Zoraptor

Yeah, I wouldn't rely on an elided one sentence summary of a law to determine the legality or not of a one sentence summary of a conversation. You'd think the jails would be full of lobbyists if the law practically functioned as that summary implies, since their job is inducing public officials to do what their paymasters want.

That bus driver analogy for brexit really is stupid. Passengers on a bus vote to go to London, with the minority voting to go to Edinburgh. Those that vote to go to Edinburgh spend the entire time whining about how the bus driver is constantly going in the wrong direction and shouting and throwing stuff at the driver, and when the question is asked whether to take the M1 or M6 to go to London they constantly vote to go north instead, all the time insisting they're reflecting the real will of the people. And of course the motorway authority really wants them to go to Edinburgh as well, so actually they can't use the motorway and have to use diversions instead, and- amazing coincidence, surely- the diversions always send them back towards Edinburgh. The original driver worked for the motorway authority, drove the bus into a cul de sac he couldn't back out of then ran off to hide like the most pathetic of spineless pathetic insult to the wormiest worm cowards (and was literally a porcine necrophiliac, lest we forget), only emerging to snipe at his successor drivers despite being the absolute cause of the whole mess and there was absolutely nothing realistically the successor drivers could do to rescue the situation. But of course it would all be solved by another vote, which would surely get the Right Result this time and we'd be eating deep fried pizza with Glenmorangie chaser at the Fringe Festival a few hours later as the motorway system mysteriously clears up. And, of course, no more pesky votes ever on how to get to Edinburgh so we can avoid all the pesky idiots voting to go there via Milton Keynes.

Ultimately all the negative performance claims resolve to Marokovsky. And there's still question as to whether he or his (wholly anonymous) source was simply pushing the Tor as an alternative given his claims that that system was effective, so at best Saudi should buy Tors instead of Pantsirs. I'm also about 99% sure the version of the Pantsir deployed by the Russians at Hmeimem is S2 rather than S1- that is certainly what russian sources like RT/ Sputnik etc have consistently reported with the S1 versions being solely Syrian. They are clearly using EW preferentially given the number of drones they're simply remoting then landing themselves, but then you would use that so long as it works since it's 'free' while even 30mm cannon rounds have a cost. In contrast to Saudi Arabia there has also been only one successful attack, and that was likely to have been (and is certainly claimed to have been by the Russians) via an infiltration team with mortars rather than drone; despite being on the receiving end of in the order of 50 drones per month at the moment, plus rocket attacks albeit those are ballistic rather than CMs. Putin suggesting the Saudis should buy S400 to defend against drones was certainly 100% pure trolling though. Would be a great idea for Russia, but utterly pointless for Saudi.

Maybe? I don't know how they could do it discretely though, and there would be plenty of countries- Turkey, Qatar, Iran and Russia at minimum- with a stake in exposing its real origin. I can't see Israel being willing to sell them to Saudi though, nor Saudi being willing to buy them due to the potential political blow back on either side.

Jacques Chirac. Not the greatest President in French history, but a veritable colossus compared to the pygmies who have succeeded him. And history will no doubt judge him a whole lot kinder than Tony Bliar or Bush at least.

