LongTimeLurker

Think Netanyahu's actual preferred end game would be to engineer a humanitarian catastrophe that leads to the Gaza Palestinians fleeing en masse into Egypt so they can then outright annex the territory like they have with the Golan Heights but the problem they have is that the Egyptians are not playing along with the idea that the Sinai peninsula can be used as a refuge for humanitarian reasons. Don't think it's a given Israel will actually invade because there appears to be a lot of skepticism as to how well their soldiers would perform against Hamas fighters if they did and whether they could handle having the Iranians turning up on their northern border via Syria and Lebanon if things escalated further from there. Not having Saddam and a mainly Sunni backed regime in power in Baghdad any more could come back to haunt them and by extension the Americans in geostrategic terms. There's a reason Israel and the western powers badly wanted a regime change where Bashar Assad's Syria was concerned because a Shiite-Alawite crescent of control from Tehran to Baghdad to Damascus to South Beirut was very bad news for them.

The Urals can be a bit of a disappointment when you see them up close. Was at a monument related to the supposed divide between the two continents close to Yekaterinburg a few years back, before Vlad totally flipped his lid and it's a bit like trying to use the Sidlaw hills between Dundee and Forfar as a major geographical divide. Not everybody sees Asia and Europe as being separate continents:

Large portions of NI's two largest cities were abandoned as no go areas between the start of the Troubles and Operation Motorman so that's not as farfetched a scenario as you might think.

Hopefully with a better outcome for the BUs than the club formerly known as Linlithgow Thistle had on Friday evening when playing away against Stirling Uni's reserve team.

Clearing fixture backlogs with midweek games during the winter months is definitely what they should be used for.

It's not much more complicated than getting more top ex-junior clubs like Lithgae Rose in as quickly as possible to have lower division SPFL sized crowds at most LL games. It's not just the SPFL that have been circling the wagons, unfortunately. If you were playing Pollok or Clydebank, you would probably have to make the game all ticket, for example, In a similar way to a game against the Accies.

...and that's still crazy money at Lowland League level. It's comparable to what a club like Morton are reported to pay most of their players to be full-time in the Championship: https://salarysport.com/football/scottish-championship/greenock-morton/

Think his career is much the same as Robert De Niro's. Spectacularly good in the 70s and still great up to the mid-90s and then a slow descent into mediocrity.

Elsewhere: Albion Rovers 0 Stirling Uni 1 Hertz B 6 Berwick Rangers 0

John Ward is back from Broxburn?

The use of ATACMS appears to be confirmed now: Biden finally grew a pair as the Americans would say, but it would no doubt have helped the Ukrainians a lot more if they had been able to take out the Berdyansk helicopter base before they started their counteroffensive.

Key being the helicopter bases in question in Berdyansk and Luhansk are outside conventional HIMARS range, so it likely had to be a new type of missile that the Ukrainians have not been using previously with ATACMS and GLSDB the likely candidates. Think cluster type ATACMS were what the Americans were said to have found still waiting for disposal and hence not on their inventory:

There is a school of thought that Arafat's plan all along was to use Oslo to get back into Palestine and then launch the intifada. Think the problem ultimately was more that neither side's politicians were able to persuade the populations they represented to go along with the two-state plan Bill Clinton came up with and the Americans were not forceful enough on insisting that Israel had to get back to something very close to the 1948-1967 borders or lose future American financial and military backing.

All that was missing was Arthur Montford going mental with a that's it we're going to Germany for this evening to be complete.

Talk of GLSDB still being on track and a big batch of Switchblade 600 drones arriving soon probably dampened Vlad's mood a bit though.

...and Sam North has a youtube clip about it:

The Gaza Strip has a big advantage of having a direct border with Egypt that is under Palestinian control. The Palestinian controlled portions of the West Bank don't have that with Jordan so even if Hamas took control there it would be a lot more difficult for them to do what they are doing militarily in the Gaza Strip.

Meanwhile in Washington, the good news is that the supposedly more moderate Republican that didn't have Trump's backing who won a secret ballot to be the nomination for the Speaker of the House of Representatives appears to be gung ho about arming Ukraine. The bad news is that he has also described himself as "David Duke w/o the baggage".

What happens when the alleged credible primary sources are telling you that there are WMDs in Iraq or that the president's head was seen to move violently forward? The internet is a useful safety mechanism for making sure that the powers that be are not also able to misinform unchallenged. The problem with Twitter right now is that Elon Musk wasn't happy that they had been doing things like actively fact-checking Donald Trump, but eliminating the staff that used to do that sort of thing also seems to have stopped accounts that are spreading sensationalist misinformation simply to generate views from being suspended. Think that eventually is going to come back to haunt him, and a lot more people will start looking for an alternative that works better.

A property developer called Jim Kean is the sugar daddy AFAIA. Think he used to play for Clyde, Hamilton Accies and Ayr United but not 100% certain on that.

The Russians are on a bit of a counterattack at the moment apparently:

No idea who Brian is or why he would have a news and intel channel but this popped up when I searched for Sderot just now and he's asking the right question: My money's on a marked reluctance to get fatally shot in contrast to their opponents because there are no 72 virgins waiting for them in the hereafter and there's very little chance they are actually going into Gaza rather than simply turning it into a car park from the air regardless of whether that approach amounts to a war crime or not. The Israelis aren't made of the same stuff militarily nowadays as they were when Moshe Dayan was around complete with eye patch and they used to do things like invade into Egypt across the Sinai Canal. They are living off their repuation from another time.

A lot of what drives the opposition to spending money on weapons and budgetary support for Ukraine is the America First isolationism that kept the US out of WWII at the outset. Israel tends to be immune from that mentality because BillyJoeJimBob in his pickup truck out in one of the flyover states thinks all Jewish people have to gather there before the rapture is going to happen for him or whatever. Think Zelensky & Co lucked out big time that the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War coincided with issues with the House of Representatives leadership and Hamas leadership couldn't just let that pass. Not so good for the hippies at the rave and people living in blocks of flats that the Israeli airforce have or are about to demolish in Gaza obviously.

On loan to a club two divisions higher, no less. From what I've seen of highlight clips, EK look like they could more than hold their own at that level, so that's no surprise. Berwick throwing money at achieving promotion this season was as daft as what East Stirlingshire were doing when Kelty were around. If you can't win the financial arms race against one club that is spending silly amounts of money it is better to wait for a season when you have a legitimate shot at it to really push the boat out on the team budget.

Always interesting to see who will read into posts like this and look for meanings that simply aren't there.