Sam Evans

@herdyshepherd1 The Farmer's Share: Who Carries the Risk vs. Who Gets the Reward?

Quiet question. Who owns Britain now? In 2023, around half of all UK farm sales went to non-farming buyers. The figure has been climbing since 2018, only easing in 2025 as the inheritance tax shock froze the market. The new owners include: Aviva Investors and Par Equity, who acquired 6,300 hectares of Aberdeenshire moorland at Glen Dye to plant trees and restore peatland against Aviva's own net zero target. Brewdog, which bought the 9,300-acre Kinrara estate in the Cairngorms for £8.85 million, killed more than half its 100,000 planted saplings in year one, collected £690,986 in Scottish Forestry public grants, then sold the estate to Oxygen Conservation in October 2025 for the same price it paid. Oxygen Conservation itself, which now controls over 20,000 hectares across 12 UK properties and plans to build a £1 billion offset portfolio before flipping the lot by 2030. Multiple anonymous shell companies registered in Jersey and the British Virgin Islands, hoovering up upland sheep farms in Cumbria, Northumberland, the Borders, and the Highlands. Beneficial owners undisclosed. The UK has not produced a public register of agricultural land ownership. Successive governments have promised one. None have delivered. The local livestock farmer cannot compete. A Welsh hill farm grossed £25,700 in 2023-24. A corporate carbon buyer can outbid them every time and write the cheque from petty cash. The farmer is outbid. The farm is consolidated. The village empties. The press release talks about nature recovery. The trees, in many cases, are already dead.

“Free Palestine.” I grew up on those words. In Lebanon, most people around me wanted a free Palestine for a very practical reason — to send the Palestinian refugees back. The civil war that tore my country apart was ignited in no small part by the Palestinian armed factions who turned Lebanon into their launching pad. “Free Palestine” meant: free us from them. In Damascus, where my father’s family lived, the sentiment was different but equally self-serving. Palestine must be returned to the Arabs, its righteous owners. No one asked follow-up questions. No one was expected to. Palestine was central to Islam, most Arabs are Muslim, therefore supporting the Palestinian cause was reflexive. A non-brainer in the most literal sense — no brain engaged at all. Nobody stopped to point out that Palestine is not an Arabic word. Nobody found it strange that Jerusalem, the supposedly third holiest city in Islam, is not mentioned once in the Quran. Not once. Nor is Palestine. The entire theological and political architecture of this cause rests on a foundation that their own scripture doesn’t bother to acknowledge. What was actually happening was indoctrination. A systematic, generational rejection of Jewish sovereignty — and frankly, of any minority sovereignty. Jews, Christians, Druze, Kurds, Assyrians, Yazidis — the Arab world has been remarkably consistent in how it treats people who are different. We just don’t talk about that. Instead, in the West, we talk about Palestine. In the West, a civilization that has elevated human rights to its highest moral currency, the Palestinian cause has become the one exception to every rule. In the queue of human suffering, Palestinians cut the line every time. Homosexuals executed in Gaza and hanged from cranes in Iran? Palestine first. Women imprisoned in Saudi Arabia for campaigning for the right to drive — a right they were denied until 2018 — girls sold into marriage in Afghanistan, women erased from public life entirely under the Taliban? After Palestine. Political dissidents ground into dust in Syrian and Egyptian prisons, journalists disappeared in Libya, children starving in Yemen while their rulers wage proxy wars, entire populations hollowed out by hunger in Sudan? All of it waits. Christians ethnically cleansed from Iraq and Syria, the Arab world methodically emptied of every Jewish community it once held — a demographic erasure carried out across a century with surgical patience and near-total Western silence? Palestine is still first. So let’s end where we started. Free Palestine. Which Palestine, exactly? The Roman invention? The British administrative line? The British Mandate covered the entire territory of what is today Israel, the West Bank, Gaza and Jordan. In 1921, 78% of that mandate was handed to the Hashemite family — a dynasty imported from Hijaz in present-day Saudi Arabia — and became the Kingdom of Jordan, which it remains to this day. A foreign royal family, on the majority of historic Palestine, ruling it as a monarchy. Nobody protests that. No flags, no chants, no encampments. The remaining 22% was designated for the Jews, became Israel, and is the only part that any pro-Palestinian activist has ever had a problem with. So when you say Free Palestine, you mean that 22%. You mean the Jews. And free it from whom? From a people with a three-thousand-year-old documented presence in that land, to restore the glory of a name coined by Roman colonizers, a name lifted from the Torah, a name that has no roots in Arabic, no mention in the Quran, and no history as a sovereign state? You are not chanting for liberation. You are chanting for colonialism — the Roman kind, repackaged for social media. Free Palestine is not a cause. It is a colonial term, coined by invaders, recycled by the indoctrinated. The least you can do is have the intelligence to understand it and the decency to reflect on your position. 📍#Israel

