Zoraptor

Is that Daniel Bryan Bryan Danielson about to tell me that both pictures were staged? (100% better staging from the US, the Taliban look like a bunch of unenthusiastic cosplayers)

That's just the Brits saying that it's the neighbours' problem now. Taliban rebranding is mostly Qatar's doing. They've tried to do similar with other groups like Jabhat al Nusra in Syria to make them more palatable to western sensibilities.

Rank and file ANA was pretty well infiltrated by the Taliban too- that's always been a problem; if you have a nominal strength of ~350k and it's 'really' about half that if some random turns up you're not quite sure whether it's one of those ghost soldiers actually turning up or not. Certainly the top end of the ANA- the Commandos- fought very hard and was high quality, but it was a very top heavy workload for them. Near exact same thing happened with the US trained/ supported Iraqi response to ISIS in Iraq (ie not the PMU/ Hashd militia but their formal army) where the exact equivalent Golden Division did a massively disproportionate amount of the fighting, and suffered pretty ludicrous losses (~40% in the Battle of Mosul alone), while the rest of the army had plenty willing to fight but they mainly ended up actually doing the fighting with the PMUs because the formal army was... awful, as an army. Indeed, if there's one thing that shows that the US/ NATO didn't learn the lesson from ISIS in Iraq* it was that the exact same mistakes made with the western trained army there existed and were repeated with the ANA, including only having one formation capable of genuine offensive actions. The main difference being the religious divide that meant that ISIS had no attraction to or ability to infiltrate shia areas, and that the Afghans never got time to properly organise a PMU equivalent when their formal army fell apart. *Or Syria; while not western trained the situation in Syria was similar prior to 2015. They only had one formation capable of significant offensive acts ('Tiger Forces') and while they had plenty of people willing to fight the army as a whole was unreliable, leading to a lot of informal loyalist militia doing the actual fighting while army units were badly led and tended to fall apart if anything went wrong. As much as Russian intervention made a difference the development of 3 or 4 formations that could reliably launch attacks to take the strain off was at least as large a factor since it meant the Tiger Forces weren't constantly being moved from crisis to crisis In the end Trump's set date did nothing, since Biden ignored it. Arguably Biden's set date did nothing either since the whole thing fell apart 4 weeks before it passed. I've always found that sort of thing disproportionately annoying. It's the diplomatic equivalent of #StopKony2012.

Myocarditis rather than pericarditis? Doesn't matter anyway, the answer is that if you run a study on ~40,000 people and a side effect only occurs at a 1/100,000 rate the chances are that no one gets the side effect in the study. But that's true whether the study is expedited or long term. If you're giving it to 500 million europeans you statistically Expect 5000 people to get it, but againm that's irrespective of whether it was approved fast or slow. They do stop studies when possibly related serious effects show up, eg they stopped the AstraZeneca covid vaccine when someone in the phase 3 trial developed neurological symptoms, but that was eventually shown to be unrelated. Indeed. For anyone who doesn't know the 'original' 'scientific' 'antivaxxer' Andrew Wakefield got his MMR vaccine --> autism paper published in The Lancet. And he, of course, wasn't really antivax since he was himself, coincidentally, trying to patent individual vaccines.

XeSS? ... Guess everybody at Intel pronounces Xe as 'ex ee' and nobody pronounces it as 'zee'.

4 new Tomb Raider releases: Legend, Anniversary, Underworld; Game of the Year (Reboot). Can get the 7 games available for a smidge over $10 total.

High viral load not necessarily correlating with symptoms and being found even in asymptomatic cases seems to be a bit of a 'delta thing'. Delta has caused high viral loads (usually still a-/ low symptomatic) even in (some) vaccinated people. Trouble with proving transmission from those people is that trying to isolate high viral loads but a-/ low symptomatic people as vectors when you can practically guarantee anyone has also been exposed to some random hacking their lungs out, and the contact tracing is either non existent or swamped.

But how can you continually smooth those skirts? RIP in peace any thoughts of a faithful book adaptation. Guess at least we may still get some braid tugging.

Anyone overly worried about the vaccines' emergency approval should just pretend it's a response to an earthquake instead and ask if they'd be shocked and appalled at how normal bureaucratic procedure isn't followed after one of those. There's a massive amount of bureaucracy that gets sidestepped in any emergency response. After an earthquake you don't want people living in tents for years because you're holding planning meetings, receiving submissions, then counter submissions, then writing the costs of repairs to water and sewerage into next year's budget and gazetting that for comment as you'd normally do. You side step all of that due to it being an emergency and fix the infrastructure without it being budgeted; but keep the stuff that is really important ie repairs and rebuilds must still be done to safety standards so next time there's an earthquake the house doesn't kill anyone living there. There are of course reasons for the extended time frame and extra bureaucracy which occurs under 'normal' circumstances but those reasons are extra safeguards for when there's the luxury of little time pressure.

