#the missile will not update its target and will only strike where you were when u accepted

[matan4il]

Update post:

Most of this will be about the unprecedented attack of the Islamist regime of Iran against Israel, but first I have to take a second to mourn a 14 year old boy, who was murdered in a Palestinian attack on Friday. At around 6 in the morning, teenager Binyamin Achimeir led his sheep herd out of the farm he lives in, but a few hours later, the sheep returned to the farm without him. At first, it was feared that he had some accident, or was dehydrated, and thousands of people voluntarily joined the search for him. On Saturday, at around noon, the IDF found his body, with signs of brutal violence on it. Based on the forensic evidence, he was murdered by several Palestinian terrorists, and he fought back. The army is still hunting down the murderers. May Binyamin's memory be a blessing.

Right, back to the Islamist regime of Iran's attack on Israel. I posted about it as soon as the news started being aired here, in case someone didn't know about it. The news broke past the normal time when people watch news on TV in Israel, I noticed it by chance right before I was about to turn in for the night. I'm physically okay, but I didn't get that much sleep, I had to wake up early to take care of some stuff, so I AM very tired, which is why I'm not going to do the usual thing I do, which is to look for English journalistic sources for everything, but I have no doubt even the stuff I won't look up can all be easily found online.

On a personal note, I can tell you that at 1:43 in the morning I heard the first explosion, but no sirens went off. A few more explosions followed, and only then did we hear the sirens. It was scary, for a moment we couldn't tell whether we're hearing explosions of missiles from neighboring areas, or whether something went wrong with the sirens, and we need to hurry into the bomb shelter. It seems like in Jerusalem specifically there was some issue with the sirens, I heard a reporter mention it. Also, the alert app didn't go off, even though it should have, at the latest when the sirens did.

This is what the Temple Mount looked like from an Iranian attack that could have easily destroyed the al-Aqsa mosque (it's not in the frame, but it's right next to where this was filmed):

Quick background: Iran is the biggest financier of anti-Israel terrorism for decades now, including funding Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis, all of which have been a part of a continuous attack on Israel since Oct 7 as Iran's proxies. Iran has sent its own military seniors to help and instruct those local terrorists, in places like Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. Israel has eliminated them whenever possible, this is not something new. On Apr 1, Israel carried out such a strike, in which it targeted 7 Iranian army seniors in Damascus, Syria's capital. Iran claimed Israel targeted the Iranian consulate in this city, but diplomatic buildings are all publicly listed. Iran has an embassy in Damascus (in a separate location) and no consulates. That's why the magnitude of Iran's response to this has taken Israel by surprise, because the Israeli strike wasn't that out of the ordinary. In fact, the US assassination of Iran's military commander, Qasem Soleimani, back in 2018, was a far graver blow for the Iranian regime, and yet it did not lead to an attack as massive as the one launched against Israel last night.

It is now known that some of the attack waves against Israel were intercepted by other countries, including The US, the UK, France and Jordan. It's been said that there's at least one more Arab country that helped in intercepting Iran's attack, but it can't be publicized. Many countries denounced Iran for attacking Israel.

We don't have numbers regarding the full size of the attack. Out of all the countries who participated in curtailing this attack, we know that the US has intercepted at least 70 suicide drones and 3 cruise missiles, while Israel has intercepted at least 185 suicide drones, 36 cruise missile and 110 ballistic missiles (that last one is the missile type that causes the most damage). Israel's interceptions are said to have been 99% successful, but like I said, no defence system is perfect. A small number of ballistic missiles did land inside Israel. One hit an Israeli air Force base in the south. There's over 30 people who got injured when rushing to the bomb shelter in the middle of the night (elderly people, including Holocaust survivors, have died from such injuries), and over 30 more ended up in hospital due to severe mental health reactions. On top of that, there's a 7 years old Muslim Bedouine girl who was injured by interceptors debris. A friend of her family that I heard being interviewed said the family wanted to go to the communal bomb shelter, but before they even had a chance to make it out of the house, the girl was hit by the debris piercing into their home, and she is suffering from severe head injuries. The hospital is currently fighting for her life.

The estimate of how much it cost Israel to defend its citizens from this one attack last night is 5 BILLION shekels (which is over 1.3 BILLION US dollars). That's for one night.

Israel will respond. According to one reporter I heard, that was decided as soon as it was clear how big the attack is, so this isn't about how much damage Iran caused, it's about how it crossed several red lines. This is the first time Iran itself attacked Israel itself, it's not an attack on an extension of Israel, nor was it done by using proxy terrorists. Israel has had terrorist organizations attacking it continuously since 2001, but this is the first attack from a fellow sovereign country since Iraq (led by tyrant Saddam Hussein) in 1991, so that in itself is crossing a red line. The size of the attack is also considered an escalation on Iran's part. In 2019, Iran launched a smaller scaled suicde drone attack on Saudi Arabia, and the latter's western allies refused to launch a counter attack, which led to these countries being seen as unreliable, and some Middle Eastern countries renewed their ties with Iran. That's why how it would seen in the Middle East if Israel doesn't react to an even bigger attack, and how it might drive more moderate countries to grow closer to Iran, is another consideration in why Israel must respond. Not to mention that launching such a mass attack basically caused a paralysis of the country once the first intel became known. For example, all educational activity (schools, universities, you name it) has been canceled, Israel's air space had to be closed, every single ambulance across the country had to be manned, and so on. That is not something any country can simply shrug off. Not to mention, Israel financially can't afford this reality to become normalized.

Not to mention, Israel tried to contain Hamas, PIJ and Hezbollah's rocket attacks for decades. What we got for it was the invasion and massacre on Oct 7. The lesson for most Israelis is that containing mass attacks on our population only leads to worse ones.

That said, there's also no desire here of getting dragged into a war on another front while we're still in the middle of one in Gaza and with Iran's proxies on several more fronts. So, Israel is looking for a balanced response, one that won't let this mass attack slide, but hopefully doesn't make matters much worse.

(for all of my updates and ask replies regarding Israel, click here)

[antoine-roquentin]

Then the question arose whether drones had been used at all, or whether the attack might in fact have been a missile strike. Previous Houthi drone strikes against oil facilities tended to result in quite limited damage which could be an indication that a different weapons system was used this time. Indeed, Aramco came to the conclusion that its facilities were attacked by missiles. Even more curious, several pictures began to emerge on social media purportedly showing the wreckage of a missile in the Saudi desert. While the images appear real, neither the date the photos were taken nor their location can be verified. Social media users quickly claimed the images showed a crashed Iranian-made Soumar cruise missile. The Soumar and its updated version, the Hoveyzeh, are Iran’s attempts at reverse-engineering the Soviet-designed KH-55 cruise missile, several of which the country illegally imported from Ukraine in the early 2000s. Others claimed it was the Quds 1, a recently unveiled Houthi cruise missile often claimed to be a rebranded Soumar. 

While at this point there are still more questions about the attack than answers, it might be a good idea to take a closer look at the Quds 1. Do the pictures in the desert actually show a Quds 1? And is the Quds 1 really just a smuggled Soumar?

The story of the Quds 1 begins in mid-June 2019, when a cruise missile fired by the Houthis hit the terminal of Abha Airport in Southern Saudi Arabia, wounding a total of 26 passengers. Not long afterwards, Saudi Arabia held a press conference showing images of the missile’s wreckage and claiming that the missile in question was an Iranian Ya Ali cruise missile. The Ya Ali is a much smaller missile than the Soumar and while the newest version of the Soumar has a range of up to 1350km, the Ya Ali’s range is limited to about 700km. With Abha airport being located only 110km from the Yemeni border, using a smaller, shorter-range system seemed to make sense. However, there was an inconsistency. The rounded wings and stabilizers shown in the Saudi presentation did not match the Ya Ali. Instead they were more reminiscent of the Soumar.

Only a few weeks later, in early July, the Houthis opened a large static display of their ballistic missile and drone arsenal. One of the surprises unveiled at the show was a cruise missile named Quds 1 (Jerusalem 1) which the Houthis claimed to have indigenously developed. 

Noting the overall similarity in design with the Soumar, many observers claimed Iran had simply smuggled it to Yemen where the Houthis gave it a new paint job and a new name, as they had done before with the Qiam. Well, it turns out cruise missiles are a lot like wines or pictures of Joe Biden. At first they all appear to be the same but once you spend enough time on them, you realize there are quite a few differences. Differences between the Quds 1 and the Soumar include the entire booster design, the wing position, the Quds 1’s fixed wings, the shape of the nose cone, the shape of the aft fuselage, the position of the stabilizers and the shape of the engine cover and exhaust. 

The differences in the shape of the aft fuselage and the position of the stabilizers make it clear that the wreckage in the desert is much more likely to be a Quds 1 than a Soumar.

There is yet another apparent difference between the Quds 1 and the Soumar/Hoveyzeh: size. A quick measurement using MK1 Eyeball reveals that the Quds 1 seems to be smaller in diameter than the Soumar. 

But while MK1 Eyeball works fine, measuring is always a little more objective. So let’s go back to the Saudi presentation for a second. When describing the remnants of the alleged Ya Ali that hit Abha airport, the Saudis mentioned that among the wreckage they found a jet engine named TJ-100. 

A quick search reveals that there indeed is a small turbojet engine called TJ100. The engine is produced by the Czech company PBS Aerospace which describes it as being especially suitable for applications in UAVs, one of its uses being the Spanish/Brazilian Diana target drone. Oh yeah, and you can also totally use it to convert your glider into a jet, which is pretty cool.

When comparing the engine seen on the Quds 1 and the TJ100 it seems pretty clear that whatever powers the Quds 1 is either a TJ100 or pretty much an exact copy of it. An engine displayed at an Iranian drone exhibition again shows stunning similarities with the TJ100, implying that Iran is producing a copy of the Czech engine for use in some of its drones.

Knowing the dimensions of the TJ100, one can precisely measure the diameter of the Quds 1. With 34cm it is significantly smaller than the Soumar, which retains the original KH-55’s diameter of 51,4cm. 

However, the Qud 1’s use of a TJ100 is interesting for more reasons than just measurements. First, the fact that the Quds 1 uses the same engine type that was found in Abha makes it highly likely that the missile that hit Abha’s terminal was a Quds-1 simply mislabeled  by Saudi Arabia. The Quds 1’s design also corresponds to the rounded wing and stabilizers found at the scene.

Second, knowing more details about the engine gives us some insights into the performance of the missile.  Both the KH-55 and the Soumar use fuel efficient turbofan engines. The TJ100 however not only has much lower thrust than the original KH-55 engine but also is just your regular old turbojet. This leads to some questions about range. Both the missile’s smaller size and its more fuel-hungry engine make it seem unlikely it’s range would be anywhere close to the the Soumar’s/Hoveyzeh’s range of 1350km.

If the pictures showing the Quds 1 wreckage in Saudi Arabia are indeed connected to the recent Abqaiq attack, it would seem more likely that the attack originated from a place closer to Eastern Saudi Arabia than Northern Yemen – potentially Iraq, Iran or perhaps even from ships. But then again that is a big if at the current moment.

All of this leaves the question of just who developed and built the Quds 1. The idea that impoverished war-torn Yemen would be able to develop a cruise missile without any outside assistance seems far-fetched. Iran’s previous supply of missiles to the Houthis and the fact that the country uses TJ100 engines in its drone program do imply that the Iran could be behind the Quds 1.

However, so far we haven’t seen any trace of the Quds 1 in Iran proper. This riddle is not unique to the Quds 1. Beginning in 2018, several missile systems began to emerge in Yemen that while broadly similar to Iranian-designed systems have no exact Iranian equivalent. These missiles include the Badr-1P and the Badr-F precision-guided solid-fuel short range missiles

given that the IRGC has to maintain plausible deniability for its proxy attacks as a matter of strategy, and that probably every radar in the gulf is focused on iran, it seems like the trump regime’s claim that the attack was launched from iran is a bald-faced lie. at this point though, the claims in favour of iraq and yemen as launching points don’t exactly look great either. did the houthis manufacture dozens of cruise missiles/drones (as a friend of mine who works on drones said recently, the lack of a serious distinction between cruise missile and drones is something “everybody in the industry knows but doesn’t want to admit) based on off the shelf components and some machine tools, then smuggle them on a boat or on land hundreds of kilometres north into the saudi desert/red sea and launch them with pinpoint accuracy? was this an IRGC plot to scuttle negotiations now that the only major obstacle, bolton, is out, or was this iran’s way of saying “you will never be safe as long as we are unable to export oil and you have to negotiate with us”?

[thesevenseraphs]

Update 2.2.1

Sandbox

TITAN

Striker—Code of the Juggernaut

Frontal Assault:

Buff duration increased from 10 to 16 seconds

Buff timer is now displayed on the HUD

Buff now increases weapon damage

25% in PvE

20% in PvP

Knockout:

Buff duration increased from 3 to 5 seconds

Buff is no longer disabled after a melee attack

In addition to breaking a shield, buff now triggers once you deal 60% damage to a target

Any damage dealt after 60% refreshes the timer

Increased bonus melee damage from 25% to 60%

General bug fix

Fixed an issue where Titans using Code of the Missile could perform the wrong melee

HUNTER

Arcstrider—Way of the Warrior

Combination Blow:

Bonus melee damage can now be stacked 3 times

Buff increases melee damage by 60% per stack in PvE

Buff increases melee damage by 22.7% per stack in PvP

This ability was previously 1 stack and increased melee damage by 50%

Kills with this ability now heal 40 health in addition to starting health regen

Deadly Reach:

Increased buff duration from 6 to 8 seconds

Buff is no longer consumed by a melee hit

Arcstrider—Way of the Wind

Disorienting Blow:

Increased the melee disorient distance from 4 meters to 6 meters

Increased duration of disorient on players from 1.5 to 2 seconds

Focused Breathing:

Increased dodge recharge bonus while sprinting from 50% to 100%

Combat Meditation:

Increased bonus grenade and melee regeneration while bloodied by 25%

Lightning Reflexes:

Increased damage resistance while dodging from 25% to 40% in PvP

Increased damage resistance while dodging from 63% to 70% In PvE

WARLOCK

General Arc Changes

Stormcaller Super

Damage scales up to 150% over 5 seconds of continuous use of the attack

Updated FX and audio to support this functionality

Stormcaller—Attunement of Conduction

Chain Lightning Melee

Can now chain up to 5 times, up from 1, and each individual target can be hit twice

Chain damage decreased from 50 to 31 damage per hit

Arc Web

Increase chain range from 10 meters to 12 meters

Can now chain to many more targets, and back and forth between targets

Chaining Arc damage now reduces the cooldown of your grenade

Works with Arc Web chains and chains from Chain Lightning melee

Earn 3% energy per instance of damage in PvE

Earn 10% energy per instance of damage in PvP

Stormcaller—Attunement of the Elements

Electrostatic Surge:

Increased bonus regeneration rate of Rift by 600% per nearby friendly Guardian

Added a UI notification when the buff is active

Now extends Rift duration from 15 to 20 seconds

Arc Soul:

Extended duration from 8 to 12 seconds.

Voidwalker Nova Warp

Reduced initial charged detonation energy cost by 20%

Reduced energy cost of holding the charged detonation by 7%

Reduced time required to fully charge the charged detonation from 0.9 seconds to 0.7 seconds

Reduced Dark Blink cost by 20%

Increased base Super duration from 18 seconds to 22 seconds

Dawnblade Everlasting Fire

Tuned the amount of Super gained from Everlasting Fire

Initial return increased from 10% to 13%

Return then decays linearly over the course of 30 kills from 13% to 0.75% returned per kill

Abilities Bug Fixes

Fixed an issue where the Warlock ability “Bloom” was not dealing any damage

Improved consistency of Handheld Supernova

Fixed a bug in which canceling Blade Barrage allows players to traverse across the map

Weapons

Weapon Changes

The Last Word

Added a timer to the Fan Fire perk

The Wardcliff Coil

Reduced PvE damage by 25% against bosses and vehicles

General Weapon Bug Fixes

Fixed a material on Coldheart that was no longer shiny

Fixed an issue where ready audio on Veist Submachine Guns was not playing on PS4

Updated the Meganeura perk's description to be more accurate

Fixed an issue where Grenade Launcher initial ammo had been unintentionally reduced

Fixed an issue bug where the Powerful Statement ornament was visible in Loaded Question's ornament socket before it had been obtained

Fixed an issue where Thorn dismantled faster than other Exotic weapons

Fixed an issue where the ATB Long Range scope was erroneously highlighting enemies when equipped on the Long Shadow Sniper Rifle

The Recluse now appears in Collections only when it has been obtained to match the behavior of other pinnacle PvP weapons

Fixed an issue that caused poor scope behavior on the Prospector's ornament "Caution: Heavy Machinery"

Fixed an issue where Wish-Ender did not highlight targets while user was invisible

Fixed an issue where Jötunn was recorded as a Scout Rifle

Fixed an issue where the Vow could not be infused above 650

Fixed an issue where the accuracy ring was not visible on the reticle of Linear Fusion Rifles when using a controller on PC

Armor

Armor Bug fixes

Using Getaway Artist with Storm Grenades now correctly spawns a super-charged Arc soul

Crown of Tempests once again works with Ball Lightning

Stronghold will no longer drain heavy ammo while guarding with Black Talon

Investment

Rewards

Increased drop rate of items in the Last Wish Raid

One Thousand Voices: 5% → 10%

Glittering Key: 5% → 20%

Used to acquire Last Wish ship "Ermine TAC-717"

Wish-Maker Shell (Last Wish Ghost Shell): 2% → 20%

Cleansing Knife (Last Wish Sparrow): 5% → 20%

Increased drop rate of items in the Dreaming City

Pallas Galliot (Dreaming City Ship): 2% → 20%

Starlight Shell (Dreaming City Ghost Shell): 2% → 20%

Silver Tercel (Dreaming City Sparrow): 5% → 20%

Increased drop rate of Lore Books

Cayde's Stash Lore

Cayde treasure map chests: 40% → 100%

Planetary chests: 4% → 50%

Dreaming City Lore

Public event completed: 2.5% → 50%

Ascendant challenge completed: 2.5% → 100%

Blind Well completed (Tier 1–3): 5% → 50%

Lost Sector completed: 1.25% → 100%

The Marasenna lore book was missing two entries: Revanche I and Palingenesis III; these entries now unlock after you unlock all other entries.

