Zoraptor

All it needs now is an animated gif of Trump wiggling a sausage suggestively.

To be fair, that is exactly what you would expect those fleeing to say if their well being depends on pleasing the government, as it is what the government would want them to say and means that they didn't actually support the rebels so should be just left alone after fleeing. I have very little doubt personally that many east Aleppo residents were forcibly held, but such statements have to be taken with a grain of salt. As do wholly unsourced (well, there are some pictures provided but they're clearly of bodies that have been recovered, not massacred as there's too little blood in situ and some are decomposing while others are, uh, fresh) accusations of 'massacres' and 'genocide' from the other side, of course. Parroted acritically by the non 'fake news' media, of course, who will then be baffled by why nobody believes them later. Looks like ISIS has knocked out 2-3 Turkish Leopard 2 tanks in Al Bab as well. 2 seem pretty definite (video evidence) and one has been admitted to by the Turks which seems to be a separate incident. It's fairly significant because they are Turkey's best tanks and they don't have anything better protected.

I agree, more or less- and especially because a lot of the same people seem to like Deus Ex Original's ending, which was functionally identical- but there are some pretty big differences between the endings with respect to AI and the like. Having the Reapers stay around to help with reconstruction and everyone (?) being part synthetic is one ending, that's hugely different from having all AI destroyed which is another. triggered

The funny thing is that they will have to address this in the games to come, if any more are made at all after this. Timetravel. I bet the next Mass Effect series after Andromeda will be about timetravel. Just so that Bioware don't have to do choice and consequence from previous games or come up with new setting. Going by current industry direction there'd be remasters of the original Mass Effect series, then remasters of ME: Andromeda after that... As it is if they do want to revisit the Milky Way they'll have best part of a decade (assuming an Andromeda trilogy) between the end of ME3 and any revisiting. Most will either have forgotten what they chose or not have save games by then, so problem solved and they can just pick whatever one they like. Can't say I really care much either way, so long as they don't go the Deus Ex: IW route and decide that all the endings happened despite it making no sense.

Looks like Aleppo is fully back under government control. Pretty quick in the end, about the same amount of time as Manbij or Fallujah (2008) once the siege was established and despite even the rebel held areas being bigger than both those cities combined. Their biggest win of the Civil War since 2013 at least. The government did manage to lose Palmyra to ISIS, though it's strategically irrelevant unless they want to get to the Euphrates and pretty hard to hold unless they were willing to commit lots of troops. ISIS supposedly committed about 4000 troops to taking it so 10 times as many as they captured Ramadi or Mosul with. On the other hand the T4 (Tiyas) airbase a few km up the road is extremely important (if of limited functionality at present due to ongoing runway upgrades), if ISIS can take that it would be a major win.

There isn't any. Even the 'anonymous source' on whom the reports are based actually says that the only evidence they have is that a private Russian hacking group was involved. That's why you have the dichotomy between what the FBI and CIA say- the FBI is concerned with what can be proven legally, which is ironically how Hillary didn't get charged, while the CIA is concerned with what they think happened rather than what they can prove happened. The last is equally ironic (more so, with regards to the CIA complaining about others interfering in elections) as that and politically mandated group think was exactly how the Saddam/ WMD BS happened. Podesta's password was- literally- 'p@ssw0rd'. It wouldn't exactly take Skynet to hack him.

Erdogan gonna Erdogan, basically, all his pet groups in Syria are named after Turkish sultans like Murad and Zengi and he thinks that- and Putin- is the template to follow. The bombs were from TAK- Kurdistan Freedom Falcons, deniable PKK splitter group that uses suicide bombers. It pretty clearly wasn't ISIS once you knew they waited until there weren't civilians around, ISIS would have just blown up police and fans without blinking while TAK at least target military/ police targets with their terrorism. Citing a wikipedia article (!) in which the single line supporting you has citation needed (!!) is at least more imaginative than your usual efforts. It's earned you an actual response, well done.

He means the Mehdi Army and similar shia militia. They still weren't significantly supported by Iran since they supported Sadr's rivals Al-Sistani and Nouri Al-Maliki but at least Iranian support for them was plausible and made general sense unlike the ludicrous 'Iran supports Al Qaeda!!!/ Taleban!!!/ ISIS!!!' story some try to push. End of the day Iran didn't even need to do anything to the US in Iraq, as soon as they held an election they'd get a friendly leader. Which is exactly what happened.

