LongTimeLurker

That's not at all clear given the HL membership has to sign off on any new tier 6 pyramid league or new member joining by application. The only thing that has been determined in terms of the rulebook is where Club 42 gets relegated to and there have been recent attempts to get that rule reversed with a poster from Kelty recently claiming on here that the only reason it didn't happen was because the SPFL knocked back an LL request for money to compensate their clubs for extra travel. The EoS accepted Luncarty last year despite their registered ground being north of the club 42 line of latitude. According to patriot1 (St Andrews United) the explanation given to EoS member clubs on how this was possible was that there were no geographical limits in the rulebook on who can apply to their league and have their application put to a vote of the membership with Orkney of the NCL apparently being mentioned in an "even Orkney can apply" sort of way.

Sad to see this linked to narrow nationalism like this but not surprising on here. This sort of stuff never gets explained properly by new outlets like the BBC as it would blow some peoples (think Swedish teenagers) fear porn narratives out of the water. Unlike 20 years ago when massive subsidies were required, wind and solar are now at grid parity and provide cheaper electricity production than fossil fuels and nuclear. That means the only technical obstacle to eliminating fossil fuels from the energy production system in a manner that saves money and does everything more cheaply (including in transportation once Li ion battery prices decline sufficiently) is storage to match peaks in demand and supply for when it isn't windy and the sun isn't shining. The shift to renewables to run modern society has always been first and foremost a technology issue more than a political one. Twenty years ago it wasn't feasible. Now it is on the very cusp of being the new reality. Denmark can hook their wind farms up to Norwegian pumped hydro storage, so they have no problem that way and can plough right on ahead with an investment like this. Scotland would also need to build a lot more pumped hydro storage in or near the Great Glen like the proposed Coire Glas scheme but it is very much technically feasible in the here and now if we can overcome the weird landscape fetish that a lot of people have about the Highlands any time a new dam or pylon line gets proposed. If England did this somewhere like the Dogger bank they would be OK on short term storage with Li ion battery technology that has made massive progress over the last five years thanks to the advances with electric cars but there is still a need for longer term storage solutions for locations where pumped hydro storage is not so easy to do to eliminate the role of gas peaking power stations. Once that missing piece to the puzzle gets sorted and there is plenty of research into solving this issue underway, renewables will dominate with no need for subsidy. At that point fossil fuel use in the energy sector will decline drastically and people who still have mindsets stuck in how things were twenty years ago will have to learn how to be optimistic for a change.

At the end of the article: ...Dr Michael Head, a senior research fellow in global health at Southampton University, said that if the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine was less protective against mild disease but prevented severe disease this would "still be a pretty good outcome". "I don't think we need to be too alarmed by [the reported findings] as yet but we do need to see the full study to work out what the implications really are," he told the BBC The content of the article is good news overall although it won't be spun that way by media outlets looking for a click baity headline. Mainly younger healthy people studied so they can't draw definite conclusions about severe outcomes but immune responses are still being observed, so the vaccine is still working against the SA variant. Not mentioned is that South Africa has recently received OxfordAZ doses from India to vaccinate its health care workers. The strong Indian role on producing OxfordAZ maybe muddies the water too much where vaccine nationalism is concerned.

...not a peep about the Tayside juniors as per usual. Don't have a strong opinion personally on which way Tayside junior clubs should go on this as there are reaonable arguments to be made both ways, but it is noteworthy that in local media stories in the Highland League catchment it is only ever the NCL plus the north region that rate a mention on this. Tayside being a factor is something you only really see on P&B.

If as many as people as possible take the initiative by directing this question to their SNP MSP and letting them know that irrational policies like this could affect how they vote in May they will probably change their posture. The problem is they only tend to ever hear from a tiny minority of cranks who are not very bright (similar to who calls into football phone-ins) and will tend to believe all the tabloid fear porn.

Got to support American C&W stars who openly describe themselves as socialist. The modern day Woody Guthrie.

^^^stunning lack of self-awareness.

It was only a matter of time before we saw a headline like this: All the COVID doom porn has been bad news for other attention seekers with a doomsday scenario to peddle. Next up, "Carbon emissions boost COVID mutation rates" and "Rising temperatures will unleash more pandemics". The news right now should be dominated by the triumph of rationality and scientific innovation over adversity in both these contexts and how we have the capacity to meet the challenges that lie ahead, but instead all we get is charlatans with messiah complexes conjuring up exagerated nightmarish visions of the future to save us from. The ice caps will melt unless you repent and follow me or you will all die from a virus with an IFR of under 0.2% unless you comply with my nanny state rather than you will be damned to eternal damnation unless you join my church and follow me, but it's the same old formula basically. It's called snake oil y'all, it's been around for a long long time.

Or find an app that lets you use your cellphone camera.

Postcodes opens up a new can of worms as it looks like FK3 may not fully concide with the old burgh boundary that the community council still seems to be based on: Worth noting that Bo'ness is still in EH territory on that as traditional county boundaries still often get used in that context making Bo'ness West Lothian as it was for many centuries. Stoneyburn is actually in Midlothian rather than West Lothian if you consider what often still gets written on envelopes.

