Zoraptor

The situations certainly aren't equivalent, but they don't have to be in order for KSA to be annoyed. The more equivalent situation would be Cyprus getting invaded by Turkey. That comparison is even less flattering though, since the US had an arms embargo on Cyprus until very recently. Needless to say, no embargo on Turkey. (bit OT but... officially the west supports Saudi as trying to restore Yemen's legit government after an aggressive Iran backed coup/ civil war threatened regional instability in a region that is critical to western interests. Generally speaking that has also been enough to get aid for other countries. Saudi has signed a treaty with Israel, which got Egypt and Jordan a lot of aid- it got Saudi the right to buy more stuff at inflated prices, but still not even the good stuff. Then they look at the $49bn in aid Ukraine has got... that's Saudi's entire military budget for 2022* just given away *per IISS, estimates very significantly)

Not a great article, that. Sort of assumes that Poland knew about the intrusion and chose not to do anything. While you can legally shoot down intruders, you can't do so retroactively. There have been tons of intrusions too probably a dozen per year on both sides and very few have ever resulted in shooting. The two most famous cold war incidents don't even come close to fitting their scenario either- Gary Powers' was a singular result of a quite deliberate, repeated and systemic pattern of intrusions dealt with at the time, KAL007 went through Soviet airspace twice for dozens of kms and despite them thinking it was a spy aircraft it still got warning shots fired at it before missiles. And there's a massive difference between dumping flares on an unmanned drone which has been illegally toodling around a country's airspace for hours and shooting down something manned. Indeed, a far better example there would have been the drone over the Black Sea that Russian plane collided with and even then, still not a great example. Far better examples of more active support not resulting in war would have been Soviet pilots flying in Korea (or the Chinese intervention there, though MacArthur at least wanted to nuke China for that) and Vietnam. But those were a lot more deniable before the internet- hard to deny that Joseph K Bloggs, Captain USAF, was just on holiday with his F-16 when shot down when you've got facebook and the like. Think there's a certain amount of that already happening. Ukraine has been pretty vocal against some of their friends for what was pretty mild criticism (eg Poland recently, Britain and Germany earlier) and have been claiming that they aren't being supplied what they want and need* to win. Plus there's a decent amount of semi public hectoring about what has been going wrong with the counteroffensive and why, and I don't imagine they're all that keen on people negotiating on their behalf either, no matter how informally. *certain amount of irony there considering that they're getting stuff for free that most have to pay for. Indeed, hard to fault Saudi/ UAE for being annoyed when they're charged $10 million a pop to protect their cities from missiles with old interceptors while Ukraine gets the new ones, for free.

They at least had leadership that liked France, up until recently. The general populace has never been that keen on 'I give leader beads euros, leader gives me land unlimited access to your economy, control of your currency and our companies the ability to export all your commodities at whatever price they want' but the leaders love it.

I'd give Biden some leeway on that. I don't think the US could practically supply Ukraine with enough aircraft to allow NATO doctrine without supplying pilots- and a lot of them- to fly them as well. Then you'd also need Apaches or similar... The stuff that might make a difference is a lot of short(ish) range Air Defence in the 15-20km range to deny Russia its air support by outranging the KA-52s. But western countries simply don't make much of that, because they always expect air superiority to take care of enemy helicopters. You could see the result of that lack by things like S-300 systems getting hit by lancets. A system with ~70km range should not really be getting hit by something with 50km range launched from behind the front lines, and haven't before or since; but they tried bringing them in close at the start, lost a few, then withdrew them as being unsustainable losses.

