Zoraptor

Dead Space is scripted to drop ammo mostly for your equipped weapons. Always liked that game, and it (and Prey) are likely to be far more worthy successors to System Shock than whatever the official SS3 comes up with.

China has been preparing to invade Taiwan for 70 years now. It's always been their aim. They're a lot more likely to salami a few ancillary islands 'peacefully'- as they seem to be doing again and have done previous in the Philipine Sea- than go for an extremely risky invasion. I very much suspect both the Taiwan and Ukraine 'crises' are being run as a deliberate scare campaign so that when nothing happens Biden gets the credit for being 'tough' and preventing the stuff that wouldn't have happened anyway from happening. That also gives him some capital to make concessions in other areas, like the JCPOA. 'Massing' = 25k troops. I wondered why articles weren't mentioning the numbers and eventually got my answer. Even in a limited invasion scenario that's way too few. Enough to intervene in a Ukrainian attack on 'Novorussia', nowhere near enough to do anything else. The Ukrainian army may make the Georgian one look like the Ghurkas, but you aren't going to invade at a 10:1 disadvantage and that excluding reserves.

I've got a British passport, lived there for a couple of years and all bar my immediate family live there. Born and bred in kiwiland though, and haven't been back to the UK in a decade. Ironically I got the passport mostly so that I could visit EU countries with no hassles...

How can you say that with no Monte or Walsingham here to defend the honour of Old Blighty?

I'm certainly not opposed to NI rejoining Ireland if the majority are for it. At least in theory, but when it comes to the actual factual you'd need to weigh and be prepared for a lot of violence from the Loyalists if it happened. OTOH the secessionist Scots are a bunch of abject whiners lead by the nose by snake oil salesmen in the SNP. Everything is the fault of the English, nothing is the fault of the Scots, everything would magically get better once independence was achieved and all the massive subsidies from the rest of the UK removed. Except of course it wouldn't, since Scotland is an utterly unremarkable post industrial backwater in reality and many places throughout the EU do everything it does, but better. Makes a nice lever for the EU, though. As the old 'joke' goes: if Scotland really wanted independence they'd advocate for England to have a referendum on it.

^^^This is what americans actually believe. (England always has and always will subsidise the other parts of the union. It's like Alabama or Mississippi 'threatening' California in the US. The only thing Scotland has going for it is the nearly exhausted North Sea oil, and Wales doesn't even have that. Their only potential future is the same as Ireland's- tax haven revenue stolen off the rest of the world. Wales also voted for Brexit, same as England, though for some reason only Scotland's and NI's votes seem to ever get mentioned... Should probably also point out to preempt any accusations of anglophilia that I earned the much valued 'lippy colonial' achievement from Monte Carlo after slagging off Britain on these very forums)

Definitely what the EU is aiming for. Gibraltar back to Spain, NI to Ireland and they'll support a Scottish independence referendum (despite being antipathetic to a Catalan one) and offer to break their accession rules to let the Scots in too. Probably try to get the UK off the UN Security Council and the EU on to it as well, despite already having France there and there being far more deserving candidates. The EU is a deeply insecure institution obsessed with its own gravitas- as shown by the current obsession with von der Leyen having to sit on a couch in Turkey- and it will want to make sure anyone else considering leaving knows what they will get.

Yeah, nah. The US hasn't really had a thing for light tanks pretty much ever. If you said mass produced 'light' tanks over most of the post WW2 period you'd be talking soviet model ones which are 1/3 lighter on average than western equivalents, and way easier to build/ maintain. (The Sherman was a 'heavy' tank with good protection when it launched, heavier than anything the Germans had and almost everything anyone else had. The definition of heavy tank shifted during the war but the only semi mass produced contemporary tank heavier than the initial Sherman were the KV series, and Churchill. Though the Churchill's early versions were so ludicrously slow they probably should have been classified as a pillbox rather than a tank. For the past 60 years US MBTs have all (well, both, since it's only the M1 and M60) been the heaviest or nearly so on the battlefield, and considerably heavier than any they were likely to fight against. It's not even like there are hordes of lighter tanks backing them up, almost exactly the same number of Bradleys have been built as Abrams and over a similar timeframe)

Funny, China would say the exact same things about the US. As would DPRK, indeed the US and ROK hold annual, and literal, simulated invasions of the North, and somehow that isn't aggressive but purely defensive and DPRK getting upset and thinking they're cover for an actual invasion is propaganda beyond belief. Not to mention the old joke about how Iran/ Syria/ Russia/ whoever aggressively and without provocation site their countries near US bases. Russia has held war games in the same area every year, for decades, and every year they get reported as a military build up and precursor to the imminent invasion of Ukraine. 2020 2019 2018 2017 2016 2015 It's not more or less aggressive than anyone else holding war games close to a border, or NATO holding them in Poland or the Baltics or whatever.

