After a competitive first half Celtic stepped up a gear in the second to swamp Kilmarnock. The back four, aided by the protection of Ismaila Soro, contributed to our first clean sheet in nine outings. David Turnbull picked up where he left off on Thursday with another assist from a corner kick, this time converted by the renewed Shane Duffy.
Celtic’s run of form extends to only two games but if any innocuous effort encapsulated it more it was the run Patryk Klimala made deep into his own half to pick up a throw-in that ultimately led to the second goal. The movement of Turnbull, Soro and Klimala (when he replaced Odsonne Edouard) has transformed Celtic into a team easy to play against into a solid operation that looks confident.
I never expected our play to right itself by moving Kristofer Ajer to right back and adding Soro and Turnbull to the midfield. After St Johnstone, I didn’t expect Neil Lennon to find a workable formula so quickly, I doubt he did either.
After demonstrations against Neil, the players and the running of the club (which I assumed was a metaphor for not sacking Neil), the appetite to demonstrate against Neil and the players has dissipated, although I am unsure if the lack of a sacking still counts as a demonstrate-able event.
I did not back Neil Lennon to get the job in 2010 or in 2019 and as recently as a week ago, I didn’t think he had a hope of getting a decent 90 minutes out of this squad. It would have been easier to have a bloodletting than for the board to tell us their man has the best chance of turning things around.
I still don’t think we will win the league this season, but it would be a Celtic fans with a heart of stone, or at least a tendancy to overreaction, who would campaign to tear our infrastructure asunder right now. Get results for the next three weeks and see what happens next.
Our Annual General Meeting was held by videoconference this afternoon. The highlight, not for the first time, was Celtic FC Foundation’s chief exec, Tony Hamilton, who explained that the Christmas Appeal in 2019 was our best ever and that our Football for Good campaing this year now topped the £1m mark.
Peter Lawwell gave a robust defence of strategy. The year between summer 2019 and summer 2020 saw the largest spend in the club’s history, £35m across the transfer windows. He affirmed his manager’s credentials and made it clear the board remain committed to the title fight this season. It is difficult to do rallying calls by recorded AGM videolink, but this was as close as we are likely to see.
Some of us have juices flowing at the prospect of a fourth consecutive treble. We won the fourth treble in our history in 2017. Yes, this clearly is pitchfork time.
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HOT SMOKED
Don’t know if your birthday was today or yesterday, in fact I hardly
know what day it is.
But Happy Birthday anyway..8-))
H.H. Mick
Some amount of ghuys on here with hearts of gold, God bless you.
HAMILTONTIM on 14TH DECEMBER 2020 10:10 PM
Stivs
You’re still one of the best on here amigo. God Bless you!
—————-
get to meet you someday. your life story , way back in the day, was quite exepional. for sharing those stories.
god bless the minx.
Paul67
There’s so much I disagree with in your article that I don’t know where to start. Probably over a beer would be better.
You spoke regarding GOD, a generation of domination. Nine years isn’t a generation Paul. It’s being brought to a premature end by a Plc board who sought the Hun pound, elected for a cheap managerial appointment when we needed quality and have failed to act decisively at the most crucial point when it was clear he was failing.
VP
How’s the Chopper :-)
Good evening CQN, can I ask all of you to keep one of our own in your prayers.
Aldo, known to some of you is in desperate need of our prayers. Aldo messaged me this evening to let me know his news. His prognosis is not good, from what he tells me. He’s not on the blog at all these days, to quote from his message “…I’m too busy fighting…and hinging aff a fence at parkheid “.
I checked with Aldo to make sure he was okay with me posting.
Keep the Faith!
Hail Hail!
DANDAN on 14TH DECEMBER 2020 7:21 PM
Just saw your post.
This place can be such an uplifting experience.
Peace brother.
HT
Whit wan? :O)
Hail Hail
Stay Safe
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EpNGCNqW8AY-3v2?format=jpg&name=small
Lennybhoy,
My thoughts and prayers with Aldo.
Fight on!! And God Bless
Haik Hail
LENNYBHOY
Thoughts with Aldo, I hope all goes well for him .hh
Lennybhoy. Will remember Aldo in prayers at Mass tomorrow.
Thoughts and prayers for Aldo.
YNWA HH
CORNELIUS on 14TH DECEMBER 2020 10:21 PM
We lost £6m before tax in 2003, not £30m
https://www.investegate.co.uk/celtic-plc/rns/final-results/200308131702356544O/
HH
CRC
Thank you Bhoys, I don’t often post these days but Aldo was a big part of CQN back in the day.
I’m logging off for the night for those that may post after this thank you as well.
Until we meet again…
Keep the Faith!
Hail Hail!
Best wishes ALDO.
H.H. Mick
To anyone who needs them or don’t mind me adding them to my prayers
Bless you all and to quote Dave Allen
May your god go with you
If you’re reading this Aldo, God Bless you pal and know that you’re in our prayers pal.
CORNELIUS
Excellent post
Hot Smokie…………….
HH and Keep It Lit, bhoy!
A CQN stalwart of good sense and positivity.
HH.
Mon the Aldo…..Hail Hail
HAMILTONTIM on 14TH DECEMBER 2020 10:23 PM
Well said good post C👍👏
CQN is taking a brave stand in defence of the indefensible.
Hopefully our team has turned a corner and we win the 10 and the quadruple treble. I sense that the change agenda among the support is now mainstream. The genie is out of the bottle
Burnley Celt
Couldn’t disagree more my friend.
Peter Lawwell is a liar! An under achieving and overpaid one at that.
He and the board are typical of their type, with an over inflated sense of worth and importance.
Well I for one am out I’m afraid.
I still hope and pray that we get the 10 but going forward I’d rather watch amateur football or find something else to do than sustain a bent game that’s run by and for a shower of bigoted cnuts who hate us and everything we stand for. It’s an absolute disgrace that our so called custodians value them more than they do sporting integrity or doing right by their own fans or our much heralded values. Totally and utterly sickened by the contempt they have for us and pretty sickened by P67’s blog today tbh, sneering at those who dare criticise or protest, really?
I’m sure that like most of you, Celtic have been the one constant passion in my life from boy to man, a way of life. Never thought I could walk away from them yet what’s the choice, continue to pay into a corrupt and artificial competition or try and effect real change by no longer supporting the charade? Oh that it should come to this and in this of all years, feck the feckin lot of them!
Right, away to lie down in a cold, dark room, rant over, aff oot!
HH
Happy Birthday Hot Smoked I hope it was a good one. 🍺🍺🎂🍺🍺🍀🍀🍀🎉🎉🎉
There’s not enough time in anybody’s day to read what I think about the present situation at our Club, suffice to say that I have never appreciated being lied to.
yo ho ho off we go
what do you know it’s 9 in a row
bye bye rangers
celtic’s on the ball again
on their way to making it 10
bye bye rangers
peter lawwell ruined my favourite celtic song.
Boards come & go, Main Shareholders come & go but the Club remains as the one constant.
Different Individuals who are in temporary control can sicken & enrage fans by their actions or lack of action.
Celtic Supporters are not unique in this regard but that doesn’t make it any easier.
I respect those like Sid who makes a decision that is right for him, personally my decision is that Celtic are my Club and doesn’t belong to Desmond or anyone else, so I will not have Celtic taken away from me.
CELTICROLLERCOASTER SUPPORTING THE WALK WITH SHAY LEGACY FUND on 14TH DECEMBER 2020 10:45 PM
Cheers for that.
I was relying on my clearly suspect memory.
I have to say I got a headache trying to read & understand the link.
HH
ST TAMS on 14TH DECEMBER 2020 11:00 PM
Cheers.
HH
VINNIETHEDOG on 14TH DECEMBER 2020 5:14 PM
Westcraigs…. Rangers had a terrific group… A belter… They also played liege away when liege was the capital of covid and they had 7 out!… First game off to a flyer… Even then guy had a absolute sitter for 1 1…..while accepting they have made big progress…. There’s this inkling ( and I might be wrong).. That’s its a house built on sand….. How I’d love to play them if they had 6 or 7 out!!
did we not lose to Prague when they had half their team out. 4-1 at home.
did sevco win away at liege?
i hope your inkling is right but i think it will probably be wrong.
