Author of “Scrumnastics,” and “Going Agile.” Boss of Scrumnastics Ltd. We Create and Coach Guerrilla Managers, Not Gorilla Managers. MD for 30+ years

Manchester, England
NickHewynHolmes retweeted
80,000 Chance of success now up to 70% from 50/50. Keep going.
2
44
210
6,806
NickHewynHolmes retweeted
Red meat has been clogging human arteries for 2.6 million years, and you have to admire how long it waited to start. 2.6 million years ago: gets our ancestors to pick up a stone and cut it off a bone. A long con begins. 2 million years ago: triples the human brain. Lulling us into a false sense of security. 500,000 years ago: has us hunting horses with spears. Still no clogging. Biding its time. 40,000 years ago: gets us through the Ice Age on mammoth. Painted on cave walls by its grateful victims. 10,000 years ago: persuades us to keep cattle and sheep, so it is always nearby. Diabolical. 3000 BC: builds Stonehenge on beef and pork. Nobody drops dead on the scaffolding. 1066: the Normans arrive and take all the best cuts for themselves. Suspiciously, they also take the country. 1700s: becomes the roast beef of old England. The French start calling us after it. An empire follows. Arteries still open. 1850: Victorians eat more of it than ever, in dripping. It holds its nerve. 1911: Crisco goes on sale. Red meat sees its chance. 1920s: cigarettes, sugar and margarine go mainstream, heart attacks take off, and red meat, after 2.6 million years of flawless service, finally makes its move. 1961: the experts catch it red-handed, standing next to the seed oil, the sugar bowl and the ashtray, and arrest the one that had been there since the Stone Age. The most patient murderer in history fed its victims for 100,000 generations first, and only struck once there were three other suspects in the room.
16
140
525
6,531
NickHewynHolmes retweeted
>be egg >feeding humans since before farming >1968 >heart association says three a week, tops >yolks binned from Maine to California >egg farmers buy adverts saying there's no evidence eggs cause heart attacks >government takes them to court >1976, court sides with the government >illegal to advertise the egg as harmless >Supreme Court declines to hear the appeal >America switches to cereal and egg-white omelettes for forty years >2015 >guidelines committee finally reads the evidence >cholesterol "not a nutrient of concern for overconsumption" >limit quietly deleted >no court case >no adverts >no apology >mfw I did forty years for something that was later removed from the guidelines
20
197
730
9,162
NickHewynHolmes retweeted
Tu ne t'es jamais demandé pourquoi tous les artistes sont de gauche ? Pourquoi tous les acteurs sont de gauche ? Pourquoi tous les sportifs qui prennent la parole sont de gauche ? Ce n'est pas un hasard. Ce n'est pas parce qu'ils sont plus intelligents ou plus « éclairés » que toi. Ça fait des décennies que tu te fais arnaquer. Et ça a un nom, une théorie et un auteur. Dans ce post, je t'explique tout 👇
Dans 50 ans, les livres d'histoire diront qu'Elon Musk a gagné une guerre que personne ne savait qu'on était en train de perdre. Une guerre commencée il y a 100 ans, dans une cellule de prison italienne. En 1926, Mussolini fait arrêter un intellectuel sarde de 35 ans. Au procès, le procureur aurait dit : « Nous devons empêcher ce cerveau de fonctionner pendant vingt ans. » Il s'appelait Antonio Gramsci. Son cerveau n'a jamais cessé de fonctionner. En prison, il a rempli des milliers de pages qui sont devenues l'un des textes politiques les plus influents du XXe siècle. Je pense qu'on est en train de vivre le moment où sa théorie s'effondre. Laissez-moi vous expliquer. Gramsci se posait une question simple. Pourquoi la révolution communiste a-t-elle réussi en Russie mais échoué partout en Occident ? Sa réponse : en Occident, le pouvoir ne tient pas seulement par l'État, la police et l'armée. Il tient par la culture. Par ce que les gens trouvent normal, évident, « de bon sens ». Il appelle ça l'hégémonie culturelle. Donc, pour prendre le pouvoir, il ne faut pas d'abord