Zoraptor

He probably doesn't, but the one thing he's done that nearly every reporter in the US loved was lobbing tomahawks at Syria. For a failing President the appeal of a cheap boost is immense. I don't think for a second that Trump intends there to actually be fighting in Korea, it's far far too risky. But much like the north he has to keep the threats on the table.

Can't help but think half of the current situation with the DPRK is about trying to get another hawk elected in the south now that the last corrupt one has been drummed out of office and a relatively pacific candidate seems likely to be elected. It's always a laugh when things like THAAD deployment get pushed through at a sprint by lame duck interim presidents so their successor gets a fait accompli. The other half is Trump trying to distract from his dreadful hair piece first 100 days by acting tough overseas. There's no chance of DPRK starting a war they know absolutely that they'd lose, but they're a guaranteed reaction if you prod them, and they have to shout about their willingness to attack so as to be taken seriously.

There was an old SPI wargame based on the early part of the Korean war, called "Korea". I played it a few times when I was younger. The rugged terrain and shape of the peninsula made for a pretty uninteresting game though. It's somewhat reminiscent of the Italian peninsula campaign during WW II -- only the sea landings made it at all interesting. Otherwise it's an endless slugfest. IIRC the tutorial scenario of The Operational Art of War was the Korean War- and that about exhausts the Korean War scenarios I can remember. Up until fairly recently there were very few Vietnam games as well.

I have to idea whether it's legal in the US, but depositor 'haircuts' have been widely suggested in the Euro Zone, especially Cyprus where they stole ~50% of deposits (mostly Russian) to bail out that failed garbage tier Euro, again. Kind of ironic, you get people who seem to genuinely wonder why Russia hates the EU as if there's no reason when they've outright stolen billions to prop up their failed economic model. But they were authorized by government to do it, which is what GD was saying, not stealing your money on their own as Elerond was claiming. In US deposits are insured by the government up to $250000 per bank per account ownership type (except for accrued but unpaid interest), but in practice no one's ever lost money in a bank as the government takes them over when they fail. The haircuts were not only authorised by the government, they were forced by them. The government of Cyprus basically nationalised their banks then stuck all the bad assets into one and grabbed depositor cash under direct orders of the EU/ ECB and under threat of being taken out behind the shed and Greeced into submission if they didn't. No bank is going to seize depositor cash 'voluntarily', anywhere, since it utterly destroys their credibility and business. But theoretically at least depositors are the same as other creditors to a failing business and much as a creditor may only get cents back on the dollar owed from a failing business the same can happen to banks. Practically though, they're bailed out as the consequences are so severe and failure may make people realise that 'money' is a completely fiat concept practically as well as theoretically. That's also why the Cyprus approach was so utterly moronic, since it encouraged people not to deposit in Cypriot banks lest it happen again, which makes them even less solvent (but, coincidentally, makes German banks more appealing; coincidentally)

it was the last bit that made me lol. At this point it's just taking the mickey.

I have to idea whether it's legal in the US, but depositor 'haircuts' have been widely suggested in the Euro Zone, especially Cyprus where they stole ~50% of deposits (mostly Russian) to bail out that failed garbage tier Euro, again. Kind of ironic, you get people who seem to genuinely wonder why Russia hates the EU as if there's no reason when they've outright stolen billions to prop up their failed economic model. (I'd also bet that if a bank outright failed you'd not get your money back except via insurance, though that's a somewhat different situation. Seizing depositor money is obviously a last resort- or done to people you don't like to avoid your deserved political repercussions from your funny money joke currency experiment- since it utterly destroys confidence in those banks every bit as much as them actually bankrupting) Lol. There's not a single correct thing there. Couldn't pick their nose. Strangely enough the Turks bombed the Yezidis last night, on Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day no less. Obviously ISIS didn't quite do a good enough job for the Turks or their Barzani stooges who stole all the Yezidis weapons then ran off to Irbil three years ago, so they need bombing until they let Barzani's goons back in for a wash and repeat.

I'm a total sucker for XCOM, so I've backed it. I'd end up buying it in 18 months or whatever time anyway.

And it's perfectly understandable too, Macron is an abysmal prospect for completely different reasons to Le Pen and there are excellent reasons for not voting for a manufactured candidate whose sole reason for existence is preservation of the status quo and who has the unrestricted support of a supine press and panicking elite. Macron stands for mealy mouthed bon mots, feel good phrases and 99% of what has been tried and failed beforehand. I don't agree with Le Pen on much at all, but at least she gives the impression that she hasn't been extruded from plastic, downloaded a personality from a press kit and been set up with the sole purpose of not offending anyone while the establishment shoves them down the people's throat like so many pre foie gras geese.

