Agiel

"Is Chaos Theory As Good As I Remember?" You bet your sweet ass it is.

Seeing these guys live really is something to behold.

Metro: Exodus DLC, Sam's Story. Moments like this are what keeps me coming back:

I would rather that the conversation moves past whether or not a public healthcare system is "socialism" (something similar to Warren's plan was championed by icons of American politics like Ted Kennedy and George McGovern, so I hardly think it would lead to the US becoming a Stalinist hellhole) so that there is an actual debate on serious questions that must be answered before such a scheme can move forwards. 1. Would the American people be willing to endure the undeniably inevitable additional tax burden on ordinary citizens? I remain unconvinced that under Warren's taxation plan even if enforcement was reasonably airtight the revenue it generated alone could cover the cost of a Medicare-for-All, almost assuredly passing on some of the cost to middle to upper-middle class workers. Just as a great deal many recent college grads are getting their student debts to manageable levels suddenly things like an annual vacation, home ownership, and sending their own children to college loan-free will be placed out of reach once again. 2. Would Americans tolerate what some may consider overly-intrusive state-intervention in the physical well-being of its citizens in order to reduce the burden on a public health-care system? In much the rest of the developed world there are hefty taxes levied on fatty and sugary snacks and beverages. It's rather hard to be an alcoholic in Norway and Sweden due to taxes on hard liquor. In the UK there is a ban on ads for candies and snacks deliberately targeting children. And in Japan there is the dreaded "metabo law," wherein employers and municipalities will incur financial penalties if those under their charge do not meet guidelines in weight and waist circumference. When this question was put to the citizens of New York under Mike Bloomberg the answer seemed to have been a resounding "no." Given how obesity rates in the US compare to the rest of the developed world, I would think even those in Norway, Japan, and France would believe it totally irresponsible to institute "Medicare-for-all" in the US as its citizens are now. 3. What is to be done in order to overcome the social and racial divisions that permeate American politics? Judging by the content of the rhetoric of the current candidates on the campaign trail and the company they keep this is an area I find Sanders severely wanting. My outlook is that a great deal of Trump voters would actually like healthcare provided by the state, BUT, they don't want it if it means their taxes insure that inner-city blacks and single-mothers "who made bad life decisions" get it too. As Jim Goad put it "My hatred is a thousand times more powerful than all of your good intentions."

To counter Huawei, U.S. could take 'controlling stake' in Ericsson, Nokia: attorney general Ooh! It's at the tip of my tongue! What is it called when a privately-held company becomes a state-owned enterprise again?

What often goes underappreciated is the extent civilian developments affect military R&D. Take for instance the plastics industry of the West; key binders used for making childrens toys had applications in holding together solid fuel rockets for missiles, which in part explains the significant lag the Soviets had in SLBMs (the contemporary Soviet equivalent to the American Trident was the SS-N-20 Sturgeon that was by all accounts unnecessarily huge and consequently much more expensive to build and maintain, leading to its swift retirement after the Cold War ended). Another more obvious example is the civilian aviation industry. A strong civil aviation industry calls for safe and relatively inexpensive air travel, which creates demand for aircraft engines that are more reliable, more fuel-efficient, and less maintenance intensive, expertise that was invaluable for developing similarly robust and reliable engines for fighter jets (for Russian ground crews the MTBO for western jet engines are simply eye-watering).

I had a cousin who went to a Christian private school through to the 8th grade and he showed me one of the civics text-book they used, and having skimmed through it perhaps I shouldn't be surprised by the xenophobia expressed by Trump supporters.

An addendum:

At risk of this being moved to the Politics topic: This bit of trivia seems to me like kind of a thing everyone learned as schoolchildren from the "Fun Facts" that were on the paper for Fruit by the Foot snacks.

Highly recommend the Philip Roth novel from which this is adapted from (and to which I also owe one of my signatures as well). Though I suspect much of the impact Roth's brilliant prose might be lost in its translation to the screen.

Metro: Exodus' final DLC "Sam's Story" coming out on February 11th, just shy of when Exodus' EGS exclusivity ends. The American character returning to the US on a Typhoon-class SSBN brings to mind a certain Tom Clancy novel and film based on the novel:

I'm distinctly reminded of Sir John Hackett reflecting on the words of Arnold Toynbee and what he called "the Military Virtues": Granted from what people in the real-estate profession have said of Trump it's doubtful he's any good at being a real-estate mogul anyways. For as much as Trump claims to idolise figures such as Patton one would have to try very hard to convince me that had Patton lived long enough to meet Trump he would not shatter his jaw within ten minutes of being in his presence.

