Olivia
Online
Rich Price
@RichiePrice
i want to go to Mongolia
Watford, spiritually at least.
Joined February 2009
978 Following
214 Followers
9.6K Posts
For all their financial and footballing travails, Everton represent an attractive proposition for an intelligent investor because of the number of people who are so passionate about the club. Takeovers are all about the money but Everton are worth buying because they mean so much to so many people. The numbers to look at are not only financial but also those who live and breathe Everton.
If Dan Friedkin needed to do due diligence into the heart and soul of Everton Football Club he need only look at the number of staff and fans signing up for the Goodison Sleepout on October 11. They’re again fund-raising for local kids at risk of homelessness.
Or Friedkin could look at the 60+ other vital initiatives that Everton In The Community are involved in, including mental health projects, suicide prevention, education interventions and empowering disabled people. Just because the tenure of majority shareholder Farhad Moshiri descended into shambles, especially on recruitment at certain times, didn’t mean the club was inherently flawed. There is plenty right about Everton.
Clubs are so much more than a first team, even if footballing fortunes dominate 90% of headlines. Managers, players and owners come and go. A club’s heartbeat is maintained by the people who stay, by loyal supporters and selfless staff. Friedkin will learn why Everton are known as the People’s Club, a beacon of hope and force for good in local wards amongst the most deprived 1% of neighbourhoods nationally.
Friedkin will see the passion of the fanbase, and the number of good people who have fought for the club, whether protesting against points deductions, calling on Moshiri to show some accountability or backing the team. (Some fans did barrack players at London Euston last month but they’re very much a minority).
The sight of Julie Clarke, a member of the club’s Fan Advisory Board, sitting behind Premier League CEO Richard Masters during a DCMS hearing in January showed the lengths Everton supporters will go to protect their club and hold power to account.
Clarke, FAB chair Dave Kelly, a tireless presence at the match-day food bank outside Goodison and Anfield, and the countless others who share their passion are the lifeblood of Everton. Friedkin buys into a strong and often very vocal family. He buys a distressed asset but an asset with huge potential for recovery because of the people. He famously flew his own Spitfire in the film “Dunkirk” so he’s used to getting historic British institutions off the ground.
Everton fans have been down so many promising pathways that turned into cul de sacs that there will inevitably be an element of caution amidst celebrations. Friedkin has to pass assorted tests of the Premier League, FA and the Financial Conduct Authority.
Fans will also be looking at events at Friedkin’s other club, Roma, in turmoil after the controversial sacking of coach and legend Daniele De Rossi and resignation of CEO Lina Souloukou. But they will certainly be delighted to see the back of Moshiri.
There are many other attractions to Friedkin, including the historic nature of the club, one of the founding members of both the Football League and Premier League. Everton have a manager in Sean Dyche widely respected within football, despite recent criticism following poor results and performances (and the caveat here is that new owners often like new managers). They have good players like Jarrad Branthwaite, Jordan Pickford, Dominic Calvert-Lewin, James Garner, Iliman Ndiaye, amongst others, although the squad still needs further strengthening in January.
Everton have a magnificent new stadium rising on the banks of the Mersey which will add to the city’s skyline, tourism traffic, employment market and businesses. Bramley-Moore Dock – the Blue Camp - will be a stunning home for Everton, a revenue stream by the river, and a symbol of a new era. And the stadium will be full. Even if dropping into the Championship, supporters of the People's Club will turn up in numbers. #EFC
accidentally discovered a guy in my comments that cannot fathom how Harvard’s financial aid program works and is just insulting anyone that explains it to him
Matt Walsh: "Nobody thinks that it will benefit America to become more like Haiti."
@ryangrim delivers a brutal takedown of Walsh’s naive stance, exposing how centuries of U.S. interference have crippled the island: "We wouldn’t want to be like basically a colony that the entire West spends 200 years punishing after the Haitian Revolution...They elect Aristide & we overthrow Aristide. Then they elect Jovenel Moïse, & Jovenel Moïse is assassinated...& then we install the prime minister in 2021."
Matt Walsh: "Let Haiti be Haiti and take care of them. Let them take care of themselves and their own problems."
Ryan Grim: "Your assumption that Haitian people are solely responsible for their plight ignores the significant role the U.S. has played in shaping their current situation."
"That room was more than half empty... how are we supposed to get justice when they don't even care?"
Vice-Chair of Grenfell United Karim Mussilhy says he was surprised by how many MPs left the Commons before Prime Minister's statement on Grenfell Inquiry report.
#Newsnight
This is what our city is about.
Posting this clip again for the 100th time
Forget riots - why not compete in the The EDL-ympics! 🎾🥋🏓
A safe space to express your misdirected hatred 😃
Liverpool tonight.
