Vesper

finally 👍🏽 Chelsea add Lucas Chevalier to their transfer shortlist https://www.thechelseachronicle.com/news/Chelsea-add-highly-rated-champions-league-goalkeeper-to-transfer-shortlist-he-starred-against-real-madrid-this-season/ The likes of Zion Suzuki and Gregor Kobel have been linked with a move to Stamford Bridge, and the latest figure on that list is Lucas Chevalier. The Frenchman has started every Ligue 1 game this season for Lille, and seems to have made an impression on a number of top clubs. One of those is Chelsea, and Simon Phillips has reported the Blues have added him to their shortlist as a potential option for the summer. He said on the Simon Phillips Substack: “But the latest name we are hearing via SPTC sources is Lucas Chevalier of Lille. Chevalier is 23-years-old, a 6-capped French U21 international, stands at 6ft 2in tall, and has played well over 100 senior league games in his career so far.

Drogba style goal

2 1 Tel

2 nil Morgan Rogers

1 nil Villa already 55 seconds in

https://www.vipleague.pm/fa-cup/aston-villa-vs-tottenham-hotspur-1-live-streaming https://www.vipleague.pm/fa-cup/aston-villa-vs-tottenham-hotspur-2-live-streaming https://redditsoccerstreams.org/event/aston-villa-tottenham-hotspur/1504607 https://favs.soccerstreams100.io/event/eng-fa/tottenham-vs-aston-villa-live-soccer-stats/730049

Pool crash out 1 nil

madness..................... Federal Financial Watchdog Ordered to Cease Activity In an email to staff of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency’s acting director ordered workers to cease “all supervision and examination activity.” https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/08/us/politics/cfpb-vought-staff-finance-watchdog.html Employees of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau were instructed to cease “all supervision and examination activity” and “all stakeholder engagement,” effectively stopping the agency’s operations, in an email from the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, on Saturday evening. Mr. Vought, who was confirmed this week to lead the Office of Management and Budget, was on Friday named acting director of the consumer protection bureau, the federal government’s financial industry watchdog. In his email to staff on Saturday, he reaffirmed earlier instructions from the previous acting director, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who ordered last week that staff should not issue any new rules or guidance and cease all investigations. “As acting director, I am committed to implementing the president’s policies, consistent with the law, and acting as a faithful steward of the bureau’s resources,” Mr. Vought wrote in the email, which was obtained by The New York Times. The agency, created by Congress in 2011 as a financial industry watchdog, cannot be closed without congressional action, but its director can freeze most of its actions by halting enforcement, weakening or repealing regulations and softening its supervision of banks and other lenders. The agency did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment on Saturday. The agency has issued a number of high-profile regulations and enforcement actions over the years, seeking to strengthen safeguards on mortgages, credit cards, loans and other consumer finance. Most recently, the bureau sued Capital One in mid-January, arguing that the bank misled customers in promoting a high-yield savings account that it then kept at a near-zero interest rate. In a Saturday evening post on X, Mr. Vought, an author of Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for radically remaking the federal government, wrote that he had notified the Federal Reserve that the finance bureau “will not be taking its next draw of unappropriated funding because it is not ‘reasonably necessary’ to carry out its duties.” (The agency is directly funded by the Federal Reserve, outside the usual congressional appropriations process.) “The Bureau’s current balance of $711.6 million is in fact excessive in the current fiscal environment,” he added in his post. “This spigot, long contributing to CFPB’s unaccountability, is now being turned off,” he said, using the agency’s initials. On Saturday, some members of the union representing the consumer protection bureau’s employees protested outside the agency’s Washington building with signs mocking Elon Musk, whose government efficiency effort has wreaked havoc across various federal agencies. Several members of Mr. Musk’s team arrived at the agency on Friday morning and gained access to its headquarters and computer systems. Later that day, Mr. Musk posted “CFPB RIP,” with an emoji of a gravestone, on X. Hours after Mr. Musk’s post, the home page of the bureau’s website was updated with a “404: Page not found” message.

the top 5 fullbacks on the planet are now off the board Nuno Mendes and Hakimi just renewed with PSG Davies renewed with Bayern Gvardiol is going nowhere and TAA will likely end up at Real Madrid (or stay at Pool)

I posted on him earlier he is ambipedal and plays mostly at LCB but certainly can play RCB as well I would love to get him and Murillo from Forest

https://www.vipleague.pm/fa-cup/plymouth-argyle-vs-liverpool-1-live-streaming https://www.vipleague.pm/fa-cup/plymouth-argyle-vs-liverpool-2-live-streaming https://www.vipleague.pm/fa-cup/plymouth-argyle-vs-liverpool-3-live-streaming https://redditsoccerstreams.org/event/plymouth-argyle-liverpool/1504605 https://favs.soccerstreams100.io/event/eng-fa/liverpool-vs-plymouth-live-soccer-stats/730037