Tangled Shore Lore

While Tangled Shore is the Flashpoint

Public event completed: 6.5% → 50%

Heroic adventure completed: 16% → 50%

Lost Sector completed: 3% → 50%

Gunsmith reputation packages now only reward Gunsmith Weapons

Four new Exotic weapon catalysts are now available to drop in Nightfall, strikes, and the Crucible

Prospector (Nightfall, strikes)

Rat King (Nightfall, strikes)

Hard Light (Nightfall, strikes)

SUROS Regime (Crucible)

Xûr's inventory now offers random rolled perks for armor

Quests/Bounties

Power Surge Bounties that have expired or been deleted are now available on the Drifter, though each bounty can still be completed only once per character

Power Surge Bounties now specify "Requires Annual Pass and Level 50" if either requirement is not met

Reaping in the Wilds Gambit Prime bounty now progresses from all high-value targets in free roam

Players who sided with the Vanguard on the Allegiance quest can now also bank Motes in normal Gambit to progress on the Prime Research quest step

Quest progress for the Survival Guide or Hidden Messages quest steps will now re-initialize properly; if you are stuck on these quest steps, you should abandon them and pick them up again from the Drifter to update the "tapes discovered" count

The weekly lockout reset for Invitations of the Nine has been moved to Thursday Reset (1700 UTC); players will now have two extra days to complete them before being locked out of a new Invitation the following Friday

Lost Sector Gambit Prime bounty now progresses from all Lost Sectors

All four weekly role bounties for Gambit Prime now grant powerful head rewards

Yes Sir, I'm A Closer weekly Gambit Prime bounty now awards 4 points for a win and 2 points for a loss, with a completion value of 20 points

Pursuits

Ada-1 will now offer all seven weapon frames each week

Players can still complete only two powerful frames each week, at which point remaining frames are removed until weekly reset

Fixed an issue where players could acquire pinnacle weapons once per character; pinnacle weapons are meant to be acquired only once per account

Drifter's weekly role bounties will now properly count Motes wagered in the Reckoning when the Mote is a lower tier than the activity itself

Gambit Prime now counts to unlock the weekly Gambit clan engram

When recycling Synths at the Drifter, the error "Your Glimmer is full" will now be properly displayed on all four Synths

Fixed an issue with the Sentry emblem where killing Giant Blockers wasn't incrementing the "Blockers killed" stat

Fixed an issue where the Gambit Prime weekly challenge didn't display completion in the UI

Triumphs

Fixed an issue where Triumphs from previous seasons were counting Glory Win Streaks in the current season

Fixed an issue where the Triumph "The Best Offense" was not giving credit for all orbs generated

The Haul Triumphs "Greater Powers" and "IX" can now be completed and will initialize for players who have already completed them as soon as they enter Orbit

General

Arsenic Bite now drops with random rolls; removed Vestian Dynasty from the general loot pool

Fixed an issue where the BrayTech RWP Mk. II could not be infused above 600

Increased drop rate of Polestar II Ghost Shell from 1% to 4%

Fixed an issue where Obsidian Crystal would sometimes not drop from the Unidentified Frame quest step

Activities

Reckoning

Reckoning Tier 2 and Tier 3 boss kills now always have a chance to award a Gambit Prime weapon

Chances for weapon rewards increase each time a boss is killed without a weapon drop

Players near the bank should no longer be able to see waypoints until they jump through the portal

When players jump through the portal, they should be placed in one of three active locations:

Anytime before players begin capturing the bridge: over the horde mode area

Anytime after players begin capturing the bridge, before they fully capture the bridge: at the beginning of the bridge

After players fully capture the bridge and begin the boss fight: at the end of the bridge

Fixed an issue where the Tier 1 Deceived Nokris was not summoning its Taken Warbeasts

Gambit Prime

Some Reckoning weapons now have a chance to drop as match completion rewards from Gambit Prime

Chances increase after each Gambit Prime match without a weapon drop

An invasion kill now heals 8% of the Primeval's health, down from 12%

The invasion portal cooldown time during the Primeval phase has been increased to 40 seconds, up from 30 seconds

This cooldown triggers after a player has been killed or successfully returns from an invasion

Fixed an issue where all Gambit medals that shipped in Forsaken were not displaying in the HUD when players earned them in Prime

Fixed an issue where the Primeval Hobgoblin was not functioning properly in Gambit Prime

Boss reintroduced to Gambit Prime

Fixed an issue where killing players in subsequent Wells of Light would unintentionally count towards earning the "Well Well Well" medal

Fixed on issue on Deep Six and New Arcadia where the Ascendant Primeval Servitor wasn't summoning Immunity Blights

The Burrow front on Six Deep had some minor adjustments to reduce combatant/environment collisions

Gambit

High-value targets now have a chance to spawn during the first round of a Gambit match; the chance for the HVT to spawn in the second round has been increased

Private Matches: Sudden Death can now be enabled or disabled via the Rounds to Win options

Fixed an issue where the "Open 24/7" medal could be acquired during a Sudden Death round of Gambit

Fixed an issue where the "Rainmaker" medal could be acquired during a Sudden Death round of Gambit

Gambit intro cinematics now run at unlocked framerates on PC

Fixed an issue where Scorn Captain's immunity totems were not properly shielding combatants

Fixed an issue where Drifter was announcing "Portal's Up" after the round had ended

Reduced the number of required Blockers to send for the Taken Herder, Shepard, and Whisperer Triumphs

Reduced the number of required number of Motes to bank in order to achieve the Protect the Runner Triumphs

Fixed an issue where players who are restricted from the Crucible/Gambit due to poor network quality were unable to launch Gambit Private Matches

Fixed an issue where Infamy ranks could be repeatedly reset without needing to progress through the ranks between each reset

Strikes

Fixed an issue where the gravlift would sometimes be missing in the Warden of Nothing strike

Nightfall tickets now have min/max and +-25 for incrementing power reduction; this will allow players to get to the +100 power reduction easier to increase the score multiplier

Crucible

Competitive

Fixed an issue where players who are disconnected from Destiny servers could not rejoin games in the Competitive Crucible playlist.

Iron Banner

The curated roll "Wizened Rebuke" Fusion Rifle awarded from completing the "Atlas, Unbound" Triumph will now appear in Lord Saladin's inventory so that players can inspect it prior to acquisition

Once earned, the weapon may be viewed in Collections

The curated roll "Wizened Rebuke" Fusion Rifle can now be reacquired from Collections for the same cost as other Masterworked, curated roll weapons

The Heavy as Iron emblem may be earned when securing 2500 kills under the effects of the Iron Burden

Removed ship "Volk-CER" from Collections due to an issue impacting the ship

Expect this to return in a future Season

Patrols

Fixed an issue where the architects would sometimes kill Guardians for absolutely no reason in a very specific area of the Dreaming City

Combatants

General

Fixed an issue where the Taken Hydra rotating shield would flicker when shielded by Taken Goblins

Fixed an issue where the Ultra Taken Hobgoblin was using the Swarm attack more frequently than intended

UI

General

Player will now always see equipped titles when inspecting another player

The weapon ornament "Powerful Statement" is no longer visible in the socket preview for Loaded Question before being obtained

Postmaster "open bundle confirmation" dialogue now shows appropriate strings when it pops up; would previously cause occasional crashes

Material cost no longer appears red on vendor tooltips if the item is not purchasable, but you have enough material

Fixed the description on some bounties to correctly read "<Element> ability kills" instead of "<Element> kills"

PC

General

Fixed an issue where performance on PC would slowly degrade over time

[dingotheanimal-blog]

Patch Notes Day one

DAY ONE PATCH NOTES

What’s changing between Early Access and World Wide Launch

For those of you who have been playing the Early Access version of the game, we wanted to let you know that a Day 1 Patch is on its way. The patch will deployed before worldwide launch.  On February 22, 2019, the game will include the following updates and our Live Service officially begins.

High level fixes

Decreased loading times for older disk drives

Fixed many infinite loading screens

Fixed multiple challenges not tracking properly

A number of issues have been fixed that were causing players to disconnect or crash

Weapons and gear now have numbers present for modifiers

General Fixes and Improvements

Loot Reveal and Expedition Summary now correctly play during the end of expedition screen.

The gather party mechanic has been made more lenient in a number of situations

At the end of expedition screen players will no longer get stuck on “Recording Victories” or “Skipping All”.

Game no longer hangs in Javelin menu when unlocking the second, third or fourth javelin

During the mission “What Freelancers Do” dying after killing Junkmaw & freeing Arcanists leaves you unable to progress, this has been fixed

Challenges now unlock for players at the correct levels

Fixed some camera issues during cutscenes

Legendary Contracts can now be accepted from the Social Hub contract board

Some enemies have had their shield values decreased

Loot now properly drops for players who are downed

The texture quality on the NPC Prospero has been improved

Final boss of strongholds now drop loot instead of only being shown on the end of expedition screen

Fixed the time outs on echoes and relics to prevent griefing and to handle disconnections properly

Players can no longer fall through the floor during the 3rd trial in the Fortress of Dawn

Completing the tutorial expedition will now show the correct Ranger appearance

After disconnecting, rejoining an expedition will now place you back into a squad if you were in one previously

Corrected an issue where players could not interact with each other in the launch bay in certain circumstances

Corrected an issue during the Mission “Bad Deal” where outlaws won’t spawn, blocking progress

The start of expedition screen has been improved

Addressed a variety of situations where killing enemies does not properly progress world events

Opening a chest now increments Tomb of the Legionnaire progress for all squad members present

Scar snipers can no longer shoot through Storm Shield

Corrected an issue where players would get stuck on the end of expedition screen in some situations

Players will no longer get disconnected if joining the “Finding Old Friends” mission while the cinematic is playing

Addressed a number of situations where players can get stuck on the environment in the launch bay

Increased the damage of the electric status effect

Corrected an issue where the Shield of Dawn could be crafted with less materials then intended in some situations

The Platinum Mission feat now grants completion as intended

Status effects can more reliably be applied to Titans

Fixed loading animations on Marksmen Rifles

Players can now access the Vault from the Forge

Swimming into jellyfish underwater no longer leaves a visual effect stuck on players.

Idle animations will no longer sync up over time in the Launch Bay

Haluk is no longer dual-wielding canes in the epilogue scene

Corrected an issue where players could not interact with each other in the launch bay in certain circumstances

Fixed an issue that could cause players in the launch bay to have identical emotes and be unable to use them

Interceptor melee ability animations will no longer stretch out in certain situations

Corrected an issue where the default Ranger appearance doesn’t preview in the forge in some situations

All animations now play as intended in the Forge

Players can now enter the Tomb of Gwanes while in a party

The default Javelin wear state has been changed from “Dirty” to “Old”

Sentinel Loyalty 2 text no longer incorrectly states that it will lead to a larger vault

Picking up ammo from the ground now properly gives you 30% of that ammo back into both the current magazine and the maximum spare ammo

Fixed a bug where some global (Javelin Icon) inscription bonuses were not being properly applied to the Javelin and other gear/weapons.

Fixed some issues that could cause the Armor Pip count on the UI to break and not display properly

Strongholds

Fixed an issue that would cause a Stronghold server crash after defeating the last boss

Temple of Scar – Players can no longer get stuck in the mined tunnel in the explosives room

Temple of Scar – Players can no longer be blocked from entering the explosives room due to fog wall

Fixed Tyrant Mine so people that join the stronghold in-progress do not end up locked away from their team

Adjusted lighting in Tyrant Mine underwater section to make it easier to navigate to the exit

The Swarm Tyrant will no longer get stuck in the side cave entrances in some situations

Corrected an issue where players would spawn into different areas of the Tyrant Mine in certain situations

Implemented more safeguards to stop players from going AFK in Strongholds

Challenges

Only Masterwork items can now be used to progress Masterwork challenges as intended

Corrected an issue where some Challenges track progress simultaneously instead of incrementally, as intended. (ex: Blast Missile I and then Blast Missile II instead of both incrementing at the same time

Gear and Weapons

After having 1st pilot unlock suit after tutorials, creating a new pilot and going to forge no longer causes load screen hang

Ice damage bonuses are now correctly applied on ice gear

Suit-wide bonuses from inscription are now functioning properly

Players can no longer salvage equipped items

Javelin specific gear and/or weapons are no longer able to be used on javelins they aren’t intended for

Corrected an issue where in some circumstances Masterwork Components do not have any inscriptions

The Endless Siege Masterwork Autocannon no longer displays a damage increase of 0% in its tooltip

Suit-wide specific weapon ammo bonuses coming from infusions are now correctly applied

A Network Error Message no longer appears when opening an item chest in the second tutorial

Colossus shoulder gear will now share the appearance of the rest of the javelin as intended

Deadeye has increased spare ammo 10 -> 20

Cloudburst has had increased damage 16.3 -> 21

Torrent has had increased damage 22.2 -> 28.6

Lightning Strike’s pre-visualization will now accurately depict that the explosion snaps to the ground.

(Ranger) Inferno Grenade base damage 130 -> 175

(Interceptor) Cryo Glaive base damage 20 -> 50

(Storm) Living Flame base damage 50 -> 60

(Storm) Glacial Beam base damage 150 -> 120

(Storm) Arc Burst secondary damage 100 -> 150

(Ranger) Pulse Blast base damage 225 -> 300, and now deals extra damage to Shields (previously did extra damage to Armored).

(Ranger) Blast Missile now properly scales up in damage as the item level increases

(Interceptor) Melee attacks now have some minor resistance penetration

Large Area of Effect abilities will better register multi-kill activities for challenges and medals

Spark Dash functionality has been significantly improved when the target enemy is at a different height (above/below) the Interceptor.

Several gear pieces that had missing primer or detonator icons have been fixed.

Several improvements have been made to ensure gear use on PC prioritizes turning the Javelin towards the reticle when used rather than casting in front of the Javelin’s current direction.

Interceptor

Colossus

Tempest Strike – Detonator Icon

Spark Dash – Detonator Icon

Venom Spray – Primer Icon

Detonating Strike – Primer Icon

Lightning Coil – Detonator Icon

Shock Coil – Primer Icon

Flamethrower – Primer Icon

Javelins

The Colossus javelin is now able to activate its shield more quickly after using an ability or firing a weapon

The Storm javelin now reacts to getting hit when its shields are up

Fixed an exploit that allowed the Storm’s ultimate attack to be used more times than intended

The Colossus exo can now shield and revive at the same time

Interceptor Combo Aura has been increased in power and now has a damage over time component

Ranger melee now has a cooldown when striking in the air

The Target Beacon ability now correctly seeks targets

Spark Dash and Venom Spray now target based on player cursor instead of character facing. This should also improve the travel path of Spark Dash.

The Colossus will no longer be knocked out of the sky in some situations when the attack was blocked by their shield

Combos + Status Effects

Combo indicator icons above creatures now are correctly removed when detonated.

When a Storm detonates an electric status effect the chained electric effect now correctly deals damage.

Combo damage now penetrates resistances

Crafting

Non-Masterwork materials purchased from the crafting store now show as their proper rarity instead of incorrectly showing as Masterwork

A number of javelin components that had different icons for their recipes and the actual items are now the same

The Battle Cry gear recipe now has the correct description

Fixed Spark Beam gear having the wrong description when being crafted

Crafting recipes are now sorted alphabetically

The items in the crafting store are now sorted by type to be clearer

Controls

Additional Mouse and Keyboard control improvements have been made

UI

Some conversations were not popping up the reputation points post conversation completion, this has been fixed

The squad screen now displays the correct information for each player

Fixed a number of issues where subtitles will no longer get stuck on the screen after dialogue has finished as often

Settings should no longer reset upon exiting and restarting the game on Xbox One

Motion blur can now correctly be turned off

The Electric Status Effect now shows scaled damage properly

An option has been added to hide the Squad Member HUD

The edge of the compass will now pulse to indicate enemy locations

A notification has been added in Fort Tarsis if a player’s vault is at the cap of 250 items

On the “Repair the Strider” step of “A Cry for Help” the search radar has been adjusted to correctly lead the player to all 4 tools

Primer and Detonator icons have been added to all Interceptor gear

Corrected a user interface issue where a player’s ultimate would show as available when it isn’t

Toggling the HDR option now properly prompts the Apply Changes button

Player banners should now display correctly

Camera shake slider has been added to settings menu

Players may now track 10 challenges instead of 5

An option to adjust screen boundaries on consoles has been added

Changing a player banner through the banner menu now properly saves the selection

Health, cooldowns, and key bindings now light up on supported keyboards

Players will now receive more clear messaging when a squad is disbanded or are kicked from a squad

Squad leaders will no longer always show as ready

The icon for players in a downed state will no longer appear in cutscenes

Cypher Annotations will now appear for more than one player if they are looking at it simultaneously

Removed mentions of respawning on the player UI when they die in a restricted respawn area

The Player Banner now updates immediately when updated from the squad screen

Fixed a number of situations where a combo will trigger but no combo floating text appears

Pressing esc to pass a notification screen no longer opens up the in-game menu

Quick chat messages will no longer appear from an ignored player

Removed a message from the mailbox which incorrectly stated that messages will be removed after 3 days

A number of inscription icons have been updated to properly reflect whether they are Javelin specific or not

Corrected an issue where players could not change loadout names on PC

Players no longer need to exit and re-enter the forge for loadout names to update

The on-screen VOIP indicator which shows a player speaking will no longer be active if that player is muted

[and-then-there-were-n0ne]

« Bats have a problem: how to find their way around in the dark. They hunt at night, and cannot use light to help them find prey and avoid obstacles. You might say that if this is a problem it is a problem of their own making, a problem that they could avoid simply by changing their habits and hunting by day. But the daytime economy is already heavily exploited by other creatures such as birds. Given that there is a living to be made at night, and given that alternative daytime trades are thoroughly occupied, natural selection has favoured bats that make a go of the night-hunting trade. It is probable, by the way, that the nocturnal trades go way back in the ancestry of all us mammals. In the time when the dinosaurs dominated the daytime economy, our mammalian ancestors probably only managed to survive at all because they found ways of scraping a living at night. Only after the mysterious mass extinction of the dinosaurs about 65 million years ago were our ancestors able to emerge into the daylight in any substantial numbers. 

Returning to bats, they have an engineering problem: how to find their way and find their prey in the absence of light. Bats are not the only creatures to face this difficulty today. Obviously the night-flying insects that they prey on must find their way about somehow. Deepsea fish and whales have little or no light by day or by night, because the sun's rays cannot penetrate far below the surface. Fish and dolphins that live in extremely muddy water cannot see because, although there is light, it is obstructed and scattered by the dirt in the water. Plenty of other modern animals make their living in conditions where seeing is difficult or impossible. Given the question of how to manoeuvre in the dark, what solutions might an engineer consider? 

