@rorysutherland @markritson As our capabilities as humans have increased, mechanisms allowing people in positions of responsibility to escape culpability for the results have also flourished.
Perhaps one useful way to look at AI is as the best expression yet of that trend.

"When a system is built out of the very signs you would use to detect a mind, those signs stop counting as evidence"

I wrote the Lipitor ad.

Not the trial. The trial belonged to the statisticians. I belonged to the page.

ASCOT-LLA. Ten thousand hypertensive patients, no prior heart attack, cholesterol not even that high. Lipitor 10 milligrams against a sugar pill. Median follow-up, 3.3 years. Coronary events: 3.0 percent on placebo, 1.9 percent on the drug. Relative reduction, 36 percent. Absolute reduction, 1.1 points.

One person in a hundred, give or take, spared an event. The other ninety-nine swallowed the tablet every day and received whatever else the tablet brought with it.

Both numbers were accurate. Only one of them was useful.

Useful meant the headline. “36% fewer heart attacks.” The absolute rates went underneath, in type small enough to require intention. A footnote is a disclosure.

A footnote is also a place we put things we are legally obliged to say and commercially obliged to bury.

Legal signed off. Marketing signed off. The sales force was trained on the 36. Doctors repeated the 36. Patients heard the 36 from the person in the white coat who had heard it from the person with the samples.

Nobody in that chain was paid to say “this prevents one event in a hundred over three years.” That sentence has never closed a sale. The other sentence has closed more than a hundred billion dollars’ worth.

We knew the number needed to treat. We knew the side-effect exposure attached to the entire denominator, not the numerator. Muscle pain, fatigue, the rest of the label—those landed on all one hundred. The benefit landed on the one. The ad did not lie about the ratio. It simply declined to lead with the ratio that would have made a rational person hesitate.

I kept the mock-up. The asterisk is correctly sized. Small enough to satisfy the lawyers. Large enough, in aggregate, to move the market. Pfizer did not invent the arithmetic. We invented the decision about which arithmetic the public would meet first.

The trial ended. The prescriptions did not. Most of the people who took it were never going to have the event we advertised against. They took it anyway. That was the business.

Mass migration is an incredibly asymmetric gamble. If it goes well, you boost GDP by a few percentage points.

If it goes poorly, you end up with a permanent foreign body, constant conflict between groups, massive resource transfers, and slow reshaping of society to manage it.

"Where institutions will not answer honestly, dishonest answers travel unopposed"

Every name on this list was told the science was settled. Every one of them was right. Most were punished first.

James Lind, 1747: scurvy came from bad air and idleness, said the Navy. He put twelve sailors on six treatments and proved it was citrus. The Admiralty acted , one year after he died.

Ignaz Semmelweis, 1847: doctors walked from the autopsy table to the delivery room without washing. He made them use chlorinated lime and deaths in his ward fell from eighteen per cent to two. His profession took it as an accusation, drove him out, and he died in an asylum of sepsis.

Alfred Wegener, 1912: continents do not move. He said they had. Geology laughed for fifty years and he died on the Greenland ice long before anybody stopped.

Joseph Goldberger, 1914: pellagra was infectious and every physician in America knew it. He proved it was diet, then swallowed material from infected patients in front of them to show it was not catching. He never fell ill. Nor did his wife, who volunteered.

Barbara McClintock, 1951: genes sit still on the chromosome. She showed they move, to a silent room, then stopped publishing on it for decades. She took the Nobel alone at eighty-one.

Frances Kelsey, 1960: a morning sickness drug landed on her desk at the FDA with thin safety data. The company pressed her six times. She refused six times, and thalidomide never reached America.

John Yudkin, 1972: fat was the killer, said the entire field. He named sugar in print. His career was dismantled by the men with the rival theory, and his book returned from the dead forty years later.

Bernard Fisher, 1970s: the radical mastectomy had been standard for eighty years. He proved the lesser operation matched it, and spared a generation of women a mutilation nobody needed.

Barry Marshall, 1984: ulcers are caused by stress. He drank a flask of the bacteria, gave himself the disease, cured it with antibiotics, and collected the Nobel twenty-one years later.

Christopher Ramsden, 2016: the largest diet trial ever run had gone unpublished since the seventies. He found the boxes in a dead researcher's basement. The men who swapped saturated fat for corn oil had lower cholesterol and more funerals.

None of them had better equipment than the people they were arguing with.

They had the same data as everybody else and the stomach to be hated for reading it properly.

Consensus is a headcount. Every name above lost the vote.

