RicoS321

The problem was the welfare state and children born out of wedlock? What the fuck? I'm guessing he's a church attendee. Mr shouty conservative gets the upper hand on an unprepared fuckwit. It's hardly a massive coup. Some cherry picked stats - delivered to an imbecile - with an exceptionally ropey conclusion. But he might be right. I remember seeing a YouTube video of a similar chap destroying some college students in the US with his evidence of creationism. He was direct, aggressive and convincing and owned the science kids and their evolution nonsense. Try arguing against a scientologist, it's a similar thing (they're trained in it). That the interviewer got nervous, flustered and unable to think is not a sign that his interviewee was correct. I don't get the blanket, and thoughtless, tag of "social justice warrior" for everyone that campaigns or fights for a cause, it's lazy. Was Pankhurst a social justice warrior? Or Martin Luther King? Or a climate change protestor? It's just an easy way of attacking the person rather than the argument. What's wrong with the central argument of black lives matter?

He's a great professional, I'd have him back no bother. Significant improvement on hedges, McLennan etc. obviously. Fit, fast and a decent hit. Get him signed.

Europe's top clubs? Brentford? It's basically England, and two teams from a few other leagues. Because they haven't bothered to go beyond the Hun and Tims, they haven't concluded that the rest of the teams in Scottish fitba's income also comes from ticket revenue. It's a fucking awful story for a Scottish newspaper to be writing.

Is it windows 10? Does your old battery work when you put it back in? Is the new battery fully charged? If not, do that then let it drain and then charge fully again. Then try. Maybe.

Bringing forward the test and trace whilst telling people to move on is a fairly transparent game. Rushed out to deflect attention, can't imagine what could go wrong. It'll be a fucking shit show. To the extent that it might actually keep Cummings out of the press until his next fuck up.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.scotsman.com/sport/football/separate-league-full-time-clubs-says-strachan-1577947%3famp At least Strachan is consistent! Shows how far we haven't come anyway. I have a lot of sympathy for the full/part time issue, I'd have hoped that we could muster 26-28 teams of full timers but it's maybe a stretch. However the notion that teams who have a wealthier benefactor (and I'd question where he got his facts on Milne) should have a greater say is pathetic at best.

Really? He just blatantly lied to the public and nobody questioned him properly. Fucking testing yer eyes? He doesn't even bother to hide his contempt for the public with that load of absolute horseshite. Why the fuck did the press not tear his fucking head off if his eyes were an issue? That's up there with Boris' bus hobby shite, just trotting out lies with zero fucks given, as if you're trying to see how ridiculous a story you can come up with. Hope somebody is waiting outside his house to hoof him in the nads to really make him frightened of being in lockdown in London. Every day for a month. Fucker.

Fucking impressive from Bojo last night. Top gaslighting. An entire nation. Trump couldn't have managed that one. Has anyone ever found that Russia investigation that got released just before the election? Edit: it must be calculated though? To get the British public to properly ignore the lockdown and begin pursuing the herd immunity once again. Then blame them for the inevitable second waves. Expect a big attack on teachers in the coming days too when they fail to return on 1st June in engurland.

They're fairly weak questions, they'll be easily batted off and ignored. They'll be gone by next week. They miss a fairly obvious question. Everyone else in Britain was under the impression that if you got sick, your child would isolate in the house with you and be in danger of contracting the illness and witness to your suffering and a bit neglected until you were better. Was it always government policy that you could ship your kids off to relatives when sick? Were the families of children who have since contracted the more serious - for kids - Kawasaki disease aware that they weren't obliged to put their kids in harm's way? For me, these offences are small and require only an apology and remorse, similarly Ferguson and the Scottish wifie. I don't expect them to be infallible. Cummings hasn't shown even that. Fucking cretin.

Fucking hell, do people actually read that shite on a regular basis? Click on the link and it's like being on a giant spam page. It's difficult to find the actual article. You did warn us like.

I agree, but do Adidas not just dictate which design we get to fill the colours in on? The bars on the away are weird

The reason I think 16 would be better is because I don't think we have the depth for 18. I think that we have 18 capable teams, but the need for a competitive full time (where possible) second division in order to make relegation and promotion viable would maybe be stretching the 18 at present in my opinion. I also think that 16 makes the season more compact and exciting. The 30 games we just had was perfect for me, and we could ditch several of the unnecessary midweek winter night fixtures too. The league format of the early cup rounds satisfies the need for more games and they could even have relegation and European spot playoffs at Hampden to add more games (split gate receipts for those games between all teams in the league). I think 16 is as near perfect as it gets for Scottish fitba in terms of the sport. But I'd be happy with 18 too. Or 42, play each other once.