This is incredible. A former police officer, under oath, has said the police didn’t smear the family of Stephen Lawrence. “That’s a security services job…scrap that last bit”.
The broadcast is then suspended!
I've just been sentenced to 5 years in prison.
The longest ever for nonviolent action.
The 'crime'?
Giving a talk on civil disobedience as an effective, evidence-based method for stopping the elite from putting enough carbon in the atmosphere to send us to extinction.
I have given hundreds of similar speeches encouraging nonviolent action and have never been arrested for it. This time I was an advisor to the M25 motorway disruption, recommending the action to go ahead to wake up the British public to societal collapse.
I was not part of the planning or action itself.
In the trial, I swore before God to tell the truth. The truth is the science. The science is clear. We're heading for billions of deaths and ecological collapse. To prove this, I presented the jury with a 250-page dossier of leading scientists' research as evidence in my defence. This was denied by the judge as an invalid - climate science is now illegal in the British courtroom.
I then began to speak about the apocalyptic conditions humanity faces - floods, wildfires, mass heat deaths - and was silenced by the judge. He sent out the jury and threatened to arrest me if I didn't stop. Instead, I stayed in the dock and argued that until I was given the right to complete my defence – I would not move. Even the prosecution tried to argue in my defence and the judge let me continue.
When the jury had shuffled in again, I spoke about the legal concept of “equality of arms” – that as the prosecution had had a right to lay facts over a whole week, I also wanted an equal opportunity. I spoke of various cases where juries had acquitted defendants when they had heard the facts, such as the Extinction Rebellion cracking of Shell's windows in 2018 as a reasonable action against criminal destruction. The Dutch Supreme Court has even said that all governments have a legal obligation to prevent the emission of greenhouse gases. Whilst the prosecution accepted that emissions pose an existential threat, for the first time in British history no less, they still tried to convict us for public nuisance rather than praise us for trying to stop those emissions. Given the objectivity of existential threat, there were overwhelming grounds to be involved in a plan to cause some disruption to the M25.
In the British law on public nuisance, there is a ‘reasonable excuse’ clause. Science says there is an overwhelming threat to my life, my children, you and your children. To argue there is not a reasonable excuse directly defies the wish of this legislation. Things are happening that cause harm – people are engaged in physical acts to stop that harm – it doesn’t matter whether it’s a protest or not.
As I began to offer up some case law, the judge kept intervening telling me I was “wasting my time” and ordering the jury to disregard me. To illustrate that I was not talking about my motivations but speaking about real necessity, I referred to a famous case over a decision to operate on conjoined twins with the likelihood that one would die. In this dilemma, I quoted the 19th Century principle that the action was necessary if the threat faced was inevitable and irrevocable, that no more should be done than essential, and that it must be proportionate. I argued that there was a “duress of circumstances” including the objective danger I’ve experienced as a farmer unable to grow food, and the global significance of “food insecurity” – a euphemism for famine and starvation.
There has never been a moment in history where ‘necessity’ has been more supported by objective facts – more than 10,000 scientific and peer-reviewed papers, indicating an outcome of mass starvation and death from man-made climate collapse.
In response, Judge Hehir called for an early lunch and dismissed the jury. He turned to me and warned that I wasn't a lawyer and that “this is not the Roger Hallam show”.
He then gave me just 15 more minutes to put forward my “beliefs” - a totally fucking incoherent statement. This isn’t belief - it’s the objective threat of destruction of property and livelihoods of billions of people and the secondary effects of famine i.e. war, rape, and torture.
I outlined four characteristics of the effects of emitting greenhouse gases (GHGs) into the atmosphere, describing them as easy to understand, but unique to human experience and so horrific that they are impossible to assimilate.
1. They have universal effects – what’s emitted in India affects the USA, a melting Arctic affects Argentina and so on.
2. The ultimate consequence of GHGs in the atmosphere is that you destroy the basis of life – some experts say for 100,000 years, others 50 million, and some say the Earth will simply become like Venus. In other words, for the first time in human history, a group of people, namely a 1% of wealthy elites, are responsible for destroying everything forever.
3. The Earth has reached a 1.5˚C rise in temperature already and at some point in the next decade we’ll have triggered geological tipping points – regardless of any action, we’ll have started unstoppable change. In other words, we don’t have time to not pull that person from in front of the lorry, if we don’t act now it will be too late. Some scientists contend it’s already too late – the UN has said we have two years in which to make radical changes – so we’re not just trying to stop people from doing bad things, but to prevent them from doing bad things which will create badness forever.
4. There is not an insubstantial possibility of entire human extinction as a result of pumping GHGs into the atmosphere, we’re talking about a crime fundamentally different from any other in history. This, I said, is why I want to be able to show the jury expert evidence.
