Stephen Holland #FBPE #Rejoin #FBPA

Time has told me.

[Anton Gerashchenko @Gerashchenko_en]

This is what Russia's Central Bank governor Elvira Nabiullina was afraid to say out loud:

"We, economists, companies, even officials, are on a falling plane, while the pilot sits in a soundproof cockpit. All we can do is pray."

Pray. What else is left for slaves to do?

[Julia Willemyns @jujulemons]

IMO this is one of the coolest parts of @KanishkaNarayan's announcements. Getting public support for data centres is hard. A genuinely smart fix is to make them beautiful.

We used to be great at making the functional inspiring. The great train stations of the 1800s made people proud of progress.

(From the @BritishProgress founding essay.)

[Julia Willemyns @jujulemons]

I’ve recently been worried about brain drain for a very selfish reason. A lot of my friends have been leaving (you know who you are). I couldn’t tell if my concern was bad reasoning from anecdotes so I tracked one group of exceptional Britons you can actually follow individually: International Mathematical Olympiad medallists.

These are not normal teenagers. ~3% of IMO winners go on to win major scientific prizes (60x the rate of MIT alumni). The UK's medallists include two Fields Medallists, the designer of the chip in 99% of the world's smartphones, and the inventors of public-key cryptography.

The headline number says I am wrong to worry: 71% retention and the UK is the second-largest importer of IMO talent globally after the US.

But look closer and you see:
1. The most recent settled-career cohort shows the lowest retention on record.
2. Before 2016, not a single UK medallist did their undergrad abroad. Since then, two have. Both went to MIT.
3. Of British medallists in industry, only 33% work for a British firm. The modal employer is Anthropic, OpenAI, or Jane Street.
4. Leaving is individually rational. IMO alumni who moved to the US were up to 6x more productive than equally talented peers who stayed home. The UK multiplier is 2-3x. The individual-optimal and nationally-optimal choice are not the same thing.

So was I right to worry? Too early to say. The data is consistent with both a structural shift and noise. But the laments of brain drain are not obviously wrong.

Full piece: https://t.co/yF5eJXrwps

(A note on statistical validity: we send six kids to the IMO a year, so some of these figures rest on analysing small numbers. This is enough to see the shape of things but not enough to lean hard on any percentage.)

[Thanos Angelopoulos @Th_Angelopoulos]

Call you old fashioned? Alright, old-fashioned, @PatrickChristys, let us go through the decades you prefer.

The 1960s: Ian Brady and Myra Hindley tortured and murdered five children, buried them on Saddleworth Moor, and recorded their screams on tape.

The 1970s: Peter Sutcliffe murdered 13 women with hammers and screwdrivers across Yorkshire.

Dennis Nilsen began strangling young men in his London flat, dismembering them, boiling their skulls on his stove, and flushing the remains down the drains.

The 1980s: Michael Ryan shot 16 people dead in Hungerford. Fred and Rose West were raping, torturing, and dismembering women and girls and burying them under their house in Gloucester. Their own daughter among them.

The 1990s: Two 10-year-old boys abducted a toddler from a shopping centre in Liverpool, tortured him, and bludgeoned him to death with bricks and an iron bar.

Thomas Hamilton walked into a primary school in Dunblane and shot 16 five-year-olds and their teacher. Harold Shipman was murdering his patients by the hundred.

The 2000s: James Watt and his family enslaved a man for a decade, tortured him with baseball bats, air pistols, boiling water, and pit bull attacks, then decapitated him and dumped his body in a lake.

Mathew Hardman, 17, murdered a 90-year-old woman, cut out her heart, placed it on a silver platter, and drank her blood.

The 2010s: Derrick Bird shot 12 people dead across Cumbria.

Thomas Mair shot and stabbed an MP in the street while shouting "Britain first".

The 2020s: Jemma Mitchell decapitated her friend, stored the body for two weeks, and drove 200 miles to dump it.

Those are the decades you prefer. And for each decade there are 20 other equally horrific incidents.

And here is the thing, old fashioned Patrick. According to the Crime Survey for England and Wales, violence, burglary, and car crime have fallen by close to 90% since the mid-1990s. The ONS confirms that violent crime is two-thirds lower now than in the 1990s.

The country you live in today is measurably, statistically, dramatically safer than the one you are nostalgic for. That's not an opinion, it's a fact.

And I am not even touching Glasgow and its past knife crime epidemic.

So, which decade was better, Patrick? Tell us.

