Gavin Crook

A Richard Feynman quote to guide you: Doubting the great Descartes … was a reaction I learned from my father: Have no respect whatsoever for authority; forget who said it and instead look what he starts with, where he ends up, and ask yourself, "Is it reasonable?"

Slamming into reverse so fast you can hear the gears crunch

I can barely be assed to criticise gas extraction at the modest Jackdaw field in the North Sea. It's tragic that the current administration listened to the wonderful, caring people from the fossil fuel industry. It won't make any difference to any of us, but £££ KERCHING for Shell and others

FUMING youtu.be/M1GCoi7l200

The richest man in the world is meddling in a war (i.e. playing with lives). But, please. Let's talk more about his bs flying car. www.wsj.com/world/ukrain...

Today's decision by Labour to approve new drilling in the North Sea is climate vandalism. It's a betrayal of all of our futures, and Labour has abandoned all credibility in the fight against climate change. This is a victory for Shell over the people. www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cw...

Kemi Badenoch wants to exempt the family home from inheritance tax. But that creates a perverse incentive for elderly people to *upsize* to save IHT. That could double the cost of the policy, and push £100bn+ from savings into housing. A 🧵 on bad tax cuts.

🧵 Matt Goodwin demanded to be fact-checked live on air when he claimed the UK spent "£100 million PER YEAR on family planning and condoms in Pakistan". He then 'corrected' himself to £74.3 million, saying it was based on a "major news story from October 2025" He was, of course, still wrong... 1/30

Not to brag, but our product has been foldable since 1828.

Truly wild to see accusations of antisemitism levelled at Miliband (who is Jewish) over this. Don't remember all the concern when he was subject to numerous antisemitic dog-whistles during his PM campaign. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Seriously, they just told Grok to make the imperial officer uniforms from Star Wars but “more Hitlery.”

If the police & security services didn't see this coming, it was a massive intelligence failure. If they did, but still gave the impression of being caught on the hop, it's something worse.

🚨 BREAKING: Patriot Platform, a new far right group launched by Tommy Robinson’s right hand man Daniel Thomas (AKA Danny Tommo) has blockaded the port and several roads in Dover. The masked men are from subgroups of PP, including Sussex, Essex, and South East Patriots Here’s all you need to know.

Not good news…the Isle of May Puffin population has declined as explained on todays blog update: isleofmaynnr.wordpress.com

Why is environmental protest necessary? Because Government won’t listen to the science Exploitation of the Jackdaw gasfield by overseas businesses will provide a handful of jobs & will not help energy security But it will push us further into climate catastrophe www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

So people publicly stated their intention to make Sadiq Khan the registered keeper of their vehicles in order to avoid taxes and congestion charges, and the DVLA and courts system just said "Well that seems fine, he's liable"? Utterly astonishing if true.

Important to remember - Michael Gove is happy to hire a rich man just released from prison for attempted rape , and believes close Epstein friend Andrew Windsor should be left alone , but that black academics should be hounded

For fuck's sake...

Brilliant 🤩 ✊🏼 “L’Infantino Way” aka @ottoenglish.bsky.social in this months @bylinetimes.bsky.social @hardeepmatharu.bsky.social @peterjukes.bsky.social @paulbernal.bsky.social @mrsbettybowers.bsky.social @worldtraveldiva.bsky.social

The fallout from the collapse of this glacier - a torrent of mud surging down the valley - killed hundreds of people. Gone, in a flash. Those people were wiped out by anthropogenic climate change. Our governments are simply not responding quickly enough to this disaster which is already upon us.

This is the letter kids got at the end of Dolly’s Imagination Library. I defy you to read this and not cry.

I have written to the Cabinet Secretary to seek assurances that the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff, who was lobbying for the privatised water industry until recently, has had no involvement in talks about the future of Thames Water.

The “free speech movement” and the anti woke movement has always had the same ambition - make the oppressors look like the oppressed - and the press didn’t fall for it, they actively want it - hate is the simple choice of the narcissist, here’s to advancing with love

Emissions have flatlined. CO2's Rising At Record Rates. WTF is going on?! youtu.be/WlD2UN7gPmg

It's honestly like something out of a sketch show. #SillySeason www.bbc.co.uk/news/videos/...

This article is informative on the initial intention and perpetrators behind the intensity of Professor Jason Arday coverage bylinetimes.com/2026/08/18/t...

A professor writes: (Jason Stanley) The problem is that journalists failed to do basic journalism. Not a single reporter seems to have checked’ Jason Arday’s citations. The ‘quantifiable metrics’ of his work. Prof Stanley did: ‘Arday is easily comparable to the leading scholars in the field’

A brief note for Nadhim Zahawi.

Plenty to reflect about re: the Arday affair, but I'm going to repeat this one thing. The playbook the right used here is effective even though it's not especially sophisticated, as it relies on the audience to do the dirty work. I've been calling it "Trojan horse propaganda", let's go with that. 1/

White professor ‘ MattGPT ‘ whose most recent book contained fabricated quotations, non-existent source references, & left ChatGPT URLs accidentally embedded in footnotes is sad about Jason Arday’s death but still wants Arday & all black academia held to higher standards than his own writing .

I’m so sad about the awful news of Prof Jason Arday’s death. I heard Simon Baron Cohen speaking about him on the radio this morning and it made me weep. My heart goes out to his family and friends.

Don’t waste your time arguing with likely bots or worse - human beings who perpetually hide their bad faith arguments under the tatty disguise of “legitimate concerns” and similar

this is important to add

UK students to pay up to 7.1% interest on loans. UK student debt £325bn, England £295bn; expected to hit £500bn by 2040s. Who can afford to afford to buy home, start family/business? England must copy Scotland, abolish university tuition fees. Write-off tuition debt.

Amazing how accurate the Simpsons was 32 years ago

Some people want the Arday affair to be all about race and woke. Here is why it isn't... open.substack.com/pub/davidaar...

Stalin had scientists dragged off to the gulags during the Soviet Lysenko era. History may not repeat, but it certainly rhymes. #ScienceUnderSiege (attn: @peterhotezmdphd.bsky.social)

Remember folks, this was ALWAYS about polluters and the threat posed to them by climate action: #ScienceUnderSiege

lol

Always interesting to contrast how LLMs are framed as "inevitable" so everyone has to just accept it and governments have to invest billions of dollars in it with how climate crisis, which is physically inevitable if we don't change cause is treated as a vague possibility that govts should ignore.

Leaders of flag-raising group Raise the Colours Oxfordshire placed trackers on highway workers’ cars to find out their home addresses, the High Court has heard. RTC then attempted to intimidate the highway staff into no longer removing flags by repeating their addresses to them.

Europe's on fire. And it's cos we're super-heating our climate.

And on the lab leak hypothesis... While a lab leak has not been disproven (and likely can never be), every piece of positive evidence that has emerged since 2020 about where the outbreak began points to a natural origin from the Wuhan wet market. www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

🧵On @thenewsagents.co.uk yesterday, school closures and the lab leak theory were offered as two examples of legitimate questions that were hard to ask. Both have in fact been asked constantly since 2020. But here's a thread on why I think they were wrong and dangerous on school closures 1/12