Zoraptor

Or for those who only read the headlines, 142 total diplomats expelled plus quite a few more Brits to reduce their diplomatic staffing to the same levels as those of Russia in the UK. The number of extra Brits isn't anywhere near the 755 extra americans kicked last time, but it adds considerably to the 23 formally expelled. We ain't kicked any Russians because they don't have any spies here, which generated some amusing headlines overseas. More realistically, we didn't kick anyone because when French agents outright murdered an NZ citizen Thatcher told us to harden up and endorsed French sanctions on us, and memories for such things are rather long here especially in the Labour Party.

You even got the etymology of it.

7/8ths of the world's countries did not join Britain in expelling Russian diplomats, how do people think the UK will handle their diplomatic isolation?

And the guy supposedly had presidential aspirations too. That idea was pretty funny even before the CA scandal, though maybe not as funny as before Trump was elected.

Ask a rhetorical question; get a non rhetorical answer. Indeed, Kaffir Limes are still called Kaffir Limes even in South Africa. I do have to admit I find kafir/ kuffar* being pretty common and unredacted in Arabic language videos on the beeb rather ironic given how they refer to the Afrikaans version, as its connotations are scarcely better in its usual context there. (kuffar/ kafir = 'unbeliever' in Arabic, though considerably more perjorative than merely 'unbeliever' is in English; it's the sort of thing ISIS would call a Yezidi to justify the genocide and rape. It's the original source for both the racist term and the lime variety)

They'd probably imprison Malema for bad words if they could, he was kicked from the ANC for singing the old farmer killer song. Too many militant followers for him though. I wonder if the Beeb refers to Kaffir Limes as [redacted racial slur] Limes on their recipe pages. Though given their name comes direct from Arabic rather than Arabic via Afrikaans they might have to call them [redacted religious slur] Limes instead.

I thought he was Albanian and dead. And a dirty commie. At least Djuric will likely be returned with all his organs intact, that's pretty rare for when Serbs are kidnapped in Kosovo.

Expulsions are always political and they're always reciprocated, asking where to close is just trolling and nothing else. Russian embassies troll very frequently, admittedly it's extremely easy for them to do so considering how eminently triggerable and credulous the average westerner is. Only question is whether the reciprocation will be absolute equivalence or proportionate- and proportionate would be worse. The UK expelling 23 Russians was 40% of their staff, Russia expelling 23 Brits was considerably less than 40% of theirs. Most countries (including the US) have way more diplomats in Russia than the reverse, hence Russia expelling 755 (!) US diplomats last time to bring the numbers back to even. One would not want to speculate on why there are so many more diplomats in Russia than the reverse, but I'm sure it's 100% innocent and none of them carry out activities outside their station. The only surprising thing is the attempt to do expulsions from the UN by the US, which is on extremely dodgy footing. Time to move the UN to Switzerland or make its territory fully non national.

Hell, even crypto investments are more profitable than investing in a business that produces something and employs people. That's not really a change though, except in method- while the crypto craze uses modern methods it's still at its base Tulip Madness and similar to every other bubble, underpinned by the willingness of people to pay an even more ridiculous price for something than the previous buyer. I don't think anyone really believed that a tulip bulb was worth $40k each or whatever the peak price was, even if theoretically you got a physical bulb instead of some ephemeral 1s and 0s. The modern funny money banking/ share market/ derivative etc tools though, absolutely. Most of them take things that used to enable normal people to make money as well and turn them into the preserve of the elites, usually to the detriment of the normal people. A standard human share trader not only has a far harder time of it than some automated algorythm making trades every 5ms but will often be actively manipulated by them.

What's Ronald Dumsfeld, chopped liver? No coincidence that Mohamed bin Salman is in the US at the moment and an arch anti Iran hawk gets appointed. Best case scenario for Iran is Saudi gets militarily involved, given MBS's military genius they'd be in Riyadh in a month- dude even manages to get planes shot down by air to air missiles when fighting a foe who has literally no operative air force.

There is only one solution to the Russian problem, bomb Iran. Yep, Bolton never met a problem that couldn't be solved by bombing someone, preferably Iran. It will be 'fun' to see if the rest of the west contorts itself to support it or if it causes an actual split like Iraq did, but either way Bolton never met a foreign affairs problem that couldn't be bombed out of existence. Well, except Afghanistan and Iraq but they totally would have worked if people had just listened to him and upped the bombing until it worked.

CDPR has released their 2017 financial results. Which are fairly interesting, for financial results, EA etc tend to be staid and boring as anything. Wouldn't see them having a random scantily clad female elf on a quarter of their pages. Most interesting stuff is Witcher series topping 33 million copies, PS4 being the top platform for TW3 by a decent margin (and xbox1 last by far) and GOG's profit more than doubling over 2016. TW3 is still selling a shed load of copies as well.

