No you don’t expect this, you absurd, bloviating clowns. You hope, that this time he might refrain from inviting women backstage, stripping naked and masturbating in front them. And stick your “reënters” up your arse while you’re about it.

Continuing the pattern. Make it all a bit harder, a bit more costly, a bit more inconvenient. One step further at every ACIP meeting. Uptake will fall further, particularly amongst the poorest.

Those who listen to classical music while writing/working. Is there a line where you can't have it as background? I can work to Bach, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven (just), but Schubert or Shostakovich whack their way into my consciousness and I have to stop to listen. Doesn't seem to track quality.

These posters for the South Korean stage production of Macbeth are the greatest thing ever? #art

At some point Americans will have to deal with the fact that they’re not a party to the Rome Statute and have to prosecute their own psychopaths.

Despite the breathless “goddamn this is cool” reporting, this just seems to describe a drunken incompetent joke of a man ordering multiple murders, and the US military going ahead and committing them. www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...

It will never not be funny when people gush about the inspiration they've gained from Newton's "If I have seen further, it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants". Newton was reaching for a quote from Bernard of Chartres so he could sneer at Robert Hooke for being a short-arse.

Flu coming back for another heave at it. Double-peaked and low (see 2023-4) is still good in terms of NHS pressure. www.gov.uk/government/s...

Most timed UK government reports and stats are published like this: the document is uploaded to an easily guessable URL and then a link that goes live at the appointed time. Throughout COVID - and now - you can get a jump on things like NHS weekly statistics. FWIW the ONS use a better system.

Australia has one of the higher (80%+) uptakes. UK latest cohorts coming in the 70%s (was 90% in earlier years). US lower - 60s%. As people age, we can expect divergence in cervical cancer rates to continue - a chance for elimination in Australia, vs still a significant cause of death for US women.

Putting this amazing result - consistent with everywhere the HPV vaccine has good uptake - side by side with news from the US: a third child killed by whooping cough in Kentucky this year (population 4.5m). All unvaccinated, mothers and children.

Oh, and the US presidential envoy is a traitor, but that’s just a normal Tuesday night.

Marina Hyde shooting fish in a barrel here, on the hilarious self-importance of some of America’s worst writers. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Huh, “Scaremongering bullshit to drive engagement from the mentally fragile” doesn’t seem to be on their list of options. pubpeer.com/publications...

I see the BBC Board (one member in particular) has been busy with the censor’s pen again.

Funny how closely this follows the revenue model. Largest market for rage-engagement = the biggest set of marks on the internet =MAGA. US left will be a slightly smaller market (on X) but still worthwhile. And maybe $100/month from Musk from doing this: only worthwhile in an emerging economy.

A modest proposal for celebrity academics: The Epstein Number. Epstein Number 1: You are named in the Epstein files.* Epstein Number 2: You have co-written an op-ed or co-signed an open letter with someone with an Epstein number of 1. And so on. * Epstein Number 0: you are Jeffrey Epstein.

So, you know, there’s the means of production. And I said well, you should seize it. And he said, sir, we’re going to seize it right now. He was very nice, very kind, and you know the bourgeoisie are not good people. Very bad people.

Oh bloody hell England I’m trying to get some work done. Stop fighting back.

The direction of travel has been clear for months, but it’s still a shock to see the lies go up on the CDC website.

Just puzzled by the continued flood of these doomy stories. Sure, getting a jab is a good idea and should be encouraged, but "experts say could be its toughest ever winter"? The numbers suggest influenza A has peaked already - early and low. This is ... good news! news.sky.com/story/why-is...

Jesus fucking Christ, US journalists have a bizarre idea of what constitutes good writing. Looks like some metric where you multiply the word count by the number of clunking metaphors and divide by clarity.

happy Partially Muscled Skeleton Stands by the Perimeter Fence and Screams for Thirty Seconds Before Vanishing day

Ok, at least one of us is having a stroke

If you’ve ever wondered whether anything travels faster than light, watch the New York Times circle the wagons around revelations that their journalists were warning a paedophile ring about investigations against him. Then search for “Sulzberger” in the Epstein emails. Anyway.

Well this is a bit of hope. The kind of thing the rest of the world are hoping that the American people (not its government) do.

Even obvious on the linear plots now.

Going to say it again (and in advance of the flu report later today, so there's potential to be proved wrong almost immediately). But I don't think flu is rocketing in the UK at all. It's early, sure, but already levelling off, at least for a while.

Mr Streeting, your “The Prime Minister is not fighting for his job this morning” T-shirt is raising questions that are not entirely answered by your shirt.

In the UK, we're having an early flu season. A (linear) chart of positivity from the weekly flu and respiratory surveillance report. www.gov.uk/government/s... A quick logit plot (right hand chart) suggest a hint of early levelling off, though past years (e.g., 2023/4) warn there can be multi-peaks.

Anyone remember that time in the 2000s sometime, where all new start-ups missed out letters at the end: Flikr, Tumblr, Scribd, Pixlr? And then they all stopped. Why? Or if it was all a domain name thing, then why did they stop?

Look for this factor and you see it - and its absence - everywhere: Starmer and Reeves can't do it, Burnham can. Of the older generation of Democrats, only Biden.

Al gore invented the algorithm, hence the name. When he said he invented the internet he was just being modest.

Very unlikely to be relevant to anything that actually happens, but good to have "traffic light coalition" all lined up ready to go.

Genuinely don’t know whether Isaac Chotiner is a unique talent, or just the only journalist in the United States who’s ever asked a follow-up question. www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a...

Starting to suspect that neither the Democrats nor UK Labour understand that politics is a visual medium, and this is fundamental to their problem.

He has no idea wtf is going on. Quick, ask him why he pardoned the founder of BOFA.

In my (very) humble opinion - this is the killer-app of wastewater data: to quickly find places where previously rare viruses are popping up. (As opposed to trying to use it to derive the prevalence of common or endemic viruses, where it seems far more prone to error.)

Despite all the rhetoric, the US Government is still spending massively more than they did last year. It's +6.9% to this point - well above any inflationary increase.

The Tories' bill on ILR is utterly insane. As Stephen Bush says www.ft.com/content/9a1d..., the criteria in the white paper dictate the deportation of ~5% of the UK population: proportionally more than Idi Amin expelled from Uganda & comparable to the population movement at Partition. They're mad.

Dallas Fed going for the macroeconomic fan-chart to rule them all. www.dallasfed.org/research/eco...

The London Business School might want to rethink the name of this course. www.london.edu/executive-ed...

How to influence billionaires: - If you claim that billionaires are the greatest moral force in our time, they listen to you (Effective Altruism et al) - If you claim that billionaires are the greatest political force in our time, they listen to you (Yarvin et al) Doesn't look too complicated.

Strange that Camus “supposed” this philosopher, given the towering contemporary example.

Timeline this morning about equal parts photos of massive happy crowds, versus riffs on “Diarrhea Don, our proudly incontinent President” and it’s taken me a little time to figure out why. Quite thankful the Americans will go to bed soon.

Sir David Attenborough was born three years before Anne Frank. One of the more disconcerting overlaps I know of.

Hmmm.

In philosophy “I don’t understand how … ” (A universally understood shorthand for: “I am about to unleash a devastating objection, but will frame it with a paper-thin layer of faux-modesty as if the problem is with my comprehension.)

Hertfordshire County Council rules for library use, 1930

Covid boosters are important when you're 79. Many people are saying this.