Oh yeah, libel per se is a -bitch- if you're nailed with it. In libel per quod ("lost-cause libel"), you have to prove damages. Generally, this is what prevents people from filing lawsuits every time someone calls them a dick on 4chan.

Libel per se is different. Oh, it is SO different. Libel per se means y'all fucked up. Y'all fucked up BAD. In LPS, what you printed was such bullshit and so obviously damaging, the plaintiff don't have to prove SHIT; they sort-of name a figure and the judge works from that.

In the case of Dominion, I'm 99% certain it'll be LPS. Also, the Gold Standard defense against libel -- what you printed is actually true -- will not apply here, and it'd be comedy gold if the defendants actually tried this defense. At that point, the three fastest winds ever recorded on the planet would be Typhoon Li, Hurricane Katrina and the explosive laughter and legal pimp slap from the bench. It'd make Rudy's immense clusterfucks in court seem like goddamn Perry Mason cross-examining a 6-year-old.

It gets better.

So, on the billion-to-one chance you win a libel per quod suit, you get "damages", which can be surprisingly little as you have to prove every single dollar in very narrow legal ways. Libel per se, on the other hand, is the BIG PRIZES. Your ass is at least catching dollar damages that would make Jerome Powell say "Y'all niggas need to tone them digits down, yo!". Those damages are ANYTHING THE COURT DECIDES. Again, LPS means the plaintiff doesn't have to prove a single dime of loss to claim damages of damned near any amount. Given that Dominion is asking for a cool bil-point-something, I wouldn't be hugely surprised if another zero wasn't slapped on the end of that figure.

That's just the "actual" damages. If you egregiously fucked up, like claiming a company overthrew a US election and was in league with a dead dictator, you get to spin the wheel of punitive damages. Punitive damages are how the court hands out spankings, only they're not spankings, they're that scene from 12 Years A Slave, only with less tickles and kittens. Given the shitstorm that followed the lies about Dominion, those damages could make the initial billion-dollar claim look quaint.

(By the way, you can't discharge the settlement in bankruptcy, given that libel per se is considered 'malicious', meaning the laughter from the judge presiding over your initial case will be roughly 1/10,000th the laughter coming from the bankruptcy judge.)

If I was Newsmax, OAN, Fox News, Rush or Alex, I'd be lawyering up but good, because the Wrath of Fucking God is coming and there ain't no rock big enough to hide behind.

Couldn't happen to a nicer group of traitorous, America-hating, back-stabbing cocksuckers (and good luck to them on their per quod claim should they decide to sue me over the previous statement).

I've been in every type of winter storm you can name (from Canada eh!), sandstorms in Saudi, monsoons in Thailand, typhoons in the Philippines, several wet seasons in northern Australia, and a fair few hurricanes here in Texas. But tornadoes - the tricky unpredictable bastards that you can't predict, plan for or gear up for, Mother Nature's switch blade, are the only things out there that freak me out.

"Holy shit, this is crazy" is the right response.

Your video, Typhoon Haima - Scenes From Hong Kong Today, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

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It's officially known as a report on the "Measurement of the Duration of a Trendless Subsample in a Global Climate Time Series." In lay-speak, it's a study of just how long the current pause in global warming has lasted. And the results are profound:

According to Canadian Ross McKitrick, a professor of environmental economics who wrote the paper for the Open Journal of Statistics, "I make the duration out to be 19 years at the surface and 16 to 26 years in the lower troposphere depending on the data set used."

In still plainer English, McKitrick has crunched the numbers from all the major weather organizations in the world and has found that there has been no overall warming at the Earth's surface since 1995 - that's 19 years in all.

During the past two decades, there have been hotter years and colder years, but on the whole the world's temperatures have not been rising. Despite a 13 per cent rise in carbon dioxide levels over the period, the average global temperature is the same today as it was almost 20 years ago.

In the lower atmosphere, there has been no warming for somewhere between 16 and 26 years, depending on which weather organization's records are used.

Not a single one of the world's major meteorological organizations - including the ones the United Nations relies on for its hysterical, the-skies-are-on-fire predictions of environmental apocalypse - shows atmospheric warming for at least the last 16 years. And some show no warming for the past quarter century.

This might be less significant if some of the major temperature records showed warming and some did not. But they all show no warming.

Even the records maintained by devoted eco-alarmists, such as the United Kingdom's Hadley Centre, show no appreciable warming since the mid-1990s.

Despite continued cymbal-crashing propaganda from environmentalists and politicians who insist humankind is approaching a critical climate-change tipping point, there is no real evidence this is true.

There are no more hurricanes than usual, no more typhoons or tornadoes, floods or droughts. What there is, is more media coverage more often.

Forty years ago when a tropical storm wiped out villages on a South Pacific Island there might have been pictures in the newspaper days or weeks later, then nothing more. Now there is live television coverage hours after the fact and for weeks afterwards.

That creates the impression storms are worse than they used to be, even though statistically they are not.

While the UN's official climate-scare mouthpiece, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has acknowledged the lack of warming over the past two decades, it has done so very quietly. What's more, it has not permitted the facts to get in the way of its continued insistence that the world is going to hell in a hand basket soon unless modern economies are crippled and more decision-making power is turned over to the UN and to national bureaucrats and environmental activists.

Later this month in New York, the UN will hold a climate summit including many of the world's leaders. So frantic are UN bureaucrats to keep the climate scare alive they have begun a worldwide search for what they themselves call a climate-change "Malala."

That's a reference to Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani schoolgirl who was shot in the head by the Taliban after demanding an education. Her wounding sparked a renewed, worldwide concern for women's rights.

The new climate spokeswoman must be a female under 30, come from a poor country and have been the victim of a natural disaster.

If the facts surrounding climate-disaster predictions weren't falling apart, the UN wouldn't such need a sympathetic new face of fear.

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Flying the Eurofighter Typhoon through the Mach Loop has been added as a related post - related requested by kulpims.

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Flying the Eurofighter Typhoon through the Mach Loop has been added as a related post - related requested by kulpims.

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The Eurofighter Typhoon fills the same role as the F-22, except that the F-22 is a much more advanced and capable jet. (And, in fact, can fulfill the role of the F-35 better than the F-35 can, in many cases. Except carrier landing.) The cost is only marginally less than the F-22 (about $110 million vs $150 million), although if the F-22 had been allowed to ramp up to full production, the price would have gone down further. Basically, the F-22 program shouldn't have been cancelled so quickly.

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If you only buy it when you need it, you won't have it when you need it.

German Eurofighters did take out U.S. F-22's during red flag.
http://theaviationist.com/2012/07/13/fia12-typhoon-raptor/

-scheherazade

Raw footage of deadly typhoon Haiyan, Philippines 2013 has been added as a related post - related requested by kulpims.