Werthead

I believe ISIS-K members have even agitated for attacking China in revenge for their treatment of the Uygher (and they have access via the remote border regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan), but even their leadership has hesitated over that so far. These are the guys who really do not give a fuck what they do or the consequences of their actions. The religious-political angle is very complex, but you have essentially a lot of Muslims from the Caucasus region who were very angry at the Chechen War, and even angrier at its conclusion when they believe - correctly - Kadyrov sold the Chechen people out to Putin in return for personal enrichment, gold toilets etc. Even after the end of the Second Chechen War and its prolonged aftermath (when fighting in the north Caucasus continued for many years after Kadyrov signed up to Team Putin, in one year almost killing a thousand Russian security personnel), you had Caucasus-based jihadist groups continuing to target the Russian government. When the conflict in Syria started, the Russian government offered these groups something of a bizarre amnesty, releasing some from prison and allowing others to leave Russian territory unharmed to fight as part of Islamic State in Syria and Iraq (presumably hoping they'd target US and allied forces). Whether the Russians realised they themselves would be engaged in that conflict shortly thereafter is unclear. However those groups still retain a hardcore element who want to liberate Chechnya and the north Caucasus and create an Islamic Republic in those areas, and have carried out occasional attacks to this end. In some cases, yes, it's likely the attacks have been inspired by the stalemate in Syria and maybe anger at Ukraine and Gaza taking the eyes of the world off that conflict. ISIS-K are also very, very unpleasant, to the point that it's believed the US has provided the Taliban with intelligence on ISIS-K operations in Afghanistan because, as problematic as the Taliban are, they're easier to deal with then these fucking total lunatics. Some Russian sources are still blaming Ukraine outright. One Russian security report even says the attackers planned to cross the border into Ukraine to escape, with the help of the Ukrainian intelligence services, so I'd hold fire on that for now. There are some in Russia agitating to make this part of the Ukrainian conflict.

The first one did see the biggest shift to Labour in electoral history, exceeding the swing in 1997 that delivered Blair his landslide victory. As was noted at the time, getting an even bigger shift to win a majority outright was almost completely demographically impossible, so complaining about that feels a bit churlish. As it was, that success plunged the Tories into a full-on crisis lasting until the next election. However, he did completely screw the pooch afterwards. Some of the complaints are valid - it was interesting seeing the absolutely titanic assault on social media of US-style advertising basically claiming that Corbyn was going to sell the country to communists, or something - but ultimately Corbyn lost because the Tories threw everything into the election on the basis of Brexit-delivery and Corbyn could not deliver what he clearly personally wanted, Labour supporting Brexit fully, but could not bring himself to whole-heartedly oppose it, so his messaging became incredibly weak, confused and incoherent on that issue. Everything else his policies seemed to resonate as well as they did in 2017, but the Tories very successfully pivoted the argument away from those policies. He fought the battle on ground of the enemy's choosing and did not show up with a viable strategy.

Some reporting that the ISIS claim has come through a fake account, but the BBC and several US news networks are saying that their sources they have that are long-affiliated with ISIS, or affiliated with affiliations of ISIS (that's a thing, apparently), are all confirming that this was an ISIS strike. The US is also saying it had firm intelligence of ISIS planning attacks against Russian interests and did directly inform Russia several weeks ago under its legal obligation to do so.

OSINT sources saying the Russian police have put out an arrest warrant for five men from Ingushetia, although this does not appear confirmed yet. Interesting if this is the "North Caucasus" group rearing its head again. This was a jihadist organisation that fought alongside the Chechens during the Second Chechen War, then went solo in Ingushetia and Dagestan. They halted operations in Russia to redeploy their assets to Syria to fight Russian forces there. They've been a generally low-key group of limited importance, but there has been concern over the fact they contain Russian citizens and can speak Russian, so could operate in Russia itself relatively freely.

The US issued a warning two weeks ago that "extremists" were planning terrorist attacks inside Russia, including targeting concert halls. It went under the radar at the time but has come up again now. Russian news sources saying that up to 40 are believed dead. Ukraine has issued a denial that it was involved, and the US concurs there is no intelligence chatter supporting Ukrainian involvement. Even Russian news and government sources have hesitate to point the finger at Ukraine. This seems to have genuinely come out of nowhere to Russia (but possibly not US intelligence).

