Agiel

I kind of never got over the fact that the Illuminati ...

Damn, picked up Guilty Gear Xrd: Revelator today too. Got a pile of gigabytes to download when I get home.

Richard Aboulafia summing up this year. Note that this does include some civil aviation talk that many will find a snooze. Most of these emphases are Aboulafia's, but there's one that's mine. Try your hand at guessing which one it is:

Apparently there's a demo out for Resident Evil 7. I am posting this less out of any attachment to the Resident Evil franchise and more because the idea of a playable demo coming out for a major game release now seems so quaint and anachronistic (unless one were to count "public multiplayer test betas," which I don't); the last AAA game I remember playing a demo for was Mass Effect 3 back in 2012.

Kind of got the sense that this implied that Deckard was a Replicant (who can somehow live a full human lifespan).

In a year that has taken so much from us, I thought it appropriate to post something remembering what around this day five years ago took:

I think they've said that TOR is supposed to basically serve as KOTOR 3-7 or so. That said, is there not a 3 millennium gap between the KOTOR series and Yavin? Just like with 40K, there's a huge time period between established events people can create their own stories in that sadly goes underutilised.

Hey, if you want, hit me up if you'd like to team up for Vermintide.

I stopped reading at this part 'Even without Iran’s direction and sponsorship of militias killing of thousands of American soldiers in Iraq'... Hands up anyone who believes the Sunni insurgents are supported and backed by Iran? Bonus points if anyone believes Trump is going to tell Boeing to drop the new deal for 80 airplanes destined for Iran. He might, just has to bribe them elsewhere. Meshbacks will clap I think even if the deal is actually inked the actual number of jets Iran will get will only amount to a dozen or so (and knowing Iranian maintenance standards, half of those will be hangar queens anyways). This is for a number of reasons: 1. Competition: People in Iran heading abroad (the United States is a popular destination) are already well served by Gulf hubs, and a great deal of Iran's own fleet is regional jets anyways (though given Iranian aviation's atrocious safety record, Iranians are probably better off rowing a boat across the Strait of Hormuz). Besides, other national carriers have a surefire way of tempting away Iranians from their own flag carriers ("We serve booze"). 2. Economy: Iran needs oil well above $90 a barrel in order to balance their books. Though recently OPEC and co have finally come to an agreement on production caps, there are already severe doubts as to whether or not major players such as Russia and Iran will actually comply with them, to say nothing about the fact that Iran is rife with corruption and its private sector is regulated to the point of near strangulation. 3. Risk: The Iran deal included snapback sanctions and Iranian carriers will be guaranteed to rely upon outside financing to actually afford those jets, and given that Iran is not a part of the Cape Town Convention which allows financiers to repossess jets in the event of delinquency (as Aboulafia mused: "Can an airliner be taken hostage?") the Iranians will be hard-pressed to find good creditors.

I actually had a very favourable view of the OC myself, though of course it serves as a set-up for the absolutely incredible MotB.

From Richard Aboulafia, an aerospace analyst whom many have been reaching out to over Trump's Twitter attacks on Boeing. This time, emphases courtesy of Aboulafia: I should also add that Boeing Defense actually has a knack for delivering on programs either on or below budget, as one wag said back when the JSF competition was in full swing "The aircraft should be designed by Lockheed Martin, but built by Boeing". I suppose if Air Force One meets or goes below it's projected $2.87 billion budget (without any actual effort on Trump's part) he could point to that in his memoirs as him "trimming the fat" (never mind that we'll see record deficits in the process, but oh well).

As someone who has the organ donor dot on his driver's license and plans on giving his corpse over for the benefit of medical students and the advancement of science, playing Devil's advocate here, but I suppose for a lot of people redundancy is a nice thing to have.

I'd say the populist and crypto-xenophobic groundswell has always been at least somewhat present in France. I think that sentiment is rather succinctly expressed by De Villepin's quote from '05: "[G]lobalization is not an ideal; it cannot be our destiny."

Those of us who loathe Trump on the basis of his more fundamental and basic failings (that of being the most dishonest, vacant, and most unstable person to have been installed into the highest office of the United States) take issue with his China approach less for the principle of recognising a fellow liberal democracy (as one wag once put it, "Taiwan can go on being a country so long as nobody acknowledges that it is a country") and more for his totally reckless and incoherent approach with zero consideration over second and third-order consequences (by the way, the difference in attitude another thing he and Mattis, someone who is known for taking a very long view on issues, might be at loggerheads over). As the Richard Nixon Twitter account once noted: The US approach on Taiwan, love it or hate it, has worked, insomuch that it has contributed to one of the longest periods of stability in East Asia while also insuring that we can go on enjoying our artificially inflated quality of life built on iPhones and laptops made in Chinese factories.

In my opinion it should not be choice. Everybody needs to serve in capacity they are capable. Which is one of the reason why I support Finland's constitutional obligation to serve. I posted this article on another topic, which kind of explains why that approach probably doesn't really work for the US, emphases mine:

It's almost as if America hasn't had close to 30 years to get the full measure of that man (note that this strip was first published in 1987):

Let's see how this goes. Though I did have a good time with DA: I, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't at least mildly disappointed that it didn't turn out to be the return to form I had hoped it to be. That said for all the issues the Mako had in Mass Effect 1, I thought the series was worse for it when they got rid of those segments wholesale rather than improve on it (and replaced it with the far more tedious planet scanning), so I'm glad they brought it back.

There remain other conceivable scenarios. For instance, should Trump not be amenable to the wisdom of Mattis and the potential SecState Pertraeus (as stated before, Mattis is very much in favour of continued engagement in world affairs which stands in stark contrast to Trump's Know-Nothing campaign rhetoric on foreign policy, and history has shown Trump to be the type that values loyalty above all else and is utterly intolerant of criticism), they may elect to resign, and given how Mattis and Pertraeus are quite popular in both military and civilian circles many in the State Department and DoD may choose to follow them.

You're kidding, right? At any rate, I've had my reservations about such a decision, but the fact that in terms of fopol he couldn't be any more different from Trump if he tried allays some of my concerns over the next four years: https://youtu.be/SCD5zHBNWG8?t=12m29s

A few days ago a very good friend of mine remarked to me that the election of Trump allowed him to finally use the phrase "we are through the looking glass." It was a phrase that took a double meaning for me. A piece from Alex Wellerstein, and in line with what I've been trying to hammer home for the past year and a half, emphases mine:

What it's like to become a YouTube gaming celebrity at 80 years old