Zoraptor

Abrams have apparently been withdrawn too. Did better than the Challenger where we saw one knocked out and another up to its turret in mud and everything else was publicity shots before they got pulled. If jamming is the problem it will effect ATACMS as well. End of the day they're old systems, and GPS signal is intrinsically and unavoidably extremely weak at earth level.

The general problem is that if you try to satirise something you hate, you almost always just end up ridiculing it instead. Which may appeal to people who agree with you, but to others just looks nasty. (The thing about someone like Cohen- not really my cup of tea, but still- is that he'll give bad people rope to hang themselves with satire wise, but in the end the vast majority of the time they make themselves look bad- and you get the occasional person who comes out of it looking like an absolute legend. It's also the difference between something like Airplane! where the writers clearly loved disaster movies for all their faults and the majority of movie 'satires' whose purpose just seems to be to hate on everything they're satirising)

I'd be pretty confident that if PoE2 didn't have full VO at launch it would not have got it later since it was not an immediate financial success unlike DOS and Elysium. Doesn't bother me personally either way. I'd suspect the full voiceover was more an issue for JES and than the devs in general since it would have been a lot of extra supervision*. End of the day most of the dev work for dialogue had to be done anyway- dialogue scripting, any triggers or other scripting, branching and dependencies all have to be done whether voiced or not. So in theory it would 'just' be adding the triggers for the sound files with appropriate timings. Easy for me to say of course when it's not me doing the extra work... *even something as 'simple' as making sure the polynesian type names would be pronounced correctly and consistently. My experiences with tourist pronounciations here is that they can be creative, even with a guide. Asking the way to Ka-ee-tah-ee-uh took a little while to process despite all the sounds being correct (Kaitaia, a town in Northland). Not the sort of thing you'd want to be dealing with with it being extra work you didn't think was necessary and when already rushed.

It's not just a French decision whether they engage in combat. They'd be being sent to a war zone and would make a tempting target. It's very easy for a Think Tanker to say the Russians would never dare, but with no NATO involved most of the deterrent is gone and the calculus on the Russian side may well be that the best way to get the troops out is to kill a lot of them and make it politically untenable. That's the thing Think Tankers tend not to consider- at some point, escalation becomes less of a risk for Russia than not escalating. Kill a few hundred Frenchies, decourager les autres; do nothing, encourage others to sends troops... If the French Sector of West Berlin was held unilaterally by the French you can guarantee it'd have been the Soviet Sector very quickly, especially when the French didn't have nukes.

While Article 5 is what gets invoked it's actually Article 6 that is relevant. per NATO: So France couldn't invoke Article 5 for the Sahel as it isn't their sovereign territory under their jurisdiction- also the case for Ukraine, of course, they'd be in or over the territory of a Non Party. For that matter, also true for the Falklands War since it was south of the Tropic of Cancer so Britain couldn't invoke Article 5 even if she wanted to. Lest we forget, there are already NATO troops on the ground anyway, just unacknowledged. Wasn't that long ago people were yelling at the Germans for revealing it with their rationale for not sending Taurus. It's extremely likely some have died already too, and been passed off as 'training accidents'. The talk of French Foreign Legion troops being sent is fundamentally because, well, no one cares if they die.

Well now. You can read the actual Bloomberg article on the matter here, via MSN to avoid the pay/ nuisancewall. If you do you'll see why JPost fails to actually link to its source. I mean it looks like it links to Bloomberg, but it actually links to another JPost article, and says its source is the nicely nebulous 'Bloomberg TV'. Which is a slight red flag for it having been manipulated by the Military Censor. A red flag hardly dispelled by the rest of the article*. The actual Bloomberg article says repeatedly that the 'Axis of Resistance' including Hezbollah has not been significantly degraded and retains its contacts/ coordination etc with Iran. *in actuality the Syrians absolutely loathe the Israelis, especially so the Syrian government. They might be compromised/ the intelligence source via other means, but all Bashar al Assad would give anyone for leaking that meeting to the Israelis would be a one way trip to Sednaya. If they even bothered with that. There have been a lot of extremely badly sourced and to be frank utterly delusional 'Syria/ Russia forces fight Iranian proxies' articles, tweets etc over the years.