In the case of Baby L, Lucy Letby went off shift at 8pm on 9th April and was off duty for several days. Yet Baby L's hypoglycaemic episode continued all through the next day, until the afternoon of the day after that! Lucy Letby did not return to work during this period. The prosecution alleged that on 9th April Lucy Letby poisoned his dextrose bags with insulin, yet within hours of her going off duty his dextrose bag was replaced with a new one, and a second one 24 hours after that. Here is how Professor Hindmarsh explained what might have happened: Hindmarsh: "The giving sets are plastic and insulin is a protein and it sticks very nicely to plastic. So in your giving set as well you would have insulin stuck potentially on to the walls of the tubing from which it could fall off over a period of time as well." (The giving set is the tubing set that connects an infusion bag with the catheter or long line. With dextrose, it doesn't have to be changed with every bag change.) In cross-examination, Hindmarsh admitted that he didn't actually know how sticky insulin might operate: Myers: "Is it the case that sticky insulin could be operative over a certain period potentially?" Hindmarsh: "I don't think anybody's actually done those kind of studies, to be honest, and I think the answer is we simply don't know." It's also worth pointing out that it wasn't known whether the giving set was actually changed when the new dextrose bags were put up. There was contradictory testimony about it. Hindmarsh: And do we also take it as a given that when they're doing that procedure, the whole giving system is changed as well? NJ: No. Hindmarsh: We don't know? NJ: No. Hindmarsh: Right. Nevertheless Nick Johnson settled on this theory as being the explanation for the continuing hypoglycaemia. From his closing speech: "We had some evidence about whether giving sets are changed and whether they're not changed; but as Professor Hindmarsh explained to us, an explanation, and a reasonable explanation for these results, is that there was insulin that had stuck to the plastic of the giving set. That even though the bag was changed for bags that didn't have insulin in, the insulin was still coming off the giving set, and therefore in ever-diminishing quantities; but it was still affecting the blood sugar results. So the fact that Lucy Letby wasn't there after about 8pm, we suggest, doesn't exculpate her at all." I find it unbelievable that Lucy Letby was convicted based on this highly speculative, unresearched expert evidence from Professor Hindmarsh. He clearly doesn't know anything about insulin adsorption and how it might behave in this situation - it's not within his field of expertise. Yet his expert testimony on this was accepted by the court. I've been looking into this and can say that he (and Nick Johnson) got this completely wrong! I will post more about it later this week.

The UK just “smashed” its May temperature record… but here’s the part the Met Office conveniently leaves out: The PREVIOUS record was set in 1922. That’s 104 years ago. Long before SUVs, private jets, or modern CO₂ emissions. Heathrow Airport didn’t even exist yet. The area was literally farmland and small villages. So if a 1922 heatwave could produce nearly identical temperatures in a world with ~130 ppm less CO₂, maybe, just maybe, natural variability plays a much bigger role than the panic merchants admit.