[Faith Donkin @DonkinFaith]

This is like calling a mugging a 'man who asked for a wallet'

[Emma 💛💙🇩🇰🇬🇧🇪🇺 @MonkEmma]

Today isn't a debunk as much as a pre-bunk!

We know the narrative that will inevitably follow this story on the front page of today's Telegraph - but particularly amongst the millions who will only read the headline and not the paywalled article

🧵
1/6

[Stephen Holland #FBPE #Rejoin #FBPA @Phesnet]

@sciencegirl And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden.

[Brian Auger @brianaugerb3]

Please join me in wishing the very great Julie Driscoll A Very Happy Birthday! The voice, the look - Julie is an icon!

[Maxi @AllForProgress_]

In a workshop in Ulverston, on the edge of the Lake District, a few dozen people are the last in Britain who can do a thing this country once did better than anywhere on earth: take molten glass, blow it by lung and hand, and cut it until it throws light like nothing else made by man.

The company is called Cumbria Crystal. Its craftsmen were brought up from Stourbridge in 1976, out of the old heartland of English glass - and then, one by one between 1990 and 2007, every great Stourbridge house shut its doors, until a skill that once had its capital across the West Midlands had its last redoubt in a single building in Cumbria.

This year, Heritage Crafts placed hand-cut crystal on its Red List of Critically Endangered Crafts. One more workshop gone, one more retirement that goes unreplaced, and three centuries of mastery simply end - it goes the way of stonemasonry or, you probably wouldn't believe is increasingly the case, metalwork.

There is a detail here on which the picture revolves. The crystal on the tables of British embassies, the glass set before presidents and kings when this country wishes to show the world what it is, comes in good part from that same endangered workshop in Ulverston. We use the craft to impress the world and cannot trouble ourselves to keep it alive at home. The glass that says "look what Britain can do" is being quietly permitted to become the glass that says "look what Britain used to be able to do."

There is no villain in this, not exactly. No minister set out to kill English crystal. It is dying the way most things die here now - by inattention, by an energy bill the kiln can barely meet, by a culture that spent two generations teaching the young that working with your hands was a lesser destiny, by the lazy faith that someone, somewhere, would always keep the old skills going so the rest of us needn't think about it.

Progress takes the opposite view of a thing like this. A skill is capital - the most patiently accumulated capital a country owns - and a nation that lets its mastery lapse is poorer in a way no quarterly figure will ever record. And a nation that barrels its energies into skill capital is rich.

Our Hallmark system exists to stamp such skills, to honour them, and to pay the people who hold them to teach the next hands, because the distance between a living craft and a glass case in a museum is exactly one generation that could not afford to pass it on.

The men and women in Ulverston still know how it is done. For now. The only question is whether a country that can fill an embassy, an office, a home, with their work can be bothered to ensure that, fifty years from now, there is still anyone left who can make the next set.

[Nick Reeves #RejoinEU #NAFO #FBPE @nickreeves9876]

Please repost if you want the full restoration of our EU Freedom of Movement, which was stolen from us by the worst abuses of democracy in modern British history.

This is the debate that we have to win if the UK is to rejoin the Single Market or the EU. In 2016 the Remain campaign did not defend our Freedom of Movement because its spineless leaders were frightened of the right-wing press. Our freedom was robbed from us without a debate.

The wave of migration from Eastern Europe is a thing of the past. Thanks to EU membership, Eastern European countries have greatly reduced the economic gap with the UK. The immigration hysteria of 2016 was a panic about a migration surge that was soon going to end, but the wretched Remain leadership failed to make that point. Indeed, given its leadership, it is remarkable that Remain got as much as 48%.

Please don't do the typical thing of educated people of finding all sorts of practical reasons why this can't happen. If Brexiters had been like that we would still be in the EU. It is our job as ordinary people to make the demand as loudly as possible. It is for politicians to listen to the people and look for ways of fulfilling that demand.

[Lord Hanson of Flint Labour Peer & Minister @RTHondavehanson]

In a corner of parliament at the far end of the Royal gallery a box lies permantly open containing sand from all five Normandy beaches -a reminder to both houses of the sacrifice & the cause of freedom fought for by brave service people on DDay June 6 th 1944. #DDay

[EdwardMO 🌻 @EdwardHMO]

Widely seen as the masterpiece of Frank Lloyd Wright #botd, from its opening the Guggenheim Museum has been an unparalleled physical and cultural presence in the New York landscape...

