Person 1: we should put all the kittens in a blender
Person 2: we should not put any kittens in blenders!
Person 3: ok, let’s put half the kittens into blenders.
Congrats! You are a moderate!
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But there is a domain at low orbit/high altitude, where a spy satellite can make a low pass to get high resolution photos, or a high flying drone could pop up to get super high altitude/high resolution photos.
what a dope
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Panda is ill-informed there. If the image had been cleared for release, there would be some explicit note there with the details of declassification (or at the very least, an UNCLASS or FOUO code). There is a black bar there because whichever flunky photographed the image on the behest of the Kompromat-in-Chief knew that having TSC or SCI code there was not a good look, and drew over the printout with a feltpen, or retouched the photograph before tweeting.
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“We and a couple of other countries have many decades of experience in rocket and nuclear weapons safety. We would like to remind those involved that these things are just very touchy. Honest to God, I don’t know what is going to happen next. If you end up wanting to get rid of that stuff, just let us know.”
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Just more “enlightened centrism”, I guess.
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Pretty fascinating analysis of the image in this tweet chain…
The author is able to pinpoint the satellite and work out some details of estimated resolution, etc.
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Top half or bottom half?
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Trump’s stupidity is visible from space. Look at it!
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Trump doesn’t do Machiavellian strategy and he has far too fragile an ego to intentionally create the impression that he made a stupid mistake. What we see on TV is what he really is. And it’s fucking HORRIFYING.
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Points out that the time and angle match an orbit. The nature of that particular satellite was previously classified but now everyone knows it’s a Keyhole.
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Donny Two Scoops, Russia’s stupidest agent.
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Meh. He’s no John Tyler.
More interesting reading
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Isn’t the whole tone of the message that “US can see all”?
The fact that they have satellites capable of such degrees of resolution can hardly be a surprise to the rest of the world, or at least those who are interested enough to be able to tentatively identify the satellite.
Whether he was an idiot, a stooge or an accomplice is barely relevant.
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This all depends on what you can a ‘satellite’. Something that is high up enough to be in a stable orbit, and not something that was just put there to lope over the site and re-enter, has trouble resolving much below a metre. If you are looking straight down through the atmosphere and the air is very still you might do better, but it is pretty much down to the atmosphere and the geometry even with dustbin-sized optics. In the eighties, you could resolve and perhaps identify single vehicles, but more often than not you spotted a tank because it was at the end of a set of tank-tracks.
But these images do look nice and sharp. My guess (and it is no more than that) is that if you had the sort of AI image enhancing stuff that we saw recently pulling ‘extra detail’ from emojis, then this would make this sort of difference. It might well be a good thing to do because it can also return a ‘confidence map’, which is a large part of satellite espionage: “we know that that is, and we know what this is, but this thing over here is not something we know”.
As for your President’s “Good luck with your crap rockets. The USA didn’t need to blow up this one, did we? You can’t blame us, but you don’t really know, amirite?”. That gets his supporters whooping. I don’t think he cares about the international situation that much.
PS: Gotta dash. Off for a protest. We do seem to have some sort of coup thing going on in the UK just now. A la lanterne les aristos, and all that. Pip-pip.
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The actual moderate position is “Wow, Trump is really terrible, and has no redeeming qualities.”
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