LongTimeLurker

I was referring only to China and Disney have several billion to recoup on the purchase of the whole franchise, so like George Lucas will be chasing after every last possible revenue stream on this.

Watched it to see what the fuss was about and regretted it a wee bit as it gives quite a bit away. Mao jackets were still very much in vogue when the first one came out and Yugoslav Partizan films was about as good as it got at the cinema for them so the target audience maybe needs to be shown a bit more of the action to get them to show up.

So why hasn't that helped Labour elsewhere in council by elections? The Lab to SNP swing is in line with recent trends even if it didn't translate into an SNP victory. Think Blantyre may just be one of Labour's most diehard electoral strongholds.

The guy is obviously getting a bit carried away, but there are examples in Shetland of relatively short crossings where a permanent fixed tunnel link could sensibly replace ferries in a similar manner to what the Faroese and Norwegians do: http://www.shetnews.co.uk/news/8000-%C2%A37-5m-ferry-costs-strengthen-tunnels-case and a longer tunnel from Caithness to Orkney would probably make sense: http://www.scotsman.com/news/163-100m-tunnel-to-orkney-feasible-1-739095

Article from The Guardian about it: http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/scotland-blog/2014/apr/30/scotland-firthofforth-coal

It connected the Kinneil and Valleyfield collieries and is probably still there even if the entrances to the old mine workings at both end are now blocked off. Not an answer to Scotland's transport issues obviously, but shows a tunnel was very much feasible and might have been the better option.

Could also mean Assad, Hezbollah and Iran given the Syrian regime is not so likely to cave in now that Russia is so heavily involved. Worth noting also that the YPG are now fighting against Al Nusra a lot of the time and they are the most pro-American of the groups that are worth taking seriously. Given their strategy up to now has been to sit on the fence and control their own areas it suggests they think Al Nusra are ultimately going to lose.

If the Yes side had won do you think bombing Syria would be on Holyrood's agenda right now? The imperial twilight world view of the Tories and New Labour at Westminster is different from that of the average SNP activist.

A lot depends on whether the TOW missiles that have kept Syrian army tanks at bay creating the current stalemate on the battlefield get augmented with MANPADs, so Russian planes and helicopters start tumbling out of the sky like they did in Afghanistan due to Stinger missiles winding up in the hands of the Mujahideen. So far the Americans (and their various allies) have been reluctant to let this particular set of Islamic crazies get their hands on that kind of weaponry for reasons that should be obvious. If Russia and Iran look like winning the proxy wars in Iraq and Syria outright in the months ahead it will be interesting to see whether states like Turkey and Saudi Arabia stick to the script on that.

I'm sure the Shia majority have forgotten and forgiven the absence of a no-fly zone for them in the south and how that enabled Saddam to defeat them and carry out reprisals against them. It's only a matter of time until they finally turn away from pro-Iranian parties and embrace American style democracy. The neoCons were right all along.

She is capable of leading her party, while Corbyn isn't. Not sure what is difficult to understand on that.

That hasn't always been the case. ISIS were allied with the FSA at one point during the conflict in much the same way Al Qaeda linked groups still are and that didn't and doesn't stop what remains of the FSA from receiving support from western countries. What has happened consistently throughout the conflict is that arms originally given to more "moderate" groups like that have soon wound up in the hands of the more radical ones. The reality is that Turkey in particular have been supporting ISIS through buying oil from them and that's even being stated openly by portions of the mainstream media now, so isn't some far out conspiracy theory: http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/david-cameron-there-arent-70000-moderate-fighters-in-syria-and-whoever-heard-of-a-moderate-with-a-a6753576.html Maybe instead of dropping bombs when many long months of that by the US haven't put much of a dent in ISIS's operational capacities (strange that?), NATO should simply get its house in order and do what it takes to stop its members and allies from actively backing religious maniacs? Won't happen, because the petrodollar has to be maintained, so Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States can never be challenged over human rights as it's much easier to deal with corrupt dictatorships than functioning democracies in that regard. Claims that the west is doing anything positive in Syria are frankly vomit inducing once you grasp what is really going on, but as usual the plebs have to be led to believe that we are the good guys in all of this, so let's boamb ra loat of thum will be the order of the day and the level of analysis provided. There was a time when the Labour party might have done what the SNP will do and tell the truth and vote against it, but even with Corbyn there's no danger of that, because he was never going to be able to lead his party to the left in a unified way and maintain party discipline given the track record he had of ignoring the party whip.

Why get involved when the UK should do just fine on the natural gas front in the years ahead thanks to fracking? Only reason I can see is to kid on we are still a superpower long after the sun has set. Leave it to the Russians and the Americans, I doubt a few RAF planes would make any significant difference beyond making terrorist attacks on the UK more rather than less likely.

It's only a matter of time until the price of oil goes up again and they still have plenty of it. The collapse of the Saudis isn't likely on that timescale in other words, but will happen eventually obviously given their birthrate and population that is way beyond what their country can reasonably sustain in the absence of oil. The Qataris are the other prime suspects along with the Saudis and Turks for arming the most radical of the bearded head chopping nutters with a gas pipeline to Europe being their end game, which is why Vlad eventually felt the need to intervene given that would be very bad news for Russia.

