Zoraptor

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.

Simplest explanation is that the drones GPS (/glonass) got mucked around with. Similar situation to the Ukrainian drone that hit near Tartu a couple of weeks ago (with basically no fanfare). The Ukrainians certainly were able to muck around with glonass for a bit since that was why the number of glide bomb videos from the Russians dropped right off for a couple of months, and if there's anything that would still be using vulnerable transceivers it's junker gerans.

Another interesting example of how bad western media has got at regurgitating state propaganda: Ursula von der Leyen's plane hit by GPS incident. Plus dozens of other articles. Number of articles citing flightradar24's statement that it didn't happen: zero. Number of articles that had been corrected: zero. Fact checkers that had checked the facts: zero. Note that the plane's transponder includes GPS consistency values, so it indicates there was no spoofing as well as no appreciable interference. While there certainly is GPS interference close to the Russian border central Bulgaria isn't close to it by any stretch. The whole incident appears to have been quite literally made up then published without asking anyone who could refute it about it. Expectation that the record will ever be corrected: also zero.

We've got AI nowadays, why not ask one of them?

Cassandra Obsession Guy was all over multiple forums for a while. Nothing will beat the theoretical analysis of Tali's sweat as an 'interesting' Bioware fan obsession. Wonder what AI have to say on that subject... "Tali's sweat is a topic of discussion among fans of the Mass Effect series, with some humorously speculating about its taste and properties, such as it being sweet or having performance-enhancing qualities. This reflects the quirky nature of fan interactions and the creativity within the community." Not the worst certainly, but hardly worth buying Jensen another leather jacket for.

South Africa is a terrible example for illustrating the sanctity of flags. One day burning an orange white and blue flag was sacrilege and everyone should be singing Die Stem, the next burning a red white yellow black and green flag was sacrilege and everyone should be singing Nkosi Sikelel iAfrica.

While they have just started production of the 'ERAM'* it does have a pretty direct equivalent in the GBU-39, which is basically a JDAM kit with rocket assist; and Boeing has a Powered 500lb PJDAM already which is most likely to be the 'ERAM' in question. The only questionable bit there is the cost, since they claim they'll be cheaper than the gbu39 despite being heavier, but supposedly at least that is the cost of a PJDAM. Which makes no sense, since an unpowered JDAM kit is of similar cost, hence 'why would you make anything else', but that's the claim. *maybe, one WSJ article citing anonymous sources is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting. Even the acronym is wonky since up to a week ago ERAM was used for an anti air missile

Wunderwaffe_Counter++ We've had outlandish claims of accuracy and reliability before for every weapon system supplied. Now they're going to supply a jam proof long range rocketbomb accurate to 10m over 450km; at 30k a pop? That's... 3 per Excalibur, 3-17 per M3X ('HiMARS'), 2-3 per Switchblade (lol), 110 (one hundred and ten) per SS/ SCALP. Begs the question: why would you ever make anything else but these unjammable accurate 500lb bombs... well, because it's basically the ALMDB to the Ground Launched Small Diameter Bomb. Which has been utter rubbish.

Apartheid era South Africa did have nukes*, whatever NATO said. And for that at least it seems that the US/ west genuinely made an effort to stop them no matter how tepid the other anti apartheid measures were. *Most probably obtained in whole or part from a similarly minded apartheid state.

Three grocery companies have 90% market share? Absolutely jealous. And don't get me started on the number of NZ products- like cow juice, sold via a monopoly because obviously that's the best way to get competition per the free marketers in the government- that manage to toodle literally half way around the world to be sold cheaper than here. Two supermarket companies have 95% market share here. It's- apparently- an absolute mystery to NZ's politicians why there is not competition between those two and they make $1 million per day in excess profits. They talk a lot about breaking up the duopoly, but never do anything. They've quite literally talked about it and given their buddies high paid consulting jobs on panels for twenty years when the solution is trivial- demerge. And debundle distribution while you're at it. That latter because, aside from the monopoly cow juice supply, NZ supermarkets absolutely fleece suppliers as well as consumers, because your options are sell to them at the price they dictate- or watch your crops rot for nothing.