I think on a personal level, the most interesting and also depressing aspect of very detailed study of WW2 administration of defence and industry in Britain, is seeing how exceptionally competent almost all of Britains administrators were. You almost get cognitive dissonance just reading half the files, trying to work out how its even the same country we live in now which once produced these kinds of reports. There is no doubt there has been a progressive, and disastrous collapse in the all round general collective intellectual capability of the civil service and defence administration in Britain over the last few decades. Its possible to argue this is inevitable after the system was optimised by the white heat of war, and the dead wood was scattered to the four winds by virtue of necessity, but it doesnt change the fact that its almost impossible to reconcile the standards which were once taken for granted as a matter of national survival, with those we see today. You can see it at every level, and even in my small town, talking to retired councillors, they cant believe the desperately poor standard of those currently doing the jobs they did 30 years ago. How do you keep the best of your systems intact passing from wartime to peacetime ? Has anyone solved this question ? Perhaps, as far as I can see from a brief search (this is not my specific area of historical study) Singapore is one example of the most valiant attempt, with some measure of sucess. This has been discussed in "Meritocracy and the Singapore Political System." Asian Journal of Political Science. (link in comments), which describes the strict measures taken post independance in Singapore to introduce performance based merit in the Civil Service, and intensely rigid anti corruption laws. Letter below from 21st November 1935, Defence Requirements Sub-Comittee of the Committee of Imperial Defence - the CID, (Chamberlain presiding) A year before, on the 8th October 1934, Chamberlain had been lambasted by Lord Hankey, for expanding the RAF by ten squadrons over and above that even recommended by the Defence Requirements committee. Chamberlain suceeded in his push to expand the RAF at home as rapidly as possible. These meetings were however, all secret, and were not declassified until the 1970`s. The push for re-armament was not fully revealed to Germany, because the CID had agreed in 1934, that it would need five years to prepare for war with Germany, and that every diplomatic measure possible was to be taken until that date (1939) to avoid the outbreak of war with Germany. It was then, after Chamberlains withdrawl from politics and death, taken as the established narrative that Britain had NOT begun large scale and direct preparations to defeat Germany before the beginning of Churchills tenure. Only after the Committee of Imperial Defence files were declassified, covering what was really happening in British war planning in the 1930`s, that the truth became apparent. The established story of British stupidly and appeasement of totalitarianism before Churchill was Prime Minister, were utter nonsense - but, had been important to maintain the illusion of until 1939.

