Jan Vowhagan

@adilray One day you think you're in the Rebel Alliance, the next day you've realised it's the Brownshirts.

People will look back in years to come and wonder what drugs Thomas Tuchel was on when he decided to leave Adam Wharton at home

A farmer dies in April 2026. His son inherits the farm. The farm has been in the family since 1847. The farm consists of: 300 acres of grazing pasture, a farmhouse built in 1892, a barn, a milking parlour, two tractors of varying ages, a Land Rover that runs about 70% of the time, and a herd of 180 Hereford-cross cattle. On paper, the farm is worth approximately £3.2 million. This is because land near him has been bought recently by a London hedge fund looking for carbon credits, which has dragged the comparable value of every field within forty miles upward to a number nobody local can justify. In cash, the farm produces a profit of about £28,000 a year in a good year. In a bad year it loses money. The son also works as a fencing contractor three days a week to keep the operation viable. The inheritance tax bill on a £3.2 million estate, even at the reduced 20% rate, comes to approximately £140,000 after the increased threshold is applied. The son does not have £140,000. The son has never had £140,000. The son has £4,200 in his current account and an overdraft. The son sells 60 acres to a developer to pay the tax. The developer puts solar panels on the 60 acres. The remaining herd cannot be sustained on the reduced land. The herd is sold. The barn becomes a holiday let. A different family eats Brazilian beef this Christmas without knowing why the price went up. The Treasury collects £140,000. The land never produces British food again.

** An open letter to @AlboMP ** Dear Prime Minister Albanese, Let’s get one thing clear: women are adult human females. You know it, I know it, you even said it in the lead up to the last election when asked “what is a woman” by Piers Morgan. But we have a big problem. I’m sure you have heard, last week, the Federal Court delivered its judgment in Giggle v Tickle, the “what is a woman” legal case that has been fighting in federal court for the past four years. To put it very simply, there are two sides to this case: women, adult human females, who want to ensure that woman is a single-sex category in law and women & girls have access to single sex spaces. The other side, which includes your human rights commission, insists that men who claim to be women are women in the eyes of the law. The full Federal Court sided with the man who claims to be a woman. Yes. A male won the “what is a woman” court case. Giggle v Tickle has turned Australia into an international laughing stock. This decision is seismic. It means women cannot run women-only businesses for women. It confirms that the ordinary meaning of sex has been twisted beyond recognition. It means men can be women in law. The Australian Human Rights Commission, captured by ideology, has weaponised the sex discrimination act against women, the very demographic it was enacted to protect. They’ve even argued in court that men who claim to be women need pregnancy protections. They’ve pushed the view that sex is a spectrum, changeable, and that anyone objecting is the bigot. Is this something you agree with? Do you, Mr Prime Minister, think men need pregnancy protections in the law? And there are real-world stakes here: Girls at school are holding their bladders all day, refusing to drink water, because boys who claim to be girls are in their bathrooms and they don’t want them there. Women prisoners are locked in cells with male sex offenders who simply “identify” as women. Female athletes are losing podiums, matches and safety. This isn’t inclusion - it’s the demise of women’s rights. Prime Minister, some of your ministers say, “we need to protect trans rights”. With all due respect, sir, your government can protect so called trans rights without stripping rights from women and girls. Every other citizen manages to exist without demanding access to the opposite sex’s protected spaces. Why not try to get “trans rights” without destroying the rights of women and girls? Have you ever even tried?  The fact that Labor hasn’t even mentioned Giggle v Tickle and women’s rights - while Liberals, Nationals, and One Nation politicians speak out - tells us everything. This week has been silence from the Labor Party. No trans visibility day parades on this one. No pride posts. Why? What don’t you want Australians to know? You boast about your 50 per cent women in cabinet. Good for you - you can accurately recognise what a woman is when it suits you. But the rest of us aren’t allowed to without fear of punishment. And can I ask, if you filled that cabinet with 50 per cent trans women, would you still call it equality between men and women? Think about that. While the UK, the United States and even New Zealand are waking up, rolling back the nonsense and restoring sanity and realizing that gender ideology is a failed experiment, your government is turning Australia into the laughing stock of the world. “Giggle v Tickle” isn’t just a punchline overseas - it’s proof Australia is upside down. I want to tell you something really important: If you will lie about something as obvious as men being women, we can assume you will look us in the eye and lie about everything.  Tell the truth. Fix the Sex Discrimination Act. Reinstate clear biological, accurate definitions of man and woman. Protect women, girls and single-sex spaces. Actually do something. Because, at the moment, Mister Prime Minister, I’m doing your job for you.

What a day in Makerfield. The enthusiasm and support on the ground is possibly even stronger than in Great Yarmouth, it is quite remarkable. I did not expect it to be that level, to be honest. 250 locals at our branch meeting last night with standing room only. We barely even advertised it. Just to members because of limited space. Rebecca gave a great speech, went down so well. Out meeting local campaign groups, community centres, pubs - support right across Makerfield. Simply amazing. These people want their country back, and we are giving them a genuine democratic alternative. Thousands and thousands of local patriots are going to take it. Restore Britain is going to make history in Makerfield.

