Contemptible. Stone has done nothing wrong. She carried out an inquiry into an MP without fear or favour and rightly found her had broken the rules. And yet the government protects the corrupt MP and calls on the investigator to resign.
Why go after Stone? Well, funny story there. You may remember a little trip to Mustique which Boris Johnson took in 2019. Kathryn Stone concluded he broke the rules because he hadn't "fulfilled conscientiously" requirements to register donations.
Incidentally, it's worth observing how this story puts the lie to the Tory claim that the standards inquiry system has no appeal. The commissioner ruled the PM broke the rules. The Committee on Standards overruled her.
There are many future standards investigations for No.10 to worry about, for instance on Johnson's flat refurbishment or contracts handed out during the pandemic. It's very much in their interest to knee-cap the standards process and Stone in particular.
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Quite extraordinary to hear Mogg say that he "fears last night debate conflated the individual case with the general concern". It was a motion on Paterson. Mogg largely ignored it and focused all his attention on the amendment for stitching-up the standards system.
He now says they'll go and try to think up a cross-party way to do this - presumably creating a committee which does not have an in-built Tory majority. Good. But Paterson remains, saved from his punishment by the amendment Mogg himself backed and the govt whipped in support of.
Ah no - turns out they really are U-turning hard as fuck.
What we're seeing today is an attempt to kill the system of standards in public life. Nothing less.
PMQs starts on the Paterson issue. Johnson says "paid lobbying... is wrong". But then: "That is not the issue in this case. it is not."
This is already a completely unacceptable thing for the prime minister to have said. That is precisely what the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards found in her report and the cross-party Committee on Standards agreed with.
You bored us to tears with Brexit, you catastrophically fucked it up, you won an election promising to stop taking about it, and now here you are: still fucking talking about it. Except this time with the added comedy value of berating your own deal.
It's not ever going to stop is it. We'll all be 90 years old and these bleating mediocrities will still be banging on about Europe.
Was really quite bowled over by Dune. It's stunning. One of the most visually arresting sci-fis I've ever seen. I loved getting lost in the pomp and treachery of it.
There is a problem though. It's not really a complete film. It feels like a (very long, very expensive) episode. So you leave feeling slightly frustrated. An odd mixture of over and under-whelmed.
You can't hold it against him, he's grappled with some really complex stuff and made a coherent story out of it. Not just coherant, but mind blowing. But if I'm honest, a part of me left thinking: this should probably be a TV series.
This, incidentally, is partly why I stopped arguing with people on Twitter. You never get anywhere. It becomes this kind of grotesque nerd gladiatorial match in which pithy condemnation replaces logic or evidence.
You can 'win', quite easily, by making fire-and-brimstone condemnations and appealing to your tribe. But both of you always come out of it looking worse than you did before. No-one ever really wins.
DC comics nerds - and I really mean hard core nerds here, ignore this if you aren't - I could use some help. I'm putting together a master list of DC history, including only good runs/stand-alones and major continuity events. If there anything really good that I'm missing?
Last bit here. Going to sort a proper reading order later and break the runs down so they're vaguely in continuity. But this is all head-cannon. I'm not too worried that I'm taking bits from different continuities and smashing them together.
I wish I had more for the epilogue though. There must be more alternative endings around that I haven't heard of. And no, not Dark Knight Returns. It's too bleak to finish with.