Zoraptor

Netflix is making a Bioshock movie. Wonder if Ken Levine will bring all that experience from MASH to the party...

Hey guys, Tyson Fury is meant to come to my house and punch me on the nose today. If he doesn't, it's because I've successfully deterred him. In terms of response South Ossetia/ Abkhazia is probably a closer comparison since they're pretty much direct equivalents, just Georgian, though they were justified as legal thanks to the stupidity of Kosovo's 'unique case'. Also had more of the genuine genocide adjacent about them since the Georgians were confirmed to have ethnically cleansed 100k ethnic Ossetians. Not that you'll see that particular fact mentioned very much; and that isn't the case for novorossiya no matter the rhetoric of Bandera fans. They'll throw a wobbly about Russian peacekeepers moving in. They'll do nothing about it except maybe some toys coming out of the cot. Doesn't make any practical difference anyway, that's the effective status quo already.

What is it with Scott Morrison and cringey photo ops? I'm sure I remember some old bloke telling him to f___ off at the airport when he tried to get a handshake around that time too, which was about the most stereotypically Australian thing I've ever seen. OTOH New Zealand's PMs have too many people shaking their hands. Not quite as topical though.

The Australian Federal Police Raids- on three media organisations. What sparked them. IGADF Report ('Brereton Report') on Australian SAS conduct in Afghanistan- pdf, and long. 2021 update. And for balance, the report on the allegations of war crimes by the New Zealand SAS ('Operation Burnham'; TLDR definitely killed civilians, probably didn't meet the criteria for a war crime though the systematic lying about it was a very bad look. The guy who wrote the exposé on that has definitely been the target of SIS spooks before and since, too). That should give Bruce some light reading for the next few days.

There's one problem with that- it's fundamentally incompatible with what they've already done. The whole point is that they've already made the existence of the intelligence public, so the hand is shown. It's the card equivalent of going for a lay down misère and then saying that maybe the player is bluffing instead of trying to lose. Once the cards are down it can't be a bluff because... that's the point of putting the cards down; once the intelligence is revealed you've already shown its existence. If the aim is to protect the intelligence then they shouldn't have revealed it in the first place.

Yeah, I'm not sure I've seen anyone at all who liked completed Picard. IIRC Guard Dog at least liked it up until the last two episodes, and I found it tolerable up to them. And that's about it for positivity. I wouldn't put it quite as regarding toys being broken, but I think that my opinion that the Federation has always been a busted flush* helps when it comes to not hating the programs. End of the day it's the bad plotting which ruined all the shows for me, not them being bad Star Trek. *I also watched Blake's 7 first, so I'll view any 'Federation' with an arrowhead symbol as less than intrinsically great, which helps when it comes to Picard.

So does the ambassador who made them for that matter. The ambassador to the UK making them was always a bit of an odd option (compared to, say, Germany), if they were intended as a positional change and not just made off the cuff. Kind of amusing seeing the number of Brits and Americans online who think that anything less than complete and unequivocal support for their assertions and inflexibility from Zelensky and other Ukrainians is treachery though. Apparently wanting to actually see the supposed plan that the US has for tomorrow's invasion is a completely unreasonable request, given that the Ukrainians are the ones who would actually have to fight said invasion. You'd think that would be more useful than some expired Javelins. Only really two options from that, either the plan doesn't exist or they don't actually want to help Ukraine fight it; and neither of those options is very complimentary.

On a my personal bête noir/ Discovery like Albatross round the neck from a couple of months ago; I watched Shadow and Bone on Netflix. Wasn't really expecting much, but I thought it would be a fairer comparison to Wheel of Time than S2 of The Witcher even if it wasn't effected by covid as much. Well, S&B was better in every single regard and I ended up liking it completely unironically. Better written, better effects, better acting (though that comparison at least may be unfair, doubtful the actors in WoT could have done much better with what they had), way better direction and cinematography overall, and it didn't reek of cheapness and being rushed despite all the money spent on it. It's not outright brilliant but I would outright recommend it to anyone who isn't allergic to a touch of the Young Adult Tropes, at least. At the time, those were pretty much exactly my thoughts. It wasn't good, but there was potential there to be built on.

I'd have far rather had a different vaccine than Pfizer for exactly those reasons. The funniest people* are those defending its cost- now the most expensive- as being due to all the research Pfizer had to do. The research was done by BionTech, and paid for by the fine volk of Deutschland. All Pfizer did was... license the design. I do rather like to pretend that all the people worshipping Pfizer are paid to do so, but facts have to faced: a lot are just stupid enough to fanboy an utterly morally bankrupt multi billion dollar company, for free. It's not even the best vaccine, half the reason boosters are needed is because its efficacy drops so steeply- considerably more so than Moderna's. Given it's Pfizer you might expect that being great short term and crap longer term is entirely by design, but as above they didn't actually design it so I guess that at least can't be blamed on wanting windfall profits. *OTOH the worst thing was slandering the cheaper alternatives, aided by useful idiots like von der Leyen desperate to throw poo at the UK for having the temerity to leave their club.