Buddy Morrissey and Notthebus
Thank you both.
Very disappointing to read that no effort seems to have been made to take even a few questions from the virtual floor.
WestCraigs
Wouldn’t give up on that ditty just yet
https://mobile.twitter.com/Heavidor/status/1338541500876075012
£10,000 raised.
Could they not just put it on the overdraft?
Oh wait.
One you won’t read in the SMSM
I really don’t see us losing on Jan 2nd st at empty Ibrox if we line up similar to last 2 games.
Could even win if we find a way to get Eddie more involved. Assuming we continue our momentum and win every game up to then.
On the board and AGM. They do take us Celtic fans as fools. Completely oblivious of changing mood among the mainstream Celtic support past month. It’s just lip service from PL & IB.
NL might have been better advised to show a bit of humility too on his own failings. Despite the mitigating circumstances, his mistakes have been the main contributing factor in where we stand in league today.
Found Paul67’s article today quite condescending too.
Evening. Man it sure feels good to have started the week with second win in 4 days under the old ever stretching belt.
The fitba guys in my company over here follow Spurs, Liverpool and Man U. One of them (the Spurs guy and smartest, data dude, top 100 of the Official Fantasy Fitba league over here) keeps up with Celtic because of, well me of course. He likes us, well, the develop at home, buy young develop and sell side, calls us the Scottish Ajax. Would that it were.
That’s how he perceives us. He has no skin in the game, wishes his team were like that (us), looking in on the careers of kids you witnessed before the masses were drawn in by the big fees. I want more of the VVD, Wanyama, Dembele, Tierney types to ply their trade, give us some years and then move on putting some coin in the old pink piggy and memories, perhaps made all the more special, in our old grey matter. For all of that though you need a coach and a team that is current and sharp. Top to bottom.
Anyway, enough of that. That’s for the meeting by the docks.
A wee piece I read in January’s edition of the The Atlantic tonight. Not relating this to a recent AGM at all. Or indeed the regime across the city with their control of the press and narrative coast to coast that is so deeply engrained in our society. Further damage has been done recently, both here and the old country. If you don’t see the similarities in the article something is stinky in Stockholm. How does one move forward? Is coming on here and battering away at your keyboard at a post you don’t agree with, with a person you may never meet, on a day you think Paul hit the post? I think it is. Common goals, caring for a cause and exchanging views that on occasion we may not want to hear but listen (read) all the same. Enough of that.
“In a democracy, who gets to say what is true—the experts or the people?”
Worth 5 mins for anyone that, like me, that doesn’t like the fact that lies repeated often become the truth, right? Nothing you don’t know but a solid piece.
To assess the legacy of Donald Trump’s presidency, start by quantifying it. Since last February, more than a quarter of a million Americans have died from COVID-19—a fifth of the world’s deaths from the disease, the highest number of any country. In the three years before the pandemic, 2.3 million Americans lost their health insurance, accounting for up to 10,000 “excess deaths”; millions more lost coverage during the pandemic. The United States’ score on the human-rights organization Freedom House’s annual index dropped from 90 out of 100 under President Barack Obama to 86 under Trump, below that of Greece and Mauritius. Trump withdrew the U.S. from 13 international organizations, agreements, and treaties. The number of refugees admitted into the country annually fell from 85,000 to 12,000. About 400 miles of barrier were built along the southern border. The whereabouts of the parents of 666 children seized at the border by U.S. officials remain unknown.
Trump reversed 80 environmental rules and regulations. He appointed more than 220 judges to the federal bench, including three to the Supreme Court—24 percent female, 4 percent Black, and 100 percent conservative, with more rated “not qualified” by the American Bar Association than under any other president in the past half century. The national debt increased by $7 trillion, or 37 percent. In Trump’s last year, the trade deficit was on track to exceed $600 billion, the largest gap since 2008. Trump signed just one major piece of legislation, the 2017 tax law, which, according to one study, for the first time brought the total tax rate of the wealthiest 400 Americans below that of every other income group. In Trump’s first year as president, he paid $750 in taxes. While he was in office, taxpayers and campaign donors handed over at least $8 million to his family business.
