Of course not, because that would mean having to admit that Russia handed a bunch of separatist rebels an advanced surface to air missile and letting them bring down aircraft indiscriminately. Much better to declare the BBC is unreliable or has an ax to grind.
And what would that be? That Russian-backed separatists are such out of control goons that Russia handing them Buk missile systems was inevitably going to lead to casualties? There's little doubt of what brought the jet down, and little doubt as to who brought it down, so now we're left with putting the blame on Ukraine for incompetence, but not bringing up the fact that it was Russian-backed irregulars who destroyed a civilian aircraft?
It's all but certain it was a Buk missile system that brought the aircraft down, which lands this squarely in Russia's court. I don't even think Russia puts that much effort into denying it now.
Well, maybe the Kaiser couldn't figure it out, but Wilhelm II wasn't exactly the brightest of bulbs. For goodness sake, Britain, France and Russia had entered the Triple Entente with the pretty obvious intent of responding to any potential German aggression. Beyond that, maintaining the independence of the Low Countries had been a policy of successive English, and later British governments since late Tudor and early Stewart times, so if Germans didn't think Britain was going to respond to the invasion of Belgium, then it was more than understanding they were lacking. But Edward VII had his nephew Wilhelm pegged as a puffed up idiot whose reign would lead to catastrophe.
The fact is Germany needs bodies, like most industrialized nations. You can debate all day whether people from certain parts of the world should be admitted to a Western nation, but almost all the Western nations are well below population replacement birthrates. In some places, like Spain and Japan, it is far more pronounced, but Germany, if not quite so bad, is still in need of workers.
The anti-immigrant types often couch their language, talking about how the right kinds of immigrants should be admitted. I went to a demographics seminar last year where the speaker talked about my country's (Canada's) demographic issues, and how we need immigrants, and lots of them. But she then pointed out that the idea that there are hundreds of thousands of *skilled* immigrants just waiting to get in Canada is absurd. Skilled immigrants are often at the point where they can shop around, and, particularly in fields like health care and the sciences, countries like Canada, the US and Germany are all basically competing for a finite resource. In other words, a fair portion of immigrants are not going to be skilled immigrants upon entry.
One of the standard rhetorical tricks in a debate, particular one on a very emotive issue, is to appeal to the most extreme cases. Clinton may have got some details wrong, but the one thing she was right about is just how very rare these extreme late term abortions Trump was talking about are. Abortions carried out after 21 weeks make up 1.4% of all abortions in the US, and the number of extreme late term abortions at 24 weeks or more probably amount to less than a tenth of a percent. But because abortions that occur earlier don't really allow for the kind of shocking imagery the pro-life crowd likes to wave around, they go for the outliers, and Clinton was right to point out that these extremely rare cases are complicated, and that the government shouldn't be intervening in such medical decisions. Otherwise you end up with something like the Savita Halappanavar case in Ireland.
Microsoft has done something very bizarre to WiFi in Windows 10. I have network dropouts on Wifi routers that have worked consistently with Androids, iOS devices and earlier versions of Windows. It actually has been extremely frustrating, as we're using some Lenovo Windows 10 mini-PCs plugged into TVs for advertising services and playing videos at some locations. Windows 10 is constantly "semi-forgetting" networks, so it shows the network as visible, but won't autoconnect. Sometimes a reboot fixes it, but the usual solution is to forget the network and then rejoin, sometimes with a reboot. We've experienced the same thing with several laptops that were upgraded to Windows 10, and we chalked it up to old drivers, but these Lenovo devices come with Windows 10 preinstalled, and a pretty new devices so I don't buy the notion that it's a driver issue. In fact, I got a Windows 10 7" tablet when I bought my new notebook from the Microsoft Store, and it suffers the same issue on occasion, losing the network, and I have to tell the OS to forget it and then usually I can bring it back, but it's a pain.
I'm positive that the rewritten WiFi modules in Windows 10 are just plain buggy. In fact, everything about Windows 10, even the new start menu, seem very fragile, and it takes little more than an update or some setting change to lead to the UI getting fucked up. My latest favorite is my Start menu suddenly becoming transparent. Go on the net, and lo and behold, it's an issue, with a fix which worked for me, but according to reports, may not last long. I've had other issues with Edge and start menus where the solution literally came down to "Cook profile, start from scratch".
