Maithanet

White guys named Cooper never work out in the NFL. I mean, when was the last time one of them won Super Bowl MVP? None in the past two years.

There were 6 quarterbacks and 7 WRs taken last night, compared to just 9 defensive players. Really shows where the league is going.

No defensive players in the top 12. That's crazy. So many quarterbacks getting overrated.

Seems like there are a lot of secondary guys that can skate by on great physical tools in college and then get exposed in the pros. In college there (usually) isn't a ton of incentive to challenge top cornerbacks, because there are always other places to throw.

I'm not sure that support from Likud will really help Trump much. I could actually see it helping Biden, since he's already under such criticism to take a harder line on Gaza. Seeing Netanyahu get all buddy-buddy with Trump might remind some younger voters why they need to get to the polls.

I do wonder if the Ukrainian ammo shortage might swing hard the other way. US and Czech ammo could be arriving in huge quantities in the next couple months.

The Draft is tonight, and it sounds like teams are gonna be reaching for quarterbacks even worse than normal. There's a lot of talk that 4 guys (Williams, Daniels, McCarthy and Maye) go in the top 6, and Penix doesn't last past 13. That would be an unprecedented QB haul, and would mean a bunch of top prospects still available for the teams picking in the first 10 picks who don't need a qb. Assuming qbs go 1-2-3 without any trades, that still leaves NYG, MIN, VEG, and DEN needing quarterbacks, and only two guys left who are even remotely 1st round picks. Think Vegas wants a year with Minshew/O'Connell under center? Or the Giants need more of the Daniel Jones Experience? There's gonna be a lot of FOMO pressure, because if you don't come out of the draft with a quarterback, your season is basically over before it begins.

But they'll still overwhelmingly vote for Trump. I know third party candidates always see their numbers drop as the election approaches, but I expect RFK will suffer particularly badly. Nationals polls had him at ~15% last fall, down to 8% today. I would be very surprised if he can hold onto even a third of that when actual votes get counted.

It is hard to imagine anyone wanting to vote for him on policy grounds. He is running as a protest candidate - "If you hate Trump and Biden, vote for me!" The problem is that if someone feels compelled to come out and vote, they probably have an opinion on whether Biden or Trump is preferable. I'm sure plenty of nonvoters would support Kennedy, but that's not exactly meaningful. It is hard to take any 3rd party candidate for President seriously, but at least the Libertarians and the Greens have an actual platform and could potentially appeal to voters on that basis. Kennedy is essentially running a vanity campaign.

Does Dune Messiah get better? I loved the first book and I am shocked at how much less interesting this book is. I'm 70 pages in and we've had: - A meeting of conspirators to kill Paul - Paul and Chani having a discussion about whether he should impregnate Irulan - A second meeting of conspirators, this time on Arrakis - A meeting of Paul's inner circle in which...nothing much is decided. I haven't finished this chapter, so maybe they actually do something later. I can slog on for a bit longer, but WTF? I was really impressed with how tight Dune was, almost every scene had a bunch of worldbuilding, character development and plot movement woven together. Thus far everything is stagnant and dull.

Right. My concern (and I'm by no means an expert here) is that it would take a significant expenditure of ATACMs or other highly valuable strike capabilities in order to achieve even that much. If it were a matter of 1 ATACM = 1 month of disabling the bridge, then I expect Ukraine would happily take that exchange. But I don't think it's that simple or easy. I am sure that Ukraine has no shortage of targets that it would love to hit. But I wouldn't underestimate the importance of the bridge as a strategic target. Supplying Russian forces in Southern Ukraine is not easy, and severing one of the two main connections would cause a lot of problems for Russian logistics. It would also create the possibility of logistical bottlenecks in occupied southern Ukraine, which would make for juicy targets.

The problem is that the experience with the Kherson Bridges demonstrated that bringing down a bridge semi-permanently is actually pretty hard. It's easy if you can plant explosives on it, but otherwise whatever you send has the potential to just go right through and cause only modest damage. You can attack the supports, but those are both fairly small and very solid so you need a lot of explosives to bring one down. So you need a strike that is: 1. Capable of covering the ~100 miles of distance to the bridge 2. Is accurate enough to hit individual supports 3. Carries a large enough warhead to destroy said support 4. Can evade Russian defenses concentrated around the bridge Putting all those things together is a pretty challenging task. Back in 2022 a truck with hundreds of kilos of explosives went off on the bridge, and that knocked traffic out for a few months, but didn't do significant damage to any of the supports. So you're talking about needing a bigger explosion than that, which limits your options pretty significantly.

Aren't they seeking to get Columbia University (and it's considerable endowment) to divest from Israel? If that's the case, protesting on campus seems like the place to do it.

The protest at Columbia explicitly had one of the Jewish student groups as active participants. The argument that this is a protest largely run by anti-semites is a smear made by people who don't want to confront the actual substance of the anti-war protests. Now, I am sure that there are indeed some people who seek to either hijack the protests into something explicitly anti-semitic, or discredit the protests by associating them with hateful groups. Many of those people are not even students at Columbia, but just outside troublemakers. This is a problem of protests of basically any size - you cannot gatekeep effectively. All you can do is try and make your message heard and make clear that hate groups are not welcome (something the protest leaders at Columbia are explicitly doing). I remember at the Women's March, I saw thousands of signs, and not even one of them was hateful, but that night on Fox News they were happy to highlight some asshole who did just that. It made me angry that they were attempting to discredit the Women's March in that way, but that's the game they play. Everyone should remember (when viewing protests on both sides) that the coverage has the ability to highlight extremist members that probably don't represent the group at large.

D&W is gonna make a lot of money. Who knows if it will actually be good. Plenty of awful movies have great previews and there are a few red flags in that one. We'll see.