Me: interests: #scicomm, books, gardening, philosophy, science journalism, photography, #nature, #travel, #DiscWorld, and so on.

Solingen, Germany
Joined March 2010
2) A detail photo of three of the zebras drinking: #Tanzania 2013, #travel, #nature, #DazzleOfZebrasSeries:
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Oooof. Now I need to see a neurosurgeon, and I also need, separately, a much more detailed MRI scan of my head, with aim of seeing a different surgeon. Huh. So my rheumatologist informs me, as per the results of (an undetailed??) MRI scan of my neck vertebrae. Huuuuuhya.
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Kids, don't get an MRI, it'll only be bad news needing more MRI's and more doctors, is all I can say.
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One problem *seems* to be (hey, detailed MRI needed) a frontal sinus osteoma, likely a benign bony tumour in a sinus. The other problem is the nerves in the back of my neck are apparently suffering badly because of my vertebrae & discs, and a neurosurgeon should do something. Huh
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Tim Skellett retweeted
Very proud to be part of this documentary about the absolute madness of transgender ideology in Australia. So many harrowing stories told by brave people who simply refused to go along with an obvious lie. Everyone needs to know what is really going on:
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This is becoming very topical again, owing to Emma Watson havering around in interviews now trying to have her cake and eat it, in a hazy cloud of verbiage.
I'm seeing quite a bit of comment about this, so I want to make a couple of points. I'm not owed eternal agreement from any actor who once played a character I created. The idea is as ludicrous as me checking with the boss I had when I was twenty-one for what opinions I should hold these days. Emma Watson and her co-stars have every right to embrace gender identity ideology. Such beliefs are legally protected, and I wouldn't want to see any of them threatened with loss of work, or violence, or death, because of them. However, Emma and Dan in particular have both made it clear over the last few years that they think our former professional association gives them a particular right - nay, obligation - to critique me and my views in public. Years after they finished acting in Potter, they continue to assume the role of de facto spokespeople for the world I created. When you've known people since they were ten years old it's hard to shake a certain protectiveness. Until quite recently, I hadn't managed to throw off the memory of children who needed to be gently coaxed through their dialogue in a big scary film studio. For the past few years, I've repeatedly declined invitations from journalists to comment on Emma specifically, most notably on the Witch Trials of JK Rowling. Ironically, I told the producers that I didn't want her to be hounded as the result of anything I said. The television presenter in the attached clip highlights Emma's 'all witches' speech, and in truth, that was a turning point for me, but it had a postscript that hurt far more than the speech itself. Emma asked someone to pass on a handwritten note from her to me, which contained the single sentence 'I'm so sorry for what you're going through' (she has my phone number). This was back when the death, rape and torture threats against me were at their peak, at a time when my personal security measures had had to be tightened considerably and I was constantly worried for my family's safety. Emma had just publicly poured more petrol on the flames, yet thought a one line expression of concern from her would reassure me of her fundamental sympathy and kindness. Like other people who've never experienced adult life uncushioned by wealth and fame, Emma has so little experience of real life she's ignorant of how ignorant she is. She'll never need a homeless shelter. She's never going to be placed on a mixed sex public hospital ward. I'd be astounded if she's been in a high street changing room since childhood. Her 'public bathroom' is single occupancy and comes with a security man standing guard outside the door. Has she had to strip off in a newly mixed-sex changing room at a council-run swimming pool? Is she ever likely to need a state-run rape crisis centre that refuses to guarantee an all-female service? To find herself sharing a prison cell with a male rapist who's identified into the women's prison? I wasn't a multimillionaire at fourteen. I lived in poverty while writing the book that made Emma famous. I therefore understand from my own life experience what the trashing of women's rights in which Emma has so enthusiastically participated means to women and girls without her privileges. The greatest irony here is that, had Emma not decided in her most recent interview to declare that she loves and treasures me - a change of tack I suspect she's adopted because she's noticed full-throated condemnation of me is no longer quite as fashionable as it was - I might never have been this honest. Adults can't expect to cosy up to an activist movement that regularly calls for a friend's assassination, then assert their right to the former friend's love, as though the friend was in fact their mother. Emma is rightly free to disagree with me and indeed to discuss her feelings about me in public - but I have the same right, and I've finally decided to exercise it.
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Tim Skellett retweeted
Well said again, David Reed - we all know which enemy state was responsible for that cyber attack. Labour’s pathetic attempts at a cover-up serve only to confirm it.
Labour tells the British public to stock up on tinned food and wind-up radios to prepare for cyberattacks. Yet after the devastating attack on JLR, estimated to have cost up to £2.1 BILLION, the Government still hasn’t publicly named those responsible. How can Britain deter hostile states if we won’t name those attacking us? The British public deserve answers. telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/10…
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whoa. An airport I've often flown into and out of myself.