prendre le palais. Il faut d'abord prendre les esprits. Les écoles. Les universités. Les journaux. Le théâtre. L'édition. Les tribunaux. C'est la « guerre de position » : une conquête lente, institution par institution. Quand la culture a basculé, la politique suit toute seule. Quarante ans plus tard, l'activiste allemand Rudi Dutschke en fera un slogan : la longue marche à travers les institutions. Pendant des décennies, on a vécu avec une énigme que personne n'arrivait vraiment à expliquer. Pourquoi presque tous les artistes sont-ils de gauche ? Les acteurs, les chanteurs, les profs, les journalistes, une bonne partie de la magistrature. Pourquoi un pays pouvait voter à droite élection après élection et voir quand même sa culture parler d'une seule voix ? On nous répondait : « c'est parce que les gens éduqués sont de gauche. » Je crois que la réponse est plus simple. Gramsci avait écrit la recette, et elle a été appliquée. Quand tu contrôles qui obtient la subvention, le poste, la bonne critique, le prix, l'invitation sur le plateau, tu contrôles ce qui devient « la culture ». La même énigme existait à l'échelle du monde. Pourquoi tant de pays en développement, notamment en Amérique latine, revotaient-ils encore et encore pour des gouvernements socialistes ou de gauche radicale ? Venezuela, Bolivie, Nicaragua, l'Argentine des Kirchner, la Colombie de Petro. L'économie s'effondrait, les cartels prospéraient, le chaos s'installait. Et pourtant le même vote revenait. Ma conviction : la pauvreté n'était pas un accident du système. C'était un électorat. Et autour, il y avait tout un écosystème d'ONG, de médias « indépendants » et de programmes de « société civile », financé en grande partie par l'argent occidental. Puis, début 2025, il s'est passé quelque chose que personne n'avait jamais osé faire. Elon et DOGE ont ouvert les livres de USAID. Une agence quasi intouchable depuis 1961, des dizaines de milliards de dollars par an. La grande majorité des programmes ont été coupés, et l'agence a été absorbée par le Département d'État. Le robinet a été fermé. Et regardez ce qui s'est passé depuis. Bolivie : le MAS perd le pouvoir après presque vingt ans. Équateur : Noboa réélu. Honduras : la droite reprend le pays. Chili : Kast élu. Argentine : Milei remporte largement les élections de mi-mandat. Et il y a deux jours, le Brésil. Jair Bolsonaro est inéligible, condamné à 27 ans de prison. La gauche pensait avoir refermé le chapitre. Lula, 80 ans, briguait un quatrième mandat face à un pays qu'on disait acquis. Dimanche, son fils Flávio est arrivé en tête du premier tour. Plus de 47 % contre près de 45 % pour Lula. Lula lui-même a reconnu un résultat « inattendu ». Le plus grand pays d'Amérique latine est à un second tour de basculer. Le plus grand virage à droite du continent depuis des décennies. Coïncidence ? Je ne crois pas. Quand le financement disparaît, le récit perd ses haut-parleurs. Il reste un dernier vrai bastion. L'Europe. Bruxelles finance ses propres réseaux d'ONG, avec une opacité que même la Cour des comptes européenne a pointée. Les grandes fondations comme l'Open Society de Soros. Les entités supranationales qui produisent de la norme sans jamais passer devant un électeur. C'est la dernière forteresse de l'hégémonie culturelle. Et elle commence à se fissurer. Je suis convaincu que tout ça va s'effondrer, et plus vite qu'on ne le pense. Gramsci avait raison sur un point essentiel : la culture précède la politique. Mais il avait oublié que ça marche dans les deux sens. Quand une culture artificielle perd ses perfusions, ce qu'il y a de vrai en dessous remonte à la surface. Ce qui vient après, je crois que c'est une renaissance. Une culture qui recommence à aimer la beauté, l'ambition, la science, la civilisation qui l'a fait naître. Et dans les livres d'histoire, on se souviendra que tout a commencé quand un homme a décidé de regarder les comptes. Il fallait quelqu'un d'assez riche pour ne dépendre de personne, d'assez fou pour s'y attaquer et d'assez libre pour encaisser la haine qui allait suivre. Merci Elon.
