Chindie

Charlotte's loss to New England is made that bit more bitter because New England's manager actually guaranteed they would win the match in his pre-game press conference. He then tried to claim he didn't do that in the post game briefing and was taken out of context, but he absolutely did.

They put some money in the meter in Tel Aviv then.

They're the most boring team in world football. It's impressive, if you can set aside the cheating that got them there, but it's so, so boring to watch. Technical brilliance isn't fun.

RE3 is great. It's very short - a blind first run might take 4hrs and when you know the game and use it's unlock system you can quite easily do a run in an hour. It feels like a very ambitious DLC in some respects. It's much more action focused and the pace is pumped up, it has basically 3 puzzles in the entire run and those are pathetic even in the Resi stakes. It's very set up to be replayed and it's unlock system is set up with a view to doing multiple runs with different gimmicks you unlock. It's not perfect. The biggest issue is the final boss on the highest difficulties is nearly broken. It actually soured me on the game a little when it essentially became a game of rolling the dice and seeing if the game was going to let me win. But overall I got 25hrs out of it that I really enjoyed. REmake 2 is the better game, but 3 is still very good.

Julia Garner cast in Fantastic 4 as the Shalla-Bal version of the Silver Surfer.

On this point... He's **** bang on.

And that's setting aside the potential for wide ranging legal and diplomatic incidents. If we decide we can't justify selling things to the Israelis and that in turn means the Israelis are troubled in buying or using a US product, that will be a disaster - would the US seek to end deals with UK companies? Would they reverse engineer a product to ensure a US company makes it which in turn would instantly threaten the UK companies involved and possibly put them out of business overnight?

Indeed. The issue though, which no-one will actually say but is definitely making the people that matter twitch, is by making a stand like that it may make future sales to anyone more difficult. If you're in the market for some missile launchers, are you buying from a friendly UK who might screw you over if you choose to use them in a manner the UK finds difficult, or are you buying from Washington who don't give a **** (... unofficially, of course we all follow the rules, cough)? These laws are right and should be followed, but realistically they aren't expected to be used - you sell to allied nations and 90% of the time that's good enough, and if they do shit themselves to your embarrassment just dither and obfusticate until it goes away.

Just a correction, it's about £500m over 15 years. In military spending terms it's not much, and largely down to the fact they don't buy much from us in respect of 'finished' items - they don't buy tanks etc from us, they buy components that are used on their own tanks, launchers etc, or those from the Yanks. It's still not good.

Surprisingly, I'm aware of all of this, in a prior job I had to be trained on export legalities that included a significant section on military and military adjacent products. It's obvious we can't 'unsell' things, and it's clear we're a smaller player in Israeli kit as the things we make military wise they buy elsewhere or make themselves in the main (historically I think we sold them some tanks but suspect those have either been superceded or the Israelis outright bought production rights to them) and thus we're probably down to components and perhaps some niche armaments, and therefore they're would be a legal nightmare to be had if our main exposure was bits of stuff that ultimately was a, for instance, US product, but it remains a problem that we are flogging stuff that ultimately is being used to splatter children.

Of course it's not just him. Israel's reliance on US support and the US' psychotic desire to give it at all costs is well known, as is the extent to which pro-Israel money is in the US system - one of the big stories leading up to their election is the massive injection of money into pro-Israel lobbying groups who are looking to remove anyone not sufficiently pro-Israel to a near unprecedented extent. I comment on Biden simply to point out that he's not someone on the moderate (for America) side of Israeli support - his record shows him to be a zealot in Israeli matters and thus any idea that he's going to pull the leash, even if he doesn't like Netanyahu, is forlorn.

A lot of high ranking legal professionals disagree with you, irrespective of how little we do or don't sell to Israel. We sell them stuff that quite clearly is 'in danger' of being used to eradicate a people, and that's against the law. We soil ourselves being associated with them.

The current US President has a record on Israel that suggests there's not a line Israel could cross that he wouldn't excuse.

Yes it's a great stain on us that in amongst the 30,000 dead a couple of hundred aid workers already lay cold from Israel's deliberate targeting of aid facilities, following in their long tradition of attacking aid facilities whenever they can. They're a despicable nation and we should be ashamed we stand by them.

In fairness I think I've clearly said '**** Israel' too many times to even set foot near a Labour Party facility. And it's self evident that the concept of anti-Semetism has been ground into the dirt at this point.

It's almost like it's a lobbying organisation for a foreign state and shouldn't be anywhere near any politician, really.

Fair play to the founder of World Central Kitchen, the charity that the 7 killed were working for, he's just straight up said the Israelis did it on purpose and called out their attacking aid workers. Good man.

Horror show incoming.

I've found the handwringing and limp finger pointing over failures of 'deconfliction' pathetic. Perhaps Israel could stop flattening everything in Gaza with zeal instead. Maybe.

I never played the Last Guardian but from what I recall of the talk at the time it came out the consensus was it was a bit crap, largely because the AI of the creature was a nightmare. Some claimed it was like that purposely to emulate the nature of trying to train an animal to do things, and others just reckoned it was shit, but the entire game experience seemed to revolve around how much you engaged with the system or not. I wouldn't be shocked if the general controls are rough - Team ICO never quite nailed character control and camera control, which basically is the only thing that harms Colossus.

Israel could blow up chunks of London and Washington and still would be getting shipments of missiles and rifles from the very same governments. 3 aid workers might stir someone to consider saying something mildly critical.

Jones sells a worldview and does so with the confidence tricksters handbook. The worldview he sells is a conservative Christian one, a very right wing very American worldview obsessed with classic Christian matters (even if he's a sinner in many respects by the same view) and classic US concerns like guns, that he packages up with some of the edges knocked off or cushioned and disguised. To sell it, he blusters and blathers through a never ending supply of stories and theories, invariably wrong but with little elements of truth (by little I mean things like he'll have the right countries involved but everything else wrong) and spouted with such conviction it sounds like it's spoken with authority from the point of view of a lay listener, and then he'll spin in elements of common conspiracies people generally believe (the usual stuff like evil companies, the government is evil, etc) or callbacks to a handful of real incidents in history. He'll rattle through news stories of the day and spin them with his viewpoint in mind, or often just outright misrepresent the news to the extent he's making the story have no resemblance to what is actually there and tying it into his view and making out how right he is, when a cursory glance at the stories and the reality will prove the opposite. He exceptionally rarely admits he's wrong (the rare times he does it's only in details not the thrust of things), and carries on spinning that he sees and speaks only truth. And all of it is just a package to sell supplements and snake oil with huge mark ups. No matter is above using, he'll work up a froth over a tragedy as much as he will the latest political fracas - only last week he was broadcasting graphic videos of the Moscow attack and trying to spin up some excitement about that in-between flogging shit, and obviously the Sandy Hook matter essentially revolves around his lying about the murder of children to whip up a frenzy to sell his wares to the viewers. And it goes all the way back to 9/11 where he was one of the principle figures behind the truly despicable Loose Change 'documentary'. He's irredeemably disgusting. There isn't a thing that could befall him that he would not deserve.

The world will be a better place when he's dead. He's absolutely meritless as a being, everything that's bad about us as a species incarnated.

Looks like Israel has got what it wanted from killing some more aid workers - at least 2 more organisations ceasing work in Gaza, as it's too dangerous. Why is it too dangerous? Israel keeps killing them, even when they're supposedly working with Israeli forces to advise where they are and who they are. May as well drive around with a big target on vehicles. Israel has also decided to bomb the Iranian consulate in Syria, killing some high ranking military officials. The current line seems to be that this is ok as they didn't target the embassy itself. Just the building next door, that was used by the embassy and it's officials. Either way it seems stupidly reckless in the current climate. But then it's Israel and they don't give a ****, and are allowed to not give a **** with impunity.

They are a rogue state that, were they not on 'our' side, would be getting high velocity democracy from a few thousand feet until they got in line. The regularity at which they kill aid workers and attack civilian infrastructure and targets makes a mockery of everyone. Despicable nation.