Broni_m

Wanderer, warbler, yogi.. fan of sun,sea and fashion...... Farney & Faughs affiliation.. ❤️ 🌍..
All views are my own.

[leilani dowding 🌸🚜 ☮️ @LeilaniDowding]

Humans are a cancer. Self entitled selfish twats The signs not to swim are enormous.
Every single one of these people should be called out. The saddest clip is the swan trying to roll her egg back under her in the water…. How many eggs will go unincubated because they were disturbed?

Credit Intsa SwansOfHamsteadHeath

https://t.co/eJIFz8AO86

[Broni_m @Broni_m]

@CarlBovisNature Used to have a pair come to the feeder during covid. I haven't seen them in a few years.

[Barack Obama @BarackObama]

The victory of the opposition in Hungary yesterday, like the Polish election in 2023, is a victory for democracy, not just in Europe but around the world. Most of all, it’s a testament to the resilience and determination of the Hungarian people – and a reminder to all of us to keep striving for fairness, equality and the rule of law.

[Harry Eccles @Heccles94]

Can we get this video of the #NoKings marches tweeted 1000 times??

Let’s show the world that America says NO to Trump!

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

If there is precisely one thing you watch today, make it this. French Senator Claude Malhuret. A microphone. And the most magnificently savage dismantling of the Trump administration ever delivered in a language they almost certainly don’t speak.

He covers Iran. He covers corruption. He covers the kind of staggering, industrial-scale incompetence that would get you fired from managing a car park. And he does it with the calm, unhurried certainty of a man who has read every page of the indictment and found it, if anything, worse than expected.

France has never pretended to like these people. But this is contempt elevated to an art form. The kind of refined, aristocratic disdain that takes centuries of civilization to produce and approximately ninety seconds to deploy.

Malhuret sounds like he is four seconds from the button. Not out of panic. Out of sheer, exhausted disgust.
Honestly? Understandable.
Watch it. Share it. The adults are speaking.

Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

Robert Mueller died last night.

He was 81 years old. He had a wife who loved him for sixty years. He had two daughters, one of whom he met for the first time in Hawaii, in 1969, on a few hours of military leave, before he got back on the plane and returned to Vietnam. He had grandchildren. He had a faith he practiced quietly, without performance. He had, in the way of men who have seen real things and survived them, a quality that is increasingly rare and increasingly mocked in the country he spent his life serving.

He had integrity.

And tonight the President of the United States said good!

I have been sitting with that word for hours now. Good. One syllable. The thing you say when the coffee is hot or the traffic is moving. The thing a man who has never had to bury anyone, never had to sit in the specific silence of a room where someone is newly absent, reaches for when he wants the world to know he is satisfied. Good. The daughters are crying and the wife is alone in the house and good.

I want to speak directly to the Americans reading this. Not the political Americans. Just the human ones. The ones who have lost a father. The ones who know what it is to be in that first hour, when you keep forgetting and then remembering again, when ordinary objects become unbearable, when the world outside the window seems obscene in its indifference. I want to ask you, simply, to hold that feeling for a moment, and then to understand that the man you elected looked at it and typed a single word.

Good.

This is not a country having a bad day. I need you to understand that. Countries have bad days. Elections go wrong. Leaders disappoint. Institutions bend. But there is a different thing, a rarer and more terrible thing, that happens when the moral center of a place simply gives way. Not dramatically. Not with a single catastrophic event. But quietly, in increments, until one evening a president celebrates the death of an old man whose family is still warm with grief, and enough people find it acceptable that it becomes the weather. Just the weather.

That is what is happening. That is what has happened.

The world knows. From Tokyo to Oslo, from London to Buenos Aires, people are not angry at America tonight. Anger would mean there was still something to fight for, some remaining faith to be betrayed. What I see, in the reactions from everywhere that is not here, is something older and sadder than anger. It is the look people get when they have waited a long time for someone they love to find their way back, and have finally understood that they are not coming.

America is being grieved. Past tense, almost. The idea of it. The thing it represented to people who had nothing else to believe in, who came here with everything they owned in a single bag because they had heard, somehow, across an ocean, that this was the place where decency was written into the walls. That idea is not resting. It is not suspended. It is being buried, in real time, with 7,450 likes before dinner.

And the church said nothing.

Seventy million people have decided that this man, this specific man who has cheated everyone he has ever made a promise to, who has mocked the disabled and the dead and the grieving, who celebrated tonight while a family wept, is an instrument of God. The pastors who made that bargain did not just trade away their credibility. They traded away the thing that made them worth listening to in the first place. The cross they carry now is a costume. The faith they preach is a loyalty oath with scripture attached. When the history of American Christianity is written, this will be the chapter they skip at seminary.

Now I want to talk about the men who stand next to him.

Because this is the part that actually breaks my heart.

JD Vance is not a bad man. I have to say that, because it is true, and because the truth matters even now, especially now. Marco Rubio is not a bad man. Lindsey Graham is not a bad man. They are idiots, but not bad, as in BAD! These are men with mothers who raised them and children who love them and friends who remember who they were before all of this. They are not monsters. Monsters are simple. Monsters do not cost you anything emotionally because there is nothing in them to mourn.

These men are something more painful than monsters.

They are men who knew better, and know better still, and will get up tomorrow and do it again.

Every small compromise they made had a reason. Every moment they looked the other way had a justification that sounded, at the time, almost reasonable. And now they have arrived here, at a place where a president celebrates the death of an old man and they will find a way, on television, to say nothing that means anything, and they will go home to houses where children who carry their name are waiting, and they will say goodnight, and they will say nothing.