The Department of Energy tried to clarify why DOGE staffers suddenly got some I.T. access to a department that oversees the U.S. nuclear stockpile. https://newrepublic.com/post/191319/doge-energy-department-nuclear-weapons The Department of Energy on Friday tried to clarify why one of Elon Musk’s DOGE underlings was granted access to the department’s I.T. systems despite opposition from its general counsel and cybersecurity offices. CNN reports that Luke Farritor, 23, whose previous work experience consists of an internship at Musk’s company SpaceX was granted access by Energy Secretary Chris Wright Wednesday. The department’s legal counsel and chief information offices, which govern I.T. and cybersecurity, “said this is a bad idea,” according to a source who spoke with CNN, given that Farritor hadn’t received a standard background check. “He’s not cleared to be in DOE, on our systems. None of those things have been done,” said the unnamed source. While Farrior was only granted access to basic I.T., including email and Microsoft 365, according to CNN’s sources, the report still rang alarm bells as the agency is in charge of the country’s nuclear arsenal, among other aspects of American energy policy and production. In response to the uproar, Wright sought to discourage speculation that Farrior or anyone else associated with DOGE had access to U.S. nuclear secrets. “I’ve heard these rumors. They’re like seeing our nuclear secrets. None of that is true at all,” the energy secretary told CNBC’s Brian Sullivan Friday. But Trump administration officials haven’t been honest with the level of access given to Musk’s DOGE cronies. One of his young software engineers, Marko Elez, had administrator privileges with the country’s most vital payment systems governing trillions of dollars in disbursements, allowing critical code to be rewritten, despite Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent claiming Elez only had “read-only” access. Elez resigned this week over racist social media posts (but already may be rehired). Meanwhile, a U.S. district court on Thursday limited DOGE’s privileges in government agencies. Right now, DOGE’s activities are stretching, if not outright breaking, federal law over government functions and positions that are supposed to be governed by Congress. But the only bulwark against Musk and Trump’s overhauling of the federal government is the courts, as federal law enforcement is in the president’s crosshairs.

