Zoraptor

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.

It's a disgrace if they support continuing sanctions and returning refugees at the same time since the returnees would have zero prospects under the current sanctions. If they supported returning refugees and lifting sanctions* it would be fine since prospects would be a lot better. The average refugee has nothing to fear from Assad and the populated part of the Damascus region and western/ central Syria is pretty much entirely quiescent, but their prospects are far far far better outside the country with the current economic situation. Kind of telling when even MbS' Saudi Arabia has a more realistic approach to things than the west does. *Since it came up a month or two back I'd note that the startup US oil firm filled with ex spies and State dept types that Trump allowed to Pillage Syria's oil looks like it's going to get its sanctions waiver removed by Biden.

Looks like Inhumans: The Movie, right down to having a GoT actor.

Most of those generals went for being too closely associated with Trotsky (or perceived to be too close, or they looked at Yezhov/ Stalin the wrong way), who organised the military during the revolution. And contrary to Stalinist propaganda Trotsky wasn't exactly big on appointing generals with White sympathies to his Red army. The biggest soviet loss from the great purge was probably Tukhachevsky, who was 20 and in a German PoW camp when the Tsar was removed. The bigger counterpoint is that France almost certainly would have done better without her ossified WW1 generalship who insisted on trying to refight the last war, badly. It's no coincidence that 'Leclerc' and de Gaulle were pretty junior in WW1 (Leclerc literally, since he was 16 at its end) unlike Weygand/ Pétain et al. Even that doesn't really apply though, because the Soviet military leadership even pre-purge was a lot lot younger on average.

IIRC Interplay still owns it. A decent number of their IPs went unbought.

T34 was the heaviest tank using Christie suspension though, the rest were all light to light mediums. That's not really game changing. The HVSS suspension used by later Shermans were a massive improvement over the originals' anyway, albeit that system was 'stolen' off the brits' heavy tanks suspension system. Which must be about the only thing of value Brit heavy tanks had.

I'd say that Enemy at the Gates gets a particularly relevant type of criticism because those it triggers tend to not be Russians/ ex soviets, with one of the characteristics of tankies/ wehraboos also being that they aren't ex soviet/ German. Braveheart occasionally triggers someone English, but there are very few people of other nationalities that get mortally offended on England's behalf.

Most of you guys have probably heard of the unacceptable hijacking of the Bolivian Presidential jet over Europe in order to illegally [in that case actually illegally, per the Vienna Conventions on Diplomatic Relations] arrest an american citizen who had exposed a load of illegal surveillance by the NSA. But according to western authorities the plane was diverted because... everyone just spontaneously refused to allow it to transit their airspace. That is playing the "it wasn't forced down, they could always just stay in the air forever" card .... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evo_Morales_grounding_incident

It's pretty simple really: Someone who thinks the Tiger Panther was the best tank of WW2 and if it wasn't it was the Kingtiger: wehraboo. Bonus if they think the Maus was in any way practical and every battle lost was due to political interference. Someone who thinks the T34 was the best tank of WW2 and if it wasn't then it was the IS3: tankie. Bonus if they rail reflexively against Enemy at the Gates and obsessively correct anyone who repeats the 1 rifles for two soldiers/ penal battalion claims. Someone who thinks the Sherman was the best tank of WW2 and if it wasn't then it was the Pershing: idiot. Bonus if they insist that a steady supply of the Tomb for 7 Brothers was the real reason the Soviets did well, and reflexively react to the M4 being called a Ronson/ Tommycooker. Not sure the History Channel US can be fairly blamed for that. Does it show any actual history any more? Wunderwaffe obsession, lost cause fetishisation and natty Hugo Boss uniforms seem to be the main attractors for wehraboos, wherever they've been exposed.

Yep, credit card debt is bad, but credit cards themselves are fine so long as you pay off the balance in full every month. In some cases it's a very good idea to buy using a credit card for the fraud protection/ chargeback facility. But I have a fair bit of sympathy for the average Joe or Jane who is bombarded with ads telling them they have to have the latest iGoogle 12 phone or they'll be laughed at for having a mere 11 at the same time they're also bombarded with ads telling them they've passed the credit check and can have thousands of dollars of credit at a magnificently low interest introductory rate of 3.5% (upped to 20% p/a after 3 months), with which to buy that phone. 'Fun' story, I always paid off my credit card in full every month, which according to a bank manager I talked to later probably had me flagged as a 'bad customer' for being too financially literate and not making the bank enough money. I had got a manually approved credit limit rise once in about a decade, after applying for it. After paying the minimum for two months in a row though I got automatically approved for a 4 fold (!) rise in credit limit. Which was some coincidence. And was also fine, for me, I just went back to paying off the full amount monthly with the ability to buy a decent quality 2nd hand car on credit whenever the fancy took me. Might not have been so great for others though.

