Jacky Tarleton 🇺🇦🦋

Find me now on Bluesky - Wilkie Collins, Louis MacNeice and Opera fan, still trying to combine all three.

[Gianl1974 @Gianl1974]

A message to all sane Republicans:

He pardoned 1,600 violent criminals.
You said nothing.

He bulldozed the East Wing.
You said nothing.

He interfered with the release of the Epstein files. You said nothing.

He took over the Kennedy Center and renamed it after himself. You said nothing.

He accepted a $400 million airplane as a personal gift. You said nothing.

He threatened Canada, Cuba, Denmark, Greenland, Venezuela, Colombia, and Brazil. You said nothing.

He tariffed just about everyone but Russia, causing inflation and instability worldwide. You said nothing.

He attacked a nation during mediated negotiations. You said nothing.

His ill-conceived war killed 175 children on day one. You said nothing.

He alienated and insulted our allies. You said nothing.

His ICE Army terrorized and murdered U.S. citizens. You said nothing.

He committed murder on the high seas. You said nothing.

He co-opted the Justice Department and directed it to prosecute his political enemies. You said nothing.

It’s time to start talking.

[Liz Webster @LizWebsterSBF]

🙌 👏 OMG watch Lord Spencer Livermore - Treasury Minister - the first serving minister to publicly face Brexit reality!

“Should we in due course re-enter the European Union? My personal view is that that is an inevitability. Of course the UK will re-enter the EU because it is absolutely in our national economic interest.”

He acknowledges Brexit has cost us 4–8% of GDP. Cutting a few tariffs is a drop in the ocean compared to that damage.

The reset is a start, but full rejoin is the logical destination.”

[Steven Isserlis @StevenIsserlis]

Wow, @Iberia - you really are absolutely appalling! Almost unimaginable incompetence - good luck for winning World’s Worst Airline. You must be favourite to win, hands down… congratulations in advance.

[Jacky Tarleton 🇺🇦🦋 @JackyTarleton]

@ioanmarcjones Great article! Can I recommend Basil by Wilkie Collins? That has everything you were asking for in a novel, including brevity! I’ve read it many times. I promise you won’t be disappointed!

[Jacky Tarleton 🇺🇦🦋 @JackyTarleton]

@operamagazine As I work my way backwards through your magazine, what a treat to find your spot-on review of @rbo_org’s Tales of Hoffmann DVD!👏

[Jacky Tarleton 🇺🇦🦋 @JackyTarleton]

@operamagazine What a delightful obituary by Hilary Finch of Max Loppert in your July issue! I always appreciated his reviews but never knew anything other than his name. Thank you!

[RobertFella 🇺🇸 🇺🇦 @Bonkavision5]

Too on point not to share. This is great, but too bad the Orange Felon’s enablers won’t let him see it.
This Australian's reply to #Trump's rant about “NATO not being there for America” is perfect.
"Mate. You run a country with 600,000 homeless people sleeping on the street tonight. A country where 40% of adults can't cover a $400 emergency without borrowing money. A country where insulin costs more than a car payment and people are rationing it to survive. A country where medical debt is the number 1 cause of bankruptcy. A country where women are dying in hospital car parks because doctors are too scared of abortion laws to treat a miscarriage.
You lock up more of your own citizens than any nation on earth. More than China. More than Russia. More than North Korea. The land of the free has 2 million people in cages, and a quarter of them haven't even been convicted of anything. They're just too poor to make bail.
Your life expectancy is going backwards. You're the only developed nation where that's happening. Your infant mortality rate is worse than Cuba's. Your kids do active shooter drills between maths and English while you sell the gunmaker's stock to your mates.
Your minimum wage hasn't moved in 15 years. You've got teachers working 2 jobs and veterans sleeping under bridges and you just spent a trillion dollars flattening a country that didn't attack you.
And you’ve got a convicted felon, adjudicating raping, paedophile protecting, porn star shagging insurrectionist running the biggest dumpster fire war campaign since the Taliban thanked you very much for losing again.
And you're calling Greenland poorly run?
Greenland has universal healthcare. Free education. One of the lowest incarceration rates in the world. Nobody goes bankrupt there because they got sick. Nobody dies in a waiting room because their insurance said no.
'NATO wasn't there when we needed them." When exactly was that, champ? September 11? Because NATO invoked Article 5 for the first and only time in history FOR YOU. Soldiers from dozens of countries deployed, fought, bled, and died in Afghanistan FOR YOU. Australia wasn't even in NATO and we still showed up. For 20 years.
And you pulled out at 2am without telling anyone and left them to deal with the mess.
So maybe before you start calling other countries poorly run, have a look at your own backyard, you spray-tanned aluminium siding salesman. The only thing poorly run in this picture is your f----- mouth."
- Tony Locke

[Meanwhile in Ukraine @MeanwhileInUA]

Putin didn't invade Ukraine because of NATO. He invaded because Ukrainians were proving democracy works.

