I am always struck by the number of people's who first reaction in modern world is to start filming when these shooting take place. There was the thing the other day at the templates in Latin America.
If I hear gunshots the last thing I am thinking about is going live on social media or getting a reel for the gram.
Even in a room full of journalists, it was quite amazing to see how many people had their phones out recording what was going on.
I’d be hiding under the table until a cop came to get me!
What was going on in the room was people being taken to safety (in a rather odd way but that's another kettle of fish). The would-be assassin never made it as far as the ballroom with Trump and the journalists, having been stopped in the foyer.
We’ll probably find out more in the coming hours as the US wakes up, but it does appear that the gunman was stopped short of the ballroom itself, having rushed through the checkpoint at the entrance after seemingly emerging from a back-of-house service door.
It looked a little chaotic, but there was some order to getting the top table out first, followed by various government officials under USSS protection, followed by guests with local police or private security details.
Veep’s USSS agent was pretty good, Vance was first off the stage after being grabbed by the lapels and dragged off his chair! Trump took a few seconds longer to move, with several agents around him, as presumably he’s not quite as agile and different protocols apply.
It’s interesting that this is one of very few events in a private venue where Trump and Vance are both in attendance. Presumably there was a ‘designated survivor’ from the Cabinet not in attendance.
Have we discussed this ? (I think it a really bad idea, which Reform will likely pick up too.)
The Conservative plan to cut the budget of UK Research and Innovation by 20%, reallocating the money to defence, is a signal that a 20 year old cross-party consensus on science funding has come to an end... https://x.com/RichardALJones/status/2047939525893140941
The UK does have a long term problem of being consistently unable to capitalise on what's often world class research, but this is not a solution to that problem.
It's eating the seedcorn. It would be disastrous.
I know Britain is skint, and there's only really a variety of bad and worse choices left, but it speaks volumes that politicians would rather do something like this, inflicting long term damage on the country, rather than make the case for ending the triple lock, increasing property taxation, etc.
In more 'seedcorn' news (AI). [...] "Decolonising the Museum: Digital Repatriation of the Gaidinliu Collection" – £805,769 Focuses on digitally returning cultural artifacts from the UK to India, part of a broader "decolonising" initiative questioned for its cost and practical value.
As PB's only Indian-born... PBer, I'd not even heard of this collection!
Still, I suppose Russia could "digitally decolonise" eastern Ukraine, and Israel could "digitally decolonise" the West Bank?
She was an Indian independence activist in the 1920s, imprisoned by the colonial authorities and her written work and artefacts confiscated and put in the Pitt-Rivers museum. She died in 1993:
Gaidinliu (1915-1993), a Zeliangrong Naga, was 16 years old when she instigated an uprising against the British between 1929 and 1932 in the present Indian regions of Assam, Nagaland, and Manipur. When she was captured, the British confiscated her notebooks, body cloths, bracelets and amulets, and other ritual objects. These objects were donated to the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, and they are now known as the Gaidinliu collection. The continued existence of this collection in a UK museum raises important questions about whether and how they should be returned to the Indigenous peoples from whom they were taken, questions that are especially pertinent as UK museums discuss decolonising their exhibitions.
It seems entirely reasonable for India to request the return of the material, and I'd be surprised if her family did not win any court case.
This is work on an important issue. They could of course just give it all back, but they are researching a middle way.
I think the problem here is that Lucky is using Charlotte Gill as his source. Gill is one of the most ill-informed, ignorant shitforbrains stirring up fake outrage in the right wing media - often by misrepresenting what she is talking about or just not knowing her topic. She started out at GB News and has a reputation as an outrage troll going back years.
Here I think she is just reacting to boo-words without having bothered to do any real work.
If John Healey had balls, he’d at least threaten to resign over this Bill.
You might say that if he had any aspirations to be a "surprise" candidate for the leadership this would be a golden opportunity to make the right mark.
Have we discussed this ? (I think it a really bad idea, which Reform will likely pick up too.)
The Conservative plan to cut the budget of UK Research and Innovation by 20%, reallocating the money to defence, is a signal that a 20 year old cross-party consensus on science funding has come to an end... https://x.com/RichardALJones/status/2047939525893140941
The UK does have a long term problem of being consistently unable to capitalise on what's often world class research, but this is not a solution to that problem.
It's eating the seedcorn. It would be disastrous.
I know Britain is skint, and there's only really a variety of bad and worse choices left, but it speaks volumes that politicians would rather do something like this, inflicting long term damage on the country, rather than make the case for ending the triple lock, increasing property taxation, etc.
In more 'seedcorn' news (AI).
"Pregnant Men: An International Exploration of Trans Male Experiences" – £668,244 A four-year study on transgender men’s reproductive experiences, also funded by the AHRC, criticised for prioritizing identity-focused research over traditional scientific inquiry.
"Decolonising the Museum: Digital Repatriation of the Gaidinliu Collection" – £805,769 Focuses on digitally returning cultural artifacts from the UK to India, part of a broader "decolonising" initiative questioned for its cost and practical value.
"Comics and Race in Latin America" – £759,293 An AHRC-funded study on racial representation in Latin American comics, highlighted as an example of disproportionate funding for niche cultural analysis.
How dare Kemi suggest re-allocating money away from such gold to mere baubles like bullets and things to 'defend the country' - Father forgive her.
If we want British universities to have experts in all aspects of life then we need them to research in what might seem abstruse areas of the humanities, and indeed sciences. (As an aside, digital rather than physical repatriation of artefacts sounds like the sort of thing that will keep the Telegraph happy.)
All your examples are projects funded by the AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) whose annual budget of £72 million is chicken feed that has already been cut by a quarter.
Have we discussed this ? (I think it a really bad idea, which Reform will likely pick up too.)
The Conservative plan to cut the budget of UK Research and Innovation by 20%, reallocating the money to defence, is a signal that a 20 year old cross-party consensus on science funding has come to an end... https://x.com/RichardALJones/status/2047939525893140941
The UK does have a long term problem of being consistently unable to capitalise on what's often world class research, but this is not a solution to that problem.
Its a good job we aren't a knowledge economy or that AI is coming for all the low hanging fruit of said knowledge economies while China increasing getting really good at the high end.
UKRI is a colossal waste of public money. 20% is pocket change - it should have its entire budget suspended until it has been reformed root and branch.
Recent awards highlighted by Charlotte Gill include:
£840,000 award for a project titled "The Europe that Gay Porn Built, 1945–2000."
£939,368 for FemIDEAS: Decolonising Sexual and Gender-Based Violence in Higher Education - at the University of Westminster Centre for Social Justice
£800,000 - Facilitating a University of Roehampton project that says the “disproportionate representation” of William Shakespeare in the theatre has propagated “white, able-bodied, heterosexual, cisgender male narratives”.
Failing to 'capitalise' on 'world class research'?
I was at a scientific conference dinner once where I was sat in between the Professor head of a European research institute and the principal researcher in a department of a British government science organisation, and my recently-published paper contributed to one side of an argument about where to prioritise funding and research to make progress on a long-standing research problem.
My point being that, even among experts in one small niche of one area of science there was disagreement over what should be funded in preference. So the idea that, in a democracy, where you would expect dissent and a plurality of opinion, the idea that I should approve of every funding decision for university research is naive and absurd.
I would find it disturbing if I could not find a number of things that I did not feel should be funded.
Have we discussed this ? (I think it a really bad idea, which Reform will likely pick up too.)
The Conservative plan to cut the budget of UK Research and Innovation by 20%, reallocating the money to defence, is a signal that a 20 year old cross-party consensus on science funding has come to an end... https://x.com/RichardALJones/status/2047939525893140941
The UK does have a long term problem of being consistently unable to capitalise on what's often world class research, but this is not a solution to that problem.
