Simon retweeted
The explanatory notes include truly Orwellian double speak. The North Sea is both in "natural decline" and yet the ban is necessary to show "climate leadership". New licences "wont change the UK as a net importer", but they would reduce those imports, reduce global carbon, and benefit the UK's BoP, inflation and fiscal balance.
Treasury should kill this part of the bill if it is serious about owning a growth plan, and cheaper energy.
gov.uk/government/publicatio…
When we look back at people during the witch trials, we think of them as unreasoned, alien people who are nothing like us.
And yet their descendants are all over the place, and the future will look back on them as equally unreasoned and alien.
This is the Great Isaiah Scroll, copied around 125 BC, more than a century before the birth of Jesus. It is one of the Dead Sea Scrolls and preserves all 66 chapters of Isaiah.
Among its passages is Isaiah 53, describing a suffering servant who bears the sins of others. Christians recognize this as a prophecy fulfilled in the suffering and death of Jesus Christ.
Part of that passage reads as follows:
“But he was pierced because of our rebellion,
crushed because of our iniquities.”
Isaiah 53:5
What makes this scroll so remarkable is that it physically preserves these words in a manuscript copied before Jesus walked the earth.
The prophecy Christians read today was already being copied and preserved long before the crucifixion.
Simon retweeted
This made my eyes leak
Mel Gibson paid Robert Downey Jr.'s insurance bond when no insurer would cover him. Eight years later, with Gibson's own career in ruins, Downey asked Hollywood to forgive him.
In 2003, Downey was coming off years of drug arrests, and no insurance company would cover him on a film set. Gibson, a producer on The Singing Detective, covered the insurance bond himself so Downey could play the lead.
Downey has said Gibson also told him not to give up hope and urged him to find his faith.
The only thing Gibson asked in return was that someday Downey help the next guy.
In 2006, Gibson was arrested in Malibu, and his own career collapsed.
In October 2011, Downey received the American Cinematheque Award and asked Gibson to present it. In the video below, Downey tells the room why he chose him. About that old favor, he says Gibson "didn't imagine the next guy would be him."
Then he urged Hollywood to forgive his friend.
Gibson later told Esquire it was "a bold and generous and kind gesture."
Did Downey owe Gibson that speech, or was it a risk nobody else in Hollywood was willing to take?
Simon retweeted
Slavery was an evil in which people from every continent and region participated. We should be honest about the whole history, not select the parts that are politically convenient today, especially given Britain's leading role in ending the transatlantic slave trade.
If Caribbean countries are asking Britain for a formal apology for Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade, will they also be asking the same of the descendants of African kingdoms, rulers and merchants who captured, sold and profited from the trade?
On demands for reparations, whether through cash or debt relief, we have been down this track before. Twenty-five years ago, Jubilee 2000, Drop the Debt and Make Poverty History argued that cancelling the debts of poorer countries would give them a fresh start. More than $100 billion of debt was eventually written off, but many of those countries have since built up even bigger debts. Labour are already spending too much on Britain's welfare state, now is not the time for Andy Burnham to be providing global welfare.
There is no reason British taxpayers today should be held financially responsible for things that happened generations before any of us were born. And I have even less patience for political elites in commonwealth countries who don’t know how to make their own citizens prosperous now looking for another opportunity to blame Britain.
As Prime Minister, Andy Burnham should be Britain’s greatest defender. Instead, he is writing articles saying we need to confront our history (as if we haven't done enough of that) and considering another formal historical apology. Tony Blair already expressed Britain’s deep sorrow and regret for our role in the slave trade nearly twenty years ago. There is no need to do so again.
This is all another navel-gazing distraction. The Commonwealth should be looking forward, not endlessly backwards. That means economic partnerships to make us all richer and deeper military and security cooperation against common threats. If every Commonwealth summit becomes an exercise in presenting Britain with demands for cash then we need to start asking if it is worth the effort.
Simon retweeted
Physics is hard to visualize through static images alone, so I turned my 174 pages of high school physics notes into an interactive website.
It covers mechanics, electricity, and magnetism, breaking down complex concepts into intuitive visualizations, real-world scenarios, and interactive problems.
Check it out here: atlas-of-physics.vercel.app/
Simon retweeted
The most amazing, heart-breaking, dramatic start to any documentary series ever. TV at its finest.
Every government should really have a mitigation plan already. For the young and the loss of entry level jobs, perhaps it’s easier, as they can be encouraged to look at jobs that will not be affected (electrician, plumber etc. being obvious AI-proof roles), but there is a much wider issue for everyone.
Is it feasible to tax AI companies enough to pay for a Universal Basic Income? If so, surely this will accelerate the move of work to countries that have cheap AI which doesn’t have to pay such taxes?