58
394
2,399
100,193
Here’s hoping…
Je pense que le XXIe siècle sera celui de la fin des idéologies collectivistes en Occident. Je vais vous expliquer pourquoi. La chute du nazisme est l'un des événements les plus heureux du XXe siècle. Une idéologie meurtrière a été vaincue militairement, puis jugée moralement. Nuremberg n'a pas seulement condamné des hommes. Nuremberg a condamné une idée. Depuis 1946, plus personne de sérieux ne peut se dire nazi sans être exclu du débat public. Mais regardez qui siégeait parmi les juges à Nuremberg. L'Union soviétique. Le régime du Goulag, de l'Holodomor et des purges de 1937. Le régime qui a tenté de faire porter aux Allemands le massacre de Katyn, qu'il avait lui-même commis. Le communisme n'a pas été jugé. Il a été invité à juger. Et parce qu'il n'est pas mort en 1945, il a pu s'exporter. L'Europe de l'Est, la Chine, la Corée, le Vietnam, Cuba, le Cambodge, l'Éthiopie. Le Grand Bond en avant et ses dizaines de millions de morts de faim. Les Khmers rouges qui ont tué près d'un quart de la population cambodgienne en moins de quatre ans. Partout le même scénario : une promesse d'égalité, un parti unique, une police politique, des famines, des camps. 1989 aurait dû être son Nuremberg. Ça ne l'a pas été. Le mur est tombé, mais l'idée est restée debout. Aujourd'hui encore, on peut porter un t-shirt du Che dans une université occidentale, citer Lénine sur un plateau télé, se dire communiste dans un parlement. Essayez la même chose avec l'autre totalitarisme du siècle. Ce deux poids deux mesures, on a pu se le permettre au XXe siècle. Au XXIe, on ne pourra plus. Voici pourquoi. Tous les régimes totalitaires de l'histoire ont buté sur deux limites. La première : ils avaient besoin d'humains pour fonctionner. La Stasi, c'était environ 90 000 agents et près de 190 000 informateurs pour surveiller 16 millions d'Allemands de l'Est. Et des humains, ça doute, ça se fatigue, ça se corrompt, ça finit par désobéir. À Leipzig en 1989, les soldats ne tirent pas. Le régime tombe. La deuxième : le problème du calcul. Mises et Hayek l'avaient démontré, aucun planificateur central ne peut rassembler l'information dispersée dans des millions de cerveaux. Le plan échoue, l'économie s'effondre, le système meurt de sa propre incompétence. Ces deux limites étaient les garde-fous de l'humanité. Elles n'ont pas empêché les régimes communistes de tuer des millions de gens, mais elles les ont empêchés de durer éternellement. L'IA supprime les deux. Plus besoin d'informateurs : chaque caméra, chaque transaction, chaque message peut être analysé en temps réel. Plus besoin de soldats qui pourraient refuser de tirer : les systèmes autonomes ne désobéissent pas. Et les planificateurs auront enfin l'illusion d'avoir résolu le problème du calcul, avec des modèles capables d'optimiser chaque prix, chaque allocation, chaque vie. Une idéologie qui pense que l'individu doit être subordonné au plan, combinée à une technologie qui rend le contrôle total techniquement possible, ça n'a qu'une issue : 1984. Mais un 1984 sans faille, sans résistance possible, sans mur qui tombe. Une hyper-élite de planificateurs convaincus de faire le bien, régnant sur le reste de l'humanité au nom de l'égalité. Pas par cruauté. Par certitude morale. C'est toujours comme ça que ça commence. C'est pour ça que je pense que le XXIe siècle sera celui d'un Nuremberg 2.0. Pas un procès des personnes. Un procès des idées. Le moment où l'Occident regardera enfin le collectivisme en face et dira ce qu'il a dit du nazisme : plus jamais. Et soyons précis. Je ne parle pas de la sécurité sociale ou d'un impôt progressif. Je parle de l'idée selon laquelle un État, un parti ou une élite peut légitimement posséder les moyens de production, la vérité et la vie des individus au nom du collectif. Cette idée a eu son siècle. Elle a eu ses dizaines de millions de morts. Elle ne peut pas avoir l'IA. Le XXe siècle a enterré le nazisme. Le XXIe doit enterrer son jumeau.