It's eating the seedcorn. It would be disastrous.
I know Britain is skint, and there's only really a variety of bad and worse choices left, but it speaks volumes that politicians would rather do something like this, inflicting long term damage on the country, rather than make the case for ending the triple lock, increasing property taxation, etc.
In more 'seedcorn' news (AI). [...] "Decolonising the Museum: Digital Repatriation of the Gaidinliu Collection" – £805,769 Focuses on digitally returning cultural artifacts from the UK to India, part of a broader "decolonising" initiative questioned for its cost and practical value.
As PB's only Indian-born... PBer, I'd not even heard of this collection!
Still, I suppose Russia could "digitally decolonise" eastern Ukraine, and Israel could "digitally decolonise" the West Bank?
She was an Indian independence activist in the 1920s, imprisoned by the colonial authorities and her written work and artefacts confiscated and put in the Pitt-Rivers museum. She died in 1993:
Gaidinliu (1915-1993), a Zeliangrong Naga, was 16 years old when she instigated an uprising against the British between 1929 and 1932 in the present Indian regions of Assam, Nagaland, and Manipur. When she was captured, the British confiscated her notebooks, body cloths, bracelets and amulets, and other ritual objects. These objects were donated to the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, and they are now known as the Gaidinliu collection. The continued existence of this collection in a UK museum raises important questions about whether and how they should be returned to the Indigenous peoples from whom they were taken, questions that are especially pertinent as UK museums discuss decolonising their exhibitions.
It seems entirely reasonable for India to request the return of the material, and I'd be surprised if her family did not win any court case.
This is work on an important issue. They could of course just give it all back, but they are researching a middle way.
I think the problem here is that Lucky is using Charlotte Gill as his source. Gill is one of the most ill-informed, ignorant shitforbrains stirring up fake outrage in the right wing media - often by misrepresenting what she is talking about or just not knowing her topic. She started out at GB News and has a reputation as an outrage troll going back years.
Here I think she is just reacting to boo-words without having bothered to do any real work.
They have form.
The Pitt Rivers people seem very concerned that the public might have wrongthoughts about their exhibits, and will remove them from display if they overhear such wrongthink:
" The decision was taken to remove the tsantsa from public display because it was felt that the way they were displayed did not sufficiently help visitors understand the cultural practices related to their making and instead led people to think in stereotypical and racist ways about Shuar culture. Standing in front of the case, people would talk about the people who had made them as ‘savage’ or ‘primitive’ and use words such as ‘gory’, ‘gruesome’ or a 'freakshow' when talking about the display. "
Apparently explaining the exhbits properly by, you know, a good explanatory label is not considered sophisticated enough these days. Reactions must be censored, shaped, or avoided.
"For the opposition to suggest that there's some type of cover-up here is just inaccurate."
The Prime Minister's Chief Secretary @darrenpjones tells Times Radio's @adamboultonTABB that a trip to tech firm Palantir with Peter Mandelson was a "visit" and not a "meeting".
"For the opposition to suggest that there's some type of cover-up here is just inaccurate."
The Prime Minister's Chief Secretary @darrenpjones tells Times Radio's @adamboultonTABB that a trip to tech firm Palantir with Peter Mandelson was a "visit" and not a "meeting".
Have we discussed this ? (I think it a really bad idea, which Reform will likely pick up too.)
The Conservative plan to cut the budget of UK Research and Innovation by 20%, reallocating the money to defence, is a signal that a 20 year old cross-party consensus on science funding has come to an end... https://x.com/RichardALJones/status/2047939525893140941
The UK does have a long term problem of being consistently unable to capitalise on what's often world class research, but this is not a solution to that problem.
Its a good job we aren't a knowledge economy or that AI is coming for all the low hanging fruit of said knowledge economies while China increasing getting really good at the high end.
UKRI is a colossal waste of public money. 20% is pocket change - it should have its entire budget suspended until it has been reformed root and branch.
Recent awards highlighted by Charlotte Gill include:
£840,000 award for a project titled "The Europe that Gay Porn Built, 1945–2000."
£939,368 for FemIDEAS: Decolonising Sexual and Gender-Based Violence in Higher Education - at the University of Westminster Centre for Social Justice
£800,000 - Facilitating a University of Roehampton project that says the “disproportionate representation” of William Shakespeare in the theatre has propagated “white, able-bodied, heterosexual, cisgender male narratives”.
Failing to 'capitalise' on 'world class research'?
From UKRI there are different things it funds. You can argue that there is money being poorly spent in bunging nonsense reearch in arts / humanities, but UKRI also funds things like EPSRC, which is how a huge proportion of STEM PhD are funded in the UK, which lots of universities are having trouble recruiting for becaues the stipend has got so bad. I bet you any money the government just reducing the budget by 20% will just result in 20% cut to all strands.
This is an interesting 2026 piece that the AI used as a source, on the BMJ website:
Before Christmas, UKRI set out how it would allocate its four year £38.6bn allocation from the government to the various councils through three priority “buckets.”1 There would be £8bn for targeted research and development “addressing national and societal priorities,” £7bn to commercialise cutting edge technologies, and £14bn for what it described as “curiosity driven research.”
So, if anything like true, this means less than 20% of their budget is the vital 'seedcorn' that everyone is wibbling about, with the vast majority given over to utter pap that is at best wasteful and at worst harmful. They should have 80% of their budget removed, not retained!
Er... No.
The National Priorities bucket is the winner-picking bit. The head boffins have decided that we want X, which junior boffins can promise to deliver X? Sometimes it can work, but governments generally can't pick winners. A good Thatcherite like you should know that.
The curiosity stuff is more like early venture capital. Sure, most of it won't pay off, even with careful regard to who applies and what they apply to do. But the few that do tend to pay off so spectacularly that the overall game is worth it. And nobody has found a way of predicting those in advance.
This is an extraordinary effort by Ukraine to create the weaponry that can inflict this and take out the air defence that stops this - from domestic means that do not require any "Please Sir, can we hit Russia?" prior approval.
The effect on the Russian economy cannot be anything other than dramatic.
Yes, they’ve designed and build a number of long-range weapons themselves, specifically so they don’t have to ask anyone permission to shoot at Russia.
The Amercians in particular, whether under Trump or Biden, were very reticent to let US-made weapons cause damage on Russian soil, or to be captured for reverse-engineering.
Ukranian drones can now go all the way to the Ural Mountains, targets were hit this weekend in Chelyabinsk and Yekaterinburg.
There appear to be large areas of Russia with little to no air defence capability.
Bit like the UK then?
We’ll never get the answer, for obvious reasons, but one suspects that there’s little beyond the QRA Typhoons in terms of active incoming air defences. Perhaps they have a couple of Patriot batteries somewhere near Lossie and somewhere near London.
If we got attacked by Drones it would be in the thousands as Russia does in Ukraine to overwhelm defence systems that actually work about 80% of the time. A few Patriot batteries are going to make next to no difference at all, as the US found in your neck of the wood.
The biggest learning point from thr Ukrainians is their success in calibrating the shooter to the target. As you say, spending half a million to down a drone costing a few tens of thousands is ultimately a loosing proposition. A problem Israel might run into, sooner or later.
Have we discussed this ? (I think it a really bad idea, which Reform will likely pick up too.)
The Conservative plan to cut the budget of UK Research and Innovation by 20%, reallocating the money to defence, is a signal that a 20 year old cross-party consensus on science funding has come to an end... https://x.com/RichardALJones/status/2047939525893140941
The UK does have a long term problem of being consistently unable to capitalise on what's often world class research, but this is not a solution to that problem.
