I doubt it. Much of the same would happen with sane people in power.

The demographic transition:

• means longer life spans (which means that older people use resources which would be used by new generations in a pre-transition society)

• means lower infant mortality (which means that people don’t need to reproduce a lot, as their children have good chances of surviving childhood)

Whatever additional processes are in play, likely aren’t amenable to change either.

• people have an increased tendency to have children after achieving economic certainty

Result: some never achieve it, some achieve it when less fertile or infertile, some when their own parents already need care.

• people have an increased tendency for solitary lifestyle

Result: people live separately from their parents more often, and expect it as a criterion of normal life, as a result of which grandparents are less available to help with child care.

• people have better education about their fertility

Result: children aren’t had accidentally.

Changing some politicians seems unlikely to change that, unless a new social agreement forms. What that agreement might be, I don’t know. I speculate it could be “considwe having children before building a career, to enable this, very strong welfare guarantees are offered to parents raising kids”.

My viewpoint: turning it into a carbon sink is likely true. A desert is near carbon neutral in its natural state anyway. Not much grows and not much decomposes. Adding even a bit of vegetation turns it into a carbon sink, but the number next to the minus sign will be very small, considering the total area.

Takla Makan is big (for those acquainted with Europe, about the size of Germany). Planting great numbers of bushes, shrubs and trees along the edges and the river beds will contain its shifting and spare settlements on the edges from the nuisance, but the desert remains a desert.

There is no need to confirm, they’ve published more than a bit about it. China has been working on containing the desert since 1978. A road was built across the desert more recently, in 1995, and a railway around it. They intend to drill a 11 km research hole to study the local region of the Earth’s crust. They intend to produce solar power.

Locals… well, this is Xinjiang. Locals mostly aren’t Han (ethnically Chinese) but various Turkic peoples, including the seriously repressed Uyghurs. They would probably fear a mass of Han Chinese moving in more than a mass of sand, but they are most likely OK with the trees, because sand pesters them just as badly. So far, it looks like not much is happening in that part of Xinjiang, because there is not much to build an economy on. Solar power is nice, but if sand buries it, it’s not so great. Currently, if you build a solar power plant to a random place in Takla Makan, there is a considerably above-zero chance of the desert burying it. Fencing it with lots of trees (irrigation needed) will allow a project to perhaps operate long enough.

There is a trend however, in several sectors: the financial volume of Chinese exports to Russia grows, but the unit volume does not.

That’s not called bankrolling, it’s called price gouging, and if someone price gouges an agressor, that’s actually pretty tolerable.

(I do not exclude that in other sectors, actual bankrolling may be occurring.)

Sources and background:

China Hikes Prices on Dual-Use Goods Exports to Russia – Study

China’s 2025 trade with Russia posts first decline in 5 years

This seems very likely to be true.

He’s the second in command of the GRU - he would be a priority target for the GUR and would not go anywhere without a bodyguard somewhere near.

Assassins of any origin have life plans too, they don’t want to be pinned down into a firefight with people who have lots of backup coming fast. The assassin did his job, which may yet prove successful, and did his best to get out fast.

Realistically speaking:

• US fighters: stealthy, cost like hell, require good airfields and fancy maintenance (US assistance)
• Swedish fighters: cheaper, not stealthy, but fire missiles that hit halfway across a state, land on straight roads, low maintenance

If the buyer is Canada and their threat model involves Trump wanting to attack them, it’s a foregone conclusion. Get Gripen, equip with Meteor, get ready to kill AWACS.

It is my impression that deep strike drones previously flew pre-programmed (attempting to locate the target using satnav, with some fancy versions using ground scanning lidar or machine vision).

The problem of deep strike drones becoming remote-controlled seems recent, and Ukraine has been experiencing an increasing frequency of those since autumn. They’ve been attacking moving targets. One recently hit a locomotive moving on a railway, the other hit a bus full of miners.

I don’t know the background - was Starlink responsive or unresponsive, or did Ukrainians wait for a statistical curve of adoption to present itself and become certain, before asking Starlink to pull the rug.

What is clear that Ukraine has worked out a way of registering and whitelisting their own Starlink terminals, and hasn’t yet fully completed the process. Some Ukrainian units relying on small donors’ Starlink dishes are still working to get theirs whitelisted. However, this likely can’t be used to determine if Starlink was responsive to requests, as Ukraine would likely not start implementing a whitelist before getting a positive reply from Starlink - so the process becomes rushed for natural reasons.

Russians have been observed cursing Musk in colorful ways. In several places, offensive operations have temporarily stopped because units had become over-reliant on Starlink, and considered Musk “their own guy”.

Next step: war of the mesh networks.

