Messages

1

GAA Discussion / Re: AI minor football championship

« on: September 17, 2017, 02:25:55 PM »

I've never seen a better minor than Clifford. An incredible combination of skill, pace, athleticism, strength and intelligence. If he doesn't fall by the wayside as so many minors do, he'll be an unbelievable player.

2

General discussion / Re: The Minister, the Commissioner and the whistleblower

« on: September 15, 2017, 09:16:51 AM »

https://www.rte.ie/news/2017/0914/904751-gra-breath-tests/

The guards are saying they didn't falsify nuttin'

Comical Ali lives.

3

General discussion / Re: George Hook

« on: September 14, 2017, 02:37:58 PM »

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51-hepLP8J4

I think this sums it up

Excellent.

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General discussion / Re: George Hook

« on: September 13, 2017, 05:00:53 PM »

The whole episode is cynical in the extreme. This miserable ould p***k is making a career, cynically supported by Newstalk in pursuit of ratings, out of copying the right-wing American shock-jocks. As somebody mentioned, there is now a formulaic three-minute rant at the start or every show where he selects the latest anti-immigrant, anti-progressive, anti-science or general right wing cause celebre and works himself into a pseudo-frenzy in a blatant attempt to get the text and twitter machines hopping.

Then, when he oversteps the mark, his employers give him a scripted apology to read out while they rub their hands with satisfaction that the formula is working.

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General discussion / Re: Who has the smugest face?

« on: September 13, 2017, 01:50:13 PM »

visitors can't see pics , please register or login

He's good but he's no Jeffrey Donaldson.

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General discussion / Re: Thread for Tony Fearon to to pontificate about Catholicism

« on: September 13, 2017, 01:47:38 PM »

 Proper order bc, and while you’re at it, bugger Steven Hawking and every other cosmologist you can think of also.
 I mean Tony says, “God created the world. That is, he made it out of nothing.”
 But Steven says, “He did on me arse, the world created itself. Matter appeared from nowhere and this is happening all the time.”
 

I haven't read everything Prof. Hawking has written, but I haven't seen him quoted thus. I'm pretty sure he would say simply that we don't know what, if anything preceded the Big Bang.
 
I don't think it's a question that will easily be answered, but most sensible people see the logical fallacy in the God of the Gaps proposition, which assumes that everything we don't (yet) know is necessarily explained by God. The problem is, God is becoming more and more idle and redundant as we discover how the world works.
 
What was there before the Big Bang may be unimaginable but eventually mathematically explicable. That wouldn't be a unique state of affairs. Try imagining or visualising an imaginary number or a complex number. Yet, for example, we wouldn't have our electricity supply, much less computers without the mathematical explanation of them.
 
Or what about the wave/particle duality of light. Completely unimaginable but quite simply explicable for practical purposes. Like wise the Uncertainty Principle and quantum mechanics in general.
 
We're not as far along in understanding the mind, but all available research is pointing to the mind being the manifestation of the physical firing of neurons and no doubt we'll get there eventually and give God another six months of the year off all in one go.

He'll still be clocking in for a few minutes every few months, though to attend to the people who confuse science and philosophy, which is where nearly all of his work is concentrated these days. Science has made fairly good strides with the "How" question in the last 400 years. The philosophers have been at it for millennia with the "Why" question and they're still no further on. It's a harder question, though the answer may be simple.

7

GAA Discussion / Re: Gobshite Of The Month - September 2017

« on: September 07, 2017, 12:52:38 PM »

Seanie, I think you're giving Finian a very easy ride here. I take the point that there are more egregious (word of the month, it seems) examples of reprehensible behaviour to be found without looking too hard. But that doesn't mitigate the harm that this gobshite has done that will potentially result in awful outcomes for some girls and women - as in awful disease and death in some cases.

Vaccination rates for cervical cancer have plummetted dramatically on nothing more than the usual anti-science, anti-expert, alternative, wacky-woo, phone-in misinformed bunk, trash and bullshit that's always at the back of anti-vaccination campaigns. As a result women will die. And here we have an alternative-leaning government minister, in the HEALTH department, giving credence to this madness, on the spurious basis that he's reflecting his constituents' "concerns". Their concerns are unfounded and that's what he should be telling them in his political clinics, rather than promoting this misinformation from within the Department of Health.

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General discussion / Re: Irish language

« on: September 07, 2017, 12:33:39 PM »

I used to be pretty handy at Irish with having done it up to A Level (that wasnt today or yesterday mind you).  My problem was that i never mixed in circles of people who could also speak it. No friends or family etc.  This has meant that i havent used it in over 15 years and thus i've mainly lost it.

