Week 28

Haha.. Very cool.

Good to see soccer is becoming a thing in US.

"Someone briefly changed the Wikipedia entry for the United States Secretary of Defense from Chuck Hagel to U.S. goalkeeper Tim Howard [..] The entry was fixed quickly, because #facts and all, but we still think Wikipedia could have left it up for a while anyway"

🤣 Occulus Rift is the VR headset company recently acquired by Facebook. Trailer video from the game Elite: Dangerous is here. Looks good.

"After a bit of setup and jumping through various Rift demos, the Elite: Dangerous servers came back online after receiving a major update; opening their doors to the world (and me) as part of the Standard Beta. Just moments into the multiplayer game, I realised it. E:D in the Oculus Rift DK2 is simply the single best gaming experience I have had to date in my 29 year life. I sat on this statement this morning, comparing memories which may have been better in both indie and triple A titles, but E:D plus DK2 beat them all by comparisons, hands down. So, what floored me and evoked surprise and emotions I never thought would surface while gaming? Initially, it was the sight of a rotating space station with a planet far below and trails of smoke from recent passers by which made the entire scene electric to me. I just sat there and soaked it in as the small beeps and sounds of my ship ticking over reminded me that I, too, was alive and part of it all. As I took a flyby of a floating city and docking station, something about the detail level and ethereal combination of elements caused an involuntary tear to roll down my right check in front of more Twitch viewers than I thought I would ever have. I have never felt that in a game. I know others will feel this with me, in time. I realised am no longer waiting for change, in fact. The world -has- changed. It has changed forever"

No More Excel Sheets for That Man

"Some on the Net created a Github project called "Capital in the 21st Century in R", the contributors are attempting to reproduce all graphs and computations of Piketty's book in R language (the author apparently used Excel). To Piketty's credit, his sheets were shared and data is (somewhat?) accessible; but sharing reproducible code / data written in a sane programming language, through Github, preferably displayable in an ipython noteebook (which also allows running R code BTW) is much better. One post here shows how using equally spaced x-axis (which is a quite normal thing to do), changes the shape of the graph"

The [death] of three settlers in the West Bank has given Israel the excuse it was waiting for to set a huge military operation in motion [..].

Israel has not taken kindly to the Palestinian Authority’s moves to join international organizations and sign international treaties [..] This would give the I.C.C. jurisdiction in Palestinian territory and thus give victims of war crimes, or crimes against humanity, access to international justice [..]

Israel [also] rejects the recent internal Palestinian political reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas and the formation of a Palestinian unity government. Israel was counting on a continuing schism to promote its own version of a solution to the Palestinian issue: a state in Gaza and other Palestinian cantons under de facto Israeli rule in the West Bank. For that plan to come to fruition, the political separation between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank would have to continue [..]

All of this worries Israel because it suggests that the unanimous and unquestioning support the country has grown accustomed to receiving from Western nations is decreasing. The success of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement in countries previously sympathetic to Israel is a testament to this shift at a grass-roots level. Israel was desperately seeking a pretext to turn the spotlight away from its weaknesses. In the disappearance and killing of the three settlers, it has found one. 

True

Israel has been stirring up trouble even since both governing authorities in Palestine united. The point we are at is a direct continuation of that policy.

ISIS victory in Syria could have given Israel another opportunity to draw parallel among various groups of "bearded people" who we are expected to assume are equally crazy just because they all have beards.

Tony Blair

[paraphrasing] Iraq War had nothing to do with current ISIS victory

Wrong

Not helping rebels in Syria was the reason [..]

Yes

It was another reason, let's just say, it was a big chain of missteps. But yes, not helping rebels in Syria was a big mistake. We were against the Iraq War and we repeatedly called for helping rebels in Syria. 

Commentator

Government of Turkey (GOT) does not want a seperate Kurdish state [..]

Well..

It is a bit unclear what it wants but in the mind of GOT, it needs oil, and wants to get it from "the guy next door" (pure tactics, zero strategy). Davutoglu and his team are too delusional to figure out that this oil is critically important for Iraq, and belongs to all of Iraq, and that alone would be a reason for this country to remain united (and the central authority would fight to keep this resource in Iraq). IMO, the policies GOT pursued have always been aimed at causing a break-up of Iraq. We said before - Ankara needs to play nice with the Iraqi central government, no matter their misgivings. 

News

The Kurds have been unable to sell much of the oil that they have managed to transport to the Turkish port of Ceyhan, on the Mediterranean coast, as buyers have been scared off by potential legal challenges.

At least four tankers, including the one lingering off the coast of Morocco, have been loaded with Kurdish oil at the port in Ceyhan, but only one, oil industry executives say, has found a buyer — an unidentified Israeli entity. Even before the current crisis, the United States opposed the Kurds’ exporting their own oil, fearing that could lead to the breakup of Iraq.

And this is the result

News

Assad helped ISIS in the past.

He probably did

Again: another Mideast dictator letting some bearded idiots roam about so he can scare off the rest of the world about them in order to solidify his position. This is what Mubarak did with Muslim Brotherhood. So yes, that means MB was artificially inflated and therefore illegitimate. Just like ISIS is today.

For any form of sanity to ever return to this region, we need two things: a united Syria without Assad, and a united Iraq which means ISIS needs to go. Like, away.

"Well, but current borders are artificially drawn". Yes they are, but that can be a starting point for an exercise in practicing tolerence and learning to rule through consensus. If two big sects of the same religion cannot live together in the same country, would they be able to live side-by-side in the same region?

Dick Cheney

[paraphrasing] US left Iraq too early and prematurely. That's why ISIS has grown.

Maybe

But today was a good time as any for a withdrawal, as what happened today would surely have happened later.