We need alternative routes instead of the Hormuz Strait. We should have oil and gas pipelines going west through the Arabian Peninsula right up to our ports in Israel.
Danny (Dennis) Citrinowicz ,داني سيترينوفيتش @citrinowicz
The administration now faces a stark choice—one it can no longer avoid.
A. Use force to reopen the strait, knowing full well that any strike on Iran’s energy infrastructure will trigger retaliation. This is not a limited operation. It’s escalation—potentially rapid, and potentially uncontrollable. There are no half-measures here: if Washington wants the strait open, it will have to fight for it.
B. Accept reality, cut losses, and pursue a deal with Tehran over the terms of access. Politically unpalatable? Absolutely. But when global oil flows and the stability of Asian markets are at stake, strategic necessity tends to override rhetoric.
What last night made unmistakably clear is this: there is no clean solution. No surgical fix. No easy win.
The longer the administration pretends otherwise, the higher the cost will be
That's not *quite* true: can the US degrade Iranian capability to a level where it can no longer threaten maritime traffic in the Straits.
And we don't know the answer to that question yet.
My assumption, though, is that is the US goal. And they will attempt to prove it is safe in the coming weeks, by having US naval vessels transit the Straits, and emerge without -hopefully- having been fired upon.
The inability to defeat the Houthis shows how hard that will be.
That's a fair point; albeit the Houthis didn't get the full force of the US and Israeli airforces (and associated Naval aviators).
Also the Houthis are a tolerable threat. A nuisance, not shutting down the waters completely.
If Iran can be diminished to the level of threat of the Houthis, then I think insurance for the Strait would be a lot more viable.
Definitely goalhanging. As I'm in an online interview watching a candidate drown...
Hopefully not a lifeguard job.
Sadly its applicants to study pharmacy (but from Access to HE courses). Usually very poor, the current one is one of the worst I've seen. He's trying a calculation right now that I suspect every PB member would achieved in 20 s or less. And failing.
I'm surprised that its usually very poor from Access courses.
I don't know what they're generally like, but my wife started Uni this year after doing an Access course (self-study, online, as well as working) last year. She was advised before she started that, that if you can do well on the Access course you should be good for Uni and that the Access course is quite challenging. She said in hindsight she agrees with that, in part as was then working so juggling the course with her job, whereas now she's full-time doing her degree/placements, but that the Access course was good prep.
Don't know if all Access courses are similar or some are better than others.
There is significant variation. I have interviewed into the three figures products of access courses. There are some good students there - typically ones who choose the wrong route early but then want to do pharmacy and don't have the A levels in the right subjects. I have accepted one such this morning.
Then there are the vast majority that were not good enough to get the right grades initially but can get the lower grades for the Access to HE courses and hope that will get them on the main course. At a Top 10 Uni like Bath (are you listening @HYUFD - we not a Russel Group but we are better than most of them) they don't cut it.
At some point I'll share a typical calculation that floors them. PBers will have no dificulty.
Is is
Simplify (a-x)(b-x)(c-x)...(z-x)
?
=0
Only when x is equal to one of the constants (I presume they are constants) a to z.
At a guess, the one between w and y?
Yes, yes. Now I'm embarrassed. I'm just so used to a, b, c, etc being constants and x, y , z, etc being variables.
x can be as variable as it likes, and (x-x) will always be zero
I've always wondered how double posts appeared. You've just managed 5 of them!
Sorry. I got error ‘failed’ messages from the site on my posts so clicked on ‘post’ again. I had no way of knowing it would eventually post my comment over and over.
I’m also quite stressed out as yesterday I had to wrestle a close friend to the ground to stop her throwing herself out of a third floor window, and today I was phoned by the Police to say that this morning she’d done precisely that. This week is one I won’t ever forget.
We need alternative routes instead of the Hormuz Strait. We should have oil and gas pipelines going west through the Arabian Peninsula right up to our ports in Israel.
That is definitely possible.
Definitely possible but not in a quick timescale.
Getting regime change would be better.
Regime change in Israel would be desirable, considering the mess they have caused in the whole area.
The inquiry predates Kent’s departure on Tuesday from his post as director of the national counterterrorism center, where he had overseen the analysis of terrorist threats, according to Semafor and CBS News. The FBI declined to comment on the existence of any such investigation...
Kent insisted that there was no evidence that Iran was close to gaining a nuclear weapon or posed an imminent threat to the US. “There was no intelligence that said, ‘Hey, on whatever day it was, March 1st, the Iranians are going to launch this big sneak attack – they’re going to do some kind of a 9/11, Pearl Harbor, et cetera, they are going to attack one of our bases.’ There was none of that intelligence.”
Instead, Kent alleged, Trump’s hand was effectively forced by Israel. “The Israelis drove the decision to take this action,” he said, claiming that prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials lobbied the president with claims that did not align with established intelligence channels.
Kent added: “I know how this works. I know the Israeli officials - some in intelligence, some in government – will come to US government officials and they will say all kinds of things that we know from our intelligence just simply isn’t true. They’ll say, hey, I’m giving you a preview, it’s not in intelligence channels yet, but here’s what’s gonna happen, and that doesn’t usually come to fruition.”....
Kent’s work at the National Counterterrorism Center was overseen by director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who on Wednesday said it was up to Trump — and Trump alone — to decide whether Iran posed a threat.
Gabbard, a veteran and former congresswoman from Hawaii, previously criticized talk of military strikes in Iran. She has not said what she thinks of the current strikes and a spokesperson has declined to respond to questions.
The White House pushed back forcefully when Kent resigned. Trump dismissed him as “weak on security”, insisting that Iran represented “a tremendous threat” and suggesting that those who disagreed lacked judgement. “If somebody didn’t think it was a threat, we don’t want those people,” he said.
The US left have been calling Kent out as anti-Semite for a long time. If you look at his resignation letter he is not actually blaming Trump for the war, but blaming a shadowy conspiracy of Jews {that may not even exist in reality} as reason US went to war on Iran. He might not be the white knight of sanity he’s being used as.
He's certainly not a white knight; another MAGA loon. (He's also repeating a conspiracy theory that Charlie Kirk was murdered at the behest of Israel.)
But the administration is arguing that they were crazy to appoint this guy, when it was quite clear what kind of person he was when Trump chose him.
Along with making the argument that any intelligence assessment which doesn't agree with Trump's vibes can be dismissed.
It's just a tower of nonsense.
But a crazy, MAGA Loon Government would be crazy not to appoint Crazy, MAGA Loons into it?
It’s a Catch-22.
On interesting point I note is how quickly after he said that he thought the war was triggered by Netanyahu the US commentary started talking about 'antisemitic overtones' and similar.
Definitely goalhanging. As I'm in an online interview watching a candidate drown...
Hopefully not a lifeguard job.
Sadly its applicants to study pharmacy (but from Access to HE courses). Usually very poor, the current one is one of the worst I've seen. He's trying a calculation right now that I suspect every PB member would achieved in 20 s or less. And failing.
I'm surprised that its usually very poor from Access courses.
I don't know what they're generally like, but my wife started Uni this year after doing an Access course (self-study, online, as well as working) last year. She was advised before she started that, that if you can do well on the Access course you should be good for Uni and that the Access course is quite challenging. She said in hindsight she agrees with that, in part as was then working so juggling the course with her job, whereas now she's full-time doing her degree/placements, but that the Access course was good prep.
Don't know if all Access courses are similar or some are better than others.
There is significant variation. I have interviewed into the three figures products of access courses. There are some good students there - typically ones who choose the wrong route early but then want to do pharmacy and don't have the A levels in the right subjects. I have accepted one such this morning.
Then there are the vast majority that were not good enough to get the right grades initially but can get the lower grades for the Access to HE courses and hope that will get them on the main course. At a Top 10 Uni like Bath (are you listening @HYUFD - we not a Russel Group but we are better than most of them) they don't cut it.
At some point I'll share a typical calculation that floors them. PBers will have no dificulty.
Is is
Simplify (a-x)(b-x)(c-x)...(z-x)
?
=0
Only when x is equal to one of the constants (I presume they are constants) a to z.
At a guess, the one between w and y?
Yes, yes. Now I'm embarrassed. I'm just so used to a, b, c, etc being constants and x, y , z, etc being variables.
x can be as variable as it likes, and (x-x) will always be zero
I've always wondered how double posts appeared. You've just managed 5 of them!
Sorry. I got error ‘failed’ messages from the site on my posts so clicked on ‘post’ again. I had no way of knowing it would eventually post my comment over and over.
I’m also quite stressed out as yesterday I had to wrestle a close friend to the ground to stop her throwing herself out of a third floor window, and today I was phoned by the Police to say that this morning she’d done precisely that. This week is one I won’t ever forget.
No apology needed, it's interesting to know how it happens.
And my condolences. A harrowing couple of days.
Her mistake, if that's the right word, was not looking down before she jumped, and hence not noticing that despite being very high up and with paving stones below, the flat beneath hers had a balcony with a washing line strung along it and the door open. It appears that after jumping from the window, she tangled with the washing line, impacted the top of the door, then the railings of the balcony, before falling one more storey to the hard ground below. She was determined to end her life, being terminally ill, but is now in a London hospital with several broken ribs and a punctured lung. It's a truly tragic story, from start to finish. It would play into the assisted dying debate, save for the fact that the mental breakdown she has had, following her terminal diagnosis, would render her considered incapable of making a considered decision about how she wishes her life to end.
Now, she faces a few weeks heavily sedated - as a suicide risk in a regular hospital - and once the injuries from her fall have healed, being returned under section 3 of the MHA to a secure mental health ward where her life will likely end.
Sounds awful for both her and you. Best wishes.
It is a fairly extreme reaction to a terminal diagnosis, assuming that she has no pre existing psychiatric history. It may well be that her mental state bounces back, and certainly sounds like she needs to talk to the pallative care team.
We need alternative routes instead of the Hormuz Strait. We should have oil and gas pipelines going west through the Arabian Peninsula right up to our ports in Israel.
That is definitely possible.
Definitely possible but not in a quick timescale.
Getting regime change would be better.
That could he an interesting adjunct to the Suez Canal alternative that there has been speculation about for decades.
We need alternative routes instead of the Hormuz Strait. We should have oil and gas pipelines going west through the Arabian Peninsula right up to our ports in Israel.
That is definitely possible.
Definitely possible but not in a quick timescale.
Getting regime change would be better.
Regime change in Israel would be desirable, considering the mess they have caused in the whole area.
I am no Bibi fan, but where is the evidence that any successor regime would be any better?
The inquiry predates Kent’s departure on Tuesday from his post as director of the national counterterrorism center, where he had overseen the analysis of terrorist threats, according to Semafor and CBS News. The FBI declined to comment on the existence of any such investigation...
Kent insisted that there was no evidence that Iran was close to gaining a nuclear weapon or posed an imminent threat to the US. “There was no intelligence that said, ‘Hey, on whatever day it was, March 1st, the Iranians are going to launch this big sneak attack – they’re going to do some kind of a 9/11, Pearl Harbor, et cetera, they are going to attack one of our bases.’ There was none of that intelligence.”
Instead, Kent alleged, Trump’s hand was effectively forced by Israel. “The Israelis drove the decision to take this action,” he said, claiming that prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials lobbied the president with claims that did not align with established intelligence channels.
Kent added: “I know how this works. I know the Israeli officials - some in intelligence, some in government – will come to US government officials and they will say all kinds of things that we know from our intelligence just simply isn’t true. They’ll say, hey, I’m giving you a preview, it’s not in intelligence channels yet, but here’s what’s gonna happen, and that doesn’t usually come to fruition.”....
Kent’s work at the National Counterterrorism Center was overseen by director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who on Wednesday said it was up to Trump — and Trump alone — to decide whether Iran posed a threat.
Gabbard, a veteran and former congresswoman from Hawaii, previously criticized talk of military strikes in Iran. She has not said what she thinks of the current strikes and a spokesperson has declined to respond to questions.
The White House pushed back forcefully when Kent resigned. Trump dismissed him as “weak on security”, insisting that Iran represented “a tremendous threat” and suggesting that those who disagreed lacked judgement. “If somebody didn’t think it was a threat, we don’t want those people,” he said.
The US left have been calling Kent out as anti-Semite for a long time. If you look at his resignation letter he is not actually blaming Trump for the war, but blaming a shadowy conspiracy of Jews {that may not even exist in reality} as reason US went to war on Iran. He might not be the white knight of sanity he’s being used as.
He's certainly not a white knight; another MAGA loon. (He's also repeating a conspiracy theory that Charlie Kirk was murdered at the behest of Israel.)
But the administration is arguing that they were crazy to appoint this guy, when it was quite clear what kind of person he was when Trump chose him.
Along with making the argument that any intelligence assessment which doesn't agree with Trump's vibes can be dismissed.
It's just a tower of nonsense.
But a crazy, MAGA Loon Government would be crazy not to appoint Crazy, MAGA Loons into it?
It’s a Catch-22.
On interesting point I note is how quickly after he said that he thought the war was triggered by Netanyahu the US commentary started talking about 'antisemitic overtones' and similar.
To be fair, he is an antisemitic and racist loon and a risk to security.
That begs two rather obvious questions:
1) Why the fuck did Trump appoint him?
2) How the fuck has Trump gone so off the wall that even an antisemitic and racist loon who is also a threat to security thinks he's a danger?
We need alternative routes instead of the Hormuz Strait. We should have oil and gas pipelines going west through the Arabian Peninsula right up to our ports in Israel.
That is definitely possible.
Definitely possible but not in a quick timescale.
Getting regime change would be better.
Regime change in Israel would be desirable, considering the mess they have caused in the whole area.
I am no Bibi fan, but where is the evidence that any successor regime would be any better?
Indeed, his opponents are somewhat worse remarkable though that may seem.
"If only it was the picture who was to grow old, and I remain young. There's nothing in the world I wouldn't give for that. Yes, I would give even my soul for it."
Are you suggetsing he should take a walk on the Wilde side?
You’re making an Earnest attempt at punning tonight. Well done.
Just trying to lighten the mood. I'm feeling a bit Grey with everything going on.
Edit - although I think IanB2 has every right to feel greyer on reading the comment below.
Definitely goalhanging. As I'm in an online interview watching a candidate drown...
Hopefully not a lifeguard job.
Sadly its applicants to study pharmacy (but from Access to HE courses). Usually very poor, the current one is one of the worst I've seen. He's trying a calculation right now that I suspect every PB member would achieved in 20 s or less. And failing.
I'm surprised that its usually very poor from Access courses.
I don't know what they're generally like, but my wife started Uni this year after doing an Access course (self-study, online, as well as working) last year. She was advised before she started that, that if you can do well on the Access course you should be good for Uni and that the Access course is quite challenging. She said in hindsight she agrees with that, in part as was then working so juggling the course with her job, whereas now she's full-time doing her degree/placements, but that the Access course was good prep.
Don't know if all Access courses are similar or some are better than others.
There is significant variation. I have interviewed into the three figures products of access courses. There are some good students there - typically ones who choose the wrong route early but then want to do pharmacy and don't have the A levels in the right subjects. I have accepted one such this morning.
Then there are the vast majority that were not good enough to get the right grades initially but can get the lower grades for the Access to HE courses and hope that will get them on the main course. At a Top 10 Uni like Bath (are you listening @HYUFD - we not a Russel Group but we are better than most of them) they don't cut it.
At some point I'll share a typical calculation that floors them. PBers will have no dificulty.
Is is
Simplify (a-x)(b-x)(c-x)...(z-x)
?
=0
Only when x is equal to one of the constants (I presume they are constants) a to z.
At a guess, the one between w and y?
Yes, yes. Now I'm embarrassed. I'm just so used to a, b, c, etc being constants and x, y , z, etc being variables.
x can be as variable as it likes, and (x-x) will always be zero
I've always wondered how double posts appeared. You've just managed 5 of them!
Sorry. I got error ‘failed’ messages from the site on my posts so clicked on ‘post’ again. I had no way of knowing it would eventually post my comment over and over.
I’m also quite stressed out as yesterday I had to wrestle a close friend to the ground to stop her throwing herself out of a third floor window, and today I was phoned by the Police to say that this morning she’d done precisely that. This week is one I won’t ever forget.
No apology needed, it's interesting to know how it happens.
And my condolences. A harrowing couple of days.
Her mistake, if that's the right word, was not looking down before she jumped, and hence not noticing that despite being very high up and with paving stones below, the flat beneath hers had a balcony with a washing line strung along it and the door open. It appears that after jumping from the window, she tangled with the washing line, impacted the top of the door, then the railings of the balcony, before falling one more storey to the hard ground below. She was determined to end her life, being terminally ill, but is now in a London hospital with several broken ribs and a punctured lung. It's a truly tragic story, from start to finish. It would play into the assisted dying debate, save for the fact that the mental breakdown she has had, following her terminal diagnosis, would render her considered incapable of making a considered decision about how she wishes her life to end.
Now, she faces a few weeks heavily sedated - as a suicide risk in a regular hospital - and once the injuries from her fall have healed, being returned under section 3 of the MHA to a secure mental health ward where her life will likely end.
Such a sad story
Our son and his colleagues recently rescued a young girl who jumped into the sea determined to drown only to repeatedly say sorry when rescued and expressed gratitude for saving her
Yesterday I had to physically force her to the ground, twice, to stop her from jumping out of that window, then stop her tricking me into re-entering her flat locking me outside, then force her into my car, then drive several miles through North London one-handed with the other hand stopping her from jumping out the passenger door, which was open for much of the trip. I returned her to her father, who had been keeping her locked inside his house that morning - and who had warned me about the suicide risk before I, naively, took her out for what I hoped would be a restorative walk and talk in the park - but, inexplicably, he seems to have let her out alone to travel back to her flat yesterday evening.