Windows 10 has some technical advantages, but since they adopted the sort of "perpetual beta" release model, the quality assurance has gone right down the shits. It feels like they're releasing updates that haven't been fully tested, and then relying upon the telemetry to phone home and tell the mother ship that some UI update has broken some installs.
Exactly. I don't really get this deal at all. In general if you've picked a Mac of any kind, it's because you like the operating system and UI; it does what you want in the way you want. Windows 10, even by the mediocre standards that Windows GUI has come to represent, is a horrible hackneyed UI. Yes, the software library is certainly bigger, but if you've been a long time Mac user, that's not likely a selling point at all.
I just don't get Microsoft. First they get into the hardware business, pissing of OEM partners they've been working with for a couple of decades, then they basically market them like some sort of carnival barker. It's not that Surfaces don't sell, I'm told they do (though my own anecdotal evidence from the couple of conferences I go to a year seem to indicate that laptops, including MacBooks, still outnumber), but it always seems to me like Microsoft is trying to bust into niche markets where it has little hope of success, and using the cheesiest most off-putting marketing campaigns in the process.
Well, once there is a Constitutional amendment requiring all citizens to be gay Muslim potheads, we can than you and all your Democrat friends for the new America.
You don't actually even care if you make sense any more, do you?
Most starving Africans at the time were just starving Africans. AIDS almost certainly had its origins in more tropical areas of Africa, as evidenced by the fact that it was contact with bush meat that was the most likely cause of HIV jumping from chimps and other primates over to humans.
It is harder for women to spread the disease, but not impossible, which is why you see such high infection rates in the developing world.
The fact is that if you have multiple sexual partners, gay or straight, vaginal or anal, male or female, you are at increased risk of HIV and STD infections. There are all kinds of other linked factors, as there always is (such as circumcised men being at slightly less risk), or, as you point out, women being less likely to spread the disease because of the structure of the vagina versus the rectum. But as evidenced by HPV, herpes and hepatitis infections, vaginal intercourse doesn't confer some magic immunity against viral STDs. All it takes is an exchange of bodily fluids, so if the man has even a small, possible even invisible lesion on the skin of his penis, he's at elevated risk of infection, and when the person he is having sex with is at later stages of the infection, and viral counts in bodily fluids like blood or vaginal fluids, those risks get higher.
What do you mean you're not allowed to say what groups are getting infected? The CDC site itself has breakdowns on the groups where new infections are the highest.
What will get you looked dimly upon in many circles is basically shouting "It's a gay disease!" and somehow asserting that sexuality itself is some inherent determinant of disease progression.
After all, outside the developed world, the bulk of new HIV infections are heterosexuals, which ought to tell you that it isn't a "gay" disease, but rather a disease where people who have unprotected sex with multiple partners put themselves at much greater risk.
Well yes, technically AIDS is a *symptom* of HIV infection, but as each individual is different, how exactly the infection proceeds can differ. In the end, however, without treatment, HIV infection in almost all individuals will lead to AIDS.
I wasn't aware Hillary Clinton had been accused of sex crimes, do tell. And apparently some of the women Trump thought loved him grabbing their genitals weren't quite so impressed.
As to the Bush-Gore issues, there were actual physical problems with the Florida ballots, in other words, there was reason for Gore to seek clarification. It wasn't simply because Gore lost.
And this whole "MSM are part of the lizard conspiracy" is getting tiring. The only reason Trump is even where he is is because the press has given him so much oxygen, and he's risen to the challenge at every occasion. Every single time something appears that might damage Clinton, Trump, who seems neurologically incapable of not having the headline, says something idiotic or outrageous.
Nobody ever thought he had a chance. That he's doing as well as he is is quite phenomenal, and does suggest that if Republicans had picked a real candidate, instead of a reality TV star, they'd probably be sailing to victory right now, and wouldn't be facing not just another four years outside the Oval Office, but the potential of losing the Senate (and possibly a weakened position in the House). Quit blaming Clinton, quit blaming the press, start blaming everyone who picked a man so unsuitable for this job (or, from what I can tell, for any job).
The current research I've read seems to suggest that the first HIV infections probably happened 70 or 80 years ago. One would also imagine that the virus, not really evolved fine tuning for humans, might have exhibited more muted symptoms (or conversely, it might have been much more lethal, like some other viruses are, and burn themselves out by killing hosts too quickly). In developing countries a lot of things can kill a person before they die of an HIV infection, so it probably simply wasn't noticed until it had found its way to a country where life expectancy and general health was much higher.