You can find a detailed map of what falls under Grangemouth community council on the Falkirk council website: https://www.falkirk.gov.uk/maps-local/council-democracy/community-councils.aspx?prop=community_&val=Grangemouth (incl Skinflats) The stadium is definitely in Grangemouth according to that. The boundary runs up the middle of the road being discussed on its way past the stadium.

1980s Yugoslav New Wave album from a Belgrade band called Idoli that is is rated very highly in that context: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odbrana_i_poslednji_dani

Lots of things are possible. That doesn't mean public policy has to be driven by every worst case scenario somebody can dream up.

The main line was originally Aviemore -> Grantown-on-Spey -> Forres -> Inverness, so the Aviemore -> Inverness portion may have been built to lower standards as a single track line.

If sense had prevailed from the very beginning there would never have been a senior vs junior grade split in the first place, Tweedmouth and Berwick Rangers would be playing in English leagues given they are from south of the Tweed never mind Berwick, and nobody would have suggested using an exact line of latitude to define the boundary for Club 42 relegation to the HL and LL catchments based on registered ground location. Suspect only Harthill really have a shot at this, but stranger things have happened given all the quirky decisions made in this sort of context previously. A lot may depend on how SJFA-orientated the first set of WoS officeholders turn out to be, if that's getting sorted out soon.

Captain Mark Philips was definitely getting frowned on for that having had the misfortune of having to listen to an irate Colonel Blimp type rant on and on about it back in the early 1980s even though nothing was ever said in the media at the time of course.

That tends to be who objects any time the possibility of Dundee clubs entering the EoS gets raised on here and why. Will be interesting to see if there are any applications that put that scenario to the test this year.

Then you could potentially have an annual booster shot on this sort of basis, if variants kept rearing their head elsewhere. As long as they don't start talking about a new strain the variant thing should be managable.

What happened to the culture of having your windaes panned for phoning the polis? Simpler times.

Please try to consider the actual context before firing off these bizarre kneejerk replies. The point here is that West Lothian junior clubs wanting to be able to play league games against clubs from the west rather than travelling to somewhere like Tweedmouth or Forfar is not a new phenomenon, so what Whitburn and Armadale are trying to do is nothing hugely out of the ordinary. The WoS league still has the ability to tell them to take a hike, so it remains to be seen whether it actually happens. The east superleague did not work as well as the west superleague did and West Lothian clubs were never that keen on it from the outset (Whitburn even refused to participate in it initially) as Tayside were originally supposed to get combined with the north region but managed to get themselves shoehorned into the east superleague as part of the compromises that cobbled together a majority for the superleague proposal. Part of what made the EoS attractive for some defecting clubs was the possibility of ditching most of the old Tayside region again to minimise travel.

Might be worth taking a trip down memory lane to look at what was being posted at the time. My recollection is that the conventional wisdom on here was that west region clubs (minus Dunipace) were in SoS territory in pyramid terms and would have to apply to the SoS to get licensed as Auchinleck Talbot had been told. Around the same time Kelty were told by the SFA that they had to join the EoS to get licensed with the difference being they actually went ahead with it unlike Talbot where the SoS was concerned. Can remember posting about how Clydebank's senior grade participation in the Stirlingshire Cup could maybe be used to argue for EoS entry instead in a nothing ventured nothing gained sort of way, when Clydebank posters stated that SoS entry was a complete non-starter for them. The EoS was still struggling big time for numbers at the time, so may have been more receptive to a membership application from the west than they otherwise would have been and have subsequently been. If you go back through old posts you will find that at one point Burnieman was arguing vociferously on here for the remaining EoS members to join the east region like Easthouses and Craigroyston did rather than vice versa. Before the Kelty Hearts defection there was very little appetite amongst either east or west region junior clubs for joining either the EoS or the SoS and that looked like it could be an insurmountable obstacle to further progress in pyramid terms, especially if Tom Johnston was still going to be rattling on about the Holy Grail and 100k toilet blocks.

Think if you asked people at your club what they wanted to happen when the superleagues were brought in they'll tell you they wanted league games against Central League clubs like Pollok and Petershill rather than trips to Dundee, Carnoustie and Forfar. More recently it was the top east superleague clubs (including Kelty) that wanted the so called superduperleague that would have combined the east and west superleague for possible tier 5 pyramid entry.

I was thinking more of the blazers. The EoS is approaching a point where reluctant east region defectors will be solidly in the majority rather than traditional EoS clubs and those that were genuinely gung ho about joining them. Throw the Whitburn and Armadale area into the mix and maybe you start getting motions to affiliate with the SJFA, enter the SJC rather than the SCC and attempts to replace officeholders from the pre-Kelty era?

More than the travel angle I suspect Harthill in particular probably want to avoid being stuck in a lower tier filled mainly with traditional EoS clubs like Eyemouth and Hawick in the years ahead something Camelon don't need to worry about too much. If being stuck in a lower tier with the likes of Glasgow Perthshire and Newmains United is more to their taste instead because it's easier to get supporters from what is mainly a Lanarkshire town interested in lower tier WoS games then good luck to them, if they get accepted OK. Are you hearing anything about Syngenta's future plans? Knocked back once already by the EoS and would probably be pushing flexibility on local authority boundaries well beyond breaking point to try for WoS entry.