Chindie

For the spoiler phobic, this is the usual movie in 3 minutes trailer so you may want to skip it. Given that we're 3 months from release this is going to be a movie where you've seen it all in trailers before you set foot in the cinema... It finally reveals who the other villain is... Looks... OK. Ish.

...and? I'm fully aware of that. Technically we've not been at war as wars are held between states, and IS despite the name isn't a state, quite.

We're off to war again.

14 dead.

I'd probably 'sympathise' with the PKK, unless I'm very mistaken by their aims. I'm no doubt evil and dangerous. I'd also be very careful claiming to genuinely know what Corbyn and Co think on something like this, which is a very complex and wide ranging topic, especially when thinking of such terms as 'sympathise'.

3 guys have shot up a centre for assisting and caring for the disabled in San Bernardino, possible bomb involved as well.

Having stuff delivered to my neighbours. I don't know why really, but I feel really awkward about it. I'd so much rather they left stuff in a 'safe place' (to a better standard than Yodel, admittedly). I hate the awkward conversation getting the parcel, the feeling I've put them out by having to sign for something even though I'd hoped to be around when something came. Also means I've got to wrap anther ton of chocolates for Christmas to say thanks.. Also, anyone who gets on a bus without their pass or change ready. My journey home everyday is bollocks with traffic, I don't need some clearing in the woods getting on a stop nobody ever uses and then spending 2 minutes patting himself down searching for his pass in every pocket and orifice he has. You're at a bus stop. You're waiting for a bus. Presumably you know you have a pass. Have the **** thing ready. You're wasting everyone's day. word removed.

That reminds me, I read an article that raised a chuckle the other day, talking about what if the new Star Wars turns out to be shit... I almost want Force Awakens to be the new Phantom Menace just so I could see the fallout from it. It's not beyond the realms of doubt either. JJ Abrams isn't a slam dunk director, he's missed a few times and iirc the writing team behind aren't earth shatterers either...

I think you may miss my somewhat flippant point :). My point was to say that the US has previous on slowly involving itself on the ground in conflicts where ground forces are sensitive issues by sending troops the designate as advisors that they then morph the mission into all or combat roles. I wasn't really making a comment on the nature of IS or action against them.

Just wheeling out the 'terrorism is a methodology' comment again... Mr Mandela was a terrorist, he just happened to have a righteous aim... To support chrisp65 more obviously though, it's entirely possible to have sympathy for terrorists. Sympathy is a daft word to use really as it's ambiguity causes issues (as the Sun knows...). But let's use it. I'd have had sympathy for Mandela at the time he embarked on a terrorist campaign because I could support what he wanted, if not the way he went about it. And so on. Just because Corbyn might feel similarly, with reason no doubt, about other causes that terrorists have taken up, doesn't necessarily mean he's an evil idiot. For many, what does is that he's left of Thatcher.

Our planes will make absolutely no difference at all. Its a gesture, grandstanding. You already have numerous air forces pounding Syria. If we don't turn up with our handful of planes, there will be just be a few more bombs dropped by the US, or Russia, or France instead. It might make a difference if it was part of a wider strategy, but that doesn't appear to be happening and is a far far harder question to answer and tackle. And asks far wider questions we don't want to answer.

4. If you watch 1 and go in episode order you'll hate Star Wars in about 30 minutes. You can probably ignore the existence of the prequels entirely. There's a suggested order that says watch 4,5,2,3,6. Episode 1 is mostly pointless with the only highlight being the fight at the end.

A couple of professors at Kings College commented earlier about how stupid the governments position on this whole thing is. I don't have them to hand but worth looking up, they were both professors of war and conflict and effectively said this is a debate over a conflict where we won't make much difference, where we don't have defined achievable goals (I.e. creating the same problem with success metrics the Vietnam war had) and so on. They were on the BBC live blog, worth consideration.

Cameron loves being able to show what an important statesman he is, and the ultimate stage for a statesman is apparently conflict. You can tell he hates the humdrum day to day stuff, he treats it largely with disdain, but if it's some grand event he can claim to have had a hand in and stand next to the US President he's all over it. He also, in this case, is particularly pushing because the last time he lost the debate, which is one of the more embarrassing moments for a PM in history. He can't have it happen again.