Intel has also iirc never actually paid any fines, they're still tied up in appeals. Really though, what can they do? While they wait for any action to come to court any competitor who signs up is getting the preferential stock, early access to samples, support etc while they aren't- and even if ASUS/ MSI/ GB showed solidarity with each other and refused there are still all the nVidia exclusive brands that wouldn't; EVGA, Zotak etc. That potentially means no day 1 cards for resisters, unreliable cards, all for an indeterminate length of time, and at worst you end up like XFX or BFG and cannot make nVidia cards at all. When that's ~75% of your AIB business that's a massive deal even if you make motherboards and other parts as well. Best they can do is what ASUS's owner is doing- have a separate sibling brand make AMD cards without restrictions, hence ASRock getting into the AIB business; or what GB is doing and use passive aggressive generic gaming 'branding' (which nVidia literally cannot stop, since it is generic; but also isn't actual branding, since it's generic and cannot be trademarked). If there's going to be legal action it has to come from AMD or regulators.

So, rumours started about 2 weeks ago of nVidia offering a new 'incentive' program to its Add In Board/ 3rd party manufacturers whereby nVidia co-opts their graphic card gaming brands (MSI Gaming X, Gigabyte Aorus, Asus Republic of Gamers etc) as exclusively nVidia in return for, well, basically the manufacturer getting timely stock, preparatory samples, shout outs and support from nVidia etc. With the strong implication being that if you don't sign up then said samples and stock, support etc will go to those who do sign up. This was largely met with a wall of silence and a rather Orwellian blog post response from nVidia that features the word 'transparency' 5 times without actually saying anything, and is so transparent they haven't said anything else and have a strict NDA so nobody else can talk. It should, perhaps, also be noted what happened to XFX when they had the temerity to start making AMD video cards- no more nVidia support for you! And eventually, no more nVidia cards at all. Bit of a Chilling Effect for anyone thinking of resisting the GPP. Anyway, fast forward two weeks and what do we find? No more Aorus AMD cards, no more Gaming X AMD cards, no more ROG AMD cards. Indeed, we have the rather amusing sight of Gigabyte claiming their "Gaming Box" is not branded Aorus because... it isn't for gaming (in german, relevant part as my best attempt "Computerbase has contacted Gigabyte as to why their new 'gaming box' Radeon RX580 lacks the "Aorus" branding. The maker replied that the focus of the product was not on gaming. However their marketing for the product claims "Turn your Ultrabook to gaming platform[sic]" and "Upgrade your game experience".) So, why is that a big deal? Basically, idiots people pay lots of money for the 'Gaming' brand name even if the product is identical, and nVidia is (almost certainly illegally, asterisk equivocation) co-opting their brands for its own use. This is massively anti-competitive since AMD is locked out of gaming brands for discrete graphics cards from most of the big AIB makers and it also targets the new Intel/ AMD processors/ iGPUs* which will not be able to be branded as 'Aorus/ ROG' etc in notebooks. That's a big deal for everyone, since if there's no competition nVidia can and absolutely will gouge worse than RAM manufacturers currently are- and at least there are three of them. And if they're strong arming partners when there is competition it will be orders of magnitude worse when there's literally no alternative. (Note, I freely admit that nVidia is one of the few companies that I outright loathe so I'm far from unbiased, but it is for these sort of reasons. There will be far more 3.5/4 1060 3gb/ 6gb and similar shenanigans when there ain't no competition) *and allegedly there's a 'full' AMD Ryzen 'APU' coming with equivalent to 580 performance based on the xbox1x gpu as well, but it ain't announced.

virumor is meming again, she's the Prosecutor General of Sevastopol (or Crimea in general, I forget which), and is most famous for looking like a real life anime tsundere (or summat, I'm not fluent in weeaboo) so has an enormous and semi random fan club. And yeah, Medvedev would be successor formally, but he was largely picked by Putin as not being a threat and not because of his competency- not that he's a complete idiot but he almost completely lacks Putin's gravitas and would almost certainly be a lame duck. Yeah, while that wouldn't help anyone's credibility he certainly couldn't even be called a high functioning alcoholic. Yeltsin is one of the very few recent leaders about whom I cannot think of a single positive; and he's completely destroyed the concept of 'western liberalism' in Russia for at least a generation which is a definite shame. Not entirely his fault to be sure, but not that far off it.

More worrying is that Putin has no obvious successor. If he drops dead tomorrow it will not be fun times at all, for anyone. Putin, despite the criticism*, is a competent leader so him staying in power is fine so far as it goes, it's mostly a problem when he does go or if he ends up incapacitated in some way. *and in some ways the criticism reinforces his competence. Being in the G8 or whatever didn't help Yeltsin be taken seriously; and he got a minute proportion of the international criticism Putin does despite Yeltsin being objectively incompetent in every respect.

