Zoraptor

In that case at least it isn't really the faction being extreme though, it's just Nasty being herself. I've actually found the factions a bit less extreme than in E1, though that may partly be residual effect from the Berserkers constantly moaning every time you checked your map/ journal. However, the Clerics were kidnapping people and indoctrinating them in E1 for example...

My dad had (well, still has) aphasia, and it developed at a pretty similar age to Willis. If he'd been an actor he could have kept working a fair while, since it didn't really effect his ability to read and recite stuff for years, just his general conversations. He'd have got increasingly hard to work with though. But yeah, aphasia is also an indicator for really unpleasant things like fronto-temporal dementia. You'd actually kind of hope it's due to a stroke given some of the alternatives.

Meh. Not really worth the argument.

The latter rise is pretty close to definitely due to the gas buying as it coincides with the announcement, and the obvious result of forcing Europeans to buy a lot of roubles is their appreciation as it increases demand for them. First rise is likely to be a correction from the currency dropping too far. (Kind of amusing watching people say that charging in roubles would be a breach of contract and Russians have to accept payment in sanctioned currencies. Pretty sure Russia didn't agree to accept payments in the equivalent of Company Scrip, and that's what the sanctions make Euros and USD to Russia)

Yeah, modern airforce and air defences are exactly what they won't get for free as they're expensive. The proposed aircraft donations were for planes that were due for replacement- hence Poland wanting expedited delivery of F16s in exchange- or in Bulgaria's case, may not have even been genuinely airworthy in the first place. Hmm, nice to see that Shoigu has been paroled from his house arrest to make tv appearances. Part of that is that Putin himself was seen as broadly pro west in the early years. People tend to forget GWB looking into his soul etc- partly because there was a desperate desire to rehabilitate Bush jr post Trump, partly because there's a lot of other stuff to ridicule him about- and relations with the west only really went downhill with the Georgia/ Ukraine NATO accession decision. The other part is how badly Yeltsin's time is regarded in Russia, and him widely being regarded as a western puppet who ran the country into the ground under western direction. Western endorsement is not a net positive, except with people who cannot remember Yeltsin. Hence Navalny's support, such as it is, is among those who can't remember the 90s or did well in them.

Nah Bruce, it's just passive aggressive wikipedia notation. Wouldn't normally use it but I also know perfectly well I'm not going to get any proof, because the claim as written is... bollocks, so it's just wasting my time adding anything else. To be fair, I certainly could get a response that it's a typo for 1944 when that did more or less happen after the Germans were ejected. Though Stalin was of course Georgian, not Russian, and they were in large majority exiled to Uzbekistan, not Siberia; so it still wouldn't be that accurate. Crimean Tartar population did drop to almost nothing then though.

Citation Required.

China has a surprising number of unvaccinated old people. The figures for Hong Kong once covid got established were pretty grim mortality wise in that regard. Last thing the Chinese leadership want is a India w/ delta like situation of mass deaths, as that becomes almost impossible to keep a lid on.

They're a lot more likely to go for the Kramatorsk/ Slavyansk/ SveroDonetsk urban area first. It's already in a salient, and taking that area both rationalises the front line and allows Putin to say that he's 'liberated' all of Donetsk/ Lugansk as a war aim. That's the statement of the Presidential spokesman, and good on him for it. The official position of the Ukrainian Defence Forces is (well, was as of last time I checked) that the footage is faked (so there's nothing to investigate). Do I really need sourcing for the Iraqi numbers? (1) it's peripheral and (2) I'd presume you at least would know what one of them was from- Iraq Body Count. Whose methodology you can argue with, but you can most definitely argue that they underestimate by using only verified media accounts of deaths as well as overestimate. The lower figure was a hospital polling by the AP, iirc, and was consistent with a later estimate from a US think tank. The hospital polling is, iirc, the same measure the UN uses for casualties in Ukraine and is where their ~1200 deaths comes from. That is of course an underestimate, in some cases significantly so where the health system isn't functioning like Mariupol, but then the Iraqi health system wasn't really functioning in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion either as they quickly got swamped, and due to islamic custom a lot of people were buried ~immediately, in ~place, rather than being taken to hospital first.

It's probably the 'unrealised capital gains' part that is most significant. Is there any taxing in the US of things like share or house/ land/ art collection/ bitcoin/ other appreciation apart from at point of sale (or tax declaration for any capital gains taxes)? If not that would be a major departure. Though it would beg some questions like if your unrealised gains become unrealised losses over a tax year do you get a 20% refund instead? Would be a fun time for accountants.

Context like "No credible effort was ever made by those who were supposedly counting civilian deaths to verify whether a person in civilian clothing was in fact a civilian"? What do you want, a nuanced and detailed response to your- what else can you call it- unsupported and nuance free blanket assertion of bad faith or gross incompetence? It actively invites out of hand dismissal.

