man than the clown trying to replace him. Much better. Lloyd Austin has a serious resume, and not as a Fox News propagandist. Our Troops deserve better, not for clown show that you protect for political reasoins at the expense of our troops. Imagine a sexual predator in charge of our military. No way

Should ethanol be a target?

Who is "they" and which Russian thing? Trump and company had so many "Russian things" you need to be more specific. If you can...boy

Oh, I should lay off the sauce?? 🤷‍♂️

Come on, the guys a disgrace. With so many able, qualified people out there who are serious professionals, we can do better. He had cancer, right?

I thought I saw that he shot him in the legs first. This was a crime of passion. This guy personally hated that CEO

Is this clown still around? His mommy should just tell him to step down. I mean, I'd love to watch the conformation hearings and all, but this guy's nomination is hanging by a thread

Man, that jobs report sure shows he is leaving Trump a fine economy, with low unemployment, roaring stock market, inflation getting under control. So if the economy is any measure, Biden was sure successful I've always thought Franklin Pierce was worse. He was the guy right before Buchannan. He is the guy that signed the Kanasa-Nebraska Act into law, which actually started a civil war in Kansas which only kept escalating Oh, and side note, hey @Irv How are you post while on the run? I know that was you in NYC wacking that CEO

I got my money on it being something like a child died and his company had previously refused to pay for some treatment.

Think I have to award the win here to the secret service guy. He beat back the attack

That's a good point. And that point does extend to stocks, also. Tesla is up 28,000 % since like 2016, as an example. I don't own any bitcoin and probably won't. The regular stock market is, and has been, pretty much on fire fore years now, so there is money to be made all over the place. Bitcoin benefits from all the publicity it gets.