The countries that hit the brick wall fastest during the Arab Spring were - curiously - the ones where the US had the biggest influence. Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Qatar, the UAE, Oman, Iraq… all saw the movement flatline in a matter of weeks. Egypt and Turkiye saw some early movement and even a successful turn of government, but immediately boomeranged back to military dictatorship when too many Arab Nationalists started gaining steam. Gaza and the West Bank had a moment, only for the Israelis to freak out and start killing people for mentioning the Nakba.

Libya, Syria, and Iran saw real instability, though. The Qaddafi government came crashing down, with its ex-leader dying to sodemy by razor blades. Assad put down his revolt with horrible violence per family tradition, buying himself another ten years of dictatorship. Liberal Iranians once again became cannon fodder for the counter-revolution, while Americans were prompted to liberate the country in the same way we’d liberated its Saddem-Era neighbor.

None of these stories ended well, because none began with an eye towards actual democratic liberalization. The Arab Spring was a beautiful narrative spun atop a horrifying region wide civil war for control of… oil.

Finally! Only took them 20 years.

Are they axing all the conservative subs or just focusing in on the really fascist ones?

Oh… no, wait. I’m receiving a note. Nevermind, that’s not what is happening at all.

The Lich system was pretty close to the mark. Possible that developers gave the underlying features of SoM a wide berth out of caution, but so much of this seems to boil down to “we don’t want to risk the possibility of a lawsuit” rather than “we can’t just do our thing and see if WB’s lawyers care enough”.

So long as you’re not directly ripping off the code from another system, patent courts have been pretty generous in interpreting overlapping abstract concepts.

But any kind of suit is scary, particularly for studios that aren’t geared up to fight them.

Millions of fake IDs have been leaked.

But it’s just vanilla combats with predictable outcomes.

So they invented… the first dozen seasons of the Pokemon cartoon?

They patented a very specific algorithm for a very specific kind of game. You can still do knock-offs of the system in the same way you can make RTS games without asking Blizzard’s permission or platformers without asking Nintendo’s.

I would suspect that SoM’s system is complex enough that nobody’s been eager to try and replicate it. But they high level concept of randomized enemy generation isn’t something you can patent. Neither is randomizing story elements between NPCs.

How much TrumpCoin did the host country buy in advance?

Forming an agreement to protect Poland at all costs and calling it the Warsaw Pact.

What? No? Is that one taken?

Jesus this is a bad take

80 people were killed, cities were bombed, and we’ve got shits on here doing “it was an inside job, aktuly”

Fucking vile.

Look up the stats on defensive gun uses. Just Google it.

The vast majority (90+%) end with no shots fired- the criminal sees the gun and runs away.

Because it’s regularly over reported.

People call the police and claim they saw/heard a thing, then grabbed a gun. Police arrive to investigate and it is - predictably - nothing. Resident self-reports that they must have scared the ephemeral assailant of. Cops dutifully write it up without further investigation.

Gun-as-security-blanket is registered as successful defensive use.

Absolutely crazy to think Trump isn’t aggressively contesting the entire Pacific Rim, North Africa, and Eastern Europe. FFS, how many times does he need to bomb Iran or Yemen before this shit is settled? How many times does need to send Steves Banon and Miller out to Germany, Poland, and Hungary to whip support within the fascist parties? How come the common denominator between every banana republic fascist in Latin America is their Austro-Hungarian parentage and their avowed support for Israel?

Might be closer to say he’s ceding the African/East Asian Global South to the Israelis/Saudis/Qataris/UAE. But even that gives him far too much credit.

I suspect he saw the non-renewal as a threat he had to respond to

I’m sure folks in the US O&G industry are disgruntled. I doubt Trump can see past the next news cycle, and this wasn’t even headline news.

Venezuela happens to tick that box

Trump’s been wrangling with every nation on the designated US Enemies List since he stepped foot into office. Venezuela’s not selling light sweet crude oil. If anything, its a competitor with Canadian Balkan crude.

Costco tends to focus its locations in large municipalities with high throughput, while Walmart built its business model on rural monopolization of retail where it could be feast or famine any given week. Costco optimized around sales flow, while Walmart optimized around margin per unit sold.

Both have been incredibly profitable over their lifetimes. Both have benefited from cities and states effectively paying subsidies to attract Big Box retailers that would drive out their smaller competitors. Both are, fundamentally, capitalist enterprises fixated on maximizing profit surplus.

The “problems” Walmart faces are problems pushed onto staffers and shoppers in markets where retail sales have declined. The “solutions” that Costco landed on only seem to work in wealthier and denser neighborhoods, where retail sales jobs are still the bottom rung of the economy.

Great news for the workers who don’t get laid off as a result.

The backbone of the petrodollar is the deal with the Saudis where they agreed to exclusively trade oil in USD. That deal is no longer in place.

The non-renewal of the 50 year agreement hasn’t changed the Saudi wholesaling of their light sweet crude in USD. Nor has it discouraged the Saudis from accruing enormous volumes of US Treasury notes with those dollars. Nor purchasing US military equipment nor contracting with US energy companies for transport and refining nor gobbling up commodities in US agricultural and industrial markets.

This is the real reason the US wants to steal Venezuela’s oil now.

It’s not. The US is a net oil exporter. We don’t need Venezuela’s oil now any more than we needed it 20 years ago, when the Fraking boom began.

But Venezuela’s export markets help keep Cuba’s economy afloat and their power on. Cutting off the bilateral trade between Venezuela and Cuba helps further isolate Cuba. And that opens Cuba up to a similar encirclement and bombardment and eventual decapitation of national leadership.

If you look at the people running the Trump bureaucracy, Cuba is the real crown jewel of Carribbean foreign policy. It’s the prize everyone from Marco Rubio to Jeff Bezos has their eyes on and the reason why Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort is crowded with guisanos looking to re-colonize the island.

None of this has to do with the petrodollar, which remains as strong as ever. The goal is to finally crack Cuba like the US cracked Chile, Argentina, and (for at least a little while under Bolsonaro) Brazil.

Okay, what I said before but totally unironically for everyone in this picture except Macy.

A bicyclist’s very existence is offensive. But I consider the .50 mounted on the back of the pickup a more sporting way to handle things. Alternatively, mini-gun mounted from a helicopter, and if anyone asks I’ll just say I was hunting wild hogs.

I’ve never set my house on fire, but I still feel better having a fire extinguisher flame thrower

The most likely person to shot you is yourself.

The second most likely person to shot you is a housemate.

The third most likely person to shot you is a loved one.

Victims of assault and abuse are overwhelmingly people closely related to the assailant.

So this does raise the question… do you feel safer living with your abusive partner if there’s a gun in the house?