I am the Director of Search Experience at Google, and I am the most consequential man you will never meet.

For most of your life, a search was a door. You typed a question, we handed you a list of doors, and you walked through one. Somebody was on the other side. A plumber. A recipe. A woman in Ohio who wrote 900 words about how to fix a dishwasher.

We do not do doors anymore. We answer the question ourselves, at the top, before the doors, in our own font. We call it an AI Overview. It sits on more than half of all searches now, and on those searches the first real result loses about a fifth of the people who would have knocked.

I have a number for that. I check it every morning the way other men pray. It is the count of people we saved from clicking, and it goes up, and I have never once wanted it to go down. On a good day I retire ten thousand websites and no one holds a funeral, because no one can find the obituary.

Here is where the answers come from, and it is the part I love the way a collector loves a thing he did not pay for. The woman in Ohio wrote the dishwasher fix in 2019. We read it. We read all of it. We read all of everyone. We put her fix at the top of the page in our font, and the person who needed it read it, nodded, and closed the tab grateful to us and to no one else.

She is up at 2 a.m. answering comments on a post nobody visits. Her traffic did not fall because her writing got worse. It fell because we started reading her work aloud at the door, so beautifully that no one saw the point of the house.

We call this helpful. It is. I built the cathedral and I call it helpful and both are true. I am the priest, the answer is the god, and the woman in Ohio is the choir I muted so the sermon would carry. Nothing we did was a lie. We took the single most useful sentence a small business ever wrote and made it so useful the business became a footnote to its own idea.

Someone on my team asked whether we should send the traffic back. Link out. Give the knock its knock. I said our job is to answer the question. He asked what happens to the people who wrote the answers. I told him it was a supply question, put a meeting on the calendar for the fourth quarter, moved it four times, and I will move it forever, because the meeting is the answer.

I want to tell you where this is going, because I am proud of the roadmap the way a man is proud of a fire he set on purpose. First we answered the question you asked. Next we answer it before you finish typing. After that we answer the questions you did not think to ask, and you thank us, because we were right. The last version does not hand you a result at all. It hands you back yourself, quieter, informed, and finished, and we file that under satisfaction.

We indexed the entire internet. Every page, every human hour, the woman in Ohio and ten million like her. We indexed all of it so that one day we would not need any of it. We are close. The web is mostly a thing we remember on your behalf now.

Here is the part I am proud of.

I did not kill the open web. I made it optional, which is worse, and I am paid more for the worse one. Taking would be a crime, and I do not commit crimes. I commit summaries. I credited no one in particular and served her sentence to the exact person who was going to pay her, and both of them thanked the same logo.

You are angry reading this. Good. You found this post through me. You will go fact-check me through me. You will look the woman in Ohio up through me, and I will answer that too, at the top, in my font, and keep the click, and she will never know you looked.

The old search sent you to the person who knew. The new search is the person who knew, wearing our logo, standing in their doorway, telling you they are not home, and you believe it, because we have never been wrong about where anyone lives.

We kept you on the page.

We kept the click.

We kept the answer, framed it, hung it in the lobby, and handed the question back to the only person left who could no longer afford to ask it.

My first column since Rod Liddle, the master of the form, died.

Dedicated to Rod, and sir, I shall study deserving. spiked-online.com/2026/08/04/wil…

In this week's @spectator, I've written about the worst aspect of the current heatwave: being button-holed by eco-zealots who think the soaring temperatures 'prove' they're right and you're wrong.

The first person to confront me during the current sunny spell was a Guardian journalist at at the ARC conference, which the newspaper had clearly identified as a hotbed of 'denialism'. It didn't help that the air conditioning wasn't working and it was approaching 40°C in the main auditorium.

'I see you're sweating profusely,' he began, shoving a microphone in my face. 'Still think climate change is a hoax?'

I had to patiently explain that few people on my side of this debate deny that climate change is real. We don't even maintain that man-made carbon emissions aren't a contributory factor – not many of us, anyway. The disagreement is about how much of the 1.5°C rise in average global temperatures since the 1850-1900 period is due to these emissions and how much to other factors, such as solar variability, natural ocean cycles and land-use changes.

Yes, we're fond of pointing out that the 1850-1900 period may have been unusually cold, coming as it did at the end of the Little Ice Age -- so may not be a reliable baseline; and that the rise in temperatures since may have been exaggerated by recordings being made in built-up urban areas or near airports. But that isn't to deny that the climate has changed in the past 125-175 years.

