Shaun Mitchem

Damn - how have only just heard of this?

Just realised that I gave you next to nothing! Have donated again

Donated

… to the job and he made plenty of bad decisions but I always got the impression he was trying to do his best in a terrible situation

Tory ministers are invariably grubby, mates of Tory ministers even more so. I’ve no doubt that the first thought of the Mones of this world was “we could make some serious money here” but, for all his faults, I find it hard to believe that Hancock was thinking in those terms. He wasn’t really up …

Agree with all that but, once we were at the point where we were about to run out of PPE, I find it hard to blame them for doing whatever it took to try and fix the problem and worry about the “details” once they were through the crisis

… said “I can solve the PPE problem for you but it is going to cost you”, I would probably have said “thank god, just do it - we will worry about the details later”. Don’t you think you would have done so too in that situation?

I’ve got no sympathy for the profiteers - agree they should be prosecuted! I just think that, if I was health secretary and we were days away from running out of PPE (and I had a million other things I had to deal with at the same time), and someone I knew (and vaguely trusted) came to me and..

If they could have found better / cheaper stuff elsewhere I’m sure they would have bought that but, for whatever reason, they couldn’t. The reason presumable was that we weren’t in a big trading bloc with lots of purchasing power

we will worry about the consequences later”. I’m not sure I would have done any different in their place.

I do have some sympathy for Hancock etc on this - it must have been a blind panic to find PPE from somewhere/anywhere before our nurses and doctors had nothing but bin bags to protect them. If someone they knew said they could get hold of some I find it hard to blame them for saying “just do it and

and being Israeli doesn’t necessarily mean you support the actions of your government either

Cantlay had been playing so well that I thought that was the one near certain win for the Americans when i saw the pairings. Thank god I never took up betting!

New word - thanks!

Do you think that “circle” of trees with a “spinney” in the middle is anything interesting or just modern planting?

That’s true! I believe you can pay a few quid a month to go ad-free

None of us like it, but why would they give it to us for free? The cost of hosting and streaming all those videos (plus developing and managing the platform) is vast…

Wow! I had no idea that there was a medieval cathedral in Glasgow

Is massive stocks of drones and cruise missiles to launch against Russian oil and gas facilities in reprisal. Symmetric but massive response

Yes we could start a campaign to take out all of Russia’s remaining air defences (that Ukraine hasn’t already taken our) but, if we achieved air superiority over Moscow, how long would it be before Russia responds with nuclear weapons of some sort? What we actually need…

Right now, I don’t think that Europe on its own has much ability to target Russian production facilities. We have a few storm shadows etc but they don’t have the range or numbers to cause much damage. We need to rectify this asap

Would you care to speculate as to what the reason for that might be? Or are they in general circulation so reasonably common?

I bet no one said it to his face though…

Monbiot is right to point out how “the centre” has been redefined. This isn’t just political drift, it’s what happens when discourse is shaped by systems that reward outrage and performance over verification.

Thank you

You don’t happen to know how long she is there for do you Simon?

Donated

I was discussing this with my family yesterday - we think AI is “good” where it makes suggestions that humans then follow up to see if they actually work. Protein folding, new antibiotics, experiment design etc

I didn’t come out from Liverpool Street at ground level for maybe a decade until a couple of years ago and it stopped me in my tracks - a wall of mirrors rising up above the old stuff that definitely hadn’t been there last time I looked!

Im always too much in a rush to stop and take that shot coming out of Liverpool Street. Glad you have snapped it for me!