Yeah no I get that. I just thought I’d clarify that the first part of your post was way more important than the last part lol.
This meme went around my world super hard like five years ago I think? The correct caption is: “Cargo claim for 77.80”
https://www.reddit.com/r/PhotoshopRequest/comments/3j1330/photoshop_request_overturned_ramen_truck/
That’s the grain itself. The important part is the truck that brings it is messed up.
Fucking hell. I was not prepared for that.
So Tel Aviv’s mayor decided to light up city hall building with the Lebanese flag as a symbol of support (doesn’t really matter if it’s meaningful or not). Same was done after the Paris attack a couple years ago. Naturally all the RWNJ went batshit crazy against it cause why not.
Hard to believe that is real as it is so surreal.
Looks like the opening scene of a disaster movie
“Before the big explosion, you can see in the center of the fire, you can see sparks, you can hear sounds like popcorn and you can hear whistles," Hayoun told The Associated Press. "This is very specific behavior of fireworks, the visuals, the sounds and the transformation from a slow burn to a massive explosion.”
Jeffrey Lewis, a missile expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California, offered a similar assessment.
“It looks like an accident,” Lewis told the AP. “First, there was a fire preceding the explosion, which is not an attack. And some of the videos show munitions what I could call popcorning, exploding like ’pop, pop, pop, pop.’”
He added that “it’s very common to see fires detonate explosives."
“If you have a fire raging next to something explosive, and you don’t put it out, it blows up," he said.
I wonder how long it’ll take to build temporary docks? I assume there are military engineers who specialize in this type of construction.
They won’t build temporary docks, they’ll do permanent repairs. There is no such thing as temporary harbors for ships that big. The short term options are Haifa (won’t happen), offloading the grain at the container port 1 mile away (more expensive, don’t think Russia has the equipment to load it) or trucking in from Turkey (don’t know if the Syrian border is open). If the damage is extensive enough they’ll need to build facilities in Tripoli.
Very much this. My initial reaction on the first watch was “wow some CG genius put this together in a day, that’s impressive”. Then I realized it was it was actual footage.
I don’t think the form of government matters too much when considering countries that are victims of what’s been inflicted upon Lebanon over the past 40+ years.
Sure, price gouging or inflation… But you don’t think that happens everywhere (black market or not) no matter the form of government when the kind of rotten shit that’s been inflicted upon Lebanon happens? I believe that kind of inflation has happened in all forms of government.
Lol price gouging. Must be some psychic store owners. Maybe google inflation.
Lebanon is corrupt and ran on this sort of unholy state capitalism, a bit like Russia. It had a totally insane banking system. People were induced to put capital into Lebanese banks with interest rates of up to 15%, that money was loaned by banks to the central bank, and THAT money was used to pay for government spending. If that sounds like a Ponzi scheme, that’s because that’s what it was. Meanwhile the central bank pegged the local currency, the lira, 1-1 to the US dollar. As confidence collapsed in Lebanese banks, this attempt to defy gravity very predictably resulted in a black market and subsequent shortage in US dollars, which are required to, you know, buy stuff from people overseas who want payment in a currency that isn’t dog shit.
The country is in for pretty awful times ahead, with a collapsing economy, the major port largely destroyed, and the pandemic going on. It will likely become a pawn of regional powers even more so than it already was.
Though I’m anti-conspiracy, I do find it odd that ammonium nitrate seized from a ship 6 years ago was allowed to languish in a port warehouse. That warehouse space is far from free and ammonium nitrate is fairly inexpensive. Apparently some judge looked the other way when notified about the danger or cost or whatever, and it seems like a fair number of officials knew the nitrate was stored there. I suspect the reason it was there amounts much more to corruption and not being able to force its removal for “political” reasons than any plan or attack by a third party.
Pretty good article by someone who once worked at the port.
It seems like even if they were having issues moving it or figuring out what to do with it, they could just announce to like the US, Russia, China, etc that they had it and they didn’t want it, and it would have been removed for them pretty quickly. I don’t think any permanent members of the UN Security Council would want 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate sitting in Beirut forever.
It’s not that rare to have a lot of it. Just a first pass at googling.
Yeah but 500,000 pounds is “only” 250 tons, and only two had that much. But there’s also a difference in having it sit in a Texas warehouse and a Beirut warehouse a few blocks away from warehouses Hezbollah uses.
So how long before Lebanon is a non existing story again? Sad part is that we only seem to care once a disaster hits. When I see how much money could be made available to battle COVID economic effects its a real shame how much of a shithole some parts of the worlds are. You feel helpless. How can you help a country with a utterly corrupt elite? You cant and nobody wants to. It takes a catastrophe to send help without strings attached. I read that the cost of these damages are around 5billion. This seems like nothing compared to expenditures in the west. I mean you could always build a wall for that kind of money. The Chinese probably will rebuild the harbour and use the county as another stepping stone.
And it strikes me as weird that it was stored for 6 years in “prime” warehouse space when it’s the sort of stuff best stored in cheap, unpopulated areas.