“To the community of Tumbler Ridge,” writes Altman. “The pain your community has endured is unimaginable. I have been thinking of you often over the past few months.
“When I spoke with Mayor Krakowka and Premier Eby about this tragedy, they conveyed the anger, sadness, and concern being felt across Tumbler Ridge. We agreed a public apology was necessary, but that time was also needed to respect the community as you grieved. I share this letter with the understanding that everyone grieves in their own way and in their own time.
“I want to express my deepest condolences to the entire community. No one should ever have to endure a tragedy like this. I cannot imagine anything worse in this world than losing a child. My heart remains with the victims, their families, all members of the community, and the province of British Columbia.
I am deeply sorry that we did not alert law enforcement to the account that was banned in June. While I know words can never be enough, I believe an apology is necessary to recognize the harm and irreversible loss your community has suffered.
I reaffirm the commitment I made to the Mayor and the Premier to find ways to prevent tragedies like this in the future. Going forward, our focus will continue to be on working with all levels of government to help ensure something like this never happens again.”
I used to attend elementary school on a military base. I didn't feel like a human shield at the time, then again I was more naive and had less life experience than I do now.
You weren’t a human shield. It would have been very easy for the US and Israel to not have blown up a school, the attack was intentional.
Notice they had 0 issues precisely striking the building housing Iranian leadership when this whole thing started. They didn’t “accidentally” hit the grocery store two blocks away.
So you think there was a conspiracy to target a school? Who do you think did it? Why? What was their goal?
I think either an intelligence failure, or a mistake or a miss is more likely. Maybe missiles don't always hit where they were meant to go. Especially if there is anti missile defences (which Iran is likely to have). Maybe Iran anti-air hit the school, or sent a US missile off course?
More than a conspiracy, they actually did attack the school - twice - about 30 minute apart (double tap).
They would have had live video feed from drones, and images sent from the first tomahawk missile for target confirmation. Yhey knew exactly what they were targeting and hitting.
> They would have had live video feed from drones, and images sent from the first tomahawk missile for target confirmation. Yhey knew exactly what they were targeting and hitting.
You sure? IIRC it was one of about 6000 strikes. Was it all a cover to bomb one school?
Forget "rules based order" or any sympathy from US Military/Pentagon/DoD.
When "arabs" bomb "the West" - it's "terrorism". When "the West" bomb "arabs" - it's a "mistake".
Same forces that did laser precision strikes against Maduro or countless military heads of Iran are attacking civilian infrastructure with double tap precision.
I am amazed how since WW2 there wasn't a military coup in USA as many wars from them were against any logic. I guess it just proves year after year, generation after generation that US military from top-to-bottom thinks that they are the only "good guys" and have been brainwashed just as their counterparts (be it Iraqis, Iranians, Chinese or anyone).
It is amazing how readily some people believe we target civilians, often based on the words of actual terrorists.
With this particular incident with apparent US strikes on a school adjacent to a military complex, and formerly part of that military complex, you would think it must be obvious to any reasonable person that we did not knowingly target a school.
And if it was an accident it only gives us more reason to oppose the whole operation. Why should we believe what they think they "know" about uranium stocks or anything else, if they couldn't figure out a building has been a school for 10+ years?
I also wonder if they really should have known by the second or third strike, but I can't readily find whether they had a live visual or anything, so probably did not. Arguably you can't in good conscience strike a target you can't see well, but I'm sure it happens all the time and doesn't usually go this bad.
When terrorists like the Trump administration openly admit to it in some cases and threaten to do it in others, and we see the evidence, it’s easy to believe our eyes and ears over your fantasies.
We are so far past there being any merit to “Israel would never knowingly target civilians/children/hospitals/etc” that you just shouldn’t even bother. Just own it, if your leadership thinks the only winning strategy is the annihilation of another people, or at least their complete displacement, own it. Stop trying to hide behind “it was a mistake” while simultaneously showing you have no issues putting a missile through a singular car window to assassinate people labeled an enemy. Nobody buys it anymore.
For planning Operation Epic Fury, the US military utilized the Maven Smart System, an artificial intelligence software designed to streamline the targeting process and greatly reduce the amount of personnel involved in it. Capable of producing 1,000 target packages in one hour, with the use of the system the US military said it had struck 6,000 targets in Iran during the first two weeks of the war.