It's probably more Bethesda Magic: It Just Works!.. ..When you're a behemoth like Bethesda already, with all the fancy bells and whistles, practically unlimited resources and an enormous inbuilt fan base. Not so easy if you're a plucky new company relying on kickstarter, and the same ideas that work for Bethesda don't necessarily work for a 12 person company trying to take down EA with a Sims killer. The big mistakes are that western doctrine relies on air superiority, at minimum, and that's the crucial part of their 'combined arms' doctrine (significantly, left out of the description above, though). Ukraine doesn't have that, not even close, and on offence their short range systems are significantly outranged by Ka-52s. NATO has by design never fought a war where they expected to have anything less than air supremacy. That reliance pervades everything. And yeah, the insistence on having raw recruits supplied so they would not have learnt bad habits meant they also hadn't learnt any good ones. No matter how good the training and simulations are people fall apart when it's real. Happens to experienced soldiers too, but a lot less. Funny (well, 'funny') all the things you see when the offensive isn't going well though. NATO would just abandon troops and not try and rescue them (yeah, right), NATO would just drive around mine fields (lol), NATO would roll out a few thousand man attacks instead of lots of 50 man ones (they wouldn't, if the 1000 man attacks were getting smashed*), Ukraine's western trained brigades were actually 2k men each not 4k (plain cope), Ukraine isn't actually using NATO tactics. The last is at least true but they did try to at the start, they just didn't work on the ground so they went back to what does: Stoss, from WW1. *to whit, the Big Bradley Burn Up from the first few days and there were at least two smaller examples. They've still been losing a lot of vehicles, but nowhere near that many all at once since reverting tactics. Also another example of mixed messaging: on one hand say the scale of the attacks are too small and independent, on the other say that that is how you taught them: to give small unit commanders initiative. Very much a "no, not like that, just do it again successfully" type situation.

Ah yes, the wonderful western aid that, hmm, had Chad 2nd from bottom, Niger 3rd from bottom (2022, don't think the 6th is from this year since it's ongoing, so position is actually dropping), CAR 4th from bottom, Mali 6th from bottom, Burkina Faso 8th and Guinea 10th on the Human Development Index. Not sure the west has been showing all that much care, eh. (Technically of course CAR and Chad aren't ECOWAS members but they were french colonies. Indeed, Chad is still french aligned, for all the benefits it's got them. About the only actual one of which was Toyotas for the Toyota War)

Interesting game of chicken in west Africa, with Mali and Burkina Faso pledging to support Niger if they were invaded. Guess it mostly depends on how much France values their cheap uranium. Doubt ECOWAS itself can do anything, more than a quarter of its members are suspended at this point and Nigeria, by far its largest member, can't even deal with Boko Haram properly. Can't see them having any stomach to go beyond political posturing. At least life can't get much worse for the average Nigerien, they could only drop five places on the HDI. Guess that shows how much all that uranium benefits the average person.

There's a load of things they could do- from stuff they really ought to have done militarily on day one (target bridges over the Dniepr) to symbolic (target the Motherland Monument or Rada) to packing thermite into longer range missiles or drones. It's not possible anyway, but the sticking point isn't just being at war (which Ukraine considers herself to be, and she's the important one since she'd be claiming Article 5) it's active territorial disputes*. So for example Turkey may 'claim' a whole swathe of Syria and Iraq informally via Misak-i-Milli, but can't call on NATO for help for their invasion as they didn't claim it formally on accession. Similarly, can't call on NATO to help them in Cyprus even if they wanted to. If Ukraine wanted to join NATO she'd have to cede anything occupied, assuming the war itself wasn't active. Though, of course, NATO is free to amend or ignore its own rules any time, for any reason. *and to be even more specific, active territorial disputes in the Treaty Region, hence no NATO article 5 when Argentina invaded the Falklands nor did their claims on Las Malvinas stop Britain joining in the first place.

I did finish WItcher S3 this afternoon. Pretty much exactly the same thoughts as for the first half after the second: it's not really that it's bad, it's just a really frustrating watch. It's not badly scripted- ie the dialogue itself is fine both in writing and delivery- the acting very seldom dips below good and is usually better than good, and the story is fine. Scenery, SFX etc, maybe some niggles but no real complaints. It's the way the story unfolds that is the problem. And it's a very major problem. The pacing is simply awful and they don't appear to have learnt anything over the three seasons despite all the criticism it got for it in S1 (albeit, the time jumps added confusion there too). You think back and pretty much everything of significance happened in one episode, and the rest... maybe a couple of things of significance but a whole lot that should have been condensed. 100% if it was a choice between Cavill and the showrunners the showrunners should have gone. They probably should go even if Cavill was staying.

I haven't quite finished Witcher S3, had to stop half way through the last episode. On Friday, and it's now Tuesday so I'm not exactly running to the tv to watch. That desert episode was stultifying. I know it's more or less book canon, but then so is 84 pages of Paris Sewer History in Les Misérables and no one has adapted that. And that was 1/3 of the new episodes. Previous episode was a lot better though not quite what I imagined, but you could see why they split the season considering how much cgi it required.

