This Milei guy is the gift that keeps on giving, every day we hear about something foolish or unintentionally humourous that this clown did. Poor workers of Argentina, having to deal with this guy's terrible economy.

So true

That introduction is too much, I can't watch the rest.

The mining stories are the stuff of nightmares. Part two, the second article linked at the bottom of the first one, describing an unofficial rescue operation, is horrifying.

Individual damage isn't that bad because it seems to be six main warheads, that then split up into 6 sub-warheads/submunitions each. So the submunitions are quite small. If it were a nuclear payload, it would only be 6 nuclear armed warheads, not 36. Still incredibly devastating to be hit by six nukes.

Though 36 submunitions, and six submunitions per target, from one missile is quite a payload. Just firing 6 missiles for example, allows you to hit 36 targets, and each target is hit with 6 submunitions, for a total of 216 submunition hits. That's quite cost effective if you think about it.

I was going to make a post on it, but then with the expansion of the de-electrification campaign in Ukraine by Russia (I think Odessa is still without electricity), the response by NATO to directly attack Russia, within it's internationally recognised borders, using NATO weapons that have to have their flight path programmed and loaded onto Ukrainian warplanes by NATO military service members, and then the response by Russia to deploy a previously unknown Conventional Prompt Strike weapon in the Oreshnik IRBM in Ukraine, it's been a lot of news to try keep up with, and I forgot/didn't have time. Here's an article for anyone interested:

Stilfontein’s dangerous and desperate illegal mining industry, GroundUp Media, 18 November 2024

The part about the fake countries is so true in a way, especially with regards to South Africa were so many got illegally stripped of their South African citizenship and forced to live in the "bantustans" during apartheid. It's a seperate issue, but it just shows how fickle the identity of a state can be when the government decides that they don't want you.

The media thing is maddening, what I find more insidious than the outright right wing media which is mainly treated as a joke, is so called liberal/progressive media, often funded by NGOs, that's centre left to left wing on internal issues, but takes a hard right, pro USA/NATO swing on foreign policy issues. Looking at the "Daily Maverick" in particular.

Technically it's an IRBM (Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile) as it's designed to operate over shorter ranges.

But yes, much of the same technology used in ICBMs, especially with regards to multiple re-entry vehicles and a MIRV bus/post boost vehicle that deploys the MIRVs. MIRVs with submunitions is a new technology though.

In South Africa we have over 4000 of illegal mine workers, who are mostly foreigners, currently besieged underground, and a lot of people, including government officials, are talking about "smoking them out", and not providing them with any food or water until they come up from underground and face arrest or worse. Thankfully the police did provide them with ARV medication a few days ago.

I can see how the current situation in Lebanon and Syria would unfortunately produce more xenophobia.

The Brits are also on the ground in Ukraine helping the Ukrainians load Storm Shadow/SCALP missiles onto their aircraft, as admitted to by the Germans during the leaked Taurus phone call. These missiles have been fired at command bunkers within Russia's internationally recognised borders. So we literally have British military personnel programming and loading missiles onto Ukrainian aircraft, modified with parts from British aircraft, to fire at Russia.

This xenophobic brainrot has penetrated very badly in South Africa unfortunately. Glad to hear that it's not made it to Iraq yet.

Six seperate Re-entry events, with 6 submunitions per event is what I estimated. So 6 MIRVs, and each MIRV has six submunitions each. We know that Oreshnik is likely an evolution of the RS-26 ICBM/IRBM, and that Oreshnik uses parts from the R-30 Bulava SLBM.

I did a comment on it earlier.

https://hexbear.net/comment/5660045

For anyone wondering why you would use parts from an SLBM (Submarine Launched Ballistic Missile) for a ground launched IRBM or MRBM, I have thought of two possible reasons. The first being that SLBMs make use of astro-inertial guidance, which corrects inertial guidance errors with celestial navigation, using the position of the stars to fine tune the inertial guidance system after launch. Stars are a fixed reference point in the sky/space, which can then be used to calculate the position of the missile. This gives you a highly accurate, self correcting inertial navigation system that cannot be jammed. Second possible reason is that SLBMs make use of a MIRV bus, also called a post boost vehicle, that's more suited to operating at shorter ranges and more lofted trajectories compared to that same component on ICBMs.

Still some really cool clips of a stage 2 seperation of the Soyuz rocket though. You can see it in the first clip in the telegram link. First at 17 seconds in, then again at 1:35.