Dangle the money over the state and tell residents they can only have it if they remove the Governor.

The state that contributed the most taxes also elected Gavin Newsom and houses Elon Musk / Peter Thiel.

They are getting what they deserve.

WTF? Talk about a straw man argument!

That’s not what a strawman argument is.

The sanctions will target Russia’s weapons supply chains

Crazy that it took them three years to get here. And given how much hardware is coming from outside the European bloc, I’m genuinely curious to know what they’re hoping to accomplish.

Another 46 financial institutions that help Russia evade sanctions have also been targeted.

Sanctions have also been placed on a further 18 ships, following 110 earlier this month, in Russia’s “shadow fleet”, which carry Russian oil under different flags (often Liberian) to continue shipping oil around the world despite sanctions that have placed a price cap on Russian oil.

So much of this sounds like token enforcement. Chasing the cut-outs and front-operations without ever actually getting to the big petro states in Turkyie or India or China or the EU/UK/US based banking sector that profit from Russian black-market trade.

I’m sure we’ll get some Panama Papers expose in another 20 years about how the usual suspects - your HSBCs and JP Morgans, your Exxon/Shell/BPs, your assorted Bitcoin brokers, and your various other war profiteers - were all flagrantly violating the sanctions while national intelligence agencies were either ignored or hushed up.

But for now, it doesn’t seem like anyone is actually staunching the flow of arms in or petrol out of the Russian sphere of influence.

You hardly have to wonder. Its a simple counting exercise.

And I can’t help but suspect getting a free pass on this scale is a huge motivating factor for a lot of these guys. If I got pardoned after J6, I could easily see the delusions gripping me to the point where I assumed I was untouchable, too.

But what the fuck, I’ll take it.

Israeli diplomacy on this issue has been virtually non-existent. It really cannot be reiterated how badly the Israeli state department has bungled international relations, given that they had an open hand at genocide as recently as a month ago.

I’m not willing to take Starmer’s response at face value, because I haven’t seen exactly what caused the heel-turn. The New Labour government loves to give passionate speeches and then reneg on their pledges weeks later. But I can see the UK caving to pressure from other Middle Eastern and European allied states, particularly if the ongoing genocide - and the Yemeni reprisal around the Suez - is seen as an economic issue rather than a humanitarian one.

Now see if you can snatch Netanyahu and put him in The Hague where he belongs.

Consider the fate of Fulgencio Batista, Fransisco Franco, and Augusto Pinochet. Consider the fate of Idi Amin and Mohammad Reza Shah and Oliver Tambo and Robert Mugabe. Even when your country disintegrates under your feet, the elites never seem to suffer any serious undo consequences.

The absolute best thing we can hope for with regard to Netanyahu is that a more zealous member of his coalition decides to do an officer’s coup and paint the PM’s office with Bibi’s brain matter. But no civil justice system will ever touch the man. If he leaves office, he’ll spend the rest of his life in high luxury, floating through the western Zionist cocktail circuit in the Commemorative Henry Kissinger Seat Of Honor.

Do people really still need to be explained why proprietary software is bad?

The degree of overreach by a US company, in this instance, is shocking. Yes, you can go spill a gallon of ink talking about how American software companies have been the tip of the spear for intelligence gathering, propagandizing, and sabotage. But I would say that an international business with a huge future stake in European implementation of their software spiking a criminal court’s Outlook servers over prosecution of an ongoing genocide is a new low.

Open source proponents have tried to explain this simple fact for more than 20 years.

Open source is a far cry from bulletproof. We could just as easily see Mossad fucking with a poorly implemented Linux iteration of an email distribution agent. But then the assumption is that the Israelis - being heavily integrated into the European socio-economic system - are on Europe’s side. Similarly, Microsoft and Google are supposed to be agents of the Big Friendly American Security State. The thing that shields you from the evil Slavs and Huns and Muslims, not the thing that stabs you in the back.

Part of this is corruption (Big Tech lobbyists effectively bribing public official to adopt their software), part of it is laziness (corporate sales reps go out of their way to make early adoption relatively easy and backload the real costs until later), part of it is the networking effect (thanks to the above there is an abundance of Microsoft-centric IT companies and experienced users who have already adapted to the privatized frameworks).