Historian and Pulitzer Prize winner Anne Applebaum puts it plainly: Putin looked at Ukraine's democratic movement and thought, "If they can do it in Ukraine, then people could do it in Russia. So I need to crush this."

That's the real threat Ukraine posed. Not missiles. Not borders. A working democracy next door.

Applebaum frames the war as a fault line between the democratic and autocratic worlds. Russia isn't just trying to take territory. It's trying to erase Ukraine as a nation, reduce it to a colony, and send a message to every country that the post-1945 rules of Europe no longer apply.

Those rules were simple: no invasions, no wars, borders don't change by force. Russia understood exactly what it was breaking when it crossed into Ukraine.

[Jacky Tarleton 🇺🇦🦋 @JackyTarleton]

@latonella @WrStaatsoper I can’t believe they’re still showing that dreadful, static production where you can only see half the characters if you sit at the side. Even worse, they used to have an atmospheric prodn - I remember snow❄️!

[ALASTAIR CAMPBELL @campbellclaret]

Whoever is Prime Minister in the coming months for heaven’s sake try to get David Miliband back into UK politics to be part of your team. His interview on Today programme just now a reminder of how much his voice and his brain are missed.

[Jacky Tarleton 🇺🇦🦋 @JackyTarleton]

@RadioTimes Please could you request Joe Swift not to recommend euphorbia as a garden plant as it causes terrible pain and blistering if the sap gets on your skin?

[The Spectator @spectator]

The Guardian has asked a panel of authors and critics to nominate their favourite novels to make up a 'Top 100', and to nobody's surprise the highest places were bagged by that well-known half-back line: Proust, Tolstoy and Joyce. 'Reigning supreme', as Fluff Freeman might have said, was George Eliot. Yes, Middlemarch, the supreme novel of provincial England, was number one.

Great writers, all. Yet how flat it seems. Ulysses, for instance, is a remarkable book, even if it is savoured more by writers than readers. It is long, self-consciously clever, and assumes a familiarity with the ancient world. But not everybody has the patience to last the course.

✍️ Michael Henderson

Article | https://t.co/tM0XkFZm3m

[Jacky Tarleton 🇺🇦🦋 @JackyTarleton]

@spectator Thanks for letting me read your article. I completely agree & I had already sent them a list of missing masterpieces!

[Jacky Tarleton 🇺🇦🦋 @JackyTarleton]

@dcsandbrook @bookclubpodhq It’s the omissions that upset me - no Wilkie Collins, Anthony Trollope, Jane Gardam, AS Byatt, Margaret Drabble, William Golding, John Updike, Sense & Sensibility, Grapes of Wrath…

[Farrukh @implausibleblog]

Laura Kuenssberg, "Rejoining the EU.. Which Streeting and Burnham have mentioned"

Wil Self, "I think the public would be much happier if Streeting stood up and said we have a problem with governmental legitimacy, because of the way the vote on Europe is still perceived"

"We need a need to have a national debate on the mismatch on our electoral systems between Proportional Representation and FPTP"

"We need to educate the British public again on our own constitution"

"The real issue is we have a war with Russia"

"I have blood cancer, the blood testing service last year was attacked by Russian hackers"

"We have a low intensity conflict, its all over the place now"

"NATO is falling apart"

"The issue about the EU is about existential defence in Europe"

"Don't people understand that?"

"Talk about fiddling while Rome burns"

Well said @wself 👏

[Jacky Tarleton 🇺🇦🦋 @JackyTarleton]

@patrick_kidd I very much enjoyed reading your obituary of Michael Pennington in today’s @ObserverUK. It brought back many happy play-going memories!

[Jacky Tarleton 🇺🇦🦋 @JackyTarleton]

… and then you restore my faith with your magnificent series ‘Key Changes’🎶🎵👏👏👏 introduced by the wonderful Michael Wood & Gillian Moore.

[Jacky Tarleton 🇺🇦🦋 @JackyTarleton]

@BBCRadio3 What has happened to you? My husband just came in and said, ‘Why have you got Radio 2 on?”

[Jacky Tarleton 🇺🇦🦋 @JackyTarleton]

@marinaiki123 @rbo_org We’re going on 11th.

[Jacky Tarleton 🇺🇦🦋 @JackyTarleton]

@rbo_org I took a musical friend who’s not attended opera to your dress rehearsal of Samson et Delila yesterday. She was completely bowled over! Now she’ll come to I Puritani with us - an official performance this time🎵🎶

[Mark Pullinger @larkingrumple]

Alas, poor Bizet...
The Pearl Fishers makes its debut at the Wiener Staatsoper: review for @Operanow
https://t.co/O7aqJnZTJx