Until Monday she was sectioned inside a secure mental health ward, but they discharged her on Monday after what seems to have been the most flimsy of assessments (they told me, "we asked her whether she still thought people were following her, and when she said no, we let her go"). I suspect the MH crisis team know they've messed up as I've had a whole stack of worried calls from them today. Yesterday, after making sure she was safe back inside her parents' house - and despite having promised her I wouldn't - I phoned the MH crisis team and told them the whole story. They said they'd give her a call - which at the time seemed an inadequate response. As far as I can establish, they didn't manage to get hold of either her or her father yesterday, and this morning she went ahead and tried to plunge to her intended death.
We need alternative routes instead of the Hormuz Strait. We should have oil and gas pipelines going west through the Arabian Peninsula right up to our ports in Israel.
That is definitely possible.
Definitely possible but not in a quick timescale.
Getting regime change would be better.
Hopefully when the Israeli election takes place we’ll get rid of the Bibi regime 👍
We need alternative routes instead of the Hormuz Strait. We should have oil and gas pipelines going west through the Arabian Peninsula right up to our ports in Israel.
That is definitely possible.
Definitely possible but not in a quick timescale.
Getting regime change would be better.
Regime change in Israel would be desirable, considering the mess they have caused in the whole area.
I am no Bibi fan, but where is the evidence that any successor regime would be any better?
Indeed, his opponents are somewhat worse remarkable though that may seem.
I suspect the impetus to the bombing of Iran during a peace conference and the attacks in Lebanon are solely due to Netanyahu wanting to stay out of prison. Im not sure any other leader would be going this far.
We need alternative routes instead of the Hormuz Strait. We should have oil and gas pipelines going west through the Arabian Peninsula right up to our ports in Israel.
That is definitely possible.
Definitely possible but not in a quick timescale.
Getting regime change would be better.
Regime change in Israel would be desirable, considering the mess they have caused in the whole area.
I am no Bibi fan, but where is the evidence that any successor regime would be any better?
It probably wouldn't be better, but nobody seriously thinks the problems in the Middle East are just down to Iran. By far the most destabilising factor is the Israeli attitude to Palestinians and their right to have a viable nation. You are never going to get lasting peace without solving that. So yes a new government in Israeli that wants to make real peace with the Palestinians is highly desirable and necessary for lasting peace.
We need alternative routes instead of the Hormuz Strait. We should have oil and gas pipelines going west through the Arabian Peninsula right up to our ports in Israel.
That is definitely possible.
Definitely possible but not in a quick timescale.
Getting regime change would be better.
Hopefully when the Israeli election takes place we’ll get rid of the Bibi regime 👍
Indeed. I would have more faith in Lapid leading this operation than Bibi. 👍
We need alternative routes instead of the Hormuz Strait. We should have oil and gas pipelines going west through the Arabian Peninsula right up to our ports in Israel.
That is definitely possible.
Definitely possible but not in a quick timescale.
Getting regime change would be better.
Hopefully when the Israeli election takes place we’ll get rid of the Bibi regime 👍
Definitely goalhanging. As I'm in an online interview watching a candidate drown...
Hopefully not a lifeguard job.
Sadly its applicants to study pharmacy (but from Access to HE courses). Usually very poor, the current one is one of the worst I've seen. He's trying a calculation right now that I suspect every PB member would achieved in 20 s or less. And failing.
I'm surprised that its usually very poor from Access courses.
I don't know what they're generally like, but my wife started Uni this year after doing an Access course (self-study, online, as well as working) last year. She was advised before she started that, that if you can do well on the Access course you should be good for Uni and that the Access course is quite challenging. She said in hindsight she agrees with that, in part as was then working so juggling the course with her job, whereas now she's full-time doing her degree/placements, but that the Access course was good prep.
Don't know if all Access courses are similar or some are better than others.
There is significant variation. I have interviewed into the three figures products of access courses. There are some good students there - typically ones who choose the wrong route early but then want to do pharmacy and don't have the A levels in the right subjects. I have accepted one such this morning.
Then there are the vast majority that were not good enough to get the right grades initially but can get the lower grades for the Access to HE courses and hope that will get them on the main course. At a Top 10 Uni like Bath (are you listening @HYUFD - we not a Russel Group but we are better than most of them) they don't cut it.
At some point I'll share a typical calculation that floors them. PBers will have no dificulty.
Is is
Simplify (a-x)(b-x)(c-x)...(z-x)
?
=0
Only when x is equal to one of the constants (I presume they are constants) a to z.
At a guess, the one between w and y?
Yes, yes. Now I'm embarrassed. I'm just so used to a, b, c, etc being constants and x, y , z, etc being variables.
x can be as variable as it likes, and (x-x) will always be zero
I've always wondered how double posts appeared. You've just managed 5 of them!
Sorry. I got error ‘failed’ messages from the site on my posts so clicked on ‘post’ again. I had no way of knowing it would eventually post my comment over and over.
I’m also quite stressed out as yesterday I had to wrestle a close friend to the ground to stop her throwing herself out of a third floor window, and today I was phoned by the Police to say that this morning she’d done precisely that. This week is one I won’t ever forget.
No apology needed, it's interesting to know how it happens.
And my condolences. A harrowing couple of days.
Her mistake, if that's the right word, was not looking down before she jumped, and hence not noticing that despite being very high up and with paving stones below, the flat beneath hers had a balcony with a washing line strung along it and the door open. It appears that after jumping from the window, she tangled with the washing line, impacted the top of the door, then the railings of the balcony, before falling one more storey to the hard ground below. She was determined to end her life, being terminally ill, but is now in a London hospital with several broken ribs and a punctured lung. It's a truly tragic story, from start to finish. It would play into the assisted dying debate, save for the fact that the mental breakdown she has had, following her terminal diagnosis, would render her considered incapable of making a considered decision about how she wishes her life to end.
Now, she faces a few weeks heavily sedated - as a suicide risk in a regular hospital - and once the injuries from her fall have healed, being returned under section 3 of the MHA to a secure mental health ward where her life will likely end.
Such a sad story
Our son and his colleagues recently rescued a young girl who jumped into the sea determined to drown only to repeatedly say sorry when rescued and expressed gratitude for saving her
Yesterday I had to physically force her to the ground, twice, to stop her from jumping out of that window, then stop her tricking me into re-entering her flat locking me outside, then force her into my car, then drive several miles through North London one-handed with the other hand stopping her from jumping out the passenger door, which was open for much of the trip. I returned her to her father, who had been keeping her locked inside his house that morning - and who had warned me about the suicide risk before I, naively, took her out for what I hoped would be a restorative walk and talk in the park - but, inexplicably, he seems to have let her out alone to travel back to her flat yesterday evening.
Until Monday she was sectioned inside a secure mental health ward, but they discharged her on Monday after what seems to have been the most flimsy of assessments (they told me, "we asked her whether she still thought people were following her, and when she said no, we let her go"). I suspect the MH crisis team know they've messed up as I've had a whole stack of worried calls from them today. Yesterday, after making sure she was safe back inside her parents' house - and despite having promised her I wouldn't - I phoned the MH crisis team and told them the whole story. They said they'd give her a call - which at the time seemed an inadequate response. As far as I can establish, they didn't manage to get hold of either her or her father yesterday, and this morning she went ahead and tried to plunge to her intended death.
We need alternative routes instead of the Hormuz Strait. We should have oil and gas pipelines going west through the Arabian Peninsula right up to our ports in Israel.
That is definitely possible.
Definitely possible but not in a quick timescale.
Getting regime change would be better.
Hopefully when the Israeli election takes place we’ll get rid of the Bibi regime 👍
He's the biggest danger currently to word peace
I'm surprised you don't think the biggest danger is Kemi Badenoch.
Definitely goalhanging. As I'm in an online interview watching a candidate drown...
Hopefully not a lifeguard job.
Sadly its applicants to study pharmacy (but from Access to HE courses). Usually very poor, the current one is one of the worst I've seen. He's trying a calculation right now that I suspect every PB member would achieved in 20 s or less. And failing.
I'm surprised that its usually very poor from Access courses.
I don't know what they're generally like, but my wife started Uni this year after doing an Access course (self-study, online, as well as working) last year. She was advised before she started that, that if you can do well on the Access course you should be good for Uni and that the Access course is quite challenging. She said in hindsight she agrees with that, in part as was then working so juggling the course with her job, whereas now she's full-time doing her degree/placements, but that the Access course was good prep.
Don't know if all Access courses are similar or some are better than others.
There is significant variation. I have interviewed into the three figures products of access courses. There are some good students there - typically ones who choose the wrong route early but then want to do pharmacy and don't have the A levels in the right subjects. I have accepted one such this morning.
Then there are the vast majority that were not good enough to get the right grades initially but can get the lower grades for the Access to HE courses and hope that will get them on the main course. At a Top 10 Uni like Bath (are you listening @HYUFD - we not a Russel Group but we are better than most of them) they don't cut it.
At some point I'll share a typical calculation that floors them. PBers will have no dificulty.
Is is
Simplify (a-x)(b-x)(c-x)...(z-x)
?
=0
Only when x is equal to one of the constants (I presume they are constants) a to z.
At a guess, the one between w and y?
Yes, yes. Now I'm embarrassed. I'm just so used to a, b, c, etc being constants and x, y , z, etc being variables.
x can be as variable as it likes, and (x-x) will always be zero
I've always wondered how double posts appeared. You've just managed 5 of them!
Sorry. I got error ‘failed’ messages from the site on my posts so clicked on ‘post’ again. I had no way of knowing it would eventually post my comment over and over.
I’m also quite stressed out as yesterday I had to wrestle a close friend to the ground to stop her throwing herself out of a third floor window, and today I was phoned by the Police to say that this morning she’d done precisely that. This week is one I won’t ever forget.
No apology needed, it's interesting to know how it happens.
And my condolences. A harrowing couple of days.
Her mistake, if that's the right word, was not looking down before she jumped, and hence not noticing that despite being very high up and with paving stones below, the flat beneath hers had a balcony with a washing line strung along it and the door open. It appears that after jumping from the window, she tangled with the washing line, impacted the top of the door, then the railings of the balcony, before falling one more storey to the hard ground below. She was determined to end her life, being terminally ill, but is now in a London hospital with several broken ribs and a punctured lung. It's a truly tragic story, from start to finish. It would play into the assisted dying debate, save for the fact that the mental breakdown she has had, following her terminal diagnosis, would render her considered incapable of making a considered decision about how she wishes her life to end.
Now, she faces a few weeks heavily sedated - as a suicide risk in a regular hospital - and once the injuries from her fall have healed, being returned under section 3 of the MHA to a secure mental health ward where her life will likely end.
Sounds awful for both her and you. Best wishes.
It is a fairly extreme reaction to a terminal diagnosis, assuming that she has no pre existing psychiatric history. It may well be that her mental state bounces back, and certainly sounds like she needs to talk to the pallative care team.
My amateur assessment is that the stress of the diagnosis and the operations and treatments she has had, has led to some sort of psychotic breakdown. If she'd said she didn't want to die a slow, lingering death from spreading cancer, I could rationalise and understand what she's done - but her explanation for the attempted suicides is that she's being followed everywhere and there is a criminal gang, working in consort with her brother, her parents, and the cleaners at the mental hospital, who have stolen her identity and who plan to torture her and bump her off in the night. Hence why she got sectioned, under section 2, in the first place. It's distressing, if also enlightening given that despite my many years in local government I've not really interacted with mental health services before, to see someone previously intelligent and rational descend so quickly into such a dark and twisted state of mind.
We need alternative routes instead of the Hormuz Strait. We should have oil and gas pipelines going west through the Arabian Peninsula right up to our ports in Israel.
That is definitely possible.
Definitely possible but not in a quick timescale.
Getting regime change would be better.
Regime change in Israel would be desirable, considering the mess they have caused in the whole area.
I am no Bibi fan, but where is the evidence that any successor regime would be any better?
It probably wouldn't be better, but nobody seriously thinks the problems in the Middle East are just down to Iran. By far the most destabilising factor is the Israeli attitude to Palestinians and their right to have a viable nation. You are never going to get lasting peace without solving that. So yes a new government in Israeli that wants to make real peace with the Palestinians is highly desirable and necessary for lasting peace.
We've also got Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Turkey all fostering conflicts in other places.
We need alternative routes instead of the Hormuz Strait. We should have oil and gas pipelines going west through the Arabian Peninsula right up to our ports in Israel.
That is definitely possible.
Definitely possible but not in a quick timescale.
Getting regime change would be better.
Hopefully when the Israeli election takes place we’ll get rid of the Bibi regime 👍
He's the biggest danger currently to word peace
I'm surprised you don't think the biggest danger is Kemi Badenoch.
She's not really relevant, the only person who is in the UK is Starmer.
We need alternative routes instead of the Hormuz Strait. We should have oil and gas pipelines going west through the Arabian Peninsula right up to our ports in Israel.
That is definitely possible.
Definitely possible but not in a quick timescale.
Getting regime change would be better.
Hopefully when the Israeli election takes place we’ll get rid of the Bibi regime 👍
He's the biggest danger currently to word peace
As has already been said getting rid of Netanyahu will not change Israel's cause anymore than in Iran
The two country's are locked in a deadly embrace with no quarter from either side no matter how many leaders are taken out
We need alternative routes instead of the Hormuz Strait. We should have oil and gas pipelines going west through the Arabian Peninsula right up to our ports in Israel.
That is definitely possible.
Definitely possible but not in a quick timescale.
Getting regime change would be better.
Hopefully when the Israeli election takes place we’ll get rid of the Bibi regime 👍
Indeed. I would have more faith in Lapid leading this operation than Bibi. 👍
We need alternative routes instead of the Hormuz Strait. We should have oil and gas pipelines going west through the Arabian Peninsula right up to our ports in Israel.
That is definitely possible.
Definitely possible but not in a quick timescale.
Getting regime change would be better.
Hopefully when the Israeli election takes place we’ll get rid of the Bibi regime 👍
He's the biggest danger currently to word peace
As has already been said getting rid of Netanyahu will not change Israel's cause anymore than in Iran
The two country's are locked in a deadly embrace with no quarter from either side no matter how many leaders are taken out
That is overly pessimistic. Both have had more moderate leadership in recent decades, and can again.
We need alternative routes instead of the Hormuz Strait. We should have oil and gas pipelines going west through the Arabian Peninsula right up to our ports in Israel.
That is definitely possible.
Definitely possible but not in a quick timescale.
Getting regime change would be better.
Hopefully when the Israeli election takes place we’ll get rid of the Bibi regime 👍
He's the biggest danger currently to word peace
As has already been said getting rid of Netanyahu will not change Israel's cause anymore than in Iran
The two country's are locked in a deadly embrace with no quarter from either side no matter how many leaders are taken out
Lowest Reform score with FoN's regular weekly poll since January 2025
I know we can't criticise a BPC pollster but surely there would be a correlation between Reform shipping nearly ten points over several months and an increase in Conservative fortunes. So if Reform are on 25 so are the Tories.
Restore
Reform has also shipped younger voters to the Greens. I know you don't think that makes sense but I'll guarantee it is the case. Reform ceased to be the only populist option and most people really do not like Mr Toad. The RefUK/Con combined vote has been slipping for a while and fell a couple of percent this month. Apparently something happened that made years of submissive devotion to Trump make them look less than attractive to a small but significant numner
Generally pissed off "sick of the status quo" not particularly up on politics people who are - key point - not racist could well switch from Reform to Green. It won't be huge numbers but it wouldn't be insignificant, esp in such a volatile multi party environment.
Definitely goalhanging. As I'm in an online interview watching a candidate drown...
Hopefully not a lifeguard job.
Sadly its applicants to study pharmacy (but from Access to HE courses). Usually very poor, the current one is one of the worst I've seen. He's trying a calculation right now that I suspect every PB member would achieved in 20 s or less. And failing.
I'm surprised that its usually very poor from Access courses.
I don't know what they're generally like, but my wife started Uni this year after doing an Access course (self-study, online, as well as working) last year. She was advised before she started that, that if you can do well on the Access course you should be good for Uni and that the Access course is quite challenging. She said in hindsight she agrees with that, in part as was then working so juggling the course with her job, whereas now she's full-time doing her degree/placements, but that the Access course was good prep.
Don't know if all Access courses are similar or some are better than others.
There is significant variation. I have interviewed into the three figures products of access courses. There are some good students there - typically ones who choose the wrong route early but then want to do pharmacy and don't have the A levels in the right subjects. I have accepted one such this morning.
Then there are the vast majority that were not good enough to get the right grades initially but can get the lower grades for the Access to HE courses and hope that will get them on the main course. At a Top 10 Uni like Bath (are you listening @HYUFD - we not a Russel Group but we are better than most of them) they don't cut it.
At some point I'll share a typical calculation that floors them. PBers will have no dificulty.
Is is
Simplify (a-x)(b-x)(c-x)...(z-x)
?
=0
Only when x is equal to one of the constants (I presume they are constants) a to z.
At a guess, the one between w and y?
Yes, yes. Now I'm embarrassed. I'm just so used to a, b, c, etc being constants and x, y , z, etc being variables.
x can be as variable as it likes, and (x-x) will always be zero
I've always wondered how double posts appeared. You've just managed 5 of them!
Sorry. I got error ‘failed’ messages from the site on my posts so clicked on ‘post’ again. I had no way of knowing it would eventually post my comment over and over.