Ukraine could build deliverable dirty bombs in, basically, minutes given they do have nuclear reactors and long range drones, rockets, missiles etc. For all but the delivery system Fiji could build one in weeks as well. There's a lot of radioactive material around if you're a state player even without a reactor, eg in health care; even smoke alarms have some. They wouldn't be effective battlefield weapons of course, but that isn't their purpose. Their purpose is to terrorise civilians populations. For that you don't even really need them to be dangerous in reality, you just need them to be dangerous in perception; and the word radiation provides the heavy lifting for the perception of danger. Ukraine doesn't use/ build them because it would alienate everyone except the staunchest NAFOids. Indeed, 90% of the discourse about them has been about them being used as false flags by Russia or Ukraine for that very reason.

The country looks like an economic miracle, and to a large extent that is what is important*. Mostly because economics is a spectacularly non rigorous field of study/ expertise with more similarities to religion than science. Same reason house price inflation was massively encouraged here- it made the economics look good though it was utterly unproductive and a very real drain on the practical economy because it sucked up all the investment. Worse, the houses were made from over priced materials and didn't fill the actual need (ie were built to appeal to appeal specifically to 'investors'). Why start a business when you could buy a house at 5-10% return y/y + rental with the knowledge that the government would prop you up? When house prices started to stabilise because no one could afford them the government started importing massive numbers of people to create artificial demand to keep the bubble inflated. Because economists mostly look at GDP nominal the fact that GDP per capita was actually dropping got ignored and then people wondered why everyone felt poor. Also why politicians and economists try and tell us that $10 butter in a country which makes 20x the amount of butter it needs is great, and everyone should be happy about it- it makes the country look like it's doing well economically. It'd be true if we had 1-2 million people and a quarter of them were involved in selling unimproved cow juice products like in the 50s and 60s, but we don't. Doesn't do much to dispel the old saying that there's one type of person who believes in infinite expansion in a closed system: economists, politicians and idiots. *eg you can borrow a lot more money at better rates because typically lenders look at GDP nominal as to whether you can pay the money back. Much like religion a great deal of economics is getting people to believe in stuff.

Reminder: the only GDP that really matters is the Purchase Price Parity variety. And really, GDP (PPP) per capita since that tells you how well the people it's relevant to are actually doing- or at least, is the best general and handy measurement of it there is. China is 78th, there. GDP (nominal) is an awful measurement and it's use is responsible for a lot of extremely bad economic management.

There has been a certain amount of revisionism about Ukraine 'giving up her nukes'. It- and the offer to Belarus and Khazakstan too- was not really an offer. One way or another they were not going to have them. And that was policy not just of Russia but of everyone else too. People tend to forget the very real fears about nukes disappearing post soviet break up because it didn't end up happening, and one of the main reasons it didn't was them being consolidated.

That always seemed to be a bit of a deliberate? misinterpretation of the NATO/ Article 5 like statement from Witkoff, given Trump said categorically there would be no NATO membership. A guarantee from the 'coalition of the willing' plus the US would effectively be NATO, plus Japan/ NZ/ AUS/ Palau/ FSM/ Nauru/ El Salvador/ Argentina/ and maybe ROK. And that would not seem likely to be a starter in any way shape or form for the Russians.

It's all Elon's fault, one of his cost cutting measures via DOGE was getting rid of all and any secure portable printers. Mind you, the subscription to HP was doubling the budget deficit. Heh. Five times more than that ingrate Volodomyr. via the transcript: "I would like to thank once again my American counterpart, for the proposal to travel out here to Alaska." "We're thankful to the citizens and the government of the U.S. for carefully taking care of their memory." "I would like to thank President Trump for our joint work, for the well wishing and trustworthy tone of our conversation." "Thank you. Thank you."

Putin is unlikely to actually give much. The winning side's usual concession is not taking all that they could if they kept on fighting rather than handing stuff back. The fairly small bits of Sumy and Kharkov oblasts are about all that can be reasonably expected and those only in exchange for something else.

It isn't intuitive to cancel standalone Prime Video either if you don't have a home Amazon. Has a separate prime video website, but you can't cancel from there and have to cancel via an Amazon mothership, using a profile category you'd never use otherwise due to not having a home Amazon and mainline Prime not being available. Also, it's completely unintuitive to get Amazon to change where it thinks you are if it's got it wrong.

You simply cannot get Prime in some places like, well, New Zealand since we don't have our own Amazon subentity. Which is kind of funny because they always, always offer me a free month of it every time I buy something and thought I lived in Australia (which has amazon.com.au) when it came to apps for their streaming dongle. NZ billing address seems to be enough to stop you getting it. You can however get Prime Video here. Presume it's the same in other places that don't have a 'home' Amazon site. Though whether it's the same as standalone Prime Video if mainline Prime is available I don't know. Contrary to the Euros' experience it didn't have much rental/ pay to watch stuff at all that I could see, though that was a year ago now.

