Jack Graeme

Jazz & Swing Singer - helping keep the legacy of The Rat Pack alive...

[Love British Food @LoveBritishFood]

EVERY MEAL begins with a farmer. 🌾🚜

Today, we're celebrating the people behind British food.

Happy #Farm24!

🇬🇧 Produce British. Serve British. Choose British.

#24HoursInFarming #LoveBritishFood #BritishFarming #ChooseBritish

@FarmersGuardian | @Morrisons | @RABIcharity

[ZUBY: @ZubyMusic]

It's wild seeing people advocating for more and more taxes. A tax on every asset and action, even those that are already taxed.

Meanwhile, I think they should all be abolished...

Say what you want, but I'm grateful to live in a place where my view is the popular one.

[Farmer Luke 🥔 @Ondaintreefarm]

Day 11 of harvest🌾

[Dr. Matthew M. Wielicki @MatthewWielicki]

The observational record is clear: global burned area has declined significantly since 2002, driven largely by reductions in savannas, grasslands, shrublands, and croplands. Meanwhile, forest burned area shows no statistically significant increase.

So the global record does NOT support claims that forests are burning more because of climate change.

[The Spectator @spectator]

'Black History Month is tokenistic nonsense.'

Headteacher Katherine Birbalsingh argues that instead of schools focussing on Black History Month once a year, they should instead teach British history that isn't seen through an 'oppressor and oppressed' lens.

Watch in full | https://t.co/IxuUdlIfSi | @michaelgove | @Miss_Snuffy

[Ted Cruz @tedcruz]

Americans buried parents alone. Children lost years of childhood. Families watched businesses they had built over a lifetime disappear.

And while the country suffered, Anthony Fauci was writing in his diary about becoming “the most famous and talked about person in the country” and marveling that his fame was “explosive and really unimaginable.”

There was no camera he couldn’t find. No interview he couldn’t give. No American life he wouldn’t micromanage.

He said one thing to the public, and would write the opposite in his diary.

Today, when the country finally demanded answers, the man who never stopped talking suddenly went silent.

[Barbarian Herodotus @BBHerodotus]

After seeing a post on it yesterday, I’ve looked more deeply into Anthropic’s purchasing and destruction of millions of used books.

They spent tens of millions of dollars acquiring and destroying books to train their AI model, Claude.

They knew, from the beginning that it would be unpopular. They knew what they were doing, was wrong.

An internal memo from 2024 stated:

“Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world.”

“We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.”

Why used books?

Companies like Anthropic and Meta found it impractical to gain permission from authors and publishers to use their work.

So instead, they stole their work to train their product through mass purchases of used books and through pirating them from the internet.

The authors of these works, didn’t receive a dime for their efforts. These companies stole the hard won literary talent of others to train machines to replace the victims of their theft.

Anthropic cofounder Ben Mann personally downloaded countless books for this purpose from LibGen, a book pirating website.

When a new book piracy website debuted in 2022, Mann sent an email sharing the link with his employees stating: “just in time!!!”

Meta employees were wary about the piracy of books, with one engineer writing, “Torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn’t feel right.”

Anthropic purchased millions of books, in batches of tens of thousands from Better World Books and U.K.-based World of Books.

They then used a “hydraulic powered cutting machine” to slice off the spines of these books before scanning them. Finally, the remains of these books were picked up for recycling.

Feel free to use AI, it’s a free country.

But remember that, if you use Claude, that Anthropic has committed a great wrong, and they knew that they were doing it from the beginning.

Below is an image, from a court case, of a warehouse full of used books, that instead of being held and read by you and your children, have been destroyed forever.

AI is inevitable, but spend your money on the companies who do good, and do not knowingly commit evils.

May the most moral company win.

[Alan D Miller @alanvibe]

Fauci holding everyone in contempt

[Kevin Bass @kevinnbass]

Emails show leading officials at NIH, including Fauci, knew the best data indicated no benefit from masks.

Why did they proclaim great benefits of masks then?

Because these officials were not managing a virus using science.

They were managing a population using psychology.

[Jim Ferguson @JimFergusonUK]

🚨 BRITAIN HAS FINALLY FOUND A WAY TO EXPLAIN NET ZERO...

MAKE IT A COMEDY.

The team at Artificial Idiots have produced one of the funniest political sketches I've seen in a long time.

The "solar-powered submarine" alone is worth watching.

Brilliant satire. Brilliant writing.

Enjoy. 🤣👇 @AiIdiots

[Kevin Bass @kevinnbass]

Sweden did not lock down

[Jack Graeme @Jack_Graeme]

@Ondaintreefarm You never seem to get a break. I very much admire your determination to succeed.

