Agiel

Looks like we're in for a Boba Fett: A Star Wars story. A shame they probably can't bring in Tameura Morrison for it. He was one of the few things I found enjoyable about Attack of the Clones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sehm7hcV100

Philip Roth, the man whom for my money is in top three of best American writers, has died at age 85. https://www.newyorker.com/books/double-take/philip-roth-in-the-new-yorker?mbid=social_twitter He had wholly retired from writing after Nemesis in 2010, but still his death among the many since 2016 is the one that hits me hardest.

Speaking of which, strong episode tonight. Idle thoughts:

Rather interesting RAND research memo from 1954, which I found to be as relevant to the US President as the "Lost Boys" who drive trucks into crowds, shoot up schools, and bomb concerts:

Was hoping people who bought the Wood Elves DLC would get an Ariel freebie so that all three Elf factions got their own Mage Queens.

Rumours seem to indicate that the new Obi-Wan Star Wars movie is going to be a bit of a re-telling of the Seven Samurai.

A US Navy aviator I follow on Quora had this question put to him: His answer:

Metro: Exodus delayed into 2019. *Sadface*

It was called Cradle, and it did manage to come out. And in spite of my distaste for most games of that form, I quite enjoyed it and highly recommend it to everyone here.

As Jared and Ivanka were headlining the US Embassy's move to Jerusalem: 55 dead in Gaza protests as Israel fetes US Embassy move

Tonight's episode of Westworld? Ho boy. Best episode of the entire series thus far, but I may be biased as a big fan of Ed Harris. It looked promising to me, but I kept putting it off, so perhaps I'm partly to blame. Would seem at a glance that its ratings were rather mid-ling for a show that I would imagine was as expensive as something like Westworld or Game of Thrones (what it may lack in marquee actors its budget makes up in the SFX department).

Ty Cobb bowed out of the job representing Trump. I guess that gig is a bit like being the drummer for Spinal Tap.

Before you change your avatar, consider: https://i.imgur.com/1MPG3Ug.mp4

I'm not so sure that any variant of SA-10/SA-20 would be so decisively better than an SA-17 against another cruise missile attack, since the extendable mast means at most an additional 8nm extra coverage against something flying even 200ft above the deck that for the cost more SA-17s/22s would do them more good. There's also the fact that simply looking at a relief map of Syria and Lebanon and the location of most of Syria's air defence systems one can come to the conclusion that it's a cruise missile/low-level attack planner's wet dream and an IADS nightmare. This explains how Israel was able to perform open-heart surgery on Syria's IADS network back in 1982 and them largely having its way since 2011.

My own favourite Apocalypse Now scenes are typically the ones that are the most visually far-removed from reality, such as when Willard kills Kurtz and of course the Do Lung Bridge scene: While the action scenes of Heat are admittedly some of the best in cinema, I'm very much partial to the more dialogue-heavy portions: The final scene of the Thing is a near pitch perfect combination of scoring, cinematography, and terror-inducing dread: And of course this classic horror scene which cemented my love for the series (or at least the two good ones and one alright Assembly Cut):

McMaster and Commander, by Patrick Radden Keefe For those inclined to read editorial pieces in the New Yorker chronicling McMaster's tenure as National Security Adviser, if you had to burn one of your three free pieces a month on one article make it this one (no recreation here, due to copyright and length).

And the articles were quoting someone who was in a _leadership position_ of the _Russian military_, which means he should be very much acquainted with tactics, doctrines, and the technical capabilities of the service he was in. This is insider knowledge we're talking about here, not an analyst throwing darts with post-its on it. Signal power level is irrelevant for anti-jamming measures because jamming is _directional_. One of the more rudimentary means of defeating jamming is to simply ignore the direction the jamming signal is coming from, per James J. Kelly: Upon detection of jamming interference, part of the antenna pattern can be turned down, so the noise from that particular direction does not interfere with the rest of the system. That is called nulling the signal. "A null means that I will not look in the direction in space that the jammer is coming from," Kelly said. The electronics protect the receiver by eliminating the interference signal. One problem with this nulling technique, however, is that "as you eliminate jammers, you eliminate your ability to receive signals from the GPS satellites," he said. "You could have a nulling system that kills off the jammers, but you no longer have enough satellites available for you to navigate." The distributed nature of the satellites makes this possible. The receiver logic goes "Okay, I can't 'hear' the correct signal coming from this direction but that's okay; I have plenty of other satellites I can use to find out where I am." It's also one of the reasons Russia put its jammers on cell phone towers; it maximises the number of directions a jamming signal can potentially come from, which is where beamforming comes in: In this instance defeating the jamming measure is more a matter processing power, which is dependent on the size allowances of the platform it is on (probably why thus far GPS-jamming has only been effective against tiny RQ-11s and not on anything in the MQ-1 class). Well, quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur. You are seriously using the "dog ate my homework excuse." If the accusation is that the presented images are misleading then the burden of proof lay with the Russian MoD to provide even more credible images of a structure that was supposedly hit but is intact, time-stamped with the morning paper of the following day with a GPS reading down to the meter and prominent and recognisable structures or other features in the background to make geolocation possible. They have not done so, so by your standards they are even more guilty of misleading by omitting details that would have disproved their case. Also, the "they fell into the ocean" excuse doesn't work when the goal of GPS jamming, as stated in my last post, is to make the missiles less accurate, not make them fall out of the sky.

Maybe this will allow you to rest a little easier tonight: Granted by this measurement we have about 5 more hours from time of this post when this might change.

It's quoting from a Russian source, the former deputy-CINC of the RuAF. You might object to this particular source, but DW used the same roughly the same quote (with slightly different wording, so in all likelihood it was a differing translation of a Russian-language source). And if the 50%+ Tomahawk failure rate story is only treated as gospel by RT which is Russia's own propaganda arm? Errr... well... Or, you know, Occam's Razor works too. Per a post from Sean O'Connor* on the matter a year ago: This is seriously the reason Tomahawk was invented. By its very nature GPS is a _LINE OF SIGHT_-based system. Receivers look at the position of satellites in geo-stationary orbit, compute the time it takes for them to be transmitted from the origin points to the receiver, then determines its location from that information, so to jam the missiles effectively the Russians would need continuous LOS on the missiles up until the moment of impact, which requires full knowledge of the flight path, assuming the platform doesn't have the kind of processing power to discern the jamming signal from the false ones (or any number of other means of defeating it), as no matter how powerful it is compared to GPS signals it does not magically destroy them. As I've banged on this before this is the main reason Russia's own jamming measures are on cell-phone towers: it maximises the range the jammers can "see" over the horizon. In fact the goal is not to cause the missiles to fall harmlessly out of the sky but to cause them to incur enough mistakes to miss by only a few meters: If indeed an aerial platform was used to overcome the horizon problem, then surely the Russian MoD would also release the radar track data it had on them so they knew where to place those aircraft. Also... I'm going to let you think for a moment on just how well that goes with this: