rocket_scientist

There was an inevitability about all this.

Ferguson and the wifie who went to Elie had to resign but Jenrick didn't. This would be double standards if the rules were clear, which they might be if I bothered to log on to a dot gov website to read them which I haven't. I understood that we weren't allowed to visit folk back then and still can't, although we can meet one parent at a time in a park I think, which even Schofield described as utterly bonkers to Handcock.

The wearing of football shirts by grown men in social environments would make me sad if I thought about it. The need to exhibit their allegiance to their tribe stems from reasons that are not healthy, immaturity and ignorance being their principal drivers, not even knowing themselves what compels them to do it. It's a revenue-earner for clubs so I'm not against the production and selling of them. It's good marketing to give the customers what they want. It's a shame that they produce shit like that though. The big white around the collar just looks stupid, yet another design fuck up by the fuck ups who run AFC.

I have NCAA clients so I know how it works out there but we can't diss every European uni in every sport. For example, Stirling University are reigning European Champions in golf. Not only that, the men's team have won the last 4 or 5 and their women's team have won the last 3 out of 4 or possibly 4 out of 5, no mean feat given that the tournament is held every two years and so they're winning with totally different personnel. They had 4 golfers in the top 100 of the World Amateur Golf Rankings and contributed two golfers to the Walker Cup the second last time at home so they're clearly doing a lot right. The best UK pro woman golfer may well come out of that uni when she graduates in a couple of years time, a hugely talented young Scot.

Brilliant. I don't think it will catch on though because we can't go home AND away to each team. But excellent thinking outside the penalty box. I would love to see my Cove v AFC. Can't stand either manager right enough but Cove are more than good enough to surprise folk. A win at Ibrox would be dream-like.

Now that the debate has moved on to league reconstruction, there are always going to be "dead rubbers". I guess the less of them the better, thus the introduction of the split. I'm of the old school where each team plays each other twice but I can understand that the inability to exercise delayed gratification and the need to attract the modern crowds means that the split is a good idea. I'm not sure what the plans are going forward but the current set-up is probably as good as it gets? Only 5 post-split fixtures would be better than 12 but I still think that playing every team twice is best so why not a 18 or 20 team SPFL? Are we saying that we don't have enough depth in quality that the bottom 6, 8 or 10 would get hammered all the time? I don't think so.

Ah so the SPFL know that professional football is going to restart in 2/3 months time? And they reckon Sky are giving them the same deal that had been negotiated, even if there's no crowds? Scottish admin shit show as per.

League reconstruction is a different subject of course but 14 teams per league and 38 games is the most sensible option I've ever read. The most insensible thing in my opinion is what they've done. As lockdown is effectively a freezing of operations - of life as well as the economy including sport - and many are being furloughed, nothing needed to happen until the corona ice has thawed. What were the reasons for having to decide now when the future isn't foreseeable? UEFA and the EPL haven't jumped.

Failing to complete the season is nuts, given that almost 80% of games had been played. We have no idea when football will come back so why make the decision just now? Money? Give them all the minimum they would have got and the balance later. UEFA haven't jumped. The EPL haven't so why did we need to? Complete this and then have a truncated season to May 2021 was the rational move. Scottish administrators are a joke, the arse-end of human competence.

The Scotland Brazil game from 1974 on BBC Scotland just now is a great watch. Fuck we had some great footballers. Martin Buchan was a class act. Most of my age (including me) describe Willie Miller as the best-ever Don. I saw Buchan often but mostly when I was primary school age. Wonder if I was 5/10 years older if I'd say that Martin was the better footballer? He was silky, intelligent and fast in both foot and mind. Edit: Kenny Dalglish reminding me in this game of my thoughts about his international career. He never cut the mustard in a Scotland shirt, a major disappointment.

I was at every one of those games. Great memories. Looking back now, I think it was belief and self confidence that defined that era. I couldn't remember Hearts having as much of the ball as tonight's highlights suggested during the Yonny Hewitt show. In fact I thought that was the most dominant final of the four. You just knew AFC would win those 4 Scottish Cups, even 83 which was a shit game.

The Channel 4 special on South Korea is exposing the lack of leadership and the horrendous lack of intelligence within this Westminster government. When Philip Schofield is shouting "Can't you see it's bonkers" at Hancock and the Cabinet minister's first response is "No" - because he genuinely can't think properly - then you know it can't get worse.

Whilst I totally agree, I think Starmer has won me round actually. A typical Scotsman (like me) would get the sledgehammer out and just batter the jolly japester jester to death. Keir is using fine scalpels to consistently remove pieces of the clown's flesh. His incisive line of questioning is razor-sharp and he exposes more and more of the empty one and his lack of substance in particular. The letter from Starmer to BlowJob has just been responded to. Brilliant. He's got him on the ropes. BJ is finished already and given his lack of everything, has no chance of getting re-elected. It's a long game Starmer is playing here - unless a vote of no confidence can be had - and the scalpel approach is way more effective than the bludgeoning that certainly my own instinct favours.