They'd want to rip off the Pantsir, it's more advanced and has a wider use scenario. Tunguska is still decent, but it's old. Basically, Patriots just plain aren't designed to target drones and CMs. If you want a system to target ballistic missiles and aircraft the trade off for that is that they will be poor at shooting low altitude and smaller munitions. Which is also true for the Russian S400- technically, it does have a missile variant designed to shoot down CMs and drones but practically you want a specialist solution (eg Pantsir) to do it as has been used effectively to defend against regular drone swarm and bulk missile attacks on Hmeimem in Syria. If nothing else shooting down a $200 drone carrying a $100 payload with a $50000 missile is costly, so using a 30mm cannon or cheap missile is way more efficient, albeit the Yemeni/ Iranian drones used at Abqaiq would have been more expensive than a balsawood HTS special. This does also mean that Abqaiq being hit isn't a problem with Patriot, except perhaps its radar if they were relying on it, the systems which should have been defending it against such an attack were Shahine and Skyguard systems, French and Swiss shorter range point defence. But even then they can only defend effectively if they can see the incoming attack and the operators are competent and alert. With Saudi operators none of the those are likely, so at least US operators and radars should increase the Shahine and Skyguard's effectiveness. In terms of size you can check out the Saudi demo event if you like. They're decent sized drones of around 2ish metre delta wing , and the Quds 1 is ~5m length and around 60cm width from memory What exactly the US could deploy depends on how the drones and CMs operated. Definitely EW stuff if they're being actively guided, but if they were fire and forget then an EW solution is far more difficult and active measures against low flying and possibly decently stealthed munitions has problems too. The fundamental problem is that US point and missile defence, except naval, is mostly predicated on targeting ballistic missiles. That's understandable with air dominance as you can simply bomb launchers and if needed shoot down slow drones and CMs with planes or AAA as was done with V1s in WW2. The systems that Saudi could deploy quickly to fix the problem are probably Israeli (albeit untested against drone swarms and CMs) and Russian and they both have political problems associated with them.

Yeah, there's plenty wrong with the testing methodology. If it drops framerate briefly but fairly frequently there's very little effect on average fps because the drop is short, but quite a large perceived effect from the microstutter. The slow start up is also pretty significant I would say. If you played a 60 hour game in 1 hour sessions it would be an extra 40 minutes load time overall, or about 1% of your time spent waiting unnecessarily.

US deploying Patriots to Saudi to defend Abqaiq. Patriots, of course, don't work against drones or cruise missiles since they're anti ballistic missiles and AA systems... Yes, and 'the people' through their elected representatives porkbarrel for their largest donors, gerrymander, vote politicians pay rises, gold plated retirement schemes and benefits and resist campaign finance reform and term limits. That's just the well earned gratitude of the people towards the civic minded and generous politicians who carry out the people's will at great personal cost. Literal lol. Politicians vote for what they think will get them re-elected- or even more realistically, what they think will make sure the other guy(s) don't get elected. If that reflects the will of the people it's purely coincidental and utterly theoretical. Term limits would help with that somewhat, some sort of finance reform would be better, but ultimately the bulk of people who want to be politicians simply do not want to be politicians to reflect 'the will of the people' and that won't change.

Ultimately it is that simple, if you want less resource usage then you fundamentally need to have fewer people using the resources. The other stuff will help- renewable energy, better use of resources etc- but if there's difficulty having enough resources for the planet's current population then there's extra difficulty when there's an extra 50-100% of said population. Nothing that can be done about India or China or Nigeria in that regard, but if New Zealand really wanted to do well on the green front (we don't, just have to look at the average lake or river here to see that) then no net population growth or population decline is what we need to do. Controlled population is also ultimately far better than the likely alternative- mass starvation, war, no water etc. Here at least we have almost no residual fossil fuel power generation left. There's one coal power plant in Huntly that is used for emergencies and load balancing basically, so the only low hanging fruit left is sticking excise on cars- while disproportionately effects poor people who cannot spend 50k on an electric car and who cannot rely on the utter crap public transport system which most of our ultra low density cities have and which focus on serving tourists and rather ludicrously the people who can afford electric cars anyway- and agriculture. The latter is ludicrous here because 98% of our animals are fed on grass in situ, so they don't have the problem the typical US or Euro livestock has of having its food trucked or shipped in from Brazil or Iowa burning diesel or fuel oil all the way. The CO2 from methane is also more or less irrelevant, since it comes from CO2 sequestered into grass in the first place and unless the grass doesn't grow due to, say, sticking a gaudy 270m^2 bungalow on it it will go back into the grass to be eaten again.

Well yeah, you could probably find that number of scientists who (genuinely) think smoking doesn't cause lung cancer as well. It's kind of the fundamental problem of science that it's very difficult to unequivocally prove anything in a complex system. I have to agree with Skarpie on Thunberg's speech though. It was the UN equivalent of someone being outraged on twitter or, god forbid, tumblr. She's young sure, but Malala was a similar age and far more impressive precisely because she didn't resort to histrionics. Population control is absolutely 100% essential. To quote the old axiom: anyone who believes in unlimited growth in a finite environment is either stupid, or an economist politician. If climate change is a scam it's not because it isn't happening, it's because the only things that will get done about it are politically expedient guff around the edges. You don't get a peep about our population growing 25% in 5 years here because it makes the economy look like it's growing and they can kick the superannuation can down the road for another decade, but huge tracts of productive agricultural land are going into McMansions with all that lovely CO2 generated by the concrete, machinery etc. Instead we have to focus on methane which doesn't even accumulate and avoiding highrises because that's for overseas slums.

Ukrainian domestic media had plenty of claims that they were interfering to stop pro Russian Trump. There is of course some wiggle room for those claims being incorrect- currying favour, domestic factors like showing they were sticking it to Russia, whether those making the claims were representative of the Ukrainian govt in general. But in the end, Manafort got got during the election cycle in large part due to information originating from Ukraine, so their own claims of what they are doing are supported.

It would be near impossible for Steele to have used sources developed at MI6 without breaking the Official Secrets Act. Steele's dossier doesn't really work for a number of reasons because of that, either he broke the OSA, his information was all old or it was made up (not necessarily by him of course, but anonymous sources do tend to love gilding the lily). The Ukrainians were pretty open about what they were doing and why they were doing it as, to them, that sort of quid pro quo isn't a big deal- and it played very well domestically to be publicly seen to be sticking it to Yanukovich and Russia, plus they'd have backed Paris Hilton over someone who had Manafort as a campaign manager. That the Ukrainian government supported Hillary is probably better documented than Russia supporting Trump, but it simply didn't get reported. And let's be frank, if a recently ex Trump staffer was fishing for information from Russia that happened to benefit Trump neither you nor WaPo (nor I for that matter) would think that was innocent. And it's not like the Ds were not using foreigners to dig up dirt, that too is well documented per Steele. But OK, it isn't universally accepted since D partisans don't accept it. Kind of funny how Politico becomes a pro Trump rag to WaPo (whose stories based on Anonymous Sources are tremendously well corroborated and documented, just the best corroboration and documentation) when they have the temerity to actually say something against the Ds for once. I wonder how strenuously WaPo looked for corroboration and documentation... and I'd bet I spent longer typing this sentence than they spent looking. That article can be summed up as "Didn't happen, can't prove it happened, and if it did it wasn't serious". Only left out 'they deserved it', albeit that's kind of implied by 'but Trump did worse!'. Which itself is of course classic whataboutism*; but what about what Trump did? *still hate the term, it's plain moronic and unironic usage is a lazy and pathetic admission that you don't have a coherent argument but prefer to hide behind buzz terms.

While it isn't in the same class as Trump's (apparent, not like the media and anonymous sources has a 100% record on accuracy where Trump is concerned) request Steele did, supposedly, use a lot of sources in the British State Apparatus such as MI6/ GCHQ. And while his sources almost certainly contravened the Official Secrets Act neither he nor they got investigated which could imply state collusion; or alternatively most of his stuff was made up and the OSA doesn't apply to fantasy. In this case though Skarpen is probably referring to Ukraine's decently documented decision to overtly back Hillary last election. It's unclear whether Hillary herself requested that interference but it's pretty much universally accepted that 'the Democrats' asked for/ met/ helped and received help from Ukraine. Not great for The Narrative though plus Hillary lost, so story lacked legs.

