Buster Crabb

Politically pragmatic. A long career in commercial diving, motorcycle racer astronomer, photographer, history and science fan. I'm also a fan of Elon M.

[GuruAnaerobic @GuruAnaerobic]

Died..."after years of heat and drought" - absolute garbage.

This tree was right at the edge of it's natural lifespan. The Woodland Trust states that an English Oak lives 600 to 1000 years..."it is often said that these trees spend 300 years growing, 300 years living, and 300 years in slow decline."

And the article itself states:

'Combining the increase in temperatures, conservation efforts dating back more than a century may also have unintentionally accelerated its decline. In 1904, metal chains and wooden props were installed beneath heavy branches to prevent them from collapsing.
Decades later, hollow sections were filled with concrete, while parts of the tree were covered with lead, fiberglass, and fire-retardant paint in an attempt to preserve it.
Experts now believe some of those interventions may have worked against the tree’s natural ageing process, explaining that ancient oaks typically shed limbs as they grow older, gradually retreating into their trunk and reducing the amount of water and nutrients they require to survive, which this tree was unable to do'.

Never let the truth get in the way of a climate change story.

[Chris Rose @ArchRose90]

Oxfordshire County Council has become the first council to start a legal battle to ban residents from raising flags.

The reason given is that it makes ethnic minorities feel "intimidated."

The LibDems don’t speak for me. Keep Raising the Colours everywhere!

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

Cross sex hormones are not HRT. The clue is in the name. Hormone replacement treatment replaces small amounts of naturally occurring hormones that have diminished with age. Cross sex hormones don’t replace anything. They are intended to disrupt the body’s hormonal balance.

[Annunziata Rees-Mogg @zatzi]

Natural England: slaughter the ponies
Environment Agency: prosecute the community cleaners

Is it me or do both of these actions go against their very names? Killing ponies is not natural. Preventing rubbish clearance isn’t environmental.

If they’re not for the environment or nature, what are they for?

Cull the quangos and clean up the arms length bodies.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

There is a weedkiller sprayed across the American corn belt that turns male frogs female. Not weakens them. Turns them. Europe banned it twenty years ago. America set a safe limit and poured another glass.

- Atrazine is sprayed on roughly half the US corn crop
- At 0.1 parts per billion, thirty times below the "safe" tap-water limit, male frogs grow eggs. At the doses near real farms, three-quarters are chemically castrated
- Some turn fully female, mate with other males, and lay viable eggs. A full recall on the entire sex
- It is an endocrine disruptor, the polite term for a chemical that reroutes your hormones, and the most common contaminant in American tap water
- Europe saw this in 2004, decided it could never be cleaned up, and stopped

America saw the same data, invented a number it could call safe, and kept spraying. The official line: everything is fine, provided you are not a frog. Yet.

[Paul Powlesland @paulpowlesland]

“What’re you in for mate?”

“Cleaning a river without a permit. What about you?”

@EnvAgency is really plumbing new depths of malevolent uselessness here.

[Sharron Davies HoL MBE @sharrond62]

This is very important news from America where all this started. Once the medical gravy trains stops the real harm will start to unfold & it will be horrendous

[Proudofus.uk @ProudofusUK]

An English surgeon in Glasgow beat a killer nobody could see. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇬🇧

Today, every safe operation on earth begins the way he insisted.

In 1865, 16 deaths in 35 operations was a good surgeon's record. The knife was not the killer. The ward was. Doctors called it hospitalism, and nobody knew the cause.

Joseph Lister went looking for an enemy nobody could see. Reading the French chemist Pasteur, he learned that rot was the work of living things, germs, and that if they entered a wound, the deaths made sense. He needed a weapon. Carlisle was cleaning its sewage with carbolic acid. If it could clean a sewer, he reasoned, it could clean a wound.

August 1865, Glasgow Royal Infirmary. An 11-year-old boy, run over by a cart, his leg broken open, the kind of wound the ward always won. Lister set the bone and dressed it with carbolic. 6 weeks later, the boy walked out.

