Agiel

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":

Mic drop from the Boss, General Mike "Mobile" Holmes":

During the height of the Cold War it was believed that airstrips that ostensibly served civil aviation were nonetheless targeted, the reasoning being that they could be used as divert airfields by bombers that had their original airbases turned into glowing craters. Of course today thanks to arms control treaties neither side can particularly afford to be frivolous as they were then with their deployed warheads, and for this reason on top of warheads being smaller and more accurate the much derided "Duck and Cover" is actually fairly sound civil defence practice today. Even though a vast majority of Americans work in cities, most commute from surrounding suburbs which were not likely to be direct targets even under a countervalue strike (though God help you if you lived a few blocks from, say, the former Rocketdyne plant in Canoga Park). Chances of survival also increase drastically if there is a skyscraper between you and the detonation point. At that point the primary concern is staying indoors and rationing water and food for the two or, ideally, three weeks for fallout to subside, though we then enter the realm of "the living will envy the dead" with violent looters and food riots.

Well the Homeworld games lent themselves well to recreating space battle scenes out of Star Wars and the like, whereas the same can't necessarily be said for the land-based combat of DoK. If you wanted to play a total conversion based on WWII or modern day combined arms RTS you are likely already well served by Steel Division and Wargame (to say nothing of the fact that DoK doesn't even have infantry modeled). As for a Dune 2 recreation, well, how many modders out there have the skill and gumption to script and animate a Sand Worm?

I mean, they flat out stated what it was in the end cinematic of Homeworld 2: a network of hyperspace gates that go throughout the galaxy.

Homeworld 3 announced: Karan S'jet is back. And she has hair!

My conclusion is that Mattis and McMaster hold to the maxim that in a democracy "the people get the government they deserve," an outlook that bears a troubling resemblance to a certain malediction oft-attributed to be of Chinese providence "May you live in interesting times." Freedom of choice after all includes the freedom to fail, and I suppose if soybean farmers still vote for Trump in 2020, then evidently they think the prospect of financial ruin is worth having the a president who "fights"... well... black athletes who kneel during the national anthem at NFL games.

A piece from the Atlantic on Mattis leaving the Trump administration. The Man Who Couldn’t Take It Anymore, by Jeffrey Goldberg.