Zoraptor

The current main WSJ contributor on the Chinese covid 19 theory- and the guy who broke the story about sick workers- has been used extensively to launder dodgy intelligence in the past. When he worked for the NYT most of the inaccurate information given by that paper was bylined by Judith Miller andor Michael R Gordon. At least he wasn't involved in outing a serving CIA officer because her husband was politically embarrassing though, unlike Miller.

For companies it's simply PR, everything that comes from their official accounts is designed to buff their image and let them sell more stuff. I do wonder if Raytheon has the same profile if seen from, say, a Saudi IP and companies that believe strongly in human rights, free speech etc seem to make an awful lot of 'mistakes' that just happen to censor things that powerful countries and customers don't like. Indian terrorists spreading terror by criticising Modi's covid response being 'accidentally' banned from twitter, a prominent search engine owned by a prominent US company 'accidentally' blocking images of tank man on the anniversary of Tiananmen Square... George Bush would have just dodged the slap with a sith eating grin afterwards.

In terms of being potentially hilariously inaccurate movies Vin Diesel's interpretation of Hannibal would have definitely been interesting to see, at least, though he did at least seem pretty invested in the idea on a personal level- but then again, so did Gibson with Braveheart and The Patriot. You just know that some people would be disappointed if he didn't eat Flaminius' liver with some fava beans and a chianti after Trasimene though. Much as I dislike Braveheart on general principle I'd say he in particular got screwed over by the old and more general adage of victors writing history. He wasn't portrayed sympathetically in Braveheart, but it wasn't massively off since he wasn't portrayed sympathetically in history either due to ultimately losing- and the victors had to justify the crime of crimes of murdering a king theoretically appointed by god.

Yeah... That kind of reasoning is the classic sort you see in military scenarios- the Russians won't mind their capital being nuked, because we say it's a proportional response and... we used an IRBM instead of an ICBM? People don't work like that, and neither do countries. If you're nuking Moscow then Washington gets nuked back, at very very least, and then you have the absolutely classic cycle of escalation under way. Realistically, given that Moscow has something like 20% of Russia's population and economy a proportional response is hitting everything from New York to Richmond; and the US can cling to its belief that it acted proportionately and honourably for the 6 hours it continues to exist as a functional country (and of course in all likelihood Russia will be doing the exact same thing). That is, in fact, exactly the sort of de Gaulle situation described; but you're expecting the US to sacrifice Washington and probably the entire eastern seaboard for Warsaw instead of Paris. So, a retaliation would likely be somewhere like Smolensk, Rostov na donu, at the outside St Petes, instead, since you can claim them as quasi sensible military targets and they're far less likely to lead to a runaway escalation, and Polish wishes mean 2/3 of diddly squat. And they're also well within range of pretty much anything nuclear capable without IRBMs. You'd have to come up with a reasonable scenario for Russia nuking Warsaw anyway, and that's probably something like NATO invading Kaliningrad with the obvious intention of keeping it. You're not going to get it in any realistic scenario in which there's not a shooting war simultaneously, and if you're invading a nuclear country then... the whole point is that you don't, because ultimately that's why you have nukes in the first place. Russia would nuke Warsaw as a last resort, and, about as definitely as you can in a hypothetical, after tactical nukes had been used extensively previous. The sort of situation in which nuking civilian targets gets considered is one in which there is already an uncontrolled escalation under way, it's just a step along the path to a full scale exchange. As for stationing, the classic example is the ABM stations. The only thing they do for the host country is make sure that they will be the first targets of any strike. It's also not like, say, Turkey has control of the nukes based at Incirlik or Germany controls the ones at Rammstein, but if those bases cop a mushroom cloud it will certainly be the US deciding any retaliation, not Ankara or Berlin. That's ultimately the reason basing US nukes in Europe has always been unpopular with a lot of people, all it really ensures is that Europe gets targeted, without a say in any retaliation.

That's not a great example since Russia doesn't need to use IRBMs to nuke Poland as Kaliningrad oblast directly borders Poland. Any scenario in which Kaliningrad no longer borders Poland is one in which things have already escalated beyond where you can apply direct logic- as is one in which Russia is using nukes for asterisks and giggles as a first strike weapon. The broader point is that that applies generally- there's already other options for any sensible scenario. If things have escalated so far that 'genuinely' medium range targets like Paris or London or Brussels or Vienna are being considered then using ICBMs can scarcely be an escalation, especially since at that level it isn't just about whether the US will retaliate. Otherwise, close targets- and tactical nukes on military targets, not hitting cities- make a lot more sense. And in any case INF did not apply to air/ sea means that you have a suite of medium range options available, they just aren't land based. On the more fundamental level, there are near literally no sensible targets for mainland US based medium range missiles, so they'd be deployed to 3rd party countries. For most of those that will mean their chance of being reciprocally targeted goes up massively, not down. If you're sticking IRBMs in, say, Japan, it isn't to defend them. That'd instantly make Japan a target for China, first strike or retaliatory.