It was. Some nice video game callbacks. The twin Needlers gag I think is a solid reference to a lot of people in the games, and a nod to the fact that nobody in the Halo universe goes into battle with remotely enough ammo for whatever mission they are facing. ETA: Oh nice! It's Harry Lloyd playing

Today's missile attacks on Ukraine were expected - Russia has been hoarding weapons for months - but may have been a strategic mistake. The Ukrainian military was bracing for attacks on fortified positions and possibly munitions factories, airfields and so on. Russia bombing energy infrastructure right now, rather than at the start of winter, is unlikely to be as effective, and Ukraine has a lot of energy infrastructure spare parts stockpiled as they'd been anticipating this back in November. Still a hard hit, with a million people out of power for most of the day. This is reasonable.

The Germans knew about it, or at least they knew/reasoned that the US, Britain etc would all have their own nuclear programmes and that's why they were racing hard to try to get it first themselves. Not to mention that the security of the project was having it as its own self-contained town with very high security on a separate continent five thousand miles away with everyone speaking a different language at a time of war at a point with no Internet or mobile phones. The actual idea of the nuclear bomb wasn't a secret at all, HG Wells wrote a short story about it almost fifty years earlier and tons of people had published tons of scientific literature on it for decades previously.

The "later books are unfilmable" thing is a bit overwrought. Only God-Emperor really has that problem. Heretics and Chapterhouse have much more action, with massive space battles, ground wars and entire planets blowing up (mostly offscreen, but you can bring some of that onscreen a bit). Also, any and all subsequent films should have: Obviously anyone even thinking of trying to film any of the Herbert Jnr./Anderson excretions should be beheaded before they even outline it.

Here we go. Looks amazing, although it has the video rendering problem afflicting a lot of Gsync monitors, like Starfield (fortunately I twigged the problem immediately on the menu screen and fixed it, rather than spending 20 hours suffering through the game with it). Looks outstanding but also plays incredibly well, likely because Guerrilla Games were clever in how they made it so it could work on PS4. But the PC version blows the PS5 version out of the water at 4K.

My general take is that conspiracies only work if you have a tiny number of people involved in them. The more people you add, the chances of exposure exponentially grow until exposure becomes inevitable. Successful, actual conspiracies achieve their goals by either the people involved being very low in number, very highly trained in keeping secrets (so government spy agencies, for example), or the people who get wind of what they're up to being fucking incompetent and not stopping them. I think the cut-off I saw quoted once was less than 50 people. Even the 20-ish people involved in 9/11 pretty much exposed themselves and put them on the FBI and CIA radar, but because the agencies were in a pissing contest, they didn't put the pieces together to stop them. It's also why the "9/11 was inside job" theories are self-inherently bullshit as you'd need many hundreds and probably a couple of thousand people involved in the conspiracy and the chances of that staying secret is zero. Keeping Kate or Charles dying/being dead secret might be possible briefly whilst a small number of people knew about it, but more than, nope.

Russia's Baltic Sea Fleet has managed to sink a Russian fishing trawler by accident during a live fire exercise. At least three people on the trawler Captain Lobanov were killed. A heavy missile strike on Kyiv. The Ukrainians are claiming 100% interception rate but falling debris caused significant damage. Some sources claiming multiple Kinzhal hypersonics were intercepted and destroyed, others just one. Some indications that the Kovalchuk Brothers have fallen out with Igor Sechin, the Rosneft energy chief. These are some of Putin's closest advisors and members of the inner circle (or, if not, are at least knocking on the door of the inner circle). The three have apparently clashed over their nominations for the post-election reshuffle. Sechin's son Ivan died last month in weird circumstances (he spontaneously suffocated and fell unconscious, then his bodyguard gave the wrong address to the ambulance, which took two hours to reach him, by which time he was dead at 35). At least some Russian formations have diverted from reinforcing the front in Ukraine to instead reinforce Belgorod, but have not yet amassed enough forces to counter-attack the partisans, who continue to attack targets in Belgorod and Kursk oblasts. The partisans apparently engaged Russian forces in Kozinka and eliminated them, but discovered they'd just called for reinforcements, so they set a trap which successful engaged and destroyed the rescue team. Reportedly this was a GRU Spetsnaz Rescue Team (2nd Detached Special Forces Brigade), which if true would be quite a scalp. Even Ukraine is treating that claim with scepticism. The CDU believes that Scholz will fold on supplying Taurus to Ukraine, but couldn't guess on the timescale. The Institute for the Study of War is pretty conservative in its reporting, but it has expressed concerns over the plans to form new Russian army units in western and north-western Russia. It believes these units have zero reason to exist other than for offensive action against NATO member countries. It does not believe the threat is imminent but could become a major issue in three to four years, especially if Russia is successful in Ukraine. However, it notes significant demography problems in Russia that makes standing up new large militarised formations from scratch problematic.