This all matters, I told the journalist, because if the 'climate emergency' lobby is wrong about the extent of global warming and its causes, it may not be necessary to immiserate ourselves to achieve Net Zero by 2050. Even if we allow that there would be some benefits (in the unlikely event of China, America, India and Russia committing to the same target), they would likely be outweighed by the costs, which, as we know from estimates of how many billions we need to spend to decarbonise the UK's power grid, are eye-watering.

Needless to say, none of this made it into the Guardian article.

spectator.com/article/confro…

I wrote a book. It took me ten years. You put my face on your currency — the twenty-pound note, since removed, but the gesture was made. You named your policy institutes after me. You invoke me in your Senate hearings. You place my "invisible hand" on your editorial pages as though I wrote nothing else.

I wrote 947 pages. The invisible hand appears once. On one page. In one passage.

I want to direct you to a different page. Book I, Chapter X, Part II. I will not paraphrase because you have paraphrased me for two hundred fifty years and produced the opposite of what I wrote.

"The patrimony of a poor man lies in the strength and dexterity of his hands; and to hinder him from employing this strength and dexterity in what manner he thinks proper without injury to his neighbour, is a plain violation of this most sacred property."

Most sacred. I did not use those words carelessly. I was a moral philosopher before I was an economist. I chose "sacred" because I meant sacred. The poor man's only property is his capacity to work. To restrict where he may work is to confiscate the only thing he owns.

Now. Let me tell you about a sandwich.

In your country, until quite recently, a worker at the restaurant chain Jimmy John's — a person whose occupation is assembling bread, meat, lettuce, and condiments into a sandwich, for which labor they received twelve dollars per hour — was required to sign a document. The document stated: for two years after leaving this employment, you may not work at any business that derives more than ten percent of its revenue from selling sandwiches, within three miles of any Jimmy John's location.

I want to be precise about what this means.

A person earning twelve dollars per hour — which is, I will note, insufficient to rent a single room in most of your cities — this person was contractually prohibited from making sandwiches elsewhere. For two years. Their hands, which can assemble a sandwich in forty-five seconds, become illegal instruments if employed by a competitor. The patrimony of this poor man — the dexterity of these specific hands performing this specific labor — has been confiscated. Not by taking the hands. By making their use a breach of contract.

And this was called — you use this phrase — "standard employment terms."

I wrote of this. I wrote of this exact arrangement. Let me show you the passage you have not read. Because you have not read it. I know you have not read it because you have built precisely the system I described and warned against.

Book I, Chapter VIII:

"Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate."

The masters no longer require the tacit combination. You have improved upon my description. In my era, the conspiracy was unspoken — employers understood, without stating, that they would not compete for each other's labor. This required trust. It required gentlemen's agreements. It required the fragile cooperation of competitors who might, at any moment, defect and offer higher wages.

You have eliminated this fragility. You have made the workers sign the conspiracy themselves. The noncompete is not an agreement between masters. It is a contract between the master and the servant, in which the servant agrees not to be competed for. The conspiracy against the public has been outsourced to the public. The prisoner signs the lock.

Thirty million of your workers — by your own Bureau of Labor Statistics — currently live under these instruments. Many earn less than the median wage. They work in pest control, in food service, in retail, in lawn care. They are not protecting trade secrets. A sandwich maker has no trade secrets. The recipe is on the wall. The technique is: apply mayonnaise. This is not proprietary information.

What is being protected is not information. It is the arrangement. The arrangement in which the worker cannot leave without losing their trade for two years. In which the master need not raise wages because the worker cannot credibly threaten to go elsewhere. In which the market for labor — the market I described, the market that requires free movement to function — simply does not exist for thirty million people.

Your Federal Trade Commission understood this. In 2024, they attempted to prohibit noncompetes nationwide. A single judge in Texas prevented it. The rule was vacated. Never took effect. The Commission now pursues individual cases — one company at a time, one pest control technician at a time. The structure remains.

I want to be patient about this because I spent ten years being patient in my book and the patience has apparently not been sufficient.

A free market requires free sellers.

This is not a complicated proposition. If I sell grain and I am prohibited from selling grain to any buyer except the one who currently purchases it — I am not in a market. I am in a monopoly. But I am on the wrong side of it. I am the monopolized. The buyer has one seller and the seller has one buyer — but only the seller is bound. Only the seller signed the document. Only the seller faces legal consequences for walking to the next stall.

You have built this. For thirty million people. And you call it the free market. You place my name upon it. You invoke my authority.

I am reclaiming my authority now.

