Gurgeh

Marble's a rescue kitty. She had been with the shelter for months because she hid from everyone who came to see her (not too surprising considering the horrible situation she was found in). Once we got her home she spent a little over a day hiding under the sideboard and then amazingly must have decided it was safe and came out to say hello and we've not looked back since!

The newest member of the household finding her comfort zone...

Apparently it was carrying a few hundred tons of Shahed drones and their warheads, which is why we got the big boom. Heads are apparently already rolling over this.

Our problem is the team has fallen apart. To draft one of the top 2 QBs we'd need to trade the future, and then have the problem of fixing the OL with what remains of the draft picks to ensure our rookie doesn't suffer the same fate as Sam, plus somehow fix the worst pass defense in the league so our new QB isn't under constant pressure just to keep us in the game. And even then, you have a 50% chance the guy you traded up for turns out no better than Sam, or worse. On the whole I think I'd look to trade down if we can get someone's 1st rounder next year as part of the deal. It's unlikely, but some team might want a QB that's there at #4. Then we roll with Sam and draft to fix the squad as best we can. That way, next year we'd have two firsts if things didn't work out and a better environment for a rookie.

I noticed a few weeks ago that Sam was showing the signs of a young QB who's taken too many hits and was trying too hard to make something happen, and it's a real shame for him because I think he's a better QB than we've seen these last few games. And the blame isn't on him; it looks more likely now that he isn't the answer at QB, but he was essentially hung out to dry by an OL that was assembled as an afterthought ("assembled" in the way our cat assembles the beads holding our blinds together), playcalling that seemed designed to get Sam injured, and coaching that has failed to develop the players that we have. While I hope we get an answer at QB next year, that is always going to be a roll of the dice. I don't think the odds are as good as 50-50 on first round QBs even in the top 10 picks. But what isn't in the lap of the gods is creating a good coaching staff and scouting team, so that we don't end up in this dysfunctional mess again. Who the new owner hires is going to be more important than who we draft, because with the wrong people in place we'll just destroy another prospect.

I can see this, but I could also see someone jumping to #3 to take a QB ahead of us. That might make it harder for us to trade down, but then we could also get Harrison if we want him.

Yes, tiredness is ravaging the Ukrainian soldiers I meet. But they never think of giving up | Nataliya Gumenyuk | The Guardian Ivan has been give the name Decent Man by his fellow soldiers, for being a decent man. As a 40-year-old teacher from central Ukraine and the father of three children, he would have been exempt from fighting at the beginning of the war. But he wanted to fight for his country. He has now spent 18 months on the battlefield and desperately misses his family. He might dream of returning home, but so far doesn’t consider being discharged an option. “The country has already spent money and resources on me. How can I leave?” he asks... Most of the servicemen I spoke to had been serving for between 15 and 20 months. They had survived major battles; many were wounded and had witnessed the deaths of their closest friends. In that time, most had not had more than a week or two off duty. Contrary to foreign media headlines, Ukrainian soldiers don’t talk so much about the lack of progress in the counteroffensive. Initially, those fighting had a sober view on the possibility of liberating the rest of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions without a decent air force and sufficient demining. (As one soldier, who lost his leg near Bakhmut this summer, told me, “For us, 200 metres of liberated land means a few dead and eight legs”). Now, what Ukrainian soldiers really care about is physical tiredness. There is no procedure for discharging those who went to fight at the start of the invasion, including those who volunteered. They have a duty to serve until the end of the war. The Ukrainian army consists of men who went to fight not because they wanted to, but because it was the only way to defend their towns and families. “Unless the Russian troops are kicked out of Ukrainian territory, the probability that my city will be occupied remains,” one serviceman explains. For those on the battlefield, the idea of a ceasefire sounds not just naive, but ignorant and detached from reality... Ukrainian soldiers now want a better equipped, more efficient army. What they don’t want is to give up.

China is watching with interest, that's for sure

I think you need two years to judge for any QB, even when they are in a good environment. First rounders tend to get that time, and more - and if Sam had been taken in the first round, I think most people would be saying "give him another year with better support".

