Zoraptor

IDF says it may take 'weeks' to fully search Al-Shifa Hospital. Remember a few days ago about how they knew exactly where the command bunker was, and it was the 'beating heart' of Hamas? Guess they're hoping everyone will have forgotten that in a few weeks, after they start in on the hospitals in southern Gaza...

Yep. You hear a lot about the Balfour Declaration, you don't hear much about the multiple agreements that had promised the same land to the Arabs years earlier. Brits got what they deserved there, unfortunately just their soldiers mostly not the duplicitous politicians who made the actual decisions. Reminder: Winston S Churchill was 100% fine with gassing arabs who didn't agree with the British Empire reneging on their deal. Strange that Bruce doesn't mention the Jewish rebellion of Irgun and especially Lehi/ Stern Gang though. Especially since Likud was basically the Lehi political party. Very peculiar. Anyway, I'm going to offer 20% of Bruce's house to a Zimbabwean refugee. Bruce gets 80% so it's heavily in his favour, and the Zimbabwean refugee has already accepted...

Yellowjackets S2: Could have been Gaslighting, the series, for its effects. Constantly asking myself 'is it just me, or does this make literally no sense?'. After the final episode 100% confident it isn't just me and the 2nd season was just an extreme mess replete with contrivance. It's still pretty entertaining in isolation and far from terrible but the plot (mostly the currentyear one) is... not coherent at all. The Boys Generation V Liked it, at least up until the last few minutes. Much like its parent series it's over the top silliness most of the time laced with just enough deadly serious to stop you laughing at it. The overall effect is very early Peter Jackson (Bad Taste, Braindead/ Deadalive) and I love those. Everyone looks like they're having a great time massively over/ underacting, especially Jensen Ackles in his cameo. The ending though is NWN2OC

The Alpine Fault has a 75% chance of rupturing in the next 50 years with a magnitude of 8+. The last Big One was ~1720, and the longest projected interval between them is 350 years. The longer it goes the bigger it's likely to be as well. IIRC Peter Thiel's bunker is near Queenstown, so it'd be the Alpine Fault that would effect it.

Good news: the entirety of New Zealand is fault lines, and we're due for a Big One. Now we just need a global calamity that would get Pete into his hideaway so Mt Earnslaw can fall on his head.

They didn't actually expect to find much given the number of troops they sent in. Certainly no 'beating heart'. Never know though, maybe Good Guy Israel siphoned that 300L of fuel they offered out of one of the Merkava tanks. It'd be about 3% of the fuel they drove in, in their tanks alone.

Palantir, not Plantir. Named, of course, after the dangerous and foolish to use seeing stones of JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings that drove John Noble to eat some chicken very messily and made Christopher Lee fail his greenhouse gas emission targets spectacularly. It's one of those names where you wonder if Mr Thiel knew about the connotations beforehand or just googled for stuff that would let you see into the future. Fun fact: Mr Thiel bought New Zealand citizenship and is one of the guys who has built a doomsday bunker here.

We've got RealMe, which is basically an excuse for the government to skimp on actual people answering phones or reading hard copy to provide services more than a clandestine scheme to monitor people online. For that they already have google, aws, fb, PSP/ IME/ Pluton, 5eyes partners/ GCSB etc.

Hagari supposedly runs a lot of social media manipulation type stuff as his normal day job which would make him essentially both a press officer and rear echelon guy. He's definitely an odd choice to front the camera and some of his (if they are his and not from higher up; he's pretty senior though) decisions have been decidedly sloppy.

I was amazed by how staged the whole thing appeared. OK, so it's obviously going to be staged in some respects, but the idea is not to make everything look staged since that is counter productive and ends up making it look fake. (Daniel Hagari is a rear admiral so a senior sailor, not a soldier. Very likely hasn't seen an actual boat either in a while either, any way a certain amount of discomfort is to be expected. But even in the more controlled briefing setting he's got more than a little bit of Bethesda NPC / the AI newsreader from the new Deus Exs about him and I always semi expect him to start talking about how Rucker Hamas has weaponised mudcrabs)

The 'funnier' one is their offer of fuel to Al Shifa. So obviously done solely so they could say they'd offered and been refused, and have it reported they had. 300L, enough to run a generator for half an hour and pick up only. To put it in perspective, the fuel capacity of a single Merkava tank is... 1400L. So they offered enough fuel to maybe turn off the low fuel light on a tank for a hospital with 700 beds and maybe twenty time the number of people there. Also the calendar/ planning document found under Al Rantisi (strangely enough, unverifiable, since Israel managed to cut off every geolocatable feature in their proof video) which consists of... dates, with the day of the week. It's like they think no one can read arabic or know what 'Monday' looks like in arabic script. One in the eye for the people who thought the laughable 'Hamas' intercept from the hit on Ah Ahli couldn't be fake because Israel wouldn't be that incompetent. They definitely would, because a lot of people will simply accept horse manure as caviar if Regev or Hagari tells them so.