The first one that might occur to him is to manufacture light, to use a lantern or a searchlight. Fireflies and some fish (usually with the help of bacteria) have the power to manufacture their own light, but the process seems to consume a large amount of energy. Fireflies use their light for attracting mates. This doesn't require prohibitively much energy: a male's tiny pinprick can be seen by a female from some distance on a dark night, since her eyes are exposed directly to the light source itself. Using light to find one's own way around requires vastly more energy, since the eyes have to detect the tiny fraction of the light that bounces off each part of the scene. The light source must therefore be immensely brighter if it is to be used as a headlight to illuminate the path, than if it is to be used as a signal to others. Anyway, whether or not the reason is the energy expense, it seems to be the case that, with the possible exception of some weird deep-sea fish, no animal apart from man uses manufactured light to find its way about. What else might the engineer think of? 

Well, blind humans sometimes seem to have an uncanny sense of obstacles in their path. It has been given the name 'facial vision', because blind people have reported that it feels a bit like the sense of touch, on the face. One report tells of a totally blind boy who could ride his tricycle at a good speed round the block near his home, using 'facial vision'. Experiments showed that, in fact, 'facial vision' is nothing to do with touch or the front of the face, although the sensation may be referred to the front of the face, like the referred pain in a phantom (severed) limb. The sensation of 'facial vision', it turns out, really goes in through the ears. The blind people, without even being aware of the fact, are actually using echoes, of their own footsteps and other sounds, to sense the presence of obstacles. Before this was discovered, engineers had already built instruments to exploit the principle, for example to measure the depth of the sea under a ship. After this technique had been invented, it was only a matter of time before weapons designers adapted it for the detection of submarines. Both sides in the Second World War relied heavily on these devices, under such code names as Asdic (British) and Sonar (American), as well as the similar technology of Radar (American) or RDF (British), which uses radio echoes rather than sound echoes.

The Sonar and Radar pioneers didn't know it then, but all the world now knows that bats, or rather natural selection working on bats, had perfected the system tens of millions of years earlier, and their 'radar' achieves feats of detection and navigation that would strike an engineer dumb with admiration. It is technically incorrect to talk about bat 'radar', since they do not use radio waves. It is sonar. But the underlying mathematical theories of radar and sonar are very similar, and much of our scientific understanding of the details of what bats are doing has come from applying radar theory to them. The American zoologist Donald Griffin, who was largely responsible for the discovery of sonar in bats, coined the term 'echolocation' to cover both sonar and radar, whether used by animals or by human instruments. In practice, the word seems to be used mostly to refer to animal sonar. 

It is misleading to speak of bats as though they were all the same. It is as though we were to speak of dogs, lions, weasels, bears, hyenas, pandas and otters all in one breath, just because they are all carnivores. Different groups of bats use sonar in radically different ways, and they seem to have 'invented' it separately and independently, just as the British, Germans and Americans all independently developed radar. Not all bats use echolocation. The Old World tropical fruit bats have good vision, and most of them use only their eyes for finding their way around. One or two species of fruit bats, however, for instance Rousettus, are capable of finding their way around in total darkness where eyes, however good, must be powerless. They are using sonar, but it is a cruder kind of sonar than is used by the smaller bats with which we, in temperate regions, are familiar.

Rousettus clicks its tongue loudly and rhythmically as it flies, and navigates by measuring the time interval between each click and its echo. A good proportion of Rousettus's clicks are clearly audible to us (which by definition makes them sound rather than ultrasound: ultrasound is just the same'as sound except that it is too high for humans to hear). In theory, the higher the pitch of a sound, the better it is for accurate sonar. This is because low-pitched sounds have long wavelengths which cannot resolve the difference between closely spaced objects. All other things being equal therefore, a missile that used echoes for its guidance system would ideally produce very high-pitched sounds. Most bats do, indeed, use extremely high-pitched sounds, far too high for humans to hear - ultrasound. Unlike Rousettus, which can see very well and which uses unmodified relatively low-pitched sounds to do a modest amount of echolocation to supplement its good vision, the smaller bats appear to be technically highly advanced echo-machines. They have tiny eyes which, in most cases, probably can't see much. They live in a world of echoes, and probably their brains can use echoes to do something akin to 'seeing' images, although it is next to impossible for us to 'visualize' what those images might be like. The noises that they produce are not just slightly too high for humans to hear, like a kind of super dog whistle. In many cases they are vastly higher than the highest note anybody has heard or can imagine. It is fortunate that we can't hear them, incidentally, for they are immensely powerful and would be deafeningly loud if we could hear them, and impossible to sleep through. These bats are like miniature spy planes, bristling with sophisticated instrumentation. [...]

Myotis, one of the common little brown bats, [emits pulses] at a rate of about 10 per second. This is about the rate of a standard teleprinter, or a Bren machine gun. Presumably the bat's image of the world in which it is cruising is being updated 10 times per second. Our own visual image appears to be continuously updated as long as our eyes are open. We can see what it might be like to have an intermittently updated world image, by using a stroboscope at night. This is sometimes done at discotheques, and it produces some dramatic effects. A dancing person appears as a succession of frozen statuesque attitudes. Obviously, the faster we set the strobe, the more the image corresponds to normal 'continuous' vision. Stroboscopic vision 'sampling' at the bat's cruising rate of about 10 samples per second would be nearly as good as normal 'continuous' vision for some ordinary purposes, though not for catching a ball or an insect. This is just the sampling rate of a bat on a routine cruising flight. When a little brown bat detects an insect and starts to move in on an interception course, its [rate] goes up. Faster than a machine gun, it can reach peak rates of 200 pulses per second as the bat finally closes in on the moving target. [...]

If we may imagine bat brains as building up an image of the world analogous to our visual images, the pulse rate alone seems to suggest that the bat's echo image might be at least as detailed and 'continuous' as our visual image. Of course, there may be other reasons why it is not so detailed as our visual image. If bats are capable of boosting their sampling rates to 200 pulses per second, why don't they keep this up all the time? Since they evidently have a rate control 'knob' on their 'stroboscope', why don't they turn it permanently to maximum, thereby keeping their perception of the world at its most acute, all the time, to meet any emergency? One reason is that these high rates are suitable only for near targets. If a pulse follows too hard on the heels of its predecessor it gets mixed up with the echo of its predecessor returning from a distant target. Even if this weren't so, there would probably be good economic reasons for not keeping up the maximum pulse rate all the time. It must be costly producing loud ultrasonic pulses, costly in energy, costly in wear and tear on voice and ears, perhaps costly in computer time. A brain that is processing 200 distinct echoes per second might not find surplus capacity for thinking about anything else. Even the ticking-over rate of about 10 pulses per second is probably quite costly, but much less so than the maximum rate of 200 per second. An individual bat that boosted its tickover rate would pay an additional price in energy, etc., which would not be justified by the increased sonar acuity. [...] When the salient vicinity includes another moving object, particularly a flying insect twisting and turning and diving in a desperate attempt to shake off its pursuer, the extra benefit to the bat of increasing its sample rate more than justifies the increased cost. 

Of course, the considerations of cost and benefit in this paragraph are all surmise, but something like this almost certainly must be going on. The engineer who sets about designing an efficient sonar or radar device soon comes up against a problem resulting from the need to make the pulses extremely loud. They have to be loud because when a sound is broadcast its wavefront advances as an ever-expanding sphere. The intensity of the sound is distributed and, in a sense, 'diluted' over the whole surface of the sphere. The surface area of any sphere is proportional to the radius squared. The intensity of the sound at any particular point on the sphere therefore decreases, not in proportion to the distance (the radius) but in proportion to the square of the distance from the sound source, as the wavefront advances and the sphere swells. This means that the sound gets quieter pretty fast, as it travels away from its source, in this case the bat. When this diluted sound hits an object, say a fly, it bounces off the fly. This reflected sound now, in its turn, radiates away from the fly in an expanding spherical wavefront. For the same reason as in the case of the original sound, it decays as the square of the distance from the fly. By the time the echo reaches the bat again, the decay in its intensity is proportional, not to the distance of the fly from the bat, not even to the square of that distance, but to something more like the square of the square - the fourth power, of the distance. This means that it is very very quiet indeed. The problem can be partially overcome if the bat beams the sound by means of the equivalent of a megaphone, but only if it already knows the direction of the target. In any case, if the bat is to receive any reasonable echo at all from a distant target, the outgoing squeak as it leaves the bat must be very loud indeed, and the instrument that detects the echo, the ear, must be highly sensitive to very quiet sounds - the echoes. 

Bat cries, as we have seen, are indeed often very loud, and their ears are very sensitive. Now here is the problem that would strike the engineer trying to design a bat-like machine. If the microphone, or ear, is as sensitive as all that, it is in grave danger of being seriously damaged by its own enormously loud outgoing pulse of sound. It is no good trying to combat the problem by making the sounds quieter, for then the echoes would be too quiet to hear. And it is no good trying to combat that by making the [ear] more sensitive, since this would only make it more vulnerable to being damaged by the, albeit now slightly quieter, outgoing sounds! It is a dilemma inherent in the dramatic difference in intensity between outgoing sound and returning echo, a difference that is inexorably imposed by the laws of physics. What other solution might occur to the engineer? 

When an analogous problem struck the designers of radar in the Second World War, they hit upon a solution which they called 'send/receive' radar. The radar signals were sent out in necessarily very powerful pulses, which might have damaged the highly sensitive aerials (American 'antennas') waiting for the faint returning echoes. The 'send/receive' circuit temporarily disconnected the receiving aerial just before the outgoing pulse was about to be emitted, then switched the aerial on again in time to receive the echo. Bats developed 'send/receive' switching technology long long ago, probably millions of years before our ancestors came down from the trees. It works as follows. In bat ears, as in ours, sound is transmitted from the eardrum to the microphonic, sound-sensitive cells by means of a bridge of three tiny bones known (in Latin) as the hammer, the anvil and the stirrup, because of their shape. [...] What matters here is that some bats have well-developed muscles attached to the stirrup and to the hammer. When these muscles are contracted the bones don't transmit sound so efficiently - it is as though you muted a microphone by jamming your thumb against the vibrating diaphragm. The bat is able to use these muscles to switch its ears off temporarily. The muscles contract immediately before the bat emits each outgoing pulse,thereby switching the ears off so that they are not damaged by the loud pulse. Then they relax so that the ear returns to maximal sensitivity just in time for the returning echo. This send/receive switching system works only if split-second accuracy in timing is maintained. The bat called Tadarida is capable of alternately contracting and relaxing its switching muscles 50 times per second, keeping in perfect synchrony with the machine gun-like pulses of ultrasound. [...]

The next problem that might occur to our engineer is the following. If the sonar device is measuring the distance of targets by measuring the duration of silence between the emission of a sound and its returning echo - the method which Rousettus, indeed, seems to be using - the sounds would seem to have to be very brief, staccato pulses. A long drawn-out sound would still be going on when the echo returned, and, even if partially muffled by send/receive muscles, would get in the way of detecting the echo. Ideally, it would seem, bat pulses should be very brief indeed. But the briefer a sound is, the more difficult it is to make it energetic enough to produce a decent echo. We seem to have another unfortunate trade-off imposed by the laws of physics. Two solutions might occur to ingenious engineers, indeed did occur to them when they encountered the same problem, again in the analogous case of radar. Which of the two solutions is preferable depends on whether it is more important to measure range (how far away an object is from the instrument) or velocity (how fast the object is moving relative to the instrument). 

The first solution is that known to radar engineers as chirp radar. We can think of radar signals as a series of pulses, but each pulse has a so-called carrier frequency. [...] The special feature of chirp radar is that it does not have a fixed carrier frequency during each shriek. Rather, the carrier frequency swoops up or down about an octave. [...] The advantage of chirp radar, as opposed to the fixed pitch pulse, is the following. It doesn't matter if the original chirp is still going on when the echo returns. They won't be confused with each other. This is because the echo being detected at any given moment will be a reflection of an earlier part of the chirp, and will therefore have a different pitch. Human radar designers have made good use of this ingenious technique. Is there any evidence that bats have 'discovered' it too, just as they did the send/receive system? Well, as a matter of fact, numerous species of bats do produce cries that sweep down, usually through about an octave, during each cry. These wolf-whistle cries are known as frequency modulated (FM). They appear to be just what would be required to exploit the 'chirp radar' technique. However, the evidence so far suggests that bats are using the technique, not to distinguish an echo from the original sound that produced it, but for the more subtle task of distinguishing echoes from other echoes. A bat lives in a world of echoes from near objects, distant objects and objects at all intermediate distances. It has to sort these echoes out from each other. If it gives downward-swooping, wolf-whistle chirps, the sorting is neatly done by pitch. When an echo from a distant object finally arrives back at the bat, it will be an 'older' echo than an echo that is simultaneously arriving back from a near object. It will therefore be of higher pitch. When the bat is faced with clashing echoes from several objects, it can apply the rule of thumb: higher pitch means farther away. 

The second clever idea that might occur to the engineer, especially one interested in measuring the speed of a moving target, is to exploit what physicists call the Doppler Shift. [...] The Doppler Shift occurs whenever a source of sound (or light or any other kind of wave) and a receiver of that sound move relative to one another. [...I]f we ride fast on a motorbike past a wailing factory siren, when we are approaching the factory the pitch will be raised: our ears are, in effect, gobbling up the [sound] waves at a faster rate than they would if we just sat still. By the same kind of argument, when our motorbike has passed the factory and is moving away from it, the pitch will be lowered. If we stop moving we shall hear the pitch of the siren as it actually is, intermediate between the two Doppler-shifted pitches. It follows that if we know the exact pitch of the siren, it is theoretically possible to work out how fast we are moving towards or away from it simply by listening to the apparent pitch and comparing it with the known 'true' pitch. The same principle works when the sound source is moving and the hstener is still. [...] It is relative motion that matters, and as far as the Doppler Effect is concerned it doesn't matter whether we consider the sound source to be moving past the ear, or the ear moving past the sound source. [...] The Doppler Effect is used in police radar speed-traps for motorists. A static instrument beams radar signals down a road. The radar waves bounce back off the cars that approach, and are registered by the receiving apparatus. The faster a car is moving, the higher is the Doppler shift in frequency. By comparing the outgoing frequency with the frequency of the returning echo the police, or rather their automatic instrument, can calculate the speed of each car. If the police can exploit the technique for measuring the speed of road hogs, dare we hope to find that bats use it for measuring the speed of insect prey? The answer is yes. 

The small bats known as horseshoe bats have long been known to emit long, fixed-pitch hoots rather than staccato clicks or descending wolf-whistles. When I say long, I mean long by bat standards. The 'hoots' are still less than a tenth of a second long. And there is often a 'wolf-whistle' tacked onto the end of each hoot, as we shall see. Imagine, first, a horseshoe bat giving out a continuous hum of ultrasound as it flies fast towards a still object, like a tree. The wavefronts will hit the tree at an accelerated rate because of the movement of the bat towards the tree. If a microphone were concealed in the tree, it would 'hear' the sound Doppler-shifted upwards in pitch because of the movement of the bat. There isn't a microphone in the tree, but the echo reflected back from the tree will be Doppler-shifted upwards in pitch in this way. Now, as the echo wavefronts stream back from the tree towards the approaching bat, the bat is still moving fast towards them. Therefore there is a further Doppler shift upwards in the bat's perception of the pitch of the echo. The movement of the bat leads to a kind of double Doppler shift, whose magnitude is a precise indication of the velocity of the bat relative to the tree. By comparing the pitch of its cry with the pitch of the returning echo, therefore, the bat (or rather its on-board computer in the brain) could, in theory, calculate how fast it was moving towards the tree. This wouldn't tell the bat how far away the tree was, but it might still be very useful information, nevertheless. If the object reflecting the echoes were not a static tree but a moving insect, the Doppler consequences would be more complicated, but the bat could still calculate the velocity of relative motion between itself and its target, obviously just the kind of information a sophisticated guided missile like a hunting bat needs. 

Actually some bats play a trick that is more interesting than simply emitting hoots of constant pitch and measuring the pitch of the returning echoes. They carefully adjust the pitch of the outgoing hoots, in such a way as to keep the pitch of the echo constant after it has been Doppler-shifted. As they speed towards a moving insect, the pitch of their cries is constantly changing, continuously hunting for just the pitch needed to keep the returning echoes at a fixed pitch. This ingenious trick keeps the echo at the pitch to which their ears are maximally sensitive - important since the echoes are so faint. They can then obtain the necessary information for their Doppler calculations, by monitoring the pitch at which they are obliged to hoot in order to achieve the fixed-pitch echo. I don't know whether man-made devices, either sonar or radar, use this subtle trick. But on the principle that most clever ideas in this field seem to have been developed first by bats, I don't mind betting that the answer is yes. It is only to be expected that these two rather different techniques, the Doppler shift technique and the 'chirp radar' technique, would be useful for different special purposes. Some groups of bats specialize in one of them, some in the other. Some groups seem to try to get the best of both worlds, tacking an FM 'wolf-whistle' onto the end (or sometimes the beginning) of a long, constant-frequency 'hoot'. [...]

Human experimenters have found it surprisingly difficult to put bats off their stride by playing loud artificial ultrasound at them. With hindsight one might have predicted this. Bats must have come to terms with the jamming-avoidance problem long ago. Many species of bats roost in enormous aggregations, in caves that must be a deafening babel of ultrasound and echoes, yet the bats can still fly rapidly about the cave, avoiding the walls and each other in total darkness. How does a bat keep track of its own echoes, and avoid being misled by the echoes of others? The first solution that might occur to an engineer is some sort of frequency coding: each bat might have its own private frequency, just like separate radio stations. To some extent this may happen, but it is by no means the whole story. How bats avoid being jammed by other bats is not well understood, but an interesting clue comes from experiments on trying to put bats off. It turns out that you can actively deceive some bats if you play back to them their own cries with an artificial delay. Give them, in other words, false echoes of their own cries. It is even possible, by carefully controlling the electronic apparatus delaying the false echo, to make the bats attempt to land on a 'phantom' ledge. I suppose it is the bat equivalent of looking at the world through a lens. It seems that bats may be using something that we could call a 'strangeness filter'. Each successive echo from a bat's own cries produces a picture of the world that makes sense in terms of the previous picture of the world built up with earlier echoes. If the bat's brain hears an echo from another bat's cry, and attempts to incorporate it into the picture of the world that it has previously built up, it will make no sense. It will appear as though objects in the world have suddenly jumped in various random directions. Objects in the real world do not behave in'such a crazy way, so the brain can safely filter out the apparent echo as background noise. If a human experimenter feeds the bat artificially delayed or accelerated 'echoes' of its own cries, the false echoes will make sense in terms of the world picture that the bat has previously built up. The false echoes are accepted by the strangeness filter because they are plausible in the context of the previous echoes. They cause objects to seem to shift in position by only a small amount, which is what objects plausibly can be expected to do in the real world. The.bat's brain relies upon the assumption that the world portrayed by any one echo pulse will be either the same as the world portrayed by previous pulses, or only slightly different: the insect being tracked may have moved a little, for instance. [...] 