1
2
50
My dad used to compete against him in bodybuilding competitions.
The most famous British film star of the twentieth century spent his childhood delivering milk from a horse and cart, and by eighteen he was six foot two. He was born in 1930 in Fountainbridge, a slum district of Edinburgh that smelled of the brewery and the rubber works. The family had two rooms and shared a lavatory on the stair. As a baby he slept in the bottom drawer of a wardrobe. At nine he got a job before school on a milk round for the St Cuthbert's Co-operative dairy. Up at five, out with the horse, bottles up four flights of tenement stairs and the empties back down. At thirteen he left school and did it full time. A milk boy drank what he carried. It was one of the few perks. A pint on the cart in the dark, cream and all, every morning for nine years. His father was a lorry driver of ordinary height. The boys he had grown up with were small, as slum children were. He was a head taller than all of them. They called him Big Tam. He joined the Navy, took up weights, placed in the Mr Universe contest, drifted into acting, and in 1962 walked onto a screen as James Bond. His name was Sean Connery. Nobody can prove what did it. But a child from two rooms in Fountainbridge had no business being built like that, and the one thing he had that the others did not was a milk cart.
1
4
125
NickHewynHolmes retweeted
We are on 🔥 this morning. Second most popular petition.
35
607
1,429
19,759
NickHewynHolmes retweeted
Watch when your body raises its own cholesterol, and you will see what it is for. It goes up in pregnancy. By the third trimester a woman's cholesterol has risen 30 to 50%, because she is building a brain, a liver and a set of glands out of it, and the body does not wait for permission. It goes up in a breastfed baby. Higher than in a formula-fed one, on purpose, because the milk is loaded with it and the brain is doubling in a year. It goes up at puberty, when the testes and ovaries open for business and need the raw material for everything they make. It goes up in winter, every year, in every population measured, because the sun is gone and the skin needs more of it on hand to make what vitamin D it can. It goes up after the menopause, when the ovaries stop using it, and the body keeps the shelf stocked. It goes up when you are injured, at the wound, to close it. And it goes down when you are dying. In sepsis, in cancer, in the starving and the frail, cholesterol falls, and the lower it falls the sooner the end. Up when building. Up when defending. Up when the light goes. Down when the body has given up. The guideline reads the number and calls up a disease and down a success. Your body has been raising it, on purpose, at every important moment of your life, and the tablet is a vote against all of them.
50
782
3,088
50,438
NickHewynHolmes retweeted
Egyptian farmers worked the Nile under a sun that cooks eggs on stone, for 3,000 years, and nobody built a melanoma ward. The sun did it, though. Roman legions marched 20 miles a day in a tunic across Spain and Syria. Sailors spent whole careers on a bare deck in the tropics. No epidemic. The sun did it, though. Every civilisation on earth raised a temple to it. Rome made it the empire's god. In 1903 a man took the Nobel Prize for curing disease with it. Carcinogen, obviously. In the 1920s children were wheeled onto hospital roofs to cure rickets with daylight. Now 1 in 5 adults is short of vitamin D and the advice is a hat and a capsule. Science marches on. Melanoma rose sixfold from 1975, in the exact decades the species moved behind glass, into cars, under cream. Less sun than any generation in history, six times the cancer. The sun did it, though. Outdoor workers get less of it than office workers. Measured for 40 years. The sun did it, though. Leave sunflower oil on a windowsill and it goes rancid in a week, because light snaps the double bonds in linoleic acid. Your skin is now a fifth linoleic acid. Put it in the sun and the same reaction runs through your arm. We call it sunburn. The oil is heart healthy, the label says so. Your grandfather roofed all summer with no cream, in a skin made of dripping, and browned. You burn in May in a skin made of sunflower. The sun did it, though. Two million years in the open with no hospital wing. Fifty years on frying oil and there is a queue at dermatology. They prosecuted the one thing that has not changed since the Pharaohs, and sold you a bottle to hide from it, so you could carry on eating the thing that has.
