Grinch

[Ben Pile @clim8resistance]

Hi praise from "Jim" no O-levels, no A-levels, no-degree, no-masters, no-professional accreditation, used to cook sausages for sailors then did a 6 week thermometer-reading course Dale.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Robert is thirty-six years old. In 1247, this is not young. Robert knows this. His knees know this. His back has known this since approximately 1239.

Robert lives in a village in Worcestershire with his wife Agnes, three surviving children, and two chickens he is not allowed to eat because the chickens produce eggs and the eggs matter more than the chickens.

Today is a Tuesday in March. Robert will describe it as a Tuesday in March. The concept of a 'week' as a unit of leisure is not yet something Robert has access to.

5:00am - Up. Pottage on the fire. The pottage is oats, leeks, and some dried parsnip from the autumn store. There is a small piece of salted pork in it, approximately the size of Robert's thumb. It is mostly flavouring. Robert eats around it for as long as possible, then eats it, then thinks about it for the rest of the morning.

6:00am - Field. Robert works the lord's strip first, then his own. The ground is still cold. His boots have a hole. He has had the hole since October. He has packed it with rags. The rags are wet. They will remain wet until June.

Robert is technically eating a plant-based diet. He is not doing this by choice. He is doing this because meat belongs to the lord, the deer belong to the king's forest, and the last man in this village who was caught with an unlicensed rabbit spent a period in the stocks that his family still doesn't fully discuss.

10:00am - Brief rest. Rye bread, hard. A small onion. Robert thinks about the pig that was slaughtered in November. He thinks about this often. The memory of fat is a specific and enduring thing when you don't have much of it.

1:00pm - Back to the field. Robert's average daily calorie intake is somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 calories, the majority from grain. He is doing agricultural labour that modern exercise scientists would classify as extremely high intensity. He is, measurably, running on insufficient fuel. He is aware of this in the way that you are aware of things that cannot be changed: completely, and without drama.

4:00pm - Home. Agnes has made more pottage. It is similar to this morning's pottage. Robert eats it. Robert's teeth hurt. They have hurt for two years. There is no dentist. There is a barber-surgeon in the market town seven miles away. Robert cannot afford the barber-surgeon and cannot take the day from the fields. His teeth continue to hurt.

7:00pm - Sleep. Robert will be awake again at five. He is thirty-six. He will probably not see forty. The leading cause of death for men in his position is a combination of infection, injury, and the slow arithmetic of malnutrition across a lifetime.

Somewhere, eight hundred years from now, someone will describe Robert's diet as "ancestral," "plant-forward," and "aligned with the earth."

Robert would have a great deal to say about this.

Robert does not have the energy.

[Merryn Somerset Webb @MerrynSW]

Is there a small silver lining watching the just stop oil people understanding what happens if you do indeed just stop oil.

[Mark Thompson @METhompson72]

If you were to create list of people in the UK who really understand metal supply and demand, have built mines, know commodity economics, large scale industrial investment, project feasibility, permitting, development and finance: then it would not be a long list, but my name would be on it.

For all of the people who know that electricity is the future and that hydrocarbons are dying, that we don't need diesel, or gas, or liquid fuels:

Tell me where the copper is coming from.
Now do silver, tin, lithium and batteries.
For those of you say the future is nuclear, tell me where the uranium is coming from.
Tell me what price these would be at, and when it could be delivered.
Tell me how you are going to build grid resilience and more importantly grid inertia from renewables.
Tell me what your plan is for windless, cloudy days in the middle of winter.
Tell me what you will do to decommission and replace wind and solar every 10 to 20 years - and where you will dump all those unrecylcable turbine blades.

For every GW of renewables we have to build a GW of conventional back-up, or rely on the kindness of foreigners.

There is no magic metal shop.

There is no new physics that makes a 100% renewables grid work.

The greatest threat to humanity is not global warming, it is energy poverty.

[Andy Mayer @mayerandrew]

It is I think now 54 years since the founding executive director of the UN Environment Programme opined “We have ten years to avoid a catastrophe".

Since then…

📈Global population has more than doubled

📉Extreme poverty has fallen from nearly half the world to less than 1 in 10.

👨‍🦳We live 24 years longer on average.

👶While child mortality is a third of what it was.

💰Global GDP has quadrupled and more than doubled per head.

🌽While we produce nearly 3 times as much food.

🌡️ So yes, the world is warmer

🌲And there are many environmental challenges.

But…

The evidence speaks to humanity thriving and using the dividends of growth and progress to address multiple environmental and social issues.

Not a catastrophe… crisis… or impossible task.

[Katie Lam @Katie_Lam_MP]

The Government plans to delete records that could uncover the truth about grooming gangs.

They say that the data isn't being stored safely.

So with @OPENJ_UK and Conservative colleagues, I've asked David Lammy to store the data in-house. There is no excuse for deleting it.

[Samuel Hughes @SCP_Hughes]

Something strange is going on with the Palace of Westminster renovations. In the nineteenth century, building the Palace cost about £2.5m.

Adjusted for inflation, that is equivalent to £385 million today, 1/28th of the lowest possible estimate for the renovations (£11bn).