If you want to share a bat's experience, it is almost certainly grossly misleading to go into a cave, shout or bang two spoons together, consciously time the delay before you hear the echo, and calculate from this how far the wall must be. That is no more what it is like to be a bat than the following is a good picture of what it is like to see colour: use an instrument to measure the wavelength of the light that is entering your eye: if it is long, you are seeing red, if it is short you are seeing violet or blue. It happens to be a physical fact that the light that we call red has a longer wavelength than the light that we call blue. Different wavelengths switch on the red-sensitive and the blue-sensitive photocells in our retinas. But there is no trace of the concept of wavelength in our subjective sensation of the colours. Nothing about 'what it is like' to see blue or red tells us which light has the longer wavelength. If it matters (it usually doesn't), we just have to remember it, or (what I always do) look it up in a book. Similarly, a bat perceives the position of an insect using what we call echoes. But the bat surely no more thinks in terms of delays of echoes when it perceives an insect, than we think in terms of wavelengths when we perceive blue or red. Indeed, if I were forced to try the impossible, to imagine what it is like to be a bat, I would guess that echolocating, for them, might be rather like seeing for us. We are such thoroughly visual animals that we hardly realize what a complicated business seeing is. Objects are 'out there'; and we think that we 'see' them out there. But I suspect that really our percept is an elaborate computer model in the brain, constructed on the basis of information coming from out there, but transformed in the head into a form in which that information can be used. Wavelength differences in the light out there become coded as 'colour' differences in the computer model in the head. Shape and other attributes are encoded in the same kind of way, encoded into a form that is convenient to handle. The sensation of seeing is, for us, very different from the sensation of hearing, but this cannot be'directly due to the physical differences between light and sound. Both light and sound are, after all, translated by the respective sense organs into the same kind of nerve impulses. It is impossible to tell, from the physical attributes of a nerve impulse, whether it is conveying information about light, about sound or about smell. The reason the sensation of seeing is so different from the sensation of hearing and the sensation of smelling is that the brain finds it convenient to use different kinds of internal model of the visual world, the world of sound and the world of smell. It is because we internally use our visual information and our sound information in different ways and for different purposes that the sensations of seeing and hearing are so different. It is not directly because of the physical differences between light and sound. But a bat uses its sound information for very much the same kind of purpose as we use our visual information. It uses sound to perceive, and continuously update its perception of, the position of objects in three-dimensional space, just as we use light. The type of internal computer model that it needs, therefore, is one suitable for the internal representation of the changing positions of objects in threedimensional space. My point is that the form that an animal's subjective experience takes will be a property of the internal computer model. That model will be designed, in evolution, for its suitability for useful internal representation, irrespective of the physical stimuli that come to it from outside. Bats and we need the same kind of internal model for representing the position of objects in three-dimensional space. The fact that bats construct their internal model with the aid of echoes, while we construct ours with the aid of light, is irrelevant. That outside information is, in any case, translated into the same kind of nerve impulses on its way to the brain. »

— The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design, Richard Dawkins

[xtruss]

Donald Trump

Trump White House Tried to Play Down US Injuries in Attack By Iran, Says Ex-Official

Alyssa Farah says she was pressured to delay reporting of injuries to more than 100 US troops in Iraq from attack avenging Qassem Suleimani

— Julian Borger in Washington

— Thursday, 09 September 2021 | The Guardian USA

Mourners attend a funeral ceremony for Qassem Suleimani in January last year in Tehran. The Trump White House wanted to play down injuries to US troops in reprisals by Iran, a former defense spokeswoman has said. Photograph: Majid Saeedi/Getty Images

Donald Trump’s White House asked the Pentagon to play down and delay reports of brain injuries suffered by US troops from an Iranian missile attack on Iraq last year, according to a former defense spokeswoman.

Alyssa Farah said she fended off the pressure from the White House, which came after Trump had first claimed there had been no casualties and then dismissed the injuries as “headaches” and “not very serious”.

More than 100 US troops were ultimately diagnosed as having suffered traumatic brain injuries in the missile attack on two bases in Iraq housing US troops on 8 January 2020, launched by Tehran in retaliation for the US drone killing of Revolutionary Guard general Qassem Suleimani five days earlier.

Roughly 80% of the American casualties from the missile attack were able to return to duty within days, but dozens had to be evacuated to Germany and then the US for treatment.

Farah described the attack as the “heaviest several hours of my life” in an interview with a new podcast, One Decision, hosted by former CNN journalist Michelle Kosinski and the former head of Britain’s MI6 intelligence agency, Sir Richard Dearlove.

Farah, who went on to work in the White House, said that when Trump claimed there had been no casualties in the wake of the attack it was “true at the time that we gave those facts to the president”.

But she added: “I think where things got shaky was there was an effort from the White House to want to say, this was not successful – the Iranians were not successful in harming our targets in response. And I think that went too far.

“And I think that it ended up glossing over what ended up being very significant injuries on US troops after the fact,” Farah told the podcast, due to air on Thursday.

She said it was Pentagon policy to release the facts as they arrived and were verified, and as a result the total reported number of casualties climbed throughout January 2020, irritating the White House.

“We did get pushback from the White House of, ‘Can you guys report this differently? Can it be every 10 days or two weeks, or we do a wrap-up after the fact?’” Farah said. “The White House would prefer if we did not give regular updates on it. It was this drip, drip of quote unquote bad news.”

Farah said she did not give in to the pressure, saying: “My feeling was, if my experience had taught me anything, transparency is always going to be your best friend in that field.”

The killing of Suleimani, as his car was leaving Baghdad airport on his arrival in Iraq on 3 January 2020, was highly controversial. The UN’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings at the time, Agnes Callamard, deemed it an “unlawful killing” because Washington had not provided sufficient evidence of an imminent threat from Suleimani.

Four days before the air strike a mob of Shia militiamen and their supporters breached the compound of the US embassy in Baghdad before being persuaded to withdraw. After Suleimani was killed the then US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, claimed there was evidence Suleimani was planning an “imminent” attack against US embassies and bases, and Trump said later there was a plot “to blow up our embassy”. But members of Congress said there was no such claim in their intelligence briefing on the drone strike. Pompeo later said the strike was aimed at “deterrence”.

Farah insisted there was “extremely credible, thoroughly planned potential to harm US and coalition partners”.

“The ‘imminence’ is really the word that I think folks would get hung up on how immediate it was,” she added. Farah said she advised the top officials at the Pentagon not to base the justification solely on the claim of imminent attacks but because “we had a terrorist on the battlefield in Iraq and an extremely bold thing for this leader to be doing, watching the Green Zone be attacked from the ground in Iraq”.

US legal opinion is divided on the Suleimani strike. Some scholars said it was justified by the Iranian general’s role across the region of orchestrating attacks on the US and its allies. Others argue that does not provide sufficient cause under international law, because there was no declared state of war between the US and Iran.

“I believe that it was in violation of international law because we were not at war with Iran,” said Gary Solis, a retired marine, former adjunct professor at West Point military academy, and author of 2006 book the Law of Armed Conflict. “Not only were we not at war with Iran, but where we killed him was in a state with which we are not at war. So what authority did we have to kill him?”

[alpha-copy-alpha]

Best PC Games of The Decade

When it comes to PC games, everyone has their own choice of games which they have been playing since their childhood, and when you ask them the reasons for their affection towards those games, they will certainly tell you about the graphics, missions, and the well-organized plot of the games. PC games have evolved a lot in terms of their gameplay and graphics. There is already a vast number of companies that are working on making PC games more and more advanced so that they can get a better response from the audience. Some of these PC games have already got released with new modes in the recent versions, but the ones launched earlier still rule and are above all other latest versions because they have left an everlasting impression on the player’s mind and soul. In this article, we will talk about some of the best PC games ever made, which got huge popularity in terms of their gameplay and graphics. Even though not all games are from this decade only, some of them are from earlier years too. But we think they also must be included in this list of the PC Games of this Decade because they are still loved by an enormous number of users and played the same way, they were played earlier.

CS: GO

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is the fourth game in the CS series which got released in 2012 for almost all the platforms. Valve and Hidden Path Entertainment developed it. It is a multiplayer game where two teams clash to eliminate each other’s players. The players have to complete the objectives in the game to win. The tasks include planting or defusing the bombs, aiming the targets, rescuing your players and so on. There are nine game modes in this game which can be selected for playing. The player can make in-app purchases for weapons like pistols, guns, grenades, rifles and machine guns.

Minecraft

This game went on sale even before it was fully developed as the developers decided to sell it. They informed the users about the price hike of the game in future and promised the buyers that if they purchase the game at the instance, they will get the future updates at no cost. Since this announcement, the sales of the game have increased at an enormous rate, and it sold around 10 million copies by 2013. Later in 2014, the developers sold the game to Microsoft. Since then, it became the best-selling video game ever. The game has already sold 180 million copies worldwide.

Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood

Developed by Ubisoft, this game is an action-adventure game. This is the third game in the Assassin’s Creed Series by Ubisoft. The game is based on the conflicts between the Assassins who are fighting for peace and the Templars who desire to control everyone. The game is played in a third player based on eliminating targets and to explore the environment. It has also received numerous awards for Best Action Games ever made.

Arma 2

This game is based on survival and battle royale. Several technical issues arrived in the game which were later on fixed. Arma 2 is an open world military-based game developed by Bohemia Interactive. This game is compatible with running on Windows. The game is focused mainly on combat situations where the game player commands his squad members on how to proceed further strategically in the region ahead. The game is set in the atmospheres of Eastern European state which has a beautiful landscape. Arma 2 features around 80 weapons which include assault rifles, missile launchers and machine guns and there are around 130 vehicles of land and air, which can be controlled by the player. In all, this game is for those who love playing games related to battle and survival.

EVE Online

It is one of the best science fiction games where you can experience yourself as if you are living a life in a virtual society. In the game, you can become dictators, warlords, or a pirate destroying space truckers ships just for the sake of fun. This is a player-driven game where a player has to decide his next move, unlike other massively multiplayer online games where the player is given a mission to complete in a limited environment with limited player interactions. In this game you will meet many other players who are playing the game in real-time adjacent to you because everyone will be in the same universe as you are.

Farmville

With its initial release, it got around 80 million by 2010, which was a massive number. It is an agricultural environment based social networking game developed by Zynga. The gameplay is based on the particulars of the farmland management techniques, which includes various aspects of harvesting crops, plowing land, planting and growing and livestock raising. The game became one of the most popular after it was launched on Facebook in 2009, and by 2012 it became the seventh most popular game on Facebook. The mission of the player in this game is to develop an empty unfertile land into a well-developed and fertile agricultural land. The game has various levels. And as the player gets more and more progress, he can sell his products in the virtual market where he gets the price in exchange for his products. This way, he will level up in the game.

David Maxwell is a creative person who has been writing blogs and articles about cyber security. He writes about the latest updates regarding McAfee.com/activate and how it can improve the work experience of users. His articles have been published in many popular e-magazines, blogs and websites.

source: Best PC Games of The Decade

[bountyofbeads]

Esper Says He Didn’t See Specific Evidence Iran Planned to Attack 4 Embassies https://nyti.ms/2R7cxCk

You would think 🤔 the Secretary of Defense would have been briefed if this were true. Either Trump is lying 🤥 🤥 to the American people or Trump's minions are making this shit up as they go along, coming extremely close to getting us in a war with Iran and costing 176 innocent lives. It is shameful that this administration is so cavalier with our national security and that of our foreign service personnel and military members and their families. SHAME. SHAME. SHAME.

Esper Says He Didn’t See Specific Evidence Iran Planned to Attack 4 Embassies

President Trump had claimed that a planned attack on four American embassies was a justification for the strike on an Iranian general.

By Thomas Gibbons-Neff | Published

Jan. 12, 2020 Updated 3:49 p.m. ET | New York Times | Posted Jan. 12, 2020 |

WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper said on Sunday that he never saw any specific piece of evidence that Iran was planning an attack on four American embassies, as President Trump had claimed last week as a justification for the strike on an Iranian general that sent the United States and Iran to the brink of war.

“I didn’t see one with regard to four embassies,” Mr. Esper said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” But he added: “I share the president’s view that probably — my expectation was they were going to go after our embassies. The embassies are the most prominent display of American presence in a country.”

The muddled message on Sunday by Mr. Esper and other administration officials only added to the public debate over the Jan. 3 strike that killed Iran’s most important general, Qassim Suleimani, and whether there was appropriate justification for the killing. The administration has offered shifting rationales for the strike, first indicating that it was a response to an “imminent” threat and then backing away from that idea, before sporadically reclaiming it.

As critics, including some Republicans, in Congress expressed dismay, administration officials have in recent days often avoided offering specifics about what prompted the airstrike. But Mr. Trump said on Friday that part of the reason was that Iran was planning attacks on four American embassies.

Mr. Esper sounded more supportive of Mr. Trump’s claim in another interview on Sunday, on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

“What the president said in regard to the four embassies is what I believe as well,” he said. “And he said he believed that they probably, that they could have been targeting the embassies in the region.”

But appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” Robert O’Brien, the national security adviser, also played down Mr. Trump’s claim of specific, imminent threats to four American embassies in the region.

“Look, it’s always difficult, even with the exquisite intelligence that we have, to know exactly what the targets are,” Mr. O’Brien said. “We knew there were threats to American facilities, now whether they were bases, embassies — you know it’s always hard until the attack happens.”

“But we had very strong intelligence,” he added.

Senator Mike Lee of Utah, one of the administration’s most outspoken Republican critics after the strike, said on CNN on Sunday that he was “worried” about the quality of the information that national security officials were sharing with Congress and had not “been able to yet ascertain specific details of the imminence of the attack.”

“I believe that the briefers and the president believed that they had a basis for concluding that there was an imminent attack, I don’t doubt that, but it is frustrating to be told that and not get the details behind it,” he said.

Asked specifically whether administration officials had briefed Congress on Iranian threats to four American embassies, as they have subsequently claimed, Mr. Lee said he did not believe so.

“I didn’t hear anything about that,” he said. “Several of my colleagues have said the same. So, that was news to me, and it is certainly not something that I recall being raised in the classified briefing.”

Speaker Nancy Pelosi struck a similar tone, telling ABC’s “This Week” that “I don’t think the administration has been straight with the Congress of the United States” about the reasons for killing General Suleimani.

On “Face the Nation,” Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California and the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, accused the president and his top national security aides of “fudging” the intelligence around the Iranian threat.

“Frankly, I think what they are doing is overstating and exaggerating what the intelligence shows,” Mr. Schiff said.

He also disputed that Congress had been told about specific threats to American embassies, or other targets.

“There was no discussion in the Gang of Eight briefings that these are four embassies that were being targeted and we have exquisite intelligence that shows these are the specific targets,” he said, referring to the group of congressional leaders and Republican and Democratic leaders of the intelligence committees. “I don’t recall frankly there being a specific discussion about bombing the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.”

He added, “In the view of the briefers, there was plotting, there was an effort to escalate being planned, but they didn’t have specificity.”

The strike on General Suleimani, who was responsible for the killing and maiming of hundreds of American troops at the height of the Iraq war, prompted retaliatory strikes last week. The Iranian military launched 16 ballistic missiles at bases in Iraq where Americans are stationed, bringing both countries to the brink of war.

When the Iranian retaliatory strikes did not kill or injure anyone, both sides pulled back. But hours after the strikes, a Ukrainian airliner was shot down over Tehran, Iran’s capital, by Iranian air defenses, killing all 176 aboard. Iranian officials said the downing of the plane was “unintentional” and the result of heightened tensions in the region.

The Trump administration has also tried to keep up pressure on Tehran. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures” that new sanctions the administration had announced last week against Iran would target industries beyond its oil sector to pressure its government.

“This is all really about cutting off money, oil sales, other revenue that would be funding their terrorist activities and their nuclear weapons development,” Mr. Mnuchin said. “We don’t want to target the people of Iran.”

Despite the new measures, questions remain about the Trump administration’s ability to further ramp up sanctions on Iran after having already used such tools so aggressively.

Meanwhile, China has continued to buy Iran’s oil. The United States has been cautious about confronting China too forcefully amid trade negotiations, but Mr. Mnuchin said he had been pressuring the Chinese to cut off their purchases of Iranian oil.

“China is subject to sanctions just like everybody else,” Mr. Mnuchin said. “We will continue to pursue sanction activities against China and anybody else around the world that continues to do business with them.”

_____

Nicholas Fandos and Chris Cameron contributed reporting.

*********

‘I Lost My Legs’: Wounded in Iraq, He Sued Iran

Americans who lost limbs or loved ones in the Iraq war and fought to prove that General Suleimani played a role see justice in his death by a missile strike.

By Richard A. Oppel Jr. and Nicholas Bogle-Burroughs | Published Jan. 12, 2020 Updated 3:18 p.m. ET | New York Times | Posted January 12, 2020 |

MELVILLE, N.Y. — Chris Levi’s fellow soldiers were sure he was dead. The Humvee he commanded in Baghdad had been torn apart by a projectile, and so had his body. When he awoke several minutes later, he followed his training, trying to assess his injuries.

“I tried to wiggle my toes, and I couldn’t move them,” he recalled. Fearing he had been paralyzed, he reached down to feel his lower body. “It’s kind of hard to describe,” he said. “You could feel wet meat, and I knew I lost my legs.”

The device that nearly killed Mr. Levi in 2008 was an improvised bomb called an explosively formed penetrator, or E.F.P. — a weapon that blasted a teardrop-shaped slug of molten copper through the passenger door of his armored Humvee.