I'll assume you mean Israel? Wouldn't put it past them, but they don't have a border with the main ISIS held areas (will add before a pedant does that there is a very small ISIS aligned area next to the Golan Heights). Agree with the poster immediately above that at one point the Assad regime could conceivably have been doing it as well, but not so likely over the last year or so once the frontlines between the two became hotly contested and it's worth noting that ISIS have not collapsed financially in the interim. What was particularly telling was that when the Kurds started to move against the last ISIS controlled area along the Turkish border north of Aleppo, Turkey declared it to be a "safe zone", although obviously it was all spun as an action against ISIS: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/new-us-turkey-plan-amounts-to-a-safe-zone-in-northwest-syria/2015/07/26/0a533345-ff2e-4b40-858a-c1b36541e156_story.html

Given the dockyard is the main local employer and independence would put a serious question mark over its future, that's an area where Labour would still be expected to be able to win.

We always get told that ISIS uses proceeds from captured oil fields to fund itself. Think it says something that nobody in the media asks the obvious question of who they could possibly be selling the oil to, given they are surrounded by what are all supposed to be enemy states, i.e. Iraq (Shiite run and allied with Iran, so that's not happening), de facto but yet to be internationally recognised Kurdistan (definitely not pals with ISIS as way too secular and borderline commie), Jordan (not likely to have forgiven and forgotten what happened to their pilot yet and appear to very much back the western backed rebels instead, and quite distant from firmly held ISIS area), what's left of Baathist Syria (way too much head chopping of captured prisoners going on for them to be trading in that sort of way to any significant extentand Iran is known to be sending the oil needed to keep the Assad war machine going), so who does that leave? By far the most likely candidate for some dodgy trading with ISIS is the neighbouring NATO member that is letting the US use one of its air bases to carry out its bombing campaign.

The evidence for this is what? I doubt the full-time clubs ever give this issue much thought and they probably have the biggest say on this within the SPFL. Since the emergence of the fifth tier and the merged SPFL, the mechanism of the pro/rel playoff is now agreed upon between the SFA and the SPFL executive board, which is dominated by the top two tiers. The SFL may have opposed three-way regionalisation when the smaller part-time clubs held the majority of the votes in the context of an SFL AGM. In an SPFL context it's not clear that they hold anything like the same voting clout on this issue. I suspect the bigger issue would be the attitude of the nonleague seniors to losing the phoney barrier between junior and senior clubs and the financial subsidies that go with it. They form a large voting block at SFA AGMs, so licensing has been implemented in a way that first and foremost accomodates the existing full-members through the provision of grants for ground improvements, and when junior clubs did start to apply the progression clause was soon added to try to scare any gate crashers away.

...or maybe it's nothing like the English scenario, because the SFA actually have no intention of doing away with the system of having senior, junior, amateur and welfare grades and building an all-encompassing pyramid, and all that was on their agenda was modernising the existing senior grade a bit with pro/rel into and out of the SPFL and introducing licensing to impose a set of minimal standards on full member Scottish cup entrants, because roped off pitches in public parks were becoming an embarrasment. Beyond that I'm not even sure your analogy makes sense in historical terms. The Isthmian and Northern Leagues were the pinacle of amateur football in England up to the early 70s. The Isthmian league eventually did become a feeder to the conference on par with the Southern and Northern Premier Leagues and initially ran in parallel with the Southern league geographically even though it had given the Conference the bodyswerve when it launched. If things followed the English precedent in other words a junior superduperleague could still feed into the SPFL and initially run in parallel with the Lowland league in geographical terms before a subsequent process of integration and rationalization to form east and weat feeders, while the north region would lose its status in relative terms by not being viewed as equal to the Highland league and instead feeding into it in a Northern league sort of way.

Makes more sense than what happened, but I wouldn't waste time with so many keystrokes if i were you, because there's no way something this radical will happen any time soon given the way the SPFL and SFA are structured in voting terms.

Think Dave King is from Castlemilk originally and the way he pumped in 20 million when David Murray was still in control for not much more than the right to wear a club blazer suggests he isn't in it to asset strip. If he hadn't gained control conditions might have become ripe for something like FCUM to emerge.

A bit like Karl Marx being the alleged inspiration for Papa Smurf, the first reaction is that this is completely mental and then as you read the rationale it makes you wonder a wee bit.

Wookies instead of ewoks and it would have been closer to the level of the first two.

The speck close to Berlin is almost certainly the Spreewald. In Scotland so much of the Caledonian forest was chopped down to create today's bleak landscape of hunting estates and rough pasture for sheep that there really isn't anything equivalent to that left to provide wolves (or bears, which are not present in the fomer DDR, but are in many of the other areas highlighted in green) with a wilderness habitat.

Before local government was restructured in the early 1970s, Whitburn was the only burgh in Scotland to have a Red Hand of Ulster in its official crest.