I have the same problem as regards practice, so that I would speak hesitantly and struggle for words and expressions, but understand perfectly (apart from some difficulty with the Donegal accent*).

I put down the ease of understanding to years of just listening and for that I thank TG4, Nuacht, Irish language programmes on radio and match commentaries in Irish. Reading Irish columns in newspapers helps too. So I highly recommend all of that. I think if you stay in touch on that level, you would be speaking quite comfortably in a matter of weeks if you were to be immersed in an Irish speaking environment.

* Then again, a member of my extended family is from Ardara and I can only catch about one in three of his words in English.

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GAA Discussion / Re: Gobshite Of The Month - September 2017

« on: September 05, 2017, 02:05:06 PM »

Apologies for putting this in the wrong section. And so I must nominate myself.

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GAA Discussion / Re: Gobshite Of The Month - September 2017

« on: September 05, 2017, 02:03:20 PM »

Fearon. What do I win 

Disqualified - no obvious answers allowed.

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GAA Discussion / Gobshite Of The Month - September 2017

« on: September 05, 2017, 12:09:35 PM »

Early nomination - Finian McGrath.

12

General discussion / Re: The Late Late show

« on: September 04, 2017, 08:50:34 PM »

This is an outrage and I sympathise deeply with the widespread anguish and woe. If the results of a survey of life expectancy in Meath were presented in the form of a map of the area in which the survey was conducted (i.e. Meath) I can hardly imagine the dimensions of the injury, insult and affront it would represent. I would be forced to take drastic action. Fire and fury like the world has never seen. I might even go all the way and phone Joe Duffy.

No maps of Meath that don't show its place in Leinster. Ireland. Europe, feckit.

And there you go again, belittling the feelings of the northern Irish and making a joke of our nationalism. That's the attitude that is feeding Tony Fearon's separatist view.

We all know that the survey covered the 26 counties, but that is no excuse for cutting out the 6 counties. Unless of course, the person responsible had never heard of the Easter Rising nor the Troubles.

Good man Orior. Always good for the wind-up.

It IS a wind-up - right?

Emmm, no. Believe it or not, there are hundreds of thousands up north who tune into the Late Late Show every week. They also watch RTE news before the BBC news. They also support the Republic soccer team and wouldn't cross the road to watch NI play. Ask yourself why so many people of all ages and economic position still carry Irish passports and do not recognise the border.

And this has precisely what to do with my post or with the 26-county survey and the presentation of its results? Or is the survey itself the problem? All surveys should be 32-county? You'd need to get a grip if you really are serious.

You're not, are you?

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General discussion / Re: The Late Late show

« on: September 04, 2017, 03:53:07 PM »

This is an outrage and I sympathise deeply with the widespread anguish and woe. If the results of a survey of life expectancy in Meath were presented in the form of a map of the area in which the survey was conducted (i.e. Meath) I can hardly imagine the dimensions of the injury, insult and affront it would represent. I would be forced to take drastic action. Fire and fury like the world has never seen. I might even go all the way and phone Joe Duffy.

No maps of Meath that don't show its place in Leinster. Ireland. Europe, feckit.

And there you go again, belittling the feelings of the northern Irish and making a joke of our nationalism. That's the attitude that is feeding Tony Fearon's separatist view.

We all know that the survey covered the 26 counties, but that is no excuse for cutting out the 6 counties. Unless of course, the person responsible had never heard of the Easter Rising nor the Troubles.

Good man Orior. Always good for the wind-up.

It IS a wind-up - right?

14

General discussion / Re: The Late Late show

« on: September 04, 2017, 09:33:35 AM »

This is an outrage and I sympathise deeply with the widespread anguish and woe. If the results of a survey of life expectancy in Meath were presented in the form of a map of the area in which the survey was conducted (i.e. Meath) I can hardly imagine the dimensions of the injury, insult and affront it would represent. I would be forced to take drastic action. Fire and fury like the world has never seen. I might even go all the way and phone Joe Duffy.

No maps of Meath that don't show its place in Leinster. Ireland. Europe, feckit.

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General discussion / Re: Cryptocurrency

« on: September 01, 2017, 08:13:30 PM »

Peter Schiff talking about this on Joe Rogan

Go to 2hrs 13mins 20secs for the start of that part of the conversation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=by1OgqQQANg

In his attempt to explain why it won't work I think he convinced me that it will.

Standard money is just a medium of exchange with no intrinsic value since the gold standard was abandoned and whose notional value is bound to collapse when the fractional reserve banking dodge, built on debt-based funny money collapses as it inevitably must.

If contracting entities in sufficient numbers agree to use bitcoin as a medium of exchange, the only difference in comparison to money is in the fact that bitcoin's notional value is not artificially inflated as debt-based money's is.