At any rate I half-expected _a_ delay for Cyberpunk 2077, but hadn't foreseen it to be into the Fall. I had thought that it would be at worst in late July, which being so close to E3 meant that CDPR would feel justified in having just a token presence at the show (announcing CP2077 for next-gen consoles with side-by-side shots plus a teaser for the multiplayer portion). It would appear that they will now be having presentations at both E3 and Gamescom.

There's going to be a lot of cancelled PTO requests for April on the desks of supes.

"Neil! Play the Drum Solo of Life!"

It if makes you feel better the vast majority of people in North America who deal with Iranians on a regular basis have nothing but positive experiences with them. One of my best friends through high school was Persian and about the only thing he did that could be remotely construed as vaguely pro-Iran was him curling his lip at the depiction of Persians in <<300>> and even I shared that sentiment. In college I had an Iranian roommate (as in he had emigrated from Iran) and had spotted me watching a documentary on Ruhollah Khomeini and the Iran-Iraq War and said to me "Why are you watching something about that a**hole?", and while at parties he could go at length about how crooked the Pasdaran and the Basij were. Trump often accuses other countries of "not sending their best and brightest" to the US, but in the case of the Iranians this simply wasn't true; I was at my cousin's Computer Science graduation at UCLA and you would go through several minutes hearing nothing but Persian last-names.