Engels Airbase in Russia, on the Volga, has come under drone attack. Unclear on the extent of the damage, but some of Russia's strategic bomber fleet is based there, including long-range bombers and aircraft used to launch cruise missiles and glide bombs at Ukrainian targets. Satellite photos showed quite a lot of planes on the tarmac just a few days ago. The lack of lots of social media and video from civilians (Saratov, a pretty big city, is right next door) suggests maybe it wasn't a huge strike, but there is one video from a nearby car park indicating at least one very large explosion. The scale of the repulsed attack on Berdychi is becoming clearer. The Russian 15th Separate Guards Brigade took an absolute pounding with several vehicles destroyed and at least dozens killed. The survivors reporting on the attack seemed to be genuinely shell-shocked. It looks like they expected an uncontested advance after Avdiivka. More trouble in Buryatia, where a woman was jailed for quoting from Pushkin at a memorial to the writer. This was perceived as being anti-government in some fashion. Belgorod has come under attack for the seventh day in a row. Kursk city has also seen some explosions in its vicinity, one of which hit a power substation and plunged the city into darkness for several hours.

The Volume is really good at doing a certain number of things, and The Mandalorian employed those things really well. The main problem since then is that everyone started using the Volume for every single thing whether it was a good idea or not. So the vast arctic alien landscape in S1 of The Mandalorian obviously makes sense to do in the Volume. Something they also did that was great was moving, dangerous environments, so all the stuff with the sandcrawler on Tatooine in the Mando vs. Jawa incident was excellent. Since then, we've seen quite a lot of "using the Volume to create a perfectly ordinary fucking forest, of which apparently they have none in California or Britain," which is where it falls over, as when the Volume is compared to a 100% real environment it falls apart almost instantly. When you're using it to do absolutely crazy environments that cannot exist in reality but they want the actor to react to it, it makes sense. Doing Dune on location 100% absolutely added to the effect, which sticking it in the Volume would not have done. I also had some issues where House of the Dragon recreated real locations or sets previously used on GoT in the Volume - or Warner Brothers' non-copyright-infringing-equivalent - and it looked fucking awful because we were used to the real thing (the long causeway steps on Dragonstone come to mind). Peter Jackson receiving a list of actresses from Weinstein not to use in the Lord of the Rings movies and him just following it without thinking about it until like 20 years later is a bit wild as well. I must admit I also found Jackson's fawning attitude to Weinstein after he fucked him over on LotR to be a bit odd.

Russian partisan forces have hit Razumnoye, a large Russian military base on the outskirts of Belgorod. The partisans are claiming - for the total campaign so far- 613 Russians killed, 829 injured, 27 captured. 7 tanks destroyed, 20 BMPs, 6 howitzers and 4 APCs. No independent confirmation (and even the Ukrainians are treating these numbers with one eyebrow raised). Kofman, who has been pretty pessimistic throughout the conflict, surprisingly measured in his latest analysis. He notes Ukraine has weaknesses and these could be exploited into a breakthrough, but generally Russia has proven unable to do so in the past. He notes their superiority in glide bombs, but that in other areas Ukraine has achieved parity or superiority. He seems to agree with the general consensus that 2024 will be the make or break year for the conflict, based on military supplies, churn of equipment and men (which he thinks will bite Russia hard in 2025) and the US Presidential Election. One reply quotes an estimate of internal European shell production to exceed 1 million in Jan-Dec 2024, which means with the Czech initiative, Ukraine will receive 2 million shells this year, which is what they need to mount a successful defence (though not the 2.5-3 million they need to undertake moderate counter-offensives as well).