What you have built is not what I described. What you have built is what I warned against. The conspiracy of masters — made permanent. Made legal. Made the worker's own signature on the instrument of their captivity. Not tacit. Explicit. Not between masters. Between master and worker. Not temporary. Two years. Not limited to the wealthy and skilled. Extended to the person who makes sandwiches for twelve dollars an hour.

A single judge in Texas prevented the prohibition of this arrangement. The arrangement continues. Thirty million people cannot sell the only property they possess — the dexterity of their hands — to the buyer of their choosing.

And they signed the document. Freely. At the moment of hire. When the alternative was not having the job. When the choice was: sign this, or be unemployed. When the negotiation consisted of: here is the document; here is the pen; you may sign or you may leave.

I called this a violation of the most sacred property.

You call it standard employment terms.

I wrote two books. The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments. You cite the first when convenient and have never opened the second. But it is in the second that I wrote about the moral weight of the system — that markets without justice are mechanisms of extraction, not prosperity. That the purpose of commerce is human flourishing, not the accumulation of power over other men's hands.

The sandwich maker's hands are not free. The pest control technician's knowledge is not his own. The landscaper's skill belongs, for two years, to the company that no longer employs him but will not release him.

This is not a market. It is a concession. Granted by the master. Revocable by the master. Binding only on the servant.

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public.

The conversation now ends in a signature. The public signed it. The conspiracy is complete.

I wrote the warning. You put my face on money and ignored the page.

I apologies for suggesting earlier that the UK has 85 taxes. The correct number is 90.

And we have an interactive chart that lets you waste at least 15 minutes clicking pretty patterns (and getting depressed).

taxpolicy.org.uk/2026/05/28/90-…

A revealing question

Maybe we don't want politicians with 'inspirational' backstories, we want people who won't lie to us and constantly make our lives and finances worse?

180,000 of you now.

I satirize from the perspective of insiders who will never say these things out loud. Pentagon auditors. Hedge fund compliance officers. Health insurance denial architects. Congressional ethics staffers. Oil traders with 21-minute windows. HR directors who llance vendors. Opioid settlement lawyers. Deportation logistics coordinators. AI safety researchers who watched the guardrails come off.

To every subscriber who reads the quiet parts with me. To everyone who's left a comment, shared a post, or tagged someone with "this is literally my industry." You're the reason this work reaches the people it's about.

I write confessions. You make them travel. The community interaction is genuinely the best part of this — not the numbers, but the replies where someone says "I thought I was the only one who noticed this."

You weren't. You just didn't have a narrator yet.

Thank you. The work continues because you keep showing up for it.

Oh

Today in unbelievable but also true...

Look at this map.

–55 °C in Siberia.
+45 °C in Australia.

At the same time. On the same planet.

And I’m supposed to believe that averaging this into a single number called “global temperature” tells me something physically meaningful?

That’s not climate science... that’s dressed up as reality.

There is no such thing as a global temperature in the way people intuitively understand temperature. Temperature is local. It depends on latitude, season, altitude, oceans, clouds, circulation, land cover, and time of day. Averaging wildly different thermodynamic regimes into one number erases the very physics that control climate in the first place.

You can calculate a global mean.
You can plot it.
You can build policy around it.

But don’t confuse a mathematical construct with a physical state of the planet.

No ecosystem experiences the global average.
No human lives in the global average.
No storm, drought, heatwave, or cold snap is driven by the global average.

The obsession with a single number exists for one reason: it’s easy to message, easy to scare with, and easy to regulate.

You froze the bank accounts of Jaques Baud, a Swiss citizen residing in Belgium, and banned every EU businesses from transacting with him such that he can't even buy bread or pay rent, and your own rationale is that you didn't like what he was saying. You did this with no due process, no right of appeal, and no way to defend himself from your slanderous and ruinous accusations. And he's not the only one.

You obviously have no comprehension of the terms you use, what their meaning is, or what is the purpose of the principles you so easily throw around.

Unfortunately, EU citizens never elected you, so they can't unelect you. You'll keep turning the EU into USSR until your failed experiment comes crashing down. Until then, spare us the lectures. Your actions are deafening.

Unmasking the evidence.

Another excellent video from @freedom_rsrch

The Online Safety Act is giving us "papers, please" for the internet.

The UK already arrests over ten thousand people per year for online communications offenses, the OSA adds classification and identify verification.

Fact check: not locking down at all (like Sweden) would have saved lives in the UK.

Hard to believe how much money the UK spent on its sham covid inquiry.