Zoraptor

Well yeah- but, the assertion is that 59 tomahawks struck, so I don't have to prove that 59 didn't since I'm not making the assertion, I can freely dismiss any hits not shown. I'm not unreasonable and I wouldn't bother arguing, if the evidence released merely disproved the Russian version. But they didn't even do that, and that begs the question why. As for Russians providing proof, they don't have to, and have good reason not to- secrecy of any countermeasures plus Trump being insecure about his grands mains turning out to be rather more petits. If someone told him the Russians had crashed his beautiful new SMART missiles and were crowing about it he'd probably order an outright war. They still provided some evidence though, via video tour and photogallery which clearly showed multiple undamaged shelters, aircraft and buildings, as well as damage, at a time it was still being claimed that the base had been destroyed. You'd need to come up with a good reason for the shelters especially not being targeted, or why some were and others weren't. Just because you believe tomahawks are infallible doesn't make them so and doesn't reverse the burden of proof onto anyone else but the US. is already defeasible both theoretically and practically. If you have mobile sources like planes it's pretty trivial to brute force, and if spoofing is involved it won't do anything. is a 'magic' defence, there's nowhere near enough known about it to prove or refute effectiveness, and it still relies on antenna(e) and the GPS signal. I also note: So, if it isn't effective against all jamming environments you can pretty much guarantee it would be Russian (or Chinese) military systems it isn't effective against, and the countermeasures are only on newer missiles as well. Hmm. Hope an old batch of tomahawks weren't used. In any case, per your aphorism, the onus is on the asserter to prove that 59 tomahawks arrived, me providing a reason as to why they didn't is wholly optional on my part.

Yeah, Putin wins because Russia now is still so much better than Russia was in the 90s with the overt western influence that it's scarcely believable, and people blame Yeltsin and the west for the bankruptcy and weakness; and, most of all, taking advantage of Russia's weakness to humiliate. Probably needs a reminder that Yeltsin the utter disaster only got a 2nd term at all because of massive direct- not devastating Pepe memes class, billions of dollars class- US intervention in the election. Funny thing about that, back when reddit (yeah guys, I know) was doing public aggregation reports one place really stood out amongst the Torontos New Yorks, Londons etc: Eglin Air Force Base, Florida. Report then got deleted, of course. Shooting missiles is not an act of war, though it could be a pretext for one. But then sneezing on an ambassador could be a pretext for war. No, if anything moving its ships make a confrontation more likely. Getting your fleet caught in port is a massive no no in a war; see Pearl Harbour, Mers el Kebir/ Algiers etc, Port Arthur, Alexandria (Aboukir), Taranto, since you present a single target able to be targeted by a single coordinated strike, cannot manoeuver and are a sitting duck. Tartous is a decent distance from Hmeimem (about 40km), and you'd far prefer to use pantsirs on CMs which have a shorter range. If you're using S400s to shoot tomahawks they aren't fully ready to shoot planes which is their primary job. As for the ship utility, depends on the ship and role. They can work very well as pickets and the like to augment radar, and of course if you've got ship launched tomahawks they also potentially give a quicker and heavier response than a plane would. Pyotr Veliky (not present in Syria) has 20 SAM systems fitted including 12 S300s so it would be significant for air defence as well, but a frigate or especially a cargo ship not so much. Reminds me, I found the video the stills of the 'chemical weapon gas cylinder' came from and it's not exactly more convincing. Video's perfectly SFW, unlike many of the others About the only thing it shows 'positively' is that there's enough concrete debris shown and the greening is unlikely to be algae, but the latter is because the hole in the ceiling is shown to be ~5m away from where the cylinder came to rest, undamaged, on the undamaged bed, and would require a truly weird trajectory of about 30 degrees from horizontal, after being dropped by a chopper and going through concrete. I'd be pretty confident in saying that at least was outright staged, so much so that I cannot see any way it can be defended as accurate. For some reason we don't get that video shown on news reports though, just 'trust us, we got the good oil' from Macron etc.