Serhii Beskrestnov (radio amateur and now adviser to the Ukrainian defense ministry) has already pointed out that Russian drones are increasingly often providing connectivity to those that fly before them (expensive Chinese frequency hopping mesh radios have been recovered). While this dulls the edge of the swarm (the swarm has to be gradual, air defense will get time to reload) it requires Ukrainians to rework their jamming efforts and try to shoot down the relay nodes (which may be identifiable using signals intelligence). And of course, ideally, someone should talk to the Chinese companies, maybe offering to buy all the fancy mesh radios they make.

Besides the speculations about Israel and Russia having some relation to Epstein’s “work” (which sure looks like a honeypot, even if typically the operator of a honeypot doesn’t dive into honey) there is another avenue of extortion open currently.

It is imaginable that US special services could offer people “deals” worded like:

• “would you like your name to be redacted from, or published with the Epstein files?”

…and it’s foreseeable that some people would do a lot to have their name redacted. I hope that in the DoJ, it’s a large crew of many people doing the redactions, since that would reduce risk of someone trading favours.

Residents told Reuters the gunmen were jihadists who often preached in the village and that they demanded that locals ditch their allegiance to the Nigerian state and switch to sharia law. When the villagers pushed back, the militants opened fire during Tuesday’s sermon, they said.

The motive almost certainly is power - gaining and maintaining it.

Jammers, jammers and ever more jammers.

If Starlink cooperates, that’s good because Ukrainian units use it for their stationary communications.

But one also has to jam GPS, Galileo, Glonass and Beidou - and these systems cannot cooperate, they just have to be jammed.

Drones can navigate using mobile networks: mobile operators have to prevent data traffic to a SIM card which roams too fast between base stations. Drones may read mobile network cell IDs, this has to be prevented.

…and finally, drones can communicate directly with ground stations far away. This too must be jammed.

…and then, drones can navigate using machine vision, radio direction finding or ground-sensing radar / lidar. These methods are really hard to counter, if they start using that, then it’s kinetic defense only. :o

Sadly, the “student” (Russia) has by far exceeded the teacher (Iran) by now, and only depends on China to supply components.

To prevent damage, one has to either:

• prevent their navigation (success varies by week)
• reduce Russian revenue (moderately successful, there is economic trouble in Russia)
• negotiate with China to stop the supply of parts (so far, no success)
• strike at assembly factories (increasingly hard, as drones can be made anywhere and factories are far)
• strike at logistics (doable, but needs a steady stream of high quality intelligence)

Of these avenues, I think Ukraine has been most successful at preventing navigation and reducing Russia’s revenue stream by just droning them back.

What has never been there, can’t be switched.

When local media released security camera footage of the couple fighting on a dark street outside it – Şebnem in a summer dress, squaring her shoulders at Bayhan – Sığın’s suspicions grew. She spoke with waiters in a nearby fish restaurant, who recalled the pair angrily leaving what was meant to be a romantic dinner there.

/…/

Sığın also got access to the police records, including a video they took inside the hotel room the morning after Şebnem’s death. This appears to show evidence of a clash: large spots of blood on the floor and a torn dark green-painted fingernail tangled in the bedsheet.

Summary: Turkish police investigate so superficially that it would permit men to push women out of windows without getting charged.

The prosecutor assigned to the case told İbrahim he was so confident Aysun had jumped 17 metres (56 feet) from her office window to her death that they would release her body for burial only if he signed a document attesting she had taken her own life. Hüsniye begged her husband not to sign and eventually a workaround was found. “The prosecutor wouldn’t say why he thought it was a suicide,” İbrahim says. “He was supposed to go to the scene, but he didn’t.”

Summary: Turkish prosecutors sometimes refuse to review evidence and pressure people to sign statements which ease their work.

There could be something to this line of speculation.

A honeypot for influential people is not a new idea, in principle it doesn’t take an intelligence agency to accomplish.

However, a lasting honeypot which works for decades and nobody is busted? That suggests there is some party involved which a common cop fears to touch. Common cops are fearful of interfering in intelligence operations, among other things.

I definitely want to read more about this puzzle. As for the documents, having taken a brief look - so much redaction. Too much, not just names.

Thank you. That’s something I did not know about. I read the timeline of events.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestine_Action

It seems like an abuse of power by the government, parliament and cops, suggesting that several branches of power structures are capable of using violence against speech they don’t like.

However, in my eyes, this does not sum up to “China has better freedom of speech”. In the UK, the ban was publicly debated and opposed by several people and media channels, and is being reviewed by a court, with outcomes still unknown. In China, treatment would be more severe.

But it definitely pushes the UK towards the low end of the freedom of speech scale.

Nope, do your research. You can only look down if you find a high enough horse.

Now try to determine my political allegiance. :)

If the plan becomes an actual amnesty, then something good has occurred.

how you’ve been scammed into another quagmire in West Asia

I love how you guess I’m American. :) Research my background to find the proper horse to look down from.

Thousands have been arrested for opposing genocide in Gaza under terrorism laws

Do you have a source for this claim?