Thanks for joining The Alligator News Roundup for Friday, September 20, 2024.
Before we start, I cannot ignore the announcement from Kate Middleton, Princess of Wales, who has finished her regimen of chemotherapy. According to the Hollywood Reporter, Kate says she is ready to return to work.
I am not precisely sure what a princess does in the line of work, but my guess is it involves lots of smiling, waving and speaking graciously while being dressed impeccably.
At any rate, I am delighted with the news. Speaking of which, here we go.
Number 5. Axios. 9 killed, thousands injured in Hezbollah pager explosions.
Close readers of the ANR have observed that I eschew hard politics, where people die or are injured (or exhibit dementia). This one, however, is too rich to pass up.
On Tuesday afternoon some 5,000 small, old-school pagers owned by Hezbollah actors in Lebanon blew up, all at the same time. Apparently, terrorists use the low-tech devices because there is no software to hack. Thus, they are safe.
Think again.
How do people carry pagers? Generally, on a belt or in a pocket. According to this article, this means hundreds — more probably, thousands — of patients across Lebanon “were being treated for injuries to their waist and crotch areas.”
Ouch.
The common wisdom now seems to be that Israel’s Mossad intercepted the shipment of pagers from a manufacturer. The suspicion is there was a small quantity of C4 or other explosive material packed into the tiny cases, and they were detonated by a universal page at a specific time.
As a counter-terrorism measure, it’s fairly brilliant. Cold-blooded, to be sure, but that’s the lay of the land. Exploding pagers are as creative as they are horrific, and as tightly targeted as they are creative.
And then this follow-up from CBS: More deadly device explosions reported in Lebanon day after Hezbollah pagers explode. This one involved walkie-talkies, about 450 of them. Same low-tech type of machinery with low-tech type of explosives.
This means that potentially 5,450 Hezbollah terrorists have been severely wounded, almost all of them in a… sensitive area. People who carried these devices were, in most cases, males of military age. They reportedly used these in order to avoid being hacked, tracked and attacked by Israeli Intelligence, aka Mossad.
Guess that didn’t work out too good.
I will be interested to see future video footage of surviving victims attending meetings a year or two from now. Probably some limping going on, maybe some canes or crutches. And perhaps some… ahh… long-term reduction in the number of new recruits available for the next generation.
With reference to the 40-year-old technology used, a new Babylon Bee headline reads: BREAKING: Israel kills thousands more terrorists with exploding ‘200 free hours of AOL’ CDs.
Number 4. NBC News. Brazil says body is that of ballooning priest.
In April, Rev. Adelir Antonio de Carli tied himself to a thousand helium-filled balloons and left this earth. For the last time, it would seem.
Launching from Paranagua, a Brazilian coastal city, it seems the priest was intent on raising money for a ministry to truck drivers. He wanted to fund a rest stop and a worship center.
These are noble aspirations which probably would have been much appreciated. But when the priest went up, the wind changed, he moved out to sea over the Atlantic, and two months later a tugboat recovered his body.
A sad day for the priest, those who knew him, and the truckers he would have served.
But, seriously, a thousand helium balloons??? For a fund-raiser exercise, it makes the traditional bake sale and silent auction look better all the time.
Number 3. The Gateway Pundit. Eco-Chaplains are helping people process climate grief.
This is a report on a story by NPR about how a new spiritual discipline is ministering to a new brand of suffering. Self-appointed chaplains, says the report, “are working at the intersection of climate, grief and spirituality… [They employ} one-on-one therapy sessions, online climate grief circles and in-person support groups…”
The focus is on people who suffer “grief, anxiety and burnout” due to their fears surrounding environmental issues. Apparently, climate anxiety is defined as “a chronic fear of environmental doom.”
Personally, I live in chronic fear that I will be forced to attend a climate grief circle. But I freely admit I am burned out on environmental issues.
“As long as the earth endures,” said the Lord to Noah, “seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.”
I suppose the climate anxiety comes from the notion that if we have our way with the earth, it WILL no longer endure, and thus we will have successfully nullified that passage in the Bible. So, through our planetary misbehavior, we pulled a fast one on the Lord, we did.
I would be very careful in presuming that ANY passage in that Book can be nullified by ANY of our behavior.
Number 2. Popsci dot com. Kids who use ChatGPT as a study assistant do worse on tests.
Well, here’s a shock!
Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania studied 1,000 high school students to assess whether ChatGPT’s artificial intelligence helps them learn math.
Spolier alert: It doesn’t.
If the question is whether they can solve math problems better with Chat’s assistance, that would be a yes. But if the question is whether they will know how to solve other math problems without Chat, it is a “probably not.”
Students who used a “hints and tips only” version of Chat scored almost exactly the same as students who simply dived in with paper and pencil and ciphered the answers.
It is illuminating to see this paragraph in the study:
ChatGPT’s errors also may have been a contributing factor.
The chatbot only answered the math problems correctly half of the time.
Its arithmetic computations were wrong 8 percent of the time,
its step-by-step approach for how to solve a problem was wrong 42 percent of the time.
If offers a new appreciation for those 3 guys with the slide-rules and skinny black ties in Apollo 13.
Number 1. YouTube. He Spent $5 million On A Tank Called Jumbo.
Theodore Rentzos, CEO of Ram Europe, built a serious fire-fighting tank.
Based on the 40-ton Leopard 1 fighting tank, this tracked vehicle carries 4,000 gallons of water, has a cruising range of 250 miles and can run 40 mph. It is built to bust through virtually any obstruction in wild terrain.
The water cannon can direct a focused stream of water at 500 gallons per minute.
CEO Rentzos’ machine has been approved for use in Greece. Now, he would like to export it around the world. The original military Leopard tank was designed by Porche and built in West Germany.
I think our local volunteer fire department could use one of these for brush fires in the Flint Hills of Kansas. We would probably make the evening news.
There may be some slightly increased maintenance costs, such as replacing all the asphalt on Main Street after every dispatch. But that’s the price one pays for progress!
Thanks for joining The Alligator News Roundup. Watch out for exploding pagers. If you get one free in the mail, I suggest you not even turn it on. Just re-gift it to your neighbor instead. Have a good weekend!
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