The Afghans had ~7bn USD in gold and foreign currency (USD) reserves, held in the US (at the New York Federal Reserve); but starting at the latest in 2017, ie 5 years ago. So it's certainly not from recent donations. The ultimate source probably was aid though, as Afghanistan had few ways to accumulate cash otherwise, eg less than 1bn in exports. It was definitively Aghanistan's money legally though, you can't get more formal than held by its central bank. Main lesson: don't use the US to store your cash.

I really couldn't care less about what politicians wear, unless it's actively stupid. Unfortunately Truss's outfit was. I do very much enjoy the annual APEC silly shirt competition though. And very occasionally you get an outfit I'd 100% unironically wear.

Boba Fett was always a stupid idea for a Disney series. "No disintegrations"; from Darth Vader? You were never going to get the same character, so to many it would be automatic disappointment. It required far too much santisation and let's be frank, removes any mystique and mystery from the character while doing so, so it's a double whammy of bad. Thus you end up with the weird spectacle of a ruthless bounty hunter running a criminal syndicate that is... extraordinarily tame, and pretty frequently looking like a putz while doing it because you need some sort of tension. It's the sort of thing that looks great on paper but when you come to actually put it on screen you find that the reasons that Boba Fett was 'cool' are exactly the same reasons he can't work on screen as a Disney lead.

My booster gave me a dead arm. The 2nd shot was worse, since that actually made me feel outright ill for a day. I almost always get some odd immediate interactions from injections too, with the booster I got a feeling as if my hand was wrapped in ice for a couple of minutes. Having had 'long flu' before though any minor inconveniences from vaccines are just that. A sore arm and a bit of a headache is nothing compared to that mass of completely random ailments; 'favourite' being the random feeling that my skin was shrinking that I got for literally months on end. You knew perfectly well it wasn't, but that didn't stop the feeling of it. Oh yeah, and my caffeine tolerance got randomly reset so even as single cup of coffee could have me bouncing off the walls. Needless to say I've had a flu jab every year since except the last one as there was no flu in NZ last year.

The articles deal with that fine, really- on the British side it was always intended as political theatre and not as constructive diplomacy; and quite possibly even intended to be actively destructive to attempts at diplomacy. She was always going there with the explicit purpose of looking tough. Hence cosplaying Thatcher despite it being comparatively bikini weather (with apologies to anyone now imagining Maggie in a bikini). It mostly failed at looking tough because it got overshadowed by her looking stupid, at least for the publications that published her looking stupid (which it has to be said many didn't for some reason). The British approach has always been to pour oil on the flames- there was also that ludicrous incident with the RN destroyer months ago and them panicking about reports from the bbc and daily fail they'd run away from warning shots. If you're in a domestic crisis you always have the option to wag the dog. As with the bombing of that aid worker and his children* in Kabul it was pretty obvious from the start that the US version was at best... selective. *Hmm. Wonder whether that guy's family will get a 3.5bn slush fund for compensation? I'll offer, hmm, 3.5bn to 1 odds, and feel a bit dirty taking the $1. Probably, as the US does not accept Russian sovereignty over the southern Kurils. Indeed, they don't actually recognise anyone's sovereignty over two of them. Which may be a hold back to Truman's demand that the Soviets hand one of the Kurils over to the US for basing rights...

But Joe Biden said the ground would freeze in February... Though that reminds me of one of the more obscure funny things from Liz Truss's visit to Moscow. She deliberately dressed up like Maggie Thatcher did, as if it was -20. It was actually a toasty 3 degrees, and she must have absolutely broiled herself. If anyone wants an actual illustration of just how stupid the New Zealand economy is at the moment, our Prime Minister already has one of the highest pay rates in the OECD (strangely enough there's always money to give politicians salary and benefit increases, otherwise their, haha, "quality might drop"). She made more money, tax free, from her house appreciating last year than from her salary- 8 times the median household income. "There will never be a capital gains tax so long as I am PM" says woman who would have to pay extra 125k in tax if there were. Oh yeah, and the alternative leader owns no less than 7 properties...