If you're (general you, not specifically you) going to claim that the Russians are egregiously targeting civilians as a war crime then you need some good evidence that they're being deliberately targeted, not just "of course they are doing it, they're evil". One of the measures of that is... the number of civilians killed, especially in comparison with other conflicts. Look, no one with any sense thinks the US deliberately targets civilians, as civilians, as a matter of policy; the worst accusation is a lack of care, with a very few exceptions. If nothing else- ie you don't count moral objections etc- what's the point militarily? It's a waste of resources and just pisses the people off. All that needs to be done is to apply the same logic to the other side. It's really, really easy to kill a load of civilians if you want to. Get a bunch of heavy bombers and carpet bomb them. Drop loads of incendiaries. Drop a FOAB, use TOS-1 etc etc. The Russians haven't even bombed the fricking rail network so civilians can get out. And ultimately results count. Looking at the casualties you end up with two possibilities* if you accept that the US killed civilians at twice the rate, by population, using precise and humane methods compared to Russia's random and inhumane ones (1) the random and inhumane ones are actually better or (2) Russia isn't deliberately targeting civilians/ the US deliberately targeted civilians and was better at it. You can safely discount the last. The issue of the war itself is a completely separate one from the idea of war crimes committed in it. Thing is, the idea of having war crimes as actual crimes is a great idea. Using them as a propaganda cudgel for western exceptionalism is an absolutely awful idea though and while it doesn't invalidate the concept it does ruin the justification. You have to apply justice even handedly, or it's not justice but just another geopolitical tool for making your enemies look bad. Nobody likes a "well you did it, so it's OK" justification, but equally no one likes hypocrites pontificating about war crimes having actually performed worse, themselves. An even handed application would have the highly beneficial effect of making everyone a lot more careful; as it stands Saudi Arabia can blow up school buses, the US can kill Afghan aid workers and their 9 children and yes, Russian can also shoot up old couples or hit theatres with impunity. *Ok, one could also just decide that it's all a conspiracy against the US, the civilians in Iraq were soldiers hiding in the general populace so it was all Saddam's fault anyway, and that figure is a... conspiracy by the left? or something? Oddly enough while the Russian Pravda is indisputably worse than the Daily Fail the Ukrainian version of Pravda was meant to be pretty decent.

My decision to stop watching Discovery will get a bit of a test next week since S4 is coming to a (free) streaming service here. I don't think I'll crack though.

The original video is Not Available in Your Country. Wild stab at it being Italy v N. Macedonia though. Poor old Italy, hasn't been the same in WCs since finishing behind New Zealand in 2010. (Here, all the other Oceania nations voted to hold our tournament outside the international window, which really made me laugh. Just a shame Aus isn't still there as the reaction from them would have been even funnier)

Jesus Christ, the Daily Mail. That's actively worse than just 'unnamed politician' or 'unnamed intelligence official'. Guess at least it wasn't The Sun. Plus of course there's a seldom mentioned and in this case absolutely contemporaneous western example of the same thing, in Al Hawl refugee camp.... As for civilian casualties not adding up: Precise and humanitarian western liberation of Iraq, 2003: minimum civilian deaths 3200 in just over a month (and the more realistic figure is ~7000) Brutal and indiscriminate Russian invasion of Ukraine, 2022: ~1000 minimum, and even Ukraine is only claiming ~4000, in just over a month Either the Russians aren't being indiscriminate, or the US was as much or more so in 2003. Take your pick, either is fine as long as you're consistent.

Going to be very interesting to see if a certain Ukrainian video released a couple of hours ago gets mentioned at all in the media.

I'd have done that anyway, numbersman just got in quicker. Mistaking them for uxo is pretty common though- doubly ironic Yahoo doing so in an article about the '60% failure' claim. (One of the first image search results for 'smerch booster' on duckduckgo is... an Intel CPU. Yeah, OK)