I’m also quite stressed out as yesterday I had to wrestle a close friend to the ground to stop her throwing herself out of a third floor window, and today I was phoned by the Police to say that this morning she’d done precisely that. This week is one I won’t ever forget.
No apology needed, it's interesting to know how it happens.
And my condolences. A harrowing couple of days.
Her mistake, if that's the right word, was not looking down before she jumped, and hence not noticing that despite being very high up and with paving stones below, the flat beneath hers had a balcony with a washing line strung along it and the door open. It appears that after jumping from the window, she tangled with the washing line, impacted the top of the door, then the railings of the balcony, before falling one more storey to the hard ground below. She was determined to end her life, being terminally ill, but is now in a London hospital with several broken ribs and a punctured lung. It's a truly tragic story, from start to finish. It would play into the assisted dying debate, save for the fact that the mental breakdown she has had, following her terminal diagnosis, would render her considered incapable of making a considered decision about how she wishes her life to end.
Now, she faces a few weeks heavily sedated - as a suicide risk in a regular hospital - and once the injuries from her fall have healed, being returned under section 3 of the MHA to a secure mental health ward where her life will likely end.
Sounds awful for both her and you. Best wishes.
It is a fairly extreme reaction to a terminal diagnosis, assuming that she has no pre existing psychiatric history. It may well be that her mental state bounces back, and certainly sounds like she needs to talk to the pallative care team.
My amateur assessment is that the stress of the diagnosis and the operations and treatments she has had, has led to some sort of psychotic breakdown. If she'd said she didn't want to die a slow, lingering death from spreading cancer, I could rationalise and understand what she's done - but her explanation for the attempted suicides is that she's being followed everywhere and there is a criminal gang, working in consort with her brother, her parents, and the cleaners at the mental hospital, who have stolen her identity and who plan to torture her and bump her off in the night. Hence why she got sectioned, under section 2, in the first place. It's distressing, if also enlightening given that despite my many years in local government I've not really interacted with mental health services before, to see someone previously intelligent and rational descend so quickly into such a dark and twisted state of mind.
At the risk of naivety, they have checked it hasn't spread to the brain, right? In suppose it hardly matters now.
There’s a touching naivety in asking a country at war (however evil its govt may be) to exercise “restraint”. If you bomb someone, anyone, there’s a significant possibility they’re going to bomb you (or someone else) where it hurts. What are these people smoking?
"I know we're killing your leaders and blowing up your military but please can you be reasonable and not hurt our oil?"
It's ridiculous. If you want to start a war then you either need to win it or else accept the other side will fight back.
We need alternative routes instead of the Hormuz Strait. We should have oil and gas pipelines going west through the Arabian Peninsula right up to our ports in Israel.
That is definitely possible.
Definitely possible but not in a quick timescale.
Getting regime change would be better.
Hopefully when the Israeli election takes place we’ll get rid of the Bibi regime 👍
He's the biggest danger currently to word peace
As has already been said getting rid of Netanyahu will not change Israel's cause anymore than in Iran
The two country's are locked in a deadly embrace with no quarter from either side no matter how many leaders are taken out
That is overly pessimistic. Both have had more moderate leadership in recent decades, and can again.
I am expressing the reality as hard as it is to take
Definitely goalhanging. As I'm in an online interview watching a candidate drown...
Hopefully not a lifeguard job.
Sadly its applicants to study pharmacy (but from Access to HE courses). Usually very poor, the current one is one of the worst I've seen. He's trying a calculation right now that I suspect every PB member would achieved in 20 s or less. And failing.
I'm surprised that its usually very poor from Access courses.
I don't know what they're generally like, but my wife started Uni this year after doing an Access course (self-study, online, as well as working) last year. She was advised before she started that, that if you can do well on the Access course you should be good for Uni and that the Access course is quite challenging. She said in hindsight she agrees with that, in part as was then working so juggling the course with her job, whereas now she's full-time doing her degree/placements, but that the Access course was good prep.
Don't know if all Access courses are similar or some are better than others.
There is significant variation. I have interviewed into the three figures products of access courses. There are some good students there - typically ones who choose the wrong route early but then want to do pharmacy and don't have the A levels in the right subjects. I have accepted one such this morning.
Then there are the vast majority that were not good enough to get the right grades initially but can get the lower grades for the Access to HE courses and hope that will get them on the main course. At a Top 10 Uni like Bath (are you listening @HYUFD - we not a Russel Group but we are better than most of them) they don't cut it.
At some point I'll share a typical calculation that floors them. PBers will have no dificulty.
Is is
Simplify (a-x)(b-x)(c-x)...(z-x)
?
=0
Only when x is equal to one of the constants (I presume they are constants) a to z.
At a guess, the one between w and y?
Yes, yes. Now I'm embarrassed. I'm just so used to a, b, c, etc being constants and x, y , z, etc being variables.
x can be as variable as it likes, and (x-x) will always be zero
I've always wondered how double posts appeared. You've just managed 5 of them!
Sorry. I got error ‘failed’ messages from the site on my posts so clicked on ‘post’ again. I had no way of knowing it would eventually post my comment over and over.
I’m also quite stressed out as yesterday I had to wrestle a close friend to the ground to stop her throwing herself out of a third floor window, and today I was phoned by the Police to say that this morning she’d done precisely that. This week is one I won’t ever forget.
No apology needed, it's interesting to know how it happens.
And my condolences. A harrowing couple of days.
Her mistake, if that's the right word, was not looking down before she jumped, and hence not noticing that despite being very high up and with paving stones below, the flat beneath hers had a balcony with a washing line strung along it and the door open. It appears that after jumping from the window, she tangled with the washing line, impacted the top of the door, then the railings of the balcony, before falling one more storey to the hard ground below. She was determined to end her life, being terminally ill, but is now in a London hospital with several broken ribs and a punctured lung. It's a truly tragic story, from start to finish. It would play into the assisted dying debate, save for the fact that the mental breakdown she has had, following her terminal diagnosis, would render her considered incapable of making a considered decision about how she wishes her life to end.
Now, she faces a few weeks heavily sedated - as a suicide risk in a regular hospital - and once the injuries from her fall have healed, being returned under section 3 of the MHA to a secure mental health ward where her life will likely end.
Sounds awful for both her and you. Best wishes.
It is a fairly extreme reaction to a terminal diagnosis, assuming that she has no pre existing psychiatric history. It may well be that her mental state bounces back, and certainly sounds like she needs to talk to the pallative care team.
My amateur assessment is that the stress of the diagnosis and the operations and treatments she has had, has led to some sort of psychotic breakdown. If she'd said she didn't want to die a slow, lingering death from spreading cancer, I could rationalise and understand what she's done - but her explanation for the attempted suicides is that she's being followed everywhere and there is a criminal gang, working in consort with her brother, her parents, and the cleaners at the mental hospital, who have stolen her identity and who plan to torture her and bump her off in the night. Hence why she got sectioned, under section 2, in the first place. It's distressing, if also enlightening given that despite my many years in local government I've not really interacted with mental health services before, to see someone previously intelligent and rational descend so quickly into such a dark and twisted state of mind.
At the risk of naivety, they have checked it hasn't spread to the brain, right? In suppose it hardly matters now.
We need alternative routes instead of the Hormuz Strait. We should have oil and gas pipelines going west through the Arabian Peninsula right up to our ports in Israel.
That is definitely possible.
Definitely possible but not in a quick timescale.
Getting regime change would be better.
Regime change in Israel would be desirable, considering the mess they have caused in the whole area.
I am no Bibi fan, but where is the evidence that any successor regime would be any better?
It probably wouldn't be better, but nobody seriously thinks the problems in the Middle East are just down to Iran. By far the most destabilising factor is the Israeli attitude to Palestinians and their right to have a viable nation. You are never going to get lasting peace without solving that. So yes a new government in Israeli that wants to make real peace with the Palestinians is highly desirable and necessary for lasting peace.
We've also got Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Turkey all fostering conflicts in other places.
I'm not suggesting that Israel alone is the problem, but the Question of Palestine has been causing conflict in the Middle East longer than most of us have been alive. Even a magical outcome of the current conflict leading to a secular democratic Iran won't bring peace to the region unless Palestinians have a viable nation.
There’s a touching naivety in asking a country at war (however evil its govt may be) to exercise “restraint”. If you bomb someone, anyone, there’s a significant possibility they’re going to bomb you (or someone else) where it hurts. What are these people smoking?
"I know we're killing your leaders and blowing up your military but please can you be reasonable and not hurt our oil?"
It's ridiculous. If you want to start a war then you either need to win it or else accept the other side will fight back.
Lowest Reform score with FoN's regular weekly poll since January 2025
I know we can't criticise a BPC pollster but surely there would be a correlation between Reform shipping nearly ten points over several months and an increase in Conservative fortunes. So if Reform are on 25 so are the Tories.
Looks like a small swing from Reform to Labour and Green to LD on that poll but Kemi is keeping her 17% core vote!
We need alternative routes instead of the Hormuz Strait. We should have oil and gas pipelines going west through the Arabian Peninsula right up to our ports in Israel.
That is definitely possible.
Definitely possible but not in a quick timescale.
Getting regime change would be better.
Hopefully when the Israeli election takes place we’ll get rid of the Bibi regime 👍
He's the biggest danger currently to word peace
I'm surprised you don't think the biggest danger is Kemi Badenoch.
She's not really relevant, the only person who is in the UK is Starmer.
We need alternative routes instead of the Hormuz Strait. We should have oil and gas pipelines going west through the Arabian Peninsula right up to our ports in Israel.
That is definitely possible.
Definitely possible but not in a quick timescale.
Getting regime change would be better.
Hopefully when the Israeli election takes place we’ll get rid of the Bibi regime 👍
He's the biggest danger currently to word peace
I'm surprised you don't think the biggest danger is Kemi Badenoch.
She's not really relevant, the only person who is in the UK is Starmer.
Lowest Reform score with FoN's regular weekly poll since January 2025
I know we can't criticise a BPC pollster but surely there would be a correlation between Reform shipping nearly ten points over several months and an increase in Conservative fortunes. So if Reform are on 25 so are the Tories.
There is no prohibition on criticising BPC pollster. Providing the criticism is based on reasonable argument and methodology. So “I think that the method of reaching respondents is flawed because of x, y and z, leading to a biased sample”
Impugning their honesty is prohibited - so no “they are fiddling the figures for money”.
Lowest Reform score with FoN's regular weekly poll since January 2025
I know we can't criticise a BPC pollster but surely there would be a correlation between Reform shipping nearly ten points over several months and an increase in Conservative fortunes. So if Reform are on 25 so are the Tories.
Looks like a small swing from Reform to Labour and Green to LD on that poll but Kemi is keeping her 17% core vote!
I'd be surprised if Restore are making that much headway. Perhaps with Timothy's comments gaining traction they will capture some of the racist vote. Farage has been pedalling like fury today to regain the racist agenda.
Was anyone else reminded of a Nuremberg rally during Farage's Scottish speech today?
We need alternative routes instead of the Hormuz Strait. We should have oil and gas pipelines going west through the Arabian Peninsula right up to our ports in Israel.
That is definitely possible.
Definitely possible but not in a quick timescale.
Getting regime change would be better.
Hopefully when the Israeli election takes place we’ll get rid of the Bibi regime 👍
He's the biggest danger currently to word peace
I'm surprised you don't think the biggest danger is Kemi Badenoch.
She's not really relevant, the only person who is in the UK is Starmer.
Definitely goalhanging. As I'm in an online interview watching a candidate drown...
Hopefully not a lifeguard job.
Sadly its applicants to study pharmacy (but from Access to HE courses). Usually very poor, the current one is one of the worst I've seen. He's trying a calculation right now that I suspect every PB member would achieved in 20 s or less. And failing.
I'm surprised that its usually very poor from Access courses.
I don't know what they're generally like, but my wife started Uni this year after doing an Access course (self-study, online, as well as working) last year. She was advised before she started that, that if you can do well on the Access course you should be good for Uni and that the Access course is quite challenging. She said in hindsight she agrees with that, in part as was then working so juggling the course with her job, whereas now she's full-time doing her degree/placements, but that the Access course was good prep.
Don't know if all Access courses are similar or some are better than others.
There is significant variation. I have interviewed into the three figures products of access courses. There are some good students there - typically ones who choose the wrong route early but then want to do pharmacy and don't have the A levels in the right subjects. I have accepted one such this morning.
Then there are the vast majority that were not good enough to get the right grades initially but can get the lower grades for the Access to HE courses and hope that will get them on the main course. At a Top 10 Uni like Bath (are you listening @HYUFD - we not a Russel Group but we are better than most of them) they don't cut it.
At some point I'll share a typical calculation that floors them. PBers will have no dificulty.
Is is
Simplify (a-x)(b-x)(c-x)...(z-x)
?
=0
Only when x is equal to one of the constants (I presume they are constants) a to z.
At a guess, the one between w and y?
Yes, yes. Now I'm embarrassed. I'm just so used to a, b, c, etc being constants and x, y , z, etc being variables.
x can be as variable as it likes, and (x-x) will always be zero
I've always wondered how double posts appeared. You've just managed 5 of them!
Sorry. I got error ‘failed’ messages from the site on my posts so clicked on ‘post’ again. I had no way of knowing it would eventually post my comment over and over.
I’m also quite stressed out as yesterday I had to wrestle a close friend to the ground to stop her throwing herself out of a third floor window, and today I was phoned by the Police to say that this morning she’d done precisely that. This week is one I won’t ever forget.
No apology needed, it's interesting to know how it happens.
And my condolences. A harrowing couple of days.
Her mistake, if that's the right word, was not looking down before she jumped, and hence not noticing that despite being very high up and with paving stones below, the flat beneath hers had a balcony with a washing line strung along it and the door open. It appears that after jumping from the window, she tangled with the washing line, impacted the top of the door, then the railings of the balcony, before falling one more storey to the hard ground below. She was determined to end her life, being terminally ill, but is now in a London hospital with several broken ribs and a punctured lung. It's a truly tragic story, from start to finish. It would play into the assisted dying debate, save for the fact that the mental breakdown she has had, following her terminal diagnosis, would render her considered incapable of making a considered decision about how she wishes her life to end.
Now, she faces a few weeks heavily sedated - as a suicide risk in a regular hospital - and once the injuries from her fall have healed, being returned under section 3 of the MHA to a secure mental health ward where her life will likely end.
Sounds awful for both her and you. Best wishes.
It is a fairly extreme reaction to a terminal diagnosis, assuming that she has no pre existing psychiatric history. It may well be that her mental state bounces back, and certainly sounds like she needs to talk to the pallative care team.
My amateur assessment is that the stress of the diagnosis and the operations and treatments she has had, has led to some sort of psychotic breakdown. If she'd said she didn't want to die a slow, lingering death from spreading cancer, I could rationalise and understand what she's done - but her explanation for the attempted suicides is that she's being followed everywhere and there is a criminal gang, working in consort with her brother, her parents, and the cleaners at the mental hospital, who have stolen her identity and who plan to torture her and bump her off in the night. Hence why she got sectioned, under section 2, in the first place. It's distressing, if also enlightening given that despite my many years in local government I've not really interacted with mental health services before, to see someone previously intelligent and rational descend so quickly into such a dark and twisted state of mind.
Is she on dexamethasone or methylprednisolone? Sometimes the neurosurgeons use it to reduce swelling around tumours etc.
It can sometimes induce paranoid psychosis in the doses that they use.
There’s a touching naivety in asking a country at war (however evil its govt may be) to exercise “restraint”. If you bomb someone, anyone, there’s a significant possibility they’re going to bomb you (or someone else) where it hurts. What are these people smoking?
"I know we're killing your leaders and blowing up your military but please can you be reasonable and not hurt our oil?"
It's ridiculous. If you want to start a war then you either need to win it or else accept the other side will fight back.
There’s more than one example of this: “The strait is open (except that the Iranians will try to sink anything that goes through it).”
MAGA meets reality. I think we’ll regret not standing up to Trump over Greenland - we’ve given him far too much line and now we can’t catch the fall.
Definitely goalhanging. As I'm in an online interview watching a candidate drown...
Hopefully not a lifeguard job.
Sadly its applicants to study pharmacy (but from Access to HE courses). Usually very poor, the current one is one of the worst I've seen. He's trying a calculation right now that I suspect every PB member would achieved in 20 s or less. And failing.
I'm surprised that its usually very poor from Access courses.
I don't know what they're generally like, but my wife started Uni this year after doing an Access course (self-study, online, as well as working) last year. She was advised before she started that, that if you can do well on the Access course you should be good for Uni and that the Access course is quite challenging. She said in hindsight she agrees with that, in part as was then working so juggling the course with her job, whereas now she's full-time doing her degree/placements, but that the Access course was good prep.
Don't know if all Access courses are similar or some are better than others.
There is significant variation. I have interviewed into the three figures products of access courses. There are some good students there - typically ones who choose the wrong route early but then want to do pharmacy and don't have the A levels in the right subjects. I have accepted one such this morning.
Then there are the vast majority that were not good enough to get the right grades initially but can get the lower grades for the Access to HE courses and hope that will get them on the main course. At a Top 10 Uni like Bath (are you listening @HYUFD - we not a Russel Group but we are better than most of them) they don't cut it.
At some point I'll share a typical calculation that floors them. PBers will have no dificulty.
Is is
Simplify (a-x)(b-x)(c-x)...(z-x)
?
=0
Only when x is equal to one of the constants (I presume they are constants) a to z.
At a guess, the one between w and y?