The judge, showing obvious disinterest, told me to wrap up in a few minutes.
Returning to the idea of ‘necessity’, I gave more examples. We agree that if a man pulls a dagger out in a pub and someone else pushes him and disarms him then there would be no question of prosecution.
In Ireland, a cyclist who stopped and intervened when an immigrant was being attacked became a national hero. But what if someone plants a bomb under the table in a pub, set to explode in 30 minutes? If you push him over, grab the bomb and take it out to the police, you wouldn’t be prosecuted, even though the harm you’re trying to prevent is in the future.
And what about those people pulling down houses in the Great Fire Of London? Their action was to try and prevent harm in other parts of London if the fire had spread. So just because something causes damage over a long time or space is irrelevant – it comes down to causality. The fact that emissions will cause damage across the planet for millions of years is not a reason to stop it from coming into court. In fact, the massive extent of the time and space is the very reason it should be in every court.
At this point, the judge sent the jury home, and again scoffed at me for defending myself as an “amateur lawyer” getting “amateur results”.
The next day reminded the courtroom that I was under oath to tell the whole truth and would continue with my evidence. The judge immediately ordered the jury out, and when I continued to declare I was under an obligation to continue, the public gallery was cleared and I was warned he would be arrested if he didn’t return to his seat.
Then three police officers arrived. I said I would not resist, but also would not assist in my own arrest. As they forcibly dragged me towards the prisoner dock I announced to the observing journalists that this was “Democracy in Action” - Nonviolent resistance to a grossly unjust system. This obscene miscarriage of justice happened to me five times throughout the trial. What a fucking indignity.
I received no good reason why I could not tell the jury what is blindingly obvious - that the elite putting carbon in the atmosphere will kill billions.
Without the whole truth, it is not a fair trial.
If thousands of people were going to die further up that motorway, we would have a reasonable excuse to disrupt it. Except it's not further up the motorway - it's everyone, all around us. Humanity, gone forever.
The judge began the next morning by bizarrely reading out my Twitter feed, which alerted my followers to the fact I wasn’t allowed to give my whole defence and called for support for a presence outside the court. But then he moved on to gleefully recounting some of the various trolls – why this was any part of a serious trial, no one could fathom. I was ordered to take them down by lunchtime or I’d be in contempt of court. This is a British judge in 2024.
Meanwhile, the UN special rapporteur for Environmental Defenders, Michel Forst sat in the gallery, watching. He had previously put out a statement on the injustice of our treatment. It states that the UK could be breaking international law on the rights of environmental protesters. A repressed, UN phrase for trying to stop the carbon elite from killing us all.
I stood up and told the jury that after they’d been ejected yesterday, I had been arrested and removed, but that they had a right to hear my evidence. Once again, the judge ordered the jury and forcibly removed me. The UN guy watched as I was dragged away. I was sent to prison and couldn’t hear the rest of the day’s trial.
Afterwards, the judge falsely claimed that I was behind the jury protection campaign, Defend Our Juries, and had ‘conned’ vulnerable people into coming to the court. No evidence was given. Fair, right?
The next day I again explained that blocking motorways has direct effects on society e.g. the farmers’ protests quickly changed EU policy, and road protests held fuel prices down. The judge dismissed this by asking whether the action had any effect on global temperatures and told me to sit down. I stayed standing and the judge just left the courtroom. What the fuck? I even looked to the prosecution for help again against the judge’s incoherent madness.
When he came back, he started quoting his favourite movie, Goodfellas, and asked me “What are you still doing here?”. Then he ordered me arrested and sent to prison, again.
Whilst I was jailed, the judge gave my friends a pathetic 15 minutes each to defend themselves. When they also spoke of the necessity for action against mass death from carbon emissions, the judge ordered them all to be arrested. After this gagging, people began to call us the #WholeTruthFive.
Finally, we came to the prosecution's closing statement, where, I kid you not, they argued that the jury must take direction from the judge, that the rule of law keeps our society free from collapse, and that climate change is irrelevant. I, of course, was dismissed as someone who “waffles about the cause”. Not a cofounder of the most influential climate movements in the world and academic on social change. Show trials are about lies, remember?
In response I gave my final statement, from behind the glass panel of the dock, reminding jurors they must be sure, not almost sure or on the verge of being sure, and that they must consider ALL the evidence and make a decision that they have actually been given all the evidence. I reminded them of the placard in the Old Bailey that confirms they can acquit based on their conscience without having to give an explanation and without any legal repercussions.
There are two elements to the indictment - conspiracy and disruption. The prosecution had presented what they say is ‘powerful evidence’ of involvement in the plan, but this is not the same as ‘conclusive evidence’. I was there to make arguments for action, and not directly involved in actual planning.