If we adjust for wage increases – i.e. imagine, insanely, no labour-saving construction technology has been invented in the last 170 years – we still come to something like £4 or 5 billion, less than half the lowest possible renovation cost.

In real terms, the build costs of a house seem to have roughly doubled since the nineteenth century (because wages have gone up a lot, but some construction labour has been saved through technological improvement). Applying that here would make the renovations at least 14 times more expensive than building the whole Palace.

I appreciate that renovation is complex and fiddly, but these still seem like astonishing costs!

[Paul Rees. ex Rucksack. @HannahIamthest1]

⚠️ A WEALTHY Arab Sheikh visiting YORKSHIRE was suddenly taken to hospital after becoming seriously ill and he needed an emergency blood transfusion! 🩸

Unfortunately the sheikh had a very rare type of blood and the LGI didn't have any in stock 😲

After some frantic calls, a Yorkshire farmer from up in the dales is located who has the same blood type and he agrees to make his way to Leeds to donate some blood.

The Sheikh recieives the blood and begins to get better. He tells his assistant that he should send the farmer many lavish gifts as a show of his appreciation.

A few days later the Yorkshireman answers the door to be greeted with a brand new tractor, £250,000 in cash, a pouch full of diamonds and a life time supply of Yorkshire tea 🚜💵☕️

A couple of days later, the Sheikh begins to get ill again and the hospital have to phone the Yorkshireman, who was more than happy to donate some more blood 💉

After receiving the blood the Sheikh gets better and once again tells his assistant to send the Yorkshireman some gifts as a show of his appreciation but this time when the Yorkshireman opens his door all he receives is a Thank you card and a £10 voucher for Toby Carvery! 😲

The Yorkshireman was shocked that the Sheikh did not reciprocate his kind gesture as he had before.

He phoned the Sheikh and asked him; ☎️

"What's this all abart? I thought tha would be generous again, a thought that tha would gimme some more money and diamonds .... but thas only given me a card and a chuffin 10 quid voucher ya tight get!" 🤷‍♂️

The sheikh replied;

"Aye lad ya reyt, but av got Yorkshire blood in me veins nar!" 😂

[Nigel Farage MP @Nigel_Farage]

No Parliament may bind its successor and we will not honour any clause.

If Starmer signs this, it’s a democratic outrage.

https://t.co/qbYfVGDZnA

[Dai 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🇬🇧 @daibach23]

Warning:If you get a link called 'Ronan Keating Sings Christmas Carols',Don't open it, It's a link to Ronan Keating singing Christmas Carols. 🎄

[Willis Eschenbach @WEschenbach]

The huge problem with the proposed Grokipedia is that Grok is far less able to determine what is true than you and I are.

All it can do is figure out the CONSENSUS about what is true.

For example, if you trained Grokipedia on pre-WWII Germany, it would tell you that it is 100% true that Jews are subhuman.

If you trained it on science immediately after Einstein published the theory of relativity, it would tell you that Einstein was 100% wrong.

If you train it on present-day data, it will tell you that we're about to experience Thermageddon™, sunken atolls, and an ice-free Arctic.

None of which is true, but all of which are consensus views.

Michael Crichton described the problem well:

"I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science.

I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled.

Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had.

Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right … In science consensus is irrelevant."

And sadly, all the Grokipedia will be able to give us is consensus …

Be clear about what I'm saying. Understanding what the consensus says can be valuable.

But you should NEVER mistake that consensus for the truth.

Best to you and yours,

w.

[Grinch @dcnseven]

@robertwlk @benonwine But how else will we report potholes?

[Simon Clarke @SirSimonClarke]

This Watermelon is crushing Britain.

What you’re about to see should terrify every taxpayer...

[Rustler @TheRustler83]

@ONS 🚨8,945 deaths registered in week 32 of 2020

🚨9,569 deaths registered in week 32 of 2025

Why are weekly deaths 600 HIGHER n 2025 than during the ‘pandemic’ ??

What has caused the 7% increase in death rates since the pandemic?

[Steve Loftus @LoftusSteve]

📊**The "LCOE is misleading" megathread **📊

When I write about electricity prices, one of the most common comebacks is a link to some form of LCOE report that says wind and solar are insanely cheap.

Let’s break down what it leaves out, and why it misleads on renewables. 🧵

[Matt Cartoons @MattCartoonist]

My latest cartoon for tomorrow's @Telegraph

Buy a print of my cartoons at https://t.co/ILFJjPmckx

Original artwork from https://t.co/bVPAkgE34y

[Everything is worse @antidependancy2]

#NetZero

[Professor Karol Sikora @ProfKarolSikora]

An unpopular opinion perhaps, but I would simply hire the best person for the job - regardless of their skin colour.

https://t.co/H8SaILGZRS

[Dougie Brimson 🎬 🇬🇧 🇮🇱 @dougiebrimson]

Just to put things into perspective for all you so keen to send our troops into Ukraine:

If you put every single serving full-time British soldier into Wembley stadium, you'd have almost 7,000 empty seats.

[Monique @MoniqueLimbos]

Ronnie has withdrawn from the Masters. He will not defend his title. Neil Robertson gets his spot... I hope Ronnie is OK and if not that he gets the help he needs 😟 https://t.co/RatN4jxGp1