It's eating the seedcorn. It would be disastrous.
I know Britain is skint, and there's only really a variety of bad and worse choices left, but it speaks volumes that politicians would rather do something like this, inflicting long term damage on the country, rather than make the case for ending the triple lock, increasing property taxation, etc.
In more 'seedcorn' news (AI). [...] "Decolonising the Museum: Digital Repatriation of the Gaidinliu Collection" – £805,769 Focuses on digitally returning cultural artifacts from the UK to India, part of a broader "decolonising" initiative questioned for its cost and practical value.
As PB's only Indian-born... PBer, I'd not even heard of this collection!
Still, I suppose Russia could "digitally decolonise" eastern Ukraine, and Israel could "digitally decolonise" the West Bank?
I’m wondering by what magic you know where every PB’er was born?
This is an extraordinary effort by Ukraine to create the weaponry that can inflict this and take out the air defence that stops this - from domestic means that do not require any "Please Sir, can we hit Russia?" prior approval.
The effect on the Russian economy cannot be anything other than dramatic.
Yes, they’ve designed and build a number of long-range weapons themselves, specifically so they don’t have to ask anyone permission to shoot at Russia.
The Amercians in particular, whether under Trump or Biden, were very reticent to let US-made weapons cause damage on Russian soil, or to be captured for reverse-engineering.
Ukranian drones can now go all the way to the Ural Mountains, targets were hit this weekend in Chelyabinsk and Yekaterinburg.
There appear to be large areas of Russia with little to no air defence capability.
Bit like the UK then?
We’ll never get the answer, for obvious reasons, but one suspects that there’s little beyond the QRA Typhoons in terms of active incoming air defences. Perhaps they have a couple of Patriot batteries somewhere near Lossie and somewhere near London.
If we got attacked by Drones it would be in the thousands as Russia does in Ukraine to overwhelm defence systems that actually work about 80% of the time. A few Patriot batteries are going to make next to no difference at all, as the US found in your neck of the wood.
The biggest learning point from thr Ukrainians is their success in calibrating the shooter to the target. As you say, spending half a million to down a drone costing a few tens of thousands is ultimately a loosing proposition. A problem Israel might run into, sooner or later.
Iron Dome was actually about cheaper interceptors to deal with cheap, short range missiles. That's all it does.
They have higher tier systems to deal with large and faster missiles.
It's one thing to wake up and find there's been another firearms incident in the vicinity of Donald Trump. It's quite another to find pb in full on conspiracy mode. I'll make two points:
1) Trump is an incredibly dodgy character 2) He was previously shot and nearly killed
A lot of people seem to have some amnesia towards the second point. Anyway as much as I criticise the BBC I'll happily rely on Gary Donoghue's verdict for now. (He was actually there).
nearly killed my butt, supposedly had bit of ear shot off which surprisingly regrew and healed perfectly.
You think it was faked?
I try not to be closed-minded about conspiracies but that's a bold claim.
it certainly looked dodgy , guy was hard to miss and then the SS let him stand up and give all the PR when they had no clue if other gunmen etc. All a bit too pat and then never a mention of the perpetrator afterwards. Bit like the rescued pilot whqere they lost a shedload of big planes , helicopters etc , and right next to a nuclear facility hundreds of miles from where he went down. Badly injured but managed to get hundreds of miles.
Have we discussed this ? (I think it a really bad idea, which Reform will likely pick up too.)
The Conservative plan to cut the budget of UK Research and Innovation by 20%, reallocating the money to defence, is a signal that a 20 year old cross-party consensus on science funding has come to an end... https://x.com/RichardALJones/status/2047939525893140941
The UK does have a long term problem of being consistently unable to capitalise on what's often world class research, but this is not a solution to that problem.
Its a good job we aren't a knowledge economy or that AI is coming for all the low hanging fruit of said knowledge economies while China increasing getting really good at the high end.
UKRI is a colossal waste of public money. 20% is pocket change - it should have its entire budget suspended until it has been reformed root and branch.
Recent awards highlighted by Charlotte Gill include:
£840,000 award for a project titled "The Europe that Gay Porn Built, 1945–2000."
£939,368 for FemIDEAS: Decolonising Sexual and Gender-Based Violence in Higher Education - at the University of Westminster Centre for Social Justice
£800,000 - Facilitating a University of Roehampton project that says the “disproportionate representation” of William Shakespeare in the theatre has propagated “white, able-bodied, heterosexual, cisgender male narratives”.
Failing to 'capitalise' on 'world class research'?
I was at a scientific conference dinner once where I was sat in between the Professor head of a European research institute and the principal researcher in a department of a British government science organisation, and my recently-published paper contributed to one side of an argument about where to prioritise funding and research to make progress on a long-standing research problem.
My point being that, even among experts in one small niche of one area of science there was disagreement over what should be funded in preference. So the idea that, in a democracy, where you would expect dissent and a plurality of opinion, the idea that I should approve of every funding decision for university research is naive and absurd.
I would find it disturbing if I could not find a number of things that I did not feel should be funded.
You, and several other people have missed the point. The point is not that a number of daft studies have received significant quantities of public money. The point is that the funding criteria is itself skewed toward the propogation of such daft and divisive ideas. It is not a bug, it's a feature.
That means that rather than setting out to fund things that have a good chance of making a handsome return on investment, UKRI is funding things that further the Green and DEI agendas - the first at best tangential and at worst inimical to economic growth, the second actively undermining social cohesion by concentrating on everything that divides us, rather than what unites us. It is taxpayer funded economic and social decline. Yes, a very good and valuable piece of research might still get through - but this cannot be used to justify the whole shebang any more than 'the Europe that gay porn built' can be used solely to condemn the whole thing.
I am always struck by the number of people's who first reaction in modern world is to start filming when these shooting take place. There was the thing the other day at the templates in Latin America.
If I hear gunshots the last thing I am thinking about is going live on social media or getting a reel for the gram.
Even in a room full of journalists, it was quite amazing to see how many people had their phones out recording what was going on.
I’d be hiding under the table until a cop came to get me!
What was going on in the room was people being taken to safety (in a rather odd way but that's another kettle of fish). The would-be assassin never made it as far as the ballroom with Trump and the journalists, having been stopped in the foyer.
We’ll probably find out more in the coming hours as the US wakes up, but it does appear that the gunman was stopped short of the ballroom itself, having rushed through the checkpoint at the entrance after seemingly emerging from a back-of-house service door.
It looked a little chaotic, but there was some order to getting the top table out first, followed by various government officials under USSS protection, followed by guests with local police or private security details.
Veep’s USSS agent was pretty good, Vance was first off the stage after being grabbed by the lapels and dragged off his chair! Trump took a few seconds longer to move, with several agents around him, as presumably he’s not quite as agile and different protocols apply.
It’s interesting that this is one of very few events in a private venue where Trump and Vance are both in attendance. Presumably there was a ‘designated survivor’ from the Cabinet not in attendance.
Hesgeth ?
Whiskey Pete was at the dinner. Here he is grinning like a muppet
"For the opposition to suggest that there's some type of cover-up here is just inaccurate."
The Prime Minister's Chief Secretary @darrenpjones tells Times Radio's @adamboultonTABB that a trip to tech firm Palantir with Peter Mandelson was a "visit" and not a "meeting".
We are doing the pinhead legalise dancing again.
Which comes across as really shifty to the general public.