Apparently all the putative government's MKs are getting heightened security due to death threats. It's a tiny theoretical majority so an assassination is being treated as a real possibility.

Looks like Netanyahu is gone as Israeli PM. Pretty big achievement being so polarising that near diametric opposites Naftali Bennet and Joint List join forces just to get you removed- and almost no tears being shed internationally since Bibi was near universally loathed by everyone. Next step for him, prison, with any luck. Then again, 8 parties and with the Joint List outside the formal coalition doesn't exactly scream stable government. You can pretty much guarantee there will be attempts to split one or more off starting 5 minutes before the deal was formalised.

Funny really, Sony, MS and Samsung will all have RDNA based 'APU's before AMD itself releases one to the public, Samsung's in something as small as a phone. I'd kind of presume the 5000 series desktop APUs are stopgaps for a Zen3 refresh- there may not be much point going RDNA2 with the integrated graphics if they're just going to choke on insufficient cache and shared DDR4 RAM. The stacked cache and (maybe) DDR5 support should move any bottleneck out a bit. They may also want to avoid people trying APU raytracing until there's more bandwidth, that performance will not exactly be great even in perfect situations.

You don't need any IRBMs if you have ICBMs, that's ultimately why the US and Soviets agreed to eliminate them. In any case, they could be (and were, the first test held by the US was literally days after leaving the INF) reinstated almost instantly, and almost certainly as nuclear too since some warheads never seem to have been actually destroyed as they were meant to be, just decommissioned. That was one of the bones of contention- frankly, breaches- of INF with the land based AEGIS anti missile stations Obama built, they used tomahawk launchers so it was trivial not just to refit them for banned conventional weapons but for banned nuclear weapons too. OK, tomahawks aren't ballistic, but there's nothing special about medium range ballistic missiles that renders making them difficult. US tanks are 'old' and require vast amounts of maintenance and resources but are fine otherwise at doing tank stuff- unless, they're export models driven by Saudis. But even then after getting blown up by some shoeless Houthi goatherd amped up on Qat using an antiquated Malyutka or Fagot the crew usually survives the direct consequences of their incompetence thanks to good design.

Zen3 and production starting end of this year according to Ian Cutress. May well be part of a simultaneous rebrand to Zen3+ though. That and the DLSS equivalent should really improve the gaming performance of their APUs. Didn't see it mentioned, but I presume that it will get used for GPUs as well at some stage, given them looking at MCM and having such a large cache on the 6000 series.

AMD's answer to DLSS, coming June 22 and hardware agnostic, should work for 500+ AMD (presumably 400+, since there's zero difference) and 1000 series plus for nVidia.

Think we class that as domestic terrorism since he had a right to be here and was not an agent of any overseas organisation. Though I think the general inclination of Australia to try and use New Zealand as a dumping ground for its home grown criminals and terrorists is why they aren't finding us very supportive in their fight with China- and the whole Rainbow Warrior affair left a generation of New Zealanders with the memory of being bombed by a supposed friend then told to 'suck it up' by supposed allies like Maggot Thatcher. Thus we have a very realistic assessment of exactly how much reciprocal 'friendship' we can expect from allies were the going to get tough, and have no appetite for supporting them when they pick fights we have far less stake in.

Bunch of DGSE cretins mining a civilian ship in a theoretically friendly country's harbour is stretching the definition of 'naval battle' a bit. Technically it was probably a draw anyway, both sides lost a ship and the French lost twice as many people, albeit none dead. Still the only act of international terrorism committed in New Zealand, and it was by the country 1 in 50 of our population never came back from after traveling 20,000km to defend it in WW1. Then people wonder why we've zero interest in picking fights with countries thousands of km away just to support out 'allies' any more.

The Fail does say 'set to be published' which would normally imply it's passed review. Then again, they're not exactly reliable and if they did understand about the difference between that and 'submitted' they wouldn't care anyway, if it made them sound more authoritative. And since it isn't 1am any more... ..while the claim of 4 basic amino acids in a row is patently false and that sequence simply isn't there it is entirely possible that that's not what the authors actually said- with what they did say being translated into a form that the average Mail reader can understand. A protein is a complex 3d structure, so you could have a phrase like 'spatially close' used and then interpreted to 'in a row' as being more easily understood. Spatially close amino acids in a protein can be very far apart in terms of the primary sequence*. That's still not great, since there isn't any inherent argument against that not being natural either; so long as it's a selective advantage there's no genetic reason not to have them spatially close or 'in a row', that's a structural problem. So long as the rest of the protein is set up to make an effective binding motif the lowest energy configuration it will still 'work'. End of the day, seeing if the paper gets published and what it actually says is the only way to actually know. *that's not shown by their 3d model though, where they highlight some basic amino acids (and cysteine bonds, important for structure). That has 3 basic AAs close together which are also sequential in the primary sequence (355-7, RKR) and then only highlights pairs that are close spatially. Since it's a 2d rep of a 3d structure you can't be absolutely sure of that except by downloading the 3d model and looking- be weird if they chose a view that hid it though- and that's far too high effort.

They funded the AstraZeneca vaccine and put in the earliest order for it. Indeed, iirc they put in both their big orders before the EU made theirs. If you ordered two Teslas from Elon Musk you'd expect them to be delivered before someone who ordered after you even if you weren't also a share holder; and the preferential treatment would be if the person who made the late orders got theirs first to reward them for backing DeLorean equivalents. The UK may have stuffed up their covid response bad initially, but there really isn't much to criticise in the vaccine rollout.

Well, either it isn't, or the Daily Fail is living up to its name again. Probably the latter. I checked, for my sins, and there simply aren't 4 positively charged amino acids in a row in sars cov 2's spike protein sequence. There 4 basic amino acids in a row in a structural protein (KHKH), but that sequence is identical to that in SARS1, so if it indicated human origin that would be the same for SARS 1. So either the Fail has garbled something badly or... dunno really. They'd have to have completely misquoted the guy though, because I checked and SARS has a sequence of no less than 7 identically charged amino acids (D/E, aspartic and glutamic acid) in a row which under the 'magnet' analogy ought to be really really impossible, if 4 in a row were. Wait until the scientific paper gets published I guess, assuming it actually exists.

The EU has given Ukraine ~5bn euro in loans since 2014, so not much really. The big loans were from the IMF (17 bn usd, in 2014 alone) and World Bank (13bn USD, not all since 2014 though). Those can't be granted by fiat by EU leadership though, only member taxes can. Though in this case the chance of that money actually being allocated any time soon is... low. Must be terrified of Lukashenko and Putin progressing the Union Treaty in Sochi since their meet has been extended for a day unscheduled. That would really put a cherry on top of the Borrel/ van der Leyen disaster show. Maybe EU bigwigs shouldn't be people judged too incompetent for government by their host countries and kicked sideways to appease their egos? Just an idea. That offer is the epitome of 'something must be done! this is something, so this must be done!'; literally only done so they can say they're doing something.

Lack of transparency is not a red flag. It's how China does business in pretty much everything. It is also extremely doubtful that the US would allow the WHO access to labs in similar circumstances given the rhetoric about the WHO being beholden to China. The bat/ pangolin theory is not at all weak. It's based on the proven (well, as much as you can) method of zoonotic transfer involved in SARS1. In that case the bats were also far removed from the initial outbreak, as were the proximal civets. The suspected method of transmission was via them mixing at a wet market, but it could equally as much have been someone from a rural area coming into the big city while infected. SARS-CoV2 has been shown to infect a fairly large variety of often not particularly closely related mammals. Humans, gorilla, pangolins, civets, mink, dogs, cats, tigers and lions at very least have had documented covid infections. In most of those cases they probably caught it from humans rather than bats, but you only need it to go the opposite way once, and as previous quite apart from SARS/ MERS coming from civets and camels you have HIV crossing over 20 times. It's rare that it happens, but the more chances you give it the more likely it is.

Yeah, nah. That's the same sort of stuff that Orogun linked me in a video a year or so ago, and it hasn't improved with age. My personal favourite there was the 'expert' who said only China had such labs, then talked about her experience in similar US labs five minutes further on in the video. Summed the whole thing up perfectly. For 3 and 4, it's a virology lab, that is the research it does. It was established specifically because of SARS1, and did coronavirus research because of SARS1. That's a matter of longstanding public record- can't get much more scientifically public than research papers- and not in any way secret. 5 isn't unusual at all. It's not unusually resistant to immune response, it's just a novel respiratory virus. Novel viruses are unusually resistant because there's no shared memory/ selection, and respiratory viruses are resistant because of the nature of their environment. And again, you look at the other natural crossover viruses and find... they're more resistant to immune response and considerably more deadly. 'Like HIV' is ludicrous anyway, since HIV was also a natural crossover which phylogenetic evidence suggests happened as many as 20 (!) times. Even if it were 'like HIV' beyond the trivial of both being RNA viruses it would not in itself have been suspicious. Well yeah, and you can find multiple papers and such from western sources with similar discussions. As a bioweapon it's... just stupid, it has no sensible utility. It doesn't target the right demographics, it isn't infectious enough or alternatively, is too infectious. As a geopolitical weapon it's stupid too, because the one thing China absolutely does not want is a global recession when its economic growth comes from exporting, and its biggest threat by far is an internal one from failing to deliver expected yearly improvements and growth. You also can't 'target' it effectively to specific countries- as before, it's too infectious to be controllable, but not infectious enough to be really effective- and anyone would know that you can't. If it were part of a bioweapons program they'd also have a parallel program for ameliorating any effects once it inevitably reached China, ie a vaccine or similar ready to roll. As it stands their vaccines are almost all the least effective- and going by 'vaccine ready' it would be a German or British bioweapon since Oxford and BionTech had working vaccines literally weeks after getting a sequence; it took China a fair bit longer and their vaccines apart from being low efficiency are also low tech. End of the day nothing could convince me more of Chinese incompetence than it being a bioweapon. Own goal that they'd know would be an own goal, badly designed, stupid stupid stupid. And again, multiple coronaviruses have crossed spontaneously in the last 20 years... That's just Xi's China being Xi's China. They suppress anything that makes them look bad, and large scale casualties- whether they caused the outbreak or not- makes them look bad. You only have to glance very briefly at their actions in Xinjiang and Hong Kong to find similar examples of repression for reasons other than a 'bioweapons' leak.