By most accounts the recently arrived Russian troops are poorly trained. The Russians transferred many of their training staff to the front lines back when Ukraine was making big advances, and now they are suffering for it. And based upon what happened last year, the recruits will be expected to provide much of their own equipment, assuming it doesn't get stolen from them. They are also being careful to recruit from the poorer regions of Russia, as far away from Moscow as they can. Despite the total state control of media, when you take over 300,000 casualties and have hundreds of thousands of men out in the field experiencing a brutal war, it's impossible for people not to hear what's really going on even if they choose not to believe it. And sentiment is turning inside Russia - "A recent Russian opinion poll indicates that the number of Russians who fully support the war in Ukraine has almost halved since February 2023 and that more Russians support a withdrawal of Russian forces from Ukraine than do not." ( Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, November 30, 2023 | Institute for the Study of War (understandingwar.org) ). NATO countries have been providing Ukraine with varying degrees of training for tens of thousands of troops - even a few weeks of basic training is probably far better than the other side is getting. But one issue that came up early on in the summer offensive was the divide between the freshly Western-trained troops and the older higher ranking Ukrainian officers who had been trained the "Soviet" way.

I think I know the target market

The Pogues live in the 80s were some of the best gigs I've been to. And he wrote some of the finest lyrics

Life in the trenches (video inside the link) Avdiivka: The story of one bloody battle in a trench in eastern Ukraine | CNN Sentsov, 47, was a famous Ukrainian filmmaker, imprisoned by the Russians for five years in 2014, and is now a soldier fighting with the 47th Mechanised Brigade, part of the Ukrainian Ground Forces. He has fought in some of the war’s fiercest battles so far — Bakhmut, Zaporizhzhia region and now Avdiivka. On October 19, he and his fellow soldiers filmed a 5-hour battle on helmet and body cameras, illustrating the cruelty of war and horrors of the trenches. ...“All wars are terrible. There are no good wars. People always suffer and die in war. The only question is why they suffer and why they die. Russians are being fooled by Putin’s propaganda. .. Ukrainians are fighting mostly as volunteers for their freedom on their own land,” he said. “Right now, people are dying for freedom near Avdiivka, near Robotyne, and other places. And there is nothing more important than that.”

I said before the season that more talented QBs than Howell have been destroyed by starting their career behind a terrible OL. I'm actually surprised he's lasted this long given the pressure he's constantly under and the hits he's taken. I think he's improved since the season began, but there've been games where I've started to think the number of sacks has made him skittish. And for what it's worth, I think Kirk and RGIII had better lines and RGIII ran a simplified offense in the first year that was suited to his style. Howell has been given no help by the coaches with the offense they've assembled or the playcalling.

Ukraine war: The Russians snitching on colleagues and strangers - BBC News "I was taught how to snitch by my grandfather who was a snitch himself," claims a woman who goes by the name of Anna Korobkova. She says she lives in a large Russian city but refuses to say which one. But she does say her grandfather was an anonymous informant for the Soviet secret police during Stalin's reign, when denunciations were part of everyday life, and she's following in his footsteps. Now, she is reporting anyone she thinks is a critic of the war in Ukraine. ...Korobkova claims to have written 1,397 denunciations since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. She says people have been fined, fired and labelled as foreign agents because of her denunciations. "I do not feel sorry for them," she reveals. "I feel joy if they are punished because of my denunciations." She seems to have two motives for snitching on her fellow citizens. Firstly, she tells me she believes she is helping Russia defeat Ukraine and, secondly, she thinks it will help protect her own financial stability... "All those who oppose the special military operation are rivals of my own wellbeing," she explains, predicting a win for Ukraine would be a loss for her. "I could lose all my savings and would have to get a full-time job." Korobkova shows no remorse for her actions, instead she proudly keeps a database of people she has reported, including the consequences.

I think you're looking for a different word than scapegoat, because losing your job as the DC of a defence featuring several first round picks that ranks last in points allowed doesn't make you a scapegoat, it makes you unfit for the role.

"I don't want war. All I want is peace. Peace. Peace! A little piece of Poland, a little piece of France A little piece of Portugal and Austria perchance A little slice of Turkey and all that that entails Und then a piece of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales" To Be or Not to Be (1983) - Mel Brooks as Dr. Frederick Bronski - IMDb

The Russian casualty levels in the last couple of months have been extreme even for this conflict. It seems the decree has come from the top that they need to capture Avdiivka no matter the cost, much like Bakhmut last year, and it's possible they'll overrun it eventually by weight of artillery and numbers. However, unlike last year at Bakhmut, there have been many reports of Russian units refusing orders to advance or attack. A lot of them are well below full strength, and have been fighting for months with little respite in poor conditions. The Russians have occasionally resorted to using special forces units in frontal assaults on the defences, and those unit commanders have complained bitterly about how it's a waste of elite troops. One of the reasons the Ukrainians managed to cross the Dneipr river around Kherson was because that area is being defended mostly by Russian troops who had been withdrawn from other areas of the front line after taking heavy casualties. It's a mix of units with poor communication between them - in one graphic video a contingent of Russian soldiers were seen to be ambushed and almost wiped out by their own side. The Russians did have special forces defending the islands in the river a few months ago, but it seems they were sent elsewhere...