Though it was fired by Shiite militia members in Iraq, Mr. Levi has sought for years to hold another party responsible: Iran.

He and dozens of other soldiers injured during the Iraq war, as well as the families of hundreds of dead service members, have pursued justice in federal court. They sued Iran’s government in an effort to prove that the attacks that took their limbs and loved ones were aided by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Their fight was little noticed, with limited hope of recovering significant damages despite a ruling last year in their favor. Then another form of justice came this month, when an American missile killed the man they hold most responsible, Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani.

His name may not have been well known to most Americans, but the general had long been a focus of anger for many wounded veterans and families of those killed in Iraq. American officials have blamed General Suleimani for a campaign of roadside bombs and other attacks that they say killed hundreds of troops at the height of the Iraq war, which took the lives of nearly 4,500 American service members and left more than 30,000 wounded.

“He was the leader of the group that killed Dad,” Kelli Hake, whose husband died in an E.F.P. attack, recalled telling her 13-year-old son when she saw the news of General Suleimani’s death flash on television.

Since 2007, the United States military has said that Iran, and specifically the Revolutionary Guard’s Quds Force, commanded by General Suleimani, provided Iraqi militias with the projectile weapons and the training needed to use them.

Last week, as White House claims that the general was killed to ward off imminent attacks on Americans were called into question, the administration sought to bolster its justification for the missile strike by also focusing on his role during the Iraq war. President Trump said in a televised statement on Wednesday that General Suleimani had “viciously wounded and murdered thousands of U.S. troops.”

The claim that Iran was partly responsible for losses in Iraq is at the heart of the lawsuit filed in February 2016 by more than 300 wounded veterans or relatives of dead service members.

The plaintiffs say the attacks at issue all had something in common: specialized weaponry or other materials or support provided by Iran. Primarily, that meant components for E.F.P. weapons, one of the most lethal devices wielded against Americans during the war. Using an explosive charge to launch a dense metal projectile at several times of the speed of sound, they could punch through the armor of almost any military vehicle.

Ms. Hake said she was skeptical when lawyers first approached her about the lawsuit. Although she might never see much money, she said she decided to join as a way to bring attention to Iran’s role in the attacks on her husband and others.

“I want it to be out there and known,” she said. Her son, Gage, was a toddler in March 2008 when his father, Staff Sgt. Christopher Hake, was killed by an E.F.P. that pierced the fuel tank of a Bradley fighting vehicle, setting it ablaze.

Ms. Hake remembers feeling grateful that her son was too young to remember his father’s death, but also devastated that he would not remember his life. The death of General Suleimani brought some of those emotions back, she said, but it also gave her a feeling of relief.

“It’s not that he physically killed Chris himself,” she said, “but he was the one who put those motions into action.”

So far, the case has focused on six specific E.F.P. strikes that killed and maimed troops, including Mr. Levi and Sergeant Hake, in Baghdad between 2005 and 2009, as well as a January 2007 kidnapping operation carried out by militiamen in central Iraq that resulted in the deaths of five service members.

In 2018, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of United States District Court for the District of Columbia conducted a three-day trial to closely examine who was behind the seven attacks. No one showed up from Iran to defend the case, which the plaintiffs filed under a law that allows Americans to seek damages from other countries for deaths and injuries caused by torture, terrorism and related acts.

Mr. Levi, who was a specialist in the Army, took the stand and described the day that the copper projectile tore through his Humvee, shattering his right arm and slicing his legs off above the knees. Over the next two years, he endured more than 100 operations at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, where doctors fitted him for prosthetic legs and used a metal plate and screws to hold his arm and hand together.

Now, when he wants to play with his two small dogs, Marley and Remy, or when he expects a visit from his young nieces, Mr. Levi straps on a shorter set of prosthetics that give him a low center of gravity. “I love being able to throw those ‘feet’ on and be the same height as my nieces,” he said.

He also wears them when he hikes or wades into the ocean near his home on Long Island, which was built by the Stephen Siller Tunnel to Towers Foundation and is filled with amenities to help him live independently.

At the trial, Mr. Levi often engaged in what the judge described as “gallows levity.” But he sometimes broke down while listening to testimony about the deaths of other soldiers, including Sergeant Hake.

“I couldn’t stop crying, and I couldn’t leave,” Mr. Levi said, adding that it was important for the world to know what happened to them, and who was responsible. “It’s something other people needed to hear,” he said.

He added, “I’m lucky I only lost limbs.”

In August, in an initial ruling for the plaintiffs, Judge Kollar-Kotelly said that evidence gathered by United States military investigators and intelligence officials clearly showed that “material support” for the seven attacks she examined had “flowed through” General Suleimani’s Quds Force.

The general’s name appeared throughout her opinion, as she described the role he played as the head of Quds Force and the fact that he reported directly to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Now, in a new phase of the litigation, the judge is looking at evidence from more than 80 other attacks, most of them involving E.F.P.s, and will decide whether those strikes were also aided by Iran. Then a special master would recommend the amount of damages owed to each plaintiff.

There is little chance that Iran could be made to pay up directly. But plaintiffs like Mr. Levi and Ms. Hake may be able to receive money from a federal fund set up to compensate victims of state-sponsored terrorism, said their lawyer, Gary Osen.

Just how many troops were killed or wounded by Iranian-supplied weaponry during the Iraq war remains in dispute. The United States military said in 2015 that during a six-year stretch, E.F.P. attacks killed 196 American troops and wounded 861 others. More recently, the Pentagon has given an estimate of 600 American troop deaths from roadside bombs and various other attacks supported by Iran during the war.

Some experts, like Joe Cirincione, who was a longtime Democratic staff member in Congress, said evidence had never been presented to blame General Suleimani for 600 deaths or the “thousands” of casualties that Mr. Trump is now citing. But he said there was no question that Iran bears considerable responsibility.

“Can you pin every single E.F.P. attack on Suleimani? No, that’s going too far,” said Mr. Cirincione, who is now the president of Ploughshares Fund, a global security foundation. But, he said, “I’ve never heard anyone claim the Iranians did not supply these weapons.”

General Suleimani once sought to plead his innocence. In January 2007, the general told Jalal Talabani, the Iraqi president at the time, that his hands were clean, according to an American diplomatic cable later revealed by WikiLeaks.

“I swear on the grave of Khomeini I haven’t authorized a bullet against the U.S.,” the general said.

Patrick Farr, another plaintiff in the suit, does not believe him.

Mr. Farr’s son, Clay, a soldier on his first deployment in Iraq, was injured by a roadside bomb on the day he turned 21. The next day, he called his father from a hospital bed. It was the last time they talked. A week later, he was back in the field, and an E.F.P. struck the Humvee he was driving, killing him.

“He was all I had,” Mr. Farr said in an interview from California City, Calif. On the night the missile strike killed General Suleimani, he celebrated with his wife after reading the news on his phone.

“He changed our lives forever,” Mr. Farr said, adding, “I do take comfort that the last thing he heard was the sound of a United States missile coming down on his head.”

______

Richard A. Oppel Jr. reported from Melville, and Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs from New York. John Ismay contributed from Washington.

*********

U.S. to Expel a Dozen Saudi Military Trainees After Pensacola Shooting

A review did not find that the students aided the gunman, a Saudi trainee, but concluded that some had ties to extremist movements and others had pornography, a taboo in Saudi Arabia.

By Eric Schmitt and Thomas Gibbons-Neff | Published Jan. 12, 2020, 1:45 p.m. ET | New York Times | Posted January 12, 2020 |

WASHINGTON — About a dozen Saudi students training alongside the American military in the United States will be sent back to Saudi Arabia after a review that stemmed from the killing of three American service members at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Fla., last month, according to a United States official.

The review, first reported by CNN, did not find evidence that the Saudi students aided the gunman, who was himself a Saudi trainee, in the Dec. 6 shooting, the official said. But some were found to have ties to extremist movements, and others were found to possess pornographic material, something forbidden in the Kingdom.

In an appearance on “Fox News Sunday,”

Robert O’Brien, the national security adviser, did not provide any specific reasons for the expulsion of members of the Saudi military, citing an “abundance of caution” after the shooting, which also wounded eight.

“We’re being very careful,” Mr. O’Brien said. “Obviously, Pensacola showed that there had been errors in the way that we’ve vetted.”

Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper said on Sunday on the CBS program “Face the Nation” that the military was moving to address those lapses.

“I’ve signed out directives that address enhanced screening of all of our foreign students that address credentialing going forward, weapons policies, etc.,” Mr. Esper said. “So we’re doing everything we can.”

He declined to comment on the investigation.

The gunman, Second Lt. Mohammed Alshamrani, was killed at the scene of the attack by a sheriff’s deputy. He had arrived in the United States in 2017, taking language classes in Texas before starting strike-fighter training in Florida.

Officials believe he may have been influenced as early as 2015 by extremist religious figures. He was said to show videos of mass shootings at a dinner party before carrying out the attack and had visited several tourist sites in New York alongside other Saudi trainees.

After the attack, the Pentagon in December suspended all operational training for nearly 900 Saudi students across the country and ordered a full review for the thousands of international military personnel from more than 150 countries training alongside the American military.

Although helpful in building military relationships with countries around the world, the training programs have long been scrutinized for the vetting and security issues that often surround the training.

_______

Chris Cameron contributed reporting.

*********

Donald Trump Is No Dick Cheney (AND I VEHEMENTLY DISLIKE BOTH MEN FOR WHAT THEY HAVE PUT OUR COUTRY AND THE WORLD THROUGH!!!)

Republican foreign policy was once defined by clashing world views. Now it’s defined only by loyalty to the president.

By James Mann | Published Jan. 12, 2020, 3:00 p.m. ET | New York Times | Posted January 12, 2020 |

Mr. Mann is the author of the forthcoming book ““The Great Rift: Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, and the Broken Friendship That Defined an Era.”

At first glance, the recent drone strike ordered by President Trump against an Iranian general would seem to return Republican foreign policy to the George W. Bush era. Several elements of the attack reflected the approach to the world defined by Mr. Bush’s vice president, Dick Cheney: a belief in the efficacy of military force, the validity of pre-emptive attack and the determination to avoid seeking approval from congressional leaders. But on closer examination, such comparisons fail. In his foreign policy, Mr. Trump represents something wholly new.

The president’s recent actions underscore the fact that the Republican Party has no guiding principles; it has only Mr. Trump, who demands loyalty to himself as its leader. Nor does the party leadership have senior figures with long experience in foreign policy who might challenge Mr. Trump’s thinking. The Republican Party, which once served as home for a variety of clashing philosophies about foreign policy, has lost its moorings.

Consider the party’s history in recent decades and the contrast with where the party stands today. Over the past half-century, the Republicans had been loosely split between two approaches for dealing with the world. One was the traditional, alliance-centered internationalism that had held sway, for example, under President George H.W. Bush. The other was the hawkish unilateralism of the party’s neoconservatives, who had gathered strength during the Reagan administration.

During the George W. Bush administration, Secretary of State Colin Powell carried forward, if imperfectly, the ideas of internationalism; Vice President Cheney embraced many of the views of the neoconservatives. These two schools of thought came into acrimonious conflict over Iraq, Israel, North Korea and other issues.

Now, under Mr. Trump, the Republican Party has been transformed in such a way that neither internationalists nor neoconservatives hold influence in the White House. Mr. Trump has weaved, wavered and reversed course on foreign policy based on his views of the moment, and as he has, the Republicans have followed. The factional disputes that characterized the Bush years have been replaced by a single question: Are you loyal to President Trump or not?

There is no one to challenge Mr. Trump now. In contrast, consider the era of Mr. Cheney and Mr. Powell. Those two men were the most durable figures at the top of America’s foreign policy apparatus from 1988 to 2008, encompassing the end of the Cold War and its aftermath.

During those 20 years, Mr. Powell served for nine years under four American presidents as national security adviser, chairman of the Joint Chiefs and secretary of state. Mr. Cheney served for a total of 12 years as secretary of defense and vice president. The Trump administration has nothing comparable; indeed, not one of the senior leaders in the current administration, including the vice president, secretary of state and defense or national security adviser, has been involved at the top ranks in any previous administration.

Even the more experienced officials Mr. Trump initially appointed to senior foreign-policy jobs, like former Defense Secretary James Mattis and the former national security adviser H.R. McMaster, had spent less previous time in senior Washington positions than veterans of previous Republican administrations (who also included figures such as Brent Scowcroft and Robert Gates). And even these older hands — the “adults in the room,” as they were often called — left the Trump administration within two years.

Determined, experienced advisers can sometimes deflect a president’s worst instincts and ideas. While doing book research in the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, I ran across the astonishing fact that in the fall of 1988, well after the Iran-contra scandal was behind him, President Reagan secretly tried to revive efforts to pay Iran for the release of American hostages in Lebanon, and to forge a new relationship with Iran.

“We have billions,” Mr. Reagan told Mr. Powell, his national security adviser. But Mr. Powell was adamantly opposed to the idea and made sure it didn’t happen. (In the early 2000s, he was less strongly opposed to the idea of going to war in Iraq, the venture strongly supported by Mr. Cheney.)

It is tempting for liberals to assume that all their opponents on the political right are alike, or stem from the same source — and that therefore, Dick Cheney somehow led to Donald Trump. But that’s not correct; Mr. Trump’s origins, outlook and style are quite different from those of Mr. Cheney.

Mr. Cheney’s rise to power — indeed, his very persona — was based on a preoccupation with government processes and a familiarity with the national-security bureaucracies (call them the “deep state”) that Mr. Trump so often disdains. Mr. Cheney has at times voiced disapproval of some of the linchpins of Mr. Trump’s foreign policy, such as his dealings with Russia and North Korea. John Bolton, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, represented the last link in the top ranks of the Trump administration to the determinedly hawkish policies advocated by Mr. Cheney.

As for Mr. Powell, it is at this point hard even to recall how or why he identified himself as a Republican. Yet at the time the Cold War was ending, the Democrats were calling for a “peace dividend” that included substantial cuts in the defense budget, and Mr. Powell, working closely with Mr. Cheney, labored hard, and for the most part successfully, to resist those efforts.

Mr. Powell’s eventual alienation from the Republican Party was a result of the same forces and dynamics that would eventually propel the rise of Mr. Trump: nativism and hostility toward immigrants and racial minorities. When Mr. Powell appeared before the Republican National Convention in 1996, he made a plea for diversity and tolerance.

“The Hispanic immigrant who became a citizen yesterday must be as precious as a Mayflower descendant,” he told the delegates then. That speech was greeted by a smattering of boos. In 2008, when Mr. Powell announced he could not support the Republican presidential nominee (even though it was his old friend John McCain), Mr. Powell specifically cited the mood of Republicans who had claimed that Senator McCain’s opponent, Barack Obama, was a Muslim.

The Trump Republicans long ago abandoned Mr. Powell and virtually everything he stood for — and while it may seem less obvious right now, they have cut loose from Cheneyism, too. We can see the party’s absence of ideas or strategy in the current policies on the Middle East and North Korea.

The drone strike came alongside Mr. Trump’s purported effort to lessen America’s involvement in the Middle East. His personal diplomacy with Kim Jong-un of North Korea and President Vladimir Putin of Russia might appear to be in line with Mr. Powell’s emphasis on diplomacy — but under Mr. Trump, what has counted so far is only the word “personal,” not the diplomacy. As a result, the Republicans are left with no past and no ideas, merely a single man and his vagaries.

*********

[rainbow-cobra-blog]

Star Wars: Battlefront 2 - Release

There's an Ideal way to play Star Wars Battlefront 2's 40-player Galactic Assault mode. I haven't mastered it, but it is about maximizing the point value of every life and spending these points in the perfect way at the ideal time. "Man, I want more things to unlock Yoda" is something someone could say on TV to signify they're a gamer. I have said that multiple times. I am a mockery. However, I do enjoy it. I do need those points. If the effort's narrative were improved and the development system not so irritating, I might have liked Battlefront 2.

I am Mostly speaking about Battle Points, which are earned and spent mid-match to spawn as X-wings, AT-STs, leap troopers, Wookiees, and all sorts of other Star Wars combatants, including heroes and villains such as Yoda, Rey, and Kylo Ren. Your primary goal in any multiplayer mode isn't your team's objective, whether that is blowing up a giant transportation tank at Theed or stealing an AT-AT on Endor. It is earning those things so you can do some real harm.

When I have too few things to spawn as anything trendy, the race Playing as a regular trooper feels like being an extra in the movies, as you're likely to get smushed by walkers and also have your courage cauterized by lightsabers close to the conclusion of a match. It's fun to be a part of the spectacle, but the next time Darth Maul murders you that the pleasure wears off. Conversely, once I have spent things to spawn as a particular droid or a man on a speeder bike or Rey herself, my entire life becomes precious, and I become attentive--personalities are dominant, but not unkillable.

Every small Killstreak: more points! Every goal play: more things! I'm excited, sometimes frustrated, as I work to make a strong character, and then I get there, and I feel like a god who only found out he is mortal and so is extremely pissed off about it--scared to perish, but eager to crush stuff.Most of my time is invested as a regular trooper, however, and the primary shooting is more enjoyable in the effort, where the attention is all on spectacle (since it certainly wasn't about the narrative). There, many enemies are weak enough to kill in 1 headshot, while in multiplayer shields can take a beating, so making most kills feel nostalgic: my shot occurred to connect with someone whose shields were already at 20 percent. Along with the map layout, though beautiful, can result in some dull struggles. In the confined spaces most maps finally push both groups into-- room to defend, like the Mos Eisley Cantina--it's a lot of reckless charges and grenade spamming, or piling up on walls and playing peek-a-boo.

Every class has three special abilities, which Change in utility and fun. The Officer course can drop an auto-turret, but it is a puny small machine which makes very little difference--it feels pointless. The whistling sound impact loop that plays while it is equipped is sound adrenaline, and its lethality makes it much more entertaining than the stock blasters.

The most peculiar thing about the Battle Points mill is its impact on teamwork. Building a cautious approach as a squad isn't a reasonable thing to do in Battlefront like it is in the Rising Storm and Battlefield series. It is a race for points, and also in a race that you operate, usually directly in the objective (a jog that takes too long on many Galactic Assault maps) to lob a grenade and attempt to score some frantic kills before dying. From the Starfighter Assault area dogfighting manner, I find that players also tend to focus on player eliminations before objectives, which include fleets of AI controlled ships to assault and mines to ruin.