I looked this up. The Red Tails (332nd Fighter Group) were based exclusively in Italy and flew escort for the 12th Air Group. They never flew out of England or France, and never escorted the Mighty 8th (the 100th Bomb Group). The red-tailed Mustangs must have been from another unit.

Some early indications that Ukraine may have retaken the Bilohorivka area, on the western approaches to Lysychansk. Ukrainian forces launched a serious assault on the trench complex near the town and took it after using some novel tactics (using heavy-duty, anti-vehicle landmines converted into "trench-clearers", or "trench-cleaners" depending on the translation). It's unclear how heavily dug in Russia is in this sector, I know there was some speculation they'd actually been focusing more on attack then defence along this area. If they have left it as a weak point, Ukraine might take a look at retaking Lysychansk, and if they can do that, they can gain fire control over Severodonetsk. Losing the twin cities would be a massive blow to Russia. However, that's getting ahead of ourselves. So far they've just stormed one area of fortifications and are now holding against counter-attacks. At the moment the combined effect of the oil campaign looks like a daily output reduction of 600,000 barrels, which is a lot (nobody can seem to agree if it's 10% or closer to 16% of Russia's total production capability). That's much higher than the losses sustained in the January-February "warmup" campaign.

I don't think that was the Red Tails. They were operating out of Italy as their main engagement in Europe, and I don't think they ever flew alongside the bombers we've been following (some of the historical accuracy crowd were moaning about that). Certainly they noted the arrival of the Mustangs which allowed them to accompany the bombers all the way to Berlin and back though.

There's also the interesting thing that in the book, that action happens at Saturn, with the Monolith located on Iapetus, because that was the original plan. Douglas Trumbull filmed test-footage of Saturn but they agreed it looked bad, so they changed the destination of Discovery to Jupiter surprisingly late on in shooting, and reshot any mention of Saturn to replace it with Jupiter. I believe this happened late enough that Clarke had finished the book and it was locked in for publication, so he couldn't change it. For the sequel novels he said fuck it and set them at Jupiter like the films (consistency in the book series being pretty non-existent). Trumbull was always annoyed about not being able to deliver Saturn, so he spent lots of his own time after 2001 wrapped getting it to the point where it looked good, where it then inspired him to make a whole film about Saturn, which became Silent Running.

Yup, the interpersonal dynamics there were really good, and also between Toranaga and his son. Blackthorne having to be reminded to watch his fucking words because what is a joke to him can get out of hand very easily. He needs to remember he's not in London anymore (which he does seem to be grasping a bit more as time goes by).

Carrie-Ann Moss looks cool as a Jedi. Otherwise not getting much from it other than Younglings: This Time They Don't All Die, Probably.

I feel the Kate conspiracy theories have reached the same level as "time travelling foetus" theories for ASoIaF, but in an incredibly advanced timeframe. Some rumours that Kate will appear in a BBC interview this week to confirm she is still extant, which feels like the right move to head off these increasingly ludicrous assertions.

Where's Arnie when you need him?

I think the show is solid, with some great high points and some absolutely diabolical low points ("Somehow, Makee returned," and the storyline with the couple's kid should have never been written or filmed). I think it evens out at okay. I do think them responding to complains that Master Chief doesn't have his helmet on enough in Season 1 by taking his armour away altogether for most of Season 2 is epic-level trolling of the video game fans on another level though. Art.

Confirmation that the Russians were indeed repulsed from Berdychi last week, as they mounted a major armoured push again yesterday. They ran into heavy counter-fire from cluster munitions and drones, and Ukrainian armoured forces mopped up what was left. Belgorod hit again today by the partisan forces. The Russians are really missing the boat on counter-attacking them properly and driving them out of range of the city. Russia has blamed both Moldova and Ukraine for a drone attack on Transnistria which destroyed a helicopter. Analysis suggests the drone was added in post-production. Additional camera angles show no drone at all, and the helicopter appears to have been left at the airstrip in 2003 and has not moved since. Some shots show it looking quite delipidated before it spontaneously combusted. OSINT sources divided on this being an accident or a deliberate fake-out.