That's general supply. The go to example there would be something like fuel. Russia has rather a lot of petrol and diesel, I think everyone accepts that, it's getting it to the front line that is potentially difficult. Which is why I brought up cruise missiles specifically. According to 'western intelligence source' Russia has been running out of them- ie their stocks would be literally depleted, no more available, not just hard to deliver to the front in [timespan++] since week one, and not being able/ having enough to use them on military targets, and now according to the same sources they're also incredibly unreliable with a failure rate of 50%+. Except, they also have plenty to fire pointlessly at civilians, apparently, and they're also apparently absolutely reliable, when fired at civilians. That's propaganda, because the two claims are fundamentally incompatible. Or at least they're incompatible without some variation on "but they're just eeeeevil". Which is itself a very common sign of propaganda. (The classic example of that sort of propaganda is the Syrian 'Barrel Bomb'. In reality, they were made because Syria was running out of proper bombs and you could roll them out of an otherwise useless transport helicopter with no specialist equipment, and they required basically nothing specialist to build either. They weren't used preferentially, or because they were particularly brutal- you didn't have Dorniers or B-17s and Lancasters dropping barrel bombs in area bombing specifically designed to kill civilians and destroy their cities, they dropped incendiaries and proper bomb(lets)- they were used because it was that or nothing. Barrel bombs were ad hoc, had no guidance, they were highly unreliable. Except, when it came to targeting the last hospital in [cityname] and bakeries etc. Then, they were aimed with precision to embarrass a JDAM. At least, in western and rebel media they were. Truth is, they were rolled out from above manpad ceiling- ie up to 5000m- over an area, with something like +/- 500 metres accuracy. You'd have difficulty hitting a hospital or bakery if you aimed for it a dozen times, and at 5000m the operators wouldn't have had a clue besides an initial gps or something. You also ended up with every bomb dropped from fixed wing craft being a 'barrel bomb' due to the hysteria in western media. Surprisingly, you can't actually roll a barrel out of a MiG 21 or Su 22 nor attach it to the hardpoints on the outside... They were also so effective that when Russia supplied the Mi8s with proper bomb rails and Syria with proper bombs the barrel bomb... got deprecated instantly? Because the aim wasn't actually to pointlessly waste military resources targeting civilians in areas you'd ultimately have to pay to repair)

Given the stereotypical complaint about Amazon's slave shops: "maybe now we can bring in a mandatory colostomy requirement and charge for the colostomy bags"

And the US bombed a civilian air raid shelter in Baghdad and killed 400+ people- that the DoD incontrovertibly knew was a civilian air raid shelter. Crap happens in war. I bring it up all the time because it's very pertinent to the question of perception vs reality, but the surgical and precise ~1 year liberation of Mosul may well have killed more civilians than the barbaric and indiscriminate ~5 year Battle of Aleppo (governate, not just city) killed civilians and combatants. If the enemy is defending a city nothing is surer than that you will kill civilians, and a lot of them, doesn't matter who you are. There's also the dichotomy of propaganda pretty obviously at work. 1) Russia is running out of arms and supplies. 2) Russia also has so much of both that they can be wasted deliberately targeting puppy orphanages and juice fountains for disabled old people rather than military targets. The second is especially 'funny' when we've heard they've been 'almost out' of things like cruise missiles since week 1 ye they're also accused of deliberately using them on civilians. Yep, if there was no concern for civilians they'd sit back and drop thermobarics on the place. That would definitely be a breach of the Geneva Conventions, but if you really don't care... TOS-1 can fire from well outside any ATGM range, let alone air dropped munitions like FOAB (lol, about as pointless as Tsar Bomba) and friends.

I watched Halo episode 1. It wasn't egregiously bad, but I did fall asleep and miss the last ten minutes, which was not a good sign considering that hasn't happened to me in years. I actually rather liked the miniseries from a few years ago with Susan from the Narnia movies (Forward Unto Dawn, and apparently a movie, definitely shown episodic here though).

Sogavare swapped recognition before the Australians intervened, so it can't have been that much of a surprise- he's also notoriously corrupt and it's unlikely the Ockers were unaware of that. Australia's problem was their unconditional support for Guadalcanal (yes WW2 buffs, that Guadalcanal, Henderson Field is the capital Honiara's airport) vs its near neighbour Malaita. In this case Malaita was very strongly pro Taiwan, and indeed in the previous round of internecine fighting around 2000 Malaitans had extensively and deliberately targeted Chinese interests. Ironically, or perhaps not, the worst parts of that fighting also had Sogavare as PM. Funny thing was that the US actually backed Malaita including a lot of monetary aid, and they held an independence referendum (unofficial, obviously) in... 2020, I think. Still, countries are free to choose their associations and who they sign defence agreements with, eh Scott, and those objecting are just paranoid?

Houthis blew up a Saudi Aramco facility in Jeddah with a drone. Formula 1 Race is meant to be held nearby this weekend.

Honestly, I'd say that actual CW genre drama style Trek would be an active improvement over what we've got, since you tended to at least get a few good seasons out of them. As much as something like Flash is a bit of a joke now, it at least had 2-3 decently entertaining seasons where you'd finish your 40 minutes feeling that the time wasn't wasted and you were more or less entertained.

Er lol. They need Turkey's permission to access the Black Sea in a time of war. That's not exactly extraordinary co-operation considering they're NATO allies. Fallujah style tactics would work in Ukraine with some adaption. Strong cordon, artillery, block to block with TOS-1. Thermobaric, so the advantage of hiding underground or in ruins is largely negated by losing all your oxygen. Just not very good for PR. Tanks aren't much use if they're used badly even with only 'traditional' ATGMs. The Syrians found that out constantly, and even ancient 60s/70s Malyutkas have taken out Saudi Abrams and Turkish Leopard 2s.