Haha, no. Biochemistry in training, but ended up mostly doing unrelated stuff like modelling (of the computer rather than Zoolander variety). I did have to do a decent amount of proper fact checking/ research though.

You'd at least think the anti Russia lot would be all over the idea of permanently weakening Russia and removing her leverage even if they don't really care about Africa. Guess it's all a bit too hard though- and for the realpolitik of it, would also remove the west's leverage over Africa... (Otherwise, and admittedly somewhat OT for here it would also save the average consumer a lot of money and be more healthy. There really aren't any negatives, to the average person, of a reduction in meat consumption apart from how tasty meat is. It's also about the biggest contribution the average westerner could make to climate change action (besides not having children, obviously and understandably a non starter for many people); which ought to be fairly important given that much of the northern hemisphere seems to have been on fire the last week. But as always, far more important to say that you're doing something about a problem than to actually do something about it which takes some effort and might result in tractors toodling around Paris or whatever. Very #StopKony2012 energy, overall)

Actually Bruce you directly quoted a heavily editorialised version from the WP. Which was pretty much literally written about one paragraph in a ~12 minute speech, the vast majority of which was extremely flattering to Russia- and in which there was also one paragraph criticising Ukraine for not even wanting to negotiate. For some reason the WP didn't report that, though... There is a transcript of Assoumani's speech available, though I'd prefer one from the AU since that's an official AU account of what was said (and is not up yet). Or you can watch one of the multiple videos of course, if you can speak French or turn on an autotranslator. I suspect that's a bit too much work though.

Starting island is maybe 4 hours. Probably a bit less for most. Only significant 'complaint' I have so far is performance, the game doesn't look good enough to be quite as slow as it is even on an old card. Niggles are there being no buying/ selling, or at least so far as I have got. Plus the voice acting is far too good for a Jagged Alliance game. Where is the iconic "she. is. evil. . a. driven. bitch" type stuff where it sounds like they grabbed someone off the street and held them at gunpoint to deliver their lines?

Sigh. The WFP is, of course, free to buy Russian grain to replace the Ukrainian grain it bought- and it did buy it, though you'd be excused for thinking they didn't and it was given away by the language used in some reports. ie Good Guy Russia, wfp has more money to buy grain since they now only have to supply ~20% of the amount to Africa they used to. Which, and this left me flabbergasted amazed and bewildered, wasn't actually 725kt. In a Very Surprising turn of events western media included amounts sent to non African countries (Afghanistan, Yemen) and one country that already has a replacement deal with Russia (Ethiopia) in their figures. Indeed, supposedly the 4 biggest receivers of WFP food aid were: Ethiopia, Turkey (!, presumably earthquake related), Afghanistan and Yemen (via wsj, but it's paywalled) and the only African country there is Ethiopia. Somalia is also western aligned, at least in theory. And, of course, the AU head's comments can very easily be read as criticism of the west for trying to stifle Russia's food exports. And yes, I know there's a lovely EU page saying they aren't doing that, it just leaves out every bit where they are. Which the Africans are very much aware of. And and once again again, if Europe and the US really wants to help Africa and stick it to Russian agricultural exports they could skip a few collective burgers. Then there would be plenty of cheap food and a lot less leverage. That takes some self control though, eh.

Dunno, buying a 1st gen amd platform worked out pretty well, for me. The 4 core Intel alternative... didn't age well at all. It does, of course, absolutely suck when you get a lemon though. If it is a BIOS issue they're hard to diagnose beyond the very basic hard reset/ try and update via usb utility (if available) as they can have pretty much any set of symptoms. Also, get a dual BIOS MB, though that is literally no help at this point.

Depends, if all you're going to do is take pointless- and inaccurate- swipes then it'd probably be better for all concerned, yes? That just wastes everyone's time. The other option would be preferable but either way, not a matter I'm going to lose sleep over.

Nowhere near enough information is known to draw concrete conclusions on anything about the negotiations, except that they're happening, kind of. Putin being the problem is... well, when isn't he the problem to unnamed security source talking about Ukraine? The interpretation of the US side leaking suggests they're the ones most keen on progress and least happy about the status quo. Even that isn't really concrete though, at minimum it requires the leak(s) to be authorised.

