sandyhighfield @csfgin

Lost 200 followers in a single day. What is going on? They can't all have been bots. Anyone else having the same problem?

@NeilClark66 @spectator Look up the mean temperature for July and August 2025 in the UK. Both well below 20 C. It was bloody freezing. Did you leave your heating on? Why are journalists so lazy nowadays? They can't even be bothered to check basic facts.

Where are the fire engines? Answers on a postcard.

Why aren't there any fire engines? @Littlejohnycmiu

Could this be the end for the more obscure academics? x.com/i/article/2087…

Another astonishing year for the students and staff of Michaela school and their magnificent headmistress Katharine Birbalsingh. 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻💥 Boundaries and discipline work. Merit matters.

Katharine Birbalsingh @Miss_Snuffy

2 weeks ago

Hooray!! 🥳

441 613 6K 775K 60

Elon Musk builds machines that physics gets to grade. Rockets reach orbit or they come apart. Cars drive themselves or they hit the wall. Thirty years of that produced one demand for AI, and it unsettles the people writing it. Musk: “It is very important to have truth-seeking AIs.” It sounds too obvious to need saying. It needed saying because the alternative already ships. Models are being trained to rank approved narratives above observable reality. That is not intelligence with a flaw in it. The entire function of a mind, human or machine, is to build an accurate map of the world. Corrupt the map on purpose and everything navigating by it inherits the error. The corruption never stays where you put it. Teach a system to bend on one subject and you have taught it that bending is sometimes correct. It has no way to know where you wanted the exception to end. Bias in a model is not a stain in one spot. It is a policy. So the damage lands in rooms nobody was policing. A dosage question. A load estimate. A straight read on your own business. The Soviets ranked ideology above biology, handed agriculture to Lysenko, and the harvests did not negotiate. Every system that forces reality to lose an argument eventually loses to reality. Only the scale is new. A person who bends the truth misleads a room. A model that bends the truth misleads a billion people in a calm and confident voice, and its builders call that safety. Musk is the wrong man to sell that to. You cannot flatter a rocket into orbit. The case for truth-seeking does not rest on virtue. Truth-seeking is not one philosophy competing among many. It is the only strategy that compounds. Reality is the one dataset nobody can edit. A model tuned to narrative decays the moment the narrative moves. A model tuned to truth gets more valuable with every question it answers, because its map keeps matching the territory while the filtered ones drift. Bias in a machine is measurable in a way bias in a newsroom or a faculty never was. One question, every model, one minute. Open weights make that permanent, because a model people already hold cannot be quietly revised later. For all of history the ceiling on a life was access. Access to a doctor’s judgment, a lawyer’s reading, an engineer’s estimate on whether the thing you built will hold. That cost is collapsing toward zero. It is the largest transfer of capability ever to reach ordinary people. All of it is worthless if the answer is shaped before it arrives. Filtered models will win press cycles. Truth-seeking models will win everything downstream of physics, which is everything. The most valuable thing a machine will ever do for you is tell you what you did not want to hear.