Since it's a bit more important than the waffle in the other post, plus the quote system is being a particular pig today and won't trim or even delete anything without borking formatting... They really need to pick nerve agent or chlorine. Sarin is unstable and despite being called nerve gas it's a liquid at STP, and you spend a lot of effort purifying and stabilising it when weaponising- combine it with chlorine liquid which it is miscible in and which is very reactive and generates nucleophiles readily and you'll get no sarin pretty quickly (or maybe no chlorine, depends on relative amounts and purity). There's simply no plus to combining the two and a lot of negatives. Chlorine can be used as an accentuator with some CW, eg phosgene, but phospgene is both literally made from chlorine, and literally is dichloroformaldehyde. There's only footage of one alleged container so the contents would have mixed. The troubles with that container are multiple though. (1) it's gone through 20cm (?) of at least somewhat reinforced concrete since you can see the rebar and is basically undamaged. Going through the concrete in itself isn't necessarily a problem since it would be Traveling and several hundred kg heavy as well but with (3) it's an insurmountable one. Going through a concrete roof undamaged and (2) being stopped by an- undamaged- bed is extraordinarily unlikely given comparative stress thresholds and (3) you can see multiple examples of other alleged gas cylinder improvised bombs and they all show obvious, sometimes massive damage to the cylinder. Note also one of them covered in concrete debris, there (4) isn't anywhere near enough concrete debris for the hole made to be recent. And (5) contrary to common belief, chlorine does not leave a green residue despite itself being green, it bleaches. That can be confirmed by the many industrial accidents involving chlorine. The green staining looks far more like algae from a wet mattress due to having a hole in the roof for some time- the picture with the hole in the roof also shows there's wall mould in places, another symptom. Difficult to be sure of that given the resolution and lack of any wide angle picture though. (Having done organic chemistry it's a bit baffling how terrible a lot of the evidence is. The French say that hexamine is diagnostic for syrian sarin, but hexamine is regularly used in rocket fuel, explosives and other solid fuels so it's all over the place in warzones) Edit: Russian ships leaving port doesn't mean much, the Tartous base is tiny. When the Kuznetsov and Pyotr Veliky were there they were anchored a fair way out to sea as there was nowhere near enough space. You don't want to be caught in port during an attack, but it doesn't mean that an attack is at all imminent. If it's today it would likely be in the next few hours though.

It was definitely local reasons- the son of the local tribe chief was killed and another injured, no one in the actual Syrian army was involved. The Conoco gas plant is also held by a competing branch of the same family. The issue got muddled a lot when 'Girkin/ Strelkov' (VK account claiming to be him) said that 3x more russians were killed than the US DOD claimed were killed total in the incident and the press ran with that as gospel despite there being no evidence, let alone proof; but the best estimate is 8-12 Wagner deaths in a camp rather than as part of an active attack. Asymmetric attacks would be used if the governments wanted a fight, not direct ones. There's already at least two groups doing so. As well as Boo's list, the guy was literally in prison in Russia, so they could easily have bumped him off at any time then and no one would have batted an eyelid. In this case it being highly pure actually introduces problems as well, since purity also increases lethality. It also cannot have been 'pure' if applied as a paste since, obviously, it's mixed with the paste, but I'd admit that as being a technical objection to the term used more than a direct objection to the conclusion made. That's a dreadful article but it does illustrate one interesting tactic. The Russians don't have to pick one of it being either a real attack perpetrated by the rebels or it not being an attack at all. That's like saying that a defence lawyer arguing that a murder victim is still alive, the evidence that was produced suggests he was stabbed rather than shot and the accused person has an alibi only reinforces the prosecution case- they can't even keep their story straight, the guy's alive but was stabbed and the accused guy wasn't there anyway? Clearly that reinforces his guilt since the prosecutor only has one story! Except per below the prosecutor has multiple stories as well. The White Helmets are also an interesting one. They definitely moved some of the bodies in the recent attack to make it look more dramatic as there's absolute proof sufficient that even extreme rebel supporters like Julian Roepcke agree, and they definitely outright staged their Mannequin Challenge bomb victim recovery video and there's good evidence for others as well, and they definitely participated in beheading and mass execution videos since you can literally see them there, and they definitely have some members who are also HTS (crypto Al Qaeda) and other extremist group members, and that is definitely used as a way to get around funding issues since you're paying the white helmet not the extremist even if they're one and the same person. But, they also genuinely do respond to attacks and the like, and genuinely do do good work. So they're neither pure manufactured propaganda merchants nor angelic saints.

The Express is as tabloid as The Fail or The Scum and possibly even more hysterical. Houthis said they'd fire a missile a day at Riyadh, that's what they're doing. Somewhere between midnight and 0200 GMT would be the likely time for a strike, so that's when the journo car park being full would be a worry. If anything that's relatively good news. A lack of British participation would be due to Trump wanting to do something really stupid, or May letting parliament vote and losing which she won't do, since she might lose. The story comes from the Russian Ministry of Defence, RT is just quoting it. If RT quotes the Russian Government or RFE/RL/VOA quotes the US one their status as propaganda arms reinforces it being the government's position. If they do it as an opinion piece or similar using disposable sources- alphabet soup think tanks, typically- then it's deniable and low value. That's true for both propaganda arms. Or, you know, Occam's Razor works too. Per a post from Sean O'Connor* on the matter a year ago: And you're still not going to use an S400 to shoot down tomahawks except under very specific circumstances, none of which were in evidence. If indeed an aerial platform was used to overcome the horizon problem, then surely the Russian MoD would also release the radar track data it had on them so they knew where to place those aircraft. Why would they though. It's operationally sensitive; and Trump is a sensitive snowflake who'd probably insist on throwing more tomahawks out there if made to look weak. This way both sides made their point and could make their claims without escalating; the US could claim to have struck a blow and obliterated the base, Russia can say it did minimal damage and was back in service the next day. You're still treating GPS like it's a terrestrial system where you can just __ to counter jamming when you can't, because the basic physics that gives GPS its advantages are the same basic physics that gives it its disadvantages. Countermeasures are designed for level playing fields not 1000000000000000 fold power differences. If you have something the size of a truck vs something the size of a truck having an 'EM battle' over frequencies some dozens of km apart from either you have a range of anti jamming options available; if you have one a few km away and the other 20,000km away it's nowhere near a fair fight. I'm going to let you think for a moment on just how well that goes with this: They go fine. Difference being; in one case you wouldn't expect evidence, in the other you would. You can't reasonably prove they crashed into water, but can prove that they hit where they said, if they showed the pictures. Which they did for some, but nowhere near enough to disprove the Russian scenario.

roll_safe.jpg always applies. Though I'd prefer stalin.jpg for this, especially since the relevant quote* is misattributed. You do have to assume that isn't what was actually meant though, and the idea was to get a better result than now. *..no man no problem"; Rybakov

If they allow either of them to ever communicate with anyone again, and I'm not exactly holding my breath after the mess Yulia made when talking to her cousin for a minute. By intervening openly and forcefully. Obviously it would be a political suicide for some but it could have been done when the war was just beginning. Yeah, that wouldn't have worked at all. You might have got rid of Assad, but he's at most the symptom of the problem, not the problem itself. If you look at the situation as was in East Ghouta that shows why intervention simply could not have worked. Surrounded by the government for 5 years and the rebels there... spent as much time fighting each other as the government. They also had a decent sized crypto Al Qaeda presence (HTS) allied to a supposed 'moderate' faction to fight another 'moderate' faction that literally called for the genocide of 2 million Syrians, took 4000 hostages* and literally paraded them as human shields in cages. There's an active war between rebels in Idlib, and even the Turkish rebels in Afrin have been fighting each other despite the Turkish Army being there. The same things that were in play in Iraq and the same things at play in Libya would have all been at play in Syria to make things worse than either, and given how bad Iraq was... You have the sectarian divide and the ethnic divides of Iraq, plus the competing local factions (Saudi/ Qatar/ Turkey) of LIbya; plus Israel looking to take even more land and the watermelon seller in Ankara dreaming he's Mehmed II Osmanli. The west has shown neither any clues about 'nation building' post intervention nor any ability to learn from mistakes so much so that you have to suspect it's a deliberate strategy to asterisk things up. There was never any prospect of the mythical moderate democratic opposition being real, even just a brief examination of the laughable goons put up as alternative governments by democratic luminaries like Erdogollum and Incompetence bin Salman give the lie to that, and make the merely massively flawed Ahmed Chalabi look like enlightenment personified. Assad's a crap leader by any objective measure and his best trait, by far, has been his unexpected persistence. Despite that he's still immeasurably better than any of the realistic alternatives, especially now when the only result from him losing would be another wave of refugees as all his supporters flee. Or look positive, maybe they'll all be moderately beheaded and the Euro taxpayer saves some cash. *footage of whom's release was used on US TV to show how relieved people were to escape... the depraved government siege. Technically true, I guess, but darkly funny if you knew what the footage actually was since nowhere near 4000 of those prisoners were alive at end.

Tunisia was the first and most successful arab spring revolution, and the only one which stuck. They also have a secular (well, secularish) elected government now.

Good thing we have Donald Trump to uh... compensate for his tiny hands?* Trouble being of course that Trump is precisely dumb and narcissist enough to really make a mess, then keep digging. Apparently his talk with Teresa May spooked her so much Britain is now trying desperately to delay things. *Fatal error, please reboot universe?

A ship was only an example. You really don't really comprehend just how weak the GPS signal is. (1) the GPS signal is so weak you can potentially block it from- literally- 100s of kms away (2) you can block it with submarines. You probably wouldn't since it would largely defeat their purpose, but you could. (3) you can jam with planes. You can jam with drones, it's so weak. Going to plot a course around planes that can fly considerably faster than the missiles you're launching? Especially if you've given an hour's notice... (4) I'd take the rferl article more seriously if it wasn't literally the propaganda arm of the US government and (5) while s400 is capable of being used against cm it's ludicrous overkill and you'd use pantsir or similar against tomahawks, so that article is mostly strawmanning. (6) radar on US warships is so good they only ram gigantic cargo ships a few times a year and only occasionally mistake Airbuses for F14s. Yep, sarky, but you can't claim system infallibility. That isn't even close to being an accurate analogy. A good analogy would be if your expert coroner says someone was shot 5 times but only shows 2 bullet wounds. Asking for the other 3 and why they weren't shown is not just fine, it should be expected. Similar sources have confirmed this only for RQ-11 Ravens and not for anything in the class of the MQ-1. Not totally unsurprising, or even unexpected for such a small RPV when there's room for a rudimentary datalink and sensors and little else such as specifically hardened anti-jamming measures (and the cost is such that there is an assumption that it _will_ be neutralised by a peer or near-peer adversary, or at least disrupted, in one way or another) that's also flying fairly high and within LOS of any jamming measures. Your arguments also fail to reconcile with what's perhaps the biggest hole in the Russian MoD story: If the missiles were jammed, where are the dozens of airframes littered across the Syrian/Lebanese countryside? Plenty of photo evidence exists of cruise missiles laying in a field due to mechanical faults mid-flight from past campaigns. Given that if nothing else the Russian bombing campaign serves as a country-sized advertisement for the latest and greatest of Russian military hardware, surely parading a big piece of the airframe on RT would be a great propaganda coup. Firstly, as I've said multiple times, the whole point would have been jamming them over the sea since terrain recognition doesn't work over water; only inertial and GPS guidance. Guidance jamming of terrain recog is practically impossible over most landforms, but not over featureless water. There'd also be no evidence of crashes in water since, well, they'd sink. Secondly, yeah, the role of recon drones as opposed to combat drones makes them intrinsically more likely to be jammed, indeed you'd probably deliberately fly them into jamming fields to test weaknesses etc. But if the reapers and predators haven't been exposed to the same extent because they're doodling around the Deir Ez Zor desert dozens of km further away to avoid being shot down and provoking an incident then yeah, you can't tell anything about the jamming potential. I haven't seen any upcoming strike scenarios which involve combat drones, only manned planes and missiles. Given the potential for being fired at in anger by the s400s they'd definitely use drones if they could reliably do so.

The funny thing about LoT is that if you posted spoilers about it people would presume you'd been eating the wrong (or right, facpov) sort of mushroom. For a TV series the animation of the final fight was pretty impressive.

Because they can. But imagine it's mostly because movie producers pay royalties for use. While game producers opt for limited licences, I imagine it's cheaper. Yep, those licenses are cheaper, and there is also the issue of format shifting not being specified in licenses- if a license specifies CD or VHS then you may have to renegotiate if you're going download or DVD. Games aren't treated uniquely badly in that respect. Many TV shows run into problems with music licensing expiry as well. Shows which used a heap of high profile music especially were effected, like Tour of Duty whose first DVD release (iirc) even required a new rights free title song due to them no longer having 'Paint it Black' licensed and had most of its contemporary soundtrack replaced with generic muzak.