The ultimate problem with that report was that it dealt with, basically, scenario fulfillment from the western side. In any realistic scenario of significant conflict the west would be in the aggressor role, ie the fighting will be near places like Smolensk or Fuzhou, not over a neutral featureless plain. Any western plane will not be fighting 1 on 1* with its Chinese or Russian equivalent, it will be fighting against a shed load of ground based opponents as well. Specifically with 'stealth'** that is a big deal because Russian ground based radar can definitely detect 'stealthed' planes even if their airborne systems cannot. In a situation in which Russian or Chinese ground based radar and AA has been neutralised it's either a minor skirmish that is irrelevant, or it's been raised to an Existential level- at which point nukes will (have) be(en) used which renders everything else moot. *funniest part of the report was the guy admitting that a Su35 could probably outfly a lot of western fighters, but it didn't matter because the fight wouldn't be 1 on 1 so another western fighter would just shoot it down. Well yeah, on a featureless plain, without any AA or other Russian planes about to distract western fighters. That exact sort of argument got laughed at when it was the soviets making it 30 odd years ago. **always been a misnomer, since it can fundamentally only work effectively over certain wavelengths and frequencies

About 90% sure that Bioware said they did body scans for both Strahovski and the reporter (Jessica Chabot?). Kind of funny how far they'd run from using that as a marketing point today. Pretty sure they'd have used 3D laser scanning (~LIDAR) for the body scans as they do for a lot of CGI work in films, while reference points are just for motion capture. Both have a bad case of bethesda face, but the bits that require less resolution are a lot better. Laser scans produce far more data than can practically be used, so they'd have had to reduce the resolution down and probably did it non selectively which would disproportionately effect areas that require high res like the face.

Bit closer to market price ended up as the same as Germany was paying which given the income disparity was decidedly pricey for Ukraine. Then again, they'd provably stolen something like 12 billion m^3 (!) of gas and it will have been multiple times that considering how short the period examined was, so hard to have too much sympathy. After that and the cut off there was a bit of a cycle of up/ down prices and up/down transit fees, some more significant problems in 2014 and not much else except for them suing each other. Theoretically Ukraine doesn't buy Russian gas any more, they buy it from their western neighbours instead (who, of course, are mostly supplied by Russia so Polish etc taxpayers end up subsidising Ukraine's gas prices...). The MSN article originally linked is pretty rubbish. They somehow- not sure how, since it's pretty obviously relevant- neglect to mention that Ukraine has guaranteed transit amounts for at least the next 3 years, and with an option to extend for another decade. Well OK, I am sure how, if you're writing outright propaganda that is exactly the sort of thing you have to leave out or avoid finding out, or you have to end up admitting that the point of the sanctions you're bemoaning not being enforced was really to try and get people to buy US gas rather than any concern for Ukraine.