I'm almost certainly not going for the Samsung B die (3200Mhz CL14 or 3600Mhz CL16) due to its cost and the slight feeling of being gouged for it- but I will almost certainly be going 3200MHz as there's a very small relative premium for that over 2400Mhz. With any luck the BIOS/ AGESA revisions due next month will remove the need for Samsung B die chips to function at full speed anyway. Got the Obsidian case on clearance as they're releasing a new model, it was actually cheaper than a 200 series Carbide. My old case was cheap generic trash and starting to rust, so not an option. I'd really like an XFX myself but in NZ we only get ASUS/ GB/ Sapphire for AMD cards- an xfx or msi (bit surprising since their MBs and nVidia cards have good/ better availability) or powercolor would have to bought via a remailer or imported directly. That's a bit risky when it comes to RMAs, and when you can buy a decent enough Nitro+ for pretty much the same price. It's certainly a shame we don't get more options though, since for the 480s at least the XFX, MSI and Powercolor options were probably the best regarded overall.

There's some reason for all the wars though, and it isn't electoral appeal since by and large the US population has disliked to hated every war they've been involved in since Vietnam excluding GW1, which as you say was a clear victory and well run- and even then BushHW lost the next election albeit for other reasons. I don't know if it's really corps or whatever, that's way above my pay grade, but there are plenty of ways for contractors and suppliers to make extra cash in war zones as opposed to just in training. I just look at it from the perspective that wars (1) aren't popular (2) are expensive to the taxpayer in blood and money and (3) are risky yet it seems that near everyone political outside of Paul(s)/ Sanders/ Gabbard loves them despite that. Give those considerations to anything else and they're political anathema.

Le Pen has no chance of becoming French president, none at all. She may well win the first round but she'll lose to any of the other three main candidates in the run off, and lose by a fair margin. Compared to Le Pen Trump and Brexit were the deadest of dead certainties, if Le Pen wins then the universe would need rebooting as a critical reality error would have occurred.

Probably going B350 as well. Easy decision when there are still almost no mid priced boards available here a month+ after launch. Guess it at least shows there is demand. Funnily enough I bought a PSU and case on Friday in preparation and to split payments across 2 months. Appropriately if coincidentally ended up buying a Corsair Obsidian case, windowless so I don't have to bother matching LEDs and the other weird stuff kids these days get up to and since it will sit under my desk anyway. Since we still have dreadful motherboard availability and have very few 4/580s as well so there's not much prospect of buying the rest of the stuff until May when supply will have hopefully picked up. Prospective build is R1700, 16GB RAM (only Samsung B die here is $100 over the odds though, $340 vs $240 for other 3200MHz RAM), GB Gaming 3, Intel 600p and a 580. Should come to just under $2000 (~1200US) including the case and PSU.

They hardly need them, it's easier and safer for them to just buy the politicians who do have those powers. That way you also avoid the responsibility and have Afghanistan and Iraq be labelled as Bush wars rather than [companyname] wars. Somebody, somewhere loves all the interventions and it's hard to see them as being long term vote winners given their consistent lack of success. Yet you can always find plenty of politicians willing to support bombing an ever increasing number of countries.

Executive producer is often a nothing/ sop title designed simply to acknowledge someone. Fran & Kaz Kuzui were EPs of every single Buffy/ Angel episode because of their involvement with the Buffy movie- and that was literally their total sum of involvement in Angel/ Buffy, getting an EP credit for every episode. Some EPs have more involvement, but this is probably a sop to stop red eagle doing some pointless legal action which they would likely lose but which would delay things.

That's one of the nice things about Connect apart from the 'free' games themselves, since GOG tends to get the 'GOTY' versions with game/ dlc bundled together there often isn't a base game to get from it, so you get the dlc for free.

I saw a giant enemy crab the other day. Horrible creatures, I avoid them whenever possible so definitely no sale.

Yeah, Stalker isn't even an fps/rpg hybrid really, it's just a very good game with excellent immersion and atmosphere. Sure, you play the role of Strelok (or Scar or whatever CS dude is formally called) but then you play the role of Marine in Doom, Duke Nukem in Duke Nukem, God in SimCity and a paddle in pong- and none of those are RPGs. The fps/rpg hybrids tend to fit into two categories, those like System Shock 2 where the shooting is player skill based but the rpg system applies weapon usage and damage dependent on the avatar's stats; and those like Deus Ex (or aforementioned Awesome Brotocols, for an Obsidian game) where you have a dual system where unskilled weapon usage involves wider spray patterns when shooting/ increased wobble, and there are modifications for damage based on skills as well. Slight digression, but I've always found comments about bullets not going where they are aimed (not exactly what is happening here, to be clear, but it is a digression so...) to be an odd complaint. OK, if you're an olympics shooting contestant or a special forces sniper and gorilla warfare expert with more than 300 confirmed kills fair enough. But I have fantastic aim, I make sure that I always get the bullseye/ rabbit/ possum or whatever right in the middle of my sights- and about half the time I miss despite that. Shame I can't use a mouse for aiming in reality I guess, since I can headshot Monolith with a Vintorez or G36 from 400m and bullet drop be damned. Fair enough preferring it the other way in a game though, after all they're meant to be fun, or alternatively, ARMA.

Yeah, Stalker was undoubtedly popular in the west and the series was multi million selling with very good name recognition. Cossacks also sold literally millions and has very good name recognition in eastern Europe, it's more or less unknown outside of there.

You can't really do that in a civil war though, it's simply too dangerous. Iraq in 2002-3 was stable enough for Blix to go wherever he wanted whenever he wanted, you cannot say the same about Syria in 2013-4.

GSC did release Cossacks 3 (to mixed reviews) recently, so they are back in business. Cossacks is a bit of an odd one in that most people in the west have never heard of it while it sold millions in eastern Europe. Stalker ought to be next, and I'll probably be telling myself that every month for the next five years.

I speak french adequately, that article is no problem to understand. Al Jazeera- even the far better English rather than the ludicrously sectarian Arabic version- is pretty pointless though in this context, HTS is itself a Qatari project to unite the rebels and make Al Qaeda acceptable; and they're always going to back stuff that makes the Syrian government look bad. Bellingcat is... amusing, since it's basically bizarro oby in its russophobia. Anyway, I'll go through both the Bellingcat reports (April 5, April 10), since they're most 'authoritative'. No mention of MSF saying there was also chlorine present. Fair enough in an early article, but there's also no mention in the later article either. Also cherry picks a 'typical summary'. Ah, yes, Dr Shajul Islam. TBDR, he was arrested under the Terrorism Act, accused of kidnapping John Cantlie- and escaped trial when Cantlie was subsequently rekidnapped and could not give evidence. Rekidnapped by ISIS, who at the time included Al Nusra, who became HTS who control Khan Shiekhoun and Binnish- and he was summarily struck off the medical register in the UK. Not exactly an unbiased medical practitioner. Though, of course, Bellingcat and nearly everyone who used him (credit to- cringe- the scum and the daily fail of all people, plus the Times who did) failed to mention any of that. Well that's right at least, and explains the cherry picked 'typical summary' saying rockets instead of the multiple others than say they saw bombs (and heard/ saw the jets immediately beforehand etc) since the debris is clearly part of a rocket, and very similar- what there is of it at least- to the grads used in Ghouta. It would have to be a S-13 though, and they haven't been seen on Syrian Su22, only the S-8 (far too small) and S-24 (far too large) have. For the sake of argument I'll accept that it's possible they have S-13s on their Su22s though, however there's also no evidence of anyone making a S-13 CW warhead, only ground based grads of the same calibre plus there's no rocket engine present only the warhead etc. There's also a significant unmentioned logical problem with using a rocket from an aircraft to deliver CW- simply put, why on earth would you? There's a good reason to have CW weapons in a ground based rockets, namely the laws of physics dictate you need significant velocity to get from A to B and to stop you hitting the ground on the way there whether you use standard artillery or rocket artillery. Neither of those are considerations for an air based rocket though since the plane is, well, flying and can just fly to the right point. Conventional air borne rockets have an advantage in some situations over conventional bombs of course, but none of those advantages apply significantly to CW rockets. For a rocket you have maybe 30% of its weight being CW agent taking casing, rocket engine, propellant and bursting charge into account, with a bomb you get 80%+. Anyway, later article Only one of those is an actual source, the witnesses. The observers have a plane taking off at the right time while the Pentagon's radar trace is not great. Yeah, it's a crap trace, but it is clear that the closest any point supplied comes to correct orientation for a strike on N Khan Sheikhoun is ~8km. That's basically impossible for a bomb, and highly unlikely even for a missile since their designated range is far less than that. If you looked at that trace without knowing where it was meant to show being attacked I think anyone would pick Souran, Kfar Zita, Kfar Nbul, Kernaz and Morek as being targets before KS. That claim was 100% fake, not unclear. Are hardly insurmountable. As with pretty much everything they do the fundamental problem with Bellingcat is that they start from a conclusion and work backwards instead of the reverse. That's fine for a mental exercise that nobody cares about, it's dreadful practice if you're trying to actually find the truth though. As above it's still required to prove that the Su22 was there at the claimed time and dropped the bombs/ fired the missiles containing CW, and witnesses vary very considerably in their descriptions of what hit and have differing recollections of other aspects. There are also significant issues in the 'official' narrative that they do not address at all- the radar trace appears to make the attack as stated unlikely and is basically just dismissed without further question despite supposedly being key evidence earlier, claims from MSF that two CW agents were present etc. Something like the Postol theory (either improvised or actual grad CW warhead detonated on ground; though personally I'd expect a basic cylinder + nebuliser system to actually deliver the CW if it were false flag) would also fit the evidence as would other ground based source. There are other unaddressed problems as well- KS is not a densely populated town and the area hit is clearly not dense residential yet more people were killed on a per rocket basis that in Ghouta, which is entirely low to mid rise buildings and apartments with several hundred thousand population. None of it is conclusive, but then nothing anyone has said has been conclusive.