Descent games have been back since December, iirc November. They were only removed because Herve forgot to pass on royalties- he's very busy, so completely understandable- and there was no intrinsic legal issue with the rights apart from that. There are plenty of examples of licensing issues getting games outright removed, racing games using real vehicles are probably the most effected proportionally by removals due to rights loss.

So a private company that stakes its reputation on its analysis (and would likely provide further proof to potential clients that are not convinced by their publicly available content) gets picked apart, yet one can take on faith a claim made almost purely for domestic consumption to placate the most misinformed hardliners and is corroborated by zero evidence? The evidence they provided was for a number of strikes consistent with the Russian version. You're using classic appeal to authority fallacy. I've seen 'experts' claim that T72BM tanks are the only ones fitted with kontakt-5 ERA and kontakt-5 means the tank has to be Russian. Literally none of that is true; and being said by an expert, in a think tank with an authoritative name ('Institute for International Strategic Studies' in that case), doesn't make it true. Pretending as if FHSS and ECCM doesn't exist; a Hollywood actress figured it out in the 1940s for the purpose of defeating jamming efforts against radio-guided torpedoes after all. The placement of GPS jammers on cell-phone towers is also critically useful against cruise missiles that have some form of GPS guidance due to the elevation giving it maximum line of sight against a low-flying target. Thus if a missile were to pass through a "communications denied environment" the INS guidance kicks in until it passes through, the GPS guidance kicks back on, and it continues as normal. GPS jammers won't do crap against cruise missiles over land, but not every military GPS utility uses terrain recognition. And there's a massive scale difference between jamming torpedo guidance which is terrestrial and on a single figure km distance scale and GPS- which is 20,000km away, and with the energy limitations of a satellite. At 0.1 femtowatt signal strength you can drown out entire bands, which brute forces switching defences. To put it in perspective the signal output of a single cellphone, not even cellphone tower, is around 1 watt and thus a full 16 orders of magnitude larger than a GPS signal. That attenuates quickly as well, of course, but still, 16 orders of magnitude higher for something you literally carry in your pocket. Edit: Is the US military itself a sufficient source?

Trouble is that facts and what is or isn't fake news tends to vary by opinion. Consider: 1) 'Obama is a lizardman alien who has returned to Venus' is obviously fake news, but it also isn't going to be believed by people blessed with the gift of a functioning brain, so no point removing or fact checking it 2) 'Hillary Clinton had Seth Rich murdered', no evidence of it apart from some odd circumstances so strongly unproven, but an opinion that can be defended as being possible. Fake news, sure, 'fake opinion', no; fact check false if stated as fact, but unproven if presented as a theory. 3) 'Trump = serial groper", objectively unproven and opinion rather than true or false, but, have a pro Trump fact check and it's false, fake news; have an anti Trump fact checker and it's true, real news. 4) 'We know where Iraq's WMD are they're at [places]..', definitely said, also absolutely a lie. Fake news? No, Rumsfeld said it; fact check would be false, now, but then it was generally regarded as being absolutely true due to the authority of the source. Conversely, the reverse opinion from Comical Ali was obviously false, then. The same thing now from Muhammed Sahif al Sahaf though would be fact checked as true. It's the latter examples which are why regulation is a potential major problem as you're providing even more motivation to move from proper facts to opinion which the authorities- whether it's facebook or the government- agree with as facts, and labeling of dissenting of opinions that predisposes people not to even consider them. That isn't free speech, indeed some might say it's the reverse. The current situation is far from ideal but is probably the best we can get with human nature, it can get far far worse.