There is a very narrow path of possible action for the MoD here and it involves giving the Hawk T2s from Valley to RAFAT. Loosely spannered together at the East Riding Theatre of Dreams so that's the Bri'ish box ticked. They are plenty of them and they have relatively low hours because they've spent of their life being broken due to engine issues.
The RAF would like T-7 to replace Hawk T2 for the AJT mission but they won't be allowed to buy that. They might get M-346 or send crew to IFTS at Deci in Sardinia in an interim arrangement that conveniently ossifies into permanence.
Have we discussed this ? (I think it a really bad idea, which Reform will likely pick up too.)
The Conservative plan to cut the budget of UK Research and Innovation by 20%, reallocating the money to defence, is a signal that a 20 year old cross-party consensus on science funding has come to an end... https://x.com/RichardALJones/status/2047939525893140941
The UK does have a long term problem of being consistently unable to capitalise on what's often world class research, but this is not a solution to that problem.
It's eating the seedcorn. It would be disastrous.
I know Britain is skint, and there's only really a variety of bad and worse choices left, but it speaks volumes that politicians would rather do something like this, inflicting long term damage on the country, rather than make the case for ending the triple lock, increasing property taxation, etc.
In more 'seedcorn' news (AI). [...] "Decolonising the Museum: Digital Repatriation of the Gaidinliu Collection" – £805,769 Focuses on digitally returning cultural artifacts from the UK to India, part of a broader "decolonising" initiative questioned for its cost and practical value.
As PB's only Indian-born... PBer, I'd not even heard of this collection!
Still, I suppose Russia could "digitally decolonise" eastern Ukraine, and Israel could "digitally decolonise" the West Bank?
She was an Indian independence activist in the 1920s, imprisoned by the colonial authorities and her written work and artefacts confiscated and put in the Pitt-Rivers museum. She died in 1993:
Gaidinliu (1915-1993), a Zeliangrong Naga, was 16 years old when she instigated an uprising against the British between 1929 and 1932 in the present Indian regions of Assam, Nagaland, and Manipur. When she was captured, the British confiscated her notebooks, body cloths, bracelets and amulets, and other ritual objects. These objects were donated to the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, and they are now known as the Gaidinliu collection. The continued existence of this collection in a UK museum raises important questions about whether and how they should be returned to the Indigenous peoples from whom they were taken, questions that are especially pertinent as UK museums discuss decolonising their exhibitions.
It seems entirely reasonable for India to request the return of the material, and I'd be surprised if her family did not win any court case.
This is work on an important issue. They could of course just give it all back, but they are researching a middle way.
I think the problem here is that Lucky is using Charlotte Gill as his source. Gill is one of the most ill-informed, ignorant shitforbrains stirring up fake outrage in the right wing media - often by misrepresenting what she is talking about or just not knowing her topic. She started out at GB News and has a reputation as an outrage troll going back years.
Here I think she is just reacting to boo-words without having bothered to do any real work.
I am grateful to Charlotte Gill for highlighting what are absolutely abuses of public money, and I think your intemperate rudeness tells its own tale.
Have we discussed this ? (I think it a really bad idea, which Reform will likely pick up too.)
The Conservative plan to cut the budget of UK Research and Innovation by 20%, reallocating the money to defence, is a signal that a 20 year old cross-party consensus on science funding has come to an end... https://x.com/RichardALJones/status/2047939525893140941
The UK does have a long term problem of being consistently unable to capitalise on what's often world class research, but this is not a solution to that problem.
Its a good job we aren't a knowledge economy or that AI is coming for all the low hanging fruit of said knowledge economies while China increasing getting really good at the high end.
UKRI is a colossal waste of public money. 20% is pocket change - it should have its entire budget suspended until it has been reformed root and branch.
Recent awards highlighted by Charlotte Gill include:
£840,000 award for a project titled "The Europe that Gay Porn Built, 1945–2000."
£939,368 for FemIDEAS: Decolonising Sexual and Gender-Based Violence in Higher Education - at the University of Westminster Centre for Social Justice
£800,000 - Facilitating a University of Roehampton project that says the “disproportionate representation” of William Shakespeare in the theatre has propagated “white, able-bodied, heterosexual, cisgender male narratives”.
Failing to 'capitalise' on 'world class research'?
I was at a scientific conference dinner once where I was sat in between the Professor head of a European research institute and the principal researcher in a department of a British government science organisation, and my recently-published paper contributed to one side of an argument about where to prioritise funding and research to make progress on a long-standing research problem.
My point being that, even among experts in one small niche of one area of science there was disagreement over what should be funded in preference. So the idea that, in a democracy, where you would expect dissent and a plurality of opinion, the idea that I should approve of every funding decision for university research is naive and absurd.
I would find it disturbing if I could not find a number of things that I did not feel should be funded.
There is a larger point, though. The vast majority of modern commercialised research can be traced back to "curiosity driven" research.
Even in commercial settings that tends to be true. It's why Bell Labs produced so many ideas which ended up being worth billions, but very few of which they made any money from themselves.
The UK's problem is not so much in research funding as it is in our perennial inability to truly capitalise on what we discover.
It's one thing to wake up and find there's been another firearms incident in the vicinity of Donald Trump. It's quite another to find pb in full on conspiracy mode. I'll make two points:
1) Trump is an incredibly dodgy character 2) He was previously shot and nearly killed
A lot of people seem to have some amnesia towards the second point. Anyway as much as I criticise the BBC I'll happily rely on Gary Donoghue's verdict for now. (He was actually there).
nearly killed my butt, supposedly had bit of ear shot off which surprisingly regrew and healed perfectly.
You think it was faked?
I try not to be closed-minded about conspiracies but that's a bold claim.
it certainly looked dodgy , guy was hard to miss and then the SS let him stand up and give all the PR when they had no clue if other gunmen etc. All a bit too pat and then never a mention of the perpetrator afterwards. Bit like the rescued pilot whqere they lost a shedload of big planes , helicopters etc , and right next to a nuclear facility hundreds of miles from where he went down. Badly injured but managed to get hundreds of miles.
Leaving aside the morality, I wonder whether the better strategy might have been to dress up in tuxedo, walk slowly towards the checkpoint in the manner of SeanT at midday, get as far as you can, then shoot the agent nearest to you before bolting into the hall. Rather than running rather obviously towards them in a manner obviously signalling your evil intent from the beginning?
Have we discussed this ? (I think it a really bad idea, which Reform will likely pick up too.)
The Conservative plan to cut the budget of UK Research and Innovation by 20%, reallocating the money to defence, is a signal that a 20 year old cross-party consensus on science funding has come to an end... https://x.com/RichardALJones/status/2047939525893140941
The UK does have a long term problem of being consistently unable to capitalise on what's often world class research, but this is not a solution to that problem.
It's eating the seedcorn. It would be disastrous.
I know Britain is skint, and there's only really a variety of bad and worse choices left, but it speaks volumes that politicians would rather do something like this, inflicting long term damage on the country, rather than make the case for ending the triple lock, increasing property taxation, etc.
In more 'seedcorn' news (AI).
"Pregnant Men: An International Exploration of Trans Male Experiences" – £668,244 A four-year study on transgender men’s reproductive experiences, also funded by the AHRC, criticised for prioritizing identity-focused research over traditional scientific inquiry.
"Decolonising the Museum: Digital Repatriation of the Gaidinliu Collection" – £805,769 Focuses on digitally returning cultural artifacts from the UK to India, part of a broader "decolonising" initiative questioned for its cost and practical value.
"Comics and Race in Latin America" – £759,293 An AHRC-funded study on racial representation in Latin American comics, highlighted as an example of disproportionate funding for niche cultural analysis.