[Farmer Luke 🥔 @Ondaintreefarm]

Harvest Update 🌾 why I’ve been MIA 🚜

[Farmer Luke 🥔 @Ondaintreefarm]

The winter wheat is all in the shed less then what there should have been, I normal fill this shed up twice, but with the dry growing conditions, the yield has been been average at its absolute best, too “would have made more money if I haven’t bothered planting it”

[Latimer Alder @latimeralder]

This is 'demand management' in ecospeak

In English it means rationing.

Yes folks, one of the world's richest countries tells its own citizens that it cannot provide enough electricity to keep the country functioning. Because of deliberate political decisions about 'climate'

Coming very soon to Britain.

Only it may not be voluntary. It may just be compulsory when the grid totally fails

@KathrynPorter26

[The potting shed @GardenerFliss]

If you had the choice, would you rather buy your food from a British farm shop and pay a little more, knowing it was grown here and supporting the people who produced it… or would price always come first?
British farmers are facing some incredibly tough times. The weather has been relentless, costs remain high, and many are wondering how much longer they can keep going.
I genuinely believe there’s something special about knowing where your food comes from. Meeting the people who grew it. Keeping money in our rural communities. Protecting the farms that feed us.
But I’d really love to know what you think.
Is there still an appetite in the UK to support British-grown food, even if it costs a little more? Or has the cost of living changed that for most people?
@NoFarmsNoFoods @TWBFarms @TheFarmingForum @loosewomen @CAupdates @NFUtweets @winnettes_ @HelenSkelton @Radmore_farm @DiddlySquatFarm

[Tironianae 🍊🍊 Z. - Ultra Verbum Vincet @Tironianae]

🚨 JUST IN: Speaker Mike Johnson refuses to back down as the debate over Sharia law and assimilation explodes in Washington.

Johnson says the real issue isn’t religion. It’s any attempt to replace American law with something else.

America runs on the Constitution. One law. One system.

Anyone who comes here should respect that and assimilate into the country that gave them the opportunity to be here in the first place.

America’s laws come first. 🇺🇸

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

The last overseas shearers Britain intends to let in are on the fells right now, working out the final weeks of their leave.

The door shut on 30 June. No vote, no debate, no announcement, just a date passing quietly in a summer when everyone was looking elsewhere. Those still working the Borders this week are here on leave that expires on 1 October, and when they fly out that is the end of it.

Understand what is walking out.

Six New Zealanders spent three months in one Northumberland valley last year and sheared nearly 90,000 sheep. Fifteen thousand head each, across farms from the Scottish Borders down to County Durham. They have been coming into Coquetdale for over thirty years. Since 2011 a concession has let up to 75 of them in each spring, and between them they take the wool off one and a half to two million British sheep in a window a few weeks long.

The Home Office rejected the application on 2 February. Twenty-six days of farmers writing to their MPs got it reinstated on 10 March for one final year, with a line about the sector having had fourteen years to train British workers and now being expected to transition to domestic labour.

Here is what that sentence is standing on. British Wool trains over 800 people a year, most of those courses are basic level, and most of the people on them are sheep farmers learning to do their own flock. Training was never the bottleneck. A top shearer clears a ewe in two or three minutes, calm hands, no panic in the animal, hundreds a day for weeks on end, and reaching that standard takes years of conditioning and a place in a global trade that follows the season around the planet.

Fourteen million breeding ewes. A few weeks to do them all. A sheep left in fleece gets eaten alive by maggots, so the job is not optional and the date is not negotiable.

Next spring those farms make phone calls that nobody answers.

Seventy-five shearers, once a year, and a government that could not find room for them.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Seren has started her own wallow, four metres from the one the adults use, and she has put it in entirely the wrong place.

She is the first bison born on that Welsh ground in six thousand years and she is learning the job by copying, which is how every large herbivore has ever learned anything. The adults roll in a wet depression at the base of the east slope that has been deepening for years. Seren watched them at it all summer. Then she went and started one of her own, on higher ground, in a spot no grown animal would have chosen, because the point of theirs is that water gathers there and the point of hers is that she liked it.

She rolls in it most days. She gets up ginger and enormously pleased with herself and goes off to glare at something.

Here is the part nobody planned for.

Her patch is bare soil now, scraped down and pressed flat by a young bison who is in it purely for the itch. Bare soil is one of the scarcest things in a British grassland. Solitary bees nest in it. Seed that has been sitting in that ground for decades needs it to come up. The rim she has thrown out is already carrying wild garlic. Hers will never hold water the way the deep one does, so it will not make dragonflies, but it is making a different set of things altogether and the estate has quietly started surveying it.

That is the whole of what a keystone species is. Not an animal doing conservation. An animal doing exactly what it fancies, at enough weight and often enough that the ground has to arrange itself around the decision.

Seren wanted a scratch.

The estate got a habitat, and nobody up there is yet sure which one.