Left main of that Jet2 at BHX spent a few seconds on the grass yesterday in the Storm Boelo crosswind before they got it back.
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🚨 Breaking: After a three year battle, County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust has finally changed its policy on single-sex spaces for staff to bring it in line with the law. It is amazing how simple it is! Now all NHS Trusts must urgently follow suit. Bethany Hutchison, President of the Darlington Nursing Union and lead claimant in the case, said: “This short sentence in a policy has taken women three years of fear, humiliation and extraordinary personal sacrifice to secure. “We were nurses asking for the most basic protection: somewhere private and safe to undress at work, away from members of the opposite sex. Instead of listening, the Trust told us to compromise, broaden our mindset and be more inclusive. We were forced out of our own changing room, placed in inadequate facilities, threatened with disciplinary action and made to fear for our jobs and professional careers. “Vulnerable colleagues were put under intolerable pressure. International nurses feared losing their visas. Women who had experienced domestic abuse were left distressed and afraid. Four of us were reported to our professional regulator simply for speaking publicly about what was happening. “Throughout it all, the Trust defended a policy it had been warned was unlawful. Even after the Supreme Court clarified the law, it refused to change course. It took a full tribunal judgment, an apology, damages and an enormous bill before the Trust finally wrote biological reality into its policy. “We welcome this change because it will protect women across the Trust, but it should never have required a three-year legal battle. No nurse should ever again be treated as we were for asking for dignity, privacy and safety.” See more breaking in the Daily Express and with @CConcern and the Christian Legal Centre who have supported the nurses from the beginning. express.co.uk/news/uk/226004… christianconcern.com/ccpress…
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Tim Skellett retweeted
The volume of propaganda pumped out by the BBC—even, as we now know, unto the embedding of government staff inside the corporation—is gobsmacking in itself, but it also exposes the fatuousness of people who obsess about GBNews.
BREAKING: BBC forced to take down its education website used by millions after it was found to contain all sorts of devices and articles promoting the Labour Party, leftist politics, as well as ‘extreme views on migration and Net Zero’ (via @DailyMail) dailymail.com/news/article-1…
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Never going to forget this one from @marklewismd
“Babe, have you seen the remote? <deep sigh> “have you checked the post-central gyrus? That’s where you lost it last time”
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When I warned in a recent column that antisemitism would lead Americans to blame Israel for grocery prices, just like I saw growing up in Egypt, I thought it would take years. Not weeks. The Strawberry Plot ideas.tikvah.org/mosaic/colu…
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Tim Skellett retweeted
“So who gets called "far right" in 2026? People who want safe cities. People who want to keep their culture. People who just want to live a peaceful life, raise their kids, and not have to board up their shop every weekend. People who want the law to apply to everyone”👇
My post about Hitler and the far right got millions of views. Clearly, it hit a nerve. So today I'm going to show you, step by step, why the notion of "far right" as it's used in France makes almost no sense. And why the people who wield it are usually the last ones who should be lecturing anyone. Let's start with the only question that matters: what makes a political system work or fail? To a very large extent, it's the economy. A country that produces wealth, that lets its citizens create, trade and build, stays standing. A country that destroys that collapses, no matter how beautiful its slogans are. And in economics, there are really only two worldviews. The first is collectivism. The idea that the State knows better than you. That it must plan production, set prices, run companies, decide what you earn, what you buy, and eventually what you think. The individual is just a cog serving a grand collective project: the class, the nation, the race, the people. The second is freedom. Capitalism, property, individual liberty, individual responsibility. The idea that millions of people creating value for one another produce infinitely more prosperity than an office of planners, however brilliant they may be. Now look at the list of the great totalitarian regimes of the 20th century. Stalin: total planning, forced collectivization, millions dead. Mao: the Great Leap Forward and the deadliest famine in human history. Pol Pot: money abolished, cities emptied, nearly a quarter of Cambodia's population exterminated. Mussolini, the man who coined the word fascism: "Everything within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State." And Hitler, leader of the National Socialist German Workers' Party, whose program proclaimed "the common good before individual good." He subjected the entire German economy to State plans: the Four-Year Plan, frozen prices and wages, unions dissolved into a single state labor front, industrialists producing whatever the regime decided. Their flags were different. Their designated enemies were different. But the machinery was the same: the individual doesn't exist, only the collective matters, and the State decides everything. Why does it always end in totalitarianism? Because collectivism doesn't work. And when a system doesn't work, it has only two options: admit failure or force people. They always choose force. Ludwig von Mises proved it as early as 1920: without free prices, without a market, a planner simply cannot know what to produce, how much, or at what cost. He is flying blind. A planned economy isn't a less efficient version of the market. It's an impossibility. Friedrich Hayek drew the political conclusion in 1944 in The Road to Serfdom, a book he dedicated "to the socialists of all parties." One chapter is titled "The Socialist Roots of Naziism." Another, "Why the Worst Get on Top." For Hayek, controlling the economy isn't controlling one sector among others. It is "the control of the means for all our ends." Whoever controls your bread controls your life. Then your speech. Then your thoughts. Milton Friedman put it his own way: a society that puts equality before freedom ends up with neither. So we know exactly what works. It's not an opinion. It's a century of real-world experiments. Listen to the Austrian school, Mises and Hayek, with Friedman from Chicago alongside them: economic freedom, limited government, individual responsibility. And this is where we get to the great accusatory inversion. Part of the left-wing press spends its time screaming fascism. Why? Because the fascism fantasy is the best way to never talk about the track record of their own ideas. Deep down, they know: if their collectivist program were applied all the way, it wouldn't work, because a collective economy cannot work. And an economy that doesn't work always ends up having to coerce, surveil and ban. In other words, it becomes exactly what they claim to be fighting. The real heirs of totalitarian logic are not the ones being pointed at. So who gets called "far right" in 2026? People who want safe cities. People who want to keep their culture. People who just want to live a peaceful life, raise their kids, and not have to board up their shop every weekend. People who want the law to apply to everyone. If that's the far right, then the word no longer means anything. And maybe that was the point.
