Lighthouse

The danger of that is you scare everyone off and they look for ways to permanently wean themselves off Russian gas. This is embarrassing and expensive for Germany, being bent over a barrel by a county who's economy is about 1/3 the size of their own. A good time to buy shares in wind turbines and solar panels, I'd imagine.

That's a bit of a Mexican standoff, Europe can't afford to completely shut off the gas and Russia can't afford not to sell any.

For further contrast, and casually assuming Wikipedia is in the right ballpark, the invasion and seven year occupation of Iraq cost the USA alone $1.1tn

I've no idea what that translates to in real terms, you'd have to ask an economist, but $630bn is less than the GDP of Switzerland or Argentina. Doesn't SEEM like a lot to be hanging your hat on when your assets are being seized across the free world.

TBF I think that's more of a warning shot than the sum total of the west's response and it's already hit Russia's stock market and the Rouble.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-europe-60454795 There's a video of Russia's spy chief absolutely sh*tting a brick and not knowing whether he's coming or going, when talking to Putin.

So we're all agreed; It seems like the correct decision based on the information we have now. Nobody is enamoured with Boris and the Tories' shenanigans during lock-downs There's no reason to think it influenced this decision and that a different one would have been made without the parties becoming public knowledge. aintforever doesn't like Boris, as he's well entitled not to, but it has nothing to do with what's been announced this week. Let's move on shall we.

I'm done, I'll leave you to it. If it gets too rough, the safety word is 'Hercules'.

Okay, I’ll rephrase; whatever Boris may or may not be thinking (which is pointless debating because none of us are Clinton Baptiste) he has arrived at the conclusion, either by luck or judgement, which you personally believe to be correct?

You said you're more than happy for restrictions to end on Thursday but you dislike Boris. That's fair enough and I wouldn't disagree but you can't use something he's done correctly against him. He may well want to be popular and have everyone forget about the Tories' indiscretions but it hasn't impacted this decision in any way so... What you're basically arguing is a coin toss whereby; heads - Boris is a w*nker and tails - Boris is a w*nker. The coin toss is an irrelevance as all possibilities default to the same outcome. The coin has no say on your decision.

😆 Not really TBH, before Christmas we had reason to be cautious and omicron was an unknown quantity. Now we know it’s the variant we’ve been hoping for and we’ve got the anti-virals we can move on with life. Plus I caught it in an après-ski bar three weeks ago and I was fine, so f**k the rest of you guys.

That’s not really true though, we basically did return to normal. Compare the nationwide lockdowns of April 2020 and January 2021, with anything that’s happened since last summer and it’s a completely different story. Even with omicron we had a normal Christmas, shops, bars and schools have pretty much stayed open and the only minor inconveniences have been masks on public transport and isolation for those positive. That was all down to the protection offered by the vaccine. If you want to continue with the mask it’s your prerogative but I don’t really understand what you’re waiting for. The virus is endemic, it’s not going to disappear. We’ve had our vaccines, we’ve got the anti-virals, the hospital numbers are manageable and trending in the right direction… I don’t really get what you’re waiting for now. It isn’t going to get any better than this. We will continue to get mutations but they will lack the shock value they had previously because of our inherent immunity and the drugs we have to combat them. Now we can finally say it’ll just be like a bad flu. Covid will ‘steal’ victims from seasonal flu and vice versa, it’ll just become part of daily life.

Forget Boris for a second; is it right - based on the medical and economic needs of the country - that these restrictions end on Thursday, yes or no?

He wants them though and he’s clearly enough of a loony to try his luck in a fight. If we go all ‘League of Nations’ over Ukraine, you can bet that’s where he will turn next. Why not go full Russian Empire? If he’s going to keep banging on about historical territories, it’s only been a century since they laid claim to the Baltics, half of Poland, Finland, Moldova, bits of Romania and most of that central Eurasian plateau.

Are you suggesting that he should have kept unnecessary restrictions in place, just because it wouldn’t be popular, in order to prove that he isn’t pulling some popularity stunt? It does amuse me slightly when people who are clearly going to do anything but forget about the parties and scandals, say he’s just doing it so we forget about the parties and scandals.

So basically the Baltics are next, according to his interview.

Disagree with that. The omicron variant has, thankfully, turned out to be the mild, dominant variant we all hoped it’d be. We haven’t got near the worst case scenarios modelled by sage. The anti-viral drugs approved at the back end of 2021 have been in widespread use for a month or two and are really having an effect on serious illness and hospitalisation rates. The vaccination programme has done its job, anyone who wants three jabs has had one. I don’t know what other triggers we realistically need to wait for. Even the Aussies are letting people back in. The biggest driver in all this is patients in MV beds and the NHS’ ability to cope with their volume. Currently it’s just over 300, the lowest since June, and falling rapidly.

So as of Thursday ‘the great global reset’ will amount to the basic advice given to anyone with a common cold in the last couple of centuries; jabs for the elderly and vulnerable, stay off work if you have symptoms.

We should recognise Chechnya as an independent nation and "allow" them to host "training exercises" with them.

Because the results are disproportionately skewed in terms of good and bad last season. If our remaining 13 fixtures were indicative of our average form from last season, we’d have finished comfortably second on 82 points. I think if the comparison drops from +16 to around +10 and we end on 53 points, that’ll be decent. Still a challenging 21 point target from 13 games.

This popped up on my twitter feed 'recommended topics', or whatever it's called. I've not been following Tiss for a year or two now but it would seem it's not just COVID, he's full on, broad-spectrum loony.

I think playing Moi was initially born out of necessity. Armstrong was injured and nobody else has looked good in that wide 10 position. Redmond has been better recently but Walcott, Tella and Djenny have done nowhere near enough.

That's basically the point though, it's a parody of cringey stand up routines, crashing and burning. John Thomson is generally very funny, IMO.

Looks about right to me. Imagine placing four way PL accumulator on Saints to beat West Ham, Leicester to beat Man City, Brighton to beat Liverpool and Villa to beat Everton, in the same weekend. That's about the likelihood of Saints winning the FA Cup this year. If anything 25-1 seems short. 10-1 for Everton seems absurd.

Got a mate who works at the Longleat site, was chatting to him about it only this morning. Trees down everywhere apparently, a right mess.