Zoraptor

Ultimately it always boils down to Us vs Them, and Israel is incontrovertibly Us so far as the vast majority of political elites in the west are concerned. For that, Ukraine doesn't matter, at all. Whatever Israel has done previous* criticism has been extremely muted, if present at all. If it weren't Russia, it would be China, if it weren't China it would be someone else. As an obese former flying ace with a penchant for women's clothing observed, it's easy, effective and extremely tempting to use fear to manipulate the population wherever you are. Elites always need enemies and if one is not apparent it will be invented. (Dunno how successful the UK government has been. Designating Palestinian Action as big t Terrorist and having Brave Bobbies regularly arresting 80 year old grannies among the thousands of others for literally holding signs has been an international embarrassment moderated only slightly by the domestic media not being able to say outright how stupid it was because, of course, that would be... Supporting Terrorism. Now, just imagine if it was Russia doing... actually you don't have to imagine, because Russia has an equivalent law and we've seen the media reaction to them using it the same way) *excluding 1956, but that was mostly the US/ USSR wanting to make sure Britain and France were permanently Broken as world powers, Israel's invasion of Egypt was pretty much an afterthought and it was only the US part of the west objecting.

Didn't take Israel very long to start abrogating the agreement. The Palestinians are meant to have 72 hours to return bodies (specref:part 4; and also the Hebrew text published in Israeli media), or give all the information they have on them and Israel is already refusing to open the Rafah crossing, halving the trucks allowed in and, quelle surprise, killing more civilians returning to their homes based on them not returning bodies. "Israel Agrees To Go Back To Killing Palestinians On Less Frequent Basis" indeed. Don't think Ukraine made any difference to be honest. You'd have hoped, if Europe's 'ideals' were actually ideals, that a campaign of indiscriminate bombing, collective punishment, mass destruction of civilian infrastructure, mass detention, mass torture, systematic sexual violence as part of that torture and mass starvation would garner some sort of functionally negative response whoever was carrying it out. There's no reason to think it wouldn't have got crickets without Ukraine, and several reasons to think Ukraine should have actually galvanised a response from them if only to avoid embarrassment at the obvious double standard. Id est: it was a highly embarrassing comparison having Ursula and Kaja (but notably, not Josep) burble on about the indiscriminate Russian bombing campaign in Ukraine while tacitly applauding/ being silent about Israel doing far worse in Gaza; or complaining about Putin and Lvova-Belova being accused genocide fugitives from justice who'd kidnapped (a few hundred, lest we forget) children while not even closing EU airspace to Netanyahu who'd outright killed far more than 10,000 Gazan children. It would have been far less embarrassing if they'd done the absolute bare minimum against Israel as well, but even that was too much. End result: there's yet another example of a double standard to be thrown in the faces of the Rules Based Order for the next 20 years.

Eh, Trump's original 'solution' was relocating all Gazans. Specifically so he entrepreneurs could build hotels along the foreshore. Like it or not you don't get any more US than its President, and you don't get any more 'West' than it either. That that did not happen was mostly due to the resistance of the arabs and, unsurprisingly, no one wanting 2 million angry and permanent refugees. The Euros- with a few exceptions- were perfectly willing to throw every moral qualm and supposed principle out the window.

Dunno, has majestic actually watched S2 of RoP or S5 of Discovery*? There may well be a limit to the ability to hate watch. *in the end a perfectly adequate of its kind season, though I think half of that was Eve Harlow (also true for Not the far superior Night Manager, But Something Named Similarly on Netflix). It did have easily the most self indulgent last 3/4 of a final episode of all time! though, and there's some stuff competition there. Something I never thought I'd ever say: I kind of wish we got S6 of Discovery, since all its problems seem to have migrated to the previously far superior SNW along, presumably, with the attention and 'talents' of the management/ producer team.

May sound harsh to outsiders but actually far, far, far too kind to our current bunch of clowns.

Oh no, Trump didn't get the peace prize. How sad, I'm sure there will be no intemperate toy tossing from the big orange baby. The Committee really is an absolute joke though. Not quite a Kissinger/ Obama tier pick, but we did for a brief and glorious period have Machado's well cited support for foreign armed intervention in Venezuela and the Nobel citation for 'peaceful transition' literally adjacent on her wikipedia page (before, inevitably, a power user came in and removed the former while Protecting the edit).

Having had a look at the pictures on Telegram I'd be very skeptical about it being in proper serial production based on them. Albeit it's been shot down/ crashed, but the electronics look to be very ad hoc and non standard.

