Agiel

By my estimation a Hillary Clinton administration would have been the biggest shot in the arm to the GOP since 94. As you often bang on about some of the biggest banking deregulation happened in Bill Clinton's administration, welfare as the US had known it until then had its heart ripped out and repeatedly trampled over, and the US bore witness to one of the most decisive routs of the Democratic party in Congress. Another Clinton administration would be impotent in the face of a GOP-controlled Congress, be under constant legal threat that would energise the opposition, and Democrat-leaning voters would be, as they were in 2010 and 2014, astoundingly derelict when it comes to both Federal and State elections in 2018.

Was more in reference to this: Opinion: Farmers ride the gravy train as Trump boosts welfare to the Heartland If they're going to accept what amounts to welfare to keep afloat, then so be it. But I don't want to hear _any_ lectures from them about the "evils of socialism" because if that isn't socialism then I don't know what is.

As I've frequently noted before as much as his supporters point to Venezuela as evidence of the failure of socialism Trump frequently betrays an attraction to Soviet industrial policy at its most wasteful and unsustainable. Wherein government fiat is thought to overcome mathematics*, loss-makers are kept running purely for the sake of full employment, and failing industries (i.e. the farmers who voted for Trump) are propped up by government subsidies due to the malfeasance of the state. *Some of my favourite stories about the weird parallel economic reality the Soviet Union lived in: When Soviet-made aircraft were first shown off at Le Bourget a Mikoyan and Gurevich representative boasted that it cost the same for the VVS to purchase a MiG-29 as a Su-27. Anyone who isn't blind can tell you how absurd that assertion was given that the Flanker was significantly larger than the Fulcrum and that it sported more sophisticated sensors and avionics. Similarly western analysts who finally got a chance to look at the variety of Ilyushins and Tupolevs up close noted how inefficiencies in their designs seemed not to be manufacturing defects or mere byproducts but deliberately built in, as one hilariously commented on the Il-96 "Wherever they could find a place to put a rivet, they put one."

My impression was that the reception to 2nd edition was rather lukewarm as a result of it distancing itself from its D&D 3.5 roots and making concessions towards those who had defected to D&D 5. That said Owlcat has said in their FAQ that they found some elements of 2nd Edition Pathfinder interesting and are looking into whether or not those very changes can be integrated in the WotR cRPG.

The closed captions are what takes this to the next level. Fun fact for non-French speakers, a certain four-letter word is <<baise>>, meaning the band's name is "McF***".

Modders ported the Half-Life Uplink demo and the Decay co-op mode from the PS2 version of Half-Life 1 to the Steam version, so it'd be interesting to see if an enterprising team ported the content of Half-Life: Alyx to a non-VR format.

You can't un-hear Sting singing this at the start of that Dire Straits song Money For Nothing.

I swear, Nunes was one step away from calling Vindman a "bezrodnyi kosmopolit."

Hair goals right there.

Got vibes of that movie Lifeforce at the end of the Diablo IV cinematic trailer.

Also of note that upon hearing of the Hiroshima bombing Stalin did fall into a state of depression similar to how he was when Barbarossa kicked off before issuing orders to move up the Red Army's invasion timetable. It was true that as a result of Klaus Fuchs the Soviets did have an inkling of the Manhattan Project, but because Fuchs was compartmentalised from information related to actual bomb production (or even due to the fact that Beria, being the paranoid piece of work that he was, did not fully trust information coming from his sources inside the program) the Soviets were caught off-guard by the speed by which usable weapons had been produced (to this day the Manhattan Project remains the fastest nuclear weapons program in terms of the time between when the decision was made to create one and when weapons were finally assembled).

Claims of Bashar as a force for moderation frankly ring at least a tiny bit hollow when school curriculums smack of gross personality cults and him visiting artillery batteries actively shelling Idlib. As for Maher there's hardly anyone else in the world who knows more than I do he spells trouble for Syria, and I don't doubt for a second even the Kremlin would love to, if it were in their power, see the IRGC and Hezbollah forces out of Syria if it didn't mean kissing four years of progress in taking back the country given the headaches they create vis-à-vis Netanyahu (hence the Russians virtually giving tacit approval to the IAF running riot on IRGC targets in Syria). I hardly see how Syria can ever recover from being a basketcase until arresting and torturing "reconciled" Syrians stops being a thing. The regime will just trade a large-scale rebellion for the slow-rot of night letters, car bombs, and weddings being shot up, things that could boil into another large-scale rebellion.

I'm just baffled that there's folks that think that opposing a wider American intervention in Syria (a view that I myself hold) and being clear-eyed and recognising that Assad is a murderous despot are somehow mutually exclusive viewpoints to hold.

Went to see Immolation on their <<Final Atonement>> tour. As always they reliably melt my face off, but one of the opening acts really killed it that night as well.

I shouldn't be surprised if this debacle turns out to be a dry run for when Trump decides to leave the Intermarium NATO countries twisting in the wind.

Perhaps if the US had a chief executive that had backbone like this...

I think of copy of <<The Commissar Vanishes>> would be an apt retirement gift for Rudy Giuliani:

I imagine something like this was going through the head of the whistleblower:

I commented on this before, but I can't help but snicker at images of Trump standing in profile, or even in 3/4 view as in this photo: I swear, with that posture one could put a glass of water on the portion of the arch of his back that was closest to horizontal and not a drop would spill.

This quote brings to mind the song <<The Fires of Frustration>> by Deathspell Omega, a critique of those whom Nietzsche referred to as "Men of Resentment":

I can only assume that the leaked audio of Trump on what the US "used to do in the old days" to "spies" was based on the fates of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. I'd post a video clip from Angels in America where the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg comes to gloat to the disbarred Roy Cohn on his deathbed but it would appear that it has been taken down.

Note that the performance of the SA-22 Greyhound in Syria has been considered less than good by the Russians, particularly against small UAVs that have repeatedly pestered Humaymim AB, and as stated before the use of a multi-million dollar flying telephone pole against such a target (which Patriot has demonstrated to have been able to shoot down) is bound to be a nightmare of an expenditure report to write. As one Russian military analyst writes (machine translated): Perhaps its poor showing in that regard isn't wholly unsurprising, given that even in test conditions the autocannons were ineffective against a small UAV target drone, resorting to its missile to down it:

Given the circumstances of the release of the "transcript," one distinctly recalls a certain episode of "Yes, Prime Minister":