If it makes you feel any better there's a good psychological explanation for it from cognition biases. If given two options in a question of that type people pick the one they recognise as the answer whether it's correct or not, sometimes even if they know it cannot be correct; and unsurprisingly more schoolchildren recognise Dumbledore. That's also an explanation for people from the US locating Ukraine in places they almost certainly know aren't correct. Arthur probably did exist, though of course not as the Malloryesque King Arthur in plate armour and the like.

I doubt Trump burned Smolenkov, given the timings that story was released now so people would draw a line between that and the current complaint. The SVR has been very successful in penetrating US intelligence apparatus and it's more likely he was pulled due to that. Details of high level spies (albeit this guy wasn't high level, he was mid to low) are- well, should always be- obfuscated from everyone except their handler(s) and if Russia isn't presuming that the US has spies in its government then Putin never worked for the KGB and has everyone using typewriters because of a love of retro tech. Wouldn't be the first time either, there was also that 'Israeli' spy who had to be extracted from ISIS due to Trump as well- who was actually a Jordanian spy whose reports Israel was reading and who panicked after the press exposure. Blatant lying seems to be flavour of the day though, Saudis misidentifying weaponry used on the attacks on their refinery too; Quds-1 missiles as Ya Alis (kind of lol, since the Iranian missile they resemble is the Soumar rather than the Ya Ali, presume they picked the YA because it's got a sectarian name and shorter range) and claiming the Houthis don't have the type of drone used which they have used, in an attack everyone accepted came from them. Then Putin offers to sell them S400, which would be only a bit less useless against drones and cruise missiles than Patriots are. More expensive than the Pantsirs which would be useful though, and Saudi princes love the shiny.

In terms of cutting edge analysis all you really need to know is that he's forgotten the XBone exists and refers to the 360 being inferior to the PS4 all the time, when the 360 hasn't been sold in years. (and yeah, it's probably deliberate since making controversial posts with mistakes in doubles down on people who reflexively respond both in terms to console wars/ PC masterrace and those who reflexively have to correct others; though the latter is pointless since there definitively aren't any reflexive correctors here at all, not a single one)

If that comment is related to the recent news stories of the US exfiltrating a spy from Moscow note that while the story broke in the last week or so- slightly suspiciously timing, in retrospect, since it's very easy to draw a straight line between the two- that agent was exfilled in June, 2017. So definitely not an urgent issue in 2019 and he cannot have been burned in a conversation on July 31st of this year. On the more general level, one of the most common complaints about Trump is that he has zero interest in briefings and details and wants everything to be as short and simple as possible. Him leaking details is unlikely, as he's unlikely to get or ask for the details in the first place. Making ludicrous promises though, sure, that's perfectly in his nature.

There's very little chance of the Chinese supplying anything without the approval of the Iranians and it's doubtful if they even could. It would be far more likely they'd supply the Iranians and then Iran would on supply the Houthis using their back channels. But even then the Iranians cannot get much at all into Yemen through the blockade and 99% of the stuff the Houthis use is still old Yemeni army stuff and ghanima off raids. The wreckage doing the twitter rounds is close to definitely of a Quds-1 Yemeni cruise missile rather than a drone, though the pictures are unverified and it's marginal whether the Quds 1 could have that range. It near definitely isn't the native/ acknowledged Iranian version of the same missile though as there are distinctive differences including size. The Quds-1 is probably an Iranian design as well, but there's no evidence that they provide anything apart from engines (extremely likely) and guidance (very likely) nor that Iran itself has any as opposed to supplying proxies. And the satellite pictures provided as evidence that Iran attacked directly from their territory are kind of lol too. Direction of impact is very marginal evidence when guided munitions are used anyway but WNW impact is more consistent with coming from Yemen or Iraq at a pinch than Iran, which is to the NE to SE . Plus any missile fired from Iran would have to go very close to competent military forces- US bases or fleets basically- instead of just toodling across desert while Saudi radar operators are playing minecraft or online poker on their screens. Still, whoever did it their accuracy was impressive and it would definitely be goodbye to most of Saudi's oil infrastructure, power plants and desalination plants in a shooting war.