Children under 12 are specifically excused from wearing masks here since it can be impossible to get them to keep them on. We now have 7 cases here, fortunately all the exposure sites are very low risk like, uh, a pub and restaurant while watching the All Blacks, a school (teacher), hospital (vaccinated nurse) and a casino. Not their fault of course since they wouldn't have had a clue about being infected. Oh well, time to tackle my gaming backlog plus get the garden organised for spring, for the next 3+ weeks. May I also say a fulsome 'thank you' to Gladys Berejiklian (premier of New South Wales in Ockeronia). I know New Zealand was once part of her state and is listed as a State itself in the Ocker constitution, but I would have been perfectly happy if she hadn't included us in her plan to spread delta throughout the commonwealth. And she had the fricking index case there and did nothing for over a week.

She's not wrong. Niqab/ burka is cultural, not religious, and you're only 'meant' to cover the hair (indeed the specific Koranic guidance is that you're not allowed to cover the face during the Hajj, so niqab/ burka are banned there).

From the 'aged like milk files: Ashraf Ghani: fixing failed states Ashraf Ghani: Preparing for a Syrian Transition but unfortunately this masterpiece from all the way back on Feb 15 1989 doesn't seem to be available online...

You can make a vaccine that theoretically works in an afternoon- that's literally how long it took to do the theory on the Oxford vaccine, literally on a napkin. It's always the trials that take the time. Most big name viruses have a vaccine unless they're too mild or rare to care about, HIV would be the biggest one that doesn't, but that's also an unusual virus in that it specifically targets the immune system itself. The directed response to a novel pathogen (eg a new virus) takes time, that's why vaccines exist since they stimulate the immune system, and make it so the pathogen is recognised. It's also why vaccines don't work immediately. It would be incorrect to say that there's no immune response prior to that though, there's a swag load of responses you inherently get to anything new (including things like pus around wooden splinters), they're just not directed specifically at it and thus less efficient.

Previously I would have said that excluding the Afghan government from negotiations was moronic, but after their recent performance I'm way less sure about that. And yeah, if the US wanted support for the Afghan government from a neighbour it would have to be Pakistan. It would have to be a pretty big offer to get them on board though, and chances are that anything significant enough would alienate India (Modi) who Trump had been courting extensively. OTOH, too much pressure would drive them to make a deal with India's other regional enemy, China. So, not easy to balance at all.

That actually does exist as a statement, kind of, though the specific interpretation of the statement is definitely and clearly misinformation rather than contextually correct: [source] So it's "In contrast, the Delta variant seems to produce the same high amount of virus in both unvaccinated and fully vaccinated people" being taken as an isolated statement out of context.

Hard for Intel to do that though. The modern TSMC nodes are all expensive and oversubscribed, and that is what they're using so the pressures will be the same as they are for AMD- to use your limited capacity to make the stuff that sells for the most money first. And that isn't budget lines. At the moment that pricing is still the natural home of the 14nm era Polaris and 16xx cards as it has been for years. They'd still be being produced but there's no/ little GDDR5 available any more (??? IIRC it's almost entirely deprecated but I can't remember the source of that...)

I'd argue that their CPUs need a (new) brand name more than their GPUs do. Xe is fine- OK, it reminds you of Blackwater constantly changing their name to escape bad press, but on the positive it also reminds you about a handy currency conversion website. In contrast even Intel engineers and PR people doing presentations have no idea what their CPU branding actually means any more.

We don't really know what advice they were giving Biden (or Trump). It's entirely possible- probable- that they were simply getting very bad intelligence at the base level, ie all their sources, the NATO trainers and the Afghans, thought that things were going to go far better than they did. Personally, I have little doubt that the US believed the Taliban were a lot weaker than they actually were because they've tended to avoid directly fighting NATO forces as much as possible- which was of course a sound strategy from them, but can easily lead to the belief that they won't/ can't fight any other way. Under those circumstances convincing yourself that even if your allied Afghans aren't that good they'll be good enough to last against a hit and run insurgency that will melt away at the first hint of a response isn't much of a stretch.