DICE creates an Effort to fix this: when you respawn, you are automatically placed into a squad, and playing near your squadmates makes you double Battle Points. But usually, my squadmates break off and do their things anyhow, or perish too quickly to help. They're hungry for those points, but it is a personal pursuit. I'm annoyed when someone catches an Ion Cannon before I could to burst the MTT on Theed because playing the goal earns points, and these points should've been mine. It doesn't make for cohesive groups.

Unlocking Luke

You will find even more points, known as Credits, a non-cash currency you Earn by playing matches and attaining milestones--the better you represent, the more Credits you receive.

Star Cards are a Largely dull method to produce your classes, ships, ground vehicles, and heroes more powerful (I'll refer to all these things as 'classes' from here on to make it simpler). They're like Call of Duty's perks, except you can equip three in a time each class so long as you have sufficiently leveled up that category, and lots of them are direct buffs. More wellness. Abilities recharge quicker. Increased primary weapon harm.

I Do not enjoy it, and I doubt I will no matter how much EA tweaks that the speed I get Credits or the expense of unlocking heroes such as Luke Skywalker. I don't want to quit matches to visit the 'career' page to gradually redeem Credits for each small milestone. I don't want to fight somebody whose TIE-fighter is numerically more potent than my ship.

A number of the Star Cards are trade-offs--exchange your sanity for a missile That locks on to vehicles, for example--and I don't have an issue with those. I also don't mind that new firearms and attachments require earning kills with a class, although it sure takes a long time. But I don't wish to poke through a hundred menu displays (not an exaggeration) equipping little upgrades which make my weapons cooldown quicker, and I do not wish to fight a participant who has.

It is a system that instills doubt, and They probably did, but how do I know their updated Star Cards weren't the difference maker? Did I mention you can update them? Sometimes you'll get Crafting Parts in loot boxes that can be used to make specific Star Cards you need, and upgrade current ones to make them stronger. It's too much.

When the premium currency was still accessible (microtransactions were temporarily eliminated On November 16), I did not feel much pressure to buy anything, because I earned those orbits I don't want at a good enough pace (I could unlock Luke when I need) and, frankly, I probably wasn't really becoming crushed because I'd like fewer Star Cards than more-skilled competitions. However, my difficulty isn't only that gamers could purchase electricity, though that's frustrating. It is that, to facilitate micro-transactions, development is slow, over-complicated, and unfun. I am skeptical that it will get more interesting and less problematic before the premium currency comes back unless it is overhauled and the returning micro-transactions use only for makeup.

The Effort

Outside of multiplayer and all that progression nonsense, the Four-to-five hour campaign is a pretty good time. The story is bland but well-acted and there are some amusing lines and entertaining cameos.

You primarily play as There is one special smash cut meant to demonstrate that Versio made a moral decision which I thought was a bug at first, because of how little persuasive she needed. It feels like a comic book that was drawn before it had been composed. Every other page includes an exquisitely-inked conflict we have to reach, so in between a few speech bubbles are full of to explain why our personalities are involved in it.

After a few missions, the characters all do precisely what they say They are going to do, and all agree with each other all the time. Their significant choices are made whimsically, and they mostly grow off-screen as we leap between the galaxy's famed battles. The dialogue itself can be amusing and smart, but the larger story is inconsistent as if large chunks were cut--except in one specific mission that slows down things.

Utilizing The Force using a lightsaber is suitably simple, and I awakened how it made me worry more about defeating a military with style than perishing. As a fanatic of this galaxy, it wouldn't make sense for a Stormtrooper to even scratch me, and there is a fun game to trying to create my playthrough canon, mixing up cool skills the way I think the character would. Holding down the perfect mouse button to auto-parry the same blaster fire I'd been hiding from in the preceding mission feels badass.

In assignments without space magical, However, Battlefront 2 is not too hard. In the singleplayer and multiplayer, the speedy fighter ships are trying to maneuver but get close enough, and my primary weapon will soft-lock on an enemy--so that I feel skilled at dogfighting. However, I'm not likely to do it with no targeting computer.

On the floor, I'm neither pinned to cover nor allowed to run around where I want. Just a couple of enemy types are spongy, and the remainder often goes flying through the air using a single grenade or headshot, which makes for proper-looking Star Wars battles. It strikes a pleasure balance between fragility and power, letting me perform with enough bravado to experiment, but not too much that I do not need to eye my shield meter and retreat to cover when sprinkled.

The major annoyance is that the checkpointed saves, particularly in the distance. Slightly too slow at destroying all the bombers because you moved off to explore before the prompt showed up? Do the entire segment over. Did a great job with the bombers but accidentally trimmed some debris? Start over. And as there's no ammo to discover on the ground--firearms generate heat which must be dissipated--there's disappointingly little to research the main route. In the first assignment's light stealth section, for example, corridors I was not supposed to return only led to closed doors.

I've encountered a few bugs, as well. The most Egregious was when I defended my grounded boat from endless waves of Enemies for many minutes--I wasn't counting--before realizing something Must be erroneous. A ramp was designed to fall a couple of moments in so that I could escape. At Least it occurred on the next attempt.

[u-can-makeadifference]

“A must read” before the Donald Trump–Kim Jong Un Summit on 27-28 of February 2019— An Essay on the Nuclear Tension Between North Korea and the U.S.--- On September 3, 2017, North Korea shocked the world when it detonated a 100-kiloton hydrogen bomb, producing a 6.3 magnitude earthquake. In the future this nuclear device would be mounted on a missile. The attached message to the U.S. was: It’s time to end your “hostile policy and futile sanctions”. This unprecedented demonstration of North Korea’s nuclear power came after President Donald Trump had warned the DPRK that any further threats would be met with “fire and fury like the world has never seen.”     This menacing scenario is but one in a series of the toxic hostilities between the U.S. and North Korea. In that same year, Trump announced he would be hitting the DPRK with the “heaviest sanctions ever imposed before”. Then he flexed U.S. muscle by test firing a Minuteman III ICBM, while continuing to conduct military exercises off the coast of the Korean peninsula. The naval operations were impressive, but extremely risky as they came at a time when Pyongyang was on full alert, and any military action could have been wrongly interpreted as a prelude to an attack on North Korea.     The malevolent statements and actions between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un would not be so troubling if it weren’t for the fact that both of these heads of state are sitting on nuclear weapons that are immensely more powerful than those that killed hundreds of thousands of people in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki explosions. And prior to 2017, I don’t think our military was that concerned about Kim Jong’s short-range missiles, and we certainly didn’t think he had the ability to reach the American mainland. But this notion vaporized when he successfully test fired the Hwasong-14 on July 4, 2017, and then the Hwasong-15, both long range ICBMs, the latter capable of reaching the entire U.S. continent.     The June 2018 Trump-Kim Summit – A Success or Failure? The Summit of June 12 brought with it great expectations for a new relationship between the U.S. and Kim’s regime. Though nothing was officially formalized, several points were discussed in the meeting. To begin with, both the U.S. and North Korea committed to establishing new relations between their countries to bring about peace and prosperity. And it’s believed by various sources familiar with the negotiations, that Trump had conveyed to Kim that he’d sign a peace declaration after the summit to give a formal end to the Korean War. A similar option called for U.S. and North Korean cooperation to build a lasting and stable peace regime on the Korean Peninsula; and in accordance, North Korea would work towards complete denuclearization; and last, the North agreed to transfer remains of American soldiers from the Korean War to the U.S. Prior to the 12 June Summit, Washington officials had urged President Trump to take a tough stand against the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, and to demand a complete removal of his nuclear missiles. But it was at that time that Trump began to tone down his rhetoric. He was no longer pushing for a CVID “complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization”, but had opted for a more diplomatic approach:  "We’re not going to go in and sign something on June 12… We’re going to start a process,“ he told reporters. Technically, in the interest of obtaining military leverage over North Korea, this change of attitude from the U.S. President seemed like an almost complete diplomatic failure. But in the interest of stabilizing the nuclear threat and working toward mutual peace, this could be seen as wise negotiating for reaching those goals.     Following the summit, concessions were made on both sides. Trump agreed to suspend the upcoming U.S.-South Korea military exercises; and his administration said it would refrain from dishing out new sanctions against North Korea as long as negotiations continued, adding that it would work together to build for peace on the Korean peninsula. Kim Jong Un took a couple of first steps at denuclearization by proceeding to blow up one of his nuclear sites, and then called a freeze on his nuclear and missile tests. So now, a few months’ later, political analysts are saying the points of the summit were vague and not substantial enough, and that Trump should have been better prepared for that important meeting with Kim Jong Un; that he should have made concrete locked-in requirements to assure the complete denuclearization of North Korea. Others believe the administration should now increase the sanctions, stating that Kim will not denuclearize until he faces tougher measures.     At the end of 2018 the sanctions against the DPRK had been ratcheted several notches and the response from the North was that U.S. sanctions are a ‘miscalculation’ that will backfire. Later on December 20th of that year, North Korea declared they would not denuclearize unless the U.S. removed its nuclear umbrella. North Korea’s nuclear Pandora box   The fighting ceased in Korea in 1953 when the U.S., North Korea, and the U.N. Command Delegation signed the Armistice Treaty. Because of the high expenditures of the war, the U.S. resolved to reduce its military force and economic aid to the ROK (South Korea). There was strong opposition to these decisions from the South Korean President who did not want the U.S. to diminish its shield of protection from his country. Probably because of this and other reasons, the U.S. decided they would have to deploy nuclear weapons to South Korea to make up for the removal of conventional forces and weapons. But there was a problem with this course of action. To introduce “new weapons” to South Korea, they would have to breach a key clause in the Armistice Treaty that had been signed by China, North Korea, the U.S. and the UN Command in 1953. And so we abrogated Article II, section 13-d of the Armistice Treaty, which prohibited the introduction into Korea of new armaments, such as nuclear weapons.       The presence of nuclear missiles in the South came as a strategic blow for North Korea who only counted on conventional weapons to deter any future hostilities with the R.O.K. and its powerful American defender. The D.P.R.K. panicked as they now feared the threat of nuclear attack from the U.S. missiles present in South Korea. They responded by digging out immense underground tunnels and structures as a protection against nuclear blasts. At this time North Korea also began seeking help from China and the Soviet Union to help them get started with their own nuclear missile program. A few years later in 1962, they constructed their first nuclear research center at Yongbyon, and by 2002 their nuclear program was in full swing, and several countries were alarmed and protesting. Their first missile test came in 1993 when they fired a Nodong-1 missile into the Sea of Japan. So in retrospect, we can assume that by being the first to introduce nuclear weapons on the Korean peninsula, that it was the U.S. who caused the nuclear Pandora Box to open in North Korea.     Other recent U.S. strategies and attitudes that may have made Kim Jong Un a little jittery, or maybe a lot, have been some of the military options we’ve had on the table. One of these being the idea of using a Libyan “decapitation” model to remove Kim’s regime. Another is talk of a preventive nuclear strike—this is when you start a nuclear war because you fear another nuclear state might attack you in the future, an action which goes against Article 2, Chapter VII, of the UN Charter. There have also been the U.S., South Korean war games—which are mock attacks on North Korean targets, and these have definitely kept Kim Jong on edge. And although U.S. nuclear weapons have been removed from South Korea in past years, the North Korean leader still considers his country vulnerable to attack from the U.S. nuclear umbrella that hovers over the Korean Japan area and beyond.     Consequently this modern North Korean warrior has given close observation to his current military disadvantages over the years, and has ultimately decided to update his Jingum swords for something bigger and more powerful, like nuclear tipped Rodongs, Taepodongs and Hwasongs. Some military sources have revealed that Kim Jong Un may now have as many as sixty or more of these missiles in his nuclear stockpile. The newest in his arsenal is the Hwasong-15 that has a range of 8,100 miles, more than enough to reach any city in the U.S. Now the big question in the on-going diplomatic talks is whether or not Kim Jong Un will allow for a complete denuclearization of his country, and pronto, as per the demands of John Bolton and other defense hawks in Washington.   BABOON AND THE TIGER – A PARALLEL OF NORTH KOREA AND THE U.S.?   A while back I watched an African wildlife video where a tiger was in hot pursuit of a baboon that was running desperately to escape. The baboon had seen the long sharp fangs in the jaws of the tiger and knew that if it didn’t run like mad, those sharp teeth would soon cut his life in pieces—and so it ran hard and fast until it found itself in a dead-end at the base of a mountain wall. The baboon knew it was trapped now—so it quickly turned and faced his foe. Spreading his arms in a threatening manner, he bared his fangs which were almost as big as the tiger’s and in no uncertain terms let the tiger know that if he was attacked, he was ready to retaliate. The baboon, the smaller of the two, knew that most likely he would go down, but not before he’d used his sharp fangs to inflict formidable damage to the tiger. Meanwhile, the tiger, seeing the baboon now facing him head-on, and brandishing a set of sharp menacing fangs, put the brakes on. Realizing that a direct attack was no longer viable, he began to move cautiously from side to side, trying to find a another way to strike the combative baboon. But no matter what strategic angle of attack the tiger analyzed, the baboon would snarl and bare its dagger-like teeth. The fangs looked mighty big and sharp to the tiger—and they proved to be enough deterrence for the tiger to finally back off and walk away, probably thinking it was too much of a risk to try and eat that little baboon.       My narration of this wild-life video may not be a fully accurate analogy of the current North Korean-U.S. missile crisis, but I think there are some aspects of it that we could benefit from. Kim Jong Un, as the baboon, may feel threatened and trapped by the U.S. tiger and its sharp nuclear teeth that could easily destroy it. Had the U.S. tiger found this Korean baboon early on, when it was still developing teeth, it might have been a different story. But now that North Korea has a fully developed set of nuclear teeth, teeth that could inflict widespread destruction to U.S. cities, it may benefit the U.S. tiger to rethink its military and political strategy as did JFK in the Cuban Missile Crisis, avoid a head-on nuclear war and go the safe route of deterrence.   How Reliable Is Our Missile Defense System? At present we have the Thaad system; Terminal High Altitude Area Defense to protect South Korea, Japan and Guam from North Korea’s missiles. But in August of 2017, the DPRK fired a missile over Japan, and the Thaad defense installations in Japan didn’t stop it. After the incident a Japanese official said, “We didn’t intercept it because no damage to Japanese territory was expected.” This was true as the missile had been programed to land safely out at sea. However, even if the U.S. or Japanese had launched interceptors, they would not have been able to stop the missile that had flown 475 miles over Japan. The existing arsenal of defense missiles cannot ascend to stratospheric levels.     Our defense interceptors are capable of hitting missiles on the way up or on the way down. The question then would be, why don’t we hit these missiles on their way up? But in order to accomplish that, a Navy ship equipped with Aegis would have to be stationed very close to the launch site, most likely right off the coast of the country that fired the missile. And of course that kind of maneuvering for a big ship takes time, and it wouldn’t have the luxury of just floating idly by, waiting to see if and when a missile would be fired. Even if we succeeded at sending out one of our missiles to stop the enemy rocket after launch, we’d have a missile chase, one which we’d probably lose, as it would be almost impossible for our rocket to reach the enemy missile as it soars into the atmosphere. Another con against knocking out a missile at the launch pad or on its ascend is the simple fact that we wouldn’t know if the missile was merely a test firing, or if it was actually aimed at Japan, Guam or an American city.     Now let’s take a look at GMD, our Ground-Based Midcourse Defense. This is our system to stop intercontinental ballistic missiles, ICBMs, aimed at the continental United States. The GMD is a complex defense system consisting of ground-based radars, satellite sensors, and interception missiles that can knock out incoming warheads. But there is concern as to the reliability of the system.     Kingston Reif, director of Disarmament and Threat Reduction policy at the Arms Control Association, said the following about the GMD. “The only system designed to defend the U.S. homeland, known as the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense system, has suffered from numerous technical and engineering problems, and testing in controlled conditions has not demonstrated that it can provide a reliable defense against even a small number of unsophisticated ICBMs.” The key words here are “controlled conditions”. In other words, situations where the test firing is pre-planned, knowing where the target missile is coming from, the size, angle of trajectory data, and the launch time, etc., in contrast to real-time battle conditions where there are only a few minutes warning, and multiple unknown factors to contend with.      Then again, in 2016 a Pentagon assessment indicated that the GMD program still had low reliability as far as knocking out incoming ICBMs. In an effort to break its poor track record, GMD conducted a live-test in May of 2017. An interceptor missile was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, and successfully destroyed a target missile. The hit raised the stats to nine successful tests out of eighteen since 1999, a 50 percent hit average in mock exercises. This is not an impressive performance record for a defense system that’s supposed to protect our cities in a nuclear war. However, it’s all we have for now.   WHAT WOULD A WAR WITH NORTH KOREA LOOK LIKE?   Jeffery Lewis, who is an American expert in nuclear nonproliferation and geopolitics, gives a chilling account of what could happen in a nuclear confrontation between North Korea and the United States. In his book, “The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against The United States”, Lewis depicts an imagined future with a nuclear exchange between the U.S. and North Korea. The writing is fictional, but everything that takes place in the book before August 7, 2018, including the supporting endnotes is true and based on actual events, says Lewis. In the narrative, our most feared nightmare emerges; a nuclear war breaks out between North Korea, the United States, and its allies. The story begins with the accidental shootdown of a South Korean passenger plane that had strayed into DPRK airspace and mistaken for a military craft. In retaliation, South Korea strikes back with six missiles aimed at specific targets, and then it begins. After analyzing the attack on his country, and slapped by a harsh tweet from Donald Trump, Kim Jong Un fears he can wait no longer. He gives the order for a nuclear strike on South Korean and American forces stationed in the south. Later, on the same day of March 21, as per the books chronology, American satellites warned our military that nuclear armed ICBMs had been launched by the DPRK, all aimed at the U.S. mainland.     The North Korean nuclear strikes, says the book, were carried out over the course of six hours. Of the thirteen missiles fired at the U.S., six managed to penetrate our defense shields. Two of the missiles veered off course and exploded off the coast of California, near San Diego. Another missile aimed at Mar-a-Lago, hit Jupiter, Florida. But then a direct hit devastated Pearl Harbor, while yet another struck Manhattan. Two other missiles fell on northern Virginia. The 200 kiloton nuclear weapons struck with a force twenty times greater than the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. In this fictitious scenario of March 2020, the lives of 1.4 million Americans were lost, and another 2.8 million were seriously wounded in the nuclear strikes from North Korea.       DO WE WANT PEACE OR WAR?   At their September summit of 2018, Kim Jong Un and Moon Jae-in made a historical move towards peace and agreed to a unification of their countries as they flew a blue united-Korean flag at the event. Then on November 29th of 2018, they further demonstrated their inter-Korean cooperation as a South Korean train traveled the rails into North Korean territory. This was definitely a sign of peaceful cooperation as such a thing had not occurred in ten years.     The events between the two Koreas accentuate statements made earlier in the year of both countries seeking to sign a peace treaty. When the Korean War ended in 1953 an armistice agreement was made to stop the fighting between North Korea and South Korea along with its powerful ally, the U.S., but this did not progress to the formal signing of a legal peace treaty. However, such a path of peace would not have been acceptable to the U.S. But even in spite of the wishes of Washington and our military, a strong union of peace and economic cooperation is already beginning to gel between the two Koreas. And why would such a peace agreement in Korea not be acceptable to the U.S.? Kim has repeatedly reached out to us, emphasizing the importance of formalizing a definitive declaration of peace between their country and ours. But our administrations over the years have set out pre-conditions before they accept any talk of a formal peace treaty with the DPRK. They want first of all, an open door to all the nuclear sites and missiles, the dismantling of all nuclear weapons, and in short, the complete denuclearization of the North.     North Korea wants a confirmation of peace, but before anything else, we want all of the above. What is obstructing the path to these goals? What is failing in our negotiations with the Pyongyang leaders? Why isn’t our policy of “Maximum Pressure” working? Why doesn’t North Korea allow us to go in there and destroy all their missiles and nuclear facilities? Perhaps we need to step back from the forest of our political and military demands and see with more clarity what the reality of our actions and expectations is. Let’s for a moment envision the interplay between the U.S. and North Korea as a movie-clip from a cowboy film; In act one we see the guy in white (U.S.) in a standoff against the guy in black (North Korea), and the guy in white says, “Drop your guns and I won’t shoot you!” Then the cowboy in black answers, “You said the same to the other two guys (Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi), and when they dropped their guns you shot them dead. In act two the cowboy in black says, “Why don’t we agree to settle this peacefully, then you drop your guns and I’ll drop mine.” Hopefully in act three both the cowboy in white and the cowboy in black will agree to forgo any gun shooting and end hostilities with a peace accord, and agree to not attack each other or any of their friends or neighbors.     CAN WE LEARN TO LIVE WITH A NUCLEAR NORTH KOREA?   At the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation, Scott D. Sagan life-streamed a talk entitled, “The Korean Missile Crisis: Why Deterrence Is Still the Best Option.” Scott begins by admitting that we’ve been unable to prevent North Korea from securing nuclear missiles, and that the DPRK no longer poses a nonproliferation problem, but rather a nuclear deterrence problem. And even though North Korea is an illegal nuclear state, we should nevertheless realize that it has become a nuclear state, and to think more deeply and creatively about ways to deter North Korea. He believes that the biggest danger now is that North Korea, South Korea and the U.S. could stumble into a war that could have catastrophic consequences.       Sagan reminds us that the world has traveled this dangerous path before; when in 1950 the Truman administration thought to implement a preventive nuclear strike to assure the Soviet Union would not acquire nuclear weapons. Then again in the 1960’s, the Kennedy administration, worried about the mental stability of Chinese leader Mao Zedong, proposed a joint strike against the Chinese nuclear program to the Soviets. Both of these ideas were rejected. The fear that this type of strategy would blow up into a conflict resembling World War II made the military opt for the safer ground of containment and deterrence. And in one of the most jarring statements of his speech, Sagan said that if “the United States learned to live with a nuclear Russia and a nuclear China…It can now learn to live with a nuclear North Korea.”                 Scott makes it known that at this point there is no longer a window of opportunity for a successful U.S. attack that could halt the North Korean nuclear program. He believes the U.S. military should make plain to their political superiors and the American public that any first strike on North Korea would result in a terrible loss of U.S. and South Korean lives. And that our leaders must assure Kim that the U.S. will not seek to overthrow his regime unless he begins a war.--- FEBRUARY 2019 TRUMP-KIM SUMMIT---WHAT WILL BE THE OUTCOME?  There is great speculation about the upcoming Trump-Kim summit which is tentatively scheduled to be in Vietnam, and which some are hoping will be a turning point. It is not likely that the administration will push for a full denuclearization of North Korea this time, and may accept a piece by piece strategy, but that is yet to be seen. And most likely we will emphasis the closure of the nuclear-processing plant in Yongbyon, as well as any other site that could be used to produce new fuel for nuclear bombs.     As for North Korea, we already know some of the items on their wish list. They have stressed their desire for a formal peace agreement; the removal of the nuclear umbrella and U.S. troops in South Korea and sanctions relief.     In one of Kim’s messages aimed at Washington, The Telegraph on January 1st said Kim is offering a gesture of peace but that it could be removed if the U.S. does not meet their expectations on the process of nuclear disarmament. But Washington is more interested in what they want and that is the complete denuclearization of the North. Many U.S. leaders still believe the first summit meeting nose-dived because it failed to secure a substantive agreement that would have assured the elimination of all of Kim’s nuclear weapons.     But now there’s a new ingredient in the Korean-U.S. missile crisis that was not a factor during the 2018 summit meeting. And namely, it’s the historical peace initiative birthed during Kim’s and Sun Moon Jae-in’s Korean summit where both leaders signed a peace accord as a first step to reunite their countries. This monumental peace summit portends to change the course of events in the Korean-U.S., social, economic, and military theater. With the peaceful unification of North and South Korea, there will be little, if any leverage left to sustain a U.S. military presence in South Korea, or even a nuclear umbrella. These military land and air strategies were crafted after the Korean War, with the express purpose of protecting and safeguarding South Korea from any military aggression or attacks from the DPRK. Briefly put, the existential purpose for any U.S. military/nuclear presence in or around the Korean peninsula region, no longer exists. Japan may object to this line of thought and say they still need to be protected from North Korea. But in effect, the peace initiative between the North and the South has removed the threat of hostility to any in the area, including Japan.       Presently the Korean peninsula is on a roll with their peace initiative, and now Kim Jong Un and Sun Jae-in have made another bold move towards consolidating that peace. They each walked across the Korean border into each other’s territory, something they had never done. At this point it would behoove the U.S., more than ever, to exercise their role as “Peace Keepers of the World”, and join this move for peace on the Korean peninsula, that is, if we haven’t already forfeited our right to the Peace Keeper of the World title. Credits: -North Korea detonates 100-kiloton hydrogen bomb. From article in QUARTZ - https://qz.com/1068659/north-korea-hydrogen-bomb-its-latest-claims/ -North Korea successfully test fires the Hwasong-14 on July 4, 2017 – From an article in THE DIPLOMAT - https://thediplomat.com/2017/07/north-korea-just-tested-a-missile-that-could-likely-reach-washington-dc-with-a-nuclear-weapon/ -North Korea test fires their new Hwasong-15 missile. – CNN - https://www.cnn.com/2017/11/29/asia/north-korea-hwasong-15-missile/index.html -Donald Trump’s “Fire and Fury”- From the Independent online newspaper. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-north-korea-fire-and-fury-like-the-world-has-never-seen-nuclear-threat-a7883386.html -At June 12 summit U.S. and North Korea commit to establishing new relations to bring about peace and prosperity. REUTERS - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-northkorea-usa-agreement-text/trump-and-kims-joint-statement-idUSKBN1J80IU -North Korea agrees to transfer remains of American soldiers from the Korean War to the U.S. - From Vox News - https://www.vox.com/world/2018/6/12/17452616/trump-kim-jong-un-north-korea-summit - Donald Trump statement: “We’re not going in there to sign something on June 12…” From article in The Guardian - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/01/kim-jong-uns-top-aide-delivers-letter-to-donald-trump -John Bolton suggests a Libyan model to handle situation in North Korea. CNN -  https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/30/asia/north-korea-bolton-libya-intl/index.html -Fighting stops in Korea in 1953 with signing of Armistice document- Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Armistice_Agreement -Kim Jong Un may have as many as 60 nuclear missiles. – USA Today - https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/10/02/north-korea-kim-jong-un-estimated-have-up-60-nuclear-weapons/1495480002/ -The U.S. breached Article II of the Armistice Treaty in 1958 when they set up missiles in South Korea. -Article from JSTOR -  https://www.jstor.org/stable/44080503?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents -Japan’s Thaad system could not have stopped North Korea’s missile that flew over their island. – Article from Defense One - https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2017/09/no-we-cannot-shoot-down-north-koreas-missiles/141070/ -(GMD- Ground-Based Midcourse Defense System) “… has not demonstrated that it can provide a reliable defense against even a small number of unsophisticated ICBMs.”  So says Kingston Reif, director of Disarmament and Threat Reduction policy at the Arms Control Association.                                        - https://www.foxnews.com/world/can-us-military-shoot-down-a-north-korean-missile -On November 29th of 2018, a South Korean train traveled the rails into North Korean territory for the first time in a decade. – New York Times -  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/29/world/asia/north-korea-train-south.html - Why Deterrence Is Still the Best Option- A speech by Scott D. Sagan at the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation. - https://vcdnp.org/the-korean-missile-crisis-why-deterrence-is-still-the-best-option/ -2nd Trump-Kim summit might emphasis on Yongbyon facility shutdown- Article in the HANKYOREH -       http://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_northkorea/880917.html -Kim Jong Un and Sun Jae-in walk across Korean border into each other’s country. – Associated Press -                  http://www.lowellsun.com/breakingnews/ci_31836660/kim-jong-un-steps-across-korean-border-makes An essay by Carlos A. Cedillo Author of “Myra and Joe”, and soon to be published “Defusing the North Korean-U.S. Missile Crisis”, a book based on the above essay.