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Long-overdue study of menopause reveals it begins more than a decade before the final period. Uri Alon and collaborators analyze 300 million tests and use a mathematical technique from astronomy to shows HRT can delay many deleterious changes 🧵
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Tim Skellett retweeted
Rep. Dan Crenshaw: Musk calls people who support Ukraine "warmongers." What is he talking about? Nobody wants to keep this war going. Ukrainians have the right to make their own decisions and defend their country. Supporting them doesn't make you a warmonger. 1/
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Tim Skellett retweeted
Le problème central du tweet est très simple et il n’y a pas à tergiverser des heures dessus. Le taux d’intérêt est un prix d’équilibre, pas une donnée du problème. La dette allemande est plus attractive à un taux d’intérêt donné, donc la France doit offrir un taux supérieur pour que les investisseurs soient en moyenne indifférents à détenir des obligations allemandes ou françaises. La différence entre les deux taux n’est pas un avantage ou un désavantage d’un pays ou de l’autre: c’est le prix de marché du désavantage de la France. Le tweet d’origine est absurde car il confond une variable libre (le prix) du problème avec une donnée de celui-ci (le risque du prêteur). Il est équivalent à affirmer que l’écart de salaire entre un diplômé d’HEC et de la « Paris School of Business » est un problème pour HEC, car en l’absence de différence de qualité entre les deux écoles, les employeurs préfèrent recruter les diplômés moins coûteux.
Vous avez été nombreux à réagir à ce tweet. Et la pauvreté du raisonnement de certains me déçoit beaucoup (je ne parle pas des trolls). Visiblement quelques rappels s'imposent.
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Absolutely right to call out the King’s huge carbon footprint. Who do he and his “elite ilk” think they are? He should set an example, like Neil, who walked to all these places. /1
BBC has role that is mere propaganda for establishment. Here the future King of UK is on a tv sofa saying we need to prove how progress is possible on climate crisis, whilst he and and his elite ilk have a carbon footprint 50 times that of average family bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c30r…
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This among other reasons (such as the @BBC's very peculiar addiction to drag queens) is why I'm fully in favour of defunding the BBC and ending its role as the state's partner.
Replying to @jonsac
Far from improving, it actually looks like the BBC - with a recorded history of antisemitism dating at least as far back as the 1940s - is reaching a crescendo of antisemitism which dwarfs anything in its sleazy past.
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Tim Skellett retweeted
The BBC has agreed to pay £400,000 to an award-winning Jewish documentary-maker who alleged she was subjected to antisemitism and pushed out of the corporation after October 7. Lucie Kon, 57, spent 22 years at the BBC and worked on programmes including Panorama, Today, BBC Breakfast and Storyville. Films she commissioned or helped produce won an Oscar, Emmy and Bafta. Kon says her treatment changed dramatically after the Hamas attacks. She alleges colleagues described Zionists like her as “evil”, argued that Israel should be called terrorist if Hamas was, and told her to consider what had driven Hamas to carry out the massacre. When she proposed a documentary about October 7, Kon says she was told she was “too partial” to oversee it because she was Jewish. She subsequently filed a formal grievance, but a BBC investigation rejected her complaint. Kon says she was then kept away from work for months. During a restructuring, her position was made redundant and she failed to secure the similar role replacing it. She launched unfair-dismissal proceedings. The BBC has now agreed substantial compensation, reported as £400,000, without admitting liability or accepting that Kon suffered antisemitism. Kon says Jewish employees still at the corporation continue to face hostility and feel unable to identify openly as Jewish or Zionist.
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