This has happened twice a year since 2014. Every time it's evidence of an imminent Russian invasion/ Ukraine taking back Donbass, and every time it's been the equivalent of Putin resigning in January 2021 because he has Parkinson's. ie a rumour that makes the rounds of the press, but when it expires it does so with no press mention. Usually the Russians do some war games where they've always done them, go home in 6 weeks, then come back 6 months later. (There used to be yearly articles about the Russians building up their military and recruiting 100ks of new troops ...which was the yearly conscription intake, and it never got mentioned when the annual intake got discharged and the size of the army dropped. Haven't seen one of those in a while though)

Definitely in a weird place, and some of it is due to covid and while OT for here they do have at least two more TV series coming to be fair. OTOH, they're... a Rogue One spinoff (?) and Obiwan miniseries, so both deeply conservative offerings. Personally, I think a large part of the problem is the near complete lack of them trying to do something different, except at the one time it was stupid to do so. Even then TLJ was clearly meant to be the ESB of the trilogy...

What's up with Netflix handing gigantic wads of dosh to over rated hacks people who have run franchises into the ground Star Wars cast offs? First Benioff and Weiss, now Rian Johnson. For that matter SW has gone from expecting annualised movie releases including two new trilogies from the aforementioned trio to literally nothing (?) in the foreseeable future, and it looked like that even before covid.

The Strait of Gibraltar is several hundred metres deep, at its shallowest. If it was easy to block the Germans would have done so in WW2, but it's even hard to mine successfully due to its very strong current. The Strait of Hormuz is also 4 miles wide, at its narrowest. The dangers of Straits being blocked is almost always due to hostile action rather than physical blocking, unless you're talking about chains across rivers. (Blockships used for 'offensive' action are notoriously ineffective, per the Zeebrugge/ Ostend raid that had no material effect on U Boat movements or the repeated Japanese attempts to block Port Arthur in the Russo-Japanese War. They weren't even that effective when used for defensive purposes. Getting a supership broadship on in a canal is a best/ worst case scenario, but it kind of relies on it being done in peacetime. The Egyptians may not be the best military in existence, but someone deliberately trying to block the Canal with a ship in times of war would not have an easy time either unless they already controlled its ends, in which case it's already effectively blocked. Far easier to especially mine it, shell it, use anti ship missiles or planes...)

Most of the NZ Press relies on housing adverts for their revenue. The 'free' suburban newspapers' page spaces are maybe 60% house sale adverts and the paid press maybe 30%, more than all other advertising combined, and by a decent amount too. That and the fact that they're bought mostly by house owning boomers largely* informs their editorial lines, which are that property speculation is great, it's the free market at work and nothing can possibly go wrong. The only real exceptions are press aimed at younger audiences, or who don't rely on adverts. Every once in a while you get an opinion piece sneaking through like the one pointing out that to keep up with house price inflation last year you'd have needed a job paying $78 /hour, and be paying no tax on it. That's maybe one in six articles though, and a similar number are "here's how a 22 year old owns their house already", spoiler, it's always through years of hard toil working to, uh, be born to rich parents. *biggest newspaper's editorial actually supported the recent changes, iirc, which was a major surprise. Most of the actual articles in the paper about it were a contradictory mess of "mum and dad investors unfairly targeted, how will they survive having to pay tax?" and "no worries, investors can just avoid everything with this one simple trick!".

Of course I can. I'll do so after you provide links showing Serbia is in the EU.

Southfront is very biased towards Russia. They've done some pretty good documentary type film reporting, but it certainly isn't disinterested reporting. There's no doubt that the US is stealing oil though, and it's very likely to classify as big P Pillage (ie a war crime). The only argument is whether it's the Kurds/ SDF controlling it. Which it also fairly clearly isn't because, ironically, a lot of it is being sold to the same Turkish militias that have been ethnically cleansing Kurds in Turkish occupied Syria. A bunch of makeshift refineries were definitely blown up last week by Russia at Sarmada and Al Qah. There isn't any oil production in those areas and you can be fairly sure that it isn't the PYD selling it to their enemies to finance attacks on themselves and the Turkish occupation. Likely Erdogan's son was still taking a cut as he had when he was trading oil with ISIS, and the oil trade is a way to curry favour with/ pressure Erdogan himself.

You've just described every oil sheikdom in the middle east. Except, maybe, Oman. OTOH, Norway has a trillion dollar sovereign wealth fund thanks to its oil that means that the whole country could go on holiday for literally years if it wanted to. If there's one country that cannot be accused of squandering its oil wealth it's Norway.

Shadow Tactics expandalone coming from Mimimi.

I'm sure Sarex will be surprised to find out that Serbia is part of the EU now. For that matter, the EU itself would be surprised to find that Serbia is part of it.

