Dr. Gonzo

probably shouldn't have laughed, but the "Howay the lads" got me...

Biden's presidency has been a joke in so many ways - although senate democrats voting against it isn't all that surprising. A lot of these "moderate democrats" are basically just Bush era Republicans - people like Manchin are about as left-wing as Bush was. I don't fucking understand the senate tbh, it seems completely unnecessary. I can understand the original reasoning of "well we don't want small states to have no power" - but the house of representatives already has a cap on how many members there can be... so big states are already underrepresented. I also don't understand how so many Americans graduate from uni loaded with so much debt. But definitely seems cruel to reinstate these payments when inflation is absolutely out of control. I don't really know how these loans work - but resuming payments while interest rates are as high as they are now seems to me like it'll just swell the amount of debt the average American is carrying around with them. The guy's also working on sending $17B to the Iranian government as a way of restarting nuclear talks and releasing some American hostages... a really great way to show Iranians who have been begging him to do more to put pressure on this evil government they've been actively fighting with for about a year now. That money's just going to go straight to Hezbollah and the Houthis, while some of it will be used to pay Palestinians to crack open Iranian skulls in the streets. Foreign policy is where the US President has the most power, and I guess I shouldn't be surprised to see "Mr. Status Quo" do what he can to keep the Middle East as fucked up as possible. If the best America can serve up is Biden or Trump... this country's beyond fixing tbh.

Sad thing is his arraignment has led to a huge boost in his popularity amongst his voters who I think had gotten a little more quiet simply because he wasn't as ever-present in the media. I will never understand the cult of personality he's managed to cultivate. He's not even charismatic... he's fucking shit at speaking English - it's made all the more funny that these people are rallying around this guy after chanting "lock her up" at Hillary for doing... the same thing - but not as bad as what he's been alleged to have done. I think the GOP has a problem though trying to untie themselves from this mess. He's still the top candidate for their party. The other frontrunners are... DeSantis, who's just tanked his national approval ratings by playing around with Florida's tax money to campaign ineffectively. Mike Pence, who's hated on the left for being an idiot zealot, and a large chunk of his own party was okay with the idea of him being hung during the January 6th capitol attacks. Anyone that's more "reasonable" has no chance at getting through a primary, it's only going to be low tier candidates like Trump, Pence, or DeSantis that can get through. I think America is doomed for another shit choice of Biden v. Trump. I hope I'm wrong though.

He’s better at the big picture business stuff than the footballing side - makes sense considering his background. He’ll forever be a LFC legend for his key role in removing parasitic owners from us and saving us from administration.

It’s bizarre to me as well because their system just props up a huge industry that probably wouldn’t exist in a “free market” that wasn’t using their insane system. The amount it would cost taxpayers to have a US NHS-style system is way less than the costs individuals (and their employers) have to pay. And this artificially propped up insurance industry ultimately just serves to make the whole healthcare system more expensive than it is in any other country America would want to be compared to. Sabotaging the NHS to bring that kind of bullshit to the UK is the most morally bankrupt thing any government could try to do.

You better pray you don't get the same shite they have in America. Imagine needing to pay something mental like 15k for an ambulance ride. Or paying something mental like 5x what everyone else in the world pays for the same medication. The doctors are all great, sure. But are they that great that the intensely high costs are worth it? Probably not. I've got a partially subsidised insurance policy through my work and thank god I do, because I've had a couple of serious surgeries here that were needed for me to... be able to move like a normal person ever again and to be able to use my hand like it's a hand. I would have gone completely broke or been permanently disabled if not for that tbh. It's an absurd system they've got in America that only really exists to: 1.) inflate medical prices for everything, 2.) prop up shite insurance companies.

You get it for PC & Xbox for the same price don't you? At least that's how it is here. Pretty good deal tbh, although I don't game on my PC at all ever except the Age of Empires remasters.

Bethesda bugs are usually hilarious so playing in those first few months is almost guaranteed to be top tier comedy. Except Fallout New Vegas bugs, those were shit

If Starfield is anything like most Bethesda single player games, namely Fallout & Elder Scrolls games… I’m going to love it. looks interesting!

When Messi left Barca he was just about the only player there earning the massive wages they were on. He was carrying Barca on his back, I think he deserved that money over a lot of his overpaid teammates. I wouldn’t put him wanting to be paid like the man who was scoring and creating most of their goals and Barca overpaying on loads of other players entirely on him. But it’s stupid for him to say he doesn’t care about money. When leaving Barca he only really had 2 options - City & PSG… clubs for mercenaries to get money. And now he’s at the MLS getting a portion ownership of his club, a massive deal with Adidas and Apple… it’s a massive financial opportunity for him. It’s probably got more potentially higher financial opportunities for him than seeing out the end of his country as a plaything for the Saudis on a higher wage.

