leicsmac

Technical issues leading directly to cost issues. Salt water corrodes practically every metallic system it's part of over time.

EG getting into the groove now.

Good controlled aggression before lunch, England in the driving seat for the moment.

Shame the bowlers couldn't have made more inroads towards the end there, but you take this if it's offered at the start of the day and you certainly take it when you've just been dismissed for 140.

Do you know where your off stump is, Daryl? Well, it's about twenty feet over there now, mate.

Superb stuff.

Looks like both teams looking to beat the rain to a result

Believe me, I wish that I was. But what's going on at the moment in terms of opinion and action speaks for itself.

Brook approaching Berserker mode now. Either brainless wicket in the next half hour or he's making a monster score, then.

The NZers are bowling very, very well here.

Time for Brook to counterattack. Better than him scratching around and getting out anyway.

Got to be the Root and Brook show again, then.

Marjane Satrapi, Iranian and French novelist responsible for Persepolis, aged 56. That's a shame, her message is so important at this time.

IMO the apathy (or even antipathy) towards this WC has little to do with the football itself and everything to do with the main hosts and the attitude of the people running it - football, political and corporate.

He did, that was just a damn good ball to get him.

Seems like it could be a good toss to lose.

NZ are no slouches, however. Will be a proper contest.

Nice loosener for EG to get stuck into first up there.

NZ win toss and bowl. Certain amount of pressure on the new batters from the outset, then.

Yes, exactly. And, with that being said, what happens now, or what should happen now? The Chinese have their own solution, but that's hardly optimal or really ideal.

I can see the logic in a way - sunlight being the best disinfectant for such viewpoints in the "marketplace of ideas" had worked pretty well up until the last couple of decades. Unfortunately, now that advances in tech have managed to make such ideas spread and with them has come a dedicated attempt to subvert the very idea of truth in order to make them stay there. The world has changed, and is changing. Such paradigms as the one above are well meaning in principle, but may well no longer hold now or in the immediate future.

"It suggests that Mr Farage, far from condemning racialised treatment, was himself invoking race as a basis for public anger." Reform are right on that to be honest. Media entities shouldn't be merely suggesting it, they should be flat out saying that exactly that invoking public anger is happening as a matter of record. Because it is, and has been for some time, wrapped up in a thin veneer of flowery language and obfuscation. Perhaps then Farage et al might be less able to hide behind weasel words and faux injured innocence.

I wish I could reassure you of this, but given current projections I fear it is not an anomaly.

It's humans listening to their hindbrain, sadly. Our tech and society is moving far faster than our brains are changing to be able to be a responsible steward of both. So yes, that's bleak, because the sentiment and ideology that leads to the tribal anger and violence described here ends nowhere good.

I guess that all depends on where a person sees the balance lie. Unfortunately, there isn't much agreement on that, either. Pratchett had it right. "For the enemy is not Troll, nor is it Dwarf, but it is the baleful, the malign, the cowardly, the vessels of hatred, those who do a bad thing and call it good..." - Thud That entire book was a metaphor treatise on race relations that more people really should read.