No. A lot of the pr0nesque games on GOG are already Steam refugees that were rejected from there long before the current controversy. Which kind of gives the lie to it all being the fault of VISA/ Mastercard/ Australian Christian Taleban pressure groups like some of the Steam/ GabeN apologists would have you believe.

Fear factor has literally never worked. All it ever does is galvanise the populace behind its own leaders. Given that the company that produces the flamingo is under investigation for embezzlement it's far more likely that Ukraine isn't producing anywhere near the claimed numbers- assuming, of course, that they aren't actually being made in the UK as some have claimed. Mostly though it also has the same launch problem as the tomahawk, even more so since it's more than twice the length, three times the wingspan and four times the weight (it's also 4x the weight of a Storm Shadow/ SCALP for comparison). You ain't going to be firing a 6t missile off a modified truck- or at least, not more than once- you're going to need a specialised launch vehicle, or (a) fixed position(s). Those are going to be extremely vulnerable, and make it very difficult to achieve any sort of saturation. (who really knows, there's clearly a lot of either obfuscation or rubbish released about it. The one strike that's been attributed to it in Crimea was short range, and the damage caused was absolutely not consistent with a 1t explosion)

Tomahawks as the latest wunderwaffe is pretty bizarre. Are they going to be given submarines or destroyers as well? Because that's how the vast majority of tomahawks are launched. OK, there are some Typhon's. But it's new and the US itself isn't close to filling its own orders for that system yet.

Only seen S1 of RoP, and it was OK, unless you care deeply about the established lore as that it absolutely butchers. It did have some of the modern writing issues (shoehorning mysteries, including set piece spectaculars even if they made no sense, nobody talks like the dialogue in reality/ no one ever seems to directly answer a question) Personally, I'd compare it to Star Trek Discovery in many ways- and I did end up watching all but one season (S4, and never watched the last ep of S3) of that, despite my reservations. It's mostly... frustrating in that it ought to be better than it is. If it were a choice between that and experiencing WoT, RoP wins out by a country mile though. Then again, getting injected with 2mL of 5 in 1 sheep vaccine under the kneecap was a better experience than watching WoT. I haven't died of pulpy kidney or an other clostridial disease (er, yet, so as not to tempt fate) after all.

Halo got good ratings (and is apparently doing very well on Netflix now) but not as good as they wanted. It was very expensive to make, had a... divisive critical reaction and was of course a 3rd party IP owned by and licensed from MS rather than being owned by Paramount. Rough first season, much improved second, and I thought it had a decent conclusion for a series that was clearly hoping for another season. I'd say it was 100% better than the Wheel of Time adaptation but 100% better than zero is still zero.

I'm not sure anything above a tiny minority expect the deal to actually work and a vanishingly small one for all its points to be fulfilled, including almost everyone who wrote it (maybe not Trump, depends how much his delusion is apparent rather than real). The hope from the vast majority- and almost all the politicians- of the west is that it goes back to status quo ante. For the non politicians so they can stop feeling bad about it and for the politicians so they can stop being criticised about how the situation is now and how weak and hypocritical their response has been.

Yep. Might be the first time it's been 'confirmed' though. All those Global Surveyor flights followed immediately by Ukrainian sea drone attacks were meant to be purely coincidental. And of course for the non US we have the Germans outing the French and Brits for doing the target programming for Storm Shadows/ SCALPs.

The problem with the wording is really, really obvious. Though to be fair it isn't just Bruce burying their head in the sand about it. That clause is part of the first step which is meant to be implemented- hostage release- and it is not crystal clear about what is required when it has to be absolutely clear. Hamas will obviously read its intent as requiring a withdrawal, Israel will obviously read it as not requiring a withdrawal; and both will be right/ wrong, because it says both. Yet you cannot do both. So from the get go one side or the other will view the other as breaking the agreement. The net effect- and one suspects it's by design- is telling Hamas to give up their leverage for nothing except maybe some prisoners. And Israel can always administratively detain, ie kidnap*, more people later. The wording might not be a problem if the sides had trust, or there was an enforcement mechanism for Israel but as it stands it's set up to fail at the first hurdle and ideally- for the west and Israel- immediately after Hamas releases the hostages. *83% civilian, by Israel's own leaked stats. This is basically the Iraqi Provisional Authority/ Afghan Interim Administration of Gaza, and they had no problem enriching themselves or their supporters. Massive fees, no bid contracts for overpriced infrastructure projects (completion, optional), large wadges of dosh disappearing off into the ether, huge payments to Erik Prince's mercenaries for security. Just replace mineral concessions with selling beach real estate so Don and Bibi can sunbathe there without the AI generation.