@BoringBiz_ @Threadreaderapp unroll

If you are starting as an investment banking analyst or summer intern tomorrow, bookmark this post so you can read it over and over again > Lose the ego. Nothing is beneath you. That includes turning useless comments or putting together a 90 page deck that clients will not even read. Maybe it is a waste of time, but that is what you are being paid $200 K+ for. You are a fresh college graduate with barely any understanding of the world. Keep a good attitude and do the small things well. Over time, you will be trusted to do the more interesting work > Relationships > work quality alone. Every time you work with someone, try to grab coffee with them. Try and build up a professional relationship with every single person you can. This goes for people beyond just your team. Use your firm as a networking resource. Finance is a small world. Many of these folks will become your reference checks when you try to move to the buyside, do an MBA, or just leave the industry as a whole > The small things matter. A lot. This includes showing up on time to the office, meetings, and everything in between. If you are an intern, you should always be the first one in and the last one to leave. Keep an organized inbox and calendar so you never miss an important date or meeting > Avoid negative gossip at all costs. Banking attracts a lot of tough characters. It is easy to fall into the trap and complain about your VPs, MDs and the stupid requests. The problem is that word travels fast. Even with other analysts, be careful about what you say. Over time, words tend to become a habit. You will say it in front of the wrong person at the wrong time, and it can cost you dearly > Banking is one of those careers where the more you put in, the more you will get out of it. Even if you plan on leaving for the buyside or corporate, try to take advantage of your banking experience. Raise your hand for the complicated staffings. Try to speak up with clients, even if you are not expected to. It will enhance your learning by 2-3x. You will be stuck in the office until late nights no matter what. Might as well make the most out of your analyst years. Also those 2 years pass by way faster than you would think > Treat it like a marathon, not a sprint. Be careful not to burn yourself out. When you really cannot take on the workload, talk to your staffers. Communicate with your deal team and associates to split up the work where needed. Dont be the analyst who tries to do everything and anything, only to get completely burned out within a span of 8 months. Use weekends and PTO time to step away from the desk as much as possible. Spend some time away from your work phone, even if it feels literally impossible to do so. A little bit of rest in between sprints goes a long way. An extra hour of sleep when you are constantly sleeping 3-4 hours many nights in a row goes a long way. > Take care of your health. You have heard of the freshman 15 in college, but the analyst 30 is just as real. You will be eating at your desk very often. You will be ordering Seamless for dinners almost every single night on weekdays. Try to avoid too many carbs. Carve out some time for the gym. Throw in a salad bowl or two into your dinner mix, along with lunch. This also goes for your mental health as well. Spend time with family and friends. Do not miss the important events, whether that is a wedding, birthday or hangout just for the sake of work. If you absolutely must, take your work phone or laptop with you. Communicate with deal teams to carve out some time for these events. Take PTO just to recharge if you must. Staying in touch with friends and family will do wonders for your mental health > Save up some money. You will get paid very well compared to most of your peers from college. Only problem is that your banking job will likely be in a high cost of living city, with even higher taxes. Make sure you keep that in mind. Do not blow your bonus buying luxury watches or clothes. Invest first, spend later. You might think you will go down the finance route forever, but life happens. Things change. Health issues and relationships take priority. Enjoy your life, but set some money aside for when you will absolutely need it. Having a cash cushion also lets you take risks with your career down the line if you need to.

Another one gone. Slow handclap again for our dear leaders!!

Yes, it is. The disappearance of the working-class voice from Scottish politics is not a footnote. It is THE headline. A young Scottish man today is three times more likely to die early than his counterpart in England, Spain, or Italy. The causes are not mysterious: drugs, suicide, cancer. The fallout of poverty, neglect, family breakdown, and political inertia. Scotland is now the only developed country where mortality among men aged 25 to 44 is rising. Life expectancy in parts of Calton sits closer to post-Soviet mining towns than to a modern Western European city. The kind of statistic you expect to find in a World Health Organisation briefing on social collapse, not in a nation that endlessly describes itself as compassionate and progressive. And nowhere is this failure more visible than in our prisons. Young men face staggering levels of despair, with suicide attempts at terrifying rates. Yet we continue spending almost as much incarcerating people for a year as it would cost to provide meaningful residential rehabilitation and recovery support. When over 70% of crimes are committed either under the influence of substances or driven by addiction itself, does it not make more moral, social and economic sense to invest seriously in recovery rather than endlessly recycling damaged people through systems of containment? We were promised that devolution would bring power closer to the people. But for those I know, in addiction, in recovery, in poverty, in communities where hope itself feels rationed, Holyrood has often felt further away than ever. Yes, we have improved representation in some important areas, sex and ethnic diversity, and that matters. But let’s be honest enough to admit the Parliament increasingly looks more like Scotland while sounding less like Scotland. The accents of managerial politics have replaced the voices of ordinary working people. The language is polished, therapeutic, procedural, endlessly consultative, yet somehow emotionally weightless. Politics has become a performance of compassion rather than the hard, costly business of practising it. As @PaulEmbery put it: “Britain isn’t experiencing social turmoil because of ‘far-right’ beliefs; it is doing so because of luxury beliefs, held by unrepresentative elites who govern our institutions. If you don’t understand that, you don’t understand anything.” And who, precisely, is carrying the burden of this failure? Not the professional classes. Not the comfortable managerial elite. The poor. The working class. The forgotten communities whose children die younger, whose streets decay faster, and whose voices are heard least. Yet policy is still too often written about them rather than with them. Consultations become curated exercises in institutional self-reassurance: polished, centralised, filtered through anaemic, on-message voices carefully selected not to disrupt the consensus. Not real representation. Not real experience. Just management. x.com/Annemarieward/…