America under Trump became less free, less equal, more divided, more alone, deeper in debt, swampier, dirtier, meaner, sicker, and deader. It also became more delusional. No number from Trump’s years in power will be more lastingly destructive than his 25,000 false or misleading statements. Super-spread by social media and cable news, they contaminated the minds of tens of millions of people. Trump’s lies will linger for years, poisoning the atmosphere like radioactive dust.
Presidents lie routinely, about everything from war to sex to their health. When the lies are consequential enough, they have a corrosive effect on democracy. Lyndon B. Johnson deceived Americans about the Gulf of Tonkin incident and everything else concerning the Vietnam War. Richard Nixon’s lifelong habit of prevaricating gave him the nickname “Tricky Dick.” After Vietnam and Watergate, Americans never fully recovered their trust in government. But these cases of presidential lying came from a time when the purpose was limited and rational: to cover up a scandal, make a disaster disappear, mislead the public in service of a particular goal. In a sense, Americans expected a degree of fabrication from their leaders. After Jimmy Carter, in his 1976 campaign, promised, “I’ll never lie to you,” and then pretty much kept his word, voters sent him back to Georgia. Ronald Reagan’s gauzy fictions were far more popular.
Trump’s lies were different. They belonged to the postmodern era. They were assaults against not this or that fact, but reality itself. They spread beyond public policy to invade private life, clouding the mental faculties of everyone who had to breathe his air, dissolving the very distinction between truth and falsehood. Their purpose was never the conventional desire to conceal something shameful from the public. He was stunningly forthright about things that other presidents would have gone to great lengths to keep secret: his true feelings about Senator John McCain and other war heroes; his eagerness to get rid of disloyal underlings; his desire for law enforcement to protect his friends and hurt his enemies; his effort to extort a foreign leader for dirt on a political adversary; his affection for Kim Jong Un and admiration for Vladimir Putin; his positive view of white nationalists; his hostility toward racial and religious minorities; and his contempt for women.
The most mendacious of Trump’s predecessors would have been careful to limit these thoughts to private recording systems. Trump spoke them openly, not because he couldn’t control his impulses, but intentionally, even systematically, in order to demolish the norms that would otherwise have constrained his power. To his supporters, his shamelessness became a badge of honesty and strength. They grasped the message that they, too, could say whatever they wanted without apology. To his opponents, fighting by the rules—even in as small a way as calling him “President Trump”—seemed like a sucker’s game. So the level of American political language was everywhere dragged down, leaving a gaping shame deficit.
Trump’s barrage of falsehoods—as many as 50 daily in the last fevered months of the 2020 campaign—complemented his unconcealed brutality. Lying was another variety of shamelessness. Just as he said aloud what he was supposed to keep to himself, he lied again and again about matters of settled fact—the more brazen and frequent the lie, the better. Two days after the polls closed, with the returns showing him almost certain to lose, Trump stood at the White House podium and declared himself the winner of an election that his opponent was trying to steal.
This crowning conspiracy theory of Trump’s presidency activated his entitled children, compliant staff, and sycophants in Congress and the media to issue dozens of statements declaring that the election was fraudulent. Following the mechanism of every big lie of the Trump years, the Republican Party establishment fell in line. Within a week of Election Day, false claims of voter fraud in swing states had received almost 5 million mentions in the press and on social media. In one poll, 70 percent of Republican voters concluded that the election hadn’t been free or fair.
So a stab-in-the-back narrative was buried in the minds of millions of Americans, where it burns away, as imperishable as a carbon isotope, consuming whatever is left of their trust in democratic institutions and values. This narrative will widen the gap between Trump believers and their compatriots who might live in the same town, but a different universe. And that was Trump’s purpose—to keep us locked in a mental prison where reality was unknowable so that he could go on wielding power, whether in or out of office, including the power to destroy.
For his opponents, the lies were intended to be profoundly demoralizing. Neither counting them nor checking facts nor debunking conspiracies made any difference. Trump demonstrated again and again that the truth doesn’t matter. In rational people this provoked incredulity, outrage, exhaustion, and finally an impulse to crawl away and abandon the field of politics to the fantasists.
