๐คฃ๐คฃHow dare the media ask a party leader why he didnโt declare ยฃ5m bungs from crypto tycoons or homes he bought for cash while telling us he was โskint.โ Outrageous!
Let me tell you what just got reported, because you will not believe it until you see it laid out.
The Trump administration cut a billion-dollar tungsten deal with Kazakhstan. Tungsten is the metal we need for missile warheads, fighter jets, and computer chips. Trump himself got on the phone to close it. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick worked it from the inside, sending letters, leaning on the Kazakh president, lining up as much as $1.6 billion in federal financing.
Within weeks of those negotiations, investors tied to a firm partly owned by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump took a 20% stake in an entity connected to the very same Kazakhstan project their father was negotiating. Around that same time, Cantor Fitzgerald, the firm run by Lutnickโs own sons, raised $210 million for a partner in the deal and pocketed the fees.
The fathers set the policy. The sons cashed in.
Six days after the Trump sons and their partners moved their money, Lutnick signed the final deal.
The reporting found one or both families have financial ties to at least 14 companies working with the government on critical mining deals.
The total federal funding flowing toward those companies tops $8.9 billion.
This is your tax money.
It is supposed to secure our supply chains and protect our troops, not pad the portfolios of the Presidentโs children and the Commerce Secretaryโs children.
This is the most corrupt administration in American history. It is not close.
We must keep digging, and keep asking the questions they do not want asked. Republicans in Congress are unwilling to lift a finger. Mike Johnson is running a protection racket.
Either we will end the corruption, or the corruption will be the end of us.
https://t.co/yFOl7zvOhC
Each birthday (and today is my 44th!) invites reflectionโon what Iโve learned, what I hold dear, and how I want to walk forward with greater clarity, courage, and grace.
This man is a threat to our democracy. He backs violence and extremism.
Blaming a group of people for the awful actions of an individual leads us to a very dark place.
Musk, Lowe, Farage, Robinson - these men don't give a shit about this country, they want to rip us apart.
Itโs not social media thatโs โinflaming tensionsโ.
Itโs not Elon Musk.
Itโs not Nigel Farage.
Itโs not the โfar-rightโ.
It is the very deliberate policy of mass uncontrolled immigration & open borders.
This policy has to end or it will destroy Western nations.
SECRETARY RUBIO: "I also want to remind everybody that the United States government is not a charity. We are not here to play social worker, we are here to win."
Imagine this was Moscow or Beijing? Its not its Holland in the centre of EU values and decency.
A pregnant woman is thrown to the ground, dragged by the hair-
Her husband of course reacted and fought the Police.
One Labour MP after another, one left-wing columnist after another, all lining up to denounce an entirely legitimate protest after saying nothing at all about unvetted illegal migrants flooding Britain, Islamist sympathisers & antisemites marching at will, & ignoring the industrial-scale assault of British women & girls for decades ๐คฎ
Bravo, @Keir_Starmer, for getting in an Adviser on Women and Girls who thinks the definition of women and girls includes men and boys. That'll definitely win back people who believe Labour's a party for smug, lanyard-wearing, luxury-belief-espousing cultural elitists. 1/2
BBC news at 1pm today did not even mention there were three stabbing victimsโ the first never happened according if you go by their omission.
Just extraordinary.
An Arab scholar in 1011 was placed under house arrest in Cairo for 10 years. He used the time to invent the scientific method, prove how vision actually works, and write a 7-volume book that Newton studied 600 years later.
I read about him last night and could not stop thinking about it.
His name was Ibn al-Haytham. The book is called the "Book of Optics."
The textbook story names Bacon, Galileo, and Descartes as the founders of modern science. All three of them came 600 years after Ibn al-Haytham. All three of them studied his work directly or through Latin translations. The man who actually invented the scientific method was working alone in a single room in Cairo while Europe was still in the Dark Ages.
Here is the story almost nobody tells you.
He was born in Basra around 965 CE. By his 40s he had a reputation across the Arab world as one of the most original minds alive. Then he made the mistake that almost killed him. He claimed publicly that he could regulate the flooding of the Nile. The mad caliph al-Hakim of Cairo summoned him to Egypt to do it.
Ibn al-Haytham took one look at the river and realized the project was impossible with the technology of his era. The caliph had executed dozens of scholars for less. So he faked madness. The caliph believed him and put him under house arrest in his own home in Cairo for the next 10 years.
Most people would have lost their actual mind. He used the time to invent science.
Before him, knowledge worked one way. You quoted authority. If Aristotle had said it, it was true. If Galen had written it, it was correct. The role of a scholar was to memorize and defend the ancient Greeks. I
Ibn al-Haytham broke this completely. He wrote a sentence in the Book of Optics that quietly destroyed 1,400 years of intellectual culture. "The seeker after truth," he said, "is not the one who follows his natural disposition to trust the writings of the ancients. The seeker after truth is the one who suspects them, questions them, and submits only to argument and experiment."
That single sentence is the foundation of modern science. He wrote it 600 years before the European Renaissance.
The second thing he did was build the actual machinery of experimentation.
He insisted that no claim about the physical world was acceptable until it had been verified by an experiment anyone could repeat. He gave detailed instructions for every experiment in his book. He told his readers, in writing, not to take his word for any of it. Build the equipment. Run the tests yourself. Verify or destroy my claims with your own eyes.
The third thing he did was use the method to overturn one of the most settled questions in physics.
The Greeks had taught for centuries that vision worked because the eye emitted invisible rays. Ibn al-Haytham proved them wrong with a darkened room, a small hole, and a wall. The first camera obscura. He showed that light from the outside world enters the eye, the exact opposite of what every Greek thinker had taught.
Two hundred years later his book was translated into Latin in Spain. Roger Bacon cited him. Kepler cited him. Galileo's work on the telescope was built on his optics. Newton's foundational work on light rested on his framework.
Walk into any physics department today. Ask who founded the scientific method. Almost nobody will say Ibn al-Haytham.
The man who invented the way humanity actually knows things did the work under house arrest, with no funding, no laboratory, and a paranoid caliph next door waiting for an excuse to kill him.
He did it anyway. Most of the world is still pretending it was someone else's idea.
Pentagon just told Britain that the Falkland Islands might not be British anymore.
Not because Argentina deserves them. Because Keir Starmer wouldnโt send a warship.
That is where Britain stands today. A nation that once ruled a quarter of the planet, reduced to a country that can have its territories handed to a South American populist as punishment for insufficient loyalty to a man who cannot spell the word alliance.
Trump was invited to meet the King. Full state visit. The works. Red carpet, Buckingham Palace, the ceremonial humiliation of a host nation pretending not to notice that their guest has spent every day since the invitation was extended publicly mocking them. He called the Prime Minister a coward. He called British aircraft carriers toys. He has treated the special relationship like a doormat and wiped his feet on it every single morning before breakfast.
And Britain just stood there and took it.
Every time.
His own niece put it better than any analyst ever could. He hates weakness above all else. Not enemies. Weakness. And nothing triggers him faster than a friend who absorbs the punishment and comes back asking for more. Because that is not friendship to him. That is sport.
Starmer still has a phone. He still has a palace on speed dial. And somewhere, buried under layers of diplomatic caution and Foreign Office nervousness, there may still be an actual human being capable of saying enough.
Cancel the visit. Tell the King to stay home. Do not give this man the photograph. Because the moment that picture is taken, he will use it to finish the job.
Trump does not do gratitude. He does dominance. Britain just volunteered to be the example.
โ Gandalv / @Microinteracti1