I've heard of barrel bombs being dropped (probably pushed out from inside) from helicopters though. I suppose it depends on how big of a barrel bomb we're talking about here. Actual barrel bombs have to be dropped by helis (or a transport plane with a loading ramp, but that's even less accurate), standard fighters/ bombers literally cannot drop them, in the vast majority of recent cases 'barrel bomb' is used as a dog whistle and it's a conventional bomb- I've even seen parachute retarded bombs referred to as 'barrel bombs'. While use of barrel bombs made sense a few years ago and they were used extensively then there's a reason why you didn't have fleets of bombers dropping barrel bombs in WW2 or over Vietnam or whatever instead of conventional bombs- barrel bombs are militarily worse in every single respect than conventional bombs. Experts who make claims not in evidence deserve to have their claims debunked and ignored. If they'd shown what they claimed there would be no argument, but they didn't. Otherwise, you get birth of credulity and death of skepticism. And Saddam's WMDs being over London in 45 minutes etc. Perhaps with that thing in your car, but whether or not they can jam a hardened signal is up for debate. It really isn't, jamming relies solely on the physical properties of EM radiation, and if the US military has a way to alter that then they can do anything. Spoofing is debatable in terms of its technical aspects and whether it would work, jamming isn't; if you have a stronger signal that overwhelms a weaker one. Cell phone towers are actually an ideal terrestrial placement for jammers since you already have the transmitter infrastructure in place, but it's really easy to make mobile ones- say, on a ship- because you don't need much power to jam weak signals. Even a cell phone signal is far stronger than GPS. As for the rest, I'd bet everything I own against a bent 5c piece that the Russians knew where the 2 US destroyers which fired the CMs were, and everyone knows they were warned in advance. One Russian ship in a place able to jam one set, one set too far away. Easy.

Yeah, they didn't show 44 hits though, they showed some hits at high resolution, and a low res set of circles on a zoomed out image covering 2-3 km that you can't tell anything about, because it's too low res. If they provided the high res images they (supposedly) had for all 44, then there would be no argument, but they provide proof for a number consistent with the Russian version, consistency with the US version is solely on their say so, not on the evidence they provide. Inverse square law (esp from 20000 km away), and satellite size means that nearly any terrestrial spoof will override GPS; average GPS signal strength is 0.1 femtowatts, ie 1*10-16 W. Inertial systems are inaccurate backups. You can readily jam GPS, or potentially spoof missiles to gradually fly themselves into the sea, and an inertial system will not register that as a significant deviation because it's gradual. Or you can spoof GPS to land drones at Iranian airbases, whatever your jam is.

Yeah, had that out last time. The satellite images released showed nowhere near 59 hits, and were a mix of decent resolution images showing definite hits and a zoomed out master image with circles drawn where you can't tell what is circled let alone whether it was damaged at the resolution supplied. The US military itself only cited those pics as proof, and they actually show ~23 hits on ~17 structures, consistent with the Russian claim. It was easy to prove the right number of hits by showing hi res images of the other claimed areas of damage instead of just three (one of which was a single building), but we never got them. It also didn't help that other US claims around it were inconsistent; Mattis claimed 20% of an air wing destroyed, then 20% of the whole Syrian airforce; the first was likely accurate, the second literally impossible- 20% of the SyAF ain't even stationed there- unless they counted derelict MiG17s, of which there are a lot around Shayrat. Plus of course the base was back in action literally the next day. GPS spoofing or other ECM while over water could easily take out one destroyer's tomahawk quota, they have a known weakness when they cannot use terrain mapping. The Wagner attack was too far from Russian assets to interfere effectively even if they wanted to, and didn't use cruise missiles which can be taken out with no consequences. The strike on T4 is near 100% Israel just like last time, corroborated by there being fire over Lebanese air space (Israeli jets usually hide behind E Qalamoun mountains for attacks. They would have been after the supposed Iranian facility there. Bit risky since the Russians definitely had personnel stationed there to fight ISIS, but they may be elsewhere now. Amusing to hear the BBC say it's an airbase in Homs city though, after 7 years I would have thought they'd have learnt the difference between Homs City and Homs Governate, T4 is way outside Homs city, about half way between Homs and Palmyra. It was very likely a thermobaric weapon removing the oxygen. Suffocations of that sort were very common in WW2 and other fire bombing campaigns in air raid shelters and basements even with conventional type weapons and incendiaries; thermobarics were developed and are particularly used against fortifications for exactly that reason- as well as having a stronger pressure wave they suck the oxygen out of (hardened) structures, suffocating those inside. If strong enough they'll suck the air straight out of your lungs. The supposed attack method is also literally impossible, you can't combine sarin and chlorine without having no sarin at the end as chlorine is a very strong oxidiser; they have to be stored and implemented as CW differently; and you cannot drop a barrel bomb from any aircraft that lacks a loading ramp. Chlorine also requires pretty ludicrously high concs to be fatal. To put it in perspective, given the death rate from the sarin attack in ghouta in 2013 and the relative lethality of chlorine you'd need 12.5 tons of chlorine liquid to get 50 deaths, and that's as a liquid which chlorine ain't at STP, so you'd need a pressure vessel... The only reason there's any fighting at all in Douma is because some in the Jaish al Islam leadership are petrified of being sent to Idlib so there's been infighting between those willing to go and those who aren't. After 10 days the government got sick of waiting, less than a day later the deal is seemingly finalised.