Oucha, now we're talking. Interesting. I'd probably support other Scottish teams in Europe if that happened.

They're established league setups. We'd be effectively starting fresh, so we should be looking to do something different and better. 14 games is a hell of a long run to be not at significant risk of relegation but unable to reach Europe. Even yer mid tablers in England can dream about going on a run that'll get them into Europe. It's being designed solely to ensure 4 scum games too, we really need to move away from that nonsense way of running our game as soon as possible. Now is the time to experiment and take any financial hit as we're already asking players to take a cut in salary. We'll really see what a farse our game is when behind closed doors games begin. Let's make it about sport and not who has the most money

It has to be 16 for me, and would have made ultimate sense given the shortened season. We need to move away from the 4 old firm games per season shite that massively compromised us when they went bust last time and had chairmen all over calling for newco to be promoted straight back into the SPL. It's completely unsustainable to base your income on two teams and leaves you completely open to blackmail/begging. 16 teams. All European money goes into a separate fund and is split between all teams. No money based on league placings. Everyone starts with the same budget other than that which their attendances afford them. An end to buying leagues, and end to sport that isn't sport. Get our own fucking TV (internet) channel, with even coverage and proper analysis and coverage of all leagues. Never again should we be held to ransom by Sky, BT or the Scum. Take the opportunity to build an actual sport and market the shite out of it as the antithesis of the EPL - for proper fitba fans. But, aye, I think ending the season was the best idea. We could have been playing the last 8 games with entirely different teams from the rest of the season. It wouldn't have worked. I'd prefer a voiding, as I think that a forever tainted league title will be just that (if I were a Tim, I don't think I'd have wanted a title in such fashion), but I understand that is a minority view for obvious reasons (I'm wrong, basically!). I also do think it's slightly unfair on Hearts. The bottom six split is way more likely to see a significant change in league placings than the top six (as the Tims pretty much beat everyone regardless), and I genuinely believe they'd have stayed up.

I think we'd have finished third. It's funny how it ended really, if we'd played another weekend of fixtures, I reckon that there'd have been a lot more contentedness with the positions. The game between us and Motherwell would have effectively been a playoff for third, and if the tims had beaten the Huns there'd have been very little argument over the title. Similarly, if hearts had picked up another 0 points they'd have been that bit closer to their deserved relegation. Anyway, it's a bit of a shite way to end things, but likely the right call. I think there'll be many casualties from this and expect to see a few closures and some reconstruction. I think we have very few out of contract from memory and expect to see much the same squad whenever fitba returns. Cormack not expecting fans this year, which will be weird. Some interesting stuff in the papers recently about refs' home bias being nullified in closed door games, so the huns will be fucked. We need to be holding the tims to ransom and get some proper concessions over European prize money and sharing the wealth in order to keep the game going up here. It'll be fairly perilous for the next couple of years.

Who can really say what might have happened. The Huns, hearts and others might have gone bust, with us being rewarded points for games played against them to date and thus ending the season on 76 points. That's certainly the scenario I had in my head at the start of the season.

And this is the bit from hitchens' otherwise excellent article that you linked a while back: "Crucially, those who began by claiming that we faced half a million deaths from the Coronavirus in this country have now lowered their estimate. Professor Neil Ferguson was one of those largely responsible for the original panic, claiming half a million people could die. He or others from Imperial college have twice revised his terrifying prophecy, first to fewer than 20,000 and then on Friday to 5,700" They didn't revise the figures, the figures were with and without lockdown (or other, i.e.do nothing) measures, the 500k being if we did nothing. A hugely important distinction - massive difference - which I was surprised to read from someone as diligent as hitchens. The rest is good reading and thought provoking. I'm not anti hitchens at all, despite not agreeing with him on a lot of things. He makes his points properly and is light years away from the Tories in government despite sharing much of their ideology.

Facts about covid-19 9 Many media reports of young and healthy people dying from Covid19 turned out to be false: many of these young people either did not die from Covid19, they had already been seriously ill (e.g. from undiagnosed leukaemia), or they were in fact 109 instead of 9 years old. They link to 3 cases where that occurred (1 still tbc). That's not "many". That's a handful among thousands if you include the young lass in the UK too, which they didn't mention. So it isn't "a fact about covid-19" at all, it's misleading and inaccurate. The biggest issue is that this article and the publisher are presenting themselves as an antidote to the inaccuracies of the mainstream media. If they're going to do that then they need to be beyond reproach and certainly not easily taken apart by the links they provide. I'm annoyed, because cunts like this are part of the problem. They need to do better. As I've said, like you, I think there's a story there. This isn't it. Hitchens seems a lot closer to the mark and a lot more careful with his claims.