49ers are ambitious, but sometimes in their ambition... they end up making strange decisions that backfire. Hopefully for Leeds' sake, they bring in some competent footballing people to make the decisions for who comes and who goes. Because there's a hell of a lot of difference in planning to be an ambitious NFL team compared to being an ambitious football team.

RedBird are absolute cancer for the sport. Sounds like they've seriously pissed off many players, staff, and fans with that decision to sack Maldini. Hopefully someone buys them the fuck out because a club like Milan doesn't deserve having its soul sucked out by some heartless venture capitalists who'd sell their mum and kids for pennies.

lol and his lawyers resigned

Trump indicted, bout fucking time The indictment is unsealed - and I particularly enjoy the prosecutors using his own public statements against him

The Iron Sheik has died

I doubt Miami would want to loan out Messi for any other time other than when the MLS season isn't going... and even then, I'm not so sure. They'll want Messi for as often as he's fit to play because he's Messi. This is the biggest signing in MLS history by some distance - and probably the biggest US football signing since Pele joined that NY team in the 70s.

I'm barely into it, but it's great that it feels more like the 2nd than the 3rd game in terms of how the world is and the aesthetic. But they kept a lot of the streamlining that made the 3rd game feel a lot more modern than the 2nd (which remains one of my favourite games of all time). I'm very pleased with the game so far. It's great that it has couch coop on console.

Trump's pretty much a RINO as well. What kind of fiscal conservative swells their country's national deficit by 25%? One that's not really fiscally conservative. He's just another neoliberal masquerading as a populist. Tuck the cuck got sacked for his statements demonstrating he knew the network was promoting absolute bullshit in that defamation case that Fox settled, by the way. They wouldn't sack their most watched show's host if not for the fact his deposition statements directly sunk Fox's ability to fight the lawsuit and had to settle. Murdoch wanted a high profile head to roll after the settlement, nobody at the network was higher profile than Tuck the cuck.

DeSantis is just a moron with a Harvard degree, he could have backed off on Disney but claimed victory and the low info base of GOP voters would have been none the wiser, while he'd still retain Disney support for his candidacy most likely. Truth or accuracy doesn't matter so much to voters, as long as you say something enough times confidently enough, Trump's demonstrated that these lies just get accepted as truth by enough people. Instead he's ended up tying up millions of dollars of taxpayer money into a legal battle with Disney... a company that is notoriously good at winning it's legal battles... while costing the state billions of Disney investment and just saw Disney's plans to relocate thousands of it's white collar tech workers to Florida scrapped in an instant. Even if you've got some high-info GOP voters out there who may have considered him... if you're a fiscal conservative, you'd likely be seeing him as a clown who's blowing his state's treasury on these idiotic battles he's picking to get national media attention. And if you're a pro-business conservative, you've just seen him go against an American business institution and one of the largest employers in the state. This is a media created mess - treating Trump as a serious candidacy has permanently changed political discourse in the US. He has a real cult of personality (don't ask me how lol), I'd say 20-30% of voters are pretty firmly in his grasp. It's got the GOP in a race to see if any candidate can "out-Trump" Trump in primaries. And then the question has to be asked... does the Trumpiest candidate that makes it through primaries have a chance at winning moderates over with a moderate democrat running against them. Left-wing voters will hold their nose and vote against anyone Trumpy, even if they're voting for a democrat that's about as left wing as George W Bush. I don't think America can clean up this mess without things getting a hell of a lot worse than they already are. But even then... I'm not so sure - we saw people storm the US capitol and most of the punishments we've seen so far have been a comparative slap on the wrist. Are Americans too complacent to demand a government that actually works for them? Tbh, I think so. This was a country founded on a protest of lack of representation despite high taxes - look at California, it's got the most democrats AND republicans in the country. It's the economic backbone of the US. And for months it had just 1 senator representing it's interests in the senate. It has the most members of the house of representatives and at the same time is the most underrepresented state in national politics per capita. 12% of the US population controls 60% of the US senate. It's a broken, outdated, and anti-democratic system of government that goes around acting like it is the bastion of freedom and democracy.

