Spain has been considerably better than most of Europe on this, even extending to the political class (by the low metric of others). There's increasingly active hostility between the Zionazi state and Spanish state too and if I was Spain I'd be seriously monitoring and considering Israel as a potential threat to national security.
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Not just any chud anchor, but Andrew Neil. A man who runs infamous right wing magazine The Spectator, which pretty much sets the news agenda for the other papers and whose yearly garden party is as close to a public British media/politics 'Illuminati' meeting as there is. He's personal friends with Trump, owns an apartment in Trump tower. His magazine has published some of the most unhinged rightwing things written beyond the mid-forties, including a passionate defenses of both the lufwaffee and SS in the 2000s.
Ben is a fucking moron.
I finally finished my replay of Mass Effect 1 and really enjoyed it. So naturally I jumped straight into Mass Effect 2, which I absolutely adored when it was new and has long been in my mental top 10 games for a long time.
And fuck me, it suuuuucks. Admittedly I'm only like 3 hours in, but honestly it's kind of stunlocked me how wrong I was / how much my perspective had changed.
The gameplay is so telegraphed and 101-brown-cover shooter of the era it's painful. The combat is worse than (the admittedly improved in the Legendary edition) first game, with annoying abstracted difficulty, artificial limitations, and a shit simplified cooldown system for powers that doesn't feel like you're a squad but one character in three places. The accuracy is annoyingly imprecise, camera and reticle movement so sway-y it's motion sickness inducing, and the weapon sounds lack any and all punch or feel.
The RPG elements have been streamlined into near irrelevancy and despite the fact that the locations are richer and fuller visually, the world feels more lifeless because your squadmates don't really say anything or interact with it. In the first game, at any time you can turn to any squadmate, hit the interact button, and they'll comment on where you are or what's happening. Sure they only have a few comments for each place / bit of timeline, but it makes them feel like real characters and the three of you like a real squad. Your choices of who to bring on missions rarely matters, with anyone not key to the mission plots standing silently staring off into space in cutscenes as if they're bored by the whole thing.
In the first game, it hides loading screens between areas with longer walks through areas that reveal vistas and do dramatic scene setting when you arrive in new locations. Or uses elevator rides as opportunities for unique, often funny or insightful conversations between the different makeups of your squad that flesh out the world and the characters. In this one, everything is just a loading screen, making all the locations, worlds, ships etc feel completely disconnected from each other and often you're just dumped on a planet with little or no context for it.
Speaking of planets, the galaxy map is a mess and having to prebuy fuel (which doesn't burn at a predictable or internally logical rate) to travel certain areas of the map really sucks. Get 99.9% of the way to your destination and have the fuel number hit zero, too bad, doesn't matter if you literally have momentum to carry you the rest of the way, game takes over and flies you all the way back to where you started to refuel. Motherfucker, if I'm totally out of fuel how the fuck are you turning around a spaceship travelling at near light speed and sending it lightyears back the way I came instead of the next ten seconds of flight time with the momentum from previous thrust in the vaccum of space! Yeah, and the surveying and abstracted, multiple resource currency extraction fucking sucks too.
It really is like they stripped back everything that actually added depth to the world, the characters, your choices when building their stats and abilities etc. And then just layered on boring, accountancy bollocks mechanics and internal currencies over the top instead.
The returning to where you started fuel thing might seem like a minor but annoying thing, but it's unfortunately a symptom of a much much bigger problem. The first one built a unique and interesting universe with a truly amazing amount of lore, politics, internal logic, technological detail, and thematic depth. Honestly is shocking how well and deeply crafted it is right off the bat in the first game. And then the second game repeatedly goes fuck that! in order to make it more like the most generic slop imaginable from the time. Really cool gun technology that is based on a microcosm of the same mass accelerator tech as propelled all these cultures into the cosmos and is a major plot point and part of the lore? Nah, ignore that because we want a generic reload system like other games. A Star Trek/DS9 type thematic throughline about the difficulty but essential need to overcome differences, historical hate/war, and personal issues to succeed and survive? Nah, fuck that, everyone is a cool self-centred libertarian asshole who spends every conversation complaining about red tape and diplomacy and how's it's much more fun and cool to just torture dudes or whatever. That evil little splinter group that were constantly fucking up and getting themselves killed by running experiments to breed face-eating-space-leopards? Oh now you work for them, no you don't get a choice, and they've somehow become a massive intergalactic shadow government with more knowledge, technology, and resources than everyone else in the space of two years.