The main issue with anonymous sources is that they can tell you what they want you to hear whether it's true or not- with zero repercussions for being wrong or outright lying. If they're telling you something that runs counter to their interests it's a lot more difficult to come up with a scenario where they're deliberately lying or over exaggerating. A 6' guy on Tinder ain't going to list himself as 5'8, the reverse, not so much. The secondary issue is knowing whether the source has been vetted properly, or even exists. So 'Russia is running out of missiles' says anonymous source in April, May, June, July, August.. of 22 is not exactly credible. It's saying what someone wants to be true, it's been said and been wrong multiple times before and the person(s) saying it haven't even had the consequence of being ignored since it kept on getting repeated. You have a bunch of things different in the Time article. No one disputes that Time was there and talked to people. So we know they had sources. They don't have a reason to make things up, they don't have a reason to make things look bad for Zelensky, it isn't what they 'want' to be true. It's written by Time of NYC, not Vremya of Moskva. It also fits a bunch of ancillary evidence- there were plenty of rumours at the time of things like refusals to launch frontal assaults from frontline commanders, it failed expectations etc. Similarly, neither WP nor Der Spiegel have any intrinsic reason to blame Ukraine for Nordstream and would obviously 'prefer' it to have been Russia. Personally, I am extremely skeptical about aspects of their story- mostly there being zero external help- precisely because it's anonymously sourced and if there was external help it'd be even more politically embarrassing than Ukraine doing it. There's also a bunch of ancillary evidence there too such as not allowing an independent investigation, its generally stalled nature and that if they had evidence it was Russia they'd have leaked like an overpressure $2 hose.

Got to give Biden credit, his diplomacy has managed to unite the arab and muslim world and get Bashar al Assad, Erdogan, MbS and Raisi into the same photo, in Riyadh, something his predecessors singularly failed at. OK, so he's got them talking about how bad his foreign policy is, but still, he's got them talking and that's a start! MbS and Raisi are practically standing next to each other too.

Ukraine better watch out, Article 5 invocation incoming: "Nato’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, said on Wednesday that if the damage to the pipeline was “proven to be an attack on Nato critical infrastructure … it will be met by a united and determined response from Nato”." Oh wait, that was about that Finnish pipeline that got hit by an anchor last month. For NordStream... it's crickets.

Hasbara gonna hasbara. Favourite bit of media manipulation: "from the river to the sea.." is antisemitic because it implies a Palestinian ethnostate and forced deportation of the Jewish population, which is bad. Also, it's used by Hamas who are terrorists, so anyone who uses it is a terrorist! Except, presumably Likud and the whacky Eretz Israel types who use the phrase all the time- due to its biblical origin in Deuteronomy. Indeed, it's literally in Likud's founding charter from 14 years before Hamas was even founded ("from the river to the sea there will be only Israeli sovereignty"). I'm sure that is Different though, for Reasons.

Netanyahu's only way to stay out of jail is to keep things going and that is far more important than anything Biden says. Doesn't seem likely Biden would actually do anything in response, certainly not things like allowing a UNSC resolution through with any teeth, nor cancelling weapon shipments. They've been ignoring calls from the US for 'humanitarian pauses' (or whatever the Orwellian phrase is) for weeks now and the US still runs interference at the UN and sends Blinken around to be humiliated. As soon as the crisis ends Bibi will be expected to resign, even if he doesn't as soon as there is an election he'll lose. That's why he looks like a deflated balloon version of himself, he's completely borked his legacy and there will be a decent number of prior supporters who were fine with the corruption but will now be thinking he should be in jail for the security failings. Even his attempts to shift the blame have backfired since he was forced to apologise for trying to blame the army and intelligence services for the initial attack.