Presumably, any 'security guarantees' now would be more robust than the 'security assurances' given then. But, one of the main reasons there's unlikely to be an agreement is because a truce/ peace interlude will massively favour Ukraine. Their current replacements in pretty much every category are below required/ desired level. That's thirty days of stockpiling artillery rounds, drones, patriot/ irisT etc interceptors and thirty days of digging and improving defences; plus thirty days of training for new recruits and thirty days of getting those new recruits. Hence Ukraine's insistence on an unconditional ceasefire. If their artillery supplies are, say, 50% what they want then a 30 day pause gives them 15 full days supply, and they can get it to the front without fear of interdiction. Budapest memorandum was flagrantly violated by everyone. Can't really say that the US and UK isn't interfering in Belarus' internal politics or using economic coercion on it, for example, and didn't do the same for Ukraine when it had leaders they didn't like. Though of course that's a special and unique case since it's us doing it of helping the Ukrainian/Belarussian people, and thus not an abrogation... For that matter Minsk I/II was violated by both parties as well.

Not sure there's that much cause for genuine optimism. It's more that, well, both sides want to sound more optimistic and more conciliatory for Trump so he doesn't throw a tantrum. There's more chance of a deal now than there was when Zelensky was insisting on unrealistic scenarios like Russia evacuating Ukraine wholesale or going back to status quo ante 2022 as he was until recently, and shows some acceptance of the situation on the ground and geopolitically with Trump, but the list of differences between the sides is still an extremely long one with multiple issues that seem insurmountable. The best that seems likely, and it isn't very likely IMO, is one of those patented Trump hand waving 'victory' agreements where there's basically no detail at all and the whole thing is aspirational. (Since Trump mentioned it, one example would be territory swaps. What territory is Ukraine going to swap? Even their most optimistic mapping supporters have them holding a few tens of square km of Russian territory. Hard to see Z getting much for that. Politically it's doubtful he can even if he were personally willing to; ordering troops to up stick and leave without a fight is... difficult at the best of times, let alone when you've got a hard core of capital N Nationalists to deal with. Similarly, is Russia going to give up, say, their territory in Zaporizhie oblast for territory in Donetsk they could take anyway? Is Russia going to accept a ceasefire during which the west can rearm Ukraine? Seems unlikely, given the result of that happening during Minsk II. And there's plenty more.)

Modi to visit China for first time in 7 years. The man responsible surely deserves a nomination for a Nobel Peace Prize.

That is a rather different concept to what RFK was talking about though. Well, probably, he doesn't seem to have much in the way of grasp on one or all of semantics/ reality/ science, and practicality, so who knows what he really means. The concept of having vaccines target something fundamental in virus families to reduce the effect of mutation and target the whole family (eg orthomyxoviridae/ flu) at once is far from new, certainly. But he's talking about a 'universal' vaccine apparently as an actual universal vaccine, not just for a family. Flu virus and coronavirus are not closely related at all- at viral Kingdom level- despite both being ssRNA viruses. The corollary would be something like wanting a universal solution for piranha and lions because they both eat people; and share many other similarities that surely can be targeted, like a spine and haemoglobin? There has been a lot of work on targeting reverse transcriptase which is the enzyme that turns viral RNA into DNA and could, very theoretically, target any RNA virus. But even that wouldn't be universal since there are DNA viruses too. Overall, more practical than horse dewormer or injecting bleach, but not that much so.

There is no international obligation to aid in ethnic cleansing though. Everyone knows that if Palestinians go anywhere outside of Palestine they'll never be allowed back and will be there permanently- we've got nearly 80 years of history demonstrating that fact. Doesn't matter anyway, it's an existential matter for Sisi and no matter what is offered or what his theoretical obligations might have been he cannot accept it. It's hard enough keeping the lid on sympathy for the Palestinians without being seen to obviously and actively aid the policies of Netanyahu, Ben Gvir and Smotrich against his own country's interests. He'd get Sadat'ed by someone in the military, and be extremely lucky if that was all he got since a lot of his population would happily Gaddafi him instead. Yeah, no credible way to spin it, instead of no way at all. Of course there's been no credible way to spin a lot of stuff that Israel has done but that hasn't stopped their rubbish being reported without pointing out that it's rubbish, until now.