Dunno about that, the internet also makes fact checking relatively easy for most things. The ultimate problem is people; we tend to make decisions based on emotion, not have much in the way of critical faculties/ desire to be actually informed and then tend to believe what we want to whatever the evidence shown. The internet has made it far easier to make stuff up and get it looked at, but it has also made it far easier to debunk stuff as well; it's just that no matter how thorough the debunking some will still believe. It certainly doesn't help that the media who should be doing a good job are doing a poor one, I certainly can't blame people for being deeply sceptical when there's so much to be legitimately sceptical of even from supposedly respectable sources. As for being old, it's pretty ancient and almost certainly is a direct consequence of writing. Pharaoh Thutmose's depiction of the Battle of Megiddo certainly fits the general category of propaganda and presents the narrative Thutmose wanted, with no practical way for the average Egyptian to challenge it.

It is an Express article- if their articles are better than the Daily Mail or The Sun's it's mere coincidence. It's also about 2 weeks old as news- eg rather less sensationalist Independent article from 29 Nov. It's only resurfacing now because of the WaPo's 'anonymous source' article and Obama's investigation order. If actually true that Russia is supporting Nazis in Germany it would be the highest form of highly ironic. Retro like August '39.

Funny thing is, "Putin did it" as an argument was a spectacular fail pre-election, why they think it will work now I don't know. Even if they did hack Podesta or the DNC instead of it being Podesta stupidly falling for phishings and Seth Rich it hardly matters, the substance of the leaks was not faked. The stuff that did the damage was stuff that actual democrats wrote, hardly matters whether it was Karl Rove, LoF, zombie Beria or a time traveller from the future trying to stop World War Hillary who leaked it. They lost because Hillary was rubbish, their plan was rubbish and to quote Powell: "hubris". If they'd have picked Bernie it would have been irrelevant. The WP report is also based on 'an anonymous source', again. Everybody seems to be treating it as being an official release though. They'll then be surprised that 'fake news' citing 'anonymous sources' gains traction, for some reason.

Yeah, I think that trope was even worse in the Star Treks if you thought of the _X_ as being living rather than an object. The NG Enterprise spent about half an average season broken down, about to be destroyed, with people being kidnapped off it, being captured, trapped in [phenomenon] etc and it was meant to be at least partly a warship and a top of the line star ship in general- not the rough equivalent of a garbage scow or container transport like Moya. It was probably even higher than half the time for the Voyager. It's just too useful a plot device in general when you have a restricted environment and want to drive the plot with something urgent.

To be fair the quoted sentence is not entirely accurate, I just didn't want to go full Longknife and write paragraphs being entirely accurate on a throwaway point. (The tweet only mentioned the fact that the bonus existed and they missed it by one point, that there would be accusations of manipulation would seem to be a obvious and inevitable consequence of the tweet- and it would have annoyed Bethesda it's safe to say- but it was not actually a part of the tweet. Virumor is doing a decent Volo impersonation, at least)

He's at Bethesda now, he worked on the new Prey. So he's at Arkane then. Working on a watered down version of the original Prey 2. Sad! Watered down version of System Shock. It's a retooling of the system shock project they were doing in 2007-8 for EA that got canned by John Riccitiello when he took over and has little to do with HH's Prey or even the original Prey. And it is of course ironic that Chris Avellone- the guy who accused Bethesda of stiffing Obsidian on FNV's metacritic bonus- is now working for them, even if it's temporary. There was corroboration of the Human Head version of events, ironically from what happened to Arkane. The reasons for cancelling weren't political and stupid; they'd have cost Beth/ Zenimax basically the same amount of cash for development and got them an owned developer from that money as well, if it had worked. That's of questionable morality, shall we say, but if you leave that aside it's an excellent idea from a financial perspective.

Apart from the different overall systems as above you also have to consider the effects of those systems. Things like literacy and numeracy or just general education were far higher in North America, and those things tend to be highly advantageous for economic development as your potential Einstein types are less likely to be illiterate or innumerate. Unless a Cuban or Venezuelan or Colombian Einstein was born into a tiny subset of privilege they'd have spent their time cutting sugar cane or harvesting bananas. You tend to get 'socialist revolutions' for two main reasons- there are lots of poor people, and the current system tends to be ratcheted down. The US has the pressure release valve of the electoral system and knowledge that in 4 years you can vote Trump/ Obama/ Bush out. If you have a Pinochet or a Galtieri, they're there long term with no prospect of going, and you potentially have a family history of centuries of grinding poverty as well. You also tend to have literal 1% owning 99% type situations, and virtually no prospect of social mobility unless it's of the radical redistribution kind. You also have the US tending to support the interests of its companies (United Fruit Corp/ Chiquita being the best known) as a matter of policy right up to present day, per the support for the (fairly) recent Honduran Coup.