Yes, yes. Now I'm embarrassed. I'm just so used to a, b, c, etc being constants and x, y , z, etc being variables.
x can be as variable as it likes, and (x-x) will always be zero
I've always wondered how double posts appeared. You've just managed 5 of them!
Sorry. I got error ‘failed’ messages from the site on my posts so clicked on ‘post’ again. I had no way of knowing it would eventually post my comment over and over.
I’m also quite stressed out as yesterday I had to wrestle a close friend to the ground to stop her throwing herself out of a third floor window, and today I was phoned by the Police to say that this morning she’d done precisely that. This week is one I won’t ever forget.
No apology needed, it's interesting to know how it happens.
And my condolences. A harrowing couple of days.
Her mistake, if that's the right word, was not looking down before she jumped, and hence not noticing that despite being very high up and with paving stones below, the flat beneath hers had a balcony with a washing line strung along it and the door open. It appears that after jumping from the window, she tangled with the washing line, impacted the top of the door, then the railings of the balcony, before falling one more storey to the hard ground below. She was determined to end her life, being terminally ill, but is now in a London hospital with several broken ribs and a punctured lung. It's a truly tragic story, from start to finish. It would play into the assisted dying debate, save for the fact that the mental breakdown she has had, following her terminal diagnosis, would render her considered incapable of making a considered decision about how she wishes her life to end.
Now, she faces a few weeks heavily sedated - as a suicide risk in a regular hospital - and once the injuries from her fall have healed, being returned under section 3 of the MHA to a secure mental health ward where her life will likely end.
Sounds awful for both her and you. Best wishes.
It is a fairly extreme reaction to a terminal diagnosis, assuming that she has no pre existing psychiatric history. It may well be that her mental state bounces back, and certainly sounds like she needs to talk to the pallative care team.
My amateur assessment is that the stress of the diagnosis and the operations and treatments she has had, has led to some sort of psychotic breakdown. If she'd said she didn't want to die a slow, lingering death from spreading cancer, I could rationalise and understand what she's done - but her explanation for the attempted suicides is that she's being followed everywhere and there is a criminal gang, working in consort with her brother, her parents, and the cleaners at the mental hospital, who have stolen her identity and who plan to torture her and bump her off in the night. Hence why she got sectioned, under section 2, in the first place. It's distressing, if also enlightening given that despite my many years in local government I've not really interacted with mental health services before, to see someone previously intelligent and rational descend so quickly into such a dark and twisted state of mind.
Is she on dexamethasone or methylprednisolone? Sometimes the neurosurgeons use it to reduce swelling around tumours etc.
It can sometimes induce paranoid psychosis in the doses that they use.
Not sure. She's had surgery, a course of daily radiotherapy, and is still on chemotherapy pills (although after being sectioned she only got them occasionally), but the NHS works in silos and each bit does its stuff and then signs her off until some future review. There's never anyone monitoring and managing each patient's holistic care, and if the patient or their friends and family aren't able to try and join the dots and convey information from one silo to another, it doesn't get done. As it was she was discharged Monday without any of her medication and when challenged they had to pay for a motorcyle courier to despatch it across North London. Most of their patients won't have the resources to do so.
Lowest Reform score with FoN's regular weekly poll since January 2025
I know we can't criticise a BPC pollster but surely there would be a correlation between Reform shipping nearly ten points over several months and an increase in Conservative fortunes. So if Reform are on 25 so are the Tories.
Looks like a small swing from Reform to Labour and Green to LD on that poll but Kemi is keeping her 17% core vote!
I'd be surprised if Restore are making that much headway. Perhaps with Timothy's comments gaining traction they will capture some of the racist vote. Farage has been pedalling like fury today to regain the racist agenda.
Was anyone else reminded of a Nuremberg rally during Farage's Scottish speech today?
Apparently he opposes religious events in public spaces.
Bang goes our Passion Play when he becomes Fuhrer.
There’s a touching naivety in asking a country at war (however evil its govt may be) to exercise “restraint”. If you bomb someone, anyone, there’s a significant possibility they’re going to bomb you (or someone else) where it hurts. What are these people smoking?
"I know we're killing your leaders and blowing up your military but please can you be reasonable and not hurt our oil?"
It's ridiculous. If you want to start a war then you either need to win it or else accept the other side will fight back.
During the Cold War, all kinds of restraints were used to prevent things going hot. Even when East Blok vs NATO engagements reached the point of shooting.
In Korea, Russian pilots were dogfighting with UN pilots
In Vietnam, Russian and Chinese “advisors” were up to various things.
The Russians shot down considerable numbers of Western recon aircraft during the Cold War as a whole.
We need alternative routes instead of the Hormuz Strait. We should have oil and gas pipelines going west through the Arabian Peninsula right up to our ports in Israel.
That is definitely possible.
Definitely possible but not in a quick timescale.
Getting regime change would be better.
Hopefully when the Israeli election takes place we’ll get rid of the Bibi regime 👍
He's the biggest danger currently to word peace
I'm surprised you don't think the biggest danger is Kemi Badenoch.
She's not really relevant, the only person who is in the UK is Starmer.
Definitely goalhanging. As I'm in an online interview watching a candidate drown...
Hopefully not a lifeguard job.
Sadly its applicants to study pharmacy (but from Access to HE courses). Usually very poor, the current one is one of the worst I've seen. He's trying a calculation right now that I suspect every PB member would achieved in 20 s or less. And failing.
I'm surprised that its usually very poor from Access courses.
I don't know what they're generally like, but my wife started Uni this year after doing an Access course (self-study, online, as well as working) last year. She was advised before she started that, that if you can do well on the Access course you should be good for Uni and that the Access course is quite challenging. She said in hindsight she agrees with that, in part as was then working so juggling the course with her job, whereas now she's full-time doing her degree/placements, but that the Access course was good prep.
Don't know if all Access courses are similar or some are better than others.
There is significant variation. I have interviewed into the three figures products of access courses. There are some good students there - typically ones who choose the wrong route early but then want to do pharmacy and don't have the A levels in the right subjects. I have accepted one such this morning.
Then there are the vast majority that were not good enough to get the right grades initially but can get the lower grades for the Access to HE courses and hope that will get them on the main course. At a Top 10 Uni like Bath (are you listening @HYUFD - we not a Russel Group but we are better than most of them) they don't cut it.
At some point I'll share a typical calculation that floors them. PBers will have no dificulty.
Is is
Simplify (a-x)(b-x)(c-x)...(z-x)
?
=0
Only when x is equal to one of the constants (I presume they are constants) a to z.
At a guess, the one between w and y?
Yes, yes. Now I'm embarrassed. I'm just so used to a, b, c, etc being constants and x, y , z, etc being variables.
x can be as variable as it likes, and (x-x) will always be zero
I've always wondered how double posts appeared. You've just managed 5 of them!
Sorry. I got error ‘failed’ messages from the site on my posts so clicked on ‘post’ again. I had no way of knowing it would eventually post my comment over and over.
I’m also quite stressed out as yesterday I had to wrestle a close friend to the ground to stop her throwing herself out of a third floor window, and today I was phoned by the Police to say that this morning she’d done precisely that. This week is one I won’t ever forget.
No apology needed, it's interesting to know how it happens.
And my condolences. A harrowing couple of days.
Her mistake, if that's the right word, was not looking down before she jumped, and hence not noticing that despite being very high up and with paving stones below, the flat beneath hers had a balcony with a washing line strung along it and the door open. It appears that after jumping from the window, she tangled with the washing line, impacted the top of the door, then the railings of the balcony, before falling one more storey to the hard ground below. She was determined to end her life, being terminally ill, but is now in a London hospital with several broken ribs and a punctured lung. It's a truly tragic story, from start to finish. It would play into the assisted dying debate, save for the fact that the mental breakdown she has had, following her terminal diagnosis, would render her considered incapable of making a considered decision about how she wishes her life to end.
Now, she faces a few weeks heavily sedated - as a suicide risk in a regular hospital - and once the injuries from her fall have healed, being returned under section 3 of the MHA to a secure mental health ward where her life will likely end.
Sounds awful for both her and you. Best wishes.
It is a fairly extreme reaction to a terminal diagnosis, assuming that she has no pre existing psychiatric history. It may well be that her mental state bounces back, and certainly sounds like she needs to talk to the pallative care team.
My amateur assessment is that the stress of the diagnosis and the operations and treatments she has had, has led to some sort of psychotic breakdown. If she'd said she didn't want to die a slow, lingering death from spreading cancer, I could rationalise and understand what she's done - but her explanation for the attempted suicides is that she's being followed everywhere and there is a criminal gang, working in consort with her brother, her parents, and the cleaners at the mental hospital, who have stolen her identity and who plan to torture her and bump her off in the night. Hence why she got sectioned, under section 2, in the first place. It's distressing, if also enlightening given that despite my many years in local government I've not really interacted with mental health services before, to see someone previously intelligent and rational descend so quickly into such a dark and twisted state of mind.
Is she on dexamethasone or methylprednisolone? Sometimes the neurosurgeons use it to reduce swelling around tumours etc.
It can sometimes induce paranoid psychosis in the doses that they use.
Not sure. She's had surgery, a course of daily radiotherapy, and is still on chemotherapy pills (although after being sectioned she only got them occasionally), but the NHS works in silos and each bit does its stuff and then signs her off until some future review. There's never anyone monitoring and managing each patient's holistic care, and if the patient or their friends and family aren't able to try and join the dots and convey information from one silo to another, it doesn't get done. As it was she was discharged Monday without any of her medication and when challenged they had to pay for a motorcyle courier to despatch it across North London. Most of their patients won't have the resources to do so.
It all sounds very chaotic and haphazard. I wish I could say that I am surprised, but that is the world that I know.
It is the GP's role to co-ordinate care between the Specialists in their silos. Sadly they often lack the time and sometimes the motivation to do so under the pressure of other demands.
It is probably worth checking if the chemo includes steroids. If she had radiotherapy then that may well be the case. I have seen some pretty flamboyant steroid psychoses in my junior doctor days.
Definitely goalhanging. As I'm in an online interview watching a candidate drown...
Hopefully not a lifeguard job.
Sadly its applicants to study pharmacy (but from Access to HE courses). Usually very poor, the current one is one of the worst I've seen. He's trying a calculation right now that I suspect every PB member would achieved in 20 s or less. And failing.
I'm surprised that its usually very poor from Access courses.
I don't know what they're generally like, but my wife started Uni this year after doing an Access course (self-study, online, as well as working) last year. She was advised before she started that, that if you can do well on the Access course you should be good for Uni and that the Access course is quite challenging. She said in hindsight she agrees with that, in part as was then working so juggling the course with her job, whereas now she's full-time doing her degree/placements, but that the Access course was good prep.
Don't know if all Access courses are similar or some are better than others.
There is significant variation. I have interviewed into the three figures products of access courses. There are some good students there - typically ones who choose the wrong route early but then want to do pharmacy and don't have the A levels in the right subjects. I have accepted one such this morning.
Then there are the vast majority that were not good enough to get the right grades initially but can get the lower grades for the Access to HE courses and hope that will get them on the main course. At a Top 10 Uni like Bath (are you listening @HYUFD - we not a Russel Group but we are better than most of them) they don't cut it.
At some point I'll share a typical calculation that floors them. PBers will have no dificulty.
Is is
Simplify (a-x)(b-x)(c-x)...(z-x)
?
=0
Only when x is equal to one of the constants (I presume they are constants) a to z.
At a guess, the one between w and y?
Yes, yes. Now I'm embarrassed. I'm just so used to a, b, c, etc being constants and x, y , z, etc being variables.
x can be as variable as it likes, and (x-x) will always be zero
I've always wondered how double posts appeared. You've just managed 5 of them!
Sorry. I got error ‘failed’ messages from the site on my posts so clicked on ‘post’ again. I had no way of knowing it would eventually post my comment over and over.
I’m also quite stressed out as yesterday I had to wrestle a close friend to the ground to stop her throwing herself out of a third floor window, and today I was phoned by the Police to say that this morning she’d done precisely that. This week is one I won’t ever forget.
No apology needed, it's interesting to know how it happens.
And my condolences. A harrowing couple of days.
Her mistake, if that's the right word, was not looking down before she jumped, and hence not noticing that despite being very high up and with paving stones below, the flat beneath hers had a balcony with a washing line strung along it and the door open. It appears that after jumping from the window, she tangled with the washing line, impacted the top of the door, then the railings of the balcony, before falling one more storey to the hard ground below. She was determined to end her life, being terminally ill, but is now in a London hospital with several broken ribs and a punctured lung. It's a truly tragic story, from start to finish. It would play into the assisted dying debate, save for the fact that the mental breakdown she has had, following her terminal diagnosis, would render her considered incapable of making a considered decision about how she wishes her life to end.
Now, she faces a few weeks heavily sedated - as a suicide risk in a regular hospital - and once the injuries from her fall have healed, being returned under section 3 of the MHA to a secure mental health ward where her life will likely end.
Sounds awful for both her and you. Best wishes.
It is a fairly extreme reaction to a terminal diagnosis, assuming that she has no pre existing psychiatric history. It may well be that her mental state bounces back, and certainly sounds like she needs to talk to the pallative care team.
My amateur assessment is that the stress of the diagnosis and the operations and treatments she has had, has led to some sort of psychotic breakdown. If she'd said she didn't want to die a slow, lingering death from spreading cancer, I could rationalise and understand what she's done - but her explanation for the attempted suicides is that she's being followed everywhere and there is a criminal gang, working in consort with her brother, her parents, and the cleaners at the mental hospital, who have stolen her identity and who plan to torture her and bump her off in the night. Hence why she got sectioned, under section 2, in the first place. It's distressing, if also enlightening given that despite my many years in local government I've not really interacted with mental health services before, to see someone previously intelligent and rational descend so quickly into such a dark and twisted state of mind.
Is she on dexamethasone or methylprednisolone? Sometimes the neurosurgeons use it to reduce swelling around tumours etc.
It can sometimes induce paranoid psychosis in the doses that they use.
Not sure. She's had surgery, a course of daily radiotherapy, and is still on chemotherapy pills (although after being sectioned she only got them occasionally), but the NHS works in silos and each bit does its stuff and then signs her off until some future review. There's never anyone monitoring and managing each patient's holistic care, and if the patient or their friends and family aren't able to try and join the dots and convey information from one silo to another, it doesn't get done. As it was she was discharged Monday without any of her medication and when challenged they had to pay for a motorcyle courier to despatch it across North London. Most of their patients won't have the resources to do so.
It all sounds very chaotic and haphazard. I wish I could say that I am surprised, but that is the world that I know.
It is the GP's role to co-ordinate care between the Specialists in their silos. Sadly they often lack the time and sometimes the motivation to do so under the pressure of other demands.
It is probably worth checking if the chemo includes steroids. If she had radiotherapy then that may well be the case. I have seen some pretty flamboyant steroid psychoses in my junior doctor days.
The GP bit of the health service is broken, surely you must know that.
Definitely goalhanging. As I'm in an online interview watching a candidate drown...
Hopefully not a lifeguard job.
Sadly its applicants to study pharmacy (but from Access to HE courses). Usually very poor, the current one is one of the worst I've seen. He's trying a calculation right now that I suspect every PB member would achieved in 20 s or less. And failing.
I'm surprised that its usually very poor from Access courses.
I don't know what they're generally like, but my wife started Uni this year after doing an Access course (self-study, online, as well as working) last year. She was advised before she started that, that if you can do well on the Access course you should be good for Uni and that the Access course is quite challenging. She said in hindsight she agrees with that, in part as was then working so juggling the course with her job, whereas now she's full-time doing her degree/placements, but that the Access course was good prep.
Don't know if all Access courses are similar or some are better than others.
There is significant variation. I have interviewed into the three figures products of access courses. There are some good students there - typically ones who choose the wrong route early but then want to do pharmacy and don't have the A levels in the right subjects. I have accepted one such this morning.
Then there are the vast majority that were not good enough to get the right grades initially but can get the lower grades for the Access to HE courses and hope that will get them on the main course. At a Top 10 Uni like Bath (are you listening @HYUFD - we not a Russel Group but we are better than most of them) they don't cut it.
At some point I'll share a typical calculation that floors them. PBers will have no dificulty.
Is is
Simplify (a-x)(b-x)(c-x)...(z-x)
?
=0
Only when x is equal to one of the constants (I presume they are constants) a to z.
At a guess, the one between w and y?
Yes, yes. Now I'm embarrassed. I'm just so used to a, b, c, etc being constants and x, y , z, etc being variables.
x can be as variable as it likes, and (x-x) will always be zero
I've always wondered how double posts appeared. You've just managed 5 of them!
Sorry. I got error ‘failed’ messages from the site on my posts so clicked on ‘post’ again. I had no way of knowing it would eventually post my comment over and over.
I’m also quite stressed out as yesterday I had to wrestle a close friend to the ground to stop her throwing herself out of a third floor window, and today I was phoned by the Police to say that this morning she’d done precisely that. This week is one I won’t ever forget.
No apology needed, it's interesting to know how it happens.
And my condolences. A harrowing couple of days.
Her mistake, if that's the right word, was not looking down before she jumped, and hence not noticing that despite being very high up and with paving stones below, the flat beneath hers had a balcony with a washing line strung along it and the door open. It appears that after jumping from the window, she tangled with the washing line, impacted the top of the door, then the railings of the balcony, before falling one more storey to the hard ground below. She was determined to end her life, being terminally ill, but is now in a London hospital with several broken ribs and a punctured lung. It's a truly tragic story, from start to finish. It would play into the assisted dying debate, save for the fact that the mental breakdown she has had, following her terminal diagnosis, would render her considered incapable of making a considered decision about how she wishes her life to end.