I mean the latest thing coming to light appears to be a violation of the espionage act - taking confidential plans of an attack on Iran, which there's a recording of him confessing to taking. But it doesn't seem to matter because the DOJ is too afraid of the political backlash from his large group of followers. Americans are faced with a bad choice, imo. Republicans just aren't putting serious candidates forward: there's criminal clown in Trump, the culture warrior in DeSantis, and the religious zealot in Pence. There's been talk of Ted Cruz trying to reposition himself as more of a moderate... but he's got the last 6 years of his political career courting the far-right to make that seem like a load of shit... and he's Ted Cruz, he's about as likeable as a bag of dogshit. The democrats need someone moderate like Biden because it's the only way the fairly conservative moderate voters don't vote for someone actively malicious - but it's no surprise an old man who was never considered a serious contender for the president when he was younger and American politics at least pretended to be more serious is struggling to run the country in the aftermath of Trump inflating the US deficit by 25% in 4 years and needing to step in to make the federal government actually properly react to a global pandemic. But who else would they have go against Biden in the next election? Gavin Newsom's from California, so he's basically poison to red state voters who fear everything about the state that carries the US's economy on it's back - and anyone else is probably just too "left" for America to ever seriously consider. And with Newsom... as someone who's been in California for a while now - I'm just not a fan of establishment SF bay area corruption that keeps those politicians afloat. So Americans are faced with the prospect of old man Biden struggling to clean up the mess the country is in... or one of the GOP un-serious candidates to come in and fuck things up for the next serious president (if the US ever has one again) to come in and try to clean up. The two-party system the US has is absolute shit - both parties are astounding failures to the country and there's nothing being done to really address the economic problems that impact the whole country. And it's hard not to think it's all by design, because it seems like at the end of the day corruption is what keeps US politics afloat and actually pushing for any kind of meaningful policy gets you shunned into political obscurity.

There's all the evidence of crimes... but it's one of those things, where the rich and powerful get a different system of justice to the rest of society. Trump's a multimillionaire with a huge amount of political power. He's already demonstrated his ability with stochastic terrorism with the capital rights, I imagine the DOJ would have a mind on what seeing Trump do a perp walk might mean for political violence. He still has his core base and once he turned on DeSantis... DeSantis saw his support sink like a stone. Trump's also got the media wrapped around his finger. All DeSantis really has in his box is using his position as governor of Florida to try to win culture war battles for his campaign trail - he's actually abysmal at dealing with the media. I thought Trump seemed childish when dealing with the media, but DeSantis's handling of "tough" questions (they're not even tough... they're just not easy questions for him to stick to his campaign talking points) actually has him look like a bratty child on the verge of tears. How's he going to govern on just culture wars, needing a super majority to get his "policy" through as President? He'll wilt under the kind of scrutiny that Bush, Obama, Trump, or Biden got from the media - the kind of scrutiny any president should expect, because they're fucking president. He's attempted to take on Disney and it's led to Disney freezing investment into the state - so he's actively acted as an anti-business governor trying to run as a pro-business politician. Even Trump has hammered him on this. Trump's actually done a very good job at hammering DeSantis on every issue that's there to hammer him on. Trump was an extremist and even he's got more appeal to average Americans than DeSantis. It's pretty mind boggling. American politics are fucked up. Also I think even if convicted, Trump can win an election because being a felon doesn't disallow you from running. Just voting!

I used to think Trump wouldn't fair well in the primaries against DeSantis... now I think he would absolutely crush DeSantis. I think America's going to be faced with the absolute shit choice of: Trump v. Biden (again).

We sort of have to. This season we were dogshit for a huge chunk of it - and now we've just seen 4 high earners, 2 of which were key players for us in the Klopp era, leave. The other two were good players, but their injury histories really really hurt us because it was their big wages tied up on the treatment table rather than in our midfield. Really last season we entered into a new chapter of Klopp's time at the club, with the front 3 that sort of defined the "Klopp era" being broken up with Mane's departure. Then now, losing Milner and Firmino - two big players for us on and off the pitch. This'll probably be Matip's last season with us as well and he's been a big player for us too (and was probably our best defender last season and arguably this season) & we've got a number of key players that are just getting older and closer to ending their time at the club. It's looking pretty likely that we're signing 2-3 central midfielders and a young left CB - so it looks like more serious steps to plan for how the future of our squad will look are taking place.

Aside from being an important player for us for such a long time… just look at what he brought to the dressing room. Basically a player-coach & someone that pushed the squad as much as he could.

Wow Croatia looks great