The EU briefed on the basis that they doses were intended for the UK, there's no doubt of that as it can be read in literally every story about the '29 million dose cache', not just an Italian Scum equivalent. Even the use of the word 'cache' is clearly designed to be emotive and set a specific narrative- it was clandestinely and deliberately hidden- since it was used instead of a neutral word. There was zero evidence that that was true, all they had was speculation and a desire to make anyone apart from them the villain of the piece. Let's be frank here. Fundamentally, the EU could have ordered AZ vaccine earlier than the UK did and avoided all of this, but they didn't. That's the core issue, everything else is window dressing- or faecal matter thrown at a fan. Not ordering early was a deliberate, calculated position made 100% voluntarily by the EU and in retrospect, but also to many at the time, utterly stupid*. They only ordered AZ doses after Sanofi had failed, and well after the UK had ordered theirs. If Sanofi had succeeded and AZ failed would the EU let the UK queue jump to cover up their failure? Not on your fricking nelly; they'd be snickering into their sleeves about the rosbifs backing the wrong horse and how terribly terribly tragic it was that the UK wasn't in the EU any more so missed out. The EU deliberately gambled with their strategy and lost; now the toys are coming out of the cot and they're resolved to fix things by threatening to just grab as much of the stake as they can back unilaterally. How did they gamble? They tried to cheap out by not ordering enough doses under the belief they could leverage better deals, and they backed the wrong horses for something like 350 million doses worth; and having done that they've whined like nothing else in existence in the hope that they'd be allowed to queue jump over the UK that ordered 100 mln doses, early. They're now threatening to steal doses on the basis of 'fairness'. Fairness that would never in a million years have been in evidence if the roles were reversed. To quote the great philosopher Scott Steiner again: "no simpy". 100% a crisis manufactured in the EU, by the EU. To be fair, partly by bad luck, but then they were also the only bloc that managed to back two losing horses for the large majority of the vaccines they ordered because they were European. Ironically the only successful Euro vaccine is one most people think is actually American... *even if Sanofi and CureVac succeeded (on time for CureVac, since at least it recently passed Phase 2 unlike Sanofi) they'd still only ordered enough doses for 1 per citizen. And if you're altering reality to make them succeed then that reality might have the BionTech vaccine not work in which case they're down 100 mln doses again. OTOH we've ended up with 4 doses per citizen here, despite having no covid, because we ordered early from multiple vendors. The EU could have done that but they cheaped out, so now they'll just steal other countries' vaccines while still claiming the moral high ground.

Yeah, the problem is not deficit spending, it's governments forgetting the second part of Keynes' recommendation. Borrow in a recession to stimulate growth, then pay back the borrowing in the good times to prepare for the next recession. There are more votes in cutting taxes so you get deficit spending in a boom too. The Keynesian approach is definitely better than the disastrous austerity approach tried in some places which neither significantly reduced debt nor got the economy growing.

They've told the press to stop saying they were going to Britain- and the stated destination on some packages was Belgium. That's certainly enough to say that they weren't going to Britain, which was the initial accusation. Expecting an out and out admission or apology from the EU is not realistic in the current climate, they will just hope that everyone forgets about it. Approval for Halix has also been sought. As Elerond mentioned it's under EMA consideration now. The Russian approach was to do bilateral deals eg with Hungary, rather than approach the EU. That approach was definitely done as a 'wedge' issue, but it wouldn't have been a wedge issue if the EU rollout had been halfway decent and not left countries scrambling. Multiple countries will be making Sputnik pending approval including some with significant capacity like Italy. Adenovirus vaccines are not difficult to make, and if you can make the AZ one you can make Sputnik. The only complication is it using 2 different vectors instead of one, but then that's why its efficacy is a decent amount higher than others and only just behind the far more expensive Pfizer/ Moderna.

As the article I quoted stated, the EU has admitted that the doses were not going to the UK. I disagree with the article on it being the EU's most embarrassing day though, even limited to covid related stuff. The day they decided to preferentially order 300 mln Sanofi vaccines sight unseen was far more embarrassing- though technically I guess that embarrassment was spared until it outright failed Phase 2 trials and is now due in 2022 at the earliest. That is, of course, why they were scrambling to order Astra Zeneca doses so late in the piece.

Another interesting story coming out of the EU: 29 million doses of Astra Zeneca vaccine found at Italian plant. The EU briefed the press as it being a secret cache hidden away and about to be clandestinely sent to the UK. Turns out it was actually about to be sent to Belgium for bottling. via the Torygraph.

The Pentagon is Very Bad at Memes. And the image in question is... While those intrepid Russkies were hacking Solarwinds one of the groups that was meant to be defending the US from such things was spending 23 fricking days creating and generating a 20 page report on one of the most tepid and forgettable- or not, since it's so bad- maymays in the history of all creation. To be fair, they got half way there and did manage to make someone look uncool online and I can readily imagine someone being yelled at after their boss has seen it in a powerpoint presentation; it's just that neither would be the Russian hackers.