Now, she faces a few weeks heavily sedated - as a suicide risk in a regular hospital - and once the injuries from her fall have healed, being returned under section 3 of the MHA to a secure mental health ward where her life will likely end.
Sounds awful for both her and you. Best wishes.
It is a fairly extreme reaction to a terminal diagnosis, assuming that she has no pre existing psychiatric history. It may well be that her mental state bounces back, and certainly sounds like she needs to talk to the pallative care team.
My amateur assessment is that the stress of the diagnosis and the operations and treatments she has had, has led to some sort of psychotic breakdown. If she'd said she didn't want to die a slow, lingering death from spreading cancer, I could rationalise and understand what she's done - but her explanation for the attempted suicides is that she's being followed everywhere and there is a criminal gang, working in consort with her brother, her parents, and the cleaners at the mental hospital, who have stolen her identity and who plan to torture her and bump her off in the night. Hence why she got sectioned, under section 2, in the first place. It's distressing, if also enlightening given that despite my many years in local government I've not really interacted with mental health services before, to see someone previously intelligent and rational descend so quickly into such a dark and twisted state of mind.
Is she on dexamethasone or methylprednisolone? Sometimes the neurosurgeons use it to reduce swelling around tumours etc.
It can sometimes induce paranoid psychosis in the doses that they use.
Not sure. She's had surgery, a course of daily radiotherapy, and is still on chemotherapy pills (although after being sectioned she only got them occasionally), but the NHS works in silos and each bit does its stuff and then signs her off until some future review. There's never anyone monitoring and managing each patient's holistic care, and if the patient or their friends and family aren't able to try and join the dots and convey information from one silo to another, it doesn't get done. As it was she was discharged Monday without any of her medication and when challenged they had to pay for a motorcyle courier to despatch it across North London. Most of their patients won't have the resources to do so.
It all sounds very chaotic and haphazard. I wish I could say that I am surprised, but that is the world that I know.
It is the GP's role to co-ordinate care between the Specialists in their silos. Sadly they often lack the time and sometimes the motivation to do so under the pressure of other demands.
It is probably worth checking if the chemo includes steroids. If she had radiotherapy then that may well be the case. I have seen some pretty flamboyant steroid psychoses in my junior doctor days.
The GP bit of the health service is broken, surely you must know that.
Andrew police inquiry ‘may expand into corruption offences’
Officers probe wider charges against Andrew as the high legal bar for misconduct risks stalling the investigation into emails found in the Epstein files
The police inquiry into Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor is likely to widen beyond the offence of misconduct in public office, The Times has learnt.
Andrew is set to be investigated over other potential corruption offences on top of a scoping inquiry into alleged sex trafficking, police sources said.
He was arrested last month on suspicion of misconduct in public office (Mipo) relating to his time as a government trade envoy, when he allegedly passed confidential information to the paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein.
But detectives at Thames Valley police are understood to be widening their investigation beyond the single offence, for which it can be difficult to mount a prosecution, to ensure all bases are covered. Andrew has denied all wrongdoing.
A police source said: “The legal bar for Mipo is high. There was always an issue over whether he was actually a public official at the time, whether he actually signed any papers. It’s not surprising that they are having to look at broader offences.”
Andrew has been dogged for more than 15 years over allegations about his relationship with Epstein, who died in a New York prison cell in 2019. Andrew’s arrest at Sandringham on his 66th birthday plunged the monarchy into a constitutional crisis.
Any further police interviews are expected to be by appointment, and any charging decisions are expected to take the best part of a year
Trump and his war in Iran are now determining monetary policy in the UK. That’s effectively the assessment of the Bank of England, which warned Britons will pay the price.
Had there been no war, the BoE would have cut interest rates by a quarter point today to 3.5%. Now traders see an 80% chance of three interest rate hikes this year to 4.5%.
Those shifts will hit households hard. Mortgage rates are climbing. Higher energy bills will cost Britons £13 billion more. It means more fiscal problems for Rachel Reeves as government borrowing costs rise and growth is hit.
Definitely goalhanging. As I'm in an online interview watching a candidate drown...
Hopefully not a lifeguard job.
Sadly its applicants to study pharmacy (but from Access to HE courses). Usually very poor, the current one is one of the worst I've seen. He's trying a calculation right now that I suspect every PB member would achieved in 20 s or less. And failing.
I'm surprised that its usually very poor from Access courses.
I don't know what they're generally like, but my wife started Uni this year after doing an Access course (self-study, online, as well as working) last year. She was advised before she started that, that if you can do well on the Access course you should be good for Uni and that the Access course is quite challenging. She said in hindsight she agrees with that, in part as was then working so juggling the course with her job, whereas now she's full-time doing her degree/placements, but that the Access course was good prep.
Don't know if all Access courses are similar or some are better than others.
There is significant variation. I have interviewed into the three figures products of access courses. There are some good students there - typically ones who choose the wrong route early but then want to do pharmacy and don't have the A levels in the right subjects. I have accepted one such this morning.
Then there are the vast majority that were not good enough to get the right grades initially but can get the lower grades for the Access to HE courses and hope that will get them on the main course. At a Top 10 Uni like Bath (are you listening @HYUFD - we not a Russel Group but we are better than most of them) they don't cut it.
At some point I'll share a typical calculation that floors them. PBers will have no dificulty.
Is is
Simplify (a-x)(b-x)(c-x)...(z-x)
?
=0
Only when x is equal to one of the constants (I presume they are constants) a to z.
At a guess, the one between w and y?
Yes, yes. Now I'm embarrassed. I'm just so used to a, b, c, etc being constants and x, y , z, etc being variables.
x can be as variable as it likes, and (x-x) will always be zero
I've always wondered how double posts appeared. You've just managed 5 of them!
Sorry. I got error ‘failed’ messages from the site on my posts so clicked on ‘post’ again. I had no way of knowing it would eventually post my comment over and over.
I’m also quite stressed out as yesterday I had to wrestle a close friend to the ground to stop her throwing herself out of a third floor window, and today I was phoned by the Police to say that this morning she’d done precisely that. This week is one I won’t ever forget.
No apology needed, it's interesting to know how it happens.
And my condolences. A harrowing couple of days.
Her mistake, if that's the right word, was not looking down before she jumped, and hence not noticing that despite being very high up and with paving stones below, the flat beneath hers had a balcony with a washing line strung along it and the door open. It appears that after jumping from the window, she tangled with the washing line, impacted the top of the door, then the railings of the balcony, before falling one more storey to the hard ground below. She was determined to end her life, being terminally ill, but is now in a London hospital with several broken ribs and a punctured lung. It's a truly tragic story, from start to finish. It would play into the assisted dying debate, save for the fact that the mental breakdown she has had, following her terminal diagnosis, would render her considered incapable of making a considered decision about how she wishes her life to end.
Now, she faces a few weeks heavily sedated - as a suicide risk in a regular hospital - and once the injuries from her fall have healed, being returned under section 3 of the MHA to a secure mental health ward where her life will likely end.
Sounds awful for both her and you. Best wishes.
It is a fairly extreme reaction to a terminal diagnosis, assuming that she has no pre existing psychiatric history. It may well be that her mental state bounces back, and certainly sounds like she needs to talk to the pallative care team.
My amateur assessment is that the stress of the diagnosis and the operations and treatments she has had, has led to some sort of psychotic breakdown. If she'd said she didn't want to die a slow, lingering death from spreading cancer, I could rationalise and understand what she's done - but her explanation for the attempted suicides is that she's being followed everywhere and there is a criminal gang, working in consort with her brother, her parents, and the cleaners at the mental hospital, who have stolen her identity and who plan to torture her and bump her off in the night. Hence why she got sectioned, under section 2, in the first place. It's distressing, if also enlightening given that despite my many years in local government I've not really interacted with mental health services before, to see someone previously intelligent and rational descend so quickly into such a dark and twisted state of mind.
Is she on dexamethasone or methylprednisolone? Sometimes the neurosurgeons use it to reduce swelling around tumours etc.
It can sometimes induce paranoid psychosis in the doses that they use.
Not sure. She's had surgery, a course of daily radiotherapy, and is still on chemotherapy pills (although after being sectioned she only got them occasionally), but the NHS works in silos and each bit does its stuff and then signs her off until some future review. There's never anyone monitoring and managing each patient's holistic care, and if the patient or their friends and family aren't able to try and join the dots and convey information from one silo to another, it doesn't get done. As it was she was discharged Monday without any of her medication and when challenged they had to pay for a motorcyle courier to despatch it across North London. Most of their patients won't have the resources to do so.
It all sounds very chaotic and haphazard. I wish I could say that I am surprised, but that is the world that I know.
It is the GP's role to co-ordinate care between the Specialists in their silos. Sadly they often lack the time and sometimes the motivation to do so under the pressure of other demands.
It is probably worth checking if the chemo includes steroids. If she had radiotherapy then that may well be the case. I have seen some pretty flamboyant steroid psychoses in my junior doctor days.
The GP bit of the health service is broken, surely you must know that.
Yes, sadly I do know that.
I am not a big fan of Streetings 10 year plan for the NHS (far too much obsession with tech-bro solutions and if the pilot schemes that I have seen likely to keel over in a big way) but I do approve of the emphasis on Primary Care.
I have my doubts that the GP system is fixable. There has been too much loss of grognard experience for it to be restored to what it was. The problem is not primarily financial, but rather one of medical education and vocation. There are some great GPs out there, but they get fewer each year.
As the comments suggest, that's more than a little misleading.
It denigrates pensioners who represent about £180 billion of the £333 billion welfare spend and classes them as "not working" which, while accurate, is part of what seems to be a deliberate demonising of them as a group.
If any party wants to means test the State pension or withdraw it from, far example, higher rate tax payers, they should come out and say so and explain how it will be done without cliff edges and a huge bureaucracy.
The small matter of what we have to pay in Debt Interest and how we have got to this point should perhaps get a bit more discussion.
The Government will collect £331bn in income tax this year, and spend £333bn on welfare.
In other words, we now spend more on people not working than we raise from those who do.
And the cost?
Debt per person has risen from £11.5k in 2000 (inflation adjusted) to over £41k today.
I'm a little surprised it is not even higher.
Two things:
1. Define benefits? 2. It has been the policy of successive governments since 1979 to move the burden of taxation away from income and towards spending, so just using one source of government revenue might be a little misleading
The Government will collect £331bn in income tax this year, and spend £333bn on welfare.
In other words, we now spend more on people not working than we raise from those who do.
And the cost?
Debt per person has risen from £11.5k in 2000 (inflation adjusted) to over £41k today.
I'm a little surprised it is not even higher.
Almost half of that 'welfare' spending is the state pension, which is deliberately omitted as otherwise it'd look like stupid comment...
The point is spent on people not working
Well that's also wrong as many of the benefits such as housing benefit, child benefit etc are largely spent on people who are working but need additional assistance.
And, ignoring arguments over the triple lock and retirement age, we need to have some state pension. People pay taxes when younger to fund when older, even if it's not funded that way.
It's just a ragebait headline that doesn't tell us anything useful.
The Government will collect £331bn in income tax this year, and spend £333bn on welfare.
In other words, we now spend more on people not working than we raise from those who do.
And the cost?
Debt per person has risen from £11.5k in 2000 (inflation adjusted) to over £41k today.
I'm a little surprised it is not even higher.
Almost half of that 'welfare' spending is the state pension, which is deliberately omitted as otherwise it'd look like stupid comment...
The point is spent on people not working
Quite apart from the fact a growing number of those eligible for the State pension (about 10%) can and do work, there are those who cannot work because of disability. There are those who are full time carers for family members.
I find Elliott's approach a cynical weaponising of "welfare" - what would the Conservatives actually do to reduce the welfare bill? Will they means test the State Pension and on what basis?
As the comments suggest, that's more than a little misleading.
It denigrates pensioners who represent about £180 billion of the £333 billion welfare spend and classes them as "not working" which, while accurate, is part of what seems to be a deliberate demonising of them as a group.
If any party wants to means test the State pension or withdraw it from, far example, higher rate tax payers, they should come out and say so and explain how it will be done without cliff edges and a huge bureaucracy.
The small matter of what we have to pay in Debt Interest and how we have got to this point should perhaps get a bit more discussion.
What is certain these levels of spending are going to end
How and when is more of an issue and some government is going to be in the firing line sooner or later
As the comments suggest, that's more than a little misleading.
It denigrates pensioners who represent about £180 billion of the £333 billion welfare spend and classes them as "not working" which, while accurate, is part of what seems to be a deliberate demonising of them as a group.
If any party wants to means test the State pension or withdraw it from, far example, higher rate tax payers, they should come out and say so and explain how it will be done without cliff edges and a huge bureaucracy.
The small matter of what we have to pay in Debt Interest and how we have got to this point should perhaps get a bit more discussion.
Why is it misleading?
It’s pointing out that the total benefits bill, which includes pensions, exceeds income tax proceeds. Which it does.
State pensions are a benefit, just like the other state payments.
A simple solution, is to merge employee NI and IT, with a retained, lower rate for lower rate tax paying pensioners. So only pensioners receiving £50k a year or more, would pay more tax.
Treat the state pension like a tax allowance. Incidentally? I would simplify the tax system at the same time
1) Personal allowance fixed, not withdrawn. 2) Sets suitable rates to make up for this, combining IT and NI
This would get rid of various anomalies.
So a simpler, fairer tax system. Cheaper to run, as well.
As the comments suggest, that's more than a little misleading.
It denigrates pensioners who represent about £180 billion of the £333 billion welfare spend and classes them as "not working" which, while accurate, is part of what seems to be a deliberate demonising of them as a group.
If any party wants to means test the State pension or withdraw it from, far example, higher rate tax payers, they should come out and say so and explain how it will be done without cliff edges and a huge bureaucracy.
The small matter of what we have to pay in Debt Interest and how we have got to this point should perhaps get a bit more discussion.
What is certain these levels of spending are going to end
How and when is more of an issue and some government is going to be in the firing line sooner or later
I suspect it will continue for a long time. Governments can kick the can down the road for a long time, and voters will not reward any efforts to rein in spending ahead of any collapse.
The Government will collect £331bn in income tax this year, and spend £333bn on welfare.
In other words, we now spend more on people not working than we raise from those who do.
And the cost?
Debt per person has risen from £11.5k in 2000 (inflation adjusted) to over £41k today.
I'm a little surprised it is not even higher.
Almost half of that 'welfare' spending is the state pension, which is deliberately omitted as otherwise it'd look like stupid comment...
The point is spent on people not working
Quite apart from the fact a growing number of those eligible for the State pension (about 10%) can and do work, there are those who cannot work because of disability. There are those who are full time carers for family members.
I find Elliott's approach a cynical weaponising of "welfare" - what would the Conservatives actually do to reduce the welfare bill? Will they means test the State Pension and on what basis?
They're in the 'point out problems' stage of opposition only. Solutions are for later, and sometimes we don't even get that as you can win an election without doing so if you are fortunate.
Definitely goalhanging. As I'm in an online interview watching a candidate drown...
Hopefully not a lifeguard job.
Sadly its applicants to study pharmacy (but from Access to HE courses). Usually very poor, the current one is one of the worst I've seen. He's trying a calculation right now that I suspect every PB member would achieved in 20 s or less. And failing.
I'm surprised that its usually very poor from Access courses.
I don't know what they're generally like, but my wife started Uni this year after doing an Access course (self-study, online, as well as working) last year. She was advised before she started that, that if you can do well on the Access course you should be good for Uni and that the Access course is quite challenging. She said in hindsight she agrees with that, in part as was then working so juggling the course with her job, whereas now she's full-time doing her degree/placements, but that the Access course was good prep.
Don't know if all Access courses are similar or some are better than others.
There is significant variation. I have interviewed into the three figures products of access courses. There are some good students there - typically ones who choose the wrong route early but then want to do pharmacy and don't have the A levels in the right subjects. I have accepted one such this morning.
Then there are the vast majority that were not good enough to get the right grades initially but can get the lower grades for the Access to HE courses and hope that will get them on the main course. At a Top 10 Uni like Bath (are you listening @HYUFD - we not a Russel Group but we are better than most of them) they don't cut it.
At some point I'll share a typical calculation that floors them. PBers will have no dificulty.
Is is
Simplify (a-x)(b-x)(c-x)...(z-x)
?
=0
Only when x is equal to one of the constants (I presume they are constants) a to z.
At a guess, the one between w and y?
Yes, yes. Now I'm embarrassed. I'm just so used to a, b, c, etc being constants and x, y , z, etc being variables.
x can be as variable as it likes, and (x-x) will always be zero
I've always wondered how double posts appeared. You've just managed 5 of them!
Sorry. I got error ‘failed’ messages from the site on my posts so clicked on ‘post’ again. I had no way of knowing it would eventually post my comment over and over.
I’m also quite stressed out as yesterday I had to wrestle a close friend to the ground to stop her throwing herself out of a third floor window, and today I was phoned by the Police to say that this morning she’d done precisely that. This week is one I won’t ever forget.
No apology needed, it's interesting to know how it happens.
And my condolences. A harrowing couple of days.
Her mistake, if that's the right word, was not looking down before she jumped, and hence not noticing that despite being very high up and with paving stones below, the flat beneath hers had a balcony with a washing line strung along it and the door open. It appears that after jumping from the window, she tangled with the washing line, impacted the top of the door, then the railings of the balcony, before falling one more storey to the hard ground below. She was determined to end her life, being terminally ill, but is now in a London hospital with several broken ribs and a punctured lung. It's a truly tragic story, from start to finish. It would play into the assisted dying debate, save for the fact that the mental breakdown she has had, following her terminal diagnosis, would render her considered incapable of making a considered decision about how she wishes her life to end.
