Zoraptor

Communist Party of Russia is still the 2nd largest voting bloc. And even in Russia people don't really like beating up grannies and veterans for their political views. MellowCommander is of course completely wrong about it being regarded as right wing, it wanting the USSR restored is revanchist* which is left/ right agnostic and everything else about them is the standard left wing authoritarian you'd expect. The right wing revanchist group is Zhironovsky's 'liberals', the 3rd biggest faction, which basically wants the Russian Empire back instead of the USSR. (The revanchism is why I'm always amused at western media descriptions of anti Putin protests where there are lots of soviet flags and Russian Imperial flags being waved- those waving them are exactly as inimical to the west as Putin is, more so in Zhiro's case even taking into account him overplaying it for effect. Still, better than events where western media outnumber Russians like some of the recent pro Navalny ones) *where Revan's name comes from in KOTOR, for anyone who didn't already know. Originates from Frenchie butthurt about losing Elsass-Lothringen to some blokes with spikey helmets, where regaining those territories was political orthodoxy for left and right.

If they really want to boost sinopharm's effectiveness they'd have to mix and match it with a different vaccine. Extra doses of the same one won't have much added effect. In terms of side effects the number of medications more likely to kill you than the AZ vaccine is... extensive, and includes for example pretty much every antibiotic in existence. And of course covid itself is far more dangerous taking it if it's available is a real no brainer unless you're somewhere you won't get covid.

Yep*, what the US is doing blocking AZ exports I have no idea. Either approve it and use it yourself or allow the exports, but instead there are literally millions of doses sitting around in storage. That's even worse since vaccines have a fairly short shelf life even when stored correctly. *EU has definitely put pressure on Pfizer/ Biontech not to export though, but short of blocking them.

Not really were. Anez/ Bolivia was less than 18 months ago (just). Doesn't matter how many precautionary tales there are of sponsored right wing figures like Noriega or Honduras' Hernandez 'going rogue' (and given the CIA's history with drug running the 'rogue' part may just have been selling to the wrong people or not giving the CIA their cut...) they'll always go back to that well. Same with Islamists after Afghanistan in the 80s; CIA sponsored a variety of loony tune head choppers in Syria that went as far as fighting Pentagon backed forces, and ambassador emeritus Jim Jeffrey's best buds in Syria were whacky Turkish sponsored ethnic cleanser jihadis- at the expense of the leftist Kurds who'd fought alongside the US- and he wanted the US to reconcile with Al Qaeda's Syrian branch.

Like Bolsonaro, Anez, Pinochet, Gaultieri, etc etc who had the fulsome support of the west? Right wing despots are bread and butter to us. Or of course the case study of literal CIA sponsored genocide of Mayans in Guatamala. To be fair they probably would have preferred Nemtsov over Navalny, but you use what you have available. Ironically the media coverage is so poor and so laced with overt russophobia that it's lowering support for Navalny not increasing it. I particularly enjoyed the Newsweek(?) article on 'mass' pro Navalny demonstrations across Russia where the mass crowd was literally outnumbered by western journalists... Most of the 40% who want new leadership want either the Commies or 'Liberals' (Zhirinovsky, so not liberal in any western sense). Younger demos who don't remember Yeltsin tend to favour the Liberals if uneducated, and Navalny or other reformists if educated/ professionals. Very very few who remember Yeltsin want anything to do with anyone seen as western aligned, the overt western sponsored fraud in the 1996 elections to get Yeltsin re-elected, massive decline in living standards and life expectation plus collapse in international prestige and outright bankruptcy saw to that.

AZ is far from the worst performer. J&J and all the Chinese ones are worse, probably the Indian one too. The only ones better are Sputnik, Moderna and Pfizer, and the latter are also 20x more expensive. A local AZ vaccine is ~2USD for a course, Pfizer brough as a priority is 56USD. Which is why I'm deeply suspicious of us getting Pfizer here for cheap when we also have a review of our drug buying agency going on simultaneously, no way we're getting a good deal without any 'conditions'. Australia went all in for AZ because it can be manufactured locally so is cheap and not subject to being blocked by the EU or US. So could Sputnik or one of the Chinese ones too, but I'd presume if they were going to still do local manufacturing away from AZ they'd license J&J for geopolitical reasons.

I'd say he's only actually played AoD in that case, whatever criticisms there are of CS that is definitely not one of them. You'll certainly fail stat/ skill checks and there's definitely an 'optimal' way of approaching things to develop skills- by doing the easy checks first to develop them- but then that's not any different in practice from tackling rats in the basement then orcs in the dungeon before going off to take on a tarrasque at the gates of hell.

That's a comment about Colony Ship, or AoD? AoD, sure, saving up your LP to game the conversations or whatever is the best approach. But you can't save your lp with CS, so the only 'win by putting points into things' is on chargen. Ironically, chardev in CS is (near) entirely use based, so it's more like Oblivion than AoD. Also, Fallout style party based, so you can generally cover developmental bases with other party members if you want to. The combat is kind of ludicrous at the moment though. Very little point in firearms since every fight starts within melee range which means there's not really much in the way of tactics to be used, and the enemy hits you with great regularity- and often imparts status effects- while you won't hit them much at all. I'd put that down to my PC being a wet noodle, but he does have three other dudes along too two of whom are meant to be decent fighters.

K** L***, please, this is a family forum. While it certainly needs to die or at least be handled a lot better than it typically is beating the villain to lose by cutscene is more than just a jRPG trope (apart from ME3 off the very very top of my head Malak does it too in KOTOR, as does ol' meatwagon in TWitcher 2 and neither of those games are jRPGs).

That has no legal standing/ compulsion to act. Of course, for some reason, Belarus signing the exact same document always gets left out... ...perhaps, maybe, because the US and UK are using economic sanctions against Belarus and are thus themselves in breach of the memorandum?

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.