Mad fact... 42% of Labour Prime Ministers have had to fire Peter Mandelson.

What is the appropriate verdict when peer reviewing a review article which only cites two primary research papers published in the last ten years, and doesn't actually mention the findings of one of them?

(a) Reject
(b) REJECT

Genuinely sorry to be Reviewer 2 today, but some drafts can't be fixed.

Yet again I remind everyone (as Elizabeth does in her very next tweet) that "foreigners are corrupting our pure blood with weakness & disease" is Fascism 101. Not some variant, not some metaphorically similar thing, not some echo -- the thing itself.

Screen capture from BBC news website: "Sir Olly told MPs that the concerns flagged by UK Security Vetting (UKSV), the government agency that did Lord Mandelson's vetting, did not relate to his previous relationship with Epstein, but did not say what they were about."

So why the fuck was Mandelson's history with Epstein NOT a cause for concern during the vetting?

Örjan Westin is yet again so deservedly Hugo nominated and I think all of you should vote for him.
A Hugo win is overdue.

Looking forward to Kezia Dugdale and everyone else at @stonewalluk.bsky.social explaining to me how we are supposed to “debate” people like this.

This is just horrific. The gender critical movement along with the British press bullied her out of her job at the NHS and now they doxed her after she fled the country and are continuing the harassment and defamation. These people are absolute monsters.

What good would it have done if the civil servants hadn't "hidden" the vetting failure? Would the outcome differ?

Phillipson appointed Mary-Ann Stephenson as EHRC chair *despite* not one but two select committes warning her not to!

This government installs all the wrong people because it wants to.

If you need to add stuff to a rerelease of a previous movie to explain your current movie I’m just going to say you’re very bad at making movies

I’ve known you since ~2000 and never realised. Although (a) I’m unobservant and (b) it’s hard to stammer online

torn between "we need to soften IP law to stop the calcification of the culture" and "we need to give the Tolkien estate the right to extrajudicially execute these clowns at will"

As any working UK university academic could have told you any time in the last 2 decades, the system is structurally screwed, and was doomed to implode from the day the fees-and-competition fix was in.

post18.co.uk/blood-debt-t...

It’s designed to protect transphobes

why appeasement doesn't work:

having, it seems, got the anti-trans policies they wanted, the next thing is to force anyone pro-trans rights from public life

sn’t that precisely the point? There’s been an arrest, which indicates the possibility of a prosecution. Saying it was the driver pre-empts the verdict of whether it was deliberate and could get the entire case thrown out.

As a former Junior Year Abroad Co-ordinator I just want to point out that calling 18-20 year olds ”children” is misleading.

NHS claims 'it's raining cats and dogs'is culturally insensitive Doctors and nurses in Lancashire told some idioms risk offending 'international colleagues or patients' Doctors and nurses have been ordered not to say "it's raining cats and dogs" and "the early bird catches the worm" to avoid offending foreign patients. Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust instructed staff against using the phrases in its diversity and inclusion training, claiming that the terms were not culturally sensitive. It warned that the terms "may not translate well across other cultures" and may need to be explained to international colleagues or patients.

No, the NHS didn’t do anything of the sort.

The evidence the NHS didn’t do that is the third paragraph in the hit piece.

Any decent paper would have trashed the piece during the pitch phase, but the Telegraph runs dozens of these articles every single day. The Telegraph must be destroyed

If this breaks the central dogma, then so does polyadenylation

This enzyme does nothing to change that. The information content of poly(CA) is virtually nil, and is unrelated to the *primary sequence* of amino acids in the enzyme.

No, he was very specific that you could not transfer *information* about the *linear sequence of monomers* from a protein template to a nucleotide product.

Why is DRT3a called a reverse transcriptase rather than a DNA polymerase, given that it’s using a DNA template?

It’s not that these people still exist. That’s just biology. It’s that they are still being paid to shit in their own hands & start clapping.

I seriously ask what room you think there is for "compromise" or "nuanced debate" with people with thiss opinion or who think it should just be a normal, legitimate one within the bounds of normal discourse? That's not a moral appeal, just a factual statement about total lack of common ground!

Literally this morning. This isn't some random transphobic account, it's a prominent figure in UK anti-trans politics, with 160k followers, routinely promoted and RTd by Rowling, "Sex Matters", etc. Just openly calling to completely ban being trans.

What are trans folks supposed to do with that?

As @goodlawproject.org have pointed out, among many others, Palantir is a company inextricably linked to the Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, and the Labour government as a whole. When they come out with scary shit like this it is time to cut ties, fast.
twitter-thread.com/t/2045574398...

6/ You have only one task: to focus on the real nuances to drown out the noise from bigots, not to engage with them. We must not take their bait about “debate” versus “no debate” either, instead, we must set our own narrative.

Happy 80th Birthday to Tim Curry, a guy who treats every single part like it was the role he was born to play.

1/🧵 Stonewall’s nonsense. I have noticed a recurring pattern where the organisation claims there is a need for a nuanced conversation regarding trans rights, yet consistently fails to engage in one. This rhetoric only serves to undermine the legitimacy of trans people, and it will not be tolerated.

Plov Recipe (Uzbek Lamb Pilau) This Uzbek iteration of the more well-known pilau is rich, aromatic and simple to cook. Carrots, onions and lamb shoulder are layered with spices and plenty of rice to create a wonderful warming dish ...

Basically this recipe but substituting dried apricots for barberries and lamb stock cubes for the salt
www.greatbritishchefs.com/recipes/plov...

Lamb plov scores 8/10 - not bad for a first try doing a rice dish in the slow cooker. Just a smidge too much liquid, will fix next time. Before/after pics below: