Inverted

If it's 5 subs in regular time you may as well take a punt on fitness if at all possible. I remember in 2014 Atleti started Costa and he had to come off almost straight away which was a bit of a punch in the gut.

It's good so far but it's very different I think. The setting is the same (Hill House) but as far as I know they made up almost a whole new story for the Netflix series. The book is closer to the film The Haunting from the 1960s.

My girlfriend and I are looking at moving in together and renting. With my new salary that I’ll be moving up to in September, and what I have saved so far, I could probably afford a decent flat in Glasgow. But we are kinda conscious that getting a mortgage together is a pretty major commitment. And there’s part of me that hopes the bubble will burst at some point before I finally decide to buy.

Lmao, it doesn't really help the idea that Russia is the one distorting history. Ukraine realises it's a "mistake" to group Japan as one of the Axis powers, because they're so desperate for Japan's help that they'll happily re-write history so as not to offend them.

Rangnicks last press conference looked very interesting. Basically saying that the club lacks people with football intelligence in scouting, the medical team, and in recruitment. And that the players aren’t training with intensity. It’s quite bold to basically go out and say that not just the players, but all the people you work with day-to-day aren’t good enough. And it feels different from Mourinho, where you could dismiss everything he said as being self-preservation or reputation management. Because it’s not just that he doesn’t care about coddling or protecting the club. The important thing is that it feels like Rangnick really doesn’t care whether the press and public rate him.

Sometimes when I'm making a stir fry and suddenly feel too lazy to make rice I do the same thing, except with a tortilla wrap.

Beautiful city and a great place to visit. I would definitely go back, and for longer.

I'm finishing up work just now, and then packing to fly off to Firenze on Friday morning. The Passenger Locator and vaccine passport stuff all seemed relatively easy, but I haven't been on anything more than a couple of nights away for years, so I'm worried that I won't remember how to pack a suitcase properly. I'll probably be walking around a shop in Italy shortly, trying to remember the Italian words for socks and toothpaste.

I'm not sure that specifically is a war crime, unless they were trying to surrender? Gunning down fleeing enemies is nasty, but I always thought it was standard practise, especially considering that a trained crew is arguably more valuable than the tank itself in the grand scheme of things. Of course, in the heat of battle, it's probably very difficult for a tank crew to simultaneously bail from their vehicle and surrender clearly at the same time. I'm sure the Ukrainians are still committing plenty of war crimes too, though.

My traineeship comes to an end in September, and I applied for two permanent roles with my current firm. One was in a department I had done a rotation in already, and I figured that was my best shot. It wasn't an area I found all that interesting, but I said it was my preference since I figured it was best to stack the odds in my favour. The other application was for the corporate team, which is flashier and more interesting, but I didn't have any direct experience in that department. Overall, there were may more trainees than internal roles open, so tbh I had kind of prepared myself for the likelihood that I would be let go at the end of my training contract, and need to look further afield. Anyway, funnily, I didn't get the first one, and somehow I've got the corporate job. So come September I'll finally have a permanent job, and now that I'm qualified my salary will almost double.

Without taking away from the fact that Russia is blatantly reaching for any flimsy justification for their actions, there is a grim sense that they are purposefully echoing the typical rhetoric we have seen the West use about war in the last 20-30 years. "The oppressed locals want us to intervene" - Kosovo 1999 "They're shielding and supporting terrorists" - Afghanistan 2001 "They have chemical weapons, we needed to act" - Iraq 2003 "They're hiding behind civilians, they are to blame if we accidentally kill any innocents" - Gaza, Iraq, Afghanistan, take your pick. Even if they can't put together anything like a cogent or believable rhetoric themselves, they seem to be purposefully touching on the right notes to at least try highlight the pervasive hypocrisy at play.

It's not that they're making money, it's everything else. And what we're talking about is whether the various rich people in the country are connected or complicit in those other things that the country is doing. The thing that makes Saudi Arabia a fairly unique country is that the entire economy is basically reliant on one sector - oil - and even the other sectors are also largely dependent on that sector. And the government is in almost total control of the oil. The point of mentioning this, is that even many nominally private companies or non-state entities, are connected and in effect owe their status to the government anyway. It is very difficult to draw a clear line between the Saudi government and Saudi private enterprise, because the whole economy owes its success to a state-controlled industry.

The thing with Saudi Arabia is that when a country's economy is overwhelmingly based on one resource, and that resource is largely state-controlled, it is very easy to connect almost any wealth in the country with the state and the government. Of course, the economic elite of all countries is in effect the ruling class, and in almost all countries have a large influence and inter-connection with the state, but the closeness becomes even more obvious the less diversified the economy is and the more heavily-involved the state is with the economy.

I agree, one of the advantages that Putin has is the tendency for liberal democracy to drive the standard of public discourse down almost indefinitely. It allows him to look like a geopolitical mastermind in comparison. In the West, there is a kind of consensual amnesia where political advancement basically requires that nobody think too deeply about the past. Things are continually brushed under the carpet, re-written, or just forgotten, and showing any kind of ideological consistency is basically a political death-sentence. Putin doesn't need to worry about swinging with the times. He can talk about his world view and historical grievances with absolute self-assurance, and he can show a 20+ year record of actions which are mostly consistent with what he says. Even if ultimately he is just cynically serving a small power base (and I think Putin is part cynical and part sincere about his nationalism) he has a public rationale which is broadly consistent with its own internal logic. There is basically nobody in Western politics who could possibly match that, because systematically it just shouldn't be possible for such a person to rise to the top and stay there.

From the range and scope of the initial missile attacks, I thought at first they were going to make a rush for Kiev along with an all out push from the Kharkov direction. But the lack of word about major combat in the north seems to suggest maybe not. Given the relatively short distances involved I thought more would have happened by now if the Russians really wanted to get into Kiev. Some are suggesting the Russians might be trying to create an impression of threat everywhere as cover for a more limited push in the Donbass.

I'm sure his public reasoning is "we don't want NATO missiles 15 minutes from Moscow". But I was also getting at the possibility that if his invasion failed, and the army and people lost confidence in the government, he personally isn't guaranteed a peaceful way out of government. Russia probably could get out of this situation peacefully, but that route isn't necessarily open to Putin personally.

Read someone who pointed out that Putin has essentially expanded MAD to the point where a nuclear state cannot just threaten nuclear retaliation for any attack on its own territory, but also even for interfering with an invasion of a non-nuclear state. So, while it maybe prevents wars between nuclear powers, it now makes every non-nuclear power fair game, essentially. He’s created an unprecedented amount of ambiguity over where the line is. Its worrying trying to think clearly about what range of actions Russia now counts as being worthy of nuclear escalation - sending troops? Sending air support? Trying to enforce a no-fly zone? Is Putin really willing to be vaporised if he can’t get a bit of extra territory or a friendly government in Kiev? Maybe he has one eye on what happens if he loses power. Maybe winning or losing is life or death in his mind.