Zoraptor

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.

Sacking Bolton by tweet is the least of the admin's faux pas and him going should make their foreign policy more coherent, not less. Indeed it would probably be more coherent if the next National Security Advisor were Bernie Sanders, given Bolton's hawkishness was way too much even for Pompeo and Bernie actually has more FP similarities to Trump. Bolton just ran around kicking anthills andor threatening to bomb people as if that by itself was a cohesive foreign policy, and he did so before they'd finished dealing with the previously kicked anthills. Pompeo/ Trump may be disliked by most foreign diplomats; but Bolton was actively loathed, didn't really work even as a 'bad cop' to make Trump/ Pompeo look more reasonable, and didn't have a single foreign policy success. Talking to the Taleban is fine. If you want peace you have to talk to your enemies; if not prepare to either have a perpetual war or to kill them all.

Mmmmmmm, yes. I'm not normally one to bask in the misfortune of others but I shall make an unrepentant exception for moustache man. So much so that I hope he gets appointed by the next administration, just so that he can be fired again.

$1- no typo, and 1 NZ dollar even- seems pretty cheap and significantly cheaper than it would ever be on steam. (MS Game pass, currently $1/ month in New Zealand. And I thought Origin Access was good value. People may cry buckets about subscription services- well, with one prominent exception that gets a pass for anything for some- but you can't beat them for their value proposition. Even if it's $1 month for a years subscription that's still extremely cheap.)

I suspect Corbyn is pretty keen on an election but the bulk of the rest of his party isn't. And it is a rare chance to humiliate the leader of his main rival party, end of the day most politicians are going to take that chance when offered before an election rather than taking the election without the ritual humiliation. Trouble being, of course, that many voters will be Single Issue when it comes to Brexit and assuming the Tories are the only big party to support leaving they will get all the Brexiteer votes while the remainers will be split. In a FPP system 40% of the vote is usually enough to win, and there could easily be 40% brexiteer vote.

I took the ISideWith quiz because I didn't have anything better to do for five minutes- and with the state of some US voting machines maybe I could end up voting, if I really wanted to. Watkins 98% Harris 93% Warren 92% Bernie 91% Biden 61% Trump 41% Not sure exactly how I got Biden so low- closer to Trump than the other Ds- with the others so high. Guess it's more evidence Biden is the real stealth Republican DINO candidate.

I had no technical issues with the GOG version of FEAR Platinum. I don't think they looked as nice on modern hardware as the original or FEAR 2 but they ran fine.

Haven't seen B&tB but I'd wager money Watson was at least a better singer than Russel Crowe- who actually does have singing experience- was in Les Mis.

So, Parliament in the UK is getting suspended until after the Brexit deadline, so there's one week of sitting left. Will there be a no confidence vote? Will Liz refuse to suspend parliament? One thing is for sure, lots of heads will be excitedly talking about it on BBC and ITV.

For sheer contrivance value none of those come close to comparing to Gollum falling into Mt Doom- highly dextrous guy gets his heart's desire, a ring which has some semi direct ability to influence circumstances/ its holder and first thing he does is fall into lava, the one thing that can destroy the ring and the one thing it would avoid at all costs. If that ending happened in something less well regarded and more consistently badly written like the SW sequels it would be utterly pilloried, especially if Space Don Henley and friends turned up ten minutes later to rescue the heroes from certain death. It gets forgiven in LOTR because the rest of the story is good enough to forgive its flaws. Similar sort of thing in Breaking Bad when Gus gets blown up and walks out of the room apparently unharmed, it's a highly unrealistic event in an otherwise highly 'realistic' (= maintaining verisimilitude) series which is forgiven because the rest of the series is good, and because it doesn't have long term consequences. Have the same thing happen in GoT S8 however and people would be screeching about it for years even if it ultimately had no impact on the story. In LOTR I'd generally agree, since they were established in The Hobbit (well, book wise; movie wise not so much). Besides, anyone with any sense knows that instead of flying the ring into Mt Doom on an Eagle it would be far more sensible to trebuchet it in. Even the physics agrees, if a trebuchet has the force necessary to fire a 90kg projectile 300m then it can, ipso facto, fire a 25g ring for a distance of ~1000km. Indeed, you might actually want to add a bit of extra weight.

I though they did a pretty decent job of establishing force powers before they became plot relevant, most of the time, which is a pretty good defence against them being classic deus ex machina. eg Luke and the training drone foreshadows the Trench Run and Darth Vader and Obiwan establish that force users can sense each other. There's lots of plotforce moments though which don't really involve The Force as such- the Millenium Falcon breaking down near to Bespin where Lando just happens to be, Han finding Luke in the snowstorm on Hoth (potential force = deus ex machina there) and some more general plot issues too like the time it would take the MF to reach Bespin at sublight. Coincidences and even dei ex machinis aren't necessary indicative of bad storytelling anyway. The Eagles turned up very conveniently in both The Hobbit and LOTR (and the goblins clearly hadn't read apochryphal Napoleon quotes either and conveniently turned up just before the dwarves and elves came to blows); and Gollum just happening to grab the Ring and accidentally fall into Mt Doom was more convenient than anything I can think of Force related in any Star Wars. (slightly off topic for this thread but the TV series Legion poked fun at the deus ex machina concept by having a character literally build machines to act as plot devices/ plot drivers multiple times)

Yeah, jimmying the poll questions etc is pretty easy to do if you want to do it as just about nobody will check, and you can always fudge the weightings if needed too which even fewer people will check. It only really comes back to bite you if the result demonstrably ends up contradicting your polls like with Brexit or to an extent the last US Presidential race. Didn't Obama supposedly not have the most enthusiastic (non official) reaction to Biden running either? Something along the lines of "you know Joe, you don't have to do this...". Had a quick search, but not an easy query to narrow down.