Don't think so. He specifically mentioned China and price inflation (ta Malcador for saving me scrolling back an entire page) despite the context being the pearl clutching about how Africa would starve. I do seem to recall someone publicly saying they'd blocked that poster though... But yeah, if Europe* ate fewer burgers Africa wouldn't starve; that's simple energy maths. 90% of the energy in food is 'lost' feeding animals. Don't eat meat reared on corn and the like and you can feed 10x as many people, and for less money. Far easier to just blame Russia than do something that would actually solve the problem though; that's the problem with a lot of Euros really, no self control, can't stick to their stated commitments and always going for the zinger to make themselves feel good even when it's a load of bollocks. *everyone really, unless you're rearing animals on grass/ land that can't be used for cropping. But westerners do eat far more meat proportionately than, say, the Chinese.

I'd suspect most of the grain supplied to China is going to animal feed rather than direct human consumption. There are a lot of pigs in China that need feeding and not all in the politburo, he says for -50 social credit. Pretty much have to be the case for Spain, their share of the Black Sea shipments works out to a fairly staggering 120kg per person. Which would mean that every Spaniard would be eating half a loaf of bread (or tortillas, to avoid being wheatist) per day, every day, solely of Ukrainian grain.

Corn is certainly a fruit, but then wheat is also a fruit*. Which is unsurprising, since wheat and maize are in the same Family so are pretty closely related. Monocot fruit is pretty much always referred to as either cereal or grain to disambiguate/ specify. As for the rest, yes you can certainly eat maize 'fresh' if it's sweetcorn and some (not much, nowhere near) is eaten that way- but it's highly unlikely that maize being exported by ship is corn on the cob. It's dried kernels or pre ground meal; cobs add extra weight/ volume and sweetcorn goes off quickly, plus it's far more difficult to load. Don't need to worry about dried kernels or meal bruising, after all, just chuck em in a silo. *as are a lot of vegetables, like pumpkins. Common usage doesn't tend to be rigorously taxonomic.

Fair enough on the sunflowers since they, well, flower so aren't technically grains. Same with soya and rapeseed/ canola for that matter. Maize/ corn is about as typical a grain as you can get though and has +50% production worldwide on either wheat or rice- and for the relevant data +100% on wheat. There is most definitely a big problem with articles reporting as if wheat is the only grain produced, and there are massive discrepancies in reported numbers due to that.

The issue with an 'all in' approach is what it has always been- the effort required to comprehensively defeat Russia would absolutely require direct intervention, ie war, and while Russia would undoubted lose a conventional war under those circumstances there is zero chance of it remaining conventional, in those circumstances. Of course, some people have convinced themselves that Russia's nukes won't work- the same people also convinced themselves that Ukraine would stroll through Russian lines to Mariupol in a week- or that they wouldn't use them even in extremis. But they would use them, that's the whole point of having them; unless people can convince themselves that the US/ Britain/ France/ Israel wouldn't if someone was aiming for their comprehensive defeat.

Dunno about the last bit, I suspect they'd still be getting most of the arms supplied so long as they had a stalled front and weren't obviously about to collapse. The justification for it would just shift to helping Ukraine defend herself rather than helping her recapture territory.

You'd have thought they would have learned to be skeptical from twenty years of 'our latest approach will work!' every six months in Afghanistan, really. As for the article itself: if they actually thought that for the reasons stated it was monumentally stupid to let them (well, not like they could have physically stopped them if they were insistent) try. Don't have enough equipment, so let them fritter it away pointlessly instead of building it up, not enough training* so let's get those who have been trained killed and the one thing you thought they had was morale which is prone to collapsing if you (1) over promise results and (2) get a bunch of people killed for no advantage. The latter is particularly bad if your well trained/ experienced and motivated troops are now being replaced by poorly motivated conscripts who have been avoiding the draft rather than volunteering, and it potentially weakens your defence if Russia were to launch another attack. To be blunt the implication of the article is that they were encouraged to go for an offensive that the westerners didn't think would work, now, because the situation would be worse not better, later, and a hail mary was the best option. The implications of that get even worse if the offensive fails. *that in particular was funny after hearing for months about how superior NATO training was going to carry the day. Then the tactics were actually exactly the same as people derided Russia for. Circle complete with Western Analyst throwing Ukraine under the bus, in the article, for not actually using advanced NATO tactics when the problem is obvious and mentioned explicitly exactly one paragraph below- basically no air support, and NATO has never fought a war where they didn't have air supremacy.