Richard Thorold

Loving grandad of six grandsons, one gone to heaven early. Campaigning for reduction in infant pedestrian deaths on UK road’s. Comments my own.

[Mike Netter @nettermike]

Black pilot, West Point graduate, and combat veteran Wesley Hunt delivered a masterclass response:

“Hey Jasmine… Black pilot here.

I graduated from West Point. I went through Army flight school. I learned to fly the AH-64 Apache. I deployed to combat and flew 55 combat missions over Baghdad.

Nobody handed me a cockpit because of my skin color. Nobody lowered the standards for me.

Suggesting that Black pilots, engineers, doctors, or leaders need special preferences to succeed is not empowering, it’s insulting.

I didn’t want a different standard. I wanted the same standard.”

He ended with a powerful line:

“Merit isn’t racist. Excellence isn’t discriminatory. And reducing every achievement to skin color says far more about your worldview than it does about mine.”

This is the kind of clarity and backbone America needs right now.

[Johnny Mercer @JohnnyMercerUK]

Always get up early this day to remember this man. Bing would be married now, be a father, experience the love of his children. The years only elevate his sacrifice.

Too tall to fit in the back of the truck, I cradled him as his life ebbed away that morning. Always consistent, always brave, deeply courageous yet humble and kind. I’ll never forget him, and neither should the Nation. #neverforget

[Christopher Hale @ChristopherHale]

“If you think the world is selfish and rotten, go to the cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer overlooking Omaha Beach. See what one group of men did for another on D-Day, June 6th, 1944.” — Andy Rooney

[DBM @DBentleyMiller]

When you want to start hating on High Court Judges please take a breath, pause, then listen to this gentleman. One of the most measured yet powerful judgements you will ever have the privilege of listening to

[John Kennedy @SenJohnKennedy]

82 years ago today, brave American heroes like CPL Edmond Elisar of Ascension Parish, Louisiana stormed the beaches of Normandy to liberate Europe from tyranny.

He was only 22 years old when he gave his life in service of our country so we could live free.

God made men like Edmond rare. Our nation must never forget his sacrifice.

[Barnaby Breaks History 🇺🇸 @CorpBarnaby]

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Honorary Scottish Badass D-Day Edition: Bill Millin

Bill Millin played his bagpipes on Sword Beach. The Germans thought he was nuts.

And yes, that’s him in the picture.

On June 6, 1944, as Lord Lovat’s commandos stormed Sword Beach, a lone Scottish piper waded through the surf and enemy fire playing his bagpipes.

William “Bill” Millin was born in Canada to Scottish parents and raised in the Highland tradition.

At 21 he was the personal piper to Brigadier Simon Fraser, 15th Lord Lovat, commander of the 1st Special Service Brigade.

Lovat had specifically chosen Millin during commando training at Achnacarry.

When the moment came on D-Day, Lovat ordered him to play.

Millin hesitated, citing regulations against piping in combat.

Lovat replied: “Ah, but that’s the English War Office. You and I are both Scottish, and that doesn’t apply.”

Millin went ashore wearing the Cameron tartan kilt his father had worn in the First World War.

He carried only his pipes and the traditional sgian-dubh knife in his stocking.

He was the only man in the entire invasion armada wearing a kilt.

True to Highland tradition, he went "commando" under the kilt.

As bullets and mortar rounds exploded around him, Millin played “Highland Laddie,” “The Road to the Isles,” and “All the Blue Bonnets Are Over the Border.”

He marched through the water and onto the beach while his fellow commandos fell around him.

The Germans reportedly thought he was mad and held their fire.

His defiant music cut through the chaos, lifting the spirits of the assault troops and becoming one of the most iconic images of D-Day.

Bill Millin survived the war and lived to see his story become legend.

He passed in 2010.

The Mad Piper of Sword Beach.

Bill Millin was a badass.

Thank you, Piper Bill! 🫡🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

[Erick Erickson @EWErickson]

One of the greatest speeches of the late 20th century, given on the 40th anniversary of one of the most spectacular days in human history.

[Echoes of War @EchoesofWarYT]

Ray Lambert had already been shot twice and blown up once before he ever set foot on Omaha Beach.

He had survived the invasion of North Africa in 1943. Then Sicily. Each time he had been wounded. Each time he had gone back. By June 6th, 1944, the 23-year-old Staff Sergeant and head medic of the 16th Infantry Regiment's 2nd Battalion was on his third invasion in two years. He had already won a Silver Star for running through German lines in North Africa to drag wounded men out.

He was not supposed to survive a third one.

Lambert landed in the first wave at Omaha Beach. Of the 31 men in his landing craft, only 7 survived the day. The other 24 were killed before they even reached the sand.

He started working immediately.

The first bullet hit his right arm and shattered the bone. He kept going. A second round tore through his right elbow as he was pulling a wounded soldier through the surf. He kept going. Something hit his leg and opened it down to the bone. He put a tourniquet on himself, injected himself with morphine from his own kit, and kept going.

He found a slab of concrete on the beach that offered a few inches of cover. He set up a treatment zone behind it, dragging men out of the water and working on them one by one under constant fire. That piece of concrete is still there today. People who visit Omaha Beach call it Ray's Rock.