So it became the rule. Clean hands. Clean tools. Clean dressings. The grand men of medicine laughed at invisible germs. Lister had kept count. Before carbolic, 16 of his 35 amputation patients died. After it, 6 of 40.

You can laugh at a theory. Nobody laughs at a ledger.

Britain's victories are often like that. Quiet, and counted. We put the names back, free, for anyone who wants them.

If you can afford to, help us teach thousands their own history:
https://t.co/rih7iKwnvf

Be part of us. ☝️🇬🇧

Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧

[Masih Alinejad 🏳️ @AlinejadMasih]

I asked American students why they don’t protest when women are whipped and shot in Iran and Afghanistan.

The answers expose a contradiction nobody wants to talk about.

We must change the narrative so the younger generation stops lending cover to Hamas, Hezbollah, Taliban and the Islamic Republic. That's why I choose to travel and speak to students face-to-face. I listen first, without judgment. Then I share what it means to live under Sharia law not as an abstraction, but as a lived reality.

Truth is not a phobia. Calling out the whipping of women is not hate. Staying silent about it is.

[The Free Speech Union @SpeechUnion]

Palantir has accused Mayor of London Sadiq Khan of stifling free speech.

The US tech firm has lodged a complaint with the High Court in an attempt to reverse the Mayor’s decision to halt its £50m contract with the Metropolitan Police.

Palantir claims the Mayor breached its right to freedom of expression under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

In its legal submission, Palantir says: “Insofar as the allegedly objectionable ‘ethics and values’ relate to expressions of political or philosophical opinion by Palantir or anyone associated with it, the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime’s restriction on contracting with Palantir is an extraordinary breach of Palantir’s freedom of expression under Article 10 of the ECHR.

“Political expression, including where a speaker seeks to criticise government actions, enjoys the highest degree of protection under Article 10 of the ECHR, given the role of political speech in a democracy.”

Read more below 👇

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

The man who co-directed Airplane! spent the 1990s watching his baby son have a hundred seizures a day.

Jim Abrahams gave the world "Surely you can't be serious." Then his eleven-month-old, Charlie, developed an epilepsy so violent the seizures came in the dozens, sometimes a hundred in a single day, while he was already on a fistful of medications.

The specialists were not short of opinions. The family visited the best neurologists in America. The verdict was a life of continued seizures and what one doctor called progressive retardation. Brain surgery was floated. More drugs were floated. A change of diet never came up, because not one of those specialists thought to raise it.

Jim, being a man who had spent his career refusing to take things at face value, went digging through the medical literature himself and found a treatment that had been sitting in the textbooks the whole time. A high-fat, near-zero-carbohydrate diet, used since the 1920s, gathering dust because it could not be bottled and sold.

He took Charlie to Johns Hopkins, one of the last places in the country still bothering to use it. The seizures stopped within days. Charlie stayed on the diet for five years, went back to eating normally, and never had another seizure in his life. He turned thirty a few years ago. He became a preschool teacher.

Jim was so quietly furious that a cure had been hiding in plain sight that he and his wife Nancy founded the Charlie Foundation, and he made a film about it, First Do No Harm, starring Meryl Streep. His estimate of how long the foundation would need to exist before the obvious caught on was about a year.

That was 1994. The foundation is still going. Funny how slowly the obvious travels when nobody profits from you knowing it.

[Bernie @Artemisfornow]

Oh BRILLIANT! I love these interviews.

Stop what you are doing and watch London’s Deputy Mayor! … it is truly staggering that this role pays £148,000 a year and THIS was the best person for the job

And also … we really are this bad 🤡

[Stuey Beef 🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 @stuey_beef]

Look at the timeline.

Labour wins power in 2024, then quietly passes a law to bring back the supplementary vote for mayors and PCCs at some point after May 2026.