The whole model of globalisation is going to hit a brick wall even harder than it already has…
This is f*cking insane. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, the man who left OpenAI to build Claude:
"80% of all entry-level lawyers, consultants and finance professionals will be completely wiped out within the next 1-5 years
The ones who survive won't be the smartest people in the room. They'll be the ones who know how to put AI agents to work"
In this 47-minute talk, Dario explains exactly who survives and how
Chatbots → Agents → AI Employees → Entire Departments Run By AI
Surviving AI doesn't mean asking a chatbot to rewrite your emails
It means being the person who can plug agents into a company's work and make them run
95% of people will watch AI take their industry, the 5% who build with it will be the ones companies fight over
Worth more than any $3,500 AI career course
Bookmark and watch it today
Then read how to plug one agent into Claude Code, Cursor and Codex in the article below ↓
Essentially the reason everyone is poorer in real terms, is because of the insane energy policies we’ve had for decades now.
We just stopped investing in anything other than vanity projects. No significant new nuclear, no new reservoirs, farmland turned into rewilding projects for the rich.
Touchy-feely-ideology-gossip has replaced real-world-strategy-planning-building, right across our state institutions. It hurts the poor the most, but progressivists are only interested in their fever dreams of utopia at the end of Hegelian history. In reality of course, history moves in cycles, things rise and things fall, and we’re choosing to be in the falling phase.
Also worth noting that nominal disposable income is up almost 45% in the UK over the last decade. The "jaws" has been inflation. Yes, Ukraine and Iran were exogenous shocks, but two decades of UK energy policy failure have amplified these impacts.
The most bullish thing for the UK economic outlook this week was a very clear grabbing back of UK energy policy by HMT, from DESNZ. The only industrial strategy worthy of the name is cheaper energy. All the workhorse economic metrics (RHDI, Corporate Margins, Business Investment) benefit from cheaper energy. This is not about shoehorning in renewables, or N Sea O&G, or Nuclear policy. It is about a model where 24/7/365 there is plentiful, cheap energy to input into economic activity.
If I were shaping UK economic policy I would prioritise delivering cheap energy over all other economic goals (actively moving resources from the myriad of downstream projects, to pursuing this single goal) - and approach the policy trade-offs accordingly.
Simon retweeted
I recall watching a BBC documentary about Katyn with my father in the early 1970s. At the time he had been in MI6. He furious that the BBC even slightly entertained the suggestion that the Germans had done it. « We were reading decoded German reports of their discovery of the massacre. It was obvious that the Germans knew nothing about it. »
Of course, my father’s boss was Philby.
Lavrentiy Beria – The Strategist
Look at this face. Round glasses, a gentle, serious look – a student who reads too much and cares too much. Put him in a seminar on social justice today, and nobody would look twice. He would have the right words, the right causes and the certainty of being on the right side of history. That is how it starts – not with cruelty, but with certainty.
This is the young Lavrentiy Beria. At twenty-two, he joined the secret police.
A quarter of a century later, at Yalta, Stalin reportedly introduced him to Roosevelt as "my Himmler." It sounded like a joke. It was a job description.
He rose the way careers rise in a system of lies: by flattery. In Georgia, Stalin's homeland, he published a history of the Bolsheviks in the Caucasus that put Stalin at its center. Stalin noticed.
In 1938, he was brought to Moscow to clean up after Yezhov, who had killed in a frenzy. The machine was devouring itself, and the country was exhausted. The mass shootings stopped. Some prisoners were even released, and people breathed again. Then Beria arrested Yezhov's men, and Yezhov himself.
The terror did not end. It became efficient.
In March 1940, he sent Stalin a short memo. The Polish officers, policemen and officials held in Soviet camps were, he wrote, "hardened, incorrigible enemies of Soviet power." He proposed to shoot them – without trial, without even hearing them. Stalin signed, and the Politburo with him. That spring, about 22,000 Poles were shot in the back of the head, in the forest of Katyn and in other places. At one of the sites, a single executioner shot thousands of them himself. We will meet him next.
Many of the dead were reservists: doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers. The elite of a nation, killed by memo. That was the strategy: without its elite, a nation can be ruled by anyone. Five years later, Moscow's men were ruling Poland.
Then came the second crime: the lie. For almost fifty years, Moscow said the Germans had done it. At Nuremberg, Soviet prosecutors even charged the Germans with it. In communist Poland, the truth could cost you your career. Moscow admitted it only in 1990. The shooting took a few weeks. The lie took half a century.
During the war, he deported entire nations – the Chechens, the Ingush, the Crimean Tatars and others. Men, women, children and the old were loaded onto trains within days. He reported the numbers to Stalin like a delivery. A large share of them died on the way or in the first years of exile.