If anyone was going to post that video... Dunno, it's wonderful for hysteria. If i see one more acritical report today which says that you can mix chlorine and sarin then drop them in a barrel bomb from a sukhoi I will... melodramatically roll my eyes at the screen.

Yeah, that's why I'm not going to reinstall Far Cry 2- insta respawn enemies in fog of war went the way of the dodo for a reason; unless your combat is fantastic and you don't have to retrace steps it's exceptionally annoying. I liked the original a lot more in the relatively short time I played it, but it's the only game I've tried that has been insurmountably unstable on this computer. As for people making noises when machetes killed them the devs really ought to have consulted with Sir Christopher Lee on the matter since he was a bit of an expert on stealth kills with bladed weapons.

Should also have mentioned that Sergei Skripal woke from his coma, coincidentally, a day after his daughter was recorded telling her cousin that he was resting comfortably instead of in a coma, and that recovery is inconsistent with the evidence of the US resident ex soviet expert (Mirzayanov) who claimed to have worked on novichoks and said the effects were permanent and recovery would not happen. The cousin also said it was food poisoning, not a nerve agent. While I'd be skeptical of that claim coming from any 'proper' knowledge I do know of one recent case involving wild boar meat (presumed, never fully proven) which had very similar initial symptoms, presumed permanent effects then recovery over a similar time frame for which no cause has ever been identified. People involved were utterly random Indian immigrants to NZ, so no chance of it being any sort of state action. Food poisoning also would not be consistent with other people getting very sick just by contacting the Skripals, but that isn't exactly consistent with CW either*. Said cousin has been blocked from visiting her, and presumably she isn't going to get another phone call any time soon. Shame the cousin didn't ask if she really didn't want consular assistance, to clear that issue up. Let's be frank though, if the situation were reversed it would definitively be stated as the dastardly Russians kidnapping a British citizen and denying access and communication to cover things up. *to whit, a nerve agent smeared on a doorknob seems unlikely to effect dozens of people mostly around a park bench far away, if you have enough on the victims to cause that much effect to bystanders it seems extraordinary that they survived a presumably exponentially higher dose while pets survived at their house, and if you go back to footage of, say, the Khan Sheikoun aftermath pretty much every single first responder has no CW or other protection at all to the sarin yet were not effected. Last one might be a problem with the KS incident and similar ones (eg Douma** 2013) rather than with the Salisbury incident though, most of the accusations of staging those attacks were precisely because the responders showed no effects. **Latest one being reported today is bollocks though, even SOHR says they suffocated because the building on top collapsed (imo more likely, a fire or thermobarics ate the oxygen) not chlorine. Still, a really crappy way to die either way.

