There is another story to be told about the pandemic, which is about the triumph of science and common endeavour. We should probably talk about it more, and perhaps we will when the immediate horror is further behind us.
I was listening to a podcast about the mRNA vaccine the other day and that shit is pure sci-fi. Extraordinary to live in a world where it exists.
To those asking, this was in a recent episode of Stuff You Should Know.
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I wonder if this week has done anything to convince the doom-mongers on my side of things about how wrong and unhelpful it is to catastrophise everything.
I see countless tweets about how we never had a functioning standards system. But if that's true, why do you think the government is so intent on destroying it?
And what do you think it does to the people who diligently and independently work to maintain scrutiny and probity for people to act like they don't exist or don't matter?
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.
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.
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.