gadfly

[gadfly @BrianFennelly]

@Geniustechw I was on a bus next to her last week.

[gadfly @BrianFennelly]

@bozwy Since Spain has always complained about the UK running Gibraltar, what is Spain doing owning a chunk of Morocco? Those invaders may be in Morocco but once they’re through that fence they’re in the EU, with everything that comes with it.

[gadfly @BrianFennelly]

@SpeechUnion @AllisonPearson Did the payout come from his own pocket? Until individuals experience the effects their actions, this lunacy will continue.

[gadfly @BrianFennelly]

@koshercockney Did she dress like that when she took her law degree?

[Peter Clack @PeterDClack]

Earth is still bound to the Late Cenozoic Ice Age, and our planet's average global temperature still hovers around a very livable 15°C.

This is far below the world's long-term planetary average of 18°C to 24°C - seen throughout most of Earth's biological history. It makes the idea of a global warming crisis seem out of sync with reality.

Despite four decades of continuous climate alarmism, roughly 10% of the Earth's total land area remains permanently capped by glacial ice, which covers 15 million square kilometers (5.8 million square miles).

That is nearly a third of its extent during the peak of the Last Glacial Maximum (26,000 to 19,000 years ago), when continental ice sheets reached their historical zenith.

The Antarctic ice sheet remains the largest and thickest body of ice on the planet, extending up to 4.8 kilometers (about 3 miles) deep. It holds roughly 90% of global ice volume and accounts for 85% of total glacial land cover. Spanning 14 million square kilometers (5.4 million square miles), Antarctica alone makes up 8.3% of Earth's total land surface.

A basic geographical reality is often forgotten: land comprises a mere 28% of the planet's surface. All human cities, towns, and infrastructure combined occupy just 1% to 3% of that land (while deserts take up 33% and forests 31%).

We live on an ocean world, and waters cover 72% of the globe to an average depth of 2.3 miles.

Crucially, the oceans hold 86% of the global carbon reservoir and absorb over 90% of retained thermal energy. By contrast, the atmosphere holds a fraction of a percent of each. The oceans—not human industrial activity—serve as the true long-term regulatory engine for atmospheric carbon dioxide and global climate stability.

The current Quaternary Glaciation is part of an ice age cycle that began 34 million years ago with the thermal isolation and glaciation of Antarctica, later intensified by the closure of the Isthmus of Panama and orbital variations (Milankovitch cycles).

Carbon dioxide was not the driver of these immense shifts.

All of human civilisation, agriculture and technological progress has unfolded within a brief, warm respite: the Holocene interglacial period, which began just 11,700 years ago.

Yet for 40 years, the narrative has been dominated by a campaign driven by an unaccountable bureaucratic authority—the United Nations—pushing an agenda of global control.

The promised catastrophe of runaway, unprecedented warming never arrived.

[gadfly @BrianFennelly]

@Gosleepriya 78.

[gadfly @BrianFennelly]

@CinemaTweets1 Somehow I can’t imagine Elliot Paige playing Maximus.

[Herod Priovolos @herodpriovolos]

Dear Christopher Nolan,
My name is Herod Priovolos and I want to tell you what #TheOdyssey truly means to me and to generations of Greeks who grew up with Homer’s story.
Homer did not sing of Odysseus simply to entertain us with ships, storms, gods and monsters. He told the story because he understood what war, time, distance and loss can do to the human soul.
Odysseus leaves Ithaca as a king, a husband and a father. He returns twenty years later alone, exhausted and disguised as a beggar, carrying the memory of every companion who never made it home.
The monsters are not merely creatures created for spectacle.
The Cyclops is power without justice. The Sirens are the beautiful voices that tempt a person to abandon their purpose. Circe represents the danger of losing our humanity. Calypso offers Odysseus immortality, but even eternal life becomes a prison when the price is forgetting his wife, his son, his homeland and his own identity.
And Ithaca is not merely an island.
Ithaca is the place that remembers you when the world no longer recognizes your face. It is the home that remains alive inside you after everything else has been taken away. It is Penelope growing older while she waits. It is Telemachus becoming a man without his father. It is Argos surviving long enough to recognize his master one final time.
Odysseus is not great simply because he defeats monsters. He is great because he is proud, frightened, wounded, clever, imperfect and deeply human. He loses his companions, his youth, his name and twenty years of his life, yet he refuses to forget who he is.
When he finally returns, Penelope does not recognize him through strength, glory or appearance. She tests him. Odysseus proves his identity by remembering the bed they built together around the roots of a living olive tree.
That is the heart of The Odyssey.
Not the battles.
Not the ships.
Not the monsters.
Two people standing before each other after twenty years, asking whether love, memory and identity can survive everything time has done to them.
That is why this poem has survived for almost 3,000 years. Every human being is trying to return to something: a home, a person, a lost part of themselves, or the life they had before the world changed them.
So use Homer’s seas, gods, heroes and monsters. But please understand what you are touching.
The Odyssey was never truly about how far a man could travel.
It was about how much the world could take from him before he stopped being himself, and whether, after losing almost everything, he could still find his way home.

[gadfly @BrianFennelly]

@KalamCenter 78

[gadfly @BrianFennelly]

@KingTunde_SZN 16. 2 Arms, neck and bottom plus 6 holes back and front.

[gadfly @BrianFennelly]

@CrewkerneGaz This is really very naughty.

[gadfly @BrianFennelly]

@Bitcoin_Teddy Got to be the most insightful thing I’ll read today.

[gadfly @BrianFennelly]

@aberdeenuni That was two days ago. How much time do you need to “review” a media post by one of your employees, or are you waiting for the police investigation to finish before deciding on the matter?