28
317
1,348
36,744
NickHewynHolmes retweeted
“Liberals take positions that make them look good and feel good — and show very little interest in the actual consequences for others, even when liberal policies are leaving havoc in their wake.” — Thomas Sowell
7
190
855
37,813
NickHewynHolmes retweeted
Between the wars Britain ran more than a hundred schools with no walls, because the government's doctors had concluded that what a sickly child needed was sunlight. They were called open-air schools. The first opened in a wood in south London in 1907. By the 1930s there were about 150 of them, with places for 20,000 children. The classrooms had a roof and a back, and nothing else. Lessons were taken in coats when it rained. After dinner every child lay down on a canvas bed in the garden and slept for an hour under a blanket, winter included. In summer they did arithmetic in their vests on the grass. They were fed three times a day. Milk on arrival, a cooked dinner with meat, and bread and dripping before they went home. Each child was weighed every month and the weights were sent to the council. In the towns there were sunlight clinics. A dozen small children in goggles and knickers stood in a ring round a great hissing lamp for a few minutes, twice a week, on prescription. It worked. Doctors had shown in 1919 that light on the skin cured rickets, and these were the children with bent legs and bad chests. The schools closed in the 1950s and 60s. A child today is kept in at dinner time if he has forgotten his hat, and is covered in factor 50 before he is allowed on the field. Rickets is back in the wards. Their great-grandparents were put out in the sun by order of the school doctor.
22
232
963
13,862
Astonishing
At the current pace, it will not be long before we have more Scottish members than both the Tories and Reform put together.
3
38
NickHewynHolmes retweeted
The chips you had on Saturday night were fried in oil that went into the fryer on Tuesday morning. Chip shops change their oil roughly once a week. It is filtered, topped up and kept hot, because 20 litres of oil costs money and a fryer never sleeps. That fryer runs at 180 degrees for 12 hours a day. Tuesday to Saturday is 60 hours. Every one of those hours, the linoleic acid in the oil is breaking down into aldehydes, the family that includes formaldehyde, and the longer it runs the faster it makes them. A British chemist heated the common cooking fats to frying temperature and measured what came off. Sunflower and corn oil threw out aldehydes at up to 200 times the daily safety limit. Lard, butter and coconut oil barely registered, because a saturated fat has nothing in it to break. By Saturday, the oil in that fryer is not the oil that went in on Tuesday. It is a different chemical, sixty hours into a reaction, and your fish was dropped into it. For 100 years every chip shop in Britain fried in beef dripping, which is half saturated and sits in a fryer for a week without turning into anything. In the 1990s they switched to vegetable oil. On health grounds. Because the dripping was bad for your heart. So the one pan in the country that runs hottest and longest was moved from the fat that cannot oxidise to the fat that does nothing else, and the leaflet called it an improvement. Tonight is Monday. The oil you ate on Saturday is still in there, hotter than ever, waiting for the Monday rush, and it will be changed tomorrow. The chip shop that still fries in dripping has a queue down the street, and nobody in it has read a word about aldehydes. They can taste it. Their bodies know.
65
389
1,484
90,261
NickHewynHolmes retweeted
Here is what the animals in the meat aisle actually ate. The chicken: soy, corn, wheat and a vegetable oil pellet, every day of its 42 days, in a shed. Its fat is over 20% seed oil. It is sold with the word healthy. The pig: soy, barley and wheat, from weaning, in a shed. Its fat is 15 to 20% seed oil. Sold as the other white meat. The salmon: a pellet of wheat, soy and rapeseed oil, in a cage. Its omega-3 is half what it was in 1990. The British cow: grass, from birth, outdoors, for 18 to 20 months. Silage, which is grass, for the winter. Barley for the last 90 days to finish. Her fat is 3 to 4% seed oil, because the rumen refuses the rest. The sheep: grass, heather and whatever the hill gives, from birth to the lorry, and often not a grain in its life. Only two animals on that list spent their lives eating what their bodies were built for, and only two have a stomach that turns whatever they ate into clean fat. They are the two with the warning. Red meat. Limit to 70 grams. For your heart. The three that ate the seed oil, in a shed, are the three with the heart logo. Every farmer in Britain could have told the committee that. The committee has never met one.