Meh, they still don't have enough troops. Indeed, the propaganda about that has been pretty ludicrous. Enough for an "imminent" invasion, supposedly spend another couple of weeks adding troops and readiness was... down to 70%? Guess it's the old anxiety habituation in action, ie you can't tell people they're in immediate danger too long or they start to ignore it. Now we're back to 'imminent', just avoid mentioning the word itself. At least Pentagon spox or whoever it was got to the meat of the issue- making NATO relevant again. Didn't see if he mentioned the attempts to get Europe to buy overpriced US gas, but he didn't really need to. Nothing braindead about that. Every increase in energy price helps out all the massively overexposed shale operations that were in trouble with the low energy prices of the early pandemic phase. Bad news for ordinary americans, but big stragetic advantage to the US, and neither party cares about poor people anyway. Not a US only phenomenon, of course, we've got reports coming out about how historic high inflation disproportionately effect... the rich. The logic being, if you're poor and spending all your money anyway you don't spend extra when prices go up because you have no extra money to spend, so there's zero impact. OTOH, rich people pay more for the Jaguar or Cayenne, so are effected. This is mostly to run interference for the entire $50bn stimulus package that caused a a lot of the inflation going to rich people who bought houses, leading to a completely unpredictable 30% (no typo, thirty percent, and yes that's annual) appreciation in house prices. The average household would now have to save every cent- ie spend literally nothing- for 14 years to afford a house at current prices. Problem being, of course, that by the time that 14 years has elapsed on historic trends the house prices will have trebled again while wages will have gone up ~15%. Coincidentally, the average NZ member of parliament owns 3 houses... Wonder how many shares in defence production and energy US politicians have?

The British FM Liz Truss and Russian FM Lavrov had a meeting today. It was... interesting, apparently*. I'd say it was pretty much exactly what you'd expect when one of the more experienced international diplomats meets, well, an idiot trying to look tough for domestic brownie points. Most of the damage done was self inflicted. Truss didn't know how translators worked, and spent the first part of the meeting speaking over them before being told to shut up and be patient. How you can be a FM and not know that basic level of etiquette is difficult to understand. It's not even a power move, it just makes you look stupid, and as if you simply couldn't be bothered with even the basics. Which was kind of a recurring theme. She also managed to say that Britain would never recognise Russian sovereignty over Rostov and Voronezh. Which are internationally recognised parts of Russia; again a sign of being hopelessly underprepared and worse, it plays perfectly into the Russian narrative. She had to be corrected by the British ambassador, and it wasn't even a trap question since the context was pretty obviously whether Russia was allowed to move troops around Russia. That she apparently thought they were regions of Ukraine was indicative of being hopelessly underprepared but also kind of irrelevant, if you have any pretensions towards competence as a diplomat you always use a generic non answer like "We recognise Russian sovereignty on Russia, but not on Ukraine" for such questions since getting them wrong doesn't make you look tough, but like a moron. It also makes it hard for other diplomats to take you seriously. (Not her first rodeo, she also somehow managed to say that Baltic Nations were on the Black Sea) *there's a more detailed take from the FT, which I'd have used but thought would be be paywalled when it isn't.

We have a similar protest here which is labeled as being alt right etc, but the 2nd most popular flag there is actually the Maori Sovereignty flag; not exactly a staple with neo nazis and the like. Does get rather amusing constantly being told that it's all alt right imported american conspiracy theories from Steve B*nnon and his coterie of trumptards- and there is a lot of MAGA stuff, to be fair- when every shot has a uniquely local flag being waved enthusiastically by decidedly brown people. The most amusing in absolute terms though? Could be the guy who thinks face masks cause lung cancer, and that the media deliberately make them look stupid? Or maybe the South Island convoy forgetting that Wellington is located in the cunningly named 'North Island' and that they couldn't simply drive across Cook Strait; leading to them trying to organise a Dunkirk type operation on short notice...

The nVidia purchase of ARM officially dead having looked like it was pining for the fjords for at least the last few months. Reuters has Softbank floating ARM as an IPO instead.

While ISIS certainly doesn't like them Taliban and Qatar/ AJ are best buds*. One of the more funny accusations made against Qatar in the western press as part of the publicity campaign for the planned Saudi invasion** was that they were supporting the Taliban as the Taliban had an embassy there. The funny thing being that the US asked Qatar to set that embassy up, in order to have somewhere/ someone to hold the ongoing negotiations that eventually became the agreement Trump made with them and led to the US withdrawal of last year. *some may have seen former AJ journalist Charlotte Bellis running publicity for the Taliban lately using the contacts she developed at AJ. Pretty funny watching an organised disinformation campaign as the target of it rather than from the outside. **seriously, the whole idea was to take over Qatar's massive gas fields. Qatar has a tiny population of actual Qataris, like the Emirates most people there aren't Qatari. Someone had to point out to Trump that the largest US base in the ME was there, including CENTCOM's forward command centre.