My old boss Derek at Mercedes AMG F1 engines in Brixworth, has written a maths intro textbook to explain maths to normal humans. He`s done this just for fun because he cant believe that everyone doesnt understand mathematics. I`m getting a proof-copy in the next couple of days to review, it wont be available to buy until we`ve been through the proofs. (Will report back) Most importantly to all those studying and in school, do not listen to any nonsense about AI doing this all for you. If you want a proper technical career, this is what you need to get into, and yes, today, if its a high end firm, your boss may be the sort of person who writes textbooks for fun. Learn maths !

Stopped buying coffee and still struggle to afford a starter home? Here are some saving tips. Switch to single-ply toilet paper. The three-ply is a luxury you can't afford. Spend too much on dating? Date someone from work. Lunchboxes instead of restaurants. Stop buying meat at the butchers. Waitrose is cheaper. Get a cheaper golf membership. You'll make it to the Surrey one day. Charge your phone at work. £1,200 saved over 30 years. Bit by bit it adds up. You'll thank us one day. 🇬🇧

It's funny that with the government promising to crack down on price gouging to help the cost of living they still allow broadband, mobile and TV companies to do massively above inflation mid-contract price rises as long as they tell you in advance of signing up.

It’s important to know exactly what is going on here. Women in the league - aka on opposing teams to the team with FIVE men who claim to be women - want to boycott matches against the glorified mens team. Management has, reportedly, effectively said “boycotting is banned.” It means that to continue playing *in the women’s league* women have to accept playing with some men they don’t want to play with or leave the competition. There is no exclusive woman competition for them to go to. It’s literally accept this or nothing. Complete exclusion from the sport, basically. It’s important to note, there is an open unisex league. So the men who claim to be women could play in that competition, thereby playing with women who are open to playing with men. But no, they want to play in the *exclusively* women’s competition, where women have signed up to exclusively play with women. Now the big problem is, the law, currently under appeal, is being interpreted as,“they ARE women, so why would you not want to play with these women but you’re fine to play with those women?” When the only reason why the women don’t want to play with the men who claim to be women is because they’re MEN. This concludes yet another examination of how gender ideology is completely incompatible with women’s rights & and society based on freedom of speech, belief & association.

You can’t lift a fridge with just your hands. Your whole body needs to conform to its shape, and bear the load between your arms and torso. Here, @BostonDynamics' Atlas uses proprioception to manage the whole-body interaction and adapt to a shifting 100+ lb load. Enabling this type of high performance manipulation is exactly why we walked away from what was arguably the world’s best implementation of MPC for humanoids, and shifted entirely to RL without looking back. This level of whole-body controls is a fundamental building block of physical intelligence and key to the value proposition of humanoids. More technical details in: Blog: bostondynamics.com/blog/training-… Behind the scenes video: youtu.be/xKK5ze3FukQ

Congrats to Aime!! He said his left forearm is basically broken 😂 Final scores: → F.03: 12,732 packages (2.83 seconds/package) → Aime: 12,924 packages (2.79 seconds/package) This is the last time a human will ever win

They want to build a datacentre in Surrey. We don't need them. Build them in China like the factories. I don't know a single person who uses a datacentre. Everyone's got Facebook on their phone now. If you don't have one there's a computer at our local library. Enough.

My town, (which is only 0.4m big) now has 14 "Turkish barbers". We also have countless vape shops, mobile repair shops, and "international shops", not to mention all the kebab shops, shit clothing shops, and various takeaways. Until lockdown, this was a really sweet little town with pasty shops, bakeries, clothe shops, greengeocers, butchers, and oddity bespoke shops. Now, unless you want some crack or to be sexually harassed by large groups of foreign men, there's zero reason to go in. The town had been destroyed. They're now spending £mns, putting up our council tax by 10.5% to pedestrianise the town, but given people refuse to be raped or robbed, this is unlikely to help the town. Companies House shows the Same names come up over and over. They just change the deeds every 12 months to avoid paying rates. It doesn't need to be pedestrianised, it needs to be made safe and Cornish again. Nobody is going to go and park their car to walk through a town full of crackheads and foreigners.

@BettsCaro Oh, I'm sure all those voters they've lost to Reform will stampede back once they hear that Labour's new Health Secretary can't define a woman.

An FA Cup final that feels both a bit boring *and* novel: the 10th in a row that has featured either Chelsea or Manchester City, but the first to feature both.

I am absolutely devastated Men who claim to be women have more rights than actual women in Australia. It is women who are being discriminated against, not the men who claim to be us. But in a sense, nothing has changed: we will all wake up tomorrow & men will still not be women.

A thread on the 50 best fortifications to go and visit in the world according to me. They are all fun for at least one in the family. They are listed in reverse rank order as determined by how much fun, unique and awesome they are.