The Germans consistently cooked the books on their losses after 1941, and the worse the result the more they cooked them. As a result any casualty ratios have to be taken with an Aral Sea sized dose of salt. eg, total casualties for the Eastern Front inc PoWs are 14M soviet, 10M German (figures swiped from wikipedia, as indicative). If you exclude PoWs the ratio is 6.5M to 4.5M dead, even if you count the PoWs who died in captivity it's 'only' 10M to 5M. The only major battle that beats all three of those ratios is... Stalingrad. The only one. Consider: (Citadel)/ Kursk: German casualties 160k, Russian casualties, 860k. So a ratio of ~5.5:1. Operation Barbarossa: German casualties 1M, Russian casualties 4.5M. So a ratio of... 4.5:1? And that includes 2.5M Soviet prisoners. For the worst defeat suffered by any side in the entirety of WW2 and which included a whole host of tactical disasters for the Soviets, vs Kursk, which was effectively a tactical draw (but major strategic loss for Germany)... who would have thought that Kursk was more successful than Barbarossa. Well, no one. Yet if you go by casualty ratios, it was, and bet the average for the Eastern Front pretty handily. And it's even worse for other 43 ops like Rumyantsev and Kiev ('43) where the supposed casualty rates were 10:1 and 8:1, in Germany's favour. As previous, the worst German defeat of the war still has them, in some sources, attaining a stunning 9:1 kill ratio while losing Belarus and much of eastern Poland/ Baltics. German casualties simply don't add up. Unsurprising, since they were extensively Goebbeled for public consumption. Kind of baffling the number of historians who will use the German figures almost without question though, fair enough maths isn't their strong suit but... it isn't exactly advanced calculus.

One of my favourite wikipedia articles for pointing out the massive bias you get from 50 years of using German/ western sources. Biggest German defeat of WW2 with an entire Army Group destroyed yet the Soviets supposedly suffered twice the number of losses/ casualties. Indeed, one source gives the Germans a 9:1 kill ratio... for their biggest defeat. As one prominent wag put it: "you could tell how the war was really going because our glorious victories kept getting closer to Berlin". Not like there wasn't a load of wasteful attacks too, but much as with Ukraine when one side does it it's human waves, when the other does it it's tactical infantry assaults.

Considering who the leak was to it was pretty obvious the Israeli government wanted to say no, but did not want to actually say no. Dunno how much of that is what people actually believe, versus what it's convenient to believe. Quite often you'll get a very detailed, if skewed, historical analysis out of such people if you challenge Hamas being the problem. The pro Israeli stance tends to be a mass of self contradictory positions (so is the pro Palestinian one, of course, though to a lesser extent since they lost) designed to make Israel simultaneously the perpetual victim forced into doing bad things yet also strong and powerful and making independent decisions for her own protection. The typical conversation goes something like: M: well Israel took Gaza off Egypt after attacking her. That's where the trouble with Gaza specifically started I: Egypt attacked us in 1967, and they don't want the land back M: Egypt attacked you? They blew their own airforce up and invaded Sinai from Israel? I: ...well, they were blockading Eilat! That's a casus belli! And were going to attack at some point! That makes it OK and super smart! M: hmm, so a blockade is an act of war and retaliation for it fine? I: Yes! M: OK, so Hamas is justified in attacking Israel because of their blockade of Gaza? I: No not like that! I: ... uh, anti semite! Hamas starting everything is particularly difficult to defend when Israel supported it in its infancy as a counter to the PLO/ Fatah precisely because it was radical and unsympathetic. Mostly though the idea is to force any criticism of Israel to come with a Hamas Bad attached; without the reciprocal Israel Bad whenever Hamas does something bad. That's a rhetorical/ propaganda framing device to make everything Israel does bad just a response to something Hamas did that was bad and thus All Hamas' Fault.

There's security camera footage of the actual (three) hit(s) as well. One is a clear miss, one's a near miss and the third is pretty much spot on. Militarily, nearly completely irrelevant though. Not going to do anything to stop kalibr's since there are plenty of alternative launch platforms. Replacement cost will be the main issue. Though I think 'heavily armed corvette' is a bit of a contradiction in terms, corvettes as a designation are simply too small to be heavily armed. Someone also sent one of Zaluzhny's colleagues a boobytrapped present, according to him. That's the second friend of his to die over the course of a few days in questionable circumstances.

Finished Picard S3. Far from perfect, but I liked it a lot overall and not all just due to nostalgia. So much better than S1 was. Definitely more than a few nuTrekisms and general sloppiness- plus various plot points seeming to have been cobbled together from other shows; ironically despite all the references not 12 Monkeys- but it was enjoyable.