...it goes on to say...
The [NYT] inquiry suggested that the school was likely targeted due to outdated coordinates provided by the Defense Intelligence Agency
Advanced rockets bolted onto mainframes guided by data from Palantir.
> For what reason would they attack a single school?
Couldn't it be to terrorise the other side while still being able to claim that it was a mistake? Remember that the school was hit by three distinct strikes.
"The Shajareh Tayyebeh girls' elementary school in southern Minab was attended by both boys and girls, taught on separate floors.[9] According to locals, the school was previously a military facility.[10] Its location was near[c] the Sayyid al-Shuhada military complex which included the headquarters of the Asif Brigade of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy (IRGCN).[13] As of early 2026, the school had existed as a civilian institution more than 10 years, close to but separate from the IRGCN compound."The Shajareh Tayyebeh girls' elementary school in southern Minab was attended by both boys and girls, taught on separate floors.[9] According to locals, the school was previously a military facility.[10] Its location was near[c] the Sayyid al-Shuhada military complex which included the headquarters of the Asif Brigade of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy (IRGCN).[13] As of early 2026, the school had existed as a civilian institution more than 10 years, close to but separate from the IRGCN compound.
For more than ten years. That's Palantir caching for you.
military bases are targets. I don't know how you jump from that to victim blaming like little kids had a say in where to build a school or where to go to school or whether to shoot rockets. it's a tragedy.
Sure. But when they're next to schools, you try to avoid the school or school hours. Not doing that isn't just mean, it's strategically self defeating.
Today on several news media were a story that people of Iran were called by the government and formed human shields at the bridges and power plants that Trump threatened to bomb if no deal reached by the deadline.
No it's not. International law is generally exceptionally clear that one war crime doesn't justify another, and using civilians as human shields is about as core a war-crime as war-crimes get.
> The prohibition of using human shields in the Geneva Conventions, Additional Protocol I and the Statute of the International Criminal Court are couched in terms of using the presence (or movements) of civilians or other protected persons to render certain points or areas (or military forces) immune from military operations.[18] Most examples given in military manuals, or which have been the object of condemnations, have been cases where persons were actually taken to military objectives in order to shield those objectives from attacks. The military manuals of New Zealand and the United Kingdom give as examples the placing of persons in or next to ammunition trains.
The situation in Iran is not this. The suggestion was that humans might volunteer to go to non-military sites.
As an extreme hypothetical, are humans living in their homes acting as human shields for those homes? How about people at school? How about people parading on a bridge? Does it become different if someone threatens to blow up a bridge and people parade there in response?
Eh, the quoted text, and also the literal text of the Fourth Geneva Convention, Article 28 [1], doesn't qualify "certain points or areas" as only "military sites". While the other side should only be attacking military sites I don't see how that could possibly justify protecting non-military sites with human shields.
> As an extreme hypothetical, are humans living in their homes acting as human shields for those homes? How about people at school? How about people parading on a bridge?
Generally speaking I read this as not, because they aren't being "used to" render those points immune from attack, they just happen to be doing so. Hypothetically if you were to rush civilians back to their homes in an evacuated town to protect it from an attack - or as you suggest organize parades on bridges that are threatened - that would seem to meet the "used to" requirement.
Article 54 gives some sites that may not be attacked. Maybe a protected person cannot render at least those sites “immune” since they are already immune.
When Lithuania was fighting for independence from USSR civilians gathered around key government buildings to protect them. in a sense they were human shields as none of them were armed. but they did it voluntarily. this happens when you threaten total annihilation of your homeland.
how do you know that iranians are forced to do this now by their government and not doing this in support of their country? do you think there are gunmen taking them to the bridges?
It was a government call. I grew up in USSR and know very well how those government "calls to volunteer" work in totalitarian regimes. Especially in a wartime country where even in peacetime they would kill people even just for being incorrectly dressed.
Anyway, as i said in the other comment, it is actually not that important how all those people got there. The key thing here is that it was a deliberate government act of human shield creation.
what a coincidence i too grew up in USSR and my parents and friends were part of above mentioned human shield. And i can tell first hand that there was no coercion. just call to action.