How dare Kemi suggest re-allocating money away from such gold to mere baubles like bullets and things to 'defend the country' - Father forgive her.
If we want British universities to have experts in all aspects of life then we need them to research in what might seem abstruse areas of the humanities, and indeed sciences. (As an aside, digital rather than physical repatriation of artefacts sounds like the sort of thing that will keep the Telegraph happy.)
All your examples are projects funded by the AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) whose annual budget of £72 million is chicken feed that has already been cut by a quarter.
Have we discussed this ? (I think it a really bad idea, which Reform will likely pick up too.)
The Conservative plan to cut the budget of UK Research and Innovation by 20%, reallocating the money to defence, is a signal that a 20 year old cross-party consensus on science funding has come to an end... https://x.com/RichardALJones/status/2047939525893140941
The UK does have a long term problem of being consistently unable to capitalise on what's often world class research, but this is not a solution to that problem.
It's eating the seedcorn. It would be disastrous.
I know Britain is skint, and there's only really a variety of bad and worse choices left, but it speaks volumes that politicians would rather do something like this, inflicting long term damage on the country, rather than make the case for ending the triple lock, increasing property taxation, etc.
In more 'seedcorn' news (AI). [...] "Decolonising the Museum: Digital Repatriation of the Gaidinliu Collection" – £805,769 Focuses on digitally returning cultural artifacts from the UK to India, part of a broader "decolonising" initiative questioned for its cost and practical value.
As PB's only Indian-born... PBer, I'd not even heard of this collection!
Still, I suppose Russia could "digitally decolonise" eastern Ukraine, and Israel could "digitally decolonise" the West Bank?
She was an Indian independence activist in the 1920s, imprisoned by the colonial authorities and her written work and artefacts confiscated and put in the Pitt-Rivers museum. She died in 1993:
Gaidinliu (1915-1993), a Zeliangrong Naga, was 16 years old when she instigated an uprising against the British between 1929 and 1932 in the present Indian regions of Assam, Nagaland, and Manipur. When she was captured, the British confiscated her notebooks, body cloths, bracelets and amulets, and other ritual objects. These objects were donated to the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, and they are now known as the Gaidinliu collection. The continued existence of this collection in a UK museum raises important questions about whether and how they should be returned to the Indigenous peoples from whom they were taken, questions that are especially pertinent as UK museums discuss decolonising their exhibitions.
It seems entirely reasonable for India to request the return of the material, and I'd be surprised if her family did not win any court case.
This is work on an important issue. They could of course just give it all back, but they are researching a middle way.
I think the problem here is that Lucky is using Charlotte Gill as his source. Gill is one of the most ill-informed, ignorant shitforbrains stirring up fake outrage in the right wing media - often by misrepresenting what she is talking about or just not knowing her topic. She started out at GB News and has a reputation as an outrage troll going back years.
Here I think she is just reacting to boo-words without having bothered to do any real work.
I am grateful to Charlotte Gill for highlighting what are absolutely abuses of public money, and I think your intemperate rudeness tells its own tale.
I have fact checked enough Charlotte Gill over a number of years to know that many of her claims are just nonsensical, and often just trolling.
Have we discussed this ? (I think it a really bad idea, which Reform will likely pick up too.)
The Conservative plan to cut the budget of UK Research and Innovation by 20%, reallocating the money to defence, is a signal that a 20 year old cross-party consensus on science funding has come to an end... https://x.com/RichardALJones/status/2047939525893140941
The UK does have a long term problem of being consistently unable to capitalise on what's often world class research, but this is not a solution to that problem.
It's eating the seedcorn. It would be disastrous.
I know Britain is skint, and there's only really a variety of bad and worse choices left, but it speaks volumes that politicians would rather do something like this, inflicting long term damage on the country, rather than make the case for ending the triple lock, increasing property taxation, etc.
In more 'seedcorn' news (AI).
"Pregnant Men: An International Exploration of Trans Male Experiences" – £668,244 A four-year study on transgender men’s reproductive experiences, also funded by the AHRC, criticised for prioritizing identity-focused research over traditional scientific inquiry.
"Decolonising the Museum: Digital Repatriation of the Gaidinliu Collection" – £805,769 Focuses on digitally returning cultural artifacts from the UK to India, part of a broader "decolonising" initiative questioned for its cost and practical value.
"Comics and Race in Latin America" – £759,293 An AHRC-funded study on racial representation in Latin American comics, highlighted as an example of disproportionate funding for niche cultural analysis.
How dare Kemi suggest re-allocating money away from such gold to mere baubles like bullets and things to 'defend the country' - Father forgive her.
If we want British universities to have experts in all aspects of life then we need them to research in what might seem abstruse areas of the humanities, and indeed sciences. (As an aside, digital rather than physical repatriation of artefacts sounds like the sort of thing that will keep the Telegraph happy.)
All your examples are projects funded by the AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) whose annual budget of £72 million is chicken feed that has already been cut by a quarter.
Have we discussed this ? (I think it a really bad idea, which Reform will likely pick up too.)
The Conservative plan to cut the budget of UK Research and Innovation by 20%, reallocating the money to defence, is a signal that a 20 year old cross-party consensus on science funding has come to an end... https://x.com/RichardALJones/status/2047939525893140941
The UK does have a long term problem of being consistently unable to capitalise on what's often world class research, but this is not a solution to that problem.
It's eating the seedcorn. It would be disastrous.
I know Britain is skint, and there's only really a variety of bad and worse choices left, but it speaks volumes that politicians would rather do something like this, inflicting long term damage on the country, rather than make the case for ending the triple lock, increasing property taxation, etc.
In more 'seedcorn' news (AI). [...] "Decolonising the Museum: Digital Repatriation of the Gaidinliu Collection" – £805,769 Focuses on digitally returning cultural artifacts from the UK to India, part of a broader "decolonising" initiative questioned for its cost and practical value.
As PB's only Indian-born... PBer, I'd not even heard of this collection!
Still, I suppose Russia could "digitally decolonise" eastern Ukraine, and Israel could "digitally decolonise" the West Bank?
She was an Indian independence activist in the 1920s, imprisoned by the colonial authorities and her written work and artefacts confiscated and put in the Pitt-Rivers museum. She died in 1993:
Gaidinliu (1915-1993), a Zeliangrong Naga, was 16 years old when she instigated an uprising against the British between 1929 and 1932 in the present Indian regions of Assam, Nagaland, and Manipur. When she was captured, the British confiscated her notebooks, body cloths, bracelets and amulets, and other ritual objects. These objects were donated to the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, and they are now known as the Gaidinliu collection. The continued existence of this collection in a UK museum raises important questions about whether and how they should be returned to the Indigenous peoples from whom they were taken, questions that are especially pertinent as UK museums discuss decolonising their exhibitions.
It seems entirely reasonable for India to request the return of the material, and I'd be surprised if her family did not win any court case.
This is work on an important issue. They could of course just give it all back, but they are researching a middle way.
I think the problem here is that Lucky is using Charlotte Gill as his source. Gill is one of the most ill-informed, ignorant shitforbrains stirring up fake outrage in the right wing media - often by misrepresenting what she is talking about or just not knowing her topic. She started out at GB News and has a reputation as an outrage troll going back years.
Here I think she is just reacting to boo-words without having bothered to do any real work.
I am grateful to Charlotte Gill for highlighting what are absolutely abuses of public money, and I think your intemperate rudeness tells its own tale.
I have fact checked enough Charlotte Gill over a number of years to know that many of her claims are just nonsensical, and often just trolling.
So I discount her entirely as a serious reporter.