Now, she faces a few weeks heavily sedated - as a suicide risk in a regular hospital - and once the injuries from her fall have healed, being returned under section 3 of the MHA to a secure mental health ward where her life will likely end.
Sounds awful for both her and you. Best wishes.
It is a fairly extreme reaction to a terminal diagnosis, assuming that she has no pre existing psychiatric history. It may well be that her mental state bounces back, and certainly sounds like she needs to talk to the pallative care team.
My amateur assessment is that the stress of the diagnosis and the operations and treatments she has had, has led to some sort of psychotic breakdown. If she'd said she didn't want to die a slow, lingering death from spreading cancer, I could rationalise and understand what she's done - but her explanation for the attempted suicides is that she's being followed everywhere and there is a criminal gang, working in consort with her brother, her parents, and the cleaners at the mental hospital, who have stolen her identity and who plan to torture her and bump her off in the night. Hence why she got sectioned, under section 2, in the first place. It's distressing, if also enlightening given that despite my many years in local government I've not really interacted with mental health services before, to see someone previously intelligent and rational descend so quickly into such a dark and twisted state of mind.
Is she on dexamethasone or methylprednisolone? Sometimes the neurosurgeons use it to reduce swelling around tumours etc.
It can sometimes induce paranoid psychosis in the doses that they use.
Not sure. She's had surgery, a course of daily radiotherapy, and is still on chemotherapy pills (although after being sectioned she only got them occasionally), but the NHS works in silos and each bit does its stuff and then signs her off until some future review. There's never anyone monitoring and managing each patient's holistic care, and if the patient or their friends and family aren't able to try and join the dots and convey information from one silo to another, it doesn't get done. As it was she was discharged Monday without any of her medication and when challenged they had to pay for a motorcyle courier to despatch it across North London. Most of their patients won't have the resources to do so.
It all sounds very chaotic and haphazard. I wish I could say that I am surprised, but that is the world that I know.
It is the GP's role to co-ordinate care between the Specialists in their silos. Sadly they often lack the time and sometimes the motivation to do so under the pressure of other demands.
It is probably worth checking if the chemo includes steroids. If she had radiotherapy then that may well be the case. I have seen some pretty flamboyant steroid psychoses in my junior doctor days.
The GP bit of the health service is broken, surely you must know that.
Yes, sadly I do know that.
I am not a big fan of Streetings 10 year plan for the NHS (far too much obsession with tech-bro solutions and if the pilot schemes that I have seen likely to keel over in a big way) but I do approve of the emphasis on Primary Care.
I have my doubts that the GP system is fixable. There has been too much loss of grognard experience for it to be restored to what it was. The problem is not primarily financial, but rather one of medical education and vocation. There are some great GPs out there, but they get fewer each year.
I haven't seen a doctor at my practice since the pandemic. Nowadays, you just fill in the e-consult form - who reviews it at the practice end, I don't know, but at best you get a phone call, or get called into the practice for an appointment that turns out to be with some variety of nurse. They're nice, helpful people but utterly unable to connect one dot with another; whatever symptom you've reported is all they can focus on, and you either get sent away with some advice you've already found yourself after five minutes on Google, or referred off for whatever test their book says people with your symptom should get. And you never get the results, especially if there's nothing found, and can only discover by accident if you log into your NHS account every month or so to see if anything new has been posted. Today I finally saw a specialist about some annoying but non-life-threatening condition for which I was referred in June 2024 - so a twenty-one month wait even to get to first consultation - and he quickly identified that some other symptoms I have, for which I have meanwhile been referred off for various tests at the hospital (all of which came back negative - a waste of money that should have been obvious to any intelligent doctor at the outset, had one ever had the case in front of him or her) all likely derive from the same probable condition. As it is, he said that I'd need a scan, for which there is currently a two month wait, and then need to come back for a follow-up consultation likely two months later. So it will be well past the two year point before we get to the stage of deciding whether anything can be done. Meanwhile my GP might as well not exist, since they don't have the capacity to keep up with the flood of new patient complaints, let alone spend time overseeing the cases of patients referred off elsewhere. Once you've been referred off from a GP practice, that appears to be the end of their interest or involvement.
Definitely goalhanging. As I'm in an online interview watching a candidate drown...
Hopefully not a lifeguard job.
Sadly its applicants to study pharmacy (but from Access to HE courses). Usually very poor, the current one is one of the worst I've seen. He's trying a calculation right now that I suspect every PB member would achieved in 20 s or less. And failing.
I'm surprised that its usually very poor from Access courses.
I don't know what they're generally like, but my wife started Uni this year after doing an Access course (self-study, online, as well as working) last year. She was advised before she started that, that if you can do well on the Access course you should be good for Uni and that the Access course is quite challenging. She said in hindsight she agrees with that, in part as was then working so juggling the course with her job, whereas now she's full-time doing her degree/placements, but that the Access course was good prep.
Don't know if all Access courses are similar or some are better than others.
There is significant variation. I have interviewed into the three figures products of access courses. There are some good students there - typically ones who choose the wrong route early but then want to do pharmacy and don't have the A levels in the right subjects. I have accepted one such this morning.
Then there are the vast majority that were not good enough to get the right grades initially but can get the lower grades for the Access to HE courses and hope that will get them on the main course. At a Top 10 Uni like Bath (are you listening @HYUFD - we not a Russel Group but we are better than most of them) they don't cut it.
At some point I'll share a typical calculation that floors them. PBers will have no dificulty.
Is is
Simplify (a-x)(b-x)(c-x)...(z-x)
?
=0
Only when x is equal to one of the constants (I presume they are constants) a to z.
At a guess, the one between w and y?
Yes, yes. Now I'm embarrassed. I'm just so used to a, b, c, etc being constants and x, y , z, etc being variables.
x can be as variable as it likes, and (x-x) will always be zero
I've always wondered how double posts appeared. You've just managed 5 of them!
Sorry. I got error ‘failed’ messages from the site on my posts so clicked on ‘post’ again. I had no way of knowing it would eventually post my comment over and over.
I’m also quite stressed out as yesterday I had to wrestle a close friend to the ground to stop her throwing herself out of a third floor window, and today I was phoned by the Police to say that this morning she’d done precisely that. This week is one I won’t ever forget.
No apology needed, it's interesting to know how it happens.
And my condolences. A harrowing couple of days.
Her mistake, if that's the right word, was not looking down before she jumped, and hence not noticing that despite being very high up and with paving stones below, the flat beneath hers had a balcony with a washing line strung along it and the door open. It appears that after jumping from the window, she tangled with the washing line, impacted the top of the door, then the railings of the balcony, before falling one more storey to the hard ground below. She was determined to end her life, being terminally ill, but is now in a London hospital with several broken ribs and a punctured lung. It's a truly tragic story, from start to finish. It would play into the assisted dying debate, save for the fact that the mental breakdown she has had, following her terminal diagnosis, would render her considered incapable of making a considered decision about how she wishes her life to end.
Now, she faces a few weeks heavily sedated - as a suicide risk in a regular hospital - and once the injuries from her fall have healed, being returned under section 3 of the MHA to a secure mental health ward where her life will likely end.
Sounds awful for both her and you. Best wishes.
It is a fairly extreme reaction to a terminal diagnosis, assuming that she has no pre existing psychiatric history. It may well be that her mental state bounces back, and certainly sounds like she needs to talk to the pallative care team.
My amateur assessment is that the stress of the diagnosis and the operations and treatments she has had, has led to some sort of psychotic breakdown. If she'd said she didn't want to die a slow, lingering death from spreading cancer, I could rationalise and understand what she's done - but her explanation for the attempted suicides is that she's being followed everywhere and there is a criminal gang, working in consort with her brother, her parents, and the cleaners at the mental hospital, who have stolen her identity and who plan to torture her and bump her off in the night. Hence why she got sectioned, under section 2, in the first place. It's distressing, if also enlightening given that despite my many years in local government I've not really interacted with mental health services before, to see someone previously intelligent and rational descend so quickly into such a dark and twisted state of mind.
My utmost sympathies. I have a very troubled sister and about 20 odd years ago I was disgorged from my hungover bed by the police, almost like the opening of apocalypse now, as my sister was on a cliff edge ready to jump and apparently I was the only person she would talk to. I went and sat on the edge of the cliff with her for about two hours trying to reason, explaining she wasn’t helping my hangover and managed to talk her down. It’s the worst feeling in the world to feel you have someone’s life in your hands where they aren’t rational and you are worried that the wrong word or look could be the difference.
As the comments suggest, that's more than a little misleading.
It denigrates pensioners who represent about £180 billion of the £333 billion welfare spend and classes them as "not working" which, while accurate, is part of what seems to be a deliberate demonising of them as a group.
If any party wants to means test the State pension or withdraw it from, far example, higher rate tax payers, they should come out and say so and explain how it will be done without cliff edges and a huge bureaucracy.
The small matter of what we have to pay in Debt Interest and how we have got to this point should perhaps get a bit more discussion.
I'm a pensioner and I've long since given up saying I'm retired, as it gives the impression my time is spent unproductively. Actually I work as hard as I'm able to, albeit in voluntary work so I don't earn money.
Definitely goalhanging. As I'm in an online interview watching a candidate drown...
Hopefully not a lifeguard job.
Sadly its applicants to study pharmacy (but from Access to HE courses). Usually very poor, the current one is one of the worst I've seen. He's trying a calculation right now that I suspect every PB member would achieved in 20 s or less. And failing.
I'm surprised that its usually very poor from Access courses.
I don't know what they're generally like, but my wife started Uni this year after doing an Access course (self-study, online, as well as working) last year. She was advised before she started that, that if you can do well on the Access course you should be good for Uni and that the Access course is quite challenging. She said in hindsight she agrees with that, in part as was then working so juggling the course with her job, whereas now she's full-time doing her degree/placements, but that the Access course was good prep.
Don't know if all Access courses are similar or some are better than others.
There is significant variation. I have interviewed into the three figures products of access courses. There are some good students there - typically ones who choose the wrong route early but then want to do pharmacy and don't have the A levels in the right subjects. I have accepted one such this morning.
Then there are the vast majority that were not good enough to get the right grades initially but can get the lower grades for the Access to HE courses and hope that will get them on the main course. At a Top 10 Uni like Bath (are you listening @HYUFD - we not a Russel Group but we are better than most of them) they don't cut it.
At some point I'll share a typical calculation that floors them. PBers will have no dificulty.
Is is
Simplify (a-x)(b-x)(c-x)...(z-x)
?
=0
Only when x is equal to one of the constants (I presume they are constants) a to z.
At a guess, the one between w and y?
Yes, yes. Now I'm embarrassed. I'm just so used to a, b, c, etc being constants and x, y , z, etc being variables.
x can be as variable as it likes, and (x-x) will always be zero
I've always wondered how double posts appeared. You've just managed 5 of them!
Sorry. I got error ‘failed’ messages from the site on my posts so clicked on ‘post’ again. I had no way of knowing it would eventually post my comment over and over.
I’m also quite stressed out as yesterday I had to wrestle a close friend to the ground to stop her throwing herself out of a third floor window, and today I was phoned by the Police to say that this morning she’d done precisely that. This week is one I won’t ever forget.
No apology needed, it's interesting to know how it happens.
And my condolences. A harrowing couple of days.
Her mistake, if that's the right word, was not looking down before she jumped, and hence not noticing that despite being very high up and with paving stones below, the flat beneath hers had a balcony with a washing line strung along it and the door open. It appears that after jumping from the window, she tangled with the washing line, impacted the top of the door, then the railings of the balcony, before falling one more storey to the hard ground below. She was determined to end her life, being terminally ill, but is now in a London hospital with several broken ribs and a punctured lung. It's a truly tragic story, from start to finish. It would play into the assisted dying debate, save for the fact that the mental breakdown she has had, following her terminal diagnosis, would render her considered incapable of making a considered decision about how she wishes her life to end.
Now, she faces a few weeks heavily sedated - as a suicide risk in a regular hospital - and once the injuries from her fall have healed, being returned under section 3 of the MHA to a secure mental health ward where her life will likely end.
Sounds awful for both her and you. Best wishes.
It is a fairly extreme reaction to a terminal diagnosis, assuming that she has no pre existing psychiatric history. It may well be that her mental state bounces back, and certainly sounds like she needs to talk to the pallative care team.
My amateur assessment is that the stress of the diagnosis and the operations and treatments she has had, has led to some sort of psychotic breakdown. If she'd said she didn't want to die a slow, lingering death from spreading cancer, I could rationalise and understand what she's done - but her explanation for the attempted suicides is that she's being followed everywhere and there is a criminal gang, working in consort with her brother, her parents, and the cleaners at the mental hospital, who have stolen her identity and who plan to torture her and bump her off in the night. Hence why she got sectioned, under section 2, in the first place. It's distressing, if also enlightening given that despite my many years in local government I've not really interacted with mental health services before, to see someone previously intelligent and rational descend so quickly into such a dark and twisted state of mind.
My utmost sympathies. I have a very troubled sister and about 20 odd years ago I was disgorged from my hungover bed by the police, almost like the opening of apocalypse now, as my sister was on a cliff edge ready to jump and apparently I was the only person she would talk to. I went and sat on the edge of the cliff with her for about two hours trying to reason, explaining she wasn’t helping my hangover and managed to talk her down. It’s the worst feeling in the world to feel you have someone’s life in your hands where they aren’t rational and you are worried that the wrong word or look could be the difference.
The saddest thing - especially since she likely has only between six and twelve months to live - is that she spent much of yesterday pleading not to be sent back to the mental hospital, yet she was so determined to do the one thing that is now almost guaranteed to ensure that's where she'll be spending much if not all of her life remaining.
Definitely goalhanging. As I'm in an online interview watching a candidate drown...
Hopefully not a lifeguard job.
Sadly its applicants to study pharmacy (but from Access to HE courses). Usually very poor, the current one is one of the worst I've seen. He's trying a calculation right now that I suspect every PB member would achieved in 20 s or less. And failing.
I'm surprised that its usually very poor from Access courses.
I don't know what they're generally like, but my wife started Uni this year after doing an Access course (self-study, online, as well as working) last year. She was advised before she started that, that if you can do well on the Access course you should be good for Uni and that the Access course is quite challenging. She said in hindsight she agrees with that, in part as was then working so juggling the course with her job, whereas now she's full-time doing her degree/placements, but that the Access course was good prep.
Don't know if all Access courses are similar or some are better than others.
There is significant variation. I have interviewed into the three figures products of access courses. There are some good students there - typically ones who choose the wrong route early but then want to do pharmacy and don't have the A levels in the right subjects. I have accepted one such this morning.
Then there are the vast majority that were not good enough to get the right grades initially but can get the lower grades for the Access to HE courses and hope that will get them on the main course. At a Top 10 Uni like Bath (are you listening @HYUFD - we not a Russel Group but we are better than most of them) they don't cut it.
At some point I'll share a typical calculation that floors them. PBers will have no dificulty.
Is is
Simplify (a-x)(b-x)(c-x)...(z-x)
?
=0
Only when x is equal to one of the constants (I presume they are constants) a to z.
At a guess, the one between w and y?
Yes, yes. Now I'm embarrassed. I'm just so used to a, b, c, etc being constants and x, y , z, etc being variables.
x can be as variable as it likes, and (x-x) will always be zero
I've always wondered how double posts appeared. You've just managed 5 of them!
Sorry. I got error ‘failed’ messages from the site on my posts so clicked on ‘post’ again. I had no way of knowing it would eventually post my comment over and over.
I’m also quite stressed out as yesterday I had to wrestle a close friend to the ground to stop her throwing herself out of a third floor window, and today I was phoned by the Police to say that this morning she’d done precisely that. This week is one I won’t ever forget.
No apology needed, it's interesting to know how it happens.
And my condolences. A harrowing couple of days.
Her mistake, if that's the right word, was not looking down before she jumped, and hence not noticing that despite being very high up and with paving stones below, the flat beneath hers had a balcony with a washing line strung along it and the door open. It appears that after jumping from the window, she tangled with the washing line, impacted the top of the door, then the railings of the balcony, before falling one more storey to the hard ground below. She was determined to end her life, being terminally ill, but is now in a London hospital with several broken ribs and a punctured lung. It's a truly tragic story, from start to finish. It would play into the assisted dying debate, save for the fact that the mental breakdown she has had, following her terminal diagnosis, would render her considered incapable of making a considered decision about how she wishes her life to end.
Now, she faces a few weeks heavily sedated - as a suicide risk in a regular hospital - and once the injuries from her fall have healed, being returned under section 3 of the MHA to a secure mental health ward where her life will likely end.
Sounds awful for both her and you. Best wishes.
It is a fairly extreme reaction to a terminal diagnosis, assuming that she has no pre existing psychiatric history. It may well be that her mental state bounces back, and certainly sounds like she needs to talk to the pallative care team.
My amateur assessment is that the stress of the diagnosis and the operations and treatments she has had, has led to some sort of psychotic breakdown. If she'd said she didn't want to die a slow, lingering death from spreading cancer, I could rationalise and understand what she's done - but her explanation for the attempted suicides is that she's being followed everywhere and there is a criminal gang, working in consort with her brother, her parents, and the cleaners at the mental hospital, who have stolen her identity and who plan to torture her and bump her off in the night. Hence why she got sectioned, under section 2, in the first place. It's distressing, if also enlightening given that despite my many years in local government I've not really interacted with mental health services before, to see someone previously intelligent and rational descend so quickly into such a dark and twisted state of mind.