Yeah, but it's so simplistic an example of reverse psychology that it really ought to only work on children.

I'd genuinely say it's an attempt at 2 year old psychology. Refuse to get in the car? Well, Hillary wants you to stay out of the car too so you're doing what she wants! Refuse to eat your broccoli? Just like Obama, he hates broccoli too!

China is blaming Hillary because it plays well to Trump, who loves a bit of a conspiracy theory and probably believes Dorian not hitting Alabama was due to Obama andor Hillary frantically releasing butterflies to deflect its path. Meng's detention was due to the overall stoush the US has with Huawei and 5G and she was detained via Canada for the same reason that they got Britain to detain that Iranian tanker rather than seized it themselves- chilling effect, and it brings another country directly into the mix and you can usually rely on that other country not to fold to pressure due to nationalism and not wanting to appear weak. Well, unless 'lol, no help for you' is your response when they need help after losing a tanker in response at least. The only conspiracy theory* for Meng's detention relates back to Huawei and its 5G system and why the US dislikes it- that there aren't Chinese backdoors beaming everything back to the 100 Acre Wood but that they are instead refusing to install NSA backdoors. Otherwise her detention is pretty much par for the course for US foreign policy. *very likely not a conspiracy theory, since the Huawei hardware has been extensively tested at this point with none of the claimed Chinese back doors found.

For a rich person a lot of that is purely theoretical tax though. Wasn't it Warren Buffet who said he paid less actual tax than his secretary despite the wealth disparity? If you're rich enough to afford good lawyers and good accountants you tend to end up paying very little tax because you can afford the good accountants and lawyers that most people cannot. Same is true for companies, which is why there's such a concerted push in some places to actually tax companies by gross revenue rather than profit after the subsidiary 'licenses' technology at gross profit -50k to its 'parent' in a tax haven. If it were a linear relation to the Australian and (projected) NZ buy back programs it would be ~15 million guns for the US; though the situation certainly aren't directly equivalent with the US having higher overall ownership and legal handguns, but a narrower range of weapons likely to be involved in a putative US buyback scheme than the Aus/ NZ ones.

Character development wise there is a whole new 'ability tree' introduced in one of B&W's questlines. It's not directly advertised in its quest description though, and first time through it ended up being one of the last quests I did.

At the moment there's no faith to keep. It's not like the US stopped attacks on the Taleban while the preliminary negotiations were taking place; so there's no reason for the Taleban to stop attacks either. Negotiation can work in Afghanistan- the case of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar is an example of a unrepentant 'terrorist' who stopped via a negotiated settlement. The big issue with the Taleban is that unlike Hekmatyar they are if not actually winning at least doing well enough that they have significant leverage and expectations from negotiations; and they aren't a wholly monolithic entity so there would be a likelihood of extremists not accepting any negotiated settlement. As for keeping faith after an agreement, it certainly wouldn't be a Vietnam 1975 type situation even if they 'broke faith' because the Taleban never held the entirety of Afghanistan even at their strongest; and while they aren't getting weaker they're still well behind how strong they were in 2001. They would run into the same issues they had last time, ie the ex soviet stans would support their minorities and Iran would back the shia. But, End of the Day, if the Taleban could stroll back into power after foreigners leave despite 20 years of nation building then there's no realistic prospect of them not being able to do so in a further 20 years anyway.

Sure there are, but if that's a consistent metric for talking to people you'd be refusing to talk to dozens of countries including multiple US allies and China. The question with such things should always be whether the 'cure' for the oppression is worse than the oppression itself. In this case 18 years of conflict with no improvement from 15 years suggest it really doesn't deserve even an air quoted 'cure' description. And talking to the Taleban doesn't mean agreeing with them, or giving them all of what they want. Practicalities are that the Taleban have significant support in Afghanistan even after 18 years so the options are some sort of status quo where lots of people die every year for the forseeable future and the country is permanently destabilised or talking with them and maybe getting at least their more moderate wing into the political process.