curls59

Et in Arcadia Ego

[Alastair Hilton @London_W4]

I am having a drink this evening with a friend in a Chiswick pub. Two policemen have just come into the pub and asked me to step outside. I have stepped outside and they have threatened me because I tweeted about a councillor banning seating outside pubs in Chiswick. They admit on video (watch it!) that I did not break the law at all. They came to threaten me. To warn me off tweeting about councillors and the council. This is modern Britain. This is the police state. Please, please, please watch this video. It does involve me using very bad language, but this has got to be seen. Police coming out to threaten someone who hasn’t committed a crime. I’m fuming.

[Tim Shipman @ShippersUnbound]

Still reeling from this one. Treasury didn’t want people who can count

[Rory Sutherland @rorysutherland]

I would also add that good air conditioning units also operate as heat pumps in cold weather. Almost all modern hotel rooms are both warmed and cooled this way. Heat pumps are vital in getting people to heat homes electrically rather than using gas.

Second point. Never mind polar bears. Electrification is valuable simply because electrical devices are omnivorous and can use energy generated from any source. Gas boilers are like pandas: they can only run on gas/bamboo. This makes them vulnerable to bottlenecks, supply shocks, etc.

[Andrew Man @TegoArcanaDei]

“The single decision Bridget Philipson made that has been most revealing.
“Eton and Star Academies wanted to open a great new free school in Middlesbrough to help more talented young people access the best universities - backed by funding from Eton.”
“When Bridget became Education Secretary she killed the project.”
Prejudice trumped social mobility.

[richard @Dickwith2dogs]

One of the greatest viz letters I ever read was something along the lines of this.
My son was run over and killed by a red lorry, whilst eating a yellow lolly,
I've got a speech Impediment, And the coroner was Chinese, so you can imagine the laughs we had at the Inquiry.

[Steve Loftus @LoftusSteve]

All Stevenson has is made up numbers and strawmen.

Multiple times in this clip he brings up a tax, gets totally schooled, and then changes what he is talking about mid argument when he gets owned.

[Foxtrot @____Foxtrot____]

Labour are about to appoint this hapless chimp, Gary Stevenson, as an ‘economic adviser’…

[James Lucas @JamesLucasIT]

This is real footage of Brazil from 117 years ago

Rio De Janeiro in 1909

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Fish and chips fried in beef dripping was a different thing entirely to what is handed over the counter today.

Walk into a Whitby chippy in 1976. The range has been roaring since eleven, the windows running with steam, the whole street smelling of hot fat and salt and the sea. The fat is beef dripping, pale gold, held at 180 degrees by a man in a white apron who has fried since he was fifteen. There is no seed oil in the building. The thought would not have crossed a single mind.

The haddock goes in first, off the boats that morning, dipped and lowered into the dripping. The fat is hot enough to seize the batter on contact, sealing it into a shell while the fish steams white and soft inside. Ninety seconds and it surfaces the colour of a conker. Press it and it cracks. Underneath, the savoury note only animal fat leaves, the thing that makes you eat faster without knowing why.

Then the chips. Thick-cut Maris Pipers in the same dripping. Dark gold at the edges, fluffy in the middle, tasting of the potato and of something deeper beneath it, something close to a Sunday roast, something you couldn't name because you were nine and nobody named it. It was simply what chips tasted like.

That deeper taste, in the fish and the chips both, was beef dripping.

Salt. Vinegar soaking through the newspaper. A handful of warm coins. You eat them walking the harbour wall in the cold, the parcel held to your chest like something living.

From the mid-seventies the fat was tipped away. The war on saturated fat reached the chippy, cheap vegetable oil undercut the dripping, and the fryers filled with rapeseed, palm and sunflower, kinder to the accountant and to the new advice. By the turn of the century nearly every fryer had switched. A stable fat used since before history, traded for an industrial oil that oxidises in the pan across a twelve-hour day.

What comes out now is paler, looser. The batter sogs instead of shattering. The chip tastes of potato and stops there. No depth. No hum. No ghost of a Friday roast.

Ask anyone under thirty what it is meant to taste like, and they will describe, in full sincerity, a supper their great-grandfather would have sent straight back. They cannot mourn it. The reference was wiped from the national tongue before they were born.

A stubborn few never let go. Yorkshire mostly, where jumbo haddock in dripping never died, and a growing handful elsewhere now painting "100% beef dripping" across the window like the badge it is.

Go. Drive. Queue. Eat it out of the paper, standing up, fish and chips together, the way it was built to be eaten. You will understand, in a single bite, what was taken.