What does it say about civil liberties if people are imprisoned for making speeches? I offered an alternative explanation for what happened – that a Murdoch-owned newspaper, the Sun, had a journalist who just wanted to make a film of my arrest and so recorded and leaked the public Zoom meeting to the police.
Let me remind you that for this I have already been to prison for four months in 2022 without a trial and have been tagged with an 11pm curfew ever since.
Even during my closing statement, the judge tried to shut me down but I went on. I argued that I just wanted the jury to hear the defendants for a few hours and to present them with three or four expert witnesses to give the whole evidence.
Of course, I wasn’t allowed to mention the ‘C-word’ but the jury had heard the undisputed facts of existential threats – which between them describe an unimaginable harm lasting tens of thousands of years. I simply asked them to consider doing what many other juries have done, let good people go free when they are persecuted by the state.
This was about facts, not beliefs. Without facts, this is not a ‘functioning democracy’ but a government that is facilitating the destruction and death of our population. That’s why UN people sat in on the trial – because we do NOT have a functioning democratic state. If you go and ask people in the street, many would laugh at the idea that they have a say in how this country is run. Plenty of expert witnesses would come and tell us we live in a capitalist democracy, a democracy for the rich. In other words no kind of democracy at all.
In the end, I said to the jury that if I speak the truth to them I may end up in prison. If the lawyers speak the truth to them they may lose their jobs. If the jury speaks the truth, nothing will happen to them. I begged them to consult their conscience and ask themselves if they were really sure we didn’t have a reasonable excuse.
The result of this kangaroo court?
You have guessed it. The jury representative stood up the next day, and one by one gave guilty verdicts for all of us, all unanimous.
After the verdict, the judge accused me of fraud and ‘grifting’ because my social media post asked for donations towards ‘court fees’. A slight miswording by my friend who writes the posts, as there were no such fees in this trial. But of course, there are massive costs around the whole legal team supporting us and the consequences of going to prison. Please donate towards them at https://t.co/Wa0nZ20WDu.
The judge then slandered me by proposing to the jurors that if I was telling lies to obtain money, I might be telling people other lies, and maybe other protesters outside the court were being told lies. He said one of them had been an elderly man hard of hearing and was worried I was exploiting vulnerable people. The public gallery gasped. The man in question was a retired GP in full possession of his faculties with a keen knowledge of the issues – what an insult, and what baseless accusations.
To top it off, he said I was 'incapable of introspection'. Guess I’ll have plenty of time for that now…
The judge finished his attacks by then personally thanking the jury for not being ‘intimidated’ and said “Well done”. He said he didn’t care what we thought of him. He was just 'doing his job'.
This is the banality of evil all over again.
He claimed our conviction was just a result of our “single issue fanaticism”. Again, no bias there from a judge who is planning to fly off on holiday when @JustStop_Oil are planning to disrupt airports…
Repression is increasing around the world. Amnesty just put out a report on the systematic state attacks on peaceful protest. Look it up.
Either we resist the the carbon elites' repression and build a true democracy, led by ordinary people in Citizen’s Assemblies, or Covid-like, ecological and economic shocks spark chaos and fascism. We've seen it over and over again.
It's time to say never again.
Never again will we let fascism produce a holocaust.
Never again we will fail to tell the whole truth: that we face the greatest holocaust ever known, a worldwide gas chamber of carbon that could kill us all.
Today it was me imprisoned for telling the truth.
Next, it could be you.
Join the resistance at https://t.co/PYjMdWeLBh before it’s too late.
The Government of 🇦🇷 Argentina dissolves the Ministry of Women, Gender and Diversity, firing 85% of its employees
America… @JMilei is showing you how it’s done.
Re-sharing something @adamparsons posted a few days ago. This, from our dear, late friend Simon Ricketts, which you may or may not wish to consider ahead of Thursday. X
Umberto Eco, who owned 50,000 books, had this to say about home libraries:
"It is foolish to think that you have to read all the books you buy, as it is foolish to criticize those who buy more books than they will ever be able to read. It would be like saying that you should use all the cutlery or glasses or screwdrivers or drill bits you bought before buying new ones.
"There are things in life that we need to always have plenty of supplies, even if we will only use a small portion.
"If, for example, we consider books as medicine, we understand that it is good to have many at home rather than a few: when you want to feel better, then you go to the 'medicine closet' and choose a book. Not a random one, but the right book for that moment. That's why you should always have a nutrition choice!
"Those who buy only one book, read only that one and then get rid of it. They simply apply the consumer mentality to books, that is, they consider them a consumer product, a good. Those who love books know that a book is anything but a commodity."
Everton Football Club 2023/2024.
Not Giving In.
#EFC
Everton Shareholders issue strong message to Everton ownership:
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