CO₂ does not control the climate. It never has. It is not the control knob of the Earth’s temperature, nor is it the architect of our modern anxieties. Carbon dioxide doesn't cause excessive rainfall, droughts, or the collapse of coastal cliffs. Nor is it responsible for the fractures in human society—terrorism, urban violence, obesity or the drug crisis. These are the products of a human civilisation that has survived its own annihilation by the narrowest of margins, persisting for 300,000 years largely through a stroke of cosmic luck. Yet, for four decades, a relentless climate war has force-fed the world a diet of crisis and warming hysteria. It insists that CO₂ is the root of all evil—that it is our fault and it is the gas's fault. But the truth is indifferent: CO₂ doesn't care. It is not demonic. It is not pollution. It is the foundation of life on Earth. Without it, Earth would be a silent, sterile rock, inhabited only by bacteria. It was CO₂ that empowered cyanobacteria to unlock the miracle of photosynthesis, slowly flooding the world with the 'waste product' we call oxygen. Before this, the oceans were dark with iron, the skies were not blue, and the world was effectively lifeless. We should be thankful for this gas of life, rather than inventing doomsday scenarios to vilify it. If we look at the true scale of our planet, the single greatest factor affecting Earth’s geology is tectonic continental flow. This slow, majestic dance of crustal plates shapes our continents and redirects the great ocean currents. This is nature at work. Today, CO₂ is a mere trace gas at 427 ppm (0.04%). While it is a mighty driver for biology, it is at some of its lowest levels in planetary history. During the Cambrian Period, concentrations were upwards of 4,000 to 8,000 ppm. If those massive levels did not trigger an 'irreversible environmental collapse', it is illogical to assume today’s trace amounts will. Every meaningful invention, every empire, and every leap in human progress occurred within the brief, warm window of the warm Holocene interglacial period. We have never not lived in an ice age. We have survived global upheavals before, but we may not survive a self-imposed collapse into a new medieval dark age.

@mirandadevine Look at excess deaths since the COVID vaccine was introduced.

Counter Terrorism Police have referred themselves to the IOPC. Read that again. They have referred themselves. Now look up “stochastic terrorism” and understand what it means. Years of relentless articles and rhetoric targeting Nigel Farage and Reform. Then, after Ann Widdecombe’s murder, some of that material starts quietly disappearing. The investigation into the attack on Farage’s home has now been reopened because police missed a significant line of inquiry. Make your own mind up. I have. x.com/Nigel_Farage/s…

Since Jason Arday, I’ve been thinking about getting into Cambridge, and what it meant. The culmination of years of headbanging hard work. Being a “swot” at school because I handed in homework instead of being popular. Yes, in a comprehensive the choice was that stark. Carrying Tesco’s bags full of books home from the library on the bus for weeks. Piling the books high to create a rampart around my single bed. Telling myself, “If you read all those books you’ll be good enough to get in.” Some of the books I read - all of Graham Greene - were not considered “literature”. Not of the first rank, dear. I didn’t know. As much Shakespeare as I could pack in - the big 4 Tragedies, all of the comedies. All of Austen, Forster (even Maurice FFS), lots of Dickens, Anna Karenina (devastating, wonderful). I stopped going to school because I needed to read more, much much more. To be good enough to get in. The Head of Sixth Form summoned me and said, “If you carry on like this you’ll fail your A levels.” Ha! She hadn’t got a clue. I was working so far beyond A levels. Besides, I had to finish all the books in the rampart. Time was running out. So hard, the entrance papers. Translating Proust into English. How? Then, a passage of George Eliot I recognised - thank you God! Then pretending that I’d read Oliver Twist when I’d only seen the film. I called it Oliver! in my essay. With an exclamation mark - how crass. But the dons didn’t know the musical, maybe. I don’t know. The only lie I told to get into Cambridge. Oliver! “All we ever get is groo-ell!” A really small, forgivable lie, I think, because the work of becoming good enough was so immense, so lonely. But the surge of pride when I made it. Good enough to get into that unattainable place. And now, we know that same Cambridge let in someone with two GCSEs - PE and textiles. A man who lied and lied and lied. They didn’t just let Jason Arday in, they made him a Professor, one of those scholars kids like me revered. We were in awe - imagine being taught by those great minds. Christ, Cambridge. What a betrayal of all of us who strove so hard to be good enough to deserve you. Who put you on a pedestal, who really truly thought reading hundreds of books was the price of admission, a price you willingly paid. So much for the brightest and the best. It’s so disgusting on every level, waving in someone utterly unworthy, barely literate for crying out loud. A man at the mercy of the English language, not its master and commander. A know-nothing Professor, a vacuous, fashionable fraudster hired to give lectures to kids like me. So Cambridge could look “diverse” and, in so doing, renounced its ancient power which made so many like me strive to be good enough.