Hamas has been building tunnels and bunkers in the Gaza strip for decades, .and if you do anything for that long you get good at it. ‘A spider’s web of tunnels’: inside Gaza’s underground network being targeted by Israel | Israel-Hamas war | The Guardian ...The phenomenon of tunnels in Gaza is not a new one – they appeared long before Hamas’s takeover of the Gaza Strip in 2007 and are used for smuggling and rudimentary military operations, including to mine Israeli positions. ...Hamas’s military engineers in particular had become highly adept at building tunnels, developing systems with concrete-faced walls, ventilation and military communication systems. ...There are claims that some tunnels are as deep as 45 metres (150ft), and the main communication tunnels are big enough for a motorbike to drive through. As an indication of the potential scale of the network, just over a decade ago Israel uncovered a tunnel from Gaza into Israel that was 1.5 miles long and 20 metres underground that required 800 tonnes of concrete to build.

The Ukrainians apparently have mixed opinions on the US Switchblade drones they've been given. They like the larger ones and want more, but the smaller drones aren't much better than the homebrew stuff the Ukrainians are making for themselves, and are much more expensive. In the air, the most dangerous drone on either side is probably the Russian Lancet. It's accounted for a lot of Ukrainian vehicles and artillery. So if anything, we should be learning from that. The Ukrainian sea drones have pushed a whole navy away, and if I was Taiwan I'd be offering a lot of money for the blueprints. You'd get a lot of those drones for the price of say a corvette, and they'd probably be more effective if you're only interested in defending your coastline and not projecting naval power to distant shores. As far as exposing our tech goes, the Russians have become pretty good at jamming HIMARS. Jamming alone doesn't stop the rounds from landing, but it has made them less accurate. Ironically, the ATACMS rounds we gave to Ukraine are so old they actually have an advantage: they use inertial guidance rather than GPS, so the Russians can't jam them. The lessons go both ways though. We've learned our anti-mine equipment can't deal with the dense minefields deployed by the Russians, who quickly realised that double-stacking their anti-tank mines will blow a hole in anything the West has given Ukraine. That was definitely an area where we were too complacent about our ability to cope. And obviously how important drones are, especially in observation, and also how important artillery is when you don't dominate the skies and can take out the enemies big guns from a safe height. Bear in mind that much of the equipment and ammunition that the US and the rest of NATO has given to Ukraine are things that were due to be retired or replaced. Those ATACMS rounds are from the 90s and were destined to be destroyed; ATACMS itself is being replaced. There's not much cutting edge tech going to the battlefield from our side.

Bits and pieces from the ISW updates (Institute for the Study of War (understandingwar.org) Both Russians and Ukrainians have called up reinforcements for the battles around Avdiivka. At full unit strength the Russians would have more than 40,000 troops there, but many units are not even close to full strength, and equipment losses have been severe. The Russians are increasingly relying on massed infantry attacks, partly because of the weather, and partly because they now simply lack the vehicles. The Ukrainians are still holding their small territory on the east bank of the Dniepr around the village of Krynky. Groups of 50 to 70 are crossing the river and attempting to push further north along the riverbank and also further inland. There's estimated to be somewhere between 300 and 600 Ukrainian marines involved. For the first time some armored vehicles (but no tanks) were ferried across the river, but we only know that because two of them were seen to be destroyed. According to the Russians, "the enemy’s losses during the week totalled up to 505 servicemen, 18 field artillery guns, 15 boats and 25 vehicles" which would have wiped them out altogether if true (and the Ukrainians are definitely still there, up to 4 km from the river in places). As well as the landing boats Ukraine destroyed, earlier in the week they severely damaged the corvette Askold in a cruise missile strike. The Askold is one of the newest ships in the Russian navy and had been used to launch cruise missile strikes on Ukraine. The ship was docked in the Zalyv shipyard at Kerch, the largest shipyard in eastern Europe and one the Russians had turned to following strikes on Sevastopol.