Isn't it the US tactic for this kind of thing to send in 'military advisors' who happen to like to advise in a very hands on way? Least shocking development ever. Even less shocking than David Cameron chomping at the bit to get some proper showy Statesman work done and none of this tedious domestic lark.

Im not a fan, but I felt both of the final Hunger Games films were awful.

I think the 'you can't bomb an idea' comment is (and it certainly is in my case because I'm more less OK with bombing (though agree it doesn't go at all far enough in a combat sense as you NEED a ground element)) an attempt to acknowledge that the idea is what is causing this at it's root and attacking ISIS with bombs won't cure that. And it'll probably make things worse in the medium term by playing into the discourse that sends young Muslim men to Syria and Iraq, amongst other things. That's the point I think most people are making with that comment on ideas being bulletproof. Bombs are treating the symptoms but not the disease. It's a case of kicking a can down the road. You could (and should) wipe ISIS and all it's adherents from the face of the earth and you'd just end up with another one in 5 years. It's not an excuse to sit and watch Syria turn into Hell. It's a comment to encourage thinking about a much broader issue. To think about a wider strategy internationally that has a military campaign against ISIS as 1 element, but also long term more importantly maybe, looks to deal with extremism and it's roots.

Excellent freekick, cracking header, **** the offside.

Wlad will win his usual risk averse structured fight behind the jab and Fury will take the payday he's been building up for months. I was considering watching it but I can't remember the last time I watched a Klitschko fight that ended up being exciting.

Some of the ice creams at the Electric are astounding. Highly recommended next time you're there.

I don't mind the films, and I think they're decent watches that have elements and moments that glimpse how good they could have been. But they do miss the mark and do pale in comparison to LOTR. They should have been great, instead they're alright, forgettable.

Just finished the extended edition of the Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies. The weakest of Jackson's Middle Earth adaptations anyway, the extended edition doesn't actually bring all that much extra to the table in truth. Far more subtle in its additions than the likes of the Lord of the Rings Extended Editions, this largely bulks out a few action scenes with little benefit, mostly serving only to make some of the stupid slapstick action even more daft. At best Beorn actually gets some screen time this time around, having been in a single slot in the original release, now he's in 3!... It's come out this week that the Hobbit movies were apparently made in a rush and at times they are making up what they were going to do as they went, and the whole thing was severely hamstrung with too little preproduction work done, so it's not really a surprise that the trilogy ended up being a messy uneven work that let a lot of people down.

As expected I don't think I've seen a single deal that's blown my socks off in this whole sale period. About the best I've seen was a couple of 4k TV offers but neither was a must buy simply because of issues with the tech at the mo and the saving not being astonishing enough to paper over the issues of the technology. Everything largely appeared to be bollocks. The top 5 deals today on HotUKDeals are testament to that. Ones for petrol!

It would be interesting to see a proposal that actually set about intending on doing something more than kicking the can down the road. You might be able to turn the massed ranks of IS into small mounds of glass with enough bombs, though you're not going to get them all even if high explosives can act like some kind of Daesh Dettol some will always slip away. But it won't solve the problem. You've got a particularly dangerous philosophy, and a stream of people happy to take up it's path. You need to solve that or you simply delay the next iteration. Bombs don't destroy thought, and they probably encourage a significant number of people to take up those thoughts. It's a more difficult problem to tackle though and has a less obvious metric of success than x tonnes of bombs dropped to kill x number of people. You can't sell it on telly. You can't easily have people understand how successful you're being. Same issue the Yanks had in Vietnam. They couldn't really define success so just started reeling off how many bombs had been dropped and how much territory they'd gained control of without those figures really meaning anything in the grand scheme of things. The bombs need to be a part of the means to a defined end as well. What's the plan? What's the long term goal? Is everyone involved agreed on that? Bombing IS to oblivion and giving ourselves a pat on the back as we leave a lawless crater behind just exacerbates the potential of the latest rabid Islamist fools to rise up. Equally if we start pissing about too much you'll piss off others and have them turn to the Islamist cause as well... It's all a little too difficult. I'm not against bombing at all. I think it's something we need to do. In truth I think we certainly need to do more than that, as you can't win a conflict from air alone. But combat needs to be part of a wider, smarter, more developed plan than what we seem to have currently, which appears to be 'fuel up the Tornadoes and **** the words removed up'.

Daesh is just the Arabic take on ISIS anyway, in essence.