[fapangel]

About that airfield plastered by Tomahawk last month. What are the factors that could've caused conflicting reports delivered by both the US and them Syrian/Russians? What errors could've been made when assessing the strike? Like, initial reports claimed 20 aircraft destroyed but the other side said it's only 9. Also how did they conclude that only 23 out of 59 missiles found their targets?

Let me try to explain something to you. 

Russians are liars. There are two kinds of Russian - the dictatorship-owned propagandist, and the average joe who’s been thoroughly brainwashed by said propagandists. I’ve seen Russians blame America for everything from sinking the Kursk (because there’s no fucking way their own incompetence could ever sink their fancy boats, no sir,) to trying to “invade Russia” by NATOizing all those ravening military superpowers on their borders like Estonia and Lithuania. I have watched these brainwashed, knuckledragging sycophant fucks parrot - word for word - the Russian government’s assertion that drone aircraft count as ground-launched cruise missiles and therefore violate the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty. In fact, I saw them doing it again a few weeks ago on SpaceBattles. 

I honestly find it alarming that you need it explained to you that state-run, state-controlled media - which is all the media in Russia and China - are the mouthpieces of dictatorships and nothing more. Even with objective journalism dead and fucking butchered in America, we, at least, still have a free press, where you’re free to weigh the alternative facts against Rachel Maddow’s latest lunacy-laden diatribe. It’s a return to the journalism America had for most of its history - where they were all fucking liars, but at least everyone was free to tell their own damn lies, as long as they could afford a printing press - and now even hobos can stagger into a public library and update a blog. In Russia or China, if you say something the government doesn’t like, they fucking kill you. They blow your fucking brains out. China is more orderly and structured with its brutality - they just put you in prison first, where the beatings, rapes, and eventual murders and widely-rumored organ theft can be conducted with prim and proper Asiatic discretion. In Russia, the bloom has been off the Communist Ideal ever since that thing over some wall, so they just fucking murder journalists that do actual journalism, straight to the fucking point. How could you not know about this? 

You seem to be asking - or at least, possessed of the good sense and decorum to ask - in a neutral, analytical fashion. But I’ve seen people - oh, oh so many people, and not just in that tard-pen /pol/, no, on actual forums where stupidity is connected to a username - hork up the fetid Russian propaganda and then hmmm and hrrrm over the vast differences, and how do you explain this dichotomy, and boy doesn’t that just activate your FUCKING ALMONDS.

I want to shake these shitheads like a minority baby. These people are the ones that give our media - and our politicians - the supreme and utter confidence that they can control us like rats in a fucking maze just by tapping the glass and waving the right treats. These are the people who can leave you sitting in your dark room in a daze, torn between the urgent, burning need to tell them to suck-start a shotgun and the sickening, hollow knowledge that it’s entirely pointless. As Twain once wrote; “h’aint we got every fool in town on our side? And ‘hain’t that a big enough majority in any town?” 

Does that answer your question, anon? 

[xtruss]

U.S. Retaliation for the Kabul Bombing Won’t Stop ISIS or End Terrorism

The central flaw in U.S. strategy is the belief that military force can eradicate extremist groups or radical ideologies.

— By Robin Wright

— August 27, 2021

ISIS-K may pay a physical price for its brazen attack at the Kabul airport, but it scored political and psychological points in the world of jihadism.Photograph by Juan Carlos / Hans Lucas / Redux

In April, 2017, the United States unleashed a twenty-two-thousand-pound bomb on a complex of caves and tunnels used by isis-k, or the Islamic State Khorasan, in eastern Afghanistan. Nicknamed “the mother of all bombs,” it was the largest non-nuclear bomb ever used in combat. It was so big that it had to be pushed out of the rear of a warplane. The bomb was so controversial that the Pentagon had to conduct a legal review to insure that it did not violate the international Law of Armed Conflict. “It is expected that the weapon will have a substantial psychological effect on those who witness its use,” the Pentagon said, in an evaluation of it in 2003.

Only it didn’t. The mother of all bombs killed fewer than a hundred of the group’s fighters, and had a negligible long-term impact on isis-k. (The “K” stands for Khorasan, the name of an ancient province that once included parts of modern-day Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran.) isis-k is now arguably the most militant group in Afghanistan. It has also carried out some of the country’s worst recent atrocities. In the first four months of this year, the jihadi extremist movement carried out seventy-seven attacks across Afghanistan, the United Nations reported. In May, a bombing at a girls’ school in Kabul killed ninety people, many of them students, and injured more than two hundred and seventy others. On Thursday, a lone isis-k bomber wearing a suicide vest walked to the perimeter of Kabul’s international airport and blew himself up. Thirteen marines and Navy personnel were killed; at least a hundred and seventy Afghans died. It was one of the deadliest attacks in more than a decade against the United States, the world’s premier military power.

Hours later, President Biden reflected the anger and agony of the nation when he vowed revenge against isis-k. “To those who carried out this attack, as well as anyone who wishes America harm, know this: we will not forgive,” he said, in a White House address. “We will not forget. We will hunt you down and make you pay.” Pressed on Biden’s comment, the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, said, on Friday, “I think he made clear yesterday that he did not want them to live on the Earth anymore.” On Friday night, Central Command announced that it had conducted a drone strike on an isis-k planner in eastern Nangarhar Province. “Initial indications are that we killed the target,” the statement said. “We know of no civilian casualties.”

The United States may indeed manage to kill more isis-k fighters and destroy some of their modest arsenal. But the central flaw in U.S. strategy is the belief that military force can eradicate extremist groups or radical ideologies. On Friday evening, a senior Biden Administration official acknowledged that the United States “can’t physically eliminate an ideology. What you can do is deal, hopefully effectively, with any threat that it poses.” Past Administrations have tried lethal strikes. In August, 1998, President Bill Clinton ordered Operation Infinite Reach, a series of cruise-missile attacks on Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and on a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan that U.S. intelligence erroneously linked to Osama bin Laden. The strikes were in retaliation for the bombings of U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed more than two hundred and injured more than four thousand. That U.S. operation had limited impact. Three years later, Al Qaeda operatives carried out the 9/11 attacks, killing nearly three thousand in the deadliest attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor. Despite the killing of bin Laden, a decade ago, the more skilled Al Qaeda fighters were the force multipliers in the Taliban’s sweep across Afghanistan this year.

“The bottom line is that kinetic action by itself cannot significantly counter terrorist organizations,” Seth Jones, a former adviser to U.S. Special Operations forces in Afghanistan, told me. “It is very limited in what it can do. It can disrupt operationally and take people out. But tactical and operational impact is very short-term.”

isis-k may pay a physical price for its brazen attack, but it scored political and psychological points among Sunni Muslim extremists and wannabe militants that will make it more popular in the world of jihadism. It could even come out ahead of where it was, experts warn. “Up until recently, before the U.S. withdrawal, isis-k had been relegated to the backwater of isis activity,” Jones, who is now the director of the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said.

isis-k was founded in late 2014 by disaffected members of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and later joined by members of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and other Central Asian militants. The United States has long tried to contain isis-k, as have both the (now defunct) Afghan government and the Taliban—it was the lone issue on which the three warring parties agreed. Since 2016, U.S. strikes have killed the movement’s first four emirs. In 2018, at its peak, isis-k was ranked as one of the deadliest terrorist groups in the world, and claimed to have up to four thousand fighters, Jones said. It has operated in Kabul and also in Nangarhar, Kunar, Jowzjan, Paktia, Kunduz, and Herat provinces. But, by the end of summer, 2018, it had been pushed out of much of northern Afghanistan. And in 2019, the group was “nearly eradicated” in its eastern strongholds, after a series of offensives by U.S., Afghan, and Taliban forces, the Congressional Research Service reported. At one point, the U.S. effectively provided air support for Taliban operations against isis-k. In November, 2019, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani boasted, using an alternate name for isis, “We have obliterated Daesh.”

Yet, today, Ghani has fled Afghanistan and isis-k has made a comeback. In June, the United Nations reported that isis-k remained “active and dangerous” in Afghanistan and a threat to the wider region. Shahab al-Muhajir, who became its emir last year, was positioning isis-k to be “the sole pure rejectionist group in Afghanistan, to recruit disaffected Taliban and other militants to swell its ranks.” Its core collection of fighters was estimated to be between fifteen hundred and two thousand, the U.N. report stated. On Friday, the Pentagon said that, as the Taliban swept across the country, thousands of isis-k fighters were freed from prisons, notably at Bagram Air Base, where the most hardened operatives were jailed.