I gave a list of studies and their costs. If you disagree with the facts, by all means present the real ones, and I will recant. Otherwise, the source is completely irrelevant, because there's no room in what I listed for journalistic bias. Your point seems rather to be that these are facts that shouldn't be presented at all. To which I say tough tits frankly.
Have we discussed this ? (I think it a really bad idea, which Reform will likely pick up too.)
The Conservative plan to cut the budget of UK Research and Innovation by 20%, reallocating the money to defence, is a signal that a 20 year old cross-party consensus on science funding has come to an end... https://x.com/RichardALJones/status/2047939525893140941
The UK does have a long term problem of being consistently unable to capitalise on what's often world class research, but this is not a solution to that problem.
Its a good job we aren't a knowledge economy or that AI is coming for all the low hanging fruit of said knowledge economies while China increasing getting really good at the high end.
UKRI is a colossal waste of public money. 20% is pocket change - it should have its entire budget suspended until it has been reformed root and branch.
Recent awards highlighted by Charlotte Gill include:
£840,000 award for a project titled "The Europe that Gay Porn Built, 1945–2000."
£939,368 for FemIDEAS: Decolonising Sexual and Gender-Based Violence in Higher Education - at the University of Westminster Centre for Social Justice
£800,000 - Facilitating a University of Roehampton project that says the “disproportionate representation” of William Shakespeare in the theatre has propagated “white, able-bodied, heterosexual, cisgender male narratives”.
Failing to 'capitalise' on 'world class research'?
I was at a scientific conference dinner once where I was sat in between the Professor head of a European research institute and the principal researcher in a department of a British government science organisation, and my recently-published paper contributed to one side of an argument about where to prioritise funding and research to make progress on a long-standing research problem.
My point being that, even among experts in one small niche of one area of science there was disagreement over what should be funded in preference. So the idea that, in a democracy, where you would expect dissent and a plurality of opinion, the idea that I should approve of every funding decision for university research is naive and absurd.
I would find it disturbing if I could not find a number of things that I did not feel should be funded.
There is a larger point, though. The vast majority of modern commercialised research can be traced back to "curiosity driven" research.
Even in commercial settings that tends to be true. It's why Bell Labs produced so many ideas which ended up being worth billions, but very few of which they made any money from themselves.
The UK's problem is not so much in research funding as it is in our perennial inability to truly capitalise on what we discover.
Indeed. Because TRL is hard, requires technical knowledge and investment. Which is heresy to Proper Generalists
Have we discussed this ? (I think it a really bad idea, which Reform will likely pick up too.)
The Conservative plan to cut the budget of UK Research and Innovation by 20%, reallocating the money to defence, is a signal that a 20 year old cross-party consensus on science funding has come to an end... https://x.com/RichardALJones/status/2047939525893140941
The UK does have a long term problem of being consistently unable to capitalise on what's often world class research, but this is not a solution to that problem.
It's eating the seedcorn. It would be disastrous.
I know Britain is skint, and there's only really a variety of bad and worse choices left, but it speaks volumes that politicians would rather do something like this, inflicting long term damage on the country, rather than make the case for ending the triple lock, increasing property taxation, etc.
In more 'seedcorn' news (AI).
"Pregnant Men: An International Exploration of Trans Male Experiences" – £668,244 A four-year study on transgender men’s reproductive experiences, also funded by the AHRC, criticised for prioritizing identity-focused research over traditional scientific inquiry.
"Decolonising the Museum: Digital Repatriation of the Gaidinliu Collection" – £805,769 Focuses on digitally returning cultural artifacts from the UK to India, part of a broader "decolonising" initiative questioned for its cost and practical value.
"Comics and Race in Latin America" – £759,293 An AHRC-funded study on racial representation in Latin American comics, highlighted as an example of disproportionate funding for niche cultural analysis.
How dare Kemi suggest re-allocating money away from such gold to mere baubles like bullets and things to 'defend the country' - Father forgive her.
If we want British universities to have experts in all aspects of life then we need them to research in what might seem abstruse areas of the humanities, and indeed sciences. (As an aside, digital rather than physical repatriation of artefacts sounds like the sort of thing that will keep the Telegraph happy.)
All your examples are projects funded by the AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) whose annual budget of £72 million is chicken feed that has already been cut by a quarter.
that crap makes it sound like a waste of 72M, all these free money for old rope schemes should be shut down and money spent on real research.
I am always struck by the number of people's who first reaction in modern world is to start filming when these shooting take place. There was the thing the other day at the templates in Latin America.
If I hear gunshots the last thing I am thinking about is going live on social media or getting a reel for the gram.
Even in a room full of journalists, it was quite amazing to see how many people had their phones out recording what was going on.
I’d be hiding under the table until a cop came to get me!
What was going on in the room was people being taken to safety (in a rather odd way but that's another kettle of fish). The would-be assassin never made it as far as the ballroom with Trump and the journalists, having been stopped in the foyer.
We’ll probably find out more in the coming hours as the US wakes up, but it does appear that the gunman was stopped short of the ballroom itself, having rushed through the checkpoint at the entrance after seemingly emerging from a back-of-house service door.
It looked a little chaotic, but there was some order to getting the top table out first, followed by various government officials under USSS protection, followed by guests with local police or private security details.
Veep’s USSS agent was pretty good, Vance was first off the stage after being grabbed by the lapels and dragged off his chair! Trump took a few seconds longer to move, with several agents around him, as presumably he’s not quite as agile and different protocols apply.
It’s interesting that this is one of very few events in a private venue where Trump and Vance are both in attendance. Presumably there was a ‘designated survivor’ from the Cabinet not in attendance.
Hesgeth ?
Whiskey Pete was at the dinner. Here he is grinning like a muppet
It's one thing to wake up and find there's been another firearms incident in the vicinity of Donald Trump. It's quite another to find pb in full on conspiracy mode. I'll make two points:
1) Trump is an incredibly dodgy character 2) He was previously shot and nearly killed
A lot of people seem to have some amnesia towards the second point. Anyway as much as I criticise the BBC I'll happily rely on Gary Donoghue's verdict for now. (He was actually there).
nearly killed my butt, supposedly had bit of ear shot off which surprisingly regrew and healed perfectly.
You think it was faked?
I try not to be closed-minded about conspiracies but that's a bold claim.
it certainly looked dodgy , guy was hard to miss and then the SS let him stand up and give all the PR when they had no clue if other gunmen etc. All a bit too pat and then never a mention of the perpetrator afterwards. Bit like the rescued pilot whqere they lost a shedload of big planes , helicopters etc , and right next to a nuclear facility hundreds of miles from where he went down. Badly injured but managed to get hundreds of miles.
Leaving aside the morality, I wonder whether the better strategy might have been to dress up in tuxedo, walk slowly towards the checkpoint in the manner of SeanT at midday, get as far as you can, then shoot the agent nearest to you before bolting into the hall. Rather than running rather obviously towards them in a manner obviously signalling your evil intent from the beginning?
Have we discussed this ? (I think it a really bad idea, which Reform will likely pick up too.)
The Conservative plan to cut the budget of UK Research and Innovation by 20%, reallocating the money to defence, is a signal that a 20 year old cross-party consensus on science funding has come to an end... https://x.com/RichardALJones/status/2047939525893140941
The UK does have a long term problem of being consistently unable to capitalise on what's often world class research, but this is not a solution to that problem.
It's eating the seedcorn. It would be disastrous.
I know Britain is skint, and there's only really a variety of bad and worse choices left, but it speaks volumes that politicians would rather do something like this, inflicting long term damage on the country, rather than make the case for ending the triple lock, increasing property taxation, etc.
In more 'seedcorn' news (AI).