They didn't even think IJO actually existed at the time but was just used by anyone attacking the US and France in Lebanon. It was all a bit fraught given the genocidal rampage by western and Israeli supported Phalangists at Sabra and Chatila had happened only six months prior. So the obvious candidate was a Palestinian upset the US was running interference for 3000 civilians getting murdered. Plus ça change, plus ça même chose there. In any case it's fundamentally a poor example because there was retaliation once they'd decided who had done it. The guy who they think ordered it got blown up in Damascus by a CIA car bomb, and there was also another infamous incident (which the US denied involvement in; the CIA had 'just' trained and supported with intelligence the 'anti terrorism' task force that did it) where 80 civilians in Beirut were killed by a car bomb aimed at another person they thought was responsible.

That isn't even the correct wikipedia article Bruce. Which about sums that post up in terms of its accuracy. The US did nothing about its embassy being bombed then because... they didn't know who had done it. Arms wise, a pending ICJ judgement of genocide against Israel would be a massive problem for Germany (and Britain, France) as it would mean they'd been abetting it, especially since the ICJ prelim was that there is a case to answer. Though I'd suspect Lexx's objection is more moral than legal. In any case, the retaliation seems to have been a damp squib, and almost literally so. Hopefully that's the end of it.

Would probably drive a fair few people mad with its clunkiness (especially early on) but it's hands down the best RPG based on ~1400 Bohemia I have ever played.

Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 has been formally announced: Jesus Christ be praised, a trailer has come to see us, god bless you trailer etc etc.

Finished the Fallout TV show. TLDR: not as good as the Amazon Marketing Blitz™ has it being, but still pretty good and gets a fairly strong recommendation from me. Mostly consistent with the games too- some issues with Fallout 1 especially, unsurprisingly it's less consistent with the west coast Fallouts than east coast given it's set near LA. I'll use nested spoilers for the big stuff

The trouble is that this is fundamentally a lose/ lose situation for Biden. If he's hard on Israel he'll lose votes, if he ignores Palestinians and Israeli war crimes he'll lose votes. There's very little at risk for Trump who can say what he likes on the issue; anyone pro Palestine or (unironic usage this time, to be clear) Rules Based Order or nuanced responses to international affairs is never going to vote for Trump anyway, and he isn't in power. In this case I don't think Biden has a smart play, from a purely political perspective, only bad and worse. (While a lot of people including myself would like Biden to make a Moral Play and actually use the US influence to, well, stop the starvation, collective punishment, destruction of educational institutions, deliberate targeting of health sites and workers, targeting of journalists, targeting of diplomatic structures, targeting of aid workers, targeting of civilian structures etc etc instead of mildly pontificating about it I struggle to think of a single time a US President has actually made a genuine Moral Play, ie (try and) do something because it's simply the right thing to do, knowing that it'll potentially hurt him politically)

David Axe forbes sites/blog is the source, so no it isn't a serious assessment. (actually not sure he's the ultimate source, but it's the title of his April 7? article. Either way, he's a clickbait merchant and his articles tend to be either 'the sky is falling' or 'everything is coming up Roses' with little in between)

Yep, should keep Netanyahu safely in power for another few months so Mission Accomplished from his pov whatever the result. Completely predictable, especially when the US made it obvious they'd back Israel under any circumstance.

Watched the first two Fallout episodes. As a big fan of the game series all the way back to its roots in 2008 and having played all of Fallout 3, 4, Shelter and 76* I am fairly pleased so far. Definitely looking forward to watching the rest of the episodes, and that is not as common as I'd like. TLDR: 1st episode is disjointed (it's a Prime TV show, after all), 2nd is a lot better. Probably comes about as close to capturing the mass market fallouts as anything could, and has some encouraging signs of 1/2/NV too. *I feel vaguely dirty typing that, but feel vaguely compelled after the number of "played all the games: 3,4 and 76!/ Captured Bethesda's genius!" that I have read.