The cattle are still in the field. The suet still hangs at the butcher. The fryer could be filled with the right fat again tomorrow.

A whole country forgot what its own national dish was meant to taste like.

[Morgan Barrett @MorganBarrettX]

Jeremy Clarkson’s Farm show on Amazon is the most radicalizing piece of mainstream media I’ve ever seen

Just one example (bear with me):

Badgers became a protected species in Britain 40+ years ago.

The population has exploded and now frequently transmits tuberculosis to cows

But farmers can’t cull the badger population to protect their cattle because the government still considers them to be endangered

Instead of addressing the root cause, the UK has the most batshit testing regime for cattle

There’s no TB vaccine. So the cattle have to get tested. The vets administering the test have to measure welts on the cows neck. Whether a cow lives or dies comes down to a vet trying to discern 1mm on a caliper (reactive vs non reactive).

If a cow tests positive, the farm (already running on super thin margins) is quarantined and starts hemorrhaging money.

Jeremy Clarkson’s cow (pregnant with twins) has an inconclusive test so it’s separated from the herd. It receives a second inconclusive test so they have to kill it (before it can give birth to the twins).

Now here’s the kicker: the autopsy reveals no sign of TB. It was a healthy cow needlessly killed

So - silver lining the farm should be removed from quarantine, right? WRONG - it’s still under quarantine and has to keep testing and can’t sell its beef

Kafkaesque doesn’t even begin to describe how f’d up it is for British farmers

[Classic Ads @ClassicAdvertz]

Who remembers Banana Man?

[Loïc @Fremond_]

Working in Parliament, you quickly realise there are thousands upon thousands of people like Paul all over the country, willing and able to do something to preserve their little patch of our green and pleasant land, but they are routinely blocked, persecuted, and crushed by local government and arms length bodies like the Environment Agency.

People who want to spend their own time and money to fill in potholes, remove graffiti, or clean their local rivers - to be good conscientious citizens. Instead of being rewarded, they are chided and criticised.

Fucked up country.

[Scott Bryan @scottygb]

BBC: “What was your screen time?”

Student: “Nine hours.”

BBC: “You’re gong to have a lot more time to fill. What will you do?”

Student: “Stare at a wall.”

[Josh Hunt @iAmJoshHunt]

Of course it will get worse. It's scheduled to.

Council tax isn't rising because of bins and potholes. It's rising because councils are the front line for the costs of an ageing, sicker, poorer country. And it’s going to get a lot worse.

Adult social care is the biggest pressure in nearly every council budget. It grows every year, because the demographics grow every year. We’re not even close to the peak of this yet. So it will continue.

Temporary accommodation accounted for nearly £3 billion last year.

When it comes to SEND, 95% of councils carry high needs deficits. The overspend is heading for £3 to £4 billion a year and as a result, councils are borrowing to cover day-to-day cash flow. The only thing preventing nearly half of them from effective bankruptcy is an accounting trick that keeps the deficit off the books.

That accounting trick will come to an end in March 2028. 79% of councils say they won’t be able to set a balanced budget the year it ends.

So yes, it will get worse. 5% rises each year is the plan. You’ll get more tax and fewer visible services, indefinitely.

Council tax stopped being a payment for services some time ago. It's now a standing charge on a country that promised to deliver more than it can fund.

That's not a prediction. It's settled. And you’ve already been living it for a number of years.

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

Burnham Promised Affordable Homes. He Built Luxury Towers For Chinese Investors

Before Andy Burnham stood for Mayor of Greater Manchester in 2017 he was explicit about what he would do with the region's housing investment fund. He criticised public loans for city centre and luxury schemes. He promised to renegotiate the fund so it would fully focus on the long term goal of an affordable home for all. Here is what he actually did.

Burnham's Greater Manchester Combined Authority lent £578 million in public money to a single developer, Daren Whitaker of Renaker. In March 2024 Burnham chaired a meeting that approved £120 million in loans to Renaker companies in the space of one minute. Out of 11,000 homes built with that public money, 503 are classed as affordable. Less than five percent. Since 2020 Whitaker's personal fortune has grown from £140 million to an estimated £698 million, making him one of the wealthiest individuals in the North West. He briefly registered his residency in Monaco before switching it back to Britain.

A tribunal found that GMCA failed to obtain a statement of assets and liabilities from Whitaker before lending him the money, exposing taxpayers to a risk the tribunal described as potentially wiping out the public funds. Whitaker also received a £40 million dividend payout despite restrictions in the original loan agreement. The GMCA would not say whether it knew about or approved those payments. The terms of the loans remain secret. A Court of Appeal hearing on £140 million of those loans is scheduled for June 9. Nine days before the Makerfield by-election.