"Pregnant Men: An International Exploration of Trans Male Experiences" – £668,244 A four-year study on transgender men’s reproductive experiences, also funded by the AHRC, criticised for prioritizing identity-focused research over traditional scientific inquiry.
"Decolonising the Museum: Digital Repatriation of the Gaidinliu Collection" – £805,769 Focuses on digitally returning cultural artifacts from the UK to India, part of a broader "decolonising" initiative questioned for its cost and practical value.
"Comics and Race in Latin America" – £759,293 An AHRC-funded study on racial representation in Latin American comics, highlighted as an example of disproportionate funding for niche cultural analysis.
How dare Kemi suggest re-allocating money away from such gold to mere baubles like bullets and things to 'defend the country' - Father forgive her.
If we want British universities to have experts in all aspects of life then we need them to research in what might seem abstruse areas of the humanities, and indeed sciences. (As an aside, digital rather than physical repatriation of artefacts sounds like the sort of thing that will keep the Telegraph happy.)
All your examples are projects funded by the AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) whose annual budget of £72 million is chicken feed that has already been cut by a quarter.
that crap makes it sound like a waste of 72M, all these free money for old rope schemes should be shut down and money spent on real research.
That's the point. Imagine if instead of having to show in the application process how green and/or woke your project was, you had to show how potentially lucrative it was, or potentially how uniting/uplifting it was in terms of its social impact (though even that I'm not sure about).
Have we discussed this ? (I think it a really bad idea, which Reform will likely pick up too.)
The Conservative plan to cut the budget of UK Research and Innovation by 20%, reallocating the money to defence, is a signal that a 20 year old cross-party consensus on science funding has come to an end... https://x.com/RichardALJones/status/2047939525893140941
The UK does have a long term problem of being consistently unable to capitalise on what's often world class research, but this is not a solution to that problem.
It's eating the seedcorn. It would be disastrous.
I know Britain is skint, and there's only really a variety of bad and worse choices left, but it speaks volumes that politicians would rather do something like this, inflicting long term damage on the country, rather than make the case for ending the triple lock, increasing property taxation, etc.
In more 'seedcorn' news (AI).
"Pregnant Men: An International Exploration of Trans Male Experiences" – £668,244 A four-year study on transgender men’s reproductive experiences, also funded by the AHRC, criticised for prioritizing identity-focused research over traditional scientific inquiry.
"Decolonising the Museum: Digital Repatriation of the Gaidinliu Collection" – £805,769 Focuses on digitally returning cultural artifacts from the UK to India, part of a broader "decolonising" initiative questioned for its cost and practical value.
"Comics and Race in Latin America" – £759,293 An AHRC-funded study on racial representation in Latin American comics, highlighted as an example of disproportionate funding for niche cultural analysis.
How dare Kemi suggest re-allocating money away from such gold to mere baubles like bullets and things to 'defend the country' - Father forgive her.
If we want British universities to have experts in all aspects of life then we need them to research in what might seem abstruse areas of the humanities, and indeed sciences. (As an aside, digital rather than physical repatriation of artefacts sounds like the sort of thing that will keep the Telegraph happy.)
All your examples are projects funded by the AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) whose annual budget of £72 million is chicken feed that has already been cut by a quarter.
that crap makes it sound like a waste of 72M, all these free money for old rope schemes should be shut down and money spent on real research.
That's the point. Imagine if instead of having to show in the application process how green and/or woke your project was, you had to show how potentially lucrative it was, or potentially how uniting/uplifting it was in terms of its social impact (though even that I'm not sure about).
I am always struck by the number of people's who first reaction in modern world is to start filming when these shooting take place. There was the thing the other day at the templates in Latin America.
If I hear gunshots the last thing I am thinking about is going live on social media or getting a reel for the gram.
Even in a room full of journalists, it was quite amazing to see how many people had their phones out recording what was going on.
I’d be hiding under the table until a cop came to get me!
What was going on in the room was people being taken to safety (in a rather odd way but that's another kettle of fish). The would-be assassin never made it as far as the ballroom with Trump and the journalists, having been stopped in the foyer.
We’ll probably find out more in the coming hours as the US wakes up, but it does appear that the gunman was stopped short of the ballroom itself, having rushed through the checkpoint at the entrance after seemingly emerging from a back-of-house service door.
It looked a little chaotic, but there was some order to getting the top table out first, followed by various government officials under USSS protection, followed by guests with local police or private security details.
Veep’s USSS agent was pretty good, Vance was first off the stage after being grabbed by the lapels and dragged off his chair! Trump took a few seconds longer to move, with several agents around him, as presumably he’s not quite as agile and different protocols apply.
It’s interesting that this is one of very few events in a private venue where Trump and Vance are both in attendance. Presumably there was a ‘designated survivor’ from the Cabinet not in attendance.
Hesgeth ?
Whiskey Pete was at the dinner. Here he is grinning like a muppet
‘Cool, so all I need is a black neck tie, right? Now, where are my funkiest socks and tan shoes…’
Look like a dinner jacket to me - piping on the pocket?
Grey suit and black tie, less horrible than his usual garish attire but not evening wear. It’s not even the deplorable Hollywood thing of a black neck tie with a dinner suit.
I am always struck by the number of people's who first reaction in modern world is to start filming when these shooting take place. There was the thing the other day at the templates in Latin America.
If I hear gunshots the last thing I am thinking about is going live on social media or getting a reel for the gram.
Even in a room full of journalists, it was quite amazing to see how many people had their phones out recording what was going on.
I’d be hiding under the table until a cop came to get me!
What was going on in the room was people being taken to safety (in a rather odd way but that's another kettle of fish). The would-be assassin never made it as far as the ballroom with Trump and the journalists, having been stopped in the foyer.
We’ll probably find out more in the coming hours as the US wakes up, but it does appear that the gunman was stopped short of the ballroom itself, having rushed through the checkpoint at the entrance after seemingly emerging from a back-of-house service door.
It looked a little chaotic, but there was some order to getting the top table out first, followed by various government officials under USSS protection, followed by guests with local police or private security details.
Veep’s USSS agent was pretty good, Vance was first off the stage after being grabbed by the lapels and dragged off his chair! Trump took a few seconds longer to move, with several agents around him, as presumably he’s not quite as agile and different protocols apply.
It’s interesting that this is one of very few events in a private venue where Trump and Vance are both in attendance. Presumably there was a ‘designated survivor’ from the Cabinet not in attendance.
Hesgeth ?
Whiskey Pete was at the dinner. Here he is grinning like a muppet
‘Cool, so all I need is a black neck tie, right? Now, where are my funkiest socks and tan shoes…’
Look like a dinner jacket to me - piping on the pocket?
Grey suit and black tie, less horrible than his usual garish attire but not evening wear. It’s not even the deplorable Hollywood thing of a black neck tie with a dinner suit.
Have we discussed this ? (I think it a really bad idea, which Reform will likely pick up too.)
The Conservative plan to cut the budget of UK Research and Innovation by 20%, reallocating the money to defence, is a signal that a 20 year old cross-party consensus on science funding has come to an end... https://x.com/RichardALJones/status/2047939525893140941
The UK does have a long term problem of being consistently unable to capitalise on what's often world class research, but this is not a solution to that problem.
It's eating the seedcorn. It would be disastrous.
I know Britain is skint, and there's only really a variety of bad and worse choices left, but it speaks volumes that politicians would rather do something like this, inflicting long term damage on the country, rather than make the case for ending the triple lock, increasing property taxation, etc.
In more 'seedcorn' news (AI).