That water clarity is an engineering decision, and the math behind it is wilder than the video. Roman aqueducts ran on gravity alone. No pumps, no pressure systems. Engineers carved channels with a gradient so shallow it borders on absurd. The Pont du Gard in southern France drops 2.5 centimeters over 275 meters. That's roughly the thickness of a coin over the length of three football fields. They surveyed that accuracy with plumb lines and wooden leveling instruments. The clarity you're seeing is a direct product of flow velocity. Too steep and the water erodes the channel walls, picks up sediment, turns brown. Too flat and it stagnates. Roman engineers targeted a slope of about 20 centimeters per kilometer, which kept the water moving fast enough to stay fresh but slow enough to stay clear. Before the water reached the city, it passed through multi-chamber settling tanks where velocity dropped near zero. Suspended particles sank. Clean water flowed out the top into the next chamber. Repeat three or four times. Pliny specified the minimum slope in writing. Vitruvius published the exact mortar ratio for hydraulic cement: one part lime to two parts volcanic ash for underwater work. The pozzolana from Pozzuoli reacted with water to form a calcium-aluminum-silicate compound that actually gets stronger the longer it sits submerged. Modern concrete degrades in water. Roman concrete bonds with it. Scale the whole system and it gets harder to process. Eleven aqueducts fed Rome at its peak. Combined output: roughly 1 million cubic meters of water per day. That works out to about 250 gallons per person for a city of one million. Modern New York delivers about 125 gallons per person per day. Ancient Rome had access to double the per capita water supply of the largest city in the United States, running entirely on slope and stone. The Trevi Fountain in Rome is still fed by one of them. Two thousand years, same source, same gravity, same water.

@Theharshhada7 @Threadreaderapp unroll

"So summers" is easily the most insane way to describe how short life is. Get. To. F*cking. Work.

8 sentences that you should carve into your f*cking desk and read every time you're about to waste another hour:

You're much more of a slave to the 1% that commit 50% of crimes than you are to the 1% that create 40% of the wealth.

What are people mostly worried about in the UK today? You said "VAT rates on Theme Park Admission" "If it's up there you can bum me on camera"

Rape victims are often accused of adultery under Sharia law if they report being raped by married Muslim men. Here is a shocking example: A 13-year-old girl in Somalia was raped by a married Muslim man. Instead of punishing the rapist, an Islamic Sharia court sentenced the little girl to death. The Muslim rapist accused her of “seducing” him by appearing in public, and the court agreed — convicting her of adultery. Hundreds of Muslim men gathered to stone her to death as an offering to Allah. They laughed, cheered and shouted “Allahu Akbar” as she screamed in agony until her last breath. Not one man stepped forward to save the 13-year-old rape victim. Everyone in the village heard her cries for help before the execution. Instead of intervening, they tied her hands behind her back and chained her feet. The local imam directed the men to dig a hole and bury her up to her waist so she could not move or dodge the stones aimed at her head. For hours before and during the stoning she begged for mercy, looking toward her neighbors, her father, and every Muslim man taking part. Until her final breath she cried out, but no one rescued her. Of the hundreds of men present, none showed compassion. The participants gladly joined this Islamic act of worship, ignoring her pleas and rejoicing with “Allahu Akbar” while brutally killing her. This is not an isolated barbaric act. This is Sharia law in practice — where the victim is punished and the rapist protected if he is married. Not all cultures are equal. Some protect the innocent. Islam punishes the raped girl and calls it justice. The West keeps importing this ideology while pretending it is compatible with our values. It is not. Share this. The world must see the true face of Sharia and stop the denial.

