Leighton Pritchard

Watched BBC 6 o clock news. Just a completely unserious broadcast. Chris Mason, acting like a children's entertainer, giving a prolonged impenetrable editorial. Not a whiff of informative content about the Budget or what it means for the country. Just playschool blah blah bollocks.

The number of inadvertently activated sleeper agents was in double figures.

Screenshot of a Washington Post article titled ‘Hegseth order on first Caribbean boat strike, officials say: Kill them all.’ Subheadline states that as two men clung to a burning ship targeted by SEAL Team 6, the Joint Special Operations commander followed the defense secretary’s order to leave no survivors. The article is dated November 28, 2025, by reporters Alex Horton and Ellen Nakashima. Below the headline is a grid of aerial infrared images of a small boat at sea before and after missile strikes.

The second screenshot shows text from the article describing how Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth allegedly issued a verbal directive ‘to kill everybody.’ A missile launched off the Trinidad coast hit the vessel, which burned while commanders watched on a drone feed. When two survivors were seen clinging to the wreckage, the Special Operations commander ordered a second strike to follow Hegseth’s order, killing the remaining men in the water.

Pete Hegseth committed a war crime and then doubled down.

He instructed the military to murder civilians at sea and when there were injured victims he gave the order to kill them all.

Surviving victims were brutally dismembered at sea by US missiles.

In stores now

I swore an oath to the Constitution in 1986. I've upheld it through 25 years of service and every day since I retired.

If Trump's trying to intimidate me, it won’t work. I’ve given too much to our country to be silenced by bullies who care more about power than the Constitution.

When it is time to do the year-end wrap up, inside you there are two wolves:

One says "HOW DARE YOU?" and recites your achievements like Daenerys Targaryen about to burn a city.

One says "Oh, nevermind. I have no memory of anything I have accomplished. Truly, I have achieved nothing this year."

First off the printer today is a lovely 10'' x 8'' print of a photo I took a few years ago of the Choir and Nave at Salisbury Cathedral.
#photography #blackandwhitephotography #print #WestCoastKin

I can't imagine what it's like to be in a field entirely populated by sages.

This is something that really bothers me in so much talk about benefits including from some policy wonks.

Not everyone who is given something from the state is Oliver Twist, nor should they be.

The state should provide help to all sorts of people in different circs, not just gruel for the needy

A reminder that the New York Times published nearly *300* stories on Biden's age. They've had 2 to date about Trump and the reason is that Fox News directed the narrative. The Times actually fabricated a story about neurologists visiting the WH to examine Biden when Biden wasn't even in the country

Something wicked this way comes... 🧬🧬🧬

(to the ATCC Genome Portal on Monday, Dec 1st...)

(wicked in a good, different, leap forward way... 😄)

Our review is now available #OpenAccess online and as formatted PDF doi.org/10.1093/fems...

And honestly I don't give a fuck if it's popular or not. It's going to make a lot of kids' lives better. That's the point of government. Not an opinion poll.

The #Qualcomm acquisition of #Arduino was indeed ominous.....

The minimum wage is not a cure all — we’re asking too much of business Politicians spend too much time uttering cheap rhetoric about cheap labour

Ultimately the minimum wage is a brilliant tool, but it can’t compensate for “we haven’t built any housing”, “we have cut cash transfers to the bone” and “all the third spaces have been cut to pay for social care”.

DOGE was created for data theft and infrastructure dismantling and it wildly succeeded on both counts within the first few weeks of its existence. It will take a generation to rebuild what it destroyed and the breach of data is unprecedented.

YouTube video by JavaMama926 Biostatistics vs. Lab Research

Teaching experimental design again tomorrow and once more reminded of this awesome distillation of why we need to teach it.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbOD...

Meet the AI workers who tell their friends and family to stay away from AI When the people making AI seem trustworthy are the ones who trust it the least, it shows that incentives for speed are overtaking safety, experts say

“AI workers said they distrust the models they work on because of a consistent emphasis on rapid turnaround time at the expense of quality.”

from Amrhein, Greenland, & McShane ("Retire statistical significance," Nature, 2019) "For example, the authors above could have written: ‘Like a previous study, our results suggest a 20% increase in risk of new-onset atrial fibrillation in patients given the anti-inflammatory drugs. Nonetheless, a risk difference ranging from a 3% decrease, a small negative association, to a 48% increase, a substantial positive association, is also reasonably compatible with our data, given our assumptions.’ "

from Amrhein, Greenland, & McShane ("Retire statistical significance," Nature, 2019) "Whatever the statistics show, it is fine to suggest reasons for your results, but discuss a range of potential explanations, not just favoured ones. Inferences should be scientific, and that goes far beyond the merely statistical. Factors such as background evidence, study design, data quality and understanding of underlying mechanisms are often more important than statistical measures such as P values or intervals."

I like this from @vamrhein.bsky.social et al. I assigned it to my class last semester and tried to explain that p-values measure how compatible (vs. surprising) the data are with the null, given our assumptions. But yeah, tests & CIs are hard to understand!

www.blakemcshane.com/Papers/natur...

Do I understand correctly that there is now a dispute within the administration about whether this "peace plan" was written by Russians or Americans?

Moderna is most shorted stock in S&P 500 as Americans skip jabs Maker of Covid-19 shots has slumped since pandemic as people turn against vaccines

on.ft.com/4icxVlG A country in the grip of a doomsday cult. Anti-vaccines, climate denial, gun ownership encouraged…

It’s so important to understand- as Arthur explains here - that the so called peace plan is not only a disaster for Ukraine but a threat to all of Europe

For the journalism schools:

Making a conspiratorial dimwit sound like a maverick hero in a just battle of wills against the negatively valenced "scientific" orthodoxy.

That is not even performative neutrality any more, that is taking sides

@peterhotezmdphd.bsky.social
@michaelemann.bsky.social

Many of you have been hoodwinked or bamboozled into thinking that tax is bad or evil. It’s literally the dues we pay for living in this big clubhouse we call civilization

We don’t resource the education system to create enough trained people, make good working conduits, or pay enough to attract enough people to the roles, so overseas labour gets brought in. It’s not hard to understand.

Dear UK: You don’t pay enough taxes to have an NHS that doesn’t run on immigration and immigrant labour.

Sorry to be brutally honest but it’s how it is