Who are these articles for?
They are for the cops, for the reactionaries/rightists, for the imperial state, they are attempting to avoid being targeted by disavowing. Also I guess part of liberal norms policing, liberals detest un-sanctioned violence. To reign in any impulses among their base to maybe sympathize with this and similar acts which might in the end result in them questioning liberalism as a whole.
It's more like flag this to vendors of automated facial recognition software. Get every Walmart, every Target, tons of third party vendors to look for a face matching this one and send hits on to the FBI. The FBI then requests more footage if they fit, they then run gait recognition on the new surveillance and the footage they have. They then narrow down where the person lives and shops and focus in on it.
So it's not that they have every sidewalk and street under cameras. It's that a normal person has to go out into places with cameras eventually. Some people can avoid it more than others like those who work from home full-time, pay to have groceries home delivered, etc. But eventually they may slip up, they go to the hardware store (Lowes and HD are huge on surveillance) for a home repair or to the bank to fix an account issue or whatever. You basically have to live completely off-grid OR you have to be like Gene Hackman in Enemy of the State, constantly aware of where cameras are and avoiding them or taking measures to prevent them seeing your face like hats, not looking up, face masks, etc.
There's also ALPRS cameras to worry about if you drive any significant distance. At least placing you at the location and without an alibi as to why you were there it does paint a target on your back as being of higher interest. Obviously doesn't apply if you live at the university, have an alibi for being there regularly (student, employee), or live in the area and can use an ebike or scooter or something without plates to do big legs of travel (though if you use a rented e-scooter they're probably pulling tracking data from those for that area and payment details to scrutinize it).
Should have found some way to cover lower face or worn a latex whole face mask. Shirt at least looks like the kind of thing you can get at any thrift shop or one of those tourist kitsch places for cash so not easy to track down on that basis.
Unfortunately enough of the face is present for facial recognition potentially if the quality of the pictures is good enough (idk).
Wear a gaiter then. Not a medical mask. They'll think you're a pro operator or gardener.
Assuming Luigi is the adjuster. They 100% used illegal NSA surveillance techniques and parallel construction to get him. The phone call never happened, the backpack and other stuff was all planted.
They could have evidence that nails the shooter dead to rights in open court and just not know it or have announced it yet. They might have had their cell phone on the entire time but cops are going to take some time to track down all phones in the area and start looking more closely into those that were in the shooting area and either had no reason to be there or subsequently left the area. Needless to say anyone whose phone places them in that building as well as everyone normally in that building without a quality alibi of being elsewhere is going to be a suspect for some time to come if they don't find anyone else and they're going to be surveilling everyone but especially those with non-reactionary political beliefs for months to years. This is the type of thing they'll have someone from the local cops working on for at least two years even if all the trails go dead, just hunting down whoever was there, trying to find a slip-up. Given who he was FBI will probably also have at least one person working this for a year or more.
So it all really depends on how much evidence there is. Did they leave DNA they're certain belongs to the shooter (e.g. ruling out all other normal people who might have reason to be there for innocent reasons by testing them)? Do they have video with a clear shot of their face? Fingerprints? Do they find the weapon? Cell phone trace. Bragging about it on an 'encrypted' online chat that the NSA has monitored which causes them to home in using parallel construction and maybe just murder them in a raid? Does someone convert to become an Evangelical in 2 years and they saw the shooter and come forward to the cops to give a sketch and info about distinctive clothing they were wearing? Lots of things could happen.
behind closed doors they're making fun of him for getting shot
Leadership maybe. Rank and file Evangelicals are sobbing and baying for blood. Maybe they forget him after next week's outrage comes out, maybe not but they're definitely not making fun of him and he will remain in their minds a martyr of left intolerance no matter who the eventual shooter turns out to be IF they are even caught. There are definitely groyper types, Nazis, terminally irony-pilled ultra-online reactionaries who are doing that but I don't think they make up anything approaching a majority in the Republican party.
So afraid of debating Hasan he hired an assassin to kill himself to get out of it and gain sympathy rather than suffer the humiliation. His only orders were "I don't want to see it coming, but make sure my kids see it, don't want them turning into libs".
Assume probably military training or they're some sort of militia type or at least serious gun hobbyist who has been practicing at the range for years and years with scoped long-guns.
obviously.
However I wonder if they'll use this specifically for targeting universities for a crackdown. Trump could order them all militarily occupied "for the safety of conservatives". He could pressure and bully them into "diversity of thought" or shoveling drooling reactionary propaganda down the throats of every course in the curriculum while censoring and chilling effecting anyone to the left of Reagan into silence or weasel wording in the course of that. I just wish it had been anywhere else given the target already on them as spaces for organizing for Palestine.
Also a thought I had on crackdowns and fear. Nixon was afraid of people protesting him and people upset about the environment but that was off a decade of assassinations against the left and he didn't have the interest in hard military crackdowns that Trump does nor were the bourgeoisie at the time or empire for that matter amenable to it after the bad PR capitalism got from the civil rights era. More than that the left was already militant at that point and there were real communist militia movements with actual ties to revolutionary states and the USSR. Right now it seems empire and bourgeoisie are 100% down with crushing the left and don't give a damn what it looks like because they're also deploying unpopular tariffs that result in people globally hating the US anyways. So they're in full bad-guy mode without the restraint they operated under doing the cold war with the soviet union I feel. So this will be a welcome excuse to turn up the pressure. Yes they would have done it anyways, but it allows them to speed things along and get decorum loving Democrats on-board with the crackdown instead of offering feeble resistance.
This might spiral into an even more nakedly oppressive police state and nothing else. Then again there's a chance with increased repression enough Democrat voting liberals get sick of the do-nothing responses from the Democratic party and radicalize a bit. We've not been closer to something big happening in 50 years probably but what that big thing is, hard to say. Americans are like the British in their incredible ability to just take abuse after abuse without revolting but the more confused the empire is, the more its eyes wander towards its own belly the less time they spend looking further afield.