"Pregnant Men: An International Exploration of Trans Male Experiences" – £668,244 A four-year study on transgender men’s reproductive experiences, also funded by the AHRC, criticised for prioritizing identity-focused research over traditional scientific inquiry.
"Decolonising the Museum: Digital Repatriation of the Gaidinliu Collection" – £805,769 Focuses on digitally returning cultural artifacts from the UK to India, part of a broader "decolonising" initiative questioned for its cost and practical value.
"Comics and Race in Latin America" – £759,293 An AHRC-funded study on racial representation in Latin American comics, highlighted as an example of disproportionate funding for niche cultural analysis.
How dare Kemi suggest re-allocating money away from such gold to mere baubles like bullets and things to 'defend the country' - Father forgive her.
AHRC = Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)
UKRI = UK Research And Innovation (UKRI), which oversees the seven research councils (AHRC, BBSRC, ESRC, EPSRC, MRC, NERC, STFC) and Research England and Innovate UK
UKRI's budget is nearly 9 billion, AHRC's budget is about 70 million (about 8%) and the ones you don't like come to about 2.2 million (about 3% of that 8%)
So you've identified woke causes in 3% of 8% of the total, which is around 0.24% of the whole. Problem is, LostPassword has identified a 20% cut in the whole.
Have we discussed this ? (I think it a really bad idea, which Reform will likely pick up too.)
The Conservative plan to cut the budget of UK Research and Innovation by 20%, reallocating the money to defence, is a signal that a 20 year old cross-party consensus on science funding has come to an end... https://x.com/RichardALJones/status/2047939525893140941
The UK does have a long term problem of being consistently unable to capitalise on what's often world class research, but this is not a solution to that problem.
It's eating the seedcorn. It would be disastrous.
I know Britain is skint, and there's only really a variety of bad and worse choices left, but it speaks volumes that politicians would rather do something like this, inflicting long term damage on the country, rather than make the case for ending the triple lock, increasing property taxation, etc.
In more 'seedcorn' news (AI).
"Pregnant Men: An International Exploration of Trans Male Experiences" – £668,244 A four-year study on transgender men’s reproductive experiences, also funded by the AHRC, criticised for prioritizing identity-focused research over traditional scientific inquiry.
"Decolonising the Museum: Digital Repatriation of the Gaidinliu Collection" – £805,769 Focuses on digitally returning cultural artifacts from the UK to India, part of a broader "decolonising" initiative questioned for its cost and practical value.
"Comics and Race in Latin America" – £759,293 An AHRC-funded study on racial representation in Latin American comics, highlighted as an example of disproportionate funding for niche cultural analysis.
How dare Kemi suggest re-allocating money away from such gold to mere baubles like bullets and things to 'defend the country' - Father forgive her.
You'd have to cancel around 13,100 "Pregnant Men: An International Exploration of Trans Male Experiences" studies to make up for the 20% reduction. There may not be enough such studies.
Comments
https://x.com/bethanyshondark/status/2048356399675998620
Gaidinliu (1915-1993), a Zeliangrong Naga, was 16 years old when she instigated an uprising against the British between 1929 and 1932 in the present Indian regions of Assam, Nagaland, and Manipur. When she was captured, the British confiscated her notebooks, body cloths, bracelets and amulets, and other ritual objects. These objects were donated to the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, and they are now known as the Gaidinliu collection. The continued existence of this collection in a UK museum raises important questions about whether and how they should be returned to the Indigenous peoples from whom they were taken, questions that are especially pertinent as UK museums discuss decolonising their exhibitions.
It seems entirely reasonable for India to request the return of the material, and I'd be surprised if her family did not win any court case.
This is work on an important issue. They could of course just give it all back, but they are researching a middle way.
I think the problem here is that Lucky is using Charlotte Gill as his source. Gill is one of the most ill-informed, ignorant shitforbrains stirring up fake outrage in the right wing media - often by misrepresenting what she is talking about or just not knowing her topic. She started out at GB News and has a reputation as an outrage troll going back years.
Here I think she is just reacting to boo-words without having bothered to do any real work.
All your examples are projects funded by the AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) whose annual budget of £72 million is chicken feed that has already been cut by a quarter.
My point being that, even among experts in one small niche of one area of science there was disagreement over what should be funded in preference. So the idea that, in a democracy, where you would expect dissent and a plurality of opinion, the idea that I should approve of every funding decision for university research is naive and absurd.
I would find it disturbing if I could not find a number of things that I did not feel should be funded.
The Pitt Rivers people seem very concerned that the public might have wrongthoughts about their exhibits, and will remove them from display if they overhear such wrongthink:
https://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/shrunken-heads
" The decision was taken to remove the tsantsa from public display because it was felt that the way they were displayed did not sufficiently help visitors understand the cultural practices related to their making and instead led people to think in stereotypical and racist ways about Shuar culture. Standing in front of the case, people would talk about the people who had made them as ‘savage’ or ‘primitive’ and use words such as ‘gory’, ‘gruesome’ or a 'freakshow' when talking about the display. "
Apparently explaining the exhbits properly by, you know, a good explanatory label is not considered sophisticated enough these days. Reactions must be censored, shaped, or avoided.
"For the opposition to suggest that there's some type of cover-up here is just inaccurate."
The Prime Minister's Chief Secretary @darrenpjones tells Times Radio's @adamboultonTABB that a trip to tech firm Palantir with Peter Mandelson was a "visit" and not a "meeting".
The National Priorities bucket is the winner-picking bit. The head boffins have decided that we want X, which junior boffins can promise to deliver X? Sometimes it can work, but governments generally can't pick winners. A good Thatcherite like you should know that.
The curiosity stuff is more like early venture capital. Sure, most of it won't pay off, even with careful regard to who applies and what they apply to do. But the few that do tend to pay off so spectacularly that the overall game is worth it. And nobody has found a way of predicting those in advance.
NEW THREAD
Must be an Indian thing, like internet scamming.
They have higher tier systems to deal with large and faster missiles.
That means that rather than setting out to fund things that have a good chance of making a handsome return on investment, UKRI is funding things that further the Green and DEI agendas - the first at best tangential and at worst inimical to economic growth, the second actively undermining social cohesion by concentrating on everything that divides us, rather than what unites us. It is taxpayer funded economic and social decline. Yes, a very good and valuable piece of research might still get through - but this cannot be used to justify the whole shebang any more than 'the Europe that gay porn built' can be used solely to condemn the whole thing.
‘Cool, so all I need is a black neck tie, right? Now, where are my funkiest socks and tan shoes…’
The vast majority of modern commercialised research can be traced back to "curiosity driven" research.
Even in commercial settings that tends to be true. It's why Bell Labs produced so many ideas which ended up being worth billions, but very few of which they made any money from themselves.
The UK's problem is not so much in research funding as it is in our perennial inability to truly capitalise on what we discover.
So I discount her entirely as a serious reporter.
*Yet*
A science grant beckons…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junior_(1994_film)
In the film, the assassin bought a ticket to a fund raiser diner. So he could walk in.
https://x.com/reaccionapr/status/2048237171199369657?s=61&t=LYVEHh2mqFy1oUJAdCfe-Q
- AHRC = Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)
- UKRI = UK Research And Innovation (UKRI), which oversees the seven research councils (AHRC, BBSRC, ESRC, EPSRC, MRC, NERC, STFC) and Research England and Innovate UK
UKRI's budget is nearly 9 billion, AHRC's budget is about 70 million (about 8%) and the ones you don't like come to about 2.2 million (about 3% of that 8%)So you've identified woke causes in 3% of 8% of the total, which is around 0.24% of the whole. Problem is, LostPassword has identified a 20% cut in the whole.
Sources