Vladimir Putin re-elected. About as inevitable as death, taxes and western media trying to say that it's all a fix and Alexei Navalny's 3% support should actually have won. Or the turn out in Chechnya being 118% with 120% voting for Putin. Big electoral change though, for once Zyuganov- who should have been President in 1996, if the US hadn't blatantly interfered- didn't come second and Zhirinovsky 3rd, the commies put up a younger billionaire (?!) candidate this time. (My favourite media complaint this cycle is that Russians are being encouraged to go and vote. Somehow coverage of Australian elections never slights them for people being legally obligated to vote and fined for not doing so, and we'd had heaps of encouragement to vote at our elections last year without it being an assault on democracy.)

Watership Down RPG/ builder sim. Like Dwarf Fortress, but with less... obsessiveness. That's at least a semi serious suggestion.

I honestly suspect that Trump hates Bolton and he gets mentioned all the time as a bit of a trojan- Bolton is transparently keen to be back in the limelight, and if the alternative is John Bolton then just about anyone else looks like an inspired choice.

Intervention in Iraq created the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, who is a big player in the Syrian conflict. The US also funded rebel groups to fight Assad. And actual intervention by the west in Syria would have achieved precisely one thing- many of the people living in government ruled areas, plus the 7 million IDPs living there, would have fled the Saudi/ Turkey vetted moderate* Wahhabi/ Ikwhan head choppers, and then their constant, inevitable, infighting. Early enough and you might just have the same number of refugees, they'd just be all the Kurds, Christians, Armenians, Yazidis, Syriacs, Alawites, Shia, secularists etc fleeing Ergogan's dream of a neo ottoman Republic of Northern Syria and the Saudi dream of Caliph Muhhamed bin Salman instead of 'Ibrahim'. And then the west would have wrung their hands and said "my goodness, who would have thunk it... Ho hum, how about that Chelsea vs Barce match or Kim Kardashian's mammaries?"; and all after Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya etc. The west is utterly useless at interventions having good results- biggest refugee source in Europe is actually fricking Kosovo, their only supposed success- so much so that you have to question Poe's Law. And no it isn't deliberate in the proper sense, it's just utter denial of reality and constant reliance on utterly crap 'expert' opinions from interested parties. *the 'moderate' Turkish backed forces in Afrin include literal child beheaders- indeed Harakat Nureddin Al Zinki was US vetted as well, which shows how good their judgement would have been in any intervention.

Agreed, that's kind of why I mentioned Shi. For the US system he's a far better model strongman type than Putin as he's a lot more subtle about things while being immovable when he thinks it necessary, and both China and the US have huge economic clout that can be used as influence. Which- apart from gas, and that's a double edged sword- Russia lacks almost entirely.

Economically the US is absolutely safe until such time as the USD isn't reserve currency. Nobody is going to call in loans when doing so makes the repayments, many of your investments and much of the world's economy effectively worthless. Owning debt is also good leverage, though limited due to the first reason. Domestic US politics is pretty opaque to foreigners, it could be close to some sort of systemic collapse and no one would know because people are always saying it's close to some sort of collapse. Putin is shorthand for the phenomenon, certainly. He's the prominent current example of a 'decisive' leader and there's a certain obsession about him and a need to either beat him- or be like him- from many in the US including Trump. That contrasts to, say, Shi Jinpeng in China who is just as authoritarian but less directly assertive/ confrontational, internationally, and has far more soft power but only attracts relatively small amounts of attention. (The phenomenon itself probably goes back to Alex the Great- or Julius Caesar. Veni vidi vici, alea iacta est; it's like politicians desperately want to get similarly 'decisive' achievements to be remembered by while not remembering that JC wasn't exactly concerned with legalities and norms; and should have been utterly curbstomped by Pompey in Greece because he ignored reality)

Somewhat relevant to this, I can't help but think that the US has learnt completely the wrong lesson from Putin's success. Trump- and a decent proportion of the US in general- confuses respect and fear and wanted a 'decisive' leader to bring back fear rather than respect. Part of being 'strong' in that sense is not having dissent in the ranks, hence Trump wanting yes men in every position (plus his fragile as bone china ego). But the fundamental problem remains the same as with GWB's big projects, it's not actually a lack of decisiveness but a lack of acceptance of reality that is the fundamental problem, and having only yes men exacerbates that rather than ameliorates it. Putin has a lot of fear and respect (and for Russia the fear aspect is an enhancement, as they have very little soft power at all) because his decisions, while autocratic, are also realistic and so have a far better success rate. US decisions are far too often based on what they want to be true, rather than what is true. That leads to massive erosions of trust when things don't work out: if you say that Iraq will be stable for 15 consecutive years and it isn't or that the Taleban is losing badly for 17 (!) consecutive years and they don't then you're only ruining your credibility. Given that Trump's knowledge is not the greatest a 'gut feeling' based US policies with no internal dissent looks terrible, even if the US system overall moderates things a bit.

Lauren Southern is definitely a troll in the older sense. Which makes banning her entry pretty stupid, and about sums up modern Britain unfortunately. Needs a big chequebook for buying some Typhoons, then she'd get receptions from Queenie and the Archbishop of Kent even if she were deliberately starving half a country.

A requiem for a video game company, if it doesn't sell eleventy billion copies.