55 thoughts on “Sunday’s Papers

  1. Formerly known as @ireland.com

    What, bumbling Boris is less popular, now that his incompetence has become more obvious! Enjoy Brexit, Charger (where ever you are).

    1. bisted

      …with an 80 seat majority and no chance of an election for four years…both the opposition party leaders are Lords…growing popularity in traditional labour heartlands…Scotland probably independent before the next election…where did it all go wrong Boris?

      1. Formerly known as @ireland.com

        Boris’ massive blue wall might decide they should have a new leader to take them to the next election. Bozo won’t give Scotland the opportunity to vote themselves out, unfortunately.

        1. bisted

          …I support democratic outcomes…NI and Scotland both voted to remain in the EU…brexit was the impetus NI needed to break from the UK and it’s well on it’s way…I expect a Hong Kong type of arrangement to emerge in NI, aka, having your cake and eating it…as for England, there’s a bigger difference here between FF and FG than between Blairites and Thatcherites…

  2. f_lawless

    Asked if Ireland’s ‘wet’ pubs will open again this year, Tánaiste @LeoVaradkar
    says “I can’t say that with any certainty. What I can say is that we are now the only country in Europe in which wet pubs are not allowed to open”, but #Covid19 cases need to stabilise and fall first.

    https://twitter.com/rtenews/status/1299403464049602566

    We’re being treated like gormless idiots at this point – or else being led them. This is beyond any reason that I can see. Why is our government continuing to send the economy down the tubes?

    The more testing done the more “new cases” are going to appear. The tests can’t distinguish between an active infection and viral debris. Viral debris is known to linger for up to 3 months or so. The tests will always return a certain number of false positives. Why are the numbers of deaths and hospitalisations now no longer mentioned as a metric for judging the level of risk? Surely that’s the bottom line – but as the weeks pass with zero or near zero figures, this seems to have become irrelevant to policy.

    1. f_lawless

      Meanwhile
      https://twitter.com/carlheneghan/status/1295257884926914561

      (From Aug 17th) Prof Carl Heneghan poses a rhetorical question:

      “Just asking: there are 47,600 pubs in the UK (let’s say 1000 week through the door) that’s nearly 300M people in 6 weeks – How many outbreaks in that time and what’s the risk?”

      (Answer: no more than a handful of pubs have had cases. Conclusion: pubs in the UK are not acting as vectors for the spread of the virus)

        1. Clampers Outside

          Reminds me of website stat bloating.. . It’s repeat visits Cian.. . I’m sure he meant ‘visits made’ rather than individuals.

          1. Cian

            Yeah I get that.

            But you are saying every man, woman and child in the UK visited a pub 5 times in 6 weeks. Or 12% of the population visited a pub every day for 6 weeks.

            That sounds bonkers.

    2. Formerly known as @ireland.com

      This is interesting…from the NY Times.

      https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/29/health/coronavirus-testing.html

      “Some of the nation’s leading public health experts are raising a new concern in the endless debate over coronavirus testing in the United States: The standard tests are diagnosing huge numbers of people who may be carrying relatively insignificant amounts of the virus.

      Most of these people are not likely to be contagious, and identifying them may contribute to bottlenecks that prevent those who are contagious from being found in time. But researchers say the solution is not to test less, or to skip testing people without symptoms, as recently suggested by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

      Instead, new data underscore the need for more widespread use of rapid tests, even if they are less sensitive.”

      1. SOQ

        You beat me to it with that one Formely. It would make sense that the viral load is an important factor in determining how infectious someone is- or not.

        What is interesting is that there appears to be no standard of sensitivity and that “commercial manufacturers and laboratories set their own.”- which is absolutely crazy. A sample could be sent to two different labs and come back with the completely different results.

        1. Formerly known as @ireland.com

          SOQ – I am uncomortable with the situation where I agree with aspects of your comments here :) . I expect EU labs to use a single standard, which would help provide some consistency, at least.

      1. f_lawless

        I saw that alright but when I tried to verify it either with the government data source he gave (on the twitter thread where he originally shared the graph) or on this site:

        https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2020-08-08..2020-08-27&country=~IRL&casesMetric=true&interval=smoothed&smoothing=7&pickerMetric=total_deaths_per_million&pickerSort=desc

        the figures didn’t seem to match exactly with his graph. That could easily have been down to my limited ability to read the data properly but in any case it made me a bit wary of it. Were you able to verify it for yourself?

        1. Cian

          More misinformation.
          His blue line “tests” seem to be correct, but the “positives” is completely wrong.

          This link shows the number of positives per day (you’ll need to copy and paste because of the ..): If you change the radio button to “tests” you get his blue graph. The orange positive should look like this:

          https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2020-08-01..2020-08-27&country=~IRL&casesMetric=true&interval=daily&smoothing=0&pickerMetric=total_deaths_per_million&pickerSort=desc

    3. Andyourpointiswhatexactly?

      It’s nonsense. Open the pubs. Even if they change/restrict the hours, it has to be done. It’s embarrassing: can they not ‘trust’ the people who have been so compliant?

    4. Janet, dreams of big guns

      meanwhile in Paris distancing non public transport is being recover to accommodate the rentrée

    5. Ben

      If alcohol is the problem then ban the sale of it

      A publican is trained through his job way we are living with this dictates the end of music the theatre the arts

      Soon life in Ireland will resemble something but for all the sexes

  3. GiggidyGoo

    Government may ask ESB to ‘help’ with broadband rollout. Well, now that the contract for €3,000,000,000 has been activated (Actavoted), let’s now provide the winning ‘bidder’ with the tools to to it (again FOC). Dinny and the blue shorts are really giving us the two fingers.

    Remember Michilín back in 2019? https://www.thejournal.ie/fianna-fail-broadband-4626499-May2019/ “if FF were in power”.?

  4. Cú Chulainn

    I see the aliens have been called in to augment the psycho seagulls.. cutting edge reporting from the Star..

  5. SOQ

    Two major anti lockdown protests yesterday in London and Berlin. How many turned up to each depends on who you read but the London estimate of 10 k seems low. Trafalgar Square holds 30 k and it appeared quite full. It was unfortunate that David Icke spoke because that is what the media has focused in on- as they would.

    The march afterwards seemed to go for ever but with so many black and Asian people in attendance, poor antifia must have been very confused- well, more than usual that is.

    Not sure what happened in Berlin- the police moved to cancel the event but there were live streams of some sort of large gathering with people giving speeches. Again, hard to put real numbers on it but 18 k was mentioned.

    1. goldenbrown

      yes and I hear the lads in London landed The Son Of God himself as a keynote speaker

      that’s quite the coup

    2. f_lawless

      In this video of RFK jr speaking, there are some glimpses here and there which give some sense of the scale of it
      https://youtu.be/RloipY83ljg

      “50 years ago my uncle, John Kennedy, came to this city.
      He came here to Berlin because Berlin was the front line against global totalitarianism.
      Today Berlin is again the front line against global totalitarianism.
      He proudly said to the people of Germany, ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’.
      All of us who are here again today can proudly say ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ “

  6. goldenbrown

    hey Bodger

    is posting links to Twitter feeds an editing offence these days? straight question just to know the rules like

  7. Q Celt

    Surely ESB becoming involved in the broadband roll out would not be allowed under the public procurement directive and state aid rules. But then who knows what to expect given the tender process was not compliant with the directive.
    Anyone know why individual government departments are allowed to tender, children’s hospital, broadband, etc, when OGP exists

    1. Liam Deliverance

      Is it not also time that with such a large tender as the NBP that we are constantly updated as to their progress and if they are meeting targets. I would imagine people, either residential or business’s, are planning projects, investments, relocations etc etc based on the progress of the plan and available broadband access.

      I looked at the website,nbi.ie, it has information such as “. . in the coming weeks, x will be rolled out” but no date stamp as to when this piece of information was published or when this target date will be reached. This is no doubt by design.

      In the past, a project like this would be 2/3rds of the way in when they would eventually say we have lost of control of this project, it will not be delivered in 2024 but is now delayed to 2028 and there will increased costs associated with the delay. Now is the time to know if they are on schedule.

  8. f_lawless

    Notable article by Naomi Klein

    “Pandemic Shock Doctrine”
    https://theintercept.com/2020/05/08/andrew-cuomo-eric-schmidt-coronavirus-tech-shock-doctrine/

    In line with what others have being saying that the pandemic is being used as a pretext by global policy makers in the west to usher in long held plans for a new AI tech-driven system of governance allowing for much greater surveillance and a major social restructuring. The US-led western globalists see the implementation of this as essential in the ongoing geopolitical struggle with China

  9. Frilly Keane, Rebooted, Live and Dangerous

    All we need to know was on Brendan R1 today
    The GP rep on the NPET – Inbetween interruptions from the big man, was constantly refering to them using an algorithm to manage any breakouts in schools. Not parents or teachers or GPs or local community health officials. Computer Code.

    Algorithms are our overlords
    Get used to it lads

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