It's not suddenly, in 1979, tens of millions of gay men suddenly started showing signs of immunological deficiency. Because HIV infections take some time to develop into full blown AIDS (and that can be highly dependent on the individual), it would have taken a long time before there would be confirmation that there was something infecting gay men. And once you've established that there is some sort of sexually transmitted disease that leads to AIDS, you now have to literally pour through all sorts of tissue samples, blood samples, lymphatic samples, and so on and so on looking for the needle in the haystack. You'll probably end up going down a few false roads because many of these individuals probably had other STD infections, so you have to also be thinking "could this be some sort of mutated syphilis or hepatitis infection?"
It is largely because of diseases like AIDS and the technology developed to isolate infectious agents that we are so much better today than we were thirty or forty years ago. To judge the medical community of the early 1980s by the standards of the 21st century is absurd.
Lots of people have had unprotected sex through the ages. HIV infections certainly are one of the nastier STDs around, but diseases like hepatitis, herpes, syphilis, chlamydia, and gonorrhea have been infecting humans for thousands of years. The problem for any sexually active group in the 1960 and 1970s was that most bacterial STD infections were readily treated with penicillin, so if you got the clap, you got a prescription, cleaned yourself up and away you went. The only thing that singled gay men out more than other populations at the time were the greater risks from anal intercourse.
While there had been rumors floating around about the "gay disease" in the 1970s, it took some for doctors to isolate a probable infectious agent, so without at least some strong hint as to whether it was an STD or some other illness, what exactly could anyone told any sexually active person in the heterosexual or homosexual communities? Patient 0 and his partners would have had no idea that they were carrying an incurable viral infection, so assigning blame seems utterly idiotic. Yes, once there was strong evidence that there was a virus that was causing AIDS, the medical community was able to inform homosexual men, intravenous drug users and other vulnerable groups that they were at high risk, and could provide information on how to prevent the spread of the disease. But the "Patient 0" generation sadly did not even really know they could be infected, and in turn, infect their sexual partners.
According to this article, the family of viruses HIV belongs to have been infecting primates for millions of years. As to HIV-1 and HIV-2, it has this to say about probable origins:
The HIV-2 strain is widely accepted to have been passed from sooty mangabeys in west Africa to humans, probably bushmeat hunters or those keeping the primates as pets, or both. Scientists believe HIV-1 was passed from chimpanzees to humans.
So what we likely have is a couple of events, unlikely in and of themselves, but where there is enough interspecies contact, as keeping infected pets or eating infected bushmeat, that the these two related viruses managed to cross-infect. After that, the viruses would have quickly have evolved to their new hosts (which really are pretty damned closely related to the old hosts).
He can't even stay on topic for more than 30 seconds, and appears to have an overall ability to remain calm of about 30 minutes. He isn't really even suitable to run businesses, and I expect that the reality is that he doesn't run his own businesses at all.
At any rate, he's going to lose. Even if Clinton loses Florida, she's still got at least five other ways to win, whereas Trump has to pretty much win all the battleground states. Simply put, it isn't going to happen.
The entire purpose of nukes in the modern age is as an existential and territorial guarantee. They are not offensive weapons, because to use them as such would lead to the much dreaded nuclear war. Countries with nuclear weapons and a reasonable delivery system, or countries who are under a nuclear power's nuclear shield, simply won't be invaded. If Ukraine had been a NATO member, there wouldn't be a Russian-backed civil war and Crimea would still be part of Ukraine, but because it gave up its arsenal for a now clearly useless guarantee of territorial integrity, and because it didn't join NATO like a number of its former Warsaw Pact neighbors did, it could easily become Russia's plaything.
A large Nuclear weapon has a lot of collateral damage. The bomb dropped on Nagasaki didn't need to happen, but the Americans convinced us that it was necessary when really only the first bomb was necessary, because that's when the Japanese and the Russians threw a panic.
This I completely disagree with. The Allies demanded unconditional surrender from Japan, just like they had from Germany. The Allies refused to accept Admiral Donitz's Flensburg Government as a de facto or de jour government, so why would they have accepted any wartime Japanese ministry? After the Hiroshima bomb, the Japanese cabinet still refused the unconditional surrender, attempting rather for a conditional armistice and surrender. The US refused absolutely, just as the Allies had done when the Flensburg Government had tried to make overtures. Even after the Nagasaki attack, a group of Japanese officers took part in an abortive attempt to kidnap the Emperor before he could command his government to surrender unconditionally.