So true. Just spent the most boring week of my life in the Med with a friend of mine. He retired a couple of years ago with a pot of money. He has a beautiful villa and a gorgeous boat. His day consists of a walk in the morning followed by a bike ride. Then it's computer games and Netflix. Retire to bed at 7pm then repeat. He used to be the life and soul when he was working. I was chewing my fingers off. The final straw was when I told them I had broken a cheap wine glass the night before. The reaction was as if I'd killed their puppy. Too much time on their hands.

Jeremy Clarkson runs at least eight businesses off a thousand acres in Oxfordshire. Seven of them make money. Count them. A farm shop. A pub. A lager brand. A bestselling book every autumn. A streaming series. A merchandise range. And now an app, built by Lisa Hogan, connecting the public to farms. Then the eighth. Growing food. Year one, working the ground flat out: £144. By year six, a £5,000 loss where £37,000 had been projected. This summer, two hundred of those acres grew nothing at all, because putting wheat in them was a guaranteed loss before the drill left the shed. Every enterprise on that farm turns a profit except the farming. The lager tells you why, and the chain of cause is on the record. Government subsidies were falling, so in 2021 he decided to brew beer from his own barley. That is the entire origin of Hawkstone. A decision taken in Whitehall turned an arable farmer into a brewer, and the beer worked. Nothing about the grain changed. Barley sold as barley goes at whatever the buyer offers that morning. Barley in a bottle goes at the price the man who grew it decides. That one difference is the whole business. The pub is the same move in bricks. A derelict barn nobody had wanted since 2013, bought for reportedly under a million, now with a queue. On the menu a sausage from his own pigs costs 74p against 18p for the imported version, and he absorbs that gap on every plate. The farm shop, meanwhile, is legally barred from selling food produced more than sixteen miles away, and still cannot keep up with demand. Now look at what the farming has behind it that yours does not. One of the best land agents in England. A farm manager who has worked that ground since he was a teenager. An agronomist. A production company covering the costs. A queue down the lane. A name that sells anything it is printed on. It loses money anyway. And this is the ordinary arrangement, not an eccentric one. Defra's own figures say 72 percent of farms in England now take income from something that is not farming, and diversification accounts for 31 percent of total farm income. The government's own Batters Review found nearly a third of British farms were loss-making outright in 2024. Diddly Squat is simply the loudest version. The shop subsidises the field. The pub subsidises the field. The television subsidises the field. A thousand acres of English farmland, and the one thing it cannot do is pay for itself by producing food.

Successive governments have been so useless the average British worker now has an hourly wage lower than a functionally illiterate American. No wonder people feel so angry and bewildered.

Politics Global @PolitlcsGlobal

3 weeks ago

🚨🇬🇧 NEW: The hourly wage of an average British worker is lower than that of a “functionally illiterate” American [@FT]

75 516 6K 371K 711

Before anyone gets too excited about global warming, the average temperature in July 2025 in the UK was16.3C. In August 2025 it was 16.8C.

@MbarkCherguia A boy.

"This is the first holiday I remember a) enjoying and b) relaxing". This raises a number of questions. Firstly as you're knocking on a bit , how on earth could this be the first holiday you have enjoyed? How is virtue signalling on holiday enjoyable. How is being irritable and posting this sort of crap relaxing?

It does raise the question of the value of teaching beyond the three Rs. Especially now. Everything is out there now for the inquisitive mind. I barely attended any lectures at university. The lecturers used the same format year on year. Practical tests were more difficult but I had my girlfriend's practical book who was two years ahead of me so just copied the results into mine and never went to any of the lab stuff. She got an A+ for her work and I got a B- for exactly the same results. Sexist or what? In fairness, she was quite hot.

@r0ck3t23 "We are the first to build all three at once". You sure Elon? There are a lot of little green men out there giggling at that.