With the withdrawal of the United States and all other nato forces, Afghanistan may now become a battlefield between the Taliban and isis-k, experts say. The senior Biden Administration official said that the United States would consider coöperating with the Taliban to contain isis-k. He predicted that isis-k would focus in the near term on regaining ground in Afghanistan rather than attacking U.S. targets. Both movements seek to create a single global Islamic caliphate, but they differ starkly in their tactics. The Taliban consider isis-k to be a terrorist group. Most of the isis-k attacks have been against soft targets, such as schools and mosques, or against rival religious sects, such as Hazara Shiites. It seeks to force allegiance. Its strategy is to recruit disaffected Taliban members and sow sectarian chaos. Rita Katz, of the site Intelligence Group, told me that it wants to counter the widely held notion among Islamists and jihadists “that the Taliban defeated America, instead framing the Taliban as an agent of the Americans and its takeover of Afghanistan as part of an American-made plan.” In a recent issue of Al-Naba, a newspaper released by isis, the group wrote, “What happened is nothing more than replacing a shaven tyrant with a bearded [tyrant].”

The Taliban, with at least seventy thousand fighters, far outnumber isis-k, which is not a formidable ground force, Katz said: “isis will continue to carry out attacks, but it is not a force that can threaten the Taliban in any significant way.” isis-k, in turn, wants to exploit the vulnerability of the new Taliban government—which has yet to form—to become the leading edge of isis worldwide, Jones told me. “There’s essentially anarchy in Afghanistan right now,” he said. “It creates opportunities for groups to take advantage of the political vacuum.” The key will be whether isis-k can recruit new members and transform itself from a terrorist group into an insurgent movement that can control territory and fight it out with the Taliban.

The ability of isis-k to carry out one of the most successful attacks against the American military in years will give it new credibility. The bombing at Kabul airport puts it in a different position than it was even a month ago, Jones noted: “How ironic that the withdrawal of U.S. forces has significantly increased the terrorism challenge—at the very time the U.S. said it had solved the terrorism problem.” And a few missiles or drone strikes, or even another strike by the mother of all bombs, won’t change much anytime soon.

— This article has been updated to include news developments.

[gertlushgaming]

Intellivision Entertainment LLC, the video game industry pioneer and innovator, today announced significant additions to its game portfolio, along with new licensing and global retail partnerships for its Amico system, the modern reboot of the iconic Intellivision video game console, now scheduled for release in April 2021. In a virtual press event, CEO Tommy Tallarico revealed an extensive list of new Amico games, including Earthworm Jim 4 and Rigid Force Redux Enhanced.

Intellivision also provided a variety of business updates, including licensing partnerships with Mattel, Sesame Workshop and Usaopoly (The Op). Intellivision’s partnership with Mattel will bring to life a much-anticipated racing game based on the popular Hot Wheels™ franchise. Teaming up with Sesame Workshop, kids and families will enjoy playing a suite of engaging and fun educational Sesame Street games together. The Op partnership brings the first-ever interactive versions of the award-winning board games, Telestrations® and Blank Slate™. These announcements come on the heels of recently announced licensing deals with brands such as Major League Baseball, Evel Knievel and The American Cornhole League.

“The magic of Intellivision Amico is that it will bring families and friends together around gaming – something that the world could always use more of – and these new games and partnerships will be a critical part of that,” said Tallarico. 

The company also announced its growing network of global retail and online partners including GameStop, Amazon, and Walmart.com among others. The new games and partnerships reinforce the conviction of Intellivision’s mission to reignite the family- and group-oriented benefits of multi-player gaming that were so prevalent at the dawn of the gaming era. Finally, the company announced that, after painstaking efforts to overcome the myriad of obstacles and constraints imposed by the global pandemic, Amico’s target launch date will shift from October 10, 2020, to April 15, 2021. 

“Despite unprecedented challenges, the accomplishments and progress made by our internal team, plus our incredible network of developers and partners, is nothing short of amazing,” said Tallarico. “Our primary focus is delivering a quality product, and we remain steadfast in our mission to bring family fun back to gaming with Intellivision Amico’s launch.” 

Details of the new games and gameplay footage that were revealed are as follows: 

Newly Announced Intellivision Amico Games

Earthworm Jim 4 The legendary multi-award-winning side-scrolling game is back exclusively for Amico. More adventure, more fun, more shenanigans and now… with MULTIPLAYER!

Sesame Workshop Intellivision and Sesame Workshop announced a series of educational titles that will utilize the unique Amico touch screen controllers, motion controls and couch co-op for the entire family to join in the learning and fun.

Mattel Hot Wheels™ Hot Wheels™ has ignited the challenger spirit around the world since the brand’s introduction in 1968. Intellivision is beyond excited to have this spectacular brand be a part of the game repertoire, and it will challenge parents, kids and fans alike as they race to the finish line.

Rigid Force Redux Enhanced A modern rendition of the classic side-scrolling shooter genre, Rigid Force Redux Enhanced arms players against waves of attackers. With a great soundtrack and magnificent graphics, the exclusive Amico version is enhanced with couch co-op multiplayer.

Telestrations  Through its partnership with The Op, Intellivision will offer the laugh-out-loud party game, Telestrations. Families will be able to experience the joy of laughter and miscommunication while they sketch and guess silly drawings and words. Never before brought to the digital era, this party game will allow for entire families, from children to grandparents, to share a laugh and enjoy the fun. 

Blank Slate Another terrific board game coming from The Op to Amico is Blank Slate. This party game allows families to get in sync with one another as they attempt to fill in the blank with just one word to complete the phrase. When players guess the same word, they receive extra points. Blank Slate only takes moments to learn and its simplicity makes it fun for players of any age.  

Finnigan Fox An all new original game, Finnigan Fox brings authentic platform gaming fun exclusively on Amico. Leverage the changing seasons and unique controls to embark on a mystic adventure with this furry friend.

Bomb Squad Bomb Squad is perfect for those looking for big fireworks and even bigger entertainment. Players will need to work together to try diffusing bombs before time runs out. It’s sure to be a BLAST!

Incan Gold/Diamant Searching for diamonds, gems and gold has never been so easy and exciting. Players will be on an adventure packed with strategy, risks, and riches as they push their luck to see who will come out on top.

Intellivision Monster Spades From Concrete Software, creators of the top played golf, bowling, and fishing games in the world, this game will be an instant family classic. Pick your favorite monster and enjoy one of the most played card games in the world.

Liar’s Dice Developed by Stainless Games with Mike Montgomery, one of the founders of the legendary Bitmap Brothers, Liar’s Dice is simple and fun for the whole family. This exclusive version is a cute and funny take on one of the most well-known dice games in the world, and utilizes the unique Amico controller screens for secrecy.

Space Strike What happens when you combine popular games like Star Castle, Rocket League Racing, and Asteroids? You get the new, exclusive Amico game called Space Strike.

New Gameplay Revealed

Moon Patrol This revamp of the 1982 video game classic promises to bring all the excitement of the classic arcade into the home as families pilot a heavily armed lunar buggy and do battle against the toughest in the galaxy. Aside from single player, co-op and versus modes are also available so everyone can play together. Revealed during the Amico Special Event, a complete demo level is now available to play in the Amico Club app.

Evel Knievel Working closely with the Knievel family, this brand-new exclusive version of this incredible daredevil adventure will add the famous Skyrocket X-2 Snake Canyon jump as well as more unlockables, animations, audio, levels, and of course, amazing crashes!

Astrosmash A staple of the original Intellivision console and one of the platform’s best-selling games, Astrosmash is a classic arcade style game where players face off against an onslaught of asteroids, meteors and invading enemies. This exclusive Amico game is included with every console. With unlimited ammo and lots of targets in both single player, co-op or versus modes, it is sure to be a big SMASH!

Intellivision ACL Cornhole With over 100 unlockables as well as single player, team, versus and arcade modes, Cornhole utilizes Amico’s motion controls to bring this fast-growing recreational sport into the living room. Easy to pick up and play and perfect for large groups to play together, Cornhole is included as a pack-in game with every Amico console.

Missile Command As one of the most successful arcade games of all time, Missile Command challenges players and teammates to protect defenseless cities from a virtually endless hail of ballistic missiles. This exclusive Amico version utilizes the unique Amico controller screen as well as includes co-op and versus modes.

Breakout Developed by Choice Provisions, the team behind the mega popular Bit Trip game series, Breakout is a brand-new exclusive take on an old classic. Utilizing the Amico touch screen and motion controls, this retro reimagined title adds music-based rhythm to the mix in a unique and modern style.

Intellivision Battle Tanks This game puts players in the driver’s seat of an explosive military tank headed into battle. Friends and families unite to take down the enemy while pushing the limits of strategy. Aside from single player, co-op, versus and capture-the-flag modes are also available.

Nitro Derby Overhead racing is taken to an extreme in this exclusive Amico game. Ten tracks with three circuits each and 14 unlockable vehicles will provide hours of racing fun.

  #gallery-0-4 { margin: auto; } #gallery-0-4 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 33%; } #gallery-0-4 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-0-4 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } /* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes/media.php */

A list of new Amico games, including Earthworm Jim 4, Moon Patrol and Rigid Force Redux Enhanced has been revealed Intellivision Entertainment LLC, the video game industry pioneer and innovator, today announced significant additions to its game portfolio, along with new licensing and global retail partnerships for its Amico system, the modern reboot of the iconic Intellivision video game console, now scheduled for release in April 2021.

[fapangel]

Regarding the DF-21, everyone seems to accept the Chinese claim that it is an "Anti-ship" missile, for all we know that's just propaganda and it's really a bunker buster, especially since the CIA probably got their hands on a couple during the sale of some to the Saudis after Gulf War One. I mean it's not the first time a military has lied about what a weapons system actually is.

They have a sizable arsenal of MRBMs with conventional warheads meant for attacking land targets, that’s no surprise - the latest one was hailed as the “Guam express” in their more strident “newspapers,” which tells you what they plan to use them for. There’s also a nuclear-armed variant. Same missile, different payloads. I’m sure it exists. How well it works is another question. 

The DF-21 has multiple issues - for one, what’s the kill-chain? It needs to know where the target is, for starters, because ballistic missiles are, uh... ballistic. They have a very limited ability to change their trajectories while in flight, so they need to have an exact fix on the target beforehand. This isn’t as easy as you might think - we were able to sail a carrier task force around in Russia’s back yard during the NORPAC 82 exercise without them ever locating the carrier group. Yes, 1982, well after satellite recon was available, and the Soviets had much more than the Chinese do. Said link doesn’t describe how the satellites were defeated (because it’s top-secret as hell, natch,) but there’s several methods for it - a simple one is weather. Even the best camera can’t see through clouds. And while some satellites have surface-search radar, they can’t tell ships apart - have a gander here for a rough idea of just how many ships are on the ocean at any given time, especially near major trade lanes like the South China Sea.  Then there’s dwell time; since inclination changes are hideously expensive delta-V wise, earth observation satellites are typically put in a polar orbit, so the earth will rotate underneath them slowly, letting them cover a “slice” a bit further west than their last pass. It only takes about 90 minutes to whip ‘round the Earth in LEO, but it takes, well, 12 hours for the same spot on Earth to come under you again (on the “back side” of your orbit) and even then it’ll be at night, so you’ll have to use the IR cameras (which are lower resolution for various reasons, especially atmosphere haet IR. Water vapor absorbs infa-red wavelengths very well.) So to have reasonable coverage - say, a recon satellite passing over a particular patch of ocean every 6 hours or so - you need more than a handful of satellites, and that’s hideously expensive. 

Of course, China only wants to control the SCS, so a single geostationary satellite could meet their needs, like the one they’ve already launched. Geostationary orbit is high, however, which is probably why that satellite’s image resolution is so abysmal (50m visible light can probably sort a carrier from a supertanker, but 400m resolution with IR won’t do shit.) On the plus side, geostationary is a lot harder to reach with missiles. That still leaves a bevy of methods for shutting it down, however, including old-fashioned jamming, either of the satellite, or of its receiving ground stations. It doesn’t matter what it sees, if it can’t tell anybody. There’s also this mention of the satellite only being able to “localize” a carrier due to the data processing time required, which strikes me as unusual - with modern technology even a geostationary satellite should have no problem with continuous high-bandwidth transmissions, unless I’m gravely mistaken. Or it could be referring to the time required for actual human eyes to scan the imagery and pick out the carrier-shaped dot, though fairly simple image-matching software ought to be up to simplifying that task. 

Or maybe we’d just shoot the damn thing down. The tl;dr is that there’s still a need for actual old-fashioned recon assets, (which can be seen by how China’s investing in them.) Unfortunately for China, this requires them to fly aircraft within 200nm of a hostile US CBG, which tends to be an unhealthy endeavor - especially if using surface-search radar. Their radar-equipped satellites and stationary radars on their new SCS outposts (assuming those don’t eat TLAMs) can at least locate contacts, so a recon aircraft can use advanced long-range optics to visually ID them, which lets the aircraft operate on passive EMCON to avoid detection. (It’ll probably have to check every contact - the map I linked above shows ships who are broadcasting their position/identification with transponders, much like aircraft, but that requires trusting the transponder’s owner...) Unfortunately that requires getting even closer, and flying at a minimum altitude to see over the curvature of the Earth - against some of the best AWACs in existence (both carrier-borne and land-based, given our bases in Japan, Singapore and elsewhere.) There’s been some speculation that the RQ-170 stealth drone that was forced down in Iran (that Obama refused to have bombed, the stupid fuck,) will go a long way towards providing the Chinese with the stealth recon assets they’ll need for this - thanks, Obama! But Iran’s a lot tighter with Russia than China, and Russia and China are a bit... touchy with each other still. So that’s an outside chance. 

For sake of argument say you find the carriers and fire on them. Now even a ballistic missile takes some time to arrive at a target, and given how a re-entry vehicle (RV’s) maneuvering ability in the terminal phase is very limited, you have to put the weapon on-target very precisely ahead of time. The time to do this is in “midcourse” flight, while the weapon’s in space and before it re-enters. The earlier you perform a course-correction maneuver, the more delta-v efficient it is - especially in midcourse, since in boost or re-entry your thrusters are fighting the atmosphere. Even if their geostationary satellite is capable of constant communication, I doubt it has a full EOTS system that’s fully networked (”datalinked”) to provide said course updates for the mid-course course-correction maneuver; this’d require constant contact to be held by recon assets. And of course, these datalinks are vulnerable to jamming. Some have suggested the DF-21 might operate in a “swarm mode,” much like the old P-700 did; with the first warheads fired searching for the target and passing data back to the ones still in mid-course so they can actually hit the target. 

Then there’s the actual terminal phase. Even a normal RV (not a fancy hyper-sonic glide vehicle) can maneuver once in atmosphere; the same way the Apollo Command Module did, by using the limited normal/compression lift generated by the blunt RV body to adjust the landing footprint. At the velocities/altitudes involved here it’ll only have the energy to tweak the trajectory, but that’s enough for terminal attack. These high-G maneuvers also double as evasive maneuvers, making high-altitude intercept difficult. Terminal attack, however, is where life gets difficult. 

At the kind of insane speeds a re-entering vehicle encounters, the compression heating forms plasma beneath the heat-shield. This plasma blocks all radio communications - that’s why you get the dramatic silence during re-entry in the old Apollo movies. The beam-riding SPRINT anti-ballistic missile, (which accelerated at 100 goddamn gravities,) was also hampered by this issue. There is a way around it, as used by the later Shuttle missions - communicating with a satellite in orbit (thus avoiding the plasma sheath below,) which bounces the signal back to the Earth command station. (This is yet another communications link vulnerable to jamming.) Without this, it’s hard to see how the DF-21 can “see” through its own plasma sheath, either optically or with radar, to continue fine-tuning its terminal intercept. It may deploy spoilers to de-accelerate sooner, (making it more vulnerable to intercept,) or wait till very shortly before terminal intercept as it deaccelerates in the thicker lower atmosphere to make final targeting corrections, which drastically reduces its footprint and makes very precise target information and course corrections in mid-course/re-entry interface even more vital. 

Without even talking about shooting it down yet, you can see that the DF-21 is just the pointy end of a much bigger system that is itself vulnerable to both hard and soft kill techniques. This is to say nothing of the need of the payload to penetrate the final defenses of the ship; which would include both decoys and very, very intense jamming (modern warships carry a lot of jammers, and they’re due for a massive leap in capability with the introduction of the Next Generation Jammer in in 2020 or so.) These jammers are capable of obfuscating the exact location of the ship throughout the attack, to every detection/tracking platform as well, and so can defeat the DF-21 simply by denying it accurate offboard targeting data for the mid-course correction.

And then there’s actually shooting them down, which is notable because it’s impressive it’s an option at all. The SM-3 is the big star here, of course, because it’s a purpose-built weapon with an exo-atmospheric interceptor; that is, it can hit the weapons in space, during mid-course, when they’re at apogee and moving the slowest. That’s an impressive ability, but recent upgrades have also made the SM-2ER (which the SM-3 was based on) and the SM-6 capable of ABM defense as well. They can’t maneuver out of atmosphere, but they can maneuver in the atmosphere better than the SM-3s final stage, which gives a high-to-medium altitude terminal intercept ability. Their blast-frag warheads aren’t nearly as effective as the hit-to-kill KKV of the SM-3, when it comes to completely destroying the target... but complete destruction of an RV is only a requirement when you’re being attacked by nuclear or chemical weapons, which have a wide area-of-affect. A blast-fragmentation hit to a DF-21 RV would not only knock it off course, but the damage to sensors, maneuvering thrusters and even the basic aerodynamic integrity would greatly inhibit its ability to conduct a successful attack. 

There’s more advantages to the SM-2ER and SM-6. Magazine requirements are one - it allows ships to defend themselves with the voluminous numbers of air-defense missiles they already carry for other threats, greatly reducing the penalty of reserving cells for the SM-3. It allows a longer timeframe for attack, since they’re effective even at medium altitudes. But best of all, they can attack the RVs without worrying about decoys or other countermeasures. Decoys are (by necessity) lighter than the RV itself, so once they hit atmospheric drag they’re soon parted from the actual weapon. At the time the RVs are coming into range of the majority of the CBGs defensive arsenal, they’ll be stripped of their decoys and have an IR signature like a neon friggin sign. 

And then there’s the attrition argument. There’s actually data on how many SM-3s are in the inventory and how many we’re likely to build per-annum. Compare this with the DF-21; it’s estimated by the US Navy that 8-10 DF-21s can be built per annum, and at least some of those are going to be conventional or nuclear land-attack warhead equipped. This isn’t a surprise; ballistic missiles are huge, expensive, and very very finicky things to build. So from a pure defense saturation perspective, we can build interceptors faster than they can build ding-dongs. 

China beats us in iPhone production, but we still beat them in rocket science.