Errr... They launched that attack on 21 March. By the 23rd it had reached its maximum extent, and never got anywhere close to the Rastan pocket. They certainly posed a threat to the airport, on March 23 to maybe Mar 26, after that they were pushed back nearly to original positions. As of April 4, ~85% of the HTS gains had been reversed and their sole gain was Souran, which is a decent sized town but otherwise utterly unimportant. They had a far more effective attack last year which took important flanking positions such as Ma'an yet failed to prompt chemical weapons, and was also largely reversed later. There was still fighting after April 4 and still ongoing, but the situation on April 4 is ~the same situation as now and ~the same situation as two months ago. Frankly the senior defence official's analysis is a load of old bollocks. If it's a battlefield decision it's used on the battlefield where at least you force the people fighting you to do so in gas masks, at most you kill a lot of them and make good gains. There's no military benefit to dropping a cw bomb on KS- that won't change the battlefield situation one iota. ('Homa' is also the literally the worst transliteration possible, since it doesn't distinguish neighbouring Hama and Homs clearly and I have an automatic negative reaction to any article using it) My deep scepticism about 'unnamed officials' is for precisely that sort of reason- the unnamed official in this case is either deeply misinformed or outright lying about the facts. My deep scepticism about media is that they repeat such stuff with no critical thought whatsoever and this illustrates that perfectly. I'd put the chances of the deconfliction agreement being reinstated as 99%, and 100% if nothing else changes.

The OPCW definitely did inspections, and the list of sites was not only from Syria since they got a list from at least the US as well; which probably incorporated Israeli intelligence. There's just inherent difficulties in carrying out inspections in a war zone, the government doesn't control the whole country and there isn't actually a lot of explicitly CW equipment- except delivery systems such as missiles/ bombs- or chemicals, much of it can be of legitimate use. Think I posted a list of the Tabun's basic precursors a page or so back, none of them are explicit indicators for Tabun and all of them have multiple (almost all common as well) uses. There's very little doubt that the government either wanted to retain some of or be able to quickly rebuild some of its program though. There certainly isn't a convincing argument that Syria doesn't have, or could not have recently made, nerve agents. The only argument would be what quality they'd be, how they could be delivered and most importantly whether they actually used them.

anybody would come to likely conclusion that the navy simple did not update their public site regarding that specific weapon (updating the page don't mean the entry were accurate updated... obvious) lol. Good start. I'm betting there's going to be 100% grasping at straws and 100% flim flam in this reply and no evidence, and I'll bet everything on it... Stop deflecting and posting anything else, post evidence that Syria used CW in Khan Sheiktoun. Eh? The Russians didn't veto the Bolivian resolution, the west blocked it. Oh dear, you didn't know about the Bolivian resolution? Guess the NYT et al forgot to mention it. Bolivians were sufficiently pissed to vote with Russia though. Seems the west doesn't want an investigation either, they just want to be able to blame Russia for there not being one. Wonder why? Could it be the LACK OF EVIDENCE? The western resolution was pure veto trolling, it assumed guilt, required nothing of the western backed Al Qaeda and friends, required lists of personnel- last time that happened to Russia Al Qaeda looked up the personnel's names and targeted them- and invoked article VII which would never pass muster after Libya. And of course I await, with 'bated breath, the resolution about the unauthorised use of force by the US on Syria. I suspect that's Different, just Different though. So, not a thing on actual evidence? Nothing, zilch, zero, duck egg, blank. Come on, post some evidence that Syria used CW in Khan Sheiktoun, I dare you.

It pretty much cannot be one local commander alone. Even by the old US version CW were held in reserves, then distributed as needed which requires at least two local commanders to act in concert in their use. That scenario is not impossible, but still runs into the same obvious logical flaws as if Assad himself ordered it; why would they, and why in that manner. It also doesn't have to be a CW depot hit, organophosphate insecticides give the same symptoms since they're basically the same chemicals with the same mode of action, they just require higher doses- and they are used in large quantities. There are literally millions of OP poisonings a year, and literally 100ks of deaths from them. (Though I do agree that Assad has some chemical weapons still they're not for use in pointlessly bombing random towns, they're for what they've always been for- deterring Israel)