Then a loose landing craft ramp swung loose in the surf and slammed into him. It broke his back.

He kept going.

Lambert lost count of how many men he treated. The official record credits him with saving at least 15 lives that morning. Other accounts say closer to two dozen. He worked until his body physically stopped, collapsing unconscious at the edge of the surf, bleeding from multiple wounds, his back broken, still in the water.

A doctor spotted him. A landing craft pulled him out.

Here is the part that does not feel real.

Lambert's brother, Euel, had also been wounded at Normandy that day. The two brothers were loaded onto the same evacuation landing craft. They were placed in the same wheeled ambulance. They were taken to the same tent hospital in England. They were brought into the same operating room at the same time.

Lambert spent almost a full year recovering before he could walk properly again.

He went home. He lived quietly for decades, rarely talking about what happened. In 2019, at the age of 98, he went back to Normandy and stood on the beach again. He published a memoir called Every Man a Hero. It became a New York Times bestseller.

In 2021, Ray Lambert died peacefully at home. He was 100 years old.

He had three invasions, four serious wounds, a broken back, a Silver Star, multiple Bronze Stars, multiple Purple Hearts, and two dozen men who came home because he refused to stop moving on the worst morning in American military history.

Today is June 6th.

Remember him.

[Maxi @AllForProgress_]

This past week, on a test bed in Britain, a Rolls-Royce jet engine ran at full take-off power on pure hydrogen, putting out water vapour instead of carbon.

Nobody on Earth had managed it before. It is the sort of thing that ought to stop the country in its tracks, and it will be forgotten by the weekend.

Leave aside the recent paroxysms of renewed net-zero insanity from Derelict Ed and the pervasive atmosphere of offended envy that greets much homegrown achievement nowadays in Britain. This engineering is a wonder, and it's British to the bone.

We gave the world the jet engine in the first place - Frank Whittle, a Coventry man and an RAF officer, patented it in 1930 while the Air Ministry assured him it was a curiosity. Rolls-Royce is today one of perhaps three firms anywhere that can build a large aero engine at the outer edge of the possible, and it has just done what most of the industry swore was twenty years away.

As usual, you marvel at how little the people who govern us had to do with it. The engineers in Derby are world-class; the stewardship above them is third-rate. They pulled off a global first while paying the most expensive industrial electricity in the developed world to keep the power on over the bench - a weight no German, American or Gulf rival has to carry. We produce frontier brilliance on the shop floor and fritter it away at the despatch box, and we have done for two generations.

That is the maddening shape of modern Britain: brilliance from below, sub- (or, indeed, ultra-) mediocrity from above. The people here who actually make things are still among the best in the world; the state that is meant to back them treats a firm like Rolls-Royce as a photocall today and a takeover target tomorrow, and prices its energy as though it would prefer the next plant were built in Texas.

Progress starts from the other end. Give these people what every rival government gives its champions and we beg ours to do without: the cheap, abundant power their competitors already enjoy, a supply chain built around them, and a state that guards a national asset rather than auctioning it. The hard part of a British revival - the talent, the nerve, the engineering - is already done, and was done again this week, by people who deserve a far better country than the one currently sitting above them.

We just taught an engine to breathe fire and exhale water. The least we owe the men and women who managed it is a government and a state as brilliant as they are.

[Arbitrage Andy @ArbitrageAndy1]

26 year olds today: "my anxiety is high, I am overwhelmed by my email job"

26 year olds in 1944:

[ARCHITECT. 🇯🇵⚓ @ArcUchenna]

THE MOST BRILLIANT LAWYER EVER ⚖️⚖️⚖️
James Spader is brilliant. so underrated. he could orate the directions on a toilet roll packet classically.
BOSTON LEGAL-A GREAT MOVIE.
I ask again 'WHERE IS OUR CONSCIENCE?
10/10 🔥
🎬 BOSTON LEGAL A

[Maxi @AllForProgress_]

82 years ago this morning, a man of 31 from Middlesbrough waded onto Gold Beach in Normandy and, before the light went, did the thing that would make him the only man awarded a Victoria Cross for the actions of D-Day itself.

His name was Stanley Hollis. Before the war he had driven lorries and worked as a sandblaster. On 6 June 1944, a company sergeant-major in the Green Howards, he spotted a German pillbox his company had walked straight past. He went at it himself, up the open slope into the machine-gun fire, cleared it with a Sten and grenades, and took a second position and its occupants prisoner. Later that day, near a village called Crépon, two of his men lay pinned in the open under a German field gun and as good as dead. He went back out for them, into the fire, and brought them in. He had taken them in there, was his reasoning, so it fell to him to get them out.

That is more or less the whole of it. No speech, no pageant, no press release. A lorry driver from Teesside decided that other men's lives were his to answer for, and walked into the guns, twice, to make it good.

My dad was born in '61. We often sit and marvel at the fact that he is the full-way, and me half-way, through our fighting ages as men, and neither of us have ever been called up to war. We are the lucky few. But it is worth being honest, on this morning of all mornings, about what has thinned out between the country my dad and I have known, and Sgt. Major Hollis'.