The Chilling Consequences of Going Along With Trump https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/08/opinion/trump-power-surrender.html In 1978, my parents went to Poland, the first foreign trip in each of their lives. When they returned to our home in Moscow, my mother couldn’t stop talking about what they’d seen — not a place but a movie, Bob Fosse’s “Cabaret.” One scene in particular stayed with her. Three friends are returning from a weekend trip. Sleep-deprived, hung over and preoccupied with their sexual and romantic entanglements, they pull over at a roadside cafe. There, a teenager wearing a Hitler Youth uniform starts singing. He is both earnest and, in his brown pants tucked into white knee-high socks, puerile. But after a minute, other young people in uniform join in, and soon all but one customer are standing and singing. The protagonists duck out. They have been pushing Nazism out of their minds, but at this moment they realize that they are in the minority, that life as they’ve been living it is over. The song everyone around them is singing is “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.” I was 11 when my mother couldn’t stop talking about “Cabaret,” and I was confused. I thought my parents had gone to an actual cabaret and somehow gained an insight into the nature of the Soviet regime. A few years later, after I’d seen the movie myself, I realized my mother was right: That scene is the single most vivid portrayal of what it feels like to live in a society that is falling in line before a totalitarian leader. I experienced this in real life as an adult, when Vladimir Putin came to power in Russia and my world suddenly felt like a chessboard from which an invisible hand was picking off pieces faster than I had thought was possible. Now, in Donald Trump’s America, I am living through something similar, and it is moving at a faster rate still. For me, it began before the election, when the owners of The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post decided to pull their papers’ endorsements of Kamala Harris for president. It continued with Mark Zuckerberg remaking Meta to reflect what he called the “cultural tipping point” that was the presidential election; with ABC News handing over millions of dollars in response to one of Trump’s frivolous lawsuits and CBS considering doing the same; and most recently, with the great erasure: of records of trans care for minors provided by hospitals and of diversity-and-inclusion policies at many universities and corporations. Now some universities are quietly retooling their programming in hopes of conforming with expectations that have not yet been clearly laid out. I am talking not about deletions of pages from government websites, such as those of the White House and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, presumably mandated by newly installed officials; I am talking about actions that individual people or private institutions took pre-emptively, with some measure of free will. The Yale historian Timothy Snyder has called this “anticipatory obedience.” In his 2017 book “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century,” lesson No. 1 was “Do not obey in advance.” Those who anticipate the demands of a repressive government and submit to these demands before they are made, Snyder wrote, are “teaching power what it can do.” Snyder is right, of course, but his admonition makes obeying in advance sound irrational. It is not. In my experience, most of the time, when people or institutions cede power voluntarily, they are acting not so much out of fear but rather on a set of apparently reasonable arguments. These arguments tend to fall into one or more of five categories. First, the responsibility-for-others argument. In 2004, I assigned and edited an article by a man who had protested Putin’s handling of a hostage crisis at a school in which more than 300 people had died. I was fiddling with the headline when one of the people in charge materialized next to my desk. If you publish that, he warned me, the entire staff of the publishing house might lose their jobs. To the best of my knowledge, the Kremlin had never threatened or even criticized the publishing house for editorial content. (The man in question now says he never tried to stop me.) The great Russian sociologist Yuri Levada coined the term “collective hostage-taking” to describe the phenomenon when individuals cannot be free to act because of a constant, credible threat of collective punishment. Collective hostage-taking is particularly insidious because it pits different sets of values against each other: My boss, for example, was asking me to weigh the value of one article against the livelihoods of hundreds of people. The article wasn’t published. The second argument is the higher-purpose argument, which is a close cousin of collective hostage-taking. In 2012, during the winter when more than 150,000 Russians protested against rigged elections and Putin’s intention to assume the presidency for a third term, a popular actress, Chulpan Khamatova, broke ranks with the liberal intelligentsia and came out in support of Putin. Khamatova had co-founded an organization that helped children with cancer. She faced some criticism but said, “If it meant that another hospital was built, I would do the same thing again.” Her dignity was, after all, a small price to pay for saving children’s lives. I suspect that some American hospital administrators who are discontinuing trans care for young people are using similar logic: To serve their patients, they must protect their federal funding — even if this means that they stop serving another group of patients. Next comes the pragmatic argument. Rational people do not stand on principle for the sake of principle. They pick their battles. Or so this argument goes. Perhaps this was the logic that led the country’s largest private funder of biomedical research to halt a $60 million diversity program, Target to scrap its D.E.I. goals or ABC News to settle Trump’s libel suit. As cynical as this argument sounds, it too is rooted in values and obligations to others — shareholders, business partners, clients. There’s also the if-I-don’t-do-it-someone-else-will argument. A few years ago, a couple of journalists who had fled Russia in fear for their lives took an assignment to make a video that looked to me and many others like pure Russian propaganda. When I asked them why they did it, they replied that someone would have done it anyway — and they needed the money. Refusing the assignment wouldn’t have changed anything, so why not? Perhaps this is the logic of the top-tier law firms that have scrambled to hire Trump loyalists and otherwise position themselves as allies of the new administration. Perhaps this is also the logic of those Senate Democrats who have voted for Trump’s cabinet nominees: The nominees would get confirmed anyway, so these senators might as well shore up support in their contested states. Last, we have the zeitgeist argument. “We are in a new era now,” Zuckerberg observed when he announced that Meta would end its fact-checking program. Companies should have more “masculine energy” and have “a culture that celebrates the aggression” more, he added a few days later, speaking on the Joe Rogan podcast. This kind of argument is the very definition of rational. Societies define sanity as conforming to dominant beliefs and culture. In totalitarian societies, cultural and intellectual rebels are often confined to psychiatric institutions. In the Soviet Union, dissidents were often diagnosed as insane — and by the standards of that society, they were. There are many good reasons to accommodate budding dictators, and only one reason not to: Anticipatory obedience is a key building block of their power. The autocracies of the 20th century relied on mass terror. Those of the 21st often don’t need to; their subjects comply willingly. But once an autocracy gains power, it will come for many of the people who quite rationally tried to safeguard themselves and their businesses. That boss from the publishing house is living in exile now, and so is that actress. Of course, many people, including wealthy entrepreneurs, are still living in Putin’s Russia. But they have discovered that to keep themselves and their businesses safe, they have had to cede ever more money and ever more power to the regime — a regime they helped build. Had they withheld obedience in advance, the autocracy that now controls almost every aspect of their lives and their businesses could not have been constructed. A couple of weeks into Trump’s second term, it can feel as if we are already living in an irreversibly changed country. And yet, my parents, who belonged to the second generation of people born under Soviet totalitarianism — they had never known a different society, and neither had their own parents — experienced a moment of recognition when they saw that scene in “Cabaret,” that moment when a new, dark era has taken hold. My mother died more than 30 years ago, so I can’t ask her where that recognition came from. All I know is that it was, apparently, possible to maintain a sense of facts and values — not only not to obey in advance but not to obey at all. If that was possible in the Soviet Union half a century ago, then it is certainly possible in the United States today.