[Mi𝕤𝕤 M🟥 @poppymoppet]

Charles Rennie Mackintosh #botd. 👨‍🎨✍🏻🎨

[Crazy Vibes @CrazyVibes_1]

A Nazi commander loaded his pistol, pressed the cold metal barrel directly against the forehead of an American soldier, and gave a chilling ultimatum: "Order the Jewish soldiers to step forward, or I will shoot you right now."

What happened next in that frozen prisoner-of-war camp changed history forever, yet the man who stared down death kept it a secret for the rest of his life.

It was January 1945, and the bitter winter of World War II was at its peak. Inside Stalag IX-A, a notorious German prison camp near Ziegenhain, thousands of American soldiers were trapped behind barbed wire. Among them was Master Sergeant Roddie Edmonds, a twenty-five-year-old from Knoxville, Tennessee. As the highest-ranking non-commissioned officer in his section, Edmonds was responsible for the lives of 1,275 men.

One day, the camp commander, a fanatical Nazi major named Siegmann, issued a terrifying directive.

He ordered that the following morning, all American prisoners of Jewish faith must step out of the ranks during roll call. Everyone knew what this meant. Separating the Jewish soldiers was the first step toward sending them to extermination camps.

Inside the dark, freezing barracks, the prisoners panicked. Some of the Jewish soldiers considered stepping forward willingly to protect their Christian brothers from Nazi wrath. But Edmonds refused to let that happen. He looked at his men and gave a clear, definitive order: "Tomorrow, everyone steps forward. Everyone."

The next morning, the ground was thick with snow. Major Siegmann walked out onto the parade ground, expecting to see a small, isolated group of Jewish soldiers standing apart from the rest. Instead, he stopped dead in his tracks. All 1,275 American soldiers had stepped forward together in perfect unison.

The commander turned red with anger and stormed over to Edmonds. "They cannot all be Jews!" Siegmann screamed.

Edmonds stood completely still, looked the Nazi straight in the eyes, and replied: "We are all Jews here."

Enraged, Siegmann drew his Luger pistol and pressed it against Edmonds' forehead. The tension was suffocating. Hundreds of men held their breath, waiting for the gunshot. But Edmonds did not blink.

"According to the Geneva Convention, we only have to give our name, rank, and serial number," Edmonds said, his voice steady and calm. "If you shoot me, you will have to shoot all of us. And when the war ends, you will be tried for war crimes."

Edmonds knew the German army was collapsing and the Allies were advancing. Siegmann knew it too. The Nazi commander looked at the wall of unified men, realized he could not break their spirit, and slowly lowered his gun. He turned around and walked away without saying another word.

Because of that moment of defiance, two hundred Jewish-American soldiers survived the Holocaust. When the war ended, Edmonds returned to Tennessee, married his sweetheart, and raised a family. He never bragged about his actions, never looked for medals, and never even told his own children what he had done. To him, protecting his men was simply his duty.

Decades after his death in 1985, his son uncovered the truth by talking to the survivors. In 2015, Edmonds was officially recognized as Righteous Among the Nations, the highest honor Israel bestows upon non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. He remains the only American soldier to ever receive this recognition.

True heroism does not look for applause, and love will always be louder than hatred.

By standing together in the snow, those soldiers proved that when we refuse to abandon each other, ordinary human beings can become absolutely invincible.

[Stephen Holland #FBPE #Rejoin #FBPA @Phesnet]

@Bertrom Your posts mean a lot, have learnt loads from them. Keep going.

[Stephen Holland #FBPE #Rejoin #FBPA @Phesnet]

@sorealfoods @archeohistories I enjoy your historical discourses but your retweets of @sorealfoods are often disgusting, obscene and cruel (OK, I like the ice creams and sweets). Can you not find more vegetarian dishes?

[Stephen Holland #FBPE #Rejoin #FBPA @Phesnet]

@MakingTime60s What a cool bunch!

[Stephen Holland #FBPE #Rejoin #FBPA @Phesnet]

@batcountry1980 Me as well. Took my family along and the two 20 year olds were impressed. An engineer explained how a mixing desk worked and then showed us Lennon's cigarette burn marks on the piano. Everything The Beatles used is kept in storage. My kids had no idea how a record is made.

[Ramin Nasibov @RaminNasibov]

Each circle has a different story

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

This may well be the last time Europe extends an invitation to clowns to mark D-Day. Not a single person in the Trump administration comes close to having the character those landings demanded. The Americans who stormed those beaches on June 6, 1944 were fighting against exactly the kind of people Hegseth represents