I'm not jumping to conclusions, I said "it raises questions". I haven't concluded anything. I asked about ascertainment bias, which is only mentioned in the backup, which I obviously opened. The attachment to the Lancet does not back up the 0.2% figure, it backs up the 7.1 figure that has an ascertainment bias attributed to it to make up the 0.54%. If that bias is slightly amended it has a big affect on the result. I'm not saying that they're wrong, I'm saying that they haven't given the backup for the bias, or I've missed it. There are not detailed facts, there are a mixture of facts and opinion. That's fine of course, but instead of chasing the 25, they could have concisely provided 3 or 4 good challenges like ionnadis' cruise ship one rather than the one of his that they link here in point 2, which I've read and added questions here (again, I could be wrong, but that's my conclusion on reading the available text, hence why I'm questioning it). Point 4 suggests a background immunity, but that isn't the conclusion of the article linked, which is a small study that raises questions that could be answered in a larger study.

I wouldn't say I was very disparaging, just critical, but fair enough. 1. Who defined the ascertainment bias in the 0.2% figure and how was it established? 2. Absolute risk doesn't seem to make any sense in the non-peer-reviewed backup. Why would this not change over time? Certainly when randomly compared with driving (a very known rate of deaths generally speaking). Why split into <65 and >65? Especially given the significantly higher rate in 40-65 year olds (who would also be more at risk than from driving) and the fact that the under 18s don't drive. 3. "Up to 80% remain symptom free". Unless your own objective is the production of propaganda, why would you use this stat in questioning the need for lockdown? One, it's very well known and repeated often by government and in the media. Two, what about the very high figure of the remaining 20%? It's just not a stat that would appear in a balanced article. It doesn't belong there. It's like the person was trying to reach an arbitrary target of 25 reasons rather than a good, balanced article. That's just from the first three points. These are 3 pretty weak arguments (in the article I mean!) In my opinion. There's probably some good stuff in there too, that is really quite relevant, but if they'd focused on the two or three important points it'd have made a convincing case I expect. It strikes me that the author has a pre-defined position (as we all do of course) and tried to find every single thing that backed that position without filter. Certainly not the work of an "anti-propaganda" proponent. The problem is that we/they're criticising the media, but any good journalist would question nearly all the points the article makes. Like you, I think there's a story there, but this doesn't find it and nor did hitchens from a month or so back. They both suffer from quantity over quality, throwing lots of little accusations/criticisms around without anything smoking gun and the basic inaccuracies (hitchens - who I quite enjoy - had a glaring one, I can't remember what it was) or deficiency of argument. Hopefully they'll keep looking.

Nope, that's why I said it raises questions, rather than provides proof. I had a look at a few of the sources (Sputnik etc), but I was commenting on the lack of balance in the article, nothing else. It presents very basic arguments that raise very basic questions that should have been addressed in a good article. There is no good reason to over-simplify an article if you're confident of its accuracy and don't have an agenda. Countering one perceived agenda with your own isn't necessary. I'm just saying that the article isn't helpful, balanced or one I'd trust off the bat. I'll definitely look through it though.

Interesting, but some fairly flawed arguments in there for something supposedly working against propaganda. Citing a rate of 0.2% is a little misleading. That 0.2% is inclusive of a lockdown. Giving the example of South Korea as an example of a country not in lockdown doesn't really tell the whole picture, and their approach directly opposes their other point on privacy. The flippant suggestion along the lines of that the old were going to die anyway sounds like something Cummings thought up and has been debunked elsewhere. The suggestion that kids are safe and should be at school is bizarre; as if kids aren't in contact with adults and couldn't spread the disease. I'm all for seeing the other side, but these aren't balanced arguments and raises questions about the swprs and who they represent. I'm guessing that they're probably correct in many of their assertions but it's lack of nuance is difficult to look past. Also, I expect the government to take a cautious approach to something that isn't fully understood. If only they'd do that with other things, such as chemicals, antibiotics etc.

Aye, but can he eat a bacon roll?

Not an expert, but I'm proficient and understand a lot of the jargon where I don't have first hand experience. Although, I didn't know that the app was being specified by third parties, I understood it was specified by NHS, being built by third parties, with data on NHS servers, but I don't know why I had that in my head. Aye, the testing going to the US is bizarre. This shit should have been sorted out years ago. We have heaps of testing facilities in the UK, they should all have been involved in pandemic drills and all have an action plan, and a coverage area. Instead of fucking off to yankland, we should have been hyper-localising our response and everyone in the country should have been aware of their role and what was expected of them. Instead, we're still redacting shite and not publishing data that decisions are based on. Which scientist suggested changing to "stay alert" (for an invisible virus)?