The whole game seems designed to limit your sense of choice, not just being forced to work for Cerberus. There's a million different upgrades and items to buy, but the economy is artificially tight so you can't afford to experiment. Same with the inability to easily or cheaply respec your character. Worse still is the Paragon/Renegade 'morality' system. For all its faults in the first game it worked thematically and allowed you to approach different situations with different reactions and attitudes. Because special dialogue choices/checks are now wholly tied to these morality points instead of putting stat points into charm/intimidate, the second game basically forces you to pick a binary 'good' or 'bad' right from the start and then pick those dialogue choices exclusively in order to have enough points to pass said checks. Any contrary choice cancels out previous ones so any nuance leaves you in a limbo where soon you can't pick either.
And the writing, oh god the writing. Conversations in the dialogue tree often don't flow at all. Sometimes asking one option before another will inexplicably remove to option to ask the other as a follow up. Other times you can choose multiple options after one another but they give the same info or even exact same voice line anyway. It also has a terrible case of meta-scriptitus. Characters know things they couldn't know, assert things that go against character, just because it's needed to advance the plot. The plot that's also a fucking mess. Even in just the first few hours, if you actually read or listen to some logs & extra dialogue, you realise that the entire plot setup doesn't make any fucking sense...
Cerberus rescued your corpse and spent two years rebuilding you after the destruction of the Normandy by the collectors. But the scientific project to do so started years before that? So they knew that you'd randomly be blown up by a ship from a race that they don't even know exist until you discover that they do, for them, later in the game?!?
Just nonsense. I could go on, but like with the game, I'm finding it hard to summon the will to continue.
Good pull. I'm too hungover to do actual referencing today so it's appreciated.
The economy is irredeemably cooked and there's no more copper wiring left to strip out of the public sector once the final round of NHS privatisation goes through. All the major political parties have completely collapsed and have functionally zero actual democratic support. The Starmer project has always been one funded and ran by American intelligence and the British establishment is desperately trying to carve out a future for itself the way it did with international financialisation after the loss of its empire.
What they've settled on is using Israel as a model to build a lean, AI-run, low tax, low spend, fascist country in name only, turning much of the country into 'free enterprise zones' for foreign capital and operating a perpetual privatised war economy. But they face three major problems:
- Demand for weapons and military technology will fall if war doesn't continue in Ukraine or if Israel is forced to scale back it's genocide in Gaza and increasing numbers of wars against its neighbours.
- The economy already cannot support the number of people who require a living and it's only going to get worse as they make this transition. The government doesn't want to be on the hook for social welfare spending for unemployment, underemployment, or disability and sickness. They need to shrink the population, starting with those people, and are doing so with a mixture of ultra-austerity to sanction and starve people out of the system, cut payments to remove disabled workers from jobs they're already in, and introduce a euthanasia scheme that allows for 'financial burden' being a criteria and can also be run at a profit. For the first time ever, the state's Strategic Defense Review listed as one of its needs for increased surveillance and military force as "dealing with demands for employment and income from politicians by the people".
- Even considering the plans above, there's simply far too many able-bodied young people who are pissed off or nihilistic, and the state has absolutely nothing to offer them even in terms of future or aspiration. Currently they're trying to manage the problem by funnelling them towards fascism and the distraction of attacking immigrants and asylum seekers, whilst heavily investing in new private prisons. In the longer term, and related to this article, the plan is to use increased military conflicts to create demand for conscription or mandatory military service of other sorts (both have seriously been floated by military and political leaders recently) to thin out the numbers and control them.
