Best Of

Didn't realise until just now that Morocco are as highly-ranked as number 5 in the world, sandwiched between England and Brazil.

https://inside.fifa.com/fifa-world-ranking/men

Damn good team.

This was very much the classic 'Group of Death' draw for Scotland.

Still, I'm sure they can probably pick up a point against *checks fixtures* Brazil.

Pre the expansion to 48 teams it would have been a hideous draw. But pre expansion Scotland wouldn’t have been at the finals…

We did win our group to be fair, so even without expansion we would have been there, but we would still have been jammy gits in doing so.

Different groups with fewer places up for grabs, but fair play on winning the group. I’m hoping the Scot’s get through. The joy and party spirit of the fans is brilliant.

A major flu outbreak has sickened nearly 160 troops at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas less than two months after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that U.S. troops would no longer be required to be vaccinated for the flu—NYT

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/18/us/flu-outbreak-air-force-base.html?unlocked_article_code=1.rFA.LASy.Em3OYzAscBzB&smid=nytcore-ios-share

Why do we need to relearn the lesson that vaccines are a good thing?

Because some people are absolute [redacted].

One of my father's colleague said recently he mentioned vaccinating a child and their parent threatened them with violence, this isn't an uncommon experience in the last few years.

But it did mean Andrew Wakefield got to shag Elle Macpherson, so there’s that.

It's worse than that.

We've got a new generation, radicalised by social media, who are anti-vaxx, we'll see the damage in the UK in the next few years as herd immunity is wiped out.

It's not just a new generation. I saw an 89 yo woman at CAB this week who confided to me that her grandson had long-Covid and that Covid was a hoax. She'd read it in a 'really interesting' free paper called The Light apparently, so it must be true.

I couldn't resist asking her how he got long-Covid if Covid was a hoax. (I'll probably get struck off.)

I had a look at "The Light" so that you don't have to. The latest [June] issue includes an article musing on the purpose of the "obviously fake" Artemis mission. Sigh.

So who are ‘Mar’? If we show Germany games will we have ‘Deu’?

No, "GER"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_FIFA_country_codes

Missing my point.

Well this is what Claude says:

FIFA codes are generally just three-letter abbreviations derived from a country's name, and Morocco is a pretty straightforward case: MAR comes from "Maroc," the French name for Morocco (and also close to the Arabic "al-Maghrib" in spirit, though it's really the French spelling driving it).
This pattern is common in FIFA codes — they often follow the French or local-language name rather than the English one, since French has historically been one of FIFA's official languages alongside English and Spanish. A few similar examples:

Germany is GER in English contexts but FIFA actually uses GER too (derived from German "Deutschland" would give GER differently, but FIFA aligns with IOC-style codes which can vary)
Spain is ESP, from "España"
Wales is WAL

So MAR fits the broader convention of FIFA codes being built from the country's name in French or the local language rather than always defaulting to English. It's largely inherited from the ISO 3166-1 and IOC country code traditions, which FIFA's codes loosely track (with occasional FIFA-specific quirks).

A major flu outbreak has sickened nearly 160 troops at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas less than two months after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that U.S. troops would no longer be required to be vaccinated for the flu—NYT

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/18/us/flu-outbreak-air-force-base.html?unlocked_article_code=1.rFA.LASy.Em3OYzAscBzB&smid=nytcore-ios-share

Why do we need to relearn the lesson that vaccines are a good thing?

Because some people are absolute [redacted].

One of my father's colleague said recently he mentioned vaccinating a child and their parent threatened them with violence, this isn't an uncommon experience in the last few years.

But it did mean Andrew Wakefield got to shag Elle Macpherson, so there’s that.

It's worse than that.

We've got a new generation, radicalised by social media, who are anti-vaxx, we'll see the damage in the UK in the next few years as herd immunity is wiped out.

And plenty of them are in Reform.

There’s a lot of blame to go around. Every time a celeb or journalist made light of not understanding science it was a step on the road. Every time concerned middle class parents started asking questions, just in case, it was another step on the road. But truly Andrew Wakefield is the biggest source of concern. A malign actor if ever there was one.

Nah, there have been anti-vaxxers ever since Jenner invented the technique in Georgian times. When I was at Med School parents were refusing whooping cough vaccine, and I remember a small epidemic of it in South London. Wakefield was simply a waypoint.

Anti-vaxxing seems to now be part of the package of right wing politics, alongside the "Great Replacement Theory", "Cultural Marxism" and anti-abortion. It comes as a bundle via MAGA dominated Social Media.

It seems to be an extreme manifestation of rugged individualism. An insistence on not being reliant on anyone else for anything, including the benefits of medical science, and that if one is strong enough, you won't get ill anyway. All then bolstered by a healthy dose of survivorship bias.

Didn't realise until just now that Morocco are as highly-ranked as number 5 in the world, sandwiched between England and Brazil.

https://inside.fifa.com/fifa-world-ranking/men

Damn good team.

This was very much the classic 'Group of Death' draw for Scotland.

Still, I'm sure they can probably pick up a point against *checks fixtures* Brazil.

Pre the expansion to 48 teams it would have been a hideous draw. But pre expansion Scotland wouldn’t have been at the finals…

We did win our group to be fair, so even without expansion we would have been there, but we would still have been jammy gits in doing so.