Fast‑forward to 2026: Reform has begun turning Labour strongholds into genuine battlegrounds; Greater Manchester is one of the few places where the party could be embarrassed by a Reform surge in a direct Labour vs Reform contest.

Suddenly, with days to go before the Makerfield by‑election that could send Andy Burnham to Westminster and trigger a mayoral vacancy, Labour rushes through a motion in the Lords to ensure the new system kicks in just in time for that race.

They told the public SV was about “fairness” and “democratic legitimacy”, yet the only thing they’ve treated with urgency is the one vote where Labour’s own power is on the line – not your council tax, not NHS waiting lists, not crime, just their job security in Greater Manchester.

This is how we slide from democracy into cartel politics: the voters still turn up, still queue, still mark a box – but the party in power quietly moves the goalposts the night before kick‑off.

[Richard Seiler @richardseiler]

𝘞𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘪𝘴 𝘪𝘵 𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘮𝘢𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘱𝘦𝘰𝘱𝘭𝘦 𝘭𝘰𝘷𝘦

Jeremy Clarkson has never pretended to be anything other than exactly what he is

Brutally honest. No oil painting. A pot belly, a lifelong smoker, a drinker. Not exactly the modern alpha male or is he?

And somehow that is the whole point

I have watched him for most of my life
First as a motoring journalist who could make you want a car you would never own and never need
Then as something bigger
The loudest, funniest, most unfiltered mouthpiece the ordinary person ever had
A man who said the thing everyone was thinking while the rest of television tiptoed around it

From Top Gear he built something that should not have worked
Three middle aged men, The Stig, a track and a chemistry you cannot manufacture
James May the patient one
Richard Hammond the brave one
And Clarkson the force of nature dragging both of them into chaos and somehow back out again

When it all fell apart at the BBC he could have disappeared
The fracas was not his finest hour and he never pretended it was
He owned it, apologized and carried on
No reinvention, no groveling tour, no carefully managed comeback
He just kept being himself and let the work speak

The move to Amazon and The Grand Tour proved something I think a lot of people missed
The format was never the magic
The men were
You can take three friends out of a studio and drop them anywhere on earth and the loyalty between them travels with them

But it is Clarkson's Farm where the whole picture finally comes into focus

Here is a man with nothing left to prove walking into a field he barely understands and refusing to fake competence he does not have
He has run that farm at break even and then at an outright loss in full public view
No editing it into a success story
No pretending the numbers work when they do not
His farm manager hands him one brutal truth after another and he sits there and takes it

A whole season swallowed by drought even after he leaned into robotics and the most advanced farming money could buy
Technology was supposed to be the answer and the weather did not care
He showed that too
Most people would have cut it

And through all of it he has done something quietly remarkable
He has dragged the plight of the British farmer into the light
The paperwork, the council, the margins that vanish, the weather that ruins a year of work in a week
People who had never thought about where their food comes from suddenly cared because he made them care

And then there is the part nobody warned me about
Men who raise animals for meat and still love them
Who name them, worry about them, sit with them
Who treat them with respect and dignity right up to the moment they cannot keep them
And feel the full weight of sending them off

He does not hide that
He lets the camera sit in the discomfort of it
The grief of a man who knows the deal he made and still finds it hard

That is not weakness
That is honesty most people are far too afraid to show

We live in an age that rewards the polished, the curated, the carefully built personal brand
And here is a scruffy, swearing, chain smoking farmer who has done the opposite of all of it and won
He stayed exactly who he was while the world begged him to become a product

That is the whole secret
There is no act
There never was

And that is exactly why we keep watching

Praying for a full recovery mate, looking forward to another season of Clarkson's Farms!

[Ben Graham @BenGrahamUK]

China restricts VPNs.
Iran restricts VPNs.
Russia restricts VPNs.

Now Britain is looking at doing the same.

The fact we're even having this conversation should alarm everyone who values privacy and freedom online.