For believers, the consequences were worse. They surrendered the ability to make basic judgments about facts, exiling themselves from the common framework of self-government. They became litter swirling in the wind of any preposterous claim that blew from @realDonaldTrump. Truth was whatever made the world whole again by hurting their enemies—the more far-fetched, the more potent and thrilling. After the election, as charges of voter fraud began to pile up, Matthew Sheffield, a reformed right-wing media activist, tweeted: “Truth for conservative journalists is anything that harms ‘the left.’ It doesn’t even have to be a fact. Trump’s numerous lies about any subject under the sun are thus justified because his deceptions point to a larger truth: that liberals are evil.”
How did half the country—practical, hands-on, self-reliant Americans, still balancing family budgets and following complex repair manuals—slip into such cognitive decline when it came to politics? Blaming ignorance or stupidity would be a mistake. You have to summon an act of will, a certain energy and imagination, to replace truth with the authority of a con man like Trump. Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, describes the susceptibility to propaganda of the atomized modern masses, “obsessed by a desire to escape from reality because in their essential homelessness they can no longer bear its accidental, incomprehensible aspects.” They seek refuge in “a man-made pattern of relative consistency” that bears little relation to reality. Though the U.S. is still a democratic republic, not a totalitarian regime, and Trump was an all-American demagogue, not a fascist dictator, his followers abandoned common sense and found their guide to the world in him. Defeat won’t change that.
Trump damaged the rest of us, too. He got as far as he did by appealing to the perennial hostility of popular masses toward elites. In a democracy, who gets to say what is true—the experts or the people? The historian Sophia Rosenfeld, author of Democracy and Truth, traces this conflict back to the Enlightenment, when modern democracy overthrew the authority of kings and priests: “The ideal of the democratic truth process has been threatened repeatedly ever since the late eighteenth century by the efforts of one or the other of these epistemic cohorts, expert or popular, to monopolize it.”
Monopoly of public policy by experts—trade negotiators, government bureaucrats, think tankers, professors, journalists—helped create the populist backlash that empowered Trump. His reign of lies drove educated Americans to place their faith, and even their identity, all the more certainly in experts, who didn’t always deserve it (the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, election pollsters). The war between populists and experts relieved both sides of the democratic imperative to persuade. The standoff turned them into caricatures.
Trump’s legacy includes an extremist Republican Party that tries to hold on to power by flagrantly undemocratic means, and an opposition pushed toward its own version of extremism. He leaves behind a society in which the bonds of trust are degraded, in which his example licenses everyone to cheat on taxes and mock affliction. Many of his policies can be reversed or mitigated. It will be much harder to clear our minds of his lies and restore the shared understanding of reality—the agreement, however inconvenient, that A is A and not B—on which a democracy depends.
But we now have the chance, because two events in Trump’s last year in office broke the spell of his sinister perversion of the truth. The first was the coronavirus. The beginning of the end of Trump’s presidency arrived on March 11, 2020, when he addressed the nation for the first time on the subject of the pandemic and showed himself to be completely out of his depth. The virus was a fact that Trump couldn’t lie into oblivion or forge into a political weapon—it was too personal and frightening, too real. As hundreds of thousands of Americans died, many of them needlessly, and the administration flailed between fantasy, partisan incitement, and criminal negligence, a crucial number of Americans realized that Trump’s lies could get someone they love killed.
The second event came on November 3. For months Trump had tried frantically to destroy Americans’ trust in the election—the essence of the democratic system, the one lever of power that belongs undeniably to the people. His effort consisted of nonstop lies about the fraudulence of mail-in ballots. But the ballots flooded into election offices, and people lined up before dawn on the first day of early voting, and some of them waited 10 hours to vote, and by the end of Election Day, despite the soaring threat of the virus, more than 150 million Americans had cast ballots—the highest turnout rate since at least 1900. The defeated president tried again to soil our faith, by taking away our votes. The election didn’t end his lies—nothing will—or the deeper conflicts that the lies revealed. But we learned that we still want democracy. This, too, is the legacy of Donald Trump.
Supple – very good indeed.
Thank you.
Back in blighty ….
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/uk-england-cornwall-55279468?__twitter_impression=true
“Make a fool of me twice …..”
Aipple
Spel chekur