The last one is the significant thing. They'll be after sources etc. And let's be frank, if he wasn't being run as an asset by (a/ multiple) NATO countries' intelligence service it would be a massive surprise since the Belarussian opposition is getting the buffet support package; so they may well get info on his handler and their Belarus internal sources too. Whether people like it or not, that is Treason so long as the government is run by Lukashenko. Not equivalent since there's literally no evidence of it being a lab leak beyond the lab being there and some of its large workforce being ill, something that happens with large workforces. That's not really even much in terms of circumstantial evidence, it has only slightly more evidence than the Chinese 'theory' that US scientists made it and diplomats deliberately spread it to defame China. OTOH, we know that every other human coronavirus has a natural origin, and that there have been at least two spontaneous crossovers in the past 20 years- SARS(1), and MERS. SARS came from Civits, iirc, and MERS from camels, and SARS was near identical in terms of how the outbreak happened mechanically to SARS2 ('covid19'). It took ~4 years to identify the intermediate species from which SARS jumped but it was identified, and that species was found a long way from the initial outbreak, because you only notice outbreaks when they hit large population centres. SARS is actually why the Chinese have a virology lab in Wuhan in the first place. There's also no evidence from the RNA sequence of tampering, beyond the facile one of it being effective at infecting humans. Even then, and after multiple mutations during the poandemic it's about 20% as effective as measles. It being of natural origin is the default, because it's provably happened multiple times before in a short, relatively speaking, timeframe. At worst, it was an accidental release of a pre-existing virus and there's no actual evidence for even that. OTOH, the origin question is clearly being used as a cudgel in the current wave of sinophobia/ sinohysteria. Much like all those EU leaders who couldn't stand the UK having a successful vaccine when they didn't and who made crap up- hello Monsieur Macron- the damage to medical credibility etc is just a side effect of people playing geopolitics. It's like Vladimir Putin having Parkinson's and retiring in January or Russia going bankrupt within in six months in 2014 due to sanctions; you aren't really meant to remember any specifics nor ask any questions, you're just meant to remember the impression it gives. And for the lab story the impression meant to be given is pretty obvious.

I can't conclusively prove it wasn't aliens, so it was definitely aliens. It's not a bad series, but it's so very very Whedon in pretty much every respect, and feels like it's been cobbled together from off cuts from his other projects.

Technically, 3rd person english forms do include a non gendered personal pronoun option as alternatives to he/ she/ (it)- 'one'. Semi archaic now though.

Eh, I don't think there's any doubt that intelligence agencies were already investigating the emergence of covid-19 given that this whole thing kicked off again because of a report from US Intelligence about workers being sick at that Wuhan Lab. At the moment Giorgio Tsoukalis has an equally well supported alternative hypothesis. An institution with hundreds to thousands of people working there having some people off sick is not exactly proof absolute.

I wouldn't be in the least bit surprised if they already had approval but want an announcement as a publicity boost for later in the KS window or one in coordination with GOG. Starcrawlers was a giveaway on GOG, so it's a bit of a nobrainer that Chimera gets approved.

Ordered plenty, sure, something like 400 million doses. 300 million of them were from companies that still don't have a working product though. Then they ordered from AZ and expected them to give the EU preferential treatment over those that ordered earlier, because they were the EU and Very Important. If there's one thing I've inherited from my english roots it's a hatred of entitled queue jumpers. The entire AZ thing is to deflect from the EU's procurement incompetence, because AZ is Anglo-Swedish and because the UK handled it so much better from outside the EU. Or, to be fair, procurement bad luck; but I don't feel charitable when they're so obviously trying to blame someone else for political reasons.