It is a myth that Japan was ready to unconditionally surrender before either Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps you could tell the Redmond shill who modded me a Troll.
Of course not, because that would mean having to admit that Russia handed a bunch of separatist rebels an advanced surface to air missile and letting them bring down aircraft indiscriminately. Much better to declare the BBC is unreliable or has an ax to grind.
And what would that be? That Russian-backed separatists are such out of control goons that Russia handing them Buk missile systems was inevitably going to lead to casualties? There's little doubt of what brought the jet down, and little doubt as to who brought it down, so now we're left with putting the blame on Ukraine for incompetence, but not bringing up the fact that it was Russian-backed irregulars who destroyed a civilian aircraft?
It's all but certain it was a Buk missile system that brought the aircraft down, which lands this squarely in Russia's court. I don't even think Russia puts that much effort into denying it now.
Well, maybe the Kaiser couldn't figure it out, but Wilhelm II wasn't exactly the brightest of bulbs. For goodness sake, Britain, France and Russia had entered the Triple Entente with the pretty obvious intent of responding to any potential German aggression. Beyond that, maintaining the independence of the Low Countries had been a policy of successive English, and later British governments since late Tudor and early Stewart times, so if Germans didn't think Britain was going to respond to the invasion of Belgium, then it was more than understanding they were lacking. But Edward VII had his nephew Wilhelm pegged as a puffed up idiot whose reign would lead to catastrophe.
The fact is Germany needs bodies, like most industrialized nations. You can debate all day whether people from certain parts of the world should be admitted to a Western nation, but almost all the Western nations are well below population replacement birthrates. In some places, like Spain and Japan, it is far more pronounced, but Germany, if not quite so bad, is still in need of workers.
The anti-immigrant types often couch their language, talking about how the right kinds of immigrants should be admitted. I went to a demographics seminar last year where the speaker talked about my country's (Canada's) demographic issues, and how we need immigrants, and lots of them. But she then pointed out that the idea that there are hundreds of thousands of *skilled* immigrants just waiting to get in Canada is absurd. Skilled immigrants are often at the point where they can shop around, and, particularly in fields like health care and the sciences, countries like Canada, the US and Germany are all basically competing for a finite resource. In other words, a fair portion of immigrants are not going to be skilled immigrants upon entry.
One of the standard rhetorical tricks in a debate, particular one on a very emotive issue, is to appeal to the most extreme cases. Clinton may have got some details wrong, but the one thing she was right about is just how very rare these extreme late term abortions Trump was talking about are. Abortions carried out after 21 weeks make up 1.4% of all abortions in the US, and the number of extreme late term abortions at 24 weeks or more probably amount to less than a tenth of a percent. But because abortions that occur earlier don't really allow for the kind of shocking imagery the pro-life crowd likes to wave around, they go for the outliers, and Clinton was right to point out that these extremely rare cases are complicated, and that the government shouldn't be intervening in such medical decisions. Otherwise you end up with something like the Savita Halappanavar case in Ireland.
Microsoft has done something very bizarre to WiFi in Windows 10. I have network dropouts on Wifi routers that have worked consistently with Androids, iOS devices and earlier versions of Windows. It actually has been extremely frustrating, as we're using some Lenovo Windows 10 mini-PCs plugged into TVs for advertising services and playing videos at some locations. Windows 10 is constantly "semi-forgetting" networks, so it shows the network as visible, but won't autoconnect. Sometimes a reboot fixes it, but the usual solution is to forget the network and then rejoin, sometimes with a reboot. We've experienced the same thing with several laptops that were upgraded to Windows 10, and we chalked it up to old drivers, but these Lenovo devices come with Windows 10 preinstalled, and a pretty new devices so I don't buy the notion that it's a driver issue. In fact, I got a Windows 10 7" tablet when I bought my new notebook from the Microsoft Store, and it suffers the same issue on occasion, losing the network, and I have to tell the OS to forget it and then usually I can bring it back, but it's a pain.
I'm positive that the rewritten WiFi modules in Windows 10 are just plain buggy. In fact, everything about Windows 10, even the new start menu, seem very fragile, and it takes little more than an update or some setting change to lead to the UI getting fucked up. My latest favorite is my Start menu suddenly becoming transparent. Go on the net, and lo and behold, it's an issue, with a fix which worked for me, but according to reports, may not last long. I've had other issues with Edge and start menus where the solution literally came down to "Cook profile, start from scratch".