Those particular Kurds are actively supported by Turkey, who even support them in their land grabs and seemingly in their desire for independence; so long as it's independence from Iraq rather than Turkey. They're also themselves predominantly Sunni, their primary beef is an ethnic one not a religious one. Hardly a popular thing to say, but they made sure to disarm the Yezidi militia before running away to Irbil when ISIS attacked and they are certainly not averse to some active ethnic cleansing as well, mostly against arabs but also including other minorities; even Turks, albeit they're shia turks who Erdy doesn't give a manure about. They're more than happy to take majority arab areas that have oil, then claim the arabs are all pro ISIS or were artificially transplanted and stick them into 'displacement camps' while their homes are bulldozed. KDP are a definitively crappy bunch, corrupt, ethnic cleansers in bed with Erdogan for weapons and support (he gets oil, and oil that can be resold since the Kurds aren't supposed to be exporting independently) they're just the west's pretty crappy bunch instead of Iran's like the PUK or a bunch of anarcho commies like the PKK. Shia PMUs will quite happily take sunni towns, indeed they're the ones who stopped up the escape route ISIS in Mosul were meant to take to Syria through the- pretty extremist and perhaps most ISIS friendly city except Fallujah- city of Tal Afar. They just don't get any US/ 'coalition' air support and get lots of bleating from Al Jazeera, especially AJArabic, about graffiti and 'ethnic' cleansing. Complaints that oddly enough don't get reported on about the Kurds nearly as much.

WWE Hall of Famer Donald J Trump appoints WWE co-owner Linda McMahon as small business secretary or something. I guess there are no hard feelings from when Trump shaved her husband's hair or from when a WWE employee brutally assaulted Trump on live TV with no repercussions. If only he'd taken my advice and gone for Terry Bollea as vice president as well.

Looks like Aleppo city is going to be captured before either Raqqa or Mosul. The rebels have already lost >70% of their former territory and there are apparently Green Buses- used for evacuating militants under truce agreements- entering the remaining rebel controlled areas of the city now. Only likely holdouts are Al Nusra, and if 8-15k rebels cannot hold it's unlikely 800-1.5k will be able to. Not what was predicted as it was supposed to be Stalingrad; albeit that was always a stupid comparison given even half of Aleppo is bigger than Stalingrad and the most generous estimate of rebel numbers in total, everywhere, is roughly the number of german troops in Stalingrad alone. (As it happens, Turkey managed to asterisk up the Raqqa attack more than Mosul at this point, since the Syrian Kurds are now busy trying to make sure the Turkish rebel proxies + actual Turkish army don't take al Bab as a priority over Raqqa. Indeed, Erdogan has managed to get the government and kurds into a pretty unlikely and almost official alliance, which is quite an unintentional achievement)

Proper hand designed encounters to maximise challenge and interactivity, please. None of this Oblivion/ Diablo level scaled copy and paste crap. Plays on names are awesome too. Far too much negativity around. Be a rainbow, not a kainebow. Very inefficient phraseology, you clearly have too much time on your (no doubt very small) hands. Why type so much when a mere three letters would suffice?

Good day for resignations, we've just lost our PM to [reasons] as well. Well, technically they wouldn't be far off given how much western civilisation owes the Romans. I'm still in lol mood over the world not ending when Trump won despite the media thinking it would.

President. And it's a largely symbolic position too, with theoretical but not much practical power. Weirdly bipolar media of it though, +/- 1.3% seems to be a landslide and they've gone from the end of western civilisation being heralded by the result to the end of fascism in our time over the course of a day.

No Bioshocks, but Civ III, IV and CivCity Rome are released. I have the first two on disk but missed the latter so I will definitely be picking it up at some point.

Here they just cheat instead, and force the teachers to raise the pupils grades to increase their attractiveness. They likely do that here as well, it just hasn't been proven- they get money from the government depending on 'performance' so there's definite reason to massage stats. They do have external exams as metrics as well which are harder to fake, but charter schools at least theoretically have internal metrics which determine performance bonuses. They've been trying to bring in 'performance pay' and the like for ages in the public sector which is a terrible idea as it leads to rote metric learning designed only to get good marks on the metrics- either from bad teachers gaming the system or from schools doing the same as they're desperate for money- and fudging any internal metrics. And of course the good teachers either get poached by rich schools or are good for reasons that aren't necessarily tangible by the sort of metrics used. They've had the same thing with the police and all it has lead to is people being encouraged not to report crimes by police who don't want their stats ruined. At least I'm now reminded how much I liked The Wire S4, as (generally) depressing as it was.