Honestly if it encourages big companies to drop Joe Rogan and the like and replace them with AI that would be pretty funny because he commands a lot of money so obviously it would be preferable to replace him with something cheaper even if it has to be a dozen somethings.
Also the only group of people I could see this consistently working on would be reactionaries who just want to be spoon-fed rage bait and the same repetitious nonsense over and over again. You could probably make a bunch of reactionary political podcasts and get a ton of boomers and such subscribing to and paying for them. Might need to pay Twitter to license raw input content for the right amount of reactionary stuff but it seems totally doable. They all talk about the same thing and you could just have your hosts invent things to be outraged about and that would work too.
Nepal is located between India and China. India has just moved closer to China dashing western hopes of pitting them against each other for the moment. The strategic value of controlling it for the US is sky high.
Ukrainian false flag surely?
Or some sort of Ukrainian hijinks as Russians wouldn't want to do that.
If they hit Poland intentionally I have to figure they'd use high precision cutting edge hypersonic missiles and make the strike count as a big "fuck off" type move (or at least something debilitating like taking out a big base, aircraft, spy agency, war manufacturing) rather than this kind of low end stuff that the Ukrainian terrorists love doing. Why risk getting into a war with NATO by delivering some tiny munitions on easily intercepted conveyances? I'd get it if Poland say sent some NATO drones to attack Russian troops as a tit for tat but given Russians haven't mentioned anything of that happening and given their tendency to turn the other cheek I doubt that too.
People give the atheist movement shit and dunk on it too hard. These people never stopped being a problem. If you can believe in magical shit like that you can deny material reality and your own interests all day too.
It got co-opted and turned into gamer-gate and Jordan Peterson anti-muslim enlightened west stuff (though a lot of people just checked out or moved onto other liberal or left causes too so only the reactionaries and grifters remained giving a false impression) but it started out with very real and deserved objections and anger towards very deranged people with absurd nonsensical and dangerous magical beliefs that were widespread and trying to worm their way into everything. On a national level I feel the whole Evangelical thing kind of hit pause after Bush left office and Obama replaced him, they receded in favor of racism, the tea party, libertarian weirdos on the national stage and didn't accomplish that much on the state level either for a few years. So liberals and leftists assumed for some reason they were some 90s relic that we didn't need to worry or think about anymore. But they never went away, they just kind of sat in the back for a bit nursing their grudges and biding their time and now they've won the repeal of Roe and many other things.
Now we kind of see the fruits of this stuff with RFK jr and the other dangerous anti-science woo. The covid denial would have happened regardless because of the interests of the bourgeoisie to sacrifice workers to keep profits flowing and the reactionary individualistic self-centered culture in the US. But I feel like a lot of the things we're now seeing could only grow as quickly as they have in soil made fertile by YECs, made fertile by people crying about ground up babies in vaccines as part of the anti-choice movement, made fertile by the Christian right and their ridiculous conspiracies and satanic panic that started in the 80s, and made fertile by the Christian right's all out attacks on the trustworthiness of science as a concept in order to attempt to bring down evolution and biology (as well as geology which also debunks YEC pretty strongly).
The thing is, (Evangelical) Christianity is a pillar of the control of the bourgeoisie within the empire. It's ready-made Gladio. A huge series of interconnected human networks of frothing, reality denying, violent, armed, aggrieved feeling fascist families and individuals. They live among us everywhere. They're politicians at the state and local level yes. But they're also teachers, they're also small business tyrants, they're also warehouse workers, they're also tech workers. They have eyes and ears everywhere. They believe in the protestant work ethic which should be called the happy slave's work ethic because that's what it is. They gulp down dubious tales spread on zuckerbook and reinforce each others reactionary nature and beliefs constantly, weekly. Hucksters on TV and the internet called TV evangelists reach those who can't or won't go in person to a church every Sunday, making nice pocket change and hammering home anti-materialist thinking, selfish thinking, self-righteous, aggrieved thinking.
Biblical giants existing and being found in Afghanistan by US troops is a goodie and an oldie to spring on these types.
It's almost like Trump's angry, threatening schtick actually produces results of cowwing the world into submission. It -might- accelerate a push into de-dollarization and loss of hegemony and the growth of the power and influence of BRICS and SCO but then again those probably were happening anyways and the US might just see this as its last chance to use the last of its strength to maximally shape the world as much as it can before anyone dares stand up to it. To set the chessboard up in a good condition. If so we can expect over the next 4-6 years lots more wars or "interventions" as the propagandists call them in Latin America and Africa to topple unwanted governments and install puppets in place for the final push and war against China by which time they'd prefer China is maximally isolated and the west's holdings are maximally high.
Sometimes chaos is the plan too. That and a bully sometimes just wants to make an example of those who defy them. Simply throwing the government into chaos, removing the figurehead of popular support and intimidating some people who were toeing the line on loyalty to considering flipping to support the US in a future push could be a goal on its own and one which would pay dividends. They then work overtime to rig the next election or create some scandal for Maduro's successor to plummet his support and push in a neo-liberal or Arcee type sell-out down the road who weakens the coalition, sets people about fighting one another and dismantles guardian institutions and removes loyalists. As we've seen with Syria and Bolivia among others not everything is a quick, clean, sudden coup. Some are very slow moving.
They don't need satellites. They have Automated License Plate Recognition Systems by evil companies like flock that have laughably dystopian stated goals like "creating a crime free world" by tracking every vehicle everywhere and creating a national searchable database of ping points that they passed. And they're expanding wildly, explosively year over year in the number of these they have deployed.