"Bacon contains nitrites and nitrites cause cancer." A 100g portion of bacon contains roughly 5.5 mg of nitrate. A 100g portion of spinach contains roughly 741 mg. Spinach has approximately 130 times more of the substance bacon is being prosecuted for. Around 80 percent of dietary nitrate in the human diet comes from vegetables. The leafy salad your dietitian recommends is, by mass, a nitrate delivery system that makes a rasher look like a rounding error. The standard rebuttal is that vegetable nitrates are different. They are not. The exact same molecule, absorbed in the exact same gut, recirculates through the exact same salivary glands, gets reduced to nitrite by the exact same bacteria on the back of the tongue, and ends up in the exact same stomach. The pathway is called the enterosalivary circulation. It is how your body makes nitric oxide. It is the basis of every beetroot pre-workout product on the shelf. The absolute increase in colorectal cancer risk from 50g of processed meat per day is roughly 0.7 percentage points over a lifetime. One in twenty-five becomes one in twenty-one. Only if you eat that much, every day, for the rest of your life. The molecule isn't the problem. The framing is. Eat the bacon.

The USDA has kept raccoon rabies out of the central United States for over 30 years by air-dropping fish-flavored ravioli from helicopters. Each one is a small packet coated in fishmeal with an oral rabies vaccine inside. Raccoons, foxes, coyotes, and skunks find them by smell, bite through, and swallow. Many animals that consume the bait develop immunity, helping build a protective barrier across populations. The bait is generally considered safe for pets and tested in many non-target species. The USDA's Wildlife Services has been running this since 1995. Without the bait program, raccoon rabies very likely would have spread much further west. A federal program you've probably never heard of is protecting your pets and your kids by feeding wild animals ravioli from a helicopter.

In 2024, the Welsh government proposed that every farm in Wales must plant trees on 10% of its land and manage another 10% as wildlife habitat to receive any subsidy payment. This was the Sustainable Farming Scheme. The economic impact assessment commissioned by the Welsh government itself, modelled at full uptake, found the scheme would deliver: A reduction of 122,000 Welsh livestock units. An 11% cut in the labour required across Welsh agriculture. The equivalent of 5,500 lost rural jobs. The response was the largest farmer mobilisation Wales had seen in a generation. Thousands of wellies lined the steps of the Senedd, each pair a family leaving the land. Tractors blocked Cardiff. Wrexham. Aberystwyth. Llandudno. The rural affairs minister was reshuffled. The scheme was paused. The blanket 10% tree mandate was dropped from the final version published on 15 July 2025. That was the headline. Read the small print. BPS payments to every farm were cut from 100% in 2025 to 60% in 2026, then 40%, 20%, and zero by 2029, a steeper taper than originally promised. The scheme-level ambition to plant 17,000 hectares of trees across Wales by 2030 was retained. A tree and hedgerow planting opportunity plan is still required of every entrant. The 10% habitat requirement is mandatory, not optional, for every participating farm. The farmers won the headline. The department kept the policy. The First Minister recently dismissed agriculture as less than 1% of the Welsh economy. The supply chain it underwrites, in feed, vets, hauliers, abattoirs, fencers, agricultural merchants, supports an estimated 230,000 jobs. The department has not produced a figure for that.

Darren Jones has finally admitted that Britain has run down its domestic refining capacity and become reliant on third parties for its fuel needs. In doing so, he undermines a central pillar of Miliband’s anti-UK hydrocarbon narrative. For years, Labour MPs have told us that domestic production does not matter because Britain does not produce enough and prices are set internationally. Now they are admitting - when it is too late to do anything - what energy realists have said all along. Capacity and domestic supply matters.

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.

Interestingly, almost every consulting firm presentation I attended for ten years stated that "80% of consumers [say they] will pay more for sustainable products". I used to sit at the back as a lonely marketer thinking "that's bollocks". But the consulting firms made money implementing all this woke shit, so it paid them to continue reciting this dumb litany.

Is there ANYONE in this government with a brain cell?? We don’t have enough money for the equipment or manpower to properly protect the UK and so we’re going to spend £1 BILLION on chip fat fuel so the RAF can pretend its hit net zero by 2040 It’s insane 🤡