[gadfly @BrianFennelly]

@MikeBales 🥴🥴🥴🥴

[gadfly @BrianFennelly]

@mazeg_mix If I wanted to read a short story I’d have used my Kindle.

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

Britain Is Sleepwalking Into Lebanon.

Lebanon did not fall overnight. It was once the most cosmopolitan, pluralist state in the Arab world. Beirut was the Paris of the Middle East. A functioning democracy. A free press. A Christian majority that built a nation generous enough to welcome those who came. It believed that openness would be met with openness. That tolerance would be reciprocated. That good faith was a universal language. It wasn't. It never is.

The Palestinians arrived after 1948 and in their hundreds of thousands after 1970, expelled from Jordan with their militias intact. The Lebanese state, too timid to enforce its own sovereignty, allowed armed factions to operate as a state within a state. Then Iran exported its revolution westward and Hezbollah was born, funded from Tehran, running its own hospitals, schools, courts and welfare networks. It made the Lebanese state optional for an entire community. Every accommodation encouraged the next demand. Every retreat was read as weakness, because it was.

The civil war that followed lasted fifteen years and killed 150,000 people. But the war was merely the violent expression of something that had already happened. The state had lost its monopoly on violence. Communities had retreated into armed confessional blocs. The centre had hollowed out. Lebanon was already two countries sharing a flag but not a future.

The Christians didn't lose because they were cruel. They lost because they were naive. They believed demographic generosity could be squared with political stability. They believed armed factions could be absorbed into a civic order. Power follows population. Identity hardens under pressure. Every community with a coherent creed will eventually act on its interests. The moral high ground is not a defence. In Lebanon it became a grave marker.

Now look at Britain.

Since 2018, boats have arrived on the Kent coast carrying tens of thousands of men, the overwhelming majority unvetted and undocumented, from Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Eritrea. They are housed and supported at public expense while the state performs the pantomime of processing them. Anyone who raises the subject is accused of racism before the sentence is finished. This is not immigration. It is the progressive dissolution of Britain's right to determine who enters its own territory.

The parallel institutions are already here. Sharia courts operating alongside civil law. Educational environments teaching loyalty to the Ummah rather than to Britain. Areas where policing is negotiation, investigations are quietly dropped, and the state modifies its own behaviour for fear of communal reaction. In Lebanon they called it accommodation. They kept calling it accommodation right up until the checkpoints went up.

The electoral bloc pressure is already here. Candidates selected on the basis of foreign conflicts. Representatives answering to communal leaderships rather than constituents. The institutional failure is already here. The Charity Commission investigated the Islamic Centre of England for three years. Little changed. Universities host vigils for mass murderers and hold nobody accountable. Prevent is applied selectively. Everyone knows it. Nobody says it.

Lebanon did not collapse because its enemies were strong. It collapsed because its institutions were weak. Because it confused tolerance with the abandonment of standards. Because it believed the centre would hold without anyone holding it. Britain is not Lebanon yet. But Lebanon wasn't Lebanon yet, once. It drifted. Demographics shifted. Parallel loyalties hardened. The state lost the nerve to enforce a single standard of law. Bit by bit the centre hollowed out.

We are drifting. The question is whether anyone in authority will admit it. Before the drift becomes a current too strong to swim against.

"Power follows population. Identity hardens under pressure. Every community with a coherent creed will eventually act on its interests."

[Christian @InTheTrenchesUK]

Oh, Hollie. "Promoted." How appropriate. You have paid to promote this. You have spent Labour members' money on this... this thing. This smear. This cowardly, legal-team-approved, "we're not saying they're connected" piece of garbage.

Look at it. The three bullet points. The sinister implication. The photo of Farage laughing, captured mid-breath and presented as if it were a confession. And then, the punchline, the legal disclaimer that exposes your entire game: "We have been strongly advised to be very clear that we're not saying these things are connected."

You know, don't you, Hollie? Your lawyers know. Your "comms team" knows. If you actually said what you are implying, you would be sued into oblivion. So you hide behind "we're just pointing out." Just asking questions. Just "worth thinking about." The tactics of the playground coward. The smear merchant with a barrister on speed dial.

You are married to Teddy Ryan, Hollie. The lobbyist for Pearson Engineering. The Israeli arms company. The £145 million in taxpayer subsidies while you were General Secretary. While you were rising to the top. While you were learning to smear your opponents and protect your donors. Did you "point out" that connection? Did you promote that fact? Did you tell the working class girls of Dagenham that their representative was married to a man who lobbies for the bombs that fall on Gaza?

No. You did not. You saved your promoted posts for Farage. For the man who threatens your establishment. For the man who would end your gravy train.

Your party has criminals, Hollie. Convicted fraudsters. Paedophiles. Corrupt MPs with Interpol red notices. And you spend your time and your money on this. On "we're not saying" and sinister photos and bullet points that imply without alleging.

You are not a General Secretary. You are a gossip with a budget. A smear artist with a legal team. A woman who climbed to the top of Labour on the backs of the working class and now uses that position to protect the very system that keeps them down.

Delete it, Hollie. Or keep it. The public see you. They see the cowardice. They see the "promoted" label and know exactly what you are buying. And it is not their votes. It is their contempt.

[gadfly @BrianFennelly]

My wife was 80 yesterday, 250 years since the birth of America. Funny to think that only two more lifetimes would have placed her 10 years after the Declaration of Independence. What extraordinary things have been achieved in the equivalent of three lifetimes.

[gadfly @BrianFennelly]

@Rainmaker1973 So the train is travelling at 3,400 miles per hour?

[gadfly @BrianFennelly]

@ajassy @elonmusk Amen to that.