updated list of right-footed CBs who are remotely available in order of valuation: Giorgio Scalvini Marc Guéhi Ousmane Diomande Edmond Tapsoba Ilya Zabarnyi António Silva Cristhian Mosquera Odilon Kossounou Isak Hien Yann Bisseck Jonathan Tah (free) Mohamed Simakan Tomás Araújo Wilfried Singo Nikola Milenković Zeno Debast Malick Thiaw Joel Ordóñez Josip Sutalo Ryan Flamingo Pietro Comuzzo Martin Vitík Logan Costa Milan Skriniar Koni De Winter Arouna Sangante Aurèle Amenda

China will deffo fill the gaping soft power void the US is creating

it is Wonkette that has always been their style does not make anything they say untrue Trump, Musk & Co are rapidly destroying the American Constitutional system of governance (as predicted), and tearing into the underpinnings of socio-economic, socio-cultural bedrock as well they are going far beyond even Project 2025 it is a sort of 'techno-Gilead kakistocracy' being erected by the RW billionaire class a person has to be wilfully blind (and/or have ill intent) to not see what is going on the hollowing out, massive systemic changes, etc are going to have disastrous impacts on a global basis it is so rapid, so voluminous, and so destructive at multivariate levelsthat it is quite breathtaking

nil 2 Wolves in a blink of an eye

Chelsea’s loss to Brighton in FA Cup showed key player may need to leave, he doesn’t suit Enzo Maresca at all https://www.thechelseachronicle.com/columnist/chelseas-loss-to-brighton-in-fa-cup-showed-key-player-may-need-to-leave-he-doesnt-suit-enzo-maresca-at-all/ Chelsea cannot blame resting all of their key players for why they exited the FA Cup at the fourth round stage last night. The Blues were beaten 2-1 by Brighton at the Amex, with the comical own goal that was handed to them just five minutes in being the sole bright spot. There were no real clear-cut chances for Chelsea, even when they were chasing the game and introduced the likes of Enzo Fernandez and Noni Madueke off the bench. Very few players did well in The Chelsea Chronicle’s player ratings for the defeat, and one of those who did not score highly is Malo Gusto. Malo Gusto may need to leave Chelsea as he doesn’t suit Enzo Maresca’s system The Frenchman has been a key player for the Blues since he became a first team player in the summer of 2023. The injury woes for Reece James have seen him have to step up as a regular. The club captain was absent from the squad last night, however Enzo Maresca cleared up that James was not expected to be missing for the next game. At times this season, Gusto has been asked to invert into midfield to suit the system that the new manager wants to play, and it is clear that this has not been a seamless transition. In fact, it seems realistic at this point to think the 21-year-old could soon be on the chopping block if the club believe Maresca is the man to carry the project forwards. It is incredible to think this opinion can even surface, given just how important he was to the squad last season. Cole Palmer voted Gusto as his Chelsea player of the season for 2023/24, and it looked as if he was in for a very successful career in West London. Gusto’s terrible stats from Chelsea’s loss to Brighton Given that Chelsea operated in a more traditional back four last night, it could be expected that Gusto could be back to his best in a Chelsea shirt. However, the Frenchman really struggled up against Kaoru Mitoma and even Tariq Lamptey, losing the most duels of any player in the match. Even if James is not fit, Chelsea have the option of starting Josh Acheampong in that position after he was promoted to the first team earlier this season and signed a long-term contract with the club. Given he can shift into midfield or a back three far easier, this could spell bad news for Gusto’s future at Stamford Bridge.

lack of VAR is killing Blackburn clear goal falsely chalked off and now a clear pen given wrongly as a dive

VERONA-ATALANTA 0-5 | HIGHLIGHTS | Unstoppable Retegui hits Verona for four | Serie A 2024/25

he has regressed to utter shite

https://www.vipleague.pm/fa-cup/blackburn-rovers-vs-wolverhampton-wanderers-1-live-streaming https://www.vipleague.pm/fa-cup/blackburn-rovers-vs-wolverhampton-wanderers-2-live-streaming https://www.vipleague.pm/fa-cup/blackburn-rovers-vs-wolverhampton-wanderers-3-live-streaming https://redditsoccerstreams.org/event/blackburn-rovers-wolverhampton-wanderers/1504618 https://favs.soccerstreams100.io/event/eng-fa/wolves-vs-blackburn-live-soccer-stats/730047