If you click on the link - the about 0.2% which is highlighted - you will see all 52 studies and the websites to back up their results (the first one being published in the Lancet). Fuck knows about your other two questions but I think on this first question alone, there's a lot more detail than you first thought available to you, which until we examine the evidence, means that we can't be sceptical or disparaging about the whole text. I vehemently disagree. There are detailed FACTS being presented here and whilst the whole casts doubt on the extreme lockdown measures taken by most governments, this is exactly what democracy and opposition is all about, examining the alternatives and establishing the boundaries of the debate, even seeking to look beyond them. I also dispute that Hitchens has left ANY holes in his position, far less any glaring ones. One of the sources that he quotes, Lord Sumption, was interviewed by Evan Davis on Radio 4 and said exactly what he has consistently been saying for months. Even the government in the 50 page document this week is coming round to admitting that Hitchens was right all along from their words on page 10. As I said, you and I - or at least me - are not qualified to know what the best strategy might have been. We are qualified to look and listen however and you would need to be a wee bit more diligent in your looking and listening before jumping to conclusions about the group who coordinated these facts or their purpose in presenting them. Personally, it never crossed my mind what their agenda might be. I was just interested in the facts they presented, some of which I had seen before and were sources that I strongly believe have been correct, Professors John Ioannidis of Stanford and Sucharit Bhakdi of Mainz in particular, both having been introduced to me by Hitchens in March, which I shared widely.

Nope, you haven't researched it sufficiently and yet you are very disparaging? That doesn't make sense to me. I don't think "proof" of much pertaining to this crisis is available generally but I don't agree that the presentation of a wide collection of opinions needs to be "balanced" when it's putting forward a particular argument, for which some (starting with 25) relevant facts are being provided in support of this view. Edit: please ask three questions raised from reading this article?

Rico, given that your comments on the piece aren't even half an hour old, are you sure you've researched both the organisation and the many cited sources sufficiently in order to be so disparaging? It's a debate I've been following from day one and tweeted a month ago that Hitchens may have been right all along. Even Trump came out with the cure can't be worse than the problem. As someone with no epidemiological expertise, I'm personally not qualified to strategise on the major crisis. I am qualified to observe however and I see incompetence - mostly of management and communication - and fear-mongering. This "media-epidemic" may have contorted the truth, adversely influenced our weak government and may have resulted in a disproportionate response. I don't know. All I do know is that nobody I know personally has been infected far less died of Covid-19 or with it (the distinction being absolutely key).

Ed: Millions ban together to avoid pig eating, for reasons not known to me. Perhaps they fear that their ancestors were fed to them. Perhaps that should've been millions banned. Edit: Millions band together... That's it.

https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/ I thought from the start there was something fishy about this virus. Now I'm hoping it was (and is continuing to be) government incompetence rather than something more sinister.

Starmer playing a stormer

11.5.83 was the best day of my life, the best of six best days, beating the days our four kids were born and the day I married their mother. Not even close actually. Such a shame that 35.5 years later I finally gave up on AFC and what it had become and in 2020 became a supporter of a team in blue with a disgusting second name. I don't agree that we should have been given league 2 but we would've won it anyway. The fucks I give for Aberdeen Westhill are zero. Aberdeen Cove is my future, a far more honest organisation and a rekindler of my love for supporting the game.

Stay alert is good; it means 1. Become alert, and then 2. Stay in this heightened state of awareness. Two words only, an excellent demonstration of the transparency and efficiency for which this government is earning a great reputation. Staying alert at home however - as Jenrick uttered today - is unfathomably stupid and in one fell swoop, may well have tarnished the reputation irreconcilably. The fact that he broke the isolation rules didn't cost him his position however, unlike the Edinburgh posh wifie and Stat Ferguson's dalliance into Staats. This may be an indication of the loyalty that this government embraces and their sporting nature, giving Jenrick more chances to come back from the Landet editor ripping his arse off on Question Time.

I think there's a danger in "mixing metaphors" here. We are not experts in App building. We, like the NHS and like the government, haven't built a national system before nor have we faced a virus on this scale. All we can do is learn and observe and by applying some basic critical thinking, we can identify some of the core issues. It was obvious more than three months ago that data was needed. John Snow would have turned in his grave (the doctor who pinpointed cholera to the water pump in Broad Street, London rather than Jon Snow of Channel 4) at the UK government's decision to abandon the common-sense strategy of testing and tracking. And the NHSX App is not an NHS initiative, having been farmed out to independent private parties at a cost of £250,000,000, parties that may or may not include former employees and/or associates of Cambridge Analytica. The news that 50,000 tests were sent to the US was interesting. And an utter disgrace.

If we could have, we would have. But like New York City in relation to the federal government, there is a limit to how much autonomy we actually have. If Scotland could have negotiated a 10% (roughly, a per capita one) payment of the UK costs of testing, PPE, the App and all other Covid expenditure, to extricate ourselves from the shit show clown show, that would have been ideal even despite the actual advantages of a bigger purchasing power. But alas, it was never an ideal world. Good on Miriam Margoyles speaking out. She'll get slaughtered by the snowflakes and the Tories and the MSM but she only said what many of us were thinking, or at least what I was thinking. I was hoping that BlowJob would die rather than come back a better person, an exercise in futility given his insane parents, his upbringing and his privileged otherworldly view on life, the universe and everything (which may or may not have been 42).

It seems that the government might not agree with you now, as they consider yet another U-turn; https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2020/may/07/uk-may-ditch-nhs-contact-tracing-app-for-apple-and-google-model?__twitter_impression=true

All inbound flights to be quarantined now. More reactive Tory policy, behind the curve from day one.