Windows 10 has some technical advantages, but since they adopted the sort of "perpetual beta" release model, the quality assurance has gone right down the shits. It feels like they're releasing updates that haven't been fully tested, and then relying upon the telemetry to phone home and tell the mother ship that some UI update has broken some installs.
Exactly. I don't really get this deal at all. In general if you've picked a Mac of any kind, it's because you like the operating system and UI; it does what you want in the way you want. Windows 10, even by the mediocre standards that Windows GUI has come to represent, is a horrible hackneyed UI. Yes, the software library is certainly bigger, but if you've been a long time Mac user, that's not likely a selling point at all.
I just don't get Microsoft. First they get into the hardware business, pissing of OEM partners they've been working with for a couple of decades, then they basically market them like some sort of carnival barker. It's not that Surfaces don't sell, I'm told they do (though my own anecdotal evidence from the couple of conferences I go to a year seem to indicate that laptops, including MacBooks, still outnumber), but it always seems to me like Microsoft is trying to bust into niche markets where it has little hope of success, and using the cheesiest most off-putting marketing campaigns in the process.
You don't actually even care if you make sense any more, do you?
Most starving Africans at the time were just starving Africans. AIDS almost certainly had its origins in more tropical areas of Africa, as evidenced by the fact that it was contact with bush meat that was the most likely cause of HIV jumping from chimps and other primates over to humans.
It is harder for women to spread the disease, but not impossible, which is why you see such high infection rates in the developing world.
The fact is that if you have multiple sexual partners, gay or straight, vaginal or anal, male or female, you are at increased risk of HIV and STD infections. There are all kinds of other linked factors, as there always is (such as circumcised men being at slightly less risk), or, as you point out, women being less likely to spread the disease because of the structure of the vagina versus the rectum. But as evidenced by HPV, herpes and hepatitis infections, vaginal intercourse doesn't confer some magic immunity against viral STDs. All it takes is an exchange of bodily fluids, so if the man has even a small, possible even invisible lesion on the skin of his penis, he's at elevated risk of infection, and when the person he is having sex with is at later stages of the infection, and viral counts in bodily fluids like blood or vaginal fluids, those risks get higher.
What do you mean you're not allowed to say what groups are getting infected? The CDC site itself has breakdowns on the groups where new infections are the highest.
What will get you looked dimly upon in many circles is basically shouting "It's a gay disease!" and somehow asserting that sexuality itself is some inherent determinant of disease progression.
After all, outside the developed world, the bulk of new HIV infections are heterosexuals, which ought to tell you that it isn't a "gay" disease, but rather a disease where people who have unprotected sex with multiple partners put themselves at much greater risk.
Well yes, technically AIDS is a *symptom* of HIV infection, but as each individual is different, how exactly the infection proceeds can differ. In the end, however, without treatment, HIV infection in almost all individuals will lead to AIDS.
Yes, species die out all the time. They do not, save during very extreme events, start dying out in the numbers being observed.
Do you realize what would likely happen to someone trying to have sex with a chimpanzee?
I wasn't aware Hillary Clinton had been accused of sex crimes, do tell. And apparently some of the women Trump thought loved him grabbing their genitals weren't quite so impressed.
As to the Bush-Gore issues, there were actual physical problems with the Florida ballots, in other words, there was reason for Gore to seek clarification. It wasn't simply because Gore lost.
And this whole "MSM are part of the lizard conspiracy" is getting tiring. The only reason Trump is even where he is is because the press has given him so much oxygen, and he's risen to the challenge at every occasion. Every single time something appears that might damage Clinton, Trump, who seems neurologically incapable of not having the headline, says something idiotic or outrageous.
Nobody ever thought he had a chance. That he's doing as well as he is is quite phenomenal, and does suggest that if Republicans had picked a real candidate, instead of a reality TV star, they'd probably be sailing to victory right now, and wouldn't be facing not just another four years outside the Oval Office, but the potential of losing the Senate (and possibly a weakened position in the House). Quit blaming Clinton, quit blaming the press, start blaming everyone who picked a man so unsuitable for this job (or, from what I can tell, for any job).
So what does APK suffer from?
Because only gay men have anal intercourse...
Oh wait, lots of heterosexuals do too.
I know I know, don't feed the 4chan trolls.