'Funny'* thing is that half of the world leaders who have turned up to the opening ceremony are... muslim. Literally, 10 out of 20 of the leaders there are muslim. In contrast the only muslim 'country' in the diplomatic boycott is Kosovo, which doesn't even have an independent foreign policy. It's deeply ironic that when you get an actual and genuine case of muslims being persecuted muslim 'champions' like MbS or MbZ kiss the ring and muslim little b brotherhood be damned. And you have those with similar supposed sentiments who didn't turn up- one Recep Tayyip Erdogan, for example; since he's in the prelims of an election race and the optics wouldn't be good- sending Uighurs back to China despite all their talk. *For something I actually found funny, the country with the 3rd most contestants in the Olympics is listed as ROC- which is, of course, the abbreviation for Republic of China, ie Taiwan. Sadly, in this case it actually stands for Russian Olympic Committee...

There are a couple more capable neighboring states than Ukraine. Poland. Japan. Arguably Finland and Norway too, despite having far lower population. Ukraine really isn't very capable at all. And, well, the US. After all Sarah Palin could see Russia from her house*, and that's pretty much the definition of neighboring. The problem for Russia is not Ukraine's capability, it's that the next round of 'Russian threats' post Ukraine accession would have purely defensive NATO troops, planes and missiles 100km from Smolensk, Belgorod and Rostov; and no natural defense lines before Moscow. *yes, I know.

The damage to the house was definitely not caused just by a suicide belt and is from casual inspection far more consistent with a missile strike. There are alternative explanations for the damage that don't involve missiles though. A missile is what some of the locals say as well, though all agree there were ground troops present their and the US accounts differ very significantly. Hard to reconcile the locals' accounts of a two hour gun battle with the US implying a surgical/ precise in and out with minimal fighting (plus losing a helicopter, albeit helicopters are fundamentally unreliable), and though the locals are not trustworthy enough to take at their word the bulk of supplementary evidence does support their version. Civilian casualties (10, from the pro Turkey/ HTS White Helmets or 7 from the more anti Turkey/ HTS SOHR) observed on the ground and from the US recounting do not reconcile at all as they say Qurayshi only killed 2 children and his wife in the blast. That leaves either 7 or 4 civilian deaths, and one or four unexplained potential fighter deaths which is only really consistent with and compatible to the locals' account. Has to be said, there's at least one pretty recent examples of local accounts being 100% accurate and the US ones being... somewhat unreliable.

ISIS have lost another 'Caliph'- in very similar circumstances to Baghdadi. Also hits all the stereotypical points from the conflict. Major ISIS figure found in Syria right next to the Turkish border and in an area of Turkish influence/ protection if not outright control. Controlled by the 'reformed' jihadis of Jabhat al Nusra Hayat Tahrir al Sham. Blows himself up rather than be captured. Like Baghdadi (and a significant and literal majority of senior ISIS leaders) was captured and held by the US at Camp Bucca before being released. I'm always slightly amused when someone choosing to blow themselves up rather than be captured is described as 'cowardly'. If it had been an ISIS raid and a US soldier choosing to blow himself up rather than be captured it would be the height of heroism. Just because you don't like them doesn't make them a coward.

Dumb, sure, crappy, meh; she's arguably correct and it's mostly dumb because it was obviously going to get a negative reaction. Note: I absolutely loathe ethnicity and race as concepts, so bear that in mind... Hardly anyone knows what race and ethnicity mean and use the terms interchangeably. They're fundamentally stupid concepts as used now and since they reduce whole groups of people to a few traits as if that's all that is important fundamentally crappy even when used as intended. Race being based on physical differences and ethnicity being based on cultural ones is the distinction that should be in effect but people can't handle the idea that Idris Elba could be racially west African but also ethnically English (and not just the National Front types you might imagine; we also got the infamous BBC claim that Luther doesn't count as a black tv series lead because... he doesn't have black friends or eat Caribbean food or act 'black'. Doubly ironic because Idris Elba has nothing to do with the Caribbean, he's of direct west African extraction) Goldberg is arguably right because the Holocaust wasn't about race, but about ethnicity. Jews weren't separated based on physical traits as they are indistinguishable from general Europeans or Levantines with the stereotypical racist tropes of big nose and sallow skin being, well, stereotypical racist tropes. If you took me and Heinrich Himmler and asked a random person which had Jewish ancestry based on stereotypes 99% they'd pick Himmler, not me. Their genocide was perpetrated on cultural lines, not physical ones, and thus can most properly be said to based on ethnicity, not race, whatever the Nazis said. OTOH, the whole reason that the Rwandan Genocide could happen was because there were significant and apparent physical differences between Hutus- darker skinned, more robust build, central African appearance- and Tutsis with lighter skin, more gracile build and more of a north east African appearance. That's how you could get 400k people killed with machetes and sticks and who didn't have a cultural/ religious requirement to self identify; because they were easily identifiable by physical traits. But that is always labeled an ethnic genocide instead of a racial one, which it ought to be labeled as. This is my biennial tirade about how stupid the concepts of race and ethnicity are, set the calendar for February 2024.