But this isn’t a problem you can simply explain your way out of. Ultimately, you need a structural change in how these institutions do business. You need ICC that has insourced its IT and is capable of self-administration, rather than a bunch of outsourced flunkies who exist as a way to pad a contractor’s wallet. You need a public that is adopting good IT practices at the grade school level, rather than feeding at the trough of private subsidies and philanthropies to defer the up front cost of technical education. You need an IT community that is well-organized and unionized and hostile to the corporate model of development and distribution of for-profit systems. Not a bunch of freelancers that see Microsoft Certification as a meal ticket.

But 90% of people simply don’t care even just a little.

90% of people (honestly closer to 99.9% of people) don’t believe they have any say over IT policies at their own offices, much less at the scale of the a trans-national criminal court.

They do not genuinely believe they live in a democratic institution and roll over in compliance for fear of some form of reprisal, because that’s how they’ve been trained to behave from their earliest days of life.

It isn’t a matter of caring nearly so much as it is a matter of learned helplessness.

Sounds to me you heard it was supposed to be 5 seasons and started looking for problems.

You can find plenty of abbreviated and dropped plotlines across the 2nd season. But the last episode really stands out as half-baked.

The entire series had tons of nothing side characters given unusually deep characterization

The first season “nothing” characters largely have completed story arcs that begin and end in their 3-episode arcs. More major characters roll through to the end of the season.

The second season breaks from this pattern in a number of instances. Meanwhile, the cinematography, the special effects, and the choreography really fall of, particularly in the final episode. This was a very obviously rushed end to the series and quite a bit of it breaks heavily from Gilroy’s earlier episode depth and polish.

They had 5 seasons originally?

Showrunners planned for five seasons, with each three-episode arc commanding something like a $75M budget and months of filming. This was planned back when Netflix, HBO, and Apple were pushing out projects on a similar scale for their top tier shows. Gilroy notes that, at the current pace of release, the project wouldn’t have been completed until 2034. Some degree of scaleback had been anticipated for a while.

But post-COVID and following a huge industry-wide reevaluation of the prospective future growth of the Streaming media model, the big studios decided to cut back significantly. HBO / Warner Bros, under newly minted CEO David Zaslov, led the pack by going so far as to scrap existing projects and take a tax deduction rather than releasing functionally finished projects. Now Max is fully invested in Discovery Channel tier Reality TV and back catalog movies. Netflix began hard-capping their projects and churning out a bunch of AI-generated slop a year or two ago and is also heavily leaning on its back catalog. Disney is just following the pattern.

I thought they did the giant jumps in time in the series because they didn’t have good stuff, but it’s because Disney fucking sucks.

Every season was effectively planned to be a year, in the five year run up to Rogue One / New Hope timeline.

The original plan for the series was five seasons. And you can see it in the edges - scenes that were filmed before the decision to cap the series at two that didn’t seem to sync up with the rest of the plot, characters introduced in a dramatic fashion who only had a few minutes of screen time, production quality in the final episodes falling off a cliff.

The last episodes were done very well in my opinion.

The final episode of the second season had a Xena Warrior Princess tier budget. Tons of close in shots, virtually no special effects after the return to Yavin, weird janky uses of greenscreen and CGI in the final five minute epiloguish-thing. This was a beautiful show that was chopped off at the knees.

Gilroy exited the project gracefully, but its abundantly clear that Disney execs looked at the returns on their streaming service and said “Fuck it, we’re better off following the Zaslov Model”. So now, much like Netflix and (HBO?)Max, AAA movie quality television at Disney is getting flushed down the toilet and we’re pivoting back to Michael Eisner’s “Give me a forth direct-to-DVD Tinkerbell movie” business plan.

Rossman was making the same point over and over and over and over

You gotta pad out your content if you want to churn multiple episodes a week that are hours long.

Strictly speaking, if you want a reliable firearm you are much better off getting one made out of steel than composite plastics.

Will never happen but if the dems don’t go fucking scorched earth

They only know how to punch left.

People hate nazis in general

If only. Entirely too many scratched-liberals in the NATO block. And that goes straight back to its founding.

American Journal Editor Releasing a Headline That Does Not Contain the Word “Slam”

Difficulty: IMPOSSIBLE

You missed one.

Krillin

The exception that proves the rule?