Best Of

First to go off-topic.

UK physics research and science facilities face ‘substantial’ cuts
Science and Technology Facilities Council seeks £162m cost savings, with existing projects facing axe
https://www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-research-councils-2026-1-uk-physics-research-and-science-facilities-face-substantial-cuts/

Does it come to this? We can’t afford a future, we are completely consumed with what we can have right now. We’re entitled. Somehow.

ISTM we're heading into a new dark age. Who cares about learning, research, all the things that take time & effort and make demands on an individual.

Tool man will get the Chinese to do it all for us and we just buy cheap as chips

First to go off-topic.

UK physics research and science facilities face ‘substantial’ cuts
Science and Technology Facilities Council seeks £162m cost savings, with existing projects facing axe
https://www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-research-councils-2026-1-uk-physics-research-and-science-facilities-face-substantial-cuts/

Does it come to this? We can’t afford a future, we are completely consumed with what we can have right now. We’re entitled. Somehow.

ISTM we're heading into a new dark age. Who cares about learning, research, all the things that take time & effort and make demands on an individual.

We all have the concentration span of a gold....

Xi smiling broadly as he shakes Starmer's hand ahead of their talks. The Chinese have always liked dull, serious and bureaucratic UK PMs. Ted Heath was always very popular with the Chinese, also like Starmer far more than he was with UK voters
"UK and China must build 'more sophisticated relationship', Starmer tells Xi - live updates - BBC News" https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cly9p5kr2q7t

Starmer making his visit to China all about the "cost of living" in the UK shows him to be deeply unserious about geopolitics

Top great communicators know instinctively how to avoid bathos without losing their audience. Imagine Carney or Blair saying this. Though if Thatcher had said something like it, she would have made it sound as if the matter was on a par with the declaration of WWII. And Major could get away with bathos 'I want to speak to the nation tonight about the the invasion of Kuwait and the cones hotline' because we liked him and his wife was probably knitting something for her friend's baby, and we identified with him as sort of normal.