He ran the camps as an economy. After Hiroshima, Stalin put him in charge of building the Soviet bomb. He delivered it in four years, with spies in America and prisoners in the uranium mines.
At night, his car cruised the streets of Moscow. His bodyguards later testified that he picked out young women and had them brought to him. As each one left, she was handed a bouquet of flowers. Taking it meant she had consented. Refusing it meant arrest. In the system of the Lie, even rape came with a bouquet.
When Stalin died in 1953, the strategist moved first – as a reformer. He pushed through an amnesty for over a million prisoners – common criminals, not political ones. He announced that the doctors accused in Stalin's last invented plot were innocent, and that their confessions had been obtained by methods forbidden by Soviet law. The chief torturer denounced torture. Nobody knew better what needed reforming.
His colleagues knew him too, and none of them wanted to end up on his list. In June 1953, at a meeting in the Kremlin, Marshal Zhukov and a group of officers arrested him. The strategist had been outplayed by the colleague everyone underestimated: Khrushchev. Beria was tried in secret, without a defense, and charged – among other things – with spying for Britain. The line attributed to him was "Show me the man, and I will find you the crime." They found his. He was sentenced and shot on the same day. The verdict, as always, had come first.
Then the system did to him what he had done to so many: it erased him. Subscribers to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia received a letter telling them to cut out the pages on Beria and paste in the new ones enclosed – a longer article on the Bering Strait.
The man who erased millions was replaced by the Bering Strait.
Today, it takes one click. And there is always a young man in round glasses, sure he is on the right side of history.
Simon retweeted
In the middle of World War Two, German soldiers in southeastern Poland started avoiding a cluster of villages.
They wouldn't go in. They wouldn't take people out for forced labor. They put up warning signs and stayed away.
They believed the area was infected with typhus.
It wasn't. Two doctors had invented the whole thing.
The man behind it was Eugene Lazowski, a young Polish doctor working for the Red Cross in the town of Rozwadów. He was watching the Nazi occupation tear his country apart. Executions. Deportations. People shipped off to labor camps, many never coming back.
He wanted to stop it. He had no weapons, no army, and no way to fight.
What he had was medicine.
His friend and fellow doctor, Stanisław Matulewicz, had discovered something strange. If you injected a person with a harmless, dead strain of a certain bacteria, their blood would test positive for typhus.
They wouldn't be sick at all. But on paper, they'd look like they had one of the most feared diseases of the war.
And the Germans were terrified of typhus. It spread fast, it killed, and it could tear through an army. When the Germans found it, they quarantined the area and kept their distance.
Lazowski realized what that meant. If he could make enough people look infected, the Germans would leave the whole region alone.
So he started injecting his patients.
He chose carefully. He sent the blood samples to German labs for testing, exactly as the rules required. The results came back positive. Again and again.
The Germans declared an epidemic zone. Villages were quarantined. Soldiers kept out. People who would have been seized for forced labor or worse were left alone, because nobody wanted to go near them.
Lazowski had to be careful. If too many cases looked fake, someone would ask why nobody was dying. So he spread out the injections over time and kept the outbreak believable.
Eventually the Germans did get suspicious. They sent a team of doctors to inspect.
Lazowski met them with food and vodka and played the gracious host. He guided them toward the sickest looking, dirtiest patients he could find, in the most crowded rooms. The German doctors, worried about catching typhus themselves, took a few samples and left in a hurry.
The tests came back positive.
The fake epidemic lasted until the end of the war. Estimates say it may have protected around 8,000 people.
Lazowski also secretly helped Jews from the nearby ghetto, giving them medical care at enormous risk.
After the war he moved to the United States and became a professor of pediatrics in Chicago. For decades he barely talked about what he'd done. Late in life he finally wrote a memoir. He called it My Private War.
He died in 2006.
He never fired a shot. He beat the Nazis with a needle and a lab test.
Dawkins the evangeliser!
I think it was my decision that I was an atheist when still fairly young that played a role in me becoming Christian. It’s the people who don’t really think about these things who are least likely to really question the foundations of reality, and therefore to find the scales falling from their eyes.
Prof Andrew Gosler - ornithologist and biologist from Oxford University - shares his story about how @RichardDawkins' The Selfish Gene, plus Dawkins' own anti-Christian commentary, forced him out of religious apathy into eventually becoming a Christian and priest!
For more stories like this, check out the book 'Coming To Faith Through Dawkins' 👉 kregel.com/apologetics-and-e…
Simon retweeted
Iran is executing athletes. Several more are now on death row. Please, please retweet as the only thing that has shown any potential to deter the regime is international scrutiny and pressure theguardian.com/global-devel…
‘Befuddled’ is the best description I’ve yet heard…