Threatening total annihilation was possibly the dumbest move Trump could have made.
“ Soldiers when in desperate straits lose the sense of fear. If there is no place of refuge, they will stand firm. If they are in the heart of a hostile country, they will show a stubborn front. If there is no help for it, they will fight hard."
Look at recordings from other totalitarian regimes - enthusiastic people doing government bidding. The key is deliberate act of human shield creation, not the specific way to do it.
Uh oh, that toilet looks pretty heavy, how much does that thing weigh? Will the extra weight be worth it during reentry? Or will the crew push the whole thing out the airlock on the way home?
I wondered why the Artemis crew module weighs twice as much as the Apollo module after 60 years of scientific progress and developments in materials science and aerospace engineering, now I am starting to understand. Plastic bags "worked", not great but they are super light, essentially you are not going to get much lighter than a plastic bag for containing and disposing of waste. On the other hand, that toilet looks insanely overbuilt, how strong do you need the seat to be??
Maybe they can position the astronauts behind it for use as a last-ditch heat shield.
This story reminds be of the tale where during the space race the Americans created a super space pen that works in zero degrees kelvin and vacuum, and the Russians used a pencil.
Correct me if I'm mistaken, but weren't pencils ruled out by NASA because of the dust they create when they write? The toilet engineering could be a similar situation. These people are professionals, we should not assume they built it like this for no reason.
My secondary school physics teacher was somewhat accommodating to "interesting" experiments - those which might look cool to teenagers whilst also providing a lesson in physics.
One of those was attaching electrical probes to each end of a pencil, and applying an electrical current. Graphite conducts extremely well: the pencil "lead" (actually graphite) heats up, glowing a bright orange colour, whilst setting fire to the wooden pencil surrounds. If you snap the graphite "lead", you can touch the two ends together causing a bright electrical arc.
It's a great physics demonstration, and graphite conductivity is the reason pencils aren't used in zero-gravity environments.
While we're at it, let's think the rest of the way through, and consider the marginal effect that additional transportation cost has on price and therefore both the supply and demand side, shall we?
To prove or disprove your hypothesis, we can look at historical gas prices.
In today's dollars (adjusted for inflation) the US average gas price stayed below $2.75/gal from roughly 1986-2002. Then they broke through that barrier, only ever going below it again for two brief moments in 2016 and in 2020. Most of the time since, they've been well above $3.50, and above $4 sometimes. [1]
If you're right that demand for gasoline is highly elastic, meaning people adjust their demand in response to price, then since gas prices got much more expensive, we should expect that gas usage decreased. Have we seen this? (No. [2]) Of course we haven't, because somewhere between 63-67% of people in the US and Canada live in car-dependent suburbs.[3] These cities and towns, in addition to most rural areas, are fundamentally car-dependent and cannot function without daily car use by a majority of residents. The only way for our society to consume less gasoline would be mass electrification of private transport.
And notably, even the recent increased popularity of EVs in the post-Model-3 era isn't manifesting in the data [2] in the form of decreased consumption to my eyes. Perhaps for every new BEV out there not using gas, five people traded the cars they used to drive for inefficient, huge SUVs.
Nice, but maybe you need to travel more! The USA and Canada is not representative of the wider world. Also, demand elasticity in USA/Canada suburbs is again not representative.
So we're not proving or disproving anything by focusing on that narrow view. I can understand, if you are in it it seems universal, but as I like to reflect, You Are Not The Only User.
Also, I think demand elasticity is more relevant in the short term, I think the costs shake out eventually. Especially when you are talking about pipeline or major infrastructure level changes in capacity, that can have major regional pricing ramifications, shall we say extreme. I think I need not elaborate, given current events in the Persian Gulf.
There seems to be some confusion around the basis of morals.
Once you are in power and you have things arranged the way you want, you claim that violence is not the answer.
Otherwise, practically speaking might makes right.
So for Greenlanders and those opposed to the US imperialism, it makes sense to say that the rule of existing law must prevail, regardless of the fact that there is no traditional military willing and able to back this up.