This is WILD! MIT just solved one of the hardest unsolved problems in robotics (Save this). For decades, the fundamental problem with soft robots and wearable exoskeletons has not been compute or AI, it has been actuation. The moment you try to give a soft robot meaningful strength, you run into the same wall every engineer has hit since the field began, fluid-driven systems require external pumps, hydraulic reservoirs, and heavy infrastructure that makes the entire thing impractical to wear or embed into fabric. MIT's new Electrofluidic Fiber Muscles solve that problem by eliminating external infrastructure entirely. The key insight is electrohydrodynamic pumping using electric fields to generate pressure directly from electricity, with no moving parts, no motors, and no external fluid reservoir. The fibers are less than 2 millimeters thick, can be woven into fabric like ordinary textile, and operate in complete silence because nothing physically moves inside them, it is just ions propelling fluid through a closed circuit. The performance numbers published in Science Robotics are not conceptual, they are empirical results from actual hardware. These fibers achieve a power density of 50 watts per kilogram, matching skeletal muscle, with a contraction strain of 20% and a response time of 0.3 seconds. A single bundled configuration lifted 4 kilograms, 200 times its own weight while a separate configuration drove a robotic arm through a 40-degree bend compliant enough to safely complete a human handshake. Another configuration launched objects in under 100 milliseconds, which is faster than a human flinch reflex. The design mirrors biological muscle architecture in a way that prior artificial muscle approaches never achieved. The fibers are organized into antagonistic pairs, one contracts while the other extends, exactly like biceps and triceps and because the system runs in a closed loop, the relaxing fiber serves as the fluid reservoir for the contracting one, which is what allows the whole system to operate untethered with no external tank. The applications are not hypothetical but rather are the exact use cases the industry has been waiting years for the hardware to catch up to. Exoskeletons for physical labor, prosthetic limbs that move with the natural compliance of biological tissue, assistive garments for patients with motor disorders, and soft robots capable of safe physical contact with humans are all immediately unlocked by a muscle technology that is silent, lightweight, and weavable into clothing. The deeper significance is what this technology does when it meets the AI robotics wave that is already underway. Every major humanoid robot program, Figure, 1X, Boston Dynamics, Tesla Optimus is currently bottlenecked by the same hardware limitations these fibers address, actuators that are too rigid, too loud, too heavy, or too dependent on infrastructure to operate naturally alongside humans. Electrofluidic fiber muscles do not just solve a materials science problem but rather they remove one of the last physical barriers between robots that live in labs and robots that live in the world.

British politics will reach a new reductio ad absurdum in the Makerfield by election: Vote Labour to destroy the sitting Labour Prime Minister. Support Labour PM Starmer but NOT voting Labour. We are having a by-election not because there’s any demand or need in the national interest but entirely to suit the convenience of the byzantine politics of the ruling party and the political pygmies in whose interest it is run. We are no longer a serious nation. No wonder the bond markets are squiffy.

As someone with a worm’s eye view of the legislative process, it really irritates me that Starmer’s spin for the poor local election results is that his Govt hasn’t been moving fast enough. There were 40 bills in the first parliamentary session and there are 37 in the second, as set out in yesterday’s King’s Speech. Starmer has created 96 peers – a higher rate per year than any previous Prime Minister. He could not be going any faster. The fact that the legislation the Govt has rammed through has not delivered growth or reduced the tax burden on working people or lowered the cost of living – delivered the ‘change’ that Labour promised – is because they’re not designed to do that. They’re designed to placate the Party’s ‘stakeholders’ – backbench Labour MPs, trade unions, NGOs, think tanks, lobby groups, allies in the legal profession, cheerleaders in the media, etc. It’s been bleedin’ obvious to everyone on the opposition benches – and probably some on the Govt benches too – that the legislation was introduced in the last parliamentary session – particularly the Employment Rights Act – will impede growth, not accelerate it. We’ve told the Govt’s ministers this in the chamber again and again and everything we’ve predicted would happen has happened – rising unemployment, rising inflation, accelerating borrowing costs, an unmanageable welfare bill, exodus of high income-earners, thereby increasing the tax burden on the rest of us, etc. The idea that if the Govt had been going *even faster* – which is just straightforwardly impossible – the country would be better off, is for the birds. Even as a piece of spin, it’s pathetic. The reason we’re in an economic doom spiral is because this Govt is only interested in pandering to its ‘stakeholders’ and their only motive is to line their own pockets and advance their own narrow sectional interests. Changing the leader will make no difference. We need a Prime Minister and a Govt who are going to prioritise the national interest. I don’t see anyone in the pack of hyenas stalking Starmer who’s going to do that.

Here are 4 things that happened to the UK in the last 24 hours: 1. The Labour government confirmed it will remove the right to a jury trial. Cases will be tried by a judge alone. 2. The Labour gvt confirmed it will impose Digital ID despite it never being included in Labour's manifesto and nearly 3 million Brits signing a petition against it. 3. The Labour gvt confirmed we will "align" with the European Union, directly going against the 2016 democratic vote for Brexit & forcing the British people to pay billions for laws they'll never be able to influence. 4. The Labour gvt confirmed that while Islamist sympathisers & antisemites are free to march on the streets of our capital city, & while it welcomes former allies of al-Qaeda into Downing Street, it has banned conservative activists from joining a peaceful protest against mass immigration in London. Put all these things together and you get a sense - just a sense - of how hideously authoritarian and illiberal this Labour government really is.