That's the aforementioned Jared Kushner- he is married to Ivanka Trump and his firm is Affinity Partners. Not to be confused with Elevation Partners which initially bought Bioware off its founders before on selling it to EA.

Yeah, and what happens when Israel decides to abrogate the agreement. No conditional, it will happen, you just have to look at the WB for that. If you're not willing to punish Israel for genocide you're not going to punish them for anything, and that makes any agreement with them that does not involve them also being Forced to abide by the terms utterly worthless. That also means it costs Netanyahu literally literally nothing to accept, since he will not be bound by it anyway. It's also hilariously badly written. Even for something that sprang (partly*) from the same mind as covfefe and injecting bleach to cure covid. To whit: So, are they withdrawing to the agreed upon line or are the battle lines frozen? Can't even stay consistent within the same point let alone between points. I wonder if the remains of orthopaedic surgeon Adnan al Bursh will be one of those dead Gazan remains released, more than a year after Israel said it would. One suspects, given that he was tortured to death, that his body has been 'accidentally' lost. *The Arab+Turkey statement is a lot more equivocal than presented in the press. Strip away the ego massage of Trump and there's very little to it. That's because you can very easily see which points they added, and which points are going to be systematically ignored by Israel with the tacit support of those pathetic western genocide apologists Starmer, Merz, Luxon and pals; and with the active support of Trump.

First Palestinian member of the committee has been announced: Vidkun al Quisling. May pair up nicely with Bezazel Smotrich, Itamar Ben Gvir, Benjamin Netanyahu and Tony Blair. Only caveat is that he may be a bit too liberal and namby pamby.

I do sometimes wonder if the MBA types expect AI to end up buying the games as well as making them. Can't wait for the Saudis to buy Intel.

Eh, if you ignore every bit of negative information for Ukraine- and there's been a lot; those horribly lop sided exchanges of bodies, averaging around 50:1 against Ukraine, and the continuing press ganging including people who patently aren't suitable or should be excluded being probably the most obvious- then yes, it's all positive for them. If you ignore every bit of positive information for Russia then it's all negative for them. You got so much of that sort of garbage propaganda in Afghanistan where the Taleban constantly failed in their aims while everything right for them/ wrong for the coalition got swept under the carpet; right up to the point the Taleban won. And there are probably still people who think the Taleban actually lost because it took them too long? actually it was all Trump's/ Biden's fault so they lost? whatever? It's attritional, much like the western front in ww1 it'll be static with little movement and high losses on both sides, precisely until it isn't. That blog approach is like taking Zelensky's 'aim' of 1991 borders and saying that he failed spectacularly because he lost more ground.

Doubt it was lawyers. Disney would have been able to pay out contracts, if they had to, from their loose change. They may- very much the conditional may- have been obligated to pay for the show, they'd not have been obligated to show it same way a bunch of their MAGA aligned stations won't be showing it*. Far more likely it was the cascade of awful publicity and people threatening to cancel Disney+ and the like. Not all that often you're going to have Ted Cruz, Jon Stewart and Bill Maher agree on something let alone the parade of TV and movie types criticising it. *I particularly liked this line from their press release: "Sinclair also calls upon Mr. Kimmel to issue a direct apology to the Kirk family. Furthermore, we ask Mr. Kimmel to make a meaningful personal donation to the Kirk Family and Turning Point USA." Very Trumpian, demanding an apology and a bung.

Good game but hobbled initially by a bad case of Paradoxitis. Absolute content desert without the dlc, especially late game. And without the dlc you had very little reason to, well, want the dlc due to it being a very shallow game after the initial set up was done. And even with the dlc still had a fair bit of 'could have been better' about it in some aspects.

It very much depends on what the deal would actually entail. An entire country's worth of data for an AI vendor would be priceless, for example, and they'd no doubt seek to eventually monetise things in a somewhat, hmm, Googlesque way at some point. Which was of course a company that- along with Facebook- was notoriously unprofitable. Right up to the point it became notoriously profitable. Nothing like defaultism for establishing a monopoly, and nothing like a monopoly for generating profits.

27 years for Bolsonaro's coup attempt.

Not just the US, almost all the decidedly little letters 'outrage' from the collective west is performative. Except for Spain, I guess. As always the juxtaposition of having a news article about some unarmed drones toodling across Poland being The End of World Civilisation!!! vs Israel bombing yet another country- and killing its citizens- is pretty stark. Good thing we have double standards, or we wouldn't have any at all. The lack of any actual consequences makes it very very clear that our politicians are absolutely fine with genocide so long as it's their friends doing it. And if you're fine with genocide then... there really isn't anything that you're not fine with, including Perfidy and having one ally bomb another.