Monday Memery

Another BRIC in the wall

Xi and Putin have been eagerly trying to steer the BRICs nations into becoming a more-or-less explicitly anti-Western coalition. Some member states like India and Brazil aren't too hip with that.

Countries like Brazil and India may subscribe to the overarching philosophy of the BRICS as an institution that can help shape the new “multipolar” world in an age of waning U.S. and Western influence, but they are not interested in subscribing to an anti-Western alliance. Both were originally skeptical of China and Russia’s push to expand the bloc, seeing it as an implicit attempt to dilute their own clout. Some analysts in both countries argue they may be better off quitting the enterprise all together.

“For us, the United States is by far the most important partner in terms of our future growth and technologies and access to technologies, and therefore, we don’t want a situation where BRICS become the focal point of conflict with the West on the economic political fronts,” Kanwal Sibal, former foreign secretary in India and former ambassador to Russia, told my colleagues in an interview.

“So while we are in there, we would like to have more cooperation within BRICS and work on a positive agenda for the form of the international system in a cooperative mode, rather than in a confrontational mode,” Sibal said. “Otherwise the BRICS will move in a direction which would become pronouncedly anti-Western.”

I can see how the fact that they have to hold meetings only in countries where Putin is allowed to travel could cause inconvenience.

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Sunday Snickers...

Automotif DLXVI...

Continuing the second generation F-body theme from yesterday is this late Seventies Z28. The hood is an '80 or '81, the fender vents say '77-'79, the grille is '78-'80. The air dam and fender flares didn't come alont until '79, so if I were to hazard a guess, it's a '79 with a functional '80-'81 cowl induction hood rather than the original hood that came with a dummy non-functional NACA duct.

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Ce n'est pas un signe

Wordy Memes...

 

Automotif DLXV...

A 1979 Pontiac Trans Am in Sundance Yellow, the last year for the 400... although the "6.6 LITRE" decal on the shaker scoop says this one's actually an Oldsmobile 403.  

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Elsewhere...

• Shooting a Triumph TR-3A in action with a Nikon D800 in color and B&W...


• A '66 Impala Sport Coupe with a rat rod vibe.

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Honorary Monday Memes...

Tumbled Gyros

I know it's Thursday but between the weather completely changing, plus yesterday's holiday, and the calendar rolling over to November, today feels like Second Monday.

Monday through Wednesday were unseasonably warm and sunny, yesterday was overcast and rainy, with temps returning to seasonal norms. Today will be sunny but cool.

It doesn't feel like tomorrow brings the weekend, but here it is.

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Ты с ума сошел, бро?

Russia is big mad that some Russkie channels have been removed from YouTube, so a Moscow arbitration court has fined the tech giant a jillion squillion hojillion dollars, which is roughly a bazillion times more than all the money in the world.

The fine, imposed after certain channels were blocked on YouTube, which Google owns, has reached more than 2 undecillion rubles, Russian business newspaper RBC reported this week. That’s about $20 decillion — a two followed by 34 zeros.

The fine is significantly more money than the combined total global net wealth of $477 trillion, according to Boston Consulting Group, and the worldwide gross domestic product last year of about $105 trillion, according to the World Bank.

Google’s parent company Alphabet — one of the five most valuable companies in the world — is valued at about $2 trillion, about 10 billion trillion times smaller than the fine.

LOL.

ROFLMAO, even.

This certainly makes me take Russia seriously and not think of them like a cross between a comic opera kleptocracy and the fictional bad guy country from an Austin Powers movie.

(The post title is, of course, Google Translate's attempt at "You mad, bro?" in Russian. Is it accurate? I don't know, and I also don't care, much like Google doesn't care about bogus fines issued by some phony-baloney court.)

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Star Wars Memes

Squirrel!

As foliage thins on the trees, squirrel photography season really gets into gear for me. I'm a lot more likely to use longer zooms as my walking-around lens. These were with the 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 VR II on the Nikon D300S. That's the equivalent of a 300mm focal length on a full-frame camera.

You don't get these shots with a cell phone.

Ballistic Testing...

At the range yesterday doing ballistic gel shooting with a few loads in two different chamberings, one of which was .327 Federal Magnum. The test gun was this Taurus 327 TORO with a Gideon Judge optic.

As a control round, I used a .32 H&R Magnum Hornady 80gr FTX Critical Defense. The Critical Defense did not expand through 4LD, and I didn't expect that ti would. It came to rest backwards in the gel block, 13" in.

The .327 Federal Hydra-Shok 85gr projectile, normally an iffy expander in 4LD, proved that even an iffy projectile can expand if you put enough ass behind it. It mushroomed nicely and came to rest, also base-first, at the 14" mark, just beyond the Hornady bullet.

The 100gr .327 Fed Gold Dot worked exactly as predicted: It expanded like a catalog photo and was found tangled in the denim on the far side of the 16" gel block. This is pretty much identical to what you get from 9mm 124gr +P GDHP and HST, which are pretty much the current gold standards, and it's what the load was designed to emulate.

That's the load I'm going to sight the dot in with.

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An Historic Invasion of Memes...

Automotif DLXIV...

Initially I thought this might be the Mercury Monterey I saw in the Broad Ripple Kroger parking lot back in 2017, but examining the photos, it sure doesn't appear to be.

This one has a single exhaust and is a faded Silver Turquoise Iridescent, while the other is Peacock and has dual exhausts. Also, the side mirrors are different.

Wild to think that there might be two of them in the area.

Lord of the Memes

Precision Targeting

Does something in your neighborhood Facebook group or favorite fandom Subreddit really get you spun up about something political? Maybe it was supposed to.

The new disinformation being peddled by foreign nations aims not just at swing states, but also at specific districts within them, and at particular ethnic and religious groups within those districts. The more targeted the disinformation is, the more likely it is to take hold, according to researchers and academics who have studied the new influence campaigns.

“When disinformation is custom-built for a specific audience by preying on their interests or opinions, it becomes more effective,” said Melanie Smith, the research director for the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a research organization based in London. “In previous elections, we were trying to determine what the big false narrative was going to be. This time, it is subtle polarized messaging that strokes the tension.”

Iran in particular has spent its resources setting up covert disinformation efforts to draw in niche groups. A website titled “Not Our War,” which aimed to draw in American military veterans, interspersed articles about the lack of support for active-duty soldiers with virulently anti-American views and conspiracy theories. Other sites included “Afro Majority,” which created content aimed at Black Americans, and “Savannah Time,” which sought to sway conservative voters in the swing state of Georgia. In Michigan, another swing state, Iran created an online outlet called “Westland Sun” to cater to Arab Americans in suburban Detroit.

Sowing discord on the social media channels of opposing nations is becoming an art form.

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