You must assert dominance in a Denny's, just like Tom Brokaw did.
Do you think it's a coincidence that that same morning I woke up from that dream about the international banking conspiracy, and the space aliens that fed me pancakes with no syrup or butter... That same morning Tom Brokaw went into a Denny's restaurant, poured ketchup on his penis, and ran around screaming "Who wants a real grand slam breakfast?!"
I believe he was involved in arranging one of the freedom flotillas, which is cool of him.
Exactly. What we're seeing here is the clumsy attempts to build a parallel version of his motives and politics in order to get the outcome they want and crackdown further on the left and further vilify trans people.
His roommate needs to stop talking to the cops and lawyer up fast. The authorities are clearly entrapping them in order to get them to say what they want them to.
Tucker called Ro Khanna on behalf of Thiel and Palantir, who are also Ro's silicon valley buddies. This is about Palantir's monopoly on DOD/DHS contracts.
Indeed.
Ironically, it's Peter Theil who's responsible for this interview ambush by Tucker.
There's another dynamic to this though that most people don't seem aware of.
Tucker has pretty close ties to the PayPal mafia faction of Thiel and Co. He's tight with Palantir and the presumed pick to front Musk's America Party that is supposedly being prepped to fill the vaccuum after Trump.
Less than a month ago, the US military and DHS decided that they were going to start experimenting with using AI services & infrastructure from the Microsoft/OpenAI suite of companies, because there's some concerns over vendor lock-in and vulnerability to giving Palantir a monopoly over government data and infrastructure.
This is a hit job on Microsoft/OpenAI on behalf of Palantir by Tucker. An embarrassment tactic (also likely based on the knowledge that the murder of the whistleblower is indeed true) to try and toxify OpenAI and Altman in a very public way.
From a subsequent interview with James Heenan on methodology:
How do you monitor human rights in a context like DPRK?
We rely on first-hand testimonies from victims and witnesses: the thousands of people who have left the DPRK for other countries. We also use information published by the Government of the DPRK, as well as other open-source data such as satellite images. We use other sources, such as information from civil society organizations, to corroborate what we hear. For this report, the Office interviewed 314 victims and witnesses who left the country after 2014. We located these people with the help of our partners, including civil society.
So 'civil society' organisations (meaning political think tanks, USAID fronts etc) come and say "oh yeah, we work with some people who escaped North Korea in the last ten years, want us to hook you up with the some testimony".
So they interview the people provided by these groups (who are also often providing them money, housing, travel documentation in exchange for giving these testimonies) who tell them whatever they think they want to hear.
And then guys like James go, 'well it sounds kind of crazy but since we can't go to North Korea to verify it, I guess it must just be true! How terrible.'
I've said it for over 20 years: most insidious paper in Britain.
3 month media tour. Remarried within the year and doing a podcast about it. Remind me New Years '27.
Hello, I'm with Palantir and while some of your cooler, more successful departments are familiar with our services, you could do better.
My government told me that street parties with bunting to celebrate nationalist violence was good and that Nazi vigilantes have a serious human point to make.
Hegseth fight Starmer in the tradition of your people and I shall act accordingly.
Someone put the audio of Clint Eastwood talking to the chair over this image.
Absolutely. It's part of a broader project of fascist-fortressing of the so called 'western liberal democracies' against the lose of global hegemony, the hollowing out of living standards under late stage capitalism, and impending ecological disruption. It's not a coincidence that the same silicon valley / unit 8200 ghouls who have spent 30 years automating & digitising Israel's genocidal project are now taking the keys to every level, military and public service, of states like the US, UK, Aus etc.
I agree that's plausible, but there's also no actual mention of that.
Miranda was head of the entire project and she only ever seems to state that Shepard was the sole focus. I checked the various wikis too and they all seem to back that up.
So while that would make more sense, it's definitely not established by the writers.