A wilding

Nothing on bans, but I used "nuke it from orbit, its only only way to be sure" in a technical IT meeting a couple of years back and got blank looks. It turned out, to my surprise, that none of the other half a dozen people present knew the quote (though I was the oldest there by about 10 years). So it might not be as widely known these days as you might think.

Sure things seem to have been going downhill slowly since not long after privatization. (Which laughably was justified by how it would result in much needed investment in the system.) And runoff from the increasing amounts of pesticides used by farmers has also become an issue.

I agree that Zorral was baiting, but it was so clear that a deflection like that was coming anyway. Pot and kettle. The boot is so often on the other foot, and when it is, I at least do try to address the argument, even when I allow myself a sideswipe at the deflection as well. We may have acquaintance in common then. While I agree that the UK has historically been very good at water quality, and has long had some of the cleanest rivers in Europe, my understanding is that the recent trend has been for steadily more and worse leaks of sewerage and a general decline. And yes a general feeling that the companies consider it cheaper just to pay the fines when they are caught. Thames Water is definitely not the worst offender though.

Can Elon Musk save the world?

But see what is really going on here. A perfectly accurate and somewhat worrying story that the government has relaxed the rules on the release of sewerage into the environment. Backed up by a link to the government's own website where this relaxation is described in detail. And the response is to attack the newspaper it is reported in as being left wing (true enough), but then go to to implicitly imply that this means that the story can be ignored. No attempt at all to address the story on its merits. I call that blind partisanship at best. Incidentally, I see that the government website gives the justifications for the relaxation as:

And this new tax is not even going to achieve its headline aim of relieving anxiety by capping social care, even after they have stopped using the money to prop up the NHS until the next election. This is a typical complex plan requiring a great deal of bureaucracy and probably riddled with gotchas that won't be come apparent for a while. However it has already been spotted that the cap applies only to "actual care" and does not include "accommodation costs". Given that a central part of the issue is that many care homes are owned by offshore tax avoiding companies whose main interest is extracting as much short term profit as possible, is is very easy to see where that will go.

A (cynical) theory. This is all the brainchild of Sunak, who is all about maintaining the privileges of the wealthy. The plan is Step one: introduce this regressive tax hike on NI, pushing it through on the grounds that it is for the NHS and for care so no one can object to it. Step two: remove the triple lock of the state pension. Another regressive change that disproportionally impacts poorer pensioners. There is a genuine case for doing so now given the financial swings during the pandemic, and there will be the additional argument that the NI increase did not impact pensioners, so it is only fair that they do some of the lifting. Step three: use the money to prop up the NHS sufficiently to ensure that it is not an election losing issue in three years time. Step four: after winning the next election, and with Covid hopefully in the rearview mirror, return to slowly starving the NHS of money to ensure its eventual failure. Use the money to subsidise end of life care but only in ways that benefit the better off and making sure that cronies get a good chunk of it. Also start gradually reducing the state pension in real terms.

Cricket is actually a quite simple game, famously explained as follows:

Should have called it "Death, taxes and English batting collapses". But England were always going to lose it from the position at the end of the fourth day.

I expect that just amused the trolls who sold them on the idea of using it

Don't go to them myself, so I will bow to your superior knowledge.

Have to agree that, from one angle, his staff shortages are Brexit working as designed. Without foreign staff available, Wetherspoon will be forced to offer better pay and conditions to recruit UK employees. Of course that would require him to increase prices, and he would thus lose Wetherspoons USP, and probably be in big trouble.

To be fair, the Mail on Sunday is a slightly different beast to the Daily Mail, and does often have a different angle. But even so: Once more I can only laugh.

It is a thing and does happen. Not so often though, as the hackers have to be able to convincingly impersonate their target when contacting the phone company. Phone companies should (and generally do) perform security checks, especially when the new SIM card is to be sent to a different address. If I were the people concerned here, then I would be looking at suing my phone company.

Agreed, the Afghan minister is a pompous idiot. But sometimes, to get things done, you have to flatter such idiots (while never losing track of what they are). I imagine that at the Foreign Office, of all places, they would be well aware of this. And in this case, it appears that "get things done" meant "saving lives". If the facts were as stated there is no excuse for Raab - except the faint one that he only acted exactly as his boss would have done,