One suspects that the media may, at some point, remember that the withdrawal was originally a Trump policy which Biden just delayed before implementing. Of course, when the policy was popular and the ANA was going to hold out for months or years it was all Joe's idea, but they can just ignore that if they try really hard. The Taliban have generally been decent about actual prisoners- at least comparatively. Though if the comparison is to Abdul Rashid Dostum... Ismail Khan for example was captured by them last time too and held for two years instead of executed, and he was captured rather than executed this time. OTOH, those like Dostum who have some, hmm, history of unpleasantness to Talib prisoners, shall we say? are not likely to rest easy. They're probably more brutal overall when it comes to civilian prisoners than military ones. There will be inevitable score settling to come, but a lot of that will be intra and inter tribal utu for those who backed the wrong side. That at least was sensible. Last stands and heroic pointless resistance make for good movies, but Kabul had Hekmatyar lobbing artillery into it for years in the 90s and all it really achieved was setting the scene for the Taliban while killing thousands and destroying the city. They did have support from NATO, just not boots on the ground support. There were still a lot of airstrikes etc. But yeah, the design of the ANA was fundamentally broken for its intended role in its intended country. The contrast would be that it was too 'western' (centralised, basically) while the Taliban was decentralised and far more flexible as well as better motivated in general. Trying to transplant western military methods into different cultures doesn't really work that well even for countries willing to chuck trillions at it like Saudi Arabia. It was centralised to try and cut down on corruption and stop warlords from having personal fiefdoms, but it all it really meant was that the local military commanders (and soldiers to an extent) had little affinity for the regions they were commander of and the soldiers' wages were stolen by someone in Kabul instead of someone local (and usually the local doesn't steal from his own soldiers, as he needs and wants their loyalty). If the US were staying for another 20 years it could have worked, but if that wasn't realistic then it was setting the ANA up to fail. Does need to be said, there were plenty of ANA soldiers willing to fight, and many who did. Not much point continuing when you're 'obviously' going to lose though, and when your commanders are defecting. There was plenty of outright treachery going on, I mentioned Ismail Khan before who was organising the resistance in Herat a week ago, it fell when... the regional governor handed Khan over to the Taliban in return for amnesty. The equipment though was definitely particularly stupid. Humvees aren't an asset for the ANA, they're an encumbrance; awful to maintain, not particularly safe, use a ludicrous amount of fuel and are too big. In 99.9% of real world situation in Afghanistan you'd either need something with 'proper' armour like an APC (or tank), or it could be handled by a far cheaper and infinitely easier to maintain Toyota Hilux or equivalent. No neighbour can readily furnish western spares and equipment full stop except Pakistan. At least Americans can console themselves that an awful lot of the 2 trillion spent went towards weapon purchases from US suppliers, though they'd have been far more sensible to have spent less and just kept the soviet stuff if the end goal was a functional army.

Bold of anyone to think that we won't need more footnotes than just * and † the way things are going.

About every six months some politician here talks about how very interested our government is in B&R, nothing ever seems to progress beyond that though. There has been some push back against Chinese 'investors' not living up to the claims they've made in their Overseas Investment Commission applications recently though, with some divestments ordered. Not that that says much, if they bought a property for a million dollars last year even if forced to sell they'd make 300k average profit (albeit, subject to tax).

Yeah, agreed. Can't really blame a fact checker who has probably checked wikipedia for something, especially when it's a subject of (semantic) debate even between experts. The strongest argument for the Sky News AUs stuff is that it can cause actual harm, under the assumption that people believe they're getting a treatment when they aren't, and that's a way stronger argument than one for any meme about events 200+ years ago.

The Washington one is interesting because of the argument of variolation vs vaccination. That is definitely not the sort of thing that SM should be worried about on principle though, it's far too granular and semantic. End of the day it doesn't really matter whether variolation <-> vaccination or not since they both achieve the same end. It's the scientific equivalent of policing grammar. Personally I always try to refer to variolation as inoculation instead, since it prompts less arguments for some reason.

There's certainly plenty to dislike about B&R. I'd cite the general insistence on using Chinese labour instead of training locals and the dubious necessity of some projects to a list too. But, there shouldn't be an expectation of altruism from them, and you do get the infrastructure built even if it is a white elephant highway like Montenegro, the other classic example often cited. I put it in the same category as someone using credit card debt, it's fine if it's really necessary, but there's a responsibility on both the lender and borrower to be responsible in how they do it. Too many countries buying the equivalent of a big screen TV on credit then being surprised when the interest free period runs out and they have to start paying for it.

SNA didn't get deplatformed, they got video upload restricted for a week, which was more of a warning shot than anything else. Yeah, it's dodgy when social media sets itself up as judge, jury and executioner for what counts as misinformation, but media really shouldn't be touting unproven cures such as HCQ or ivermectin, and Murdoch outlets regularly touted both. I guess at least they're unlikely to do anyone taking them extra damage beyond not being the miracle cure that they might expect.