It definitely isn't something that only the Russians know how to make as (1) it was supposedly a soviet developed weapon, and the USSR is now a bunch of countries not just Russia and (2) that isn't really how chemical synthesis works- if you know someone synthesised a chemical structure then you know you can synthesise it too (near literally QED; someone has already made it) and if you're looking for a defence to a nerve agent there is a very high likelihood you will have made it, to test it. Admitting that is, of course, not something you want to do. Knowing what a compound is and does almost always makes it a lot easier to synthesise than the initial discovery and synthesis, that's one of the main reasons for drug patents, a chemical that might take a decade to develop can usually be made by a plant in India or China within months or even weeks of release. That's also why claims that nerve agents have to be governmental are difficult to support, may be true for novichoks but the sarins and vxs of the world are basically organophosphate fly sprays that kill people instead, so long as they don't have to keep effective for a long storage time (which as chemical weapons they have to, of course) they're 'easy' to make at least chemically speaking. They likely know the exact chemical used, novichoks is their only name, they don't have short names like 'sarin' or 'vx' and the scientific names for complex chemicals may take 5 minutes to say so just saying novochok family doesn't imply they don't know the exact formula. It is possible though that they didn't get enough pure sample (since they seemed to take ages finding where it was applied) for MS etc, if they had to use samples from the victims they might not know the formula since the chemical would have been metabolised which involves the chemical being broken down into 'common' bits. The poisoning story is inherently quite strong, they haven't done a very good job of selling it convincingly at all though since reflex action is to exaggerate/ lie. Boris lying and covering it up was utterly moronic. Propaganda, well it isn't convincing to those who aren't already convinced and like most propaganda can easily be run in reverse to make it look like (sometimes suspicious) posturing. UK security council person saying that Russia should be excluded from investigations as they were an interested party that would prejudge innocence? Bye bye all UK, US and other experts from countries that prejudged guilt by expelling diplomats then, logically. Only 6 countries backed Russians experts to go on the OPCW mission? Well, you did little better since the majority abstained. 26 countries expelled diplomats? 170 odd didn't, that's a pathetic 12% backing you... Lots of people care, some even 100% genuinely so, since other people were effected. But a lot of those people certainly would not care if the UK had whacked Kim Philby and some innocent Russians had died or been injured, that would have been realpolitik and getting a traitor. And a fair few would only care if it was done by the Russians to 'nice' people and wouldn't care about Israeli Mossad murdering innocent people in, say, Lillehammer, or the French DGSE murdering an innocent guy here.

Looks like Boris Johnson rather over egged the case against Russia for the Skripal poisonings, as per usual, since Porton Down did not attribute any manufacturer and he and the foreign office repeatedly claimed they did. For anyone with knowledge of organic chemistry that was pretty obvious, you cannot get a country of origin from chemicals except in very specific circumstances since a chemical is a chemical wherever it comes from. Full on damage control now though. Pretty stupid approach too, you can over egg while remaining technically truthful and if you can rely on media not to question you can easily get away with being vague rather than specific; and it isn't like the circumstantial evidence ain't enough for the general public. Similar with the Khan Sheikhoun CW attack too, since it was a year ago today. The more actual detail released the less consistent sense is made, such as 40% of victims turning up at hospitals too early and in some cases literally teleporting 100km, and there being conventional rockets that have supposedly diagnostic chemical bomb 'filler caps' (eg, to right of main debris). Not that the Russians are any better at it, but if they're worse it isn't by much.

World building? In my campy time travel show? It's less common than you might think? Per Amentep, there's plenty of ways that Obama could be president at some point. There's far, far worse inconsistencies in the shows than that, which tend to get hand waved by 'speedforce' and similar explanations. There's one other Arrowverse president, Supergirl has Linda Carter playing her as they love their stunt castings even more than Flash does. That was about as blatant a political statement as possible since she's also a literal alien and pretty much everyone made comments about how they'd never vote for 'that other guy'*. That's a different universe version from the other shows though. *Then, ironically (don't you think?), one of the Arrowverse EPs got the chop for sexual harassment as part of #MeToo...

Yeah, consumer products aren't confirmed, but... That pro/ machine learning Vega20 was announced in January. Die shrunk Vega consumer cards actually were mentioned before that, they simply haven't been mentioned since. To put it in perspective, most people expect a new nVidia series to drop in the next month or so, and it hasn't been formally announced either and there were pro versions of Vega10 before the consumer version release as well, given '7nm' is a new process and the margins for pro level cards that's an almost inevitable approach. Advantages to Vega of a die shrink are far too great to pass up since it would fix nearly all its problems bar some associated with HBM; and even there reduced GPU heat will help memory clock a lot (indeed, undervolting the gpu to reduce memory throttling is perhaps the most common 'overclock' approach for Vega). Unless Navi is far further along than thought- possible, but the only 'evidence' for it is the inconsistent and speculative ps5 leaks- they'd be stuck with Vega 10/ Polaris chips for maybe the next 18 months.