Keir Starmer has completely lost the plot.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

In 1916 a man called James Kraft took out a patent on a way to grind up cheese, heat it with an emulsifying salt, and pour it into a tin so that it would never ripen, never run, and never go off. He had, in effect, patented the death of cheese.

Real cheese is alive. A farmhouse cheddar, bound in cloth and aged on a wooden shelf for a year, is a slow collaboration between raw milk, bacteria, a cellar's worth of mould, and time. It develops crystals you can feel against your teeth. It tastes of the specific grass the specific herd ate. No two wheels are identical, because no two summers are.

What sits in the American refrigerator now, wrapped in individual plastic films, is legally not permitted to call itself cheese at all. The label reads pasteurised process cheese food, or sometimes just cheese product, because there is not enough actual cheese left in it to qualify. It is an emulsion engineered to melt evenly on a burger and to survive a nuclear winter in the door of the fridge.

A nation that once had a cheesemonger in every town, cutting wedges off a cloth-bound wheel with a wire, now has a stack of orange plastic squares and a vague sense that this is what cheese is supposed to be.

The wheel still exists. A few hundred stubborn makers in Vermont and Wisconsin and the West Country still turn raw milk into the living thing on wooden shelves.

You have to go looking for it now.

Your great-grandmother had it delivered.

[Rupert Lowe MP @RupertLowe10]

The BBC continues to ignore our rape gang inquiry when it’s convenient. But please read this to understand how the bent establishment weaponises its institutions against us…

When a malicious complaint was made to Parliament about our fundraising efforts for the inquiry last year, the BBC were leaked it. Obviously. They gave us ten minutes to respond, and then published the story insinuating we had done something wrong.

We hadn’t.

It was immediately cleared by Parliament, and the BBC was forced to issue an apology.

Not before the lie had spread around the country.

But.

When we held our hearings, zero coverage. Silence.

Same for our report now. Nothing. The most comprehensive and honest analysis of the rape gang scandal. Ignored.

It clearly is of public interest, because the covered the negative story with such enthusiasm. So can you tell me why they won’t report our findings?

The entire establishment wants us to fail.

We will not.

[Stuey Beef 🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 @stuey_beef]

If Vladimir Putin changed the voting system days before an election to stop his opponents winning, every British journalist would call it what it is: rigging the rules.

Tonight, Labour rammed through a last‑minute switch in the Lords so that if Andy Burnham wins Makerfield and quits as Greater Manchester Mayor, his replacement won’t be chosen on a simple first‑past‑the‑post ballot, but on the supplementary vote system instead.

Why now?

Because Labour knows the race to replace Burnham would be a straight two‑horse fight with Reform UK – and under FPTP, the candidate with the most votes wins, no second chances, no back‑room redistributions, no “stop Reform” stitch‑ups.

Under SV, Labour gets a second bite of the cherry: if their candidate can limp into the top two, they can hoover up second preferences from every other party and magic a “majority” on the second count, even if Reform tops the poll on first preferences.

This isn’t “modernising democracy”. It’s the governing party using its Commons majority and the unelected Lords to hurriedly doctor the rules of one specific contest because it’s terrified the voters might choose someone else.

When the establishment preached to the world about “rules‑based order”, they forgot to mention one thing: in Britain, the rules are “based” on whether Labour thinks it might lose.

[Dr Helen Fry | WWII Historian @DrHelenFry]

Mary Lindell, one of the few women parachuted into France for MI9, ran escape lines under the alias Marie-Claire.

Despite arrest and concentration camp imprisonment, she continued organising routes for downed airmen.

Her resilience helped save hundreds of Allied lives and exemplified MI9’s daring operations.

Have you heard of her before?

[Colin Wynter KC @QcWynter]

I have previously written about this young man and the sheer gall & ignobility it takes for a boy to find joy in the defeat of his sister in a girls' race in which he should never have featured.
So, all I need say now is that he writes suspiciously well for a 14 year old.