23
308
1,348
23,046
NickHewynHolmes retweeted
Your evening meme.
11
409
3,020
30,048
NickHewynHolmes retweeted
An Afghan illegal who murdered Wayne Broadhurst has been sentenced to an indefinite hospital order. 'held indefinitely in a secure hospital to receive mental health treatment' The BBC even reports they are discussing releasing him back into the community at some stage. We are so far past the time for half-measures now. So far past. A Restore Britain Government will deport millions, end immigration into our country from Afghanistan entirely and put the very worst of these Afghan criminals to death with the British people's approval. Enough is enough.
442
3,174
22,138
349,451
NickHewynHolmes retweeted
Margaret Thatcher pulled Friedrich Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty from her bag and slammed it on a table during a 1975 Conservative Party meeting, said "This is what we believe," and left the book open. Ideas govern policy, and bad ideas govern badly. Thatcher read Hayek seriously. The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944, traced the mechanism by which central planning concentrates power until individual liberty becomes administratively inconvenient. She absorbed his core argument: that no central authority possesses sufficient information to allocate resources across millions of actors, each holding local knowledge no planner ever sees. Prices do that work. Prices encode what planners cannot know. Britain in the 1970s gave her a living case study. Inflation reached 24% in 1975. Unions held effective veto power over production decisions. The state owned steel, coal, telecoms, and airlines, running most of them at chronic losses. Hayek had explained the mechanism: remove the profit-and-loss signal and you remove the only mechanism that tells producers whether they are creating or destroying value. Her reforms privatized over 30 state enterprises between 1979 and 1990. She broke union monopoly power via the Employment Acts of 1980 and 1982. Top income tax rates fell from 83% to 40%. The British economy was saved. These results weren't magic, and Thatcher herself never fully embraced sound money discipline (the money supply expanded sharply in the late 1980s, producing exactly the boom-bust Hayek warned about). Reading Hayek matters little if you selectively apply him.
39
230
876
13,042
Oooh… covet.
#Lancia 🇮🇹 Aurelia B20 GT Outlaw
2
70
NickHewynHolmes retweeted
A wonderful wartime memory from Harry Secombe: Face to Face with Field Marshall Montgomery.
29
189
1,403
102,088
NickHewynHolmes retweeted
Charging you interest for the privilege of holding your own savings is a confession that the entire monetary system had broken its own internal logic. Between 2014 and 2022, the European Central Bank held its deposit rate below zero. The Bank of Japan pushed rates negative in January 2016. At the peak, roughly $18 trillion in global debt carried negative nominal yields. Pension funds in Denmark and Switzerland watched the return on safe assets go below zero and had to explain this to retirees. Banks in Sweden passed the cost directly to depositors. You earned less money for having money. The theoretical justification was that cheap enough credit would prod banks into lending and businesses into investing. This inverts every principle of capital formation. Interest rates coordinate time preferences across millions of people. When rates rise, savers are rewarded and borrowers slow down. When rates fall, the reverse occurs. When rates go negative, the signal says: consuming today is better than saving for tomorrow, always, unconditionally, forever. Ludwig von Mises identified artificial credit expansion as a means of transferring wealth from savers to debtors. Negative rates drop the pretense and do it explicitly. The practical results confirmed the theory. Corporate zombies that should have liquidated in 2010 borrowed at zero percent and stayed alive, absorbing labor and capital that productive firms needed. Housing prices in Frankfurt, Stockholm, and Auckland inflated grotesquely because yield-starved investors pushed money into any asset generating a positive return. Central banks then pointed at asset price inflation as evidence their policy was working. The real economy produces goods and services. Finance intermediates between savers and producers. Negative rates punished the first group to subsidize the second group's debt loads, resulting in asset bubbles. The inevitable correction arrived starting in 2022, when the Fed raised rates from 0.25% to over 5% inside eighteen months, and the bond market suffered its worst annual losses since 1788(not a typo).
11
36
145
5,949