The China dimension is where the story connects to something considerably larger. The taxpayer backed developments were actively marketed to Chinese buy to let investors through Hong Kong estate agents. A marketing event was held in Hong Kong just weeks before the GMCA approved a £69 million loan for the Contour development. Hundreds of flats in taxpayer backed skyscrapers have been sold to Asian investors according to Telegraph analysis of Companies House filings.

Angela Rayner, then Deputy Prime Minister, was simultaneously telling the Telegraph that it was a real frustration that international investors could buy up houses before local people get a look in. Her government's mayor in Manchester was lending public money to a developer marketing those same homes to Chinese buy to let investors in Hong Kong. Labour was pledging a stamp duty surcharge on overseas landlords while its most prominent northern mayor was facilitating exactly the investment it claimed to oppose.

For Makerfield voters the question is direct. The constituency sits within a region where 18,000 people have no permanent address and one in 61 Manchester residents is homeless. The man asking them to send him to Westminster promised in 2017 to focus public money on affordable homes for all. He then lent £578 million to a developer who built luxury towers now owned by Chinese landlords, extracted dividend payments despite loan restrictions, and left taxpayers exposed without conducting adequate financial checks.

For Britain as a whole the question is broader. The pattern of accommodating Chinese financial interests runs from the super embassy in London to the spy trial collapse to Mandelson's undisclosed relationship with China's finance minister. The Renaker story adds a further dimension. Public money, lent without adequate due diligence, flowing into luxury developments marketed directly to Chinese investors, by the mayor now seeking to become Prime Minister.

The Court of Appeal will hear the case on June 9. The voters of Makerfield deliver their verdict on June 18. Both deserve an honest answer.

"Burnham's Greater Manchester Combined Authority lent £578 million in public money to a single developer, Daren Whitaker of Renaker."

[Stephen Pollard @stephenpollard]

I've always been mystified why serial chancer Andy Burnham is viewed as a saviour by Labour.
Bookmark this: after six months of Burnham, the Starmer years will seem like a model of good government in comparison.

[Concerned Citizen @BGatesIsaPyscho]

🚨🇬🇧 “I’m not going to go through the Fiscal rules - I know what they are”

Absolutely incredible - wannabe UK Prime Minister & protector of Rape Gangs Andy Burnham - gets caught lying - you can see him immediately get angry when he realises he’s busted.

This Man is an absolute Charlatan & will only destroy the UK faster than Starmer has.

[James Melville 🚜 @JamesMelville]

The UK government vastly underestimated carbon emissions from AI data centres and now raised their estimate by more than x100.

Energy use by AI data centres in the UK could cause emissions of 123m tonnes of carbon dioxide – as much generated by 2.7 million people over 10 years.

Net zero for us, but not for the tech giants.

[James Melville 🚜 @JamesMelville]

The UK now hosts more than 500 active data centres (the third largest in the world). They have been rammed through despite huge local community concerns about the impact on their local landscapes and energy and water consumption.

These enormous data centres are giant industrial facilities consuming vast quantities of electricity, water and land while placing increasing pressure on the UK’s energy infrastructure.

▪️Water consumption by data centres is expected to reach 9.3 trillion litres, while CO2 emissions will rise to 399 million tons.

▪️Annual power consumption from data centres is projected to double to 945 TWh by 2030, around ‌the ⁠same as the whole of Japan’s energy consumption, with AI accounting for 40% of the total.

▪️The rise of AI is accelerating this trend. The UK Government's Compute Roadmap notes that AI data centres can devote up to 40% of their energy consumption to cooling systems.

▪️It is estimated that data-centre power and water consumption could double by 2030 due to AI growth.

▪️Emerging research suggests large AI facilities can create localised warming effects around their sites, sometimes described as a “data heat island” effect.

Numerous campaigns against these data centres are being organised by local communities. No one voted for this. If you are involved in any of these local campaigns, please DM me and I’ll try and help you amplify your campaigns.

[Yonan @yonann]

Kevin O'Leary says Apple's genius is making people pay 5x more for a laptop they could buy for $350

"you can buy an Apple laptop, average price about $1,800, or you can buy the same functionality for $350 on a Windows laptop"

"but you still pay $1,800. Why? Brand"

"you're paying a 5x multiple in some cases for something that is exactly like a Windows machine"

"I put that out to people, they say, yeah, but it's not an Apple. So there is the genius of Jobs"