However, if you are American and you stand to benefit, what you want to happen is backed up by the most powerful military the world has ever seen.
And I bet a good chunk of people in Greenland know that with no roads and no infrastructure, they can go toe to toe with the US military inland, that is until they stop getting shipments of grain. But can even the vaunted US military blockade this continent sized island, especially with zero allies in tow?
So morally speaking, both parties are in the right. But you can predict what the outcome would eventually be, it is very much David vs Goliath, barring Greenlandic alignment with another foreign power in a proxy war.
Ethically speaking, the chronic under development and under investment in the global North is not beneficial to humanity. Viewed from afar, it does seem that Denmark has not been handling this colonial remnant particularly well.
Depends what you mean by large areas. Most of it is an kce sheet, the interior is uninhabitable and the habitable sections are hundreds of miles apart.
Depends what I mean with large areas? Ever been to Greenland?
Greenland is about 25% of the US excluding Alaska, the ice sheet covers 80% of that.
This means that the ice free area of Greenland is a bit larger than California. Thats the third largest state in the US. I would say that is a large area.
I think what I mean by colonial remnant is "administration and control from afar", not "subjugation of indigenous peoples", and it's concerned with what's happening now, rather than what happened 1000 or more years ago and it's no longer particularly relevant. By remnant, I mean that it's administered by Denmark as a byproduct of a colonial gold rush, not because they are the best entity for that job.
USA had its own legislative assemblies too before the declaration of Independence, look what happened.
The vikings landed there, not Denmark, who were Norse, Erik the Red was from Norway (But was considered by then an Icelander exile?). Before Danish control Greenland was a Norwegian colony, this was the colony that died out.
Norse colonisation tended to reflect their origin e.g. the Norwegians colonised the north west of Scotland and Iceland, which were more similar to Norway; Danes went to England and Normandy which were more southerly, flatter and more fertile, much like Denmark; the Swedes with their long Baltic coastline turned their attentions eastward.
Denmark got the North Atlantic islands through the union with Norway, and retained them after Norway became independent.
I know, but that was much later and had a very different dynamic, due to climatic changes etc.
The earlier Norse colonisation of Greenland seemed to consist of farmers and independent settlers, mostly via Iceland. In some areas, they never interacted with Inuit, or rarely.
The later effort seems more focussed on Christian missions to the natives, and commercial whaling and sealing.
From the 1600s to immediately after WW2, Battleship meant roughly the same thing, not "fast armored ship with big guns", but literally "Ship fit to stand in the line of battle". So yeah it's not a WW2 fast heavily armed and armored Iowa class, but those are obsolete, so we should be happy.
If the guided missile cruiser is now the biggest meanest surface unit, I'm fine with calling it a battleship.
Also, if gun caliber and armor plate thickness and speed, etc are less than the Iowa class battleship, the above still stands. It just means that the state of the art in what the biggest baddest ship is has moved on.
The aircraft carrier in many ways already became the new battleship in 1942, and existing battleships became effectively second rate in the sense that a fleet aircraft carrier smokes a battleship, it still does.
Another way to think about it is that guided missile cruisers are kind of another evolution of the aircraft carrier, they launch large numbers of missiles at much less cost.
Of course, the reality is much more complicated. It's unclear how useful guided missile classes and nuclear powered aircraft carriers will be in a standup full blown major power fight, aircraft carriers have sure been nice for asymmetric warfare in relative peacetime.
I'm not sure if people realize this, but Iran suffered more than any other nation during WW2, including Poland, Japan, the Philippines, China, and that's saying something. As a neutral country, I believe they have had something like 25% fatality rate during the war.
This can be seen as the knock on effects from the downfall of the Persian and Ottoman empires, and to a greater extent the destruction of the Persian civilization as the leader in the Middle East, replaced by the British and later American empires.
Water depletion and failure is but one small symptom of their civilizational decline. These issues wouldn't have been circumvented by better planning, it was to some extent written in the sky that this would come to pass. How can they support the needed infrastructure spending and policy goals, not being a leading global power? For example, not being able to control inflows from neighboring countries, or have the USD or trading partners available to pay to import food.
An apology means a lot, I appreciate it. And hope that it can mean change.
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