Past 10,000 dead Palestinians today. Interesting fact: 4104 of those are children, killed by humane precision western backed weapons per the Rules Based Order fired by the most moral army in the world. This amounts to almost exactly 40% of the casualty figure, and is ~the proportion of children in the Gaza strip vs the whole population. ie, it's exactly the proportion you'd expect statistically if Israel were firing off weapons blindly, or deliberately targeting the general population. Weird, eh? 31 Israeli children died out of 1400 to the indiscriminate/ deliberate terrorists of Hamas. That's ~2% of the 1400 Israeli deaths, the overall proportion of children in Israel is 28%. So the indiscriminate/ deliberate attacks managed to kill 1/12 the number of children you'd expect as a proportion for indiscriminate/ deliberate attacks. Weird eh? Israel has managed to kill 135x more children than Hamas did in absolute terms; and using the most generous measure (ie normalising for demographics and relative casualties between the two groups) more than 10x as many in relative terms. That's super duper weird, eh? Can't wait for all the baffled looks from western politicians next time they burble on about someone they don't like committing war crimes and wonder why the rest of the world won't fall into line behind them.

An ambulance was hit outside Gaza's main hospital. We know it can't have been Israel though, because no 5-7m wide crater and they only have munitions that make 5-7m wide craters... oh wait, they admitted to hitting it, very strange. Maybe they got some new weapons that don't just make 5-7m wide craters? Some sort of retribution based name might be appropriate, hellfire maybe? Or perhaps their presentation on the Al Ahli hit was complete bollocks designed to convince idiots who'd accept anything. Not just that absolute trash impact comparison but also a missile break up/ interception that took place over 2km away from the hospital, plus the magical launch sites 4km apart and the amazing pidgin arabic comms interception. Also, rather a lot of new incidents of civilians being shot up along the 'safe routes'. Yet Netanyahu keeps telling people to use them, for some reason. No doubt it's Hamas wasting munitions on making Israel look bad, Or Something. The only 'funny' thing about this is how every single 'Russia bad' trope from Mariupol, Bakhmut, a Leppo, Ghouta and every other 'siege' is being carried out by Israel to a far greater extent, to geopolitical crickets when not outright aid from the Rules Based Order. My personal favourite was Biden suggesting that the Palestinian casualty figures were exaggerated when he knew (well, it's Biden so...) that they were regarded as accurate by the US. Have to wonder though in a chicken/ egg way which came first, France deciding to host a conference for humanitarian aid to Gaza, and Israel deciding to hit AFP (Agence France Presse) and the French Institute as 'terror targets'.

Been going through some of the Prime catalogue since I've got a free month. The Boys S3- liked it pretty well overall, quite a lot more than S2. Mostly because I think I've accepted that the main plot progress is going to be glacial and there are going to be... clichés: ie have to make Stormfront worse than Homelander, have to make [S3 antagonist] worse than Homelander as a way to put the Big Confrontation off. Also, lots of [currentyear] allusions. Did you know both Donald Trump and Homelander could shoot someone and their approval ratings would go up? Not exactly subtle social commentary, but then can't really expect that from a show that has octopus sexy times and a guy with a bigger dong than any Vietnamese financial institution wandering around. At least it's fairly even handed given that there's the homicidal AOC analogue as well. Rings of Power- well, I didn't hate it. The problems are myriad though. Some I suspect are Exec Interference/ Focus Group based- the Mystery Plot doesn't work here and didn't work in WoT S1 either. Others... is Galadriel 4000, or 14? It's often shot like an adaptation of a stage play. There's some truly awful CGI (wtf was that Elven ship G jumped off of? I might be able to do better than that, and I have the artistic talent of asphalt), the scale is at times ridiculous, the dialogue is a bad combination of stagey and stilted and the overall plot is disjointed and tries to set up confliction that cannot actually occur. And 2 episodes into Picard S3. I've skipped S2 as everyone says it's crap. Now this, I like, so far. Not quite unreservedly, but fairly close. Did you know that this season's showrunner also ran 12 Monkeys (TV)? It's pretty subtle but I caught on after the actor for Shaw, the reference to James Cole and a drug called Splinter...

That'd be the Houthis, not rump Yemen. They've been sending drones along the Red Sea for about a week. One hit the Egyptian town next to Eilat Israel a couple of days ago and a US warship shot another couple down a few days earlier than that. Houthis actually have "'Death' to Israel" as part of their motto which is on their flags. Rump Yemen can't use the toilet without asking Saudi- or the UAE, if it's around Aden/ Socotra- permission. They're more likely to declare war on the faction backed by the other country than on anyone external.