https://www.congress.gov/116/meeting/house/110331/documents/HMKP-116-JU00-20191211-SD1364.pdf PRESIDENT ZELENSKY: So, can you give me a word that you will come to our great country? PRESIDENT TRUMP: Well, I’m going to try. (Laughter.) And I know a lot of people — I will say this: I know a lot of people from Ukraine. They’re great people. And I owned something called the Miss Universe pageants years ago, and I sold it to IMG. And when I ran for President, I thought maybe it wouldn’t be the greatest thing to own the Miss Universe and Miss USA pageants. But it’s a great thing. And we had a winner from Ukraine, and we’ve really had — we got to know the country very well in a lot of different ways. But it’s a country, I think, with tremendous potential. PRESIDENT ZELENSKY: Yes, I know it, because I’m from this country. ... Q Will the military aid continue? Can you assure that it will continue in the future? PRESIDENT TRUMP: Well, we’re working with Ukraine. And we want other countries to work with Ukraine. When I saw “work,” I’m referring to money. They should put up more money. We put up a lot of money. I gave you anti-tank busters that — frankly, President Obama was sending you pillows and sheets. And I gave you anti-tank busters. And a lot of people didn’t want to do that, but I did it. And I really hope that Russia — because I really believe that President Putin would like to do something. I really hope that you and President Putin get together and can solve your problem. That would be a tremendous achievement. And I know you’re trying to do that And as things turned out, Trump was right about one thing. President Putin definitely did "like to do something"

It's unfortunately behind a paywall but it's a good read The commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces on how to win the war (economist.com) The 49-year-old told The Economist that he initially believed he could halt Russia “by bleeding its troops”. "That was my mistake. Russia has lost at least 150,000 dead. In any other country such casualties would have stopped the war. Let’s be honest, it’s a feudal state where the cheapest resource is human life. And for us…the most expensive thing we have is our people." Ukraine’s army should have been able to push back at a pace of 18 miles a day as it breached Russian defensive lines, the general said. “If you look at Nato’s text books and at the maths which we did [in planning the counter-offensive], four months should have been enough time for us to have reached Crimea, to have fought in Crimea, to return from Crimea and to have gone back in and out again,” Zaluzhny told the magazine. When his troops got nowhere, he wondered if it was his commanders, so he changed them. They still had no luck. He said he only got an insight when he reread a book published in 1941 by a Soviet major-general, who analysed the battles of the First World War. It was called “Breaching Fortified Defence Lines”. He said: “And before I got even halfway through it, I realised that is exactly where we are because just like then, the level of our technological development today has put both us and our enemies in a stupor.”

Try Ctrl - Shift - Escape next time, like a good QB when a play breaks down

More from the ISW the past few days (Institute for the Study of War (understandingwar.org) After making early advances around Avdiivka the Russians ground to halt after taking heavy losses, estimated at over 200 armored vehicles. They have since regrouped and did what they always do, which is to bring up more artillery and try to level the town so there's no cover left to defend. The situation is reminiscent of Bakhmut, where the Russians were absolutely determined to take a position no matter the cost, and just keep throwing men and equipment forward. The Ukrainians are launching counterattacks in the north and west, retaking some of the ground lost to the Russians. They've also advanced again near Bakhmut and claim to "hold positions on all the dominant heights" around the town, and have crossed the rail lines south of the town. Controlling rail lines is significant because the Russian army relies on them for supply and movement, being relatively ill-equipped with trucks. Fighting continues around the breach in the Russian lines at Robotyne. Sometimes the Ukrainians advance up to the outskirts of what's left of the surrounding towns and villages, or even enter them, then the Russians push them back. The poor weather and the fact that neither side can make much use of armor means in this area it's an ugly WW1 trench by trench fight. Further south, the Ukrainians are holding their ground on the eastern side of the Dnipro river after more than a week. They control a small area some 2km deep and are raiding further inland. There are reports that more Ukrainian forces are crossing the river in small groups. The Russians have been relying mainly on air strikes and artillery to hold them back, perhaps indicating they are short of troops, having transferred units to Avdiivka and Robotyne. The Russians have started receiving tens of thousands of rounds of artillery shells from North Korea. This will allow the Russians to maintain their current level of firing, enough to severely limit the use of tanks by Ukraine, although still far below the amount of shells that were being fired by the Russians at the start of the war. They have also started using their own version of the Iranian Shahed drones. These new drones are lighter, allowing the Russians to strike deeper inside Ukraine, at the cost of a smaller payload, and seem designed to strike non-military targets like electricity substations.