Agiel

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.

Uh-oh: Silicon Valley is building a Chinese-style social credit system

Which is ignoring what I had put forward in previous posts, that the Mk41 cannot launch Tomahawk missiles without the necessary _fire control hardware_ (as is the case for vessels for every other allied nation's navy that has ships with the Mk41 cells). As stated with the example of the Kongo-class destroyer if the presence of the cells was evidence that the ship can launch Tomahawk missiles, that would have meant that Japan was in violation of Article 9 of the Post-War Constitution. To classify the Mk41 cells by themselves as a launcher in violation of the treaty is to make the definition of "launcher" so broad as to make it effectively impossible for any side to fully abide by the treaty to the letter. Were such the case any mounting, no matter how crude, that was sized appropriately to prop up a canister which contained a Tomahawk missile plus rudimentary wiring will have qualified as a "launcher". Just as the Trident II has sufficient range that an Ohio or Vanguard-class submarine can launch them at any target within Russia' borders from any waters north of the equator enables them to patrol with almost total security, so too can submarines operate in the Adriatic with nearly as much safety, far more so than a fixed site that is quite well within range of a Kilo-class submarine capable of launching its own submarine-launched cruise missiles. The US military flat out doesn't need land-launched cruise missiles, and in fact are unlikely to want them if it threatens to cannibalise their other budgetary priorities (unless it's a case of the national security apparatus under Bolton cramming it down their throats regardless, Marshall Ustinov-style, which given that by all appearances Trump seems to find a lot to love about Soviet industrial policy isn't wholly unbelievable even by me). As stated by General Paul Selva:

I should have clarified that the Aegis Ashore system is "much more than just its launcher," as the point I was making with the rest of the post is that the Mk41 cells really cannot be taken alone as evidence that they are capable of launching Tomahawks (see original post, vis-à-vis Fridtjof Nansen frigates, Kongo destroyers, plus many other allied vessels). If the existence of the cells on land was enough to have been in violation of INF, then the definition of "launcher" would be so hopelessly vague as to encompass a bewildering number of wholly unrelated hardware (including civilian). Take for instance the M901 launcher vehicle component of a Patriot battery: And compare to a cross-section of a Mk41 VLS module: The cells of both the M901 and the Mk41 are in essence some cabling and steel scaffolding meant to prop up a canister containing the missile. For the former the missiles cannot launch without the necessary equipment, full stop (in its case the fire-control radar and the command vehicle). For the latter it's the TWCS, of which the Aegis Ashore facilities lack. Even if one is utterly convinced of perfidy of military planners so surreptitious as to pass beneath the notice of Congress or the host country one would still have to answer the question of "what's the point?". As mentioned before each cell that does not contain an interceptor makes it correspondingly worse at its intended role, and even if it theoretically maxed out at 24 Tomahawks it's still far fewer effective munitions that can be carried than by other platforms which the Russian military would have a much harder time keeping a watchful eye on (a Flt II Los Angeles Class submarine has 12 VLS tubes for Tomahawks and can carry up to 25 additional missiles that can be launched from its re-loadable torpedo tubes, to say nothing of the Ohio-class guided missile subs which has 154 vertical launch tubes).