Is she on dexamethasone or methylprednisolone? Sometimes the neurosurgeons use it to reduce swelling around tumours etc.
It can sometimes induce paranoid psychosis in the doses that they use.
Not sure. She's had surgery, a course of daily radiotherapy, and is still on chemotherapy pills (although after being sectioned she only got them occasionally), but the NHS works in silos and each bit does its stuff and then signs her off until some future review. There's never anyone monitoring and managing each patient's holistic care, and if the patient or their friends and family aren't able to try and join the dots and convey information from one silo to another, it doesn't get done. As it was she was discharged Monday without any of her medication and when challenged they had to pay for a motorcyle courier to despatch it across North London. Most of their patients won't have the resources to do so.
It all sounds very chaotic and haphazard. I wish I could say that I am surprised, but that is the world that I know.
It is the GP's role to co-ordinate care between the Specialists in their silos. Sadly they often lack the time and sometimes the motivation to do so under the pressure of other demands.
It is probably worth checking if the chemo includes steroids. If she had radiotherapy then that may well be the case. I have seen some pretty flamboyant steroid psychoses in my junior doctor days.
The GP bit of the health service is broken, surely you must know that.
Yes, sadly I do know that.
I am not a big fan of Streetings 10 year plan for the NHS (far too much obsession with tech-bro solutions and if the pilot schemes that I have seen likely to keel over in a big way) but I do approve of the emphasis on Primary Care.
I have my doubts that the GP system is fixable. There has been too much loss of grognard experience for it to be restored to what it was. The problem is not primarily financial, but rather one of medical education and vocation. There are some great GPs out there, but they get fewer each year.
I haven't seen a doctor at my practice since the pandemic. Nowadays, you just fill in the e-consult form - who reviews it at the practice end, I don't know, but at best you get a phone call, or get called into the practice for an appointment that turns out to be with some variety of nurse. They're nice, helpful people but utterly unable to connect one dot with another; whatever symptom you've reported is all they can focus on, and you either get sent away with some advice you've already found yourself after five minutes on Google, or referred off for whatever test their book says people with your symptom should get. And you never get the results, especially if there's nothing found, and can only discover by accident if you log into your NHS account every month or so to see if anything new has been posted. Today I finally saw a specialist about some annoying but non-life-threatening condition for which I was referred in June 2024 - so a twenty-one month wait even to get to first consultation - and he quickly identified that some other symptoms I have, for which I have meanwhile been referred off for various tests at the hospital (all of which came back negative - a waste of money that should have been obvious to any intelligent doctor at the outset, had one ever had the case in front of him or her) all likely derive from the same probable condition. As it is, he said that I'd need a scan, for which there is currently a two month wait, and then need to come back for a follow-up consultation likely two months later. So it will be well past the two year point before we get to the stage of deciding whether anything can be done. Meanwhile my GP might as well not exist, since they don't have the capacity to keep up with the flood of new patient complaints, let alone spend time overseeing the cases of patients referred off elsewhere. Once you've been referred off from a GP practice, that appears to be the end of their interest or involvement.
I don't disagree. My own family's experience of Island Medical services is my only concern about retiring there.
One of the bizarre aspects of the drive to put non-doctors* into Primary care is that there is funding for these staff, but not for extra GP principals. We have contrived a similtaneous crisis of GP access and one of GP unemployment. I cannot help wonder if it is deliberate.
*can be very useful in some tasks and I work with some excellent ones daily, but they are only good within tightly bound guidelines. They simply do not have the broader medical education to join the dots of holistic care that is so essential.
The Government will collect £331bn in income tax this year, and spend £333bn on welfare.
In other words, we now spend more on people not working than we raise from those who do.
And the cost?
Debt per person has risen from £11.5k in 2000 (inflation adjusted) to over £41k today.
I'm a little surprised it is not even higher.
Almost half of that 'welfare' spending is the state pension, which is deliberately omitted as otherwise it'd look like stupid comment...
The point is spent on people not working
Well that's also wrong as many of the benefits such as housing benefit, child benefit etc are largely spent on people who are working but need additional assistance.
And, ignoring arguments over the triple lock and retirement age, we need to have some state pension. People pay taxes when younger to fund when older, even if it's not funded that way.
It's just a ragebait headline that doesn't tell us anything useful.
Definitely goalhanging. As I'm in an online interview watching a candidate drown...
Hopefully not a lifeguard job.
Sadly its applicants to study pharmacy (but from Access to HE courses). Usually very poor, the current one is one of the worst I've seen. He's trying a calculation right now that I suspect every PB member would achieved in 20 s or less. And failing.
I'm surprised that its usually very poor from Access courses.
I don't know what they're generally like, but my wife started Uni this year after doing an Access course (self-study, online, as well as working) last year. She was advised before she started that, that if you can do well on the Access course you should be good for Uni and that the Access course is quite challenging. She said in hindsight she agrees with that, in part as was then working so juggling the course with her job, whereas now she's full-time doing her degree/placements, but that the Access course was good prep.
Don't know if all Access courses are similar or some are better than others.
There is significant variation. I have interviewed into the three figures products of access courses. There are some good students there - typically ones who choose the wrong route early but then want to do pharmacy and don't have the A levels in the right subjects. I have accepted one such this morning.
Then there are the vast majority that were not good enough to get the right grades initially but can get the lower grades for the Access to HE courses and hope that will get them on the main course. At a Top 10 Uni like Bath (are you listening @HYUFD - we not a Russel Group but we are better than most of them) they don't cut it.
At some point I'll share a typical calculation that floors them. PBers will have no dificulty.
Is is
Simplify (a-x)(b-x)(c-x)...(z-x)
?
=0
Only when x is equal to one of the constants (I presume they are constants) a to z.
At a guess, the one between w and y?
Yes, yes. Now I'm embarrassed. I'm just so used to a, b, c, etc being constants and x, y , z, etc being variables.
x can be as variable as it likes, and (x-x) will always be zero
I've always wondered how double posts appeared. You've just managed 5 of them!
Sorry. I got error ‘failed’ messages from the site on my posts so clicked on ‘post’ again. I had no way of knowing it would eventually post my comment over and over.
I’m also quite stressed out as yesterday I had to wrestle a close friend to the ground to stop her throwing herself out of a third floor window, and today I was phoned by the Police to say that this morning she’d done precisely that. This week is one I won’t ever forget.
No apology needed, it's interesting to know how it happens.
And my condolences. A harrowing couple of days.
Her mistake, if that's the right word, was not looking down before she jumped, and hence not noticing that despite being very high up and with paving stones below, the flat beneath hers had a balcony with a washing line strung along it and the door open. It appears that after jumping from the window, she tangled with the washing line, impacted the top of the door, then the railings of the balcony, before falling one more storey to the hard ground below. She was determined to end her life, being terminally ill, but is now in a London hospital with several broken ribs and a punctured lung. It's a truly tragic story, from start to finish. It would play into the assisted dying debate, save for the fact that the mental breakdown she has had, following her terminal diagnosis, would render her considered incapable of making a considered decision about how she wishes her life to end.
Now, she faces a few weeks heavily sedated - as a suicide risk in a regular hospital - and once the injuries from her fall have healed, being returned under section 3 of the MHA to a secure mental health ward where her life will likely end.
Sounds awful for both her and you. Best wishes.
It is a fairly extreme reaction to a terminal diagnosis, assuming that she has no pre existing psychiatric history. It may well be that her mental state bounces back, and certainly sounds like she needs to talk to the pallative care team.
My amateur assessment is that the stress of the diagnosis and the operations and treatments she has had, has led to some sort of psychotic breakdown. If she'd said she didn't want to die a slow, lingering death from spreading cancer, I could rationalise and understand what she's done - but her explanation for the attempted suicides is that she's being followed everywhere and there is a criminal gang, working in consort with her brother, her parents, and the cleaners at the mental hospital, who have stolen her identity and who plan to torture her and bump her off in the night. Hence why she got sectioned, under section 2, in the first place. It's distressing, if also enlightening given that despite my many years in local government I've not really interacted with mental health services before, to see someone previously intelligent and rational descend so quickly into such a dark and twisted state of mind.
Is she on dexamethasone or methylprednisolone? Sometimes the neurosurgeons use it to reduce swelling around tumours etc.
It can sometimes induce paranoid psychosis in the doses that they use.
Not sure. She's had surgery, a course of daily radiotherapy, and is still on chemotherapy pills (although after being sectioned she only got them occasionally), but the NHS works in silos and each bit does its stuff and then signs her off until some future review. There's never anyone monitoring and managing each patient's holistic care, and if the patient or their friends and family aren't able to try and join the dots and convey information from one silo to another, it doesn't get done. As it was she was discharged Monday without any of her medication and when challenged they had to pay for a motorcyle courier to despatch it across North London. Most of their patients won't have the resources to do so.
It all sounds very chaotic and haphazard. I wish I could say that I am surprised, but that is the world that I know.
It is the GP's role to co-ordinate care between the Specialists in their silos. Sadly they often lack the time and sometimes the motivation to do so under the pressure of other demands.
It is probably worth checking if the chemo includes steroids. If she had radiotherapy then that may well be the case. I have seen some pretty flamboyant steroid psychoses in my junior doctor days.
The GP bit of the health service is broken, surely you must know that.
Yes, sadly I do know that.
I am not a big fan of Streetings 10 year plan for the NHS (far too much obsession with tech-bro solutions and if the pilot schemes that I have seen likely to keel over in a big way) but I do approve of the emphasis on Primary Care.
I have my doubts that the GP system is fixable. There has been too much loss of grognard experience for it to be restored to what it was. The problem is not primarily financial, but rather one of medical education and vocation. There are some great GPs out there, but they get fewer each year.
I haven't seen a doctor at my practice since the pandemic. Nowadays, you just fill in the e-consult form - who reviews it at the practice end, I don't know, but at best you get a phone call, or get called into the practice for an appointment that turns out to be with some variety of nurse. They're nice, helpful people but utterly unable to connect one dot with another; whatever symptom you've reported is all they can focus on, and you either get sent away with some advice you've already found yourself after five minutes on Google, or referred off for whatever test their book says people with your symptom should get. And you never get the results, especially if there's nothing found, and can only discover by accident if you log into your NHS account every month or so to see if anything new has been posted. Today I finally saw a specialist about some annoying but non-life-threatening condition for which I was referred in June 2024 - so a twenty-one month wait even to get to first consultation - and he quickly identified that some other symptoms I have, for which I have meanwhile been referred off for various tests at the hospital (all of which came back negative - a waste of money that should have been obvious to any intelligent doctor at the outset, had one ever had the case in front of him or her) all likely derive from the same probable condition. As it is, he said that I'd need a scan, for which there is currently a two month wait, and then need to come back for a follow-up consultation likely two months later. So it will be well past the two year point before we get to the stage of deciding whether anything can be done. Meanwhile my GP might as well not exist, since they don't have the capacity to keep up with the flood of new patient complaints, let alone spend time overseeing the cases of patients referred off elsewhere. Once you've been referred off from a GP practice, that appears to be the end of their interest or involvement.
I went for some heart scans a few years ago (family history). After waiting for a few months for the results I arranged an appointment with the GP. They scrolled through my records on their PC for a while then said "Well, I guess they decided there was nothing important. There's nothing here."
The Government will collect £331bn in income tax this year, and spend £333bn on welfare.
In other words, we now spend more on people not working than we raise from those who do.
And the cost?
Debt per person has risen from £11.5k in 2000 (inflation adjusted) to over £41k today.
I'm a little surprised it is not even higher.
Almost half of that 'welfare' spending is the state pension, which is deliberately omitted as otherwise it'd look like stupid comment...
The point is spent on people not working
Badenoch remains committed to the Triple Lock. Any other welfare cost savings are dwarfed by that commitment.
At present all parties are but that will inevitably change and be means tested
They are all unsustainable levels of welfare
Yet you remain a voter for the party most committed to keeping it.
You wouldn't vote Tory if you really wanted the finances to be sorted.
I don't think any party is offering to take public finances seriously. Tories strike me as slightly less addicted to spending beyond our means than Lab, LD, Ref or Green, but it's a low, low bar.
Definitely goalhanging. As I'm in an online interview watching a candidate drown...
Hopefully not a lifeguard job.
Sadly its applicants to study pharmacy (but from Access to HE courses). Usually very poor, the current one is one of the worst I've seen. He's trying a calculation right now that I suspect every PB member would achieved in 20 s or less. And failing.
I'm surprised that its usually very poor from Access courses.
I don't know what they're generally like, but my wife started Uni this year after doing an Access course (self-study, online, as well as working) last year. She was advised before she started that, that if you can do well on the Access course you should be good for Uni and that the Access course is quite challenging. She said in hindsight she agrees with that, in part as was then working so juggling the course with her job, whereas now she's full-time doing her degree/placements, but that the Access course was good prep.
Don't know if all Access courses are similar or some are better than others.
There is significant variation. I have interviewed into the three figures products of access courses. There are some good students there - typically ones who choose the wrong route early but then want to do pharmacy and don't have the A levels in the right subjects. I have accepted one such this morning.
Then there are the vast majority that were not good enough to get the right grades initially but can get the lower grades for the Access to HE courses and hope that will get them on the main course. At a Top 10 Uni like Bath (are you listening @HYUFD - we not a Russel Group but we are better than most of them) they don't cut it.
At some point I'll share a typical calculation that floors them. PBers will have no dificulty.
Is is
Simplify (a-x)(b-x)(c-x)...(z-x)
?
=0
Only when x is equal to one of the constants (I presume they are constants) a to z.
At a guess, the one between w and y?
Yes, yes. Now I'm embarrassed. I'm just so used to a, b, c, etc being constants and x, y , z, etc being variables.
x can be as variable as it likes, and (x-x) will always be zero
I've always wondered how double posts appeared. You've just managed 5 of them!
Sorry. I got error ‘failed’ messages from the site on my posts so clicked on ‘post’ again. I had no way of knowing it would eventually post my comment over and over.
I’m also quite stressed out as yesterday I had to wrestle a close friend to the ground to stop her throwing herself out of a third floor window, and today I was phoned by the Police to say that this morning she’d done precisely that. This week is one I won’t ever forget.
No apology needed, it's interesting to know how it happens.
And my condolences. A harrowing couple of days.
Her mistake, if that's the right word, was not looking down before she jumped, and hence not noticing that despite being very high up and with paving stones below, the flat beneath hers had a balcony with a washing line strung along it and the door open. It appears that after jumping from the window, she tangled with the washing line, impacted the top of the door, then the railings of the balcony, before falling one more storey to the hard ground below. She was determined to end her life, being terminally ill, but is now in a London hospital with several broken ribs and a punctured lung. It's a truly tragic story, from start to finish. It would play into the assisted dying debate, save for the fact that the mental breakdown she has had, following her terminal diagnosis, would render her considered incapable of making a considered decision about how she wishes her life to end.
Now, she faces a few weeks heavily sedated - as a suicide risk in a regular hospital - and once the injuries from her fall have healed, being returned under section 3 of the MHA to a secure mental health ward where her life will likely end.
Sounds awful for both her and you. Best wishes.
It is a fairly extreme reaction to a terminal diagnosis, assuming that she has no pre existing psychiatric history. It may well be that her mental state bounces back, and certainly sounds like she needs to talk to the pallative care team.
My amateur assessment is that the stress of the diagnosis and the operations and treatments she has had, has led to some sort of psychotic breakdown. If she'd said she didn't want to die a slow, lingering death from spreading cancer, I could rationalise and understand what she's done - but her explanation for the attempted suicides is that she's being followed everywhere and there is a criminal gang, working in consort with her brother, her parents, and the cleaners at the mental hospital, who have stolen her identity and who plan to torture her and bump her off in the night. Hence why she got sectioned, under section 2, in the first place. It's distressing, if also enlightening given that despite my many years in local government I've not really interacted with mental health services before, to see someone previously intelligent and rational descend so quickly into such a dark and twisted state of mind.
My utmost sympathies. I have a very troubled sister and about 20 odd years ago I was disgorged from my hungover bed by the police, almost like the opening of apocalypse now, as my sister was on a cliff edge ready to jump and apparently I was the only person she would talk to. I went and sat on the edge of the cliff with her for about two hours trying to reason, explaining she wasn’t helping my hangover and managed to talk her down. It’s the worst feeling in the world to feel you have someone’s life in your hands where they aren’t rational and you are worried that the wrong word or look could be the difference.
The saddest thing - especially since she likely has only between six and twelve months to live - is that she spent much of yesterday pleading not to be sent back to the mental hospital, yet she was so determined to do the one thing that is now almost guaranteed to ensure that's where she'll be spending much if not all of her life remaining.
I do have an agreement with one of my sisters that if I am terminal and lose the will to live to get hold of a load of opioids and heroin that I can knock back and go out in a stream of delirium.
Could have done with it this week as was, slightly ironically, nearly dying from a fall and ripped my face off at a wake. I’m clearly nothing without my beautiful face so was very worried. But we soldier on. The funeralee (if that’s a word) would have been very amused by me joining him whilst utterly bollocksed.
Definitely goalhanging. As I'm in an online interview watching a candidate drown...
Hopefully not a lifeguard job.
Sadly its applicants to study pharmacy (but from Access to HE courses). Usually very poor, the current one is one of the worst I've seen. He's trying a calculation right now that I suspect every PB member would achieved in 20 s or less. And failing.
