Have Your Say

From X Richard Seiller

𝘞𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘪𝘴 𝘪𝘵 𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘮𝘢𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘱𝘦𝘰𝘱𝘭𝘦 𝘭𝘰𝘷𝘦

Jeremy Clarkson has never pretended to be anything other than exactly what he is

Brutally honest. No oil painting. A pot belly, a lifelong smoker, a drinker. Not exactly the modern alpha male or is he?

And somehow that is the whole point

I have watched him for most of my life
First as a motoring journalist who could make you want a car you would never own and never need
Then as something bigger
The loudest, funniest, most unfiltered mouthpiece the ordinary person ever had
A man who said the thing everyone was thinking while the rest of television tiptoed around it

From Top Gear he built something that should not have worked
Three middle aged men, The Stig, a track and a chemistry you cannot manufacture
James May the patient one
Richard Hammond the brave one
And Clarkson the force of nature dragging both of them into chaos and somehow back out again

When it all fell apart at the BBC he could have disappeared
The fracas was not his finest hour and he never pretended it was
He owned it, apologized and carried on
No reinvention, no groveling tour, no carefully managed comeback
He just kept being himself and let the work speak

The move to Amazon and The Grand Tour proved something I think a lot of people missed
The format was never the magic
The men were
You can take three friends out of a studio and drop them anywhere on earth and the loyalty between them travels with them

But it is Clarkson’s Farm where the whole picture finally comes into focus

Here is a man with nothing left to prove walking into a field he barely understands and refusing to fake competence he does not have
He has run that farm at break even and then at an outright loss in full public view
No editing it into a success story
No pretending the numbers work when they do not
His farm manager hands him one brutal truth after another and he sits there and takes it

A whole season swallowed by drought even after he leaned into robotics and the most advanced farming money could buy
Technology was supposed to be the answer and the weather did not care
He showed that too
Most people would have cut it

And through all of it he has done something quietly remarkable
He has dragged the plight of the British farmer into the light
The paperwork, the council, the margins that vanish, the weather that ruins a year of work in a week
People who had never thought about where their food comes from suddenly cared because he made them care

And then there is the part nobody warned me about
Men who raise animals for meat and still love them
Who name them, worry about them, sit with them
Who treat them with respect and dignity right up to the moment they cannot keep them
And feel the full weight of sending them off

He does not hide that
He lets the camera sit in the discomfort of it
The grief of a man who knows the deal he made and still finds it hard

That is not weakness
That is honesty most people are far too afraid to show

We live in an age that rewards the polished, the curated, the carefully built personal brand
And here is a scruffy, swearing, chain smoking farmer who has done the opposite of all of it and won
He stayed exactly who he was while the world begged him to become a product

That is the whole secret
There is no act
There never was

And that is exactly why we keep watching

Praying for a full recovery mate, looking forward to another season of Clarkson’s Farms!

Mrs Holy and I watched another episode of Clarkson’s farm last night, a robotic tractor that works 24 hours a day. Cultivates, fertilises, plants the seed and is accurate to 20 cm in its row spaces. Then there was the solar powered onion seed planter. Travels at 1 km per hour, burys the seed at exactly 15 cm.
This is the way of future farming.

Old habits die hard?

https://x.com/its_the_dr/status/2067432505301492195?s=46

Good policy from ACT

A real estate agent with a spotless 30-year record banned for five years for refusing ideological training.
Nurses dragged through disciplinary hearings over personal social media posts.
The Teaching Council using teachers’ own fees to make political submissions, then pursuing a teacher who disagreed.

As ACT’s Public Service spokesperson, I’ve had enough. Freedom of expression in New Zealand is under threat from professional regulators who have decided their job is to police your thoughts.

Today, I am announcing a new ACT policy to strip regulators of the power to punish professionals for lawful, private beliefs.

Under our proposed legislation, we will restrict mandatory training to actual professional competence and safety, and we will require regulators to stay politically neutral.

Your career shouldn’t depend on bowing to the latest ideological fad. It’s time to put regulators back in their lane.

Little Johnny was doing his math homework. He said to himself, “Two plus five, that son of a bitch is seven. Three plus six, that son of a bitch is nine.”
His mother heard what he was saying and gasped, “What are you doing?”
The little boy answered, “I’m doing my math homework.”
” And this is how your teacher taught you to do it?” the mother asked. “Yes,” he answered.
Infuriated, the mother goes to Little Johnny’s school the next day and confronted the teacher, “What are you teaching my son?”
The teacher replied, “Right now, we are learning addition.” The mother asked, “And are you teaching them to say two plus two, that son of a bitch is four? Because that’s what little Johnny keeps saying. He must have learnt it at school, since I don’t teach addition at home!”
After the teacher stopped laughing, she replied, “Let me show you what we are teaching at our school. Then you can decide where he is learning the phrase from.”
The teacher takes Johnny’s mother into the classroom, where the kids are clearly saying,”two plus two, the sum of which is four.”

Something anyone done?

A cop waited outside a popular pub hoping to nab a drunk driver.
At closing time, as everyone came out, he spotted his potential quarry. The man was so obviously inebriated he could barely walk. He stumbled around the parking lot for a few minutes looking for his car. After trying his keys on one, two, three, four, five other vehicles, he finally found his own car.
He sat in the car for a good ten minutes as other pub patrons left. He turned his lights on, then off, then on again. Then off. Then he started to pull forward into the grass, then stopped. Finally, when his was the last car, he pulled out onto the road and started to drive away.
The cop waiting for this turned on the blues and twos and pulled the man over. He administrated a breathalyzer test, and to his great surprise, the man easily passed. Zero alcohol in his system.
The cop was dumbfounded. “This equipment must be broke,” said the policeman. “I doubt it,” smirked the man. “Tonight, I’m the DD.” The policeman said, “what’s that?”
“Designated decoy,” was the answer.