The current research I've read seems to suggest that the first HIV infections probably happened 70 or 80 years ago. One would also imagine that the virus, not really evolved fine tuning for humans, might have exhibited more muted symptoms (or conversely, it might have been much more lethal, like some other viruses are, and burn themselves out by killing hosts too quickly). In developing countries a lot of things can kill a person before they die of an HIV infection, so it probably simply wasn't noticed until it had found its way to a country where life expectancy and general health was much higher.
It's not suddenly, in 1979, tens of millions of gay men suddenly started showing signs of immunological deficiency. Because HIV infections take some time to develop into full blown AIDS (and that can be highly dependent on the individual), it would have taken a long time before there would be confirmation that there was something infecting gay men. And once you've established that there is some sort of sexually transmitted disease that leads to AIDS, you now have to literally pour through all sorts of tissue samples, blood samples, lymphatic samples, and so on and so on looking for the needle in the haystack. You'll probably end up going down a few false roads because many of these individuals probably had other STD infections, so you have to also be thinking "could this be some sort of mutated syphilis or hepatitis infection?"
It is largely because of diseases like AIDS and the technology developed to isolate infectious agents that we are so much better today than we were thirty or forty years ago. To judge the medical community of the early 1980s by the standards of the 21st century is absurd.
Lots of people have had unprotected sex through the ages. HIV infections certainly are one of the nastier STDs around, but diseases like hepatitis, herpes, syphilis, chlamydia, and gonorrhea have been infecting humans for thousands of years. The problem for any sexually active group in the 1960 and 1970s was that most bacterial STD infections were readily treated with penicillin, so if you got the clap, you got a prescription, cleaned yourself up and away you went. The only thing that singled gay men out more than other populations at the time were the greater risks from anal intercourse.
While there had been rumors floating around about the "gay disease" in the 1970s, it took some for doctors to isolate a probable infectious agent, so without at least some strong hint as to whether it was an STD or some other illness, what exactly could anyone told any sexually active person in the heterosexual or homosexual communities? Patient 0 and his partners would have had no idea that they were carrying an incurable viral infection, so assigning blame seems utterly idiotic. Yes, once there was strong evidence that there was a virus that was causing AIDS, the medical community was able to inform homosexual men, intravenous drug users and other vulnerable groups that they were at high risk, and could provide information on how to prevent the spread of the disease. But the "Patient 0" generation sadly did not even really know they could be infected, and in turn, infect their sexual partners.
According to this article, the family of viruses HIV belongs to have been infecting primates for millions of years. As to HIV-1 and HIV-2, it has this to say about probable origins:
So what we likely have is a couple of events, unlikely in and of themselves, but where there is enough interspecies contact, as keeping infected pets or eating infected bushmeat, that the these two related viruses managed to cross-infect. After that, the viruses would have quickly have evolved to their new hosts (which really are pretty damned closely related to the old hosts).
He can't even stay on topic for more than 30 seconds, and appears to have an overall ability to remain calm of about 30 minutes. He isn't really even suitable to run businesses, and I expect that the reality is that he doesn't run his own businesses at all.
At any rate, he's going to lose. Even if Clinton loses Florida, she's still got at least five other ways to win, whereas Trump has to pretty much win all the battleground states. Simply put, it isn't going to happen.
The entire purpose of nukes in the modern age is as an existential and territorial guarantee. They are not offensive weapons, because to use them as such would lead to the much dreaded nuclear war. Countries with nuclear weapons and a reasonable delivery system, or countries who are under a nuclear power's nuclear shield, simply won't be invaded. If Ukraine had been a NATO member, there wouldn't be a Russian-backed civil war and Crimea would still be part of Ukraine, but because it gave up its arsenal for a now clearly useless guarantee of territorial integrity, and because it didn't join NATO like a number of its former Warsaw Pact neighbors did, it could easily become Russia's plaything.
This I completely disagree with. The Allies demanded unconditional surrender from Japan, just like they had from Germany. The Allies refused to accept Admiral Donitz's Flensburg Government as a de facto or de jour government, so why would they have accepted any wartime Japanese ministry? After the Hiroshima bomb, the Japanese cabinet still refused the unconditional surrender, attempting rather for a conditional armistice and surrender. The US refused absolutely, just as the Allies had done when the Flensburg Government had tried to make overtures. Even after the Nagasaki attack, a group of Japanese officers took part in an abortive attempt to kidnap the Emperor before he could command his government to surrender unconditionally.
It is a myth that Japan was ready to unconditionally surrender before either Hiroshima or Nagasaki.