Their oldest friends are watching. The ones who knew Rubio when he still believed in something. Who knew Graham when he said, out loud, on the record, that this exact man would destroy the Republican Party and deserve it. Who sat next to Vance and thought here is someone worth knowing. Those friends are not angry tonight. They moved through anger a long time ago. What they feel now is the quiet, irrecoverable sadness of watching someone disappear while still being present. Of watching a person they loved choose, again and again, to become less.

That is what cowardice costs. Not the coward. The people who loved him.

And in the comments tonight, the followers celebrate. People who ten years ago brought casseroles to grieving neighbours. Who stood in the rain at gravesides and meant the words they said. Who told their children that we do not speak ill of the dead because the dead were someone's beloved. Those people are tonight typing gleeful things about a man whose daughters are not yet done crying. And they feel clean doing it. Righteous. Because somewhere along the way the thing they were given in exchange for their decency was the feeling of belonging to something, and that feeling is very hard to give up even when you can no longer remember what you gave for it.

When Trump is gone, they will still be here.

Standing in the silence where the noise used to be. Without the permission the crowd gave them. Without the pastor who told them their cruelty was holy. They will be alone with what they said and what they cheered and what they chose to become, and there will be no one left to tell them it was righteous.

That morning is coming.

Robert Mueller flew across the Pacific on military leave to hold his newborn daughter for a few hours before returning to the war. He came home. He buried his dead with honour. He served presidents of both parties because he understood that the institution was larger than any one man. He told his grandchildren that a lie is the worst thing a person can do, that a reputation once lost cannot be recovered, and he lived that, every day, in the quiet and unglamorous way of people who actually believe what they say.

He was the kind of American the world used to point to when it needed to believe the story was true.

He died last night. His wife is alone in their house in Georgetown. His daughters are learning what the world is without him in it. And somewhere in the particular hush that falls over a family in the first hours of loss, the most powerful man and the biggest loser on earth sent a message to say he was glad.

The world that loved what America was supposed to be is grieving tonight. Not for Robert Mueller only. For the country that produced him and then became this. For the distance between what was promised and what was delivered. For the suspicion, growing quieter and more certain with each passing month, that the America people believed in was always partly a story, and the story is over now, and there is nothing yet to replace it.

That is all it needed to be.

A man died. His family is broken open with grief.

That is all it needed to be.

Instead the President said good.

And the country that once stood for something looked away 🇺🇸

Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

[Sky News @SkyNews]

Former President of Ireland Mary Robinson says we can't have "double standards" with the international rule of law.

She compares the criticism of Putin invading Ukraine with the U.S. and Israel's strike on Iran, which she says very few countries have spoken explicitly about it.

[Broni_m @Broni_m]

@DrSuneelDhand I couldn't agree more, especially about the importance of keeping mobile. The hospital my mum was in had signs warning you how quickly mobility could be lost but no one with any time to help people get out of bed. If you'd no family/friends visiting then you had no chance.

[Maya Angelou @DrMayaAngelou]

“I believe that education, and only education, is the key which can open the dungeon of ignorance.” — Maya Angelou

On #InternationalDayOfEducation, we honor education as a path to liberation, dignity, and joy — and recommit to equitable access for all.

#EducationForAll #MayaAngelou

[dominic dyer @domdyer70]

Yes indeed

[Other Europe 🇪🇺 @other_europe]

🇪🇺🇩🇰 Danish citizens are organising a huge boycott that includes cancelling planned holidays in the US, cancelling subscriptions to on-demand services based in the US & more generally, recommending the use of EU 🇪🇺 services instead of those provided by American platforms.

[Broni_m @Broni_m]

They're so smart, thinking of them in boxes like this is heartbreaking.

[dominic dyer @domdyer70]

Well done Chile

[𝔗𝔯𝔲𝔱𝔥 𝔐𝔞𝔱𝔱𝔢𝔯𝔰 @politicsusa46]

For anyone who would like to hear Mark Carney’s outstanding Davos speech in full here it is. This is what true global leadership looks like.

Canada should be immensely proud today, because they are leading the fight back when others dare not.

🎥 TikTok - https://t.co/BExGV2YIDq

[Julian Lennon @JulianLennon]

🖤

[dominic dyer @domdyer70]

Everyone talks about sustainability like it is a sacrifice. Sweden quietly treated it like a design problem.

They opened a full shopping mall where nothing sold is new. Not as a protest. Not as a lecture. As a place people actually want to spend time. Bright interiors. Well curated spaces. Skilled repair shops. Designers turning old materials into desirable products. It feels modern because it is.

What a great concept I hope this goes global

[Barack Obama @BarackObama]

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. dedicated his life fighting for equity and justice. He taught us that even in the face of intimidation and discrimination, we must never stop working towards a better future – a lesson that feels especially relevant today.

Change has never been easy. It takes persistence and determination, and requires all of us to speak out and stand up for what we believe in. As we honor Dr. King today, let’s draw strength from his example, and do our part to build on his legacy.

[Garbhán Downey @Garbhan_D]

What an honestly-acquired Nobel Peace Prize looks like.

[dominic dyer @domdyer70]

In Alaska, the legal loophole allowing hunters to target hibernating bears and nursing mothers in their dens is not only unethical but also a threat to the survival of these majestic animals.

This practice, legalized by recent federal rulings, permits hunters to exploit bears at their most vulnerable moments, jeopardizing the future of these iconic species.

[Mr. Spock 🖖 (Commentary) @SpockResists]

I keep thinking about the Buddhist monks walking for peace — step by step — from Texas toward Washington, DC.
Everywhere they go, people gather. And many of them cry. Not because the monks are saying anything dramatic, but because they aren’t saying much at all. They’re just

[dominic dyer @domdyer70]

Well done Poland