I'm surprised that its usually very poor from Access courses.
I don't know what they're generally like, but my wife started Uni this year after doing an Access course (self-study, online, as well as working) last year. She was advised before she started that, that if you can do well on the Access course you should be good for Uni and that the Access course is quite challenging. She said in hindsight she agrees with that, in part as was then working so juggling the course with her job, whereas now she's full-time doing her degree/placements, but that the Access course was good prep.
Don't know if all Access courses are similar or some are better than others.
There is significant variation. I have interviewed into the three figures products of access courses. There are some good students there - typically ones who choose the wrong route early but then want to do pharmacy and don't have the A levels in the right subjects. I have accepted one such this morning.
Then there are the vast majority that were not good enough to get the right grades initially but can get the lower grades for the Access to HE courses and hope that will get them on the main course. At a Top 10 Uni like Bath (are you listening @HYUFD - we not a Russel Group but we are better than most of them) they don't cut it.
At some point I'll share a typical calculation that floors them. PBers will have no dificulty.
Is is
Simplify (a-x)(b-x)(c-x)...(z-x)
?
=0
Only when x is equal to one of the constants (I presume they are constants) a to z.
At a guess, the one between w and y?
Yes, yes. Now I'm embarrassed. I'm just so used to a, b, c, etc being constants and x, y , z, etc being variables.
x can be as variable as it likes, and (x-x) will always be zero
I've always wondered how double posts appeared. You've just managed 5 of them!
Sorry. I got error ‘failed’ messages from the site on my posts so clicked on ‘post’ again. I had no way of knowing it would eventually post my comment over and over.
I’m also quite stressed out as yesterday I had to wrestle a close friend to the ground to stop her throwing herself out of a third floor window, and today I was phoned by the Police to say that this morning she’d done precisely that. This week is one I won’t ever forget.
No apology needed, it's interesting to know how it happens.
And my condolences. A harrowing couple of days.
Her mistake, if that's the right word, was not looking down before she jumped, and hence not noticing that despite being very high up and with paving stones below, the flat beneath hers had a balcony with a washing line strung along it and the door open. It appears that after jumping from the window, she tangled with the washing line, impacted the top of the door, then the railings of the balcony, before falling one more storey to the hard ground below. She was determined to end her life, being terminally ill, but is now in a London hospital with several broken ribs and a punctured lung. It's a truly tragic story, from start to finish. It would play into the assisted dying debate, save for the fact that the mental breakdown she has had, following her terminal diagnosis, would render her considered incapable of making a considered decision about how she wishes her life to end.
Now, she faces a few weeks heavily sedated - as a suicide risk in a regular hospital - and once the injuries from her fall have healed, being returned under section 3 of the MHA to a secure mental health ward where her life will likely end.
Sounds awful for both her and you. Best wishes.
It is a fairly extreme reaction to a terminal diagnosis, assuming that she has no pre existing psychiatric history. It may well be that her mental state bounces back, and certainly sounds like she needs to talk to the pallative care team.
My amateur assessment is that the stress of the diagnosis and the operations and treatments she has had, has led to some sort of psychotic breakdown. If she'd said she didn't want to die a slow, lingering death from spreading cancer, I could rationalise and understand what she's done - but her explanation for the attempted suicides is that she's being followed everywhere and there is a criminal gang, working in consort with her brother, her parents, and the cleaners at the mental hospital, who have stolen her identity and who plan to torture her and bump her off in the night. Hence why she got sectioned, under section 2, in the first place. It's distressing, if also enlightening given that despite my many years in local government I've not really interacted with mental health services before, to see someone previously intelligent and rational descend so quickly into such a dark and twisted state of mind.
Is she on dexamethasone or methylprednisolone? Sometimes the neurosurgeons use it to reduce swelling around tumours etc.
It can sometimes induce paranoid psychosis in the doses that they use.
Not sure. She's had surgery, a course of daily radiotherapy, and is still on chemotherapy pills (although after being sectioned she only got them occasionally), but the NHS works in silos and each bit does its stuff and then signs her off until some future review. There's never anyone monitoring and managing each patient's holistic care, and if the patient or their friends and family aren't able to try and join the dots and convey information from one silo to another, it doesn't get done. As it was she was discharged Monday without any of her medication and when challenged they had to pay for a motorcyle courier to despatch it across North London. Most of their patients won't have the resources to do so.
It all sounds very chaotic and haphazard. I wish I could say that I am surprised, but that is the world that I know.
It is the GP's role to co-ordinate care between the Specialists in their silos. Sadly they often lack the time and sometimes the motivation to do so under the pressure of other demands.
It is probably worth checking if the chemo includes steroids. If she had radiotherapy then that may well be the case. I have seen some pretty flamboyant steroid psychoses in my junior doctor days.
The GP bit of the health service is broken, surely you must know that.
Yes, sadly I do know that.
I am not a big fan of Streetings 10 year plan for the NHS (far too much obsession with tech-bro solutions and if the pilot schemes that I have seen likely to keel over in a big way) but I do approve of the emphasis on Primary Care.
I have my doubts that the GP system is fixable. There has been too much loss of grognard experience for it to be restored to what it was. The problem is not primarily financial, but rather one of medical education and vocation. There are some great GPs out there, but they get fewer each year.
I haven't seen a doctor at my practice since the pandemic. Nowadays, you just fill in the e-consult form - who reviews it at the practice end, I don't know, but at best you get a phone call, or get called into the practice for an appointment that turns out to be with some variety of nurse. They're nice, helpful people but utterly unable to connect one dot with another; whatever symptom you've reported is all they can focus on, and you either get sent away with some advice you've already found yourself after five minutes on Google, or referred off for whatever test their book says people with your symptom should get. And you never get the results, especially if there's nothing found, and can only discover by accident if you log into your NHS account every month or so to see if anything new has been posted. Today I finally saw a specialist about some annoying but non-life-threatening condition for which I was referred in June 2024 - so a twenty-one month wait even to get to first consultation - and he quickly identified that some other symptoms I have, for which I have meanwhile been referred off for various tests at the hospital (all of which came back negative - a waste of money that should have been obvious to any intelligent doctor at the outset, had one ever had the case in front of him or her) all likely derive from the same probable condition. As it is, he said that I'd need a scan, for which there is currently a two month wait, and then need to come back for a follow-up consultation likely two months later. So it will be well past the two year point before we get to the stage of deciding whether anything can be done. Meanwhile my GP might as well not exist, since they don't have the capacity to keep up with the flood of new patient complaints, let alone spend time overseeing the cases of patients referred off elsewhere. Once you've been referred off from a GP practice, that appears to be the end of their interest or involvement.
I'm lucky to live on Torbay and have an excellent GP
Far better than anything experienced in the West Midlands up to 2017
Twice filled in a Klinik online form in past 3 years. Both times in considable pain.
Both times saw a GP within 24 hours.
First time antibiotics sorted in 14 days.
Second time GP same day. Antibiotics and MRI scan. Scan within 21 days non cancerous medication
That GP visit though led to seeing different GP expert in a different non aggressive condition. Within 2 weeks very specific cryptotherapy treatment ongoing
It's outstanding service. I'm lucky and not making any political point.
What is happening here are a number of AI trials and new technology linked to a new Treatment and Scanning Centre linked yo Torbay Hospital.
As the comments suggest, that's more than a little misleading.
It denigrates pensioners who represent about £180 billion of the £333 billion welfare spend and classes them as "not working" which, while accurate, is part of what seems to be a deliberate demonising of them as a group.
If any party wants to means test the State pension or withdraw it from, far example, higher rate tax payers, they should come out and say so and explain how it will be done without cliff edges and a huge bureaucracy.
The small matter of what we have to pay in Debt Interest and how we have got to this point should perhaps get a bit more discussion.
Why is it misleading?
It’s pointing out that the total benefits bill, which includes pensions, exceeds income tax proceeds. Which it does.
State pensions are a benefit, just like the other state payments.
A simple solution, is to merge employee NI and IT, with a retained, lower rate for lower rate tax paying pensioners. So only pensioners receiving £50k a year or more, would pay more tax.
Treat the state pension like a tax allowance. Incidentally? I would simplify the tax system at the same time
1) Personal allowance fixed, not withdrawn. 2) Sets suitable rates to make up for this, combining IT and NI
This would get rid of various anomalies.
So a simpler, fairer tax system. Cheaper to run, as well.
I would do all that and go one step further, merge UC with Income Tax.
Comments
Getting regime change would be better.
If Iran can be diminished to the level of threat of the Houthis, then I think insurance for the Strait would be a lot more viable.
It is a fairly extreme reaction to a terminal diagnosis, assuming that she has no pre existing psychiatric history. It may well be that her mental state bounces back, and certainly sounds like she needs to talk to the pallative care team.
That begs two rather obvious questions:
1) Why the fuck did Trump appoint him?
2) How the fuck has Trump gone so off the wall that even an antisemitic and racist loon who is also a threat to security thinks he's a danger?
The others just aren't showy enough.
This is TOTALLY @TSE
Until Monday she was sectioned inside a secure mental health ward, but they discharged her on Monday after what seems to have been the most flimsy of assessments (they told me, "we asked her whether she still thought people were following her, and when she said no, we let her go"). I suspect the MH crisis team know they've messed up as I've had a whole stack of worried calls from them today. Yesterday, after making sure she was safe back inside her parents' house - and despite having promised her I wouldn't - I phoned the MH crisis team and told them the whole story. They said they'd give her a call - which at the time seemed an inadequate response. As far as I can establish, they didn't manage to get hold of either her or her father yesterday, and this morning she went ahead and tried to plunge to her intended death.
The two country's are locked in a deadly embrace with no quarter from either side no matter how many leaders are taken out
This war is basically three theocracies, America, Iran, and Israel droning the shit out of each other.
https://bsky.app/profile/jackmurphyrgr.bsky.social/post/3mhgredz5lk2p
It's ridiculous. If you want to start a war then you either need to win it or else accept the other side will fight back.
Impugning their honesty is prohibited - so no “they are fiddling the figures for money”.
Was anyone else reminded of a Nuremberg rally during Farage's Scottish speech today?
It can sometimes induce paranoid psychosis in the doses that they use.
MAGA meets reality. I think we’ll regret not standing up to Trump over Greenland - we’ve given him far too much line and now we can’t catch the fall.
Classic Netanyahu: In Hebrew, he said the war will continue as long as it takes
In English, he said that it will end faster than most think
Bang goes our Passion Play when he becomes Fuhrer.
Netanyahu: “They say Israel somehow dragged the U.S. into a conflict with Iran.
“Does anyone really think that someone can tell Trump what to do? Come on.”
Netanyahu: “I think the Americans will open the Strait of Hormuz, and the oil prices will go down.”
https://bsky.app/profile/chadbourn.bsky.social/post/3mhgtal4rts2e
forest and palace showing the big clubs how to do it. Hopefully villa as well soon.
https://x.com/i/status/2034637163132858448
In Korea, Russian pilots were dogfighting with UN pilots
In Vietnam, Russian and Chinese “advisors” were up to various things.
The Russians shot down considerable numbers of Western recon aircraft during the Cold War as a whole.
The Government will collect £331bn in income tax this year, and spend £333bn on welfare.
In other words, we now spend more on people not working than we raise from those who do.
And the cost?
Debt per person has risen from £11.5k in 2000 (inflation adjusted) to over £41k today.
I'm a little surprised it is not even higher.
It is the GP's role to co-ordinate care between the Specialists in their silos. Sadly they often lack the time and sometimes the motivation to do so under the pressure of other demands.
It is probably worth checking if the chemo includes steroids. If she had radiotherapy then that may well be the case. I have seen some pretty flamboyant steroid psychoses in my junior doctor days.
Officers probe wider charges against Andrew as the high legal bar for misconduct risks stalling the investigation into emails found in the Epstein files
The police inquiry into Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor is likely to widen beyond the offence of misconduct in public office, The Times has learnt.
Andrew is set to be investigated over other potential corruption offences on top of a scoping inquiry into alleged sex trafficking, police sources said.
He was arrested last month on suspicion of misconduct in public office (Mipo) relating to his time as a government trade envoy, when he allegedly passed confidential information to the paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein.
But detectives at Thames Valley police are understood to be widening their investigation beyond the single offence, for which it can be difficult to mount a prosecution, to ensure all bases are covered. Andrew has denied all wrongdoing.
A police source said: “The legal bar for Mipo is high. There was always an issue over whether he was actually a public official at the time, whether he actually signed any papers. It’s not surprising that they are having to look at broader offences.”
Andrew has been dogged for more than 15 years over allegations about his relationship with Epstein, who died in a New York prison cell in 2019. Andrew’s arrest at Sandringham on his 66th birthday plunged the monarchy into a constitutional crisis.
Any further police interviews are expected to be by appointment, and any charging decisions are expected to take the best part of a year
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/andrew-mountbatten-windsor-police-inquiry-widens-misconduct-public-office-v7dkzwrs0
https://obr.uk/forecasts-in-depth/brief-guides-and-explainers/public-finances/
Alex Wickham
@alexwickham
Trumpflation: analysis by
@PhilAldrick
Trump and his war in Iran are now determining monetary policy in the UK. That’s effectively the assessment of the Bank of England, which warned Britons will pay the price.
Had there been no war, the BoE would have cut interest rates by a quarter point today to 3.5%. Now traders see an 80% chance of three interest rate hikes this year to 4.5%.
Those shifts will hit households hard. Mortgage rates are climbing. Higher energy bills will cost Britons £13 billion more. It means more fiscal problems for Rachel Reeves as government borrowing costs rise and growth is hit.
https://x.com/alexwickham/status/2034717532192706860
I am not a big fan of Streetings 10 year plan for the NHS (far too much obsession with tech-bro solutions and if the pilot schemes that I have seen likely to keel over in a big way) but I do approve of the emphasis on Primary Care.
I have my doubts that the GP system is fixable. There has been too much loss of grognard experience for it to be restored to what it was. The problem is not primarily financial, but rather one of medical education and vocation. There are some great GPs out there, but they get fewer each year.
Overhaul planning law.
It denigrates pensioners who represent about £180 billion of the £333 billion welfare spend and classes them as "not working" which, while accurate, is part of what seems to be a deliberate demonising of them as a group.
If any party wants to means test the State pension or withdraw it from, far example, higher rate tax payers, they should come out and say so and explain how it will be done without cliff edges and a huge bureaucracy.
The small matter of what we have to pay in Debt Interest and how we have got to this point should perhaps get a bit more discussion.
They are all unsustainable levels of welfare
1. Define benefits?
2. It has been the policy of successive governments since 1979 to move the burden of taxation away from income and towards spending, so just using one source of government revenue might be a little misleading
And, ignoring arguments over the triple lock and retirement age, we need to have some state pension. People pay taxes when younger to fund when older, even if it's not funded that way.
It's just a ragebait headline that doesn't tell us anything useful.
You wouldn't vote Tory if you really wanted the finances to be sorted.
I find Elliott's approach a cynical weaponising of "welfare" - what would the Conservatives actually do to reduce the welfare bill? Will they means test the State Pension and on what basis?
Exclusive:
Britain's civil service ethics chief twice offered to officially question Lord Mandelson over his links to Jeffrey Epstein but was rebuffed by No10.
How and when is more of an issue and some government is going to be in the firing line sooner or later
It’s pointing out that the total benefits bill, which includes pensions, exceeds income tax proceeds. Which it does.
State pensions are a benefit, just like the other state payments.
A simple solution, is to merge employee NI and IT, with a retained, lower rate for lower rate tax paying pensioners. So only pensioners receiving £50k a year or more, would pay more tax.
Treat the state pension like a tax allowance. Incidentally? I would simplify the tax system at the same time
1) Personal allowance fixed, not withdrawn.
2) Sets suitable rates to make up for this, combining IT and NI
This would get rid of various anomalies.
So a simpler, fairer tax system. Cheaper to run, as well.
https://x.com/TheEconomist/status/2034702725670109347
Is this the Matthew Elliott?
Hardly a reliable source
One of the bizarre aspects of the drive to put non-doctors* into Primary care is that there is funding for these staff, but not for extra GP principals. We have contrived a similtaneous crisis of GP access and one of GP unemployment. I cannot help wonder if it is deliberate.
*can be very useful in some tasks and I work with some excellent ones daily, but they are only good within tightly bound guidelines. They simply do not have the broader medical education to join the dots of holistic care that is so essential.
https://www.datawrapper.de/_/DaEoP/?v=2
End of consultation.
Probably all fine.
He's so fucked.
Could have done with it this week as was, slightly ironically, nearly dying from a fall and ripped my face off at a wake. I’m clearly nothing without my beautiful face so was very worried. But we soldier on. The funeralee (if that’s a word) would have been very amused by me joining him whilst utterly bollocksed.
Far better than anything experienced in the West Midlands up to 2017
Twice filled in a Klinik online form in past 3 years. Both times in considable pain.
Both times saw a GP within 24 hours.
First time antibiotics sorted in 14 days.
Second time GP same day. Antibiotics and MRI scan.
Scan within 21 days non cancerous medication
That GP visit though led to seeing different GP expert in a different non aggressive condition. Within 2 weeks very specific cryptotherapy treatment ongoing
It's outstanding service. I'm lucky and not making any political point.
What is happening here are a number of AI trials and new technology linked to a new Treatment and Scanning Centre linked yo Torbay Hospital.
This is as a direct result of Boris Johnson, rishi Sunak policy.
Matthew Eliott I assume Taxpayers Alliance.
Maybe he and you should be questioning Tory Policy.