Frankly I wouldn't let the Soviets off that easily on that basis. The behaviour of the flight that was not consistent with previous American reconnaissance missions should have tipped the Soviets off, and they had courses other than shooting down the jet (Put it this way: Technically in some US jurisdictions it is legal to brandish a firearm at or shoot some kid that intruded on one's property. Nonetheless the shooter shouldn't expect anyone to break out the 18-year old scotch for him at the next block party) per David E. Hoffman's chapter on KAL 007 in "The Dead Hand": <<Another plane flew in the sky that night, circling close to the Soviet Union, an RC-135 four-engine jet used for intelligence missions by the U.S. air force. The RC-135, a converted Boeing 707, was a familiar spy plane, known to the Soviets. Osipovich, the interceptor pilot, recalled he had chased it many times. The RC-135 flights were monitoring Soviet ballistic missile tests on an intelligence mission known as Cobra Ball. The plane was crammed with cameras and special windows down one side to photograph a Soviet missile warhead as it neared its target. The upper surface of the wing on the side of the cameras was painted black to avoid reflection. The RC-135s were based on Shemya Island, a remote rocky outcropping in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. Soviet missile tests often aimed at the Kamchatka Peninsula. How the missiles landed could help the United States monitor arms control treaties and look for violations. The pictures could show how many MIRVs came from a missile and the final trajectory. The RC-135 planes flew in circular or figure-eight orbits with camera lenses aimed at the Soviet coastline, in anticipation of a test. On the night of August 31, a missile test was expected and the RC-135 loitered in the sky, waiting. The RC-135 had a wingspan of 130 feet, compared to the 747, which stretched 195 feet and 10 inches across. Both had four engines, located under the wings. The 747 featured a prominent hump on the front of the fuselage for the upper passenger deck. As the RC-135 circled, at about 1 A.M., the larger 747 flew by, seventy-five miles south. This was a critical moment of confusion for the Soviets. They had been tracking the RC-135 by radar. When the missile test didn’t happen, the RC-135 headed back to its base on Shemya Island, but Soviet radar didn’t see it turn and go home. On the way home, the RC-135 crossed the flight path of the 747 at one point. The Soviet radar somehow lost the RC-135 and picked up the 747, now unexpectedly heading directly for Kamchatka. The plane was given a number, 6065, and the track was annotated with an “81,” which meant one unidentified aircraft. It was the off-course Korean Air Lines flight, but the Soviet ground controllers thought it might be an RC-135. The radar tracked the plane as it approached Kamchatka, but not constantly. Radar contact was lost, and picked up again while the plane was about halfway over the peninsula. When the airliner approached Kamchatka, Soviet air defense forces were slow to react. Controllers were groggy, commanders had to be awakened, and there were radar gaps. Transcripts of ground control conversations show they spotted the plane just as it flew over the air defense forces base at Yelizovo. They scrambled four interceptors. These planes zigzagged in the air for twenty minutes but could not find the jet, which was actually north of them, and they were forced to return to base. The plane flew on, straight out over the Sea of Okhotsk and toward Sakhalin Island, about seven hundred miles away. Radar contact was lost at 1:28 A.M. the plane just as it flew over the air defense forces base at Yelizovo. They scrambled four interceptors. These planes zigzagged in the air for twenty minutes but could not find the jet, which was actually north of them, and they were forced to return to base. The plane flew on, straight out over the Sea of Okhotsk and toward Sakhalin Island, about seven hundred miles away. Radar contact was lost at 1:28 A.M. .. Guk, the KGB chief in London, had been in Moscow during the shoot down, and he later took Gordievsky aside and told him that eight of the eleven Soviet air defense radar stations on Kamchatka and Sakhalin were not functioning properly. Dobrynin heard>> Emphases seem to corroborate the testimony of the Soviet defector pilot Alexander Zuyev, who claims that several EW and GCI radars remained inoperable because they hadn't been repaired in a timely manner despite the Far East MD's claims to the contrary. https://youtu.be/_glEQuvurFQ?t=107 <<At 3:09 A.M. an order was given to destroy the plane, but then rescinded. The Sokol command post duty officer wondered if the Americans would really fly a spy plane directly into Soviet airspace. They usually circled outside territorial waters. “Somehow this all looks very suspicious to me,” he said. “I don’t think the enemy is stupid, so … Can it be one of ours?” He called another command center at Makarov, on the eastern tip of the island, to see what they knew about the plane’s flight. “It hasn’t bombed us yet,” was the reply. ... The Soviet ground controllers asked Osipovich six times whether the airliner was showing navigation lights, on the assumption that a plane without them might be on a spy mission. At 3:18, Osipovich reported, “The air navigation light is on, the flashing light is on.”>> Note that contrary to popular culture examples even the SR-71 kept their flights outside of Soviet airspace, as they had sensors and photographic equipment powerful enough for their missions monitoring Soviet naval bases in Murmansk, Vladivostok, and Petropavlovsk from this distance. <<At 3:24, Osipovich’s radio crackled with orders: “805, approach target and destroy target!” The airliner was just slipping away from the Sakhalin coast. Osipovich recalled later it was at this point he had finally gotten a look at the plane, and he realized suddenly it was larger than an RC-135. “Soon I could see it with my own eyes,” he recalled. “It was a big plane, and I thought it was a military-cargo plane because it had a flickering flash-light. There were no passenger plane routes, and there had been no occasions of any passenger planes losing their way…I could see it was a large plane. It wasn’t a fighter plane, but either a reconnaissance plane or a cargo plane.” ... Dobrynin recalled seeing Andropov that day. Looking haggard and worried, Andropov ordered Dobrynin to rush back to Washington to deal with the crisis, saying, “Our military made a gross blunder by shooting down the airliner and it probably will take us a long time to get out of this mess.” Andropov called the generals “blockheads” who didn’t understand the implications of what they had done. Dobrynin said Andropov “sincerely believed,” along with the military, that the plane had made an intrusion into Soviet airspace as part of an intelligence mission to check Soviet radars. But even that, Andropov said, was no excuse for shooting it down instead of forcing it to land.>> The PVO commanders made a stupid gamble for the sake of their careers ordering the shootdown of KAL-007.

That's rough. Our plan has the "rollover" of unused time off above an arbitrary annual limit reimbursed as back pay on the last paycheck of the year.

And here I am with my three weeks of PTO banked up for just that occasion .

I'd recommend giving Call of Pripyat a shake. For a great deal many STALKER fans who were in a similar boat as you that title managed to win them back.

As an aside here's a Twitter account that is as criminally unrecognised as Black Metal Cats: I give you Conan the Salaryman.

On the other hand were I to go to retirement communities in Florida and Arizona and ask the seniors living there whether or not they voted for Nixon in 1972 there will probably come a point at which I will find it difficult to believe them if they said they did not, considering the near total Electoral clean-sweep and popular vote landslide.

The False Romance of Russia by Anne Applebaum Having recently brushed up on Roger Griffin's <<The Nature of Fascism>> and <<Terrorist's Creed>> the following seems particularly pointed: And what has always struck me as most surprising about the "blood and soil" right-wingers' weird fascination with Putin's Russia: