marklaffan.bsky.social

I love the fact that the NYP thinks will be deeply shocking to a city full of Italians, Irish, Greeks, Arabs…cultures in which “He/She’s not my Uncle/Aunt but”….is a sentence that every single person has said.

I think it’s the most egregious capture of a board I can remember. A CEO involved in multiple roles, a falling share price, making demands…unimaginable with any other board. He is an owner in all but name, running a private company in all but name.

Restriction of access to means used for suicide One of the most effective public health measures to prevent suicide is the restriction of access to means used in suicidal acts. This approach can be …

It’s a sensitive area, as it can be seen as diminishing the importance of broader interventions to deal with underlying issues. But it’s a strand of many prevention strategies. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

From what I remember of undergraduate psych, suicide is overwhelmingly linked to opportunity. Farmers aren’t particularly depressed - they have high suicide rates because they have barns and shotguns. Access to means in the moment is a massive factor.

Qualifications (Left).

I suspect, scarily, that a lot of the future lies in the hands of the press. Reform’s biggest challenge will be fielding 650 candidates without descending into complete chaos. The extent to which the press allows Farage to run a presidential campaign will decide whether that chaos is ignored.

I don’t think it’s illegal. He’s not in possession, so it’s not a throw forward. And he gathers, so it’s not a knock on.

Timing too - Irish teams are usually slow out of the blocks, timing their season to peak from the 6N to the European knock outs. Mostly the provinces don’t hit their straps until December.

I think that misses a bit. Farrell shifted us to an off the ball system because Nienaber moved Leinster to one. He can supplement his pack with transfers and Farrell can’t. AF has done great things with Ireland, but will stand or fall on his ability to optimize a system to fix that gap.

We changed the whole system just last year. If what we mean is “relies on putting out the Leinster team” then we’re fucked. Agree that Farrell isn’t the answer for the next WC, but he’s the answer to whether we’re picking on form or not.

Tom Farrell has to be given a run. There’s not many centres really putting their hand up. I’m less concerned about the pack - Munster have a rake of big, strong, young players coming to the boil. Edogbo, Gleeson, Quinn and Ahern will all be test players.

I don’t think those early season games tell us much about relative strengths. Irish provincial packs have more than held their own against SA teams over the last 3/4 seasons and will again this year.

I think that presupposes that any of the listed players somehow “should” have been test fly halves. I don’t think any of those players moves Sexton before the last WC, and Crowley and Prendergast are better than all of them. All subjective, obviously, but I struggle to see what was missed.

Joey’s injuries aside, I don’t think any of those players underachieved. Look at NZ, England, France. Have any of them done a better job in producing test level 10s? They’re a pretty rare type of player.

And he ignores the fact that they had a look at Billy Burns too. I don’t think any side in Europe gave as many 10’s a run as Ireland did in that period. I think there was only Healy and Hanrahan they could have added to the list.

It doesn’t matter. They and their voters believe that government is an essentially bad thing. They have no expectation of it functioning well, and when they mismanage it it provides further evidence for their case that all government is bad. Win win (for them, obviously everyone else loses).

No longer wading through 100 replies from
Blue Tick Wankers on every post isn’t flouncing.

Washington Post comes out to the right of The Pope. Remarkable.

“The girlfriend of one of the founders of Antifa…”

It feels very much to me like women’s rugby is being shoehorned into a template developed for a men’s game with much higher participation levels, schools infrastructure, ticket sales and TV audiences, simply because that’s what the Union knows how to run.

I’m not totally convinced that turning the women’s game into a heavily subsidized version of the men’s game is all that great an idea. I’d hope the bulk of that funding is going into broadening access and participation.

I can only make sense of her if her sole political priority is to stem the loss of votes to Reform. I don’t think she has any intention of winning a GE.

I’m not sure it is. They’re flaunting their impunity. Just as they did with Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall.

The only angle I can see is as an event. The Dubai and Hong Kong sevens are both great weekends on the beer. I just don’t see that providing enough cash to keep all of those afloat.

Baffling. When and where will these teams train together?

True - a big part of what they’re actually craving is an environment that will re-engage their own fans. The assumption is that there’s a massive latent support that is dormant because of the competition they’re playing in. Which is wishful thinking, I fear.

100%. The only people to adopt “inside the tent pissing in” as their default position, and it’s going on for a couple of decades now. They’ve hated every competition they’ve played in.

And one of the people at that party is your Ex, who you’re convinced still thinks about you as much as you think about them rather than being completely indifferent to you.

They’re convinced that Northampton fans would be really excited about Anglo welsh derbies when they can’t sell out Scarlets/Ospreys. And English club rugby is broke. They’ve run a massive survey that basically says “we’d like it to be 1986 again”.

I remain deeply unconvinced by Welsh fans view that an English Premiership that can’t keep its own teams solvent can support theirs too. But I do genuinely think they should be free to pursue that course. Welsh regional fans bring nothing but negativity to the URC, just like the formats before it.