Hollis did not wait to be told. He did not film the pillbox and tag the relevant authority. He saw what needed doing, judged it his to do, and did it. That mortal reflex - take responsibility, act, and expect no official to come and save you - was once an ordinary thing here, bred into ordinary men. Two generations of being managed and waited upon have quietly bred much of it not out but into deep dormancy.

The men of that generation did not cross the Channel in 1944 for a Britain that waits for permission to act, nor for one that watches its own dying boys handcuffed on the pavement. They did it for something they felt in their bones and would never have trusted to an institutional memorandum: a free people, fit to govern and defend itself, worth the dying for.

We owe them more than a poppy and a minute's silence. We owe them the vision of that country.

Stanley Hollis came home, kept a pub, and died in 1972. There are barely any of them left now, very old and very quiet. The decent thing would be to become a country of which they might be proud.

[Artur Nadolny @ArturNadol7566]

SHE REPORTED CHILD ABUSE 181 TIMES. BRITAIN SAID NOT NOW, THANKS.

Sara Rowbotham was an NHS sexual health coordinator in Rochdale. Between 2005 and 2011 she filed 181 detailed referrals to Greater Manchester Police and social services.

Each one named victims. Each one described systematic rape and trafficking of girls as young as 11. Each one went nowhere.

She was not ignored because the evidence was weak. She was ignored because the evidence was inconvenient.

Authorities labelled her not credible. Her team was dismissed. The official reason given for inaction was community cohesion.

Read that again.

Community cohesion. While children were being passed between men like property, the priority was keeping things quiet.

She was made redundant in 2014.

A 2024 independent review confirmed every referral she filed was credible, substantive and appropriately communicated. The same review identified 96 men still considered an active risk to children. Still out there. In 2024. Because the original response scraped only the surface and called it a job done.

Five police officers refused to cooperate with the review. They were not charged. They were not recalled. They retired on pensions.

Sara Rowbotham got an MBE.

The system that failed 181 times got a press release about lessons learned.

If this does not alarm you, you have not understood it yet.

@BBC @guardian @AndyBurnhamGM

[Camilla Tominey @CamillaTominey]

The electorate has had enough of 'the media'? No, Gordon, they've had enough of an incompetent government which, to quote Pat McFadden, taxes them to pay benefits; of an economically illiterate Chancellor destroying businesses and increasing unemployment; of a police force that thinks racism is a worse crime than murder; of judges who refuse to jail teenage rapists who filmed themselves degrading their victims. They've had enough of so-called progressives telling them women can have penises and had it up to here with Islamists and other useful idiots mourning murderous mullahs on our streets. They've had enough of being branded "far right" by actual antisemites. But most of all - they've had enough of denialists like you pretending that none of this is happening.

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

Let’s nail this state lie once and for all. The government is NOT increasing defence spending by £270 billion during this parliament. It is a ludicrous claim.
Yet one Keir Starmer made to Parliament’s Liaison Committee in March: Labour, he said, will “spend £270 billion MORE (my emphasis) than we would otherwise have done on defence” in this Parliament.
Starmer has always been weak on facts and figures but even by his standards this is a massive porkie.
This is the truth: £270 billion is the total cumulative projected defence spending for the four financial years from 2025/26 up to and including 2028/29 lumped together.
It is NOT even the cumulative increase in defence spending during these years.
Nobody (except perhaps Gordon Brown) speaks about public spending in this way, unless the intention is massively to mislead.
By 28/29 defence spending is projected to be £13 billion a year more than at the start of the period. So not exactly £270 billion. But I guess if you’re going to lie you might as well make it a whopper.

[Andrew Bridgen @ABridgen]

RIP David Bellamy. A man who told the truth and presented the science despite it costing him his position and reputation.
True hero. History will be kind to him.

[Tawadotcom @Tawadotcom]

life hacks everyday💡

[Robin Monotti @robinmonotti]

JOHN CLAUSER, 2022 PHYSICS NOBEL PRIZE WINNER:

"I can very confidently assert, there is no climate emergency.
As much as it may upset many people, my message is the planet is NOT in peril.

Atmospheric CO2 and methane have negligible effect on the climate.
The policies government have been implementing are totally unnecessary and should be eliminated.
So far, [we] have totally misidentified what is the dominant process in controlling the climate, and all of the various models are based on incomplete and incorrect physics.
The dominant process, is “the cloud-sunlight-reflexivity thermostat mechanism.
Clouds are all bright white, and they reflected 90% of the sunlight back into space making them the most crucial yet most overlooked aspect of the climate system.
Two-thirds of the Earth are ocean. The Pacific Ocean alone is half the Earth. The average cloud cover for the Earth is 67%; about 50% over land and 75% over oceans.
I claim that the above conspicuous properties of clouds are the missing part of the puzzle."

[Sebastián Puig ⚓ @Lentejitas]

“El peor enemigo del socialismo no es el capitalismo. Es la realidad”
- Margaret Thatcher

[Declaration of Memes @LibertyCappy]

Which countries place the highest tax burdens on their citizens?

👇