The Nord Stream 2 sanction regime was always going to fail, because it wanted to impose costs on Germany especailly to further an exclusively US foreign policy goal (note, I don't count Baltics and Poland getting a chub at Russia being discomfited as an actual foreign policy goal). Merkel has never been supportive of Ukraine in the same way that the US has, and reiterated during Maidan and since that the politicians saying Ukraine would join the EU as a matter of course were lying. She's also a lot more realistic about exactly what Ukraine's behaviour entailed than the US- like Yulia Timoshenko going from owning a VHS rental store to multi billionaire in a few years when she got her hands on the gas concession. The blatant theft and graft of Ukrainian leaders wasn't just costing itself or Russia, it cost down stream partners as well who ultimately had to pay for the gas filched. Hilarious though thinking about the US reps who actually thought Europe would opt for massively overpriced imported US gas, despite there being no infrastructure at all for it and it being, well, ludicrously expensive. Biden is just accepting that the US played its cards and lost, world would be a lot better if countries behaved that way more often and didn't dig in just for the principal of it. Qatar got too big for its boots. Its citizen population is minute, but it's very rich. MbS was by most accounts planning on a literal invasion and annexation, not just sanctions and a blockade. Stopped by Turkey mostly, but also because the US would not approve it due to having an absolutely massive base there (which quite apart from the negative appearance of allowing an invasion would have to go as there was no US basing allowed in Saudi) Pretty much anything about MbS can be explained as him being the ultimate trust fund baby- never had any consequences for his mistakes previous, so had a massively inflated sense of his won competence and no idea of how others would react when they weren't directly beholden to him. See also: Yemen and the break up of the alliance with the UAE, and somehow managing to run Saudi Arabia's economy at a persistent deficit. Hamas is basically Ikhwan (Brotherhood), which is Sunni. Iran is Shia. The main Ikhwan backers are Turkey and Qatar, both of which were vehemently opposed to Assad. So Hamas betrayed Assad and Iran and sided with the Syrian rebels which had a sizeable Ikhwan component (indeed the last major uprising in Syria previous was Ikhwan), while other Palestinian groups didn't, indeed one of the more effective pro government groups was Liwa Al Quds, a palestinian formation. To this day Hamas has zero presence in Syria as a result. So far as I am aware the last time any comment was made about rapprochement it was dismissed extremely undiplomatically by the Syrians. Doesn't stop Iran selling weapons to Hamas though, and they maintain supplies to some of the smaller non Hamas groups too. They're Sunni Muslims who believe in Political Islam. By most measures they're more moderate than the typical salafi supported by Saudi or the west, not that that's saying much, but Political Islam is a threat to most of the monarchies and dictatorships of the region, so it's suppressed due to 'terrorism'. Their aim is the same as any other party really, to attain power. They're not particularly concerned about how to do it, but then in that region no one really is. Theoretically they kind of support democracy, but only the sort of democracy that could be relied upon to elect the 'right' person all the time.

Yes, the vast majority of Hamas rockets are 100% home grown and machined in Gaza, like the Qassam. That's why they're so inaccurate. That's also why there are so many of them and they cost a ludicrously small amount, by some estimates as little as $300, to make. One of the more amusing things about the whole situation is watching people who crap bricks about Iran's rockets simultaneously claim that 30% of rockets launch crash in Gaza (and get blamed for all the politically inexpedient casualties*) and are supplied by Iran. Pick one, either Iran is supplying the rockets, and their rocket program is therefore garbage, or they aren't. In reality Iran's rocket program is pretty good and a definite threat. They hit Al Asad airbase about as precisely as you can get with ballistic missiles, and temporarily crippled KSA's oil infrastructure while making it very obvious they could do it a lot more permanently if they wanted to. Hamas bottle rockets aren't in the same league precisely because they aren't Iranian. Iran is not much of an actual supporter of Hamas any more, they mostly sell them arms now paid for by Qatar (hence Israel's hard on for blowing up Al Jazeera offices). They fell out very badly, and in terms of being actual friends, pretty permanently, when Hamas decided to stab Assad in the back in Syria. Obviously it's a lot easier to blame Iran for everything rather than a US ally though, but it is also part of the Ikwhan (Muslim Brotherhood; Turkey and Qatar practically) v Saudi Arabia bloc conflict much like the coup against Morsi in Egypt was, and a way for them to contrast their support for Palestinians with Saudi and friends supine stance. *Interesting stats, as weapon precision has got better Israel has killed proportionally more civilians rather than less, and kills more civilians as a percentage than WW2 which had genocide, nukes, firebombing, Japan in China, Germany in USSR etc. They've also killed around twice as many civilians, proportionally, as the Syrian Civil War. Yes, really. Long term friends, nah, but MbS is desperately trying to extricate himself from troubles now and that requires detente with Iran which is the best that can be expected. He at least is pretty resigned to the JCPOA being reinstated prior to the Iranian elections. Hilarious watching early interviews where he and his foreign minister were saying that they didn't need to even talk to Iran because "they aren't even arab". Trust fund baby getting a dose of reality.

Claiming the building housing the AP for 15 years was also a Hamas HQ shows a certain amount of, uh, chutzpah. Even more amusing, I've seen Hasbara claiming the roof was being used to fire rockets, when it was mostly used for AP/ Al Jazeera live reporting and it would literally be impossible to have used it for such. Considering Israel also targeted the building housing AlJ in 2014 I suspect there's some 'suggesting' going on about the advisability of hosting Al Jazeera in your building if you want it to remain undamaged. Not like Israel needs to be worried about punishment for war crimes after all.