Richard Hollis

Can I interest you in a pre-loved motor vehicle?

[Race @multiplanet1]

A young SpaceX employee asked Elon what happens if they fail to reach Mars in his lifetime. The room was full of engineers and the question landed heavier than anyone expected.

It was a simple question but it cut to the core of everything SpaceX exists for. The entire company, every late night, every exploded prototype, every engineer who missed their kid's birthday for a launch window, it all points at Mars. What if it doesn't happen in time?

Elon paused.

He said that the goal was never for him personally to walk on Mars. The goal was to build the infrastructure that makes it inevitable. That even if he dies before the first crew lands, the system he built would carry the mission forward without him.

He said the rockets, the factories, the team, the culture, all of it is designed to outlast any single person. Including him. Especially him.

Then he said something that reportedly moved people in the room.

He said that if he thought success depended on him being alive, he would have already failed. The whole point is building something that doesn't need its founder to keep going.

He compared it to a cathedral. The architects of medieval cathedrals knew they would die before the building was finished. They designed it anyway. They poured their life into something they would never see completed because the completion wasn't the point. The commitment was.

SpaceX is his cathedral. He may never set foot on Mars. But the road between here and there will exist because he refused to accept that nobody was building it.

The most ambitious man alive has already made peace with the possibility that his greatest achievement might happen after he's gone. That's not failure. That's faith in something bigger than yourself.

[Al Carns @AlistairCarns]

Five tests for the next Prime Minister.

[Merryn Somerset Webb @MerrynSW]

To repeat. The UK is not ungovernable. It is badly governed. These are different things.

[Richard Hollis @UsedCarHead]

@wallaceme Saw this recently, tank clearance….

[Richard Hollis @UsedCarHead]

@ListerLawrence

[The Farmer's Dog @FamersDog]

An update and a message from Jeremy.

“Thank you so much for all the kind messages I've had but now, an announcement.”

[Northampton Saints 😇 @SaintsRugby]

A season’s work made good in 80 minutes.

Gallagher PREM Champions 🏆

[Richard Hollis @UsedCarHead]

Moscow air defence addendum, it’s worse than useless it was responsible for the most iconic damage shot of the day

[OSINTtechnical @Osinttechnical]

New footage confirms that an errant Russian surface to air missile was responsible for the tank roof toss at the Moscow Oil Refinery this morning.

[Kate from Kharkiv @BohuslavskaKate]

HOLY SMOKES! Moscow right now 🔥🔥🔥

[Richard Hollis @UsedCarHead]

@PhilipN_Auto Not sure the 50,000 people who are no longer on the payroll this month would agree with that

[Richard Hollis @UsedCarHead]

Moscow’s air defence in action…

…spoiler, it’s not very good 💥💥💥

[OSINTtechnical @Osinttechnical]

This appears to be a second angle:

[Sophy Ridge @SophyRidgeSky]

🚨Sir Mark Rowley has just told me London will be “less safe” by the end of the year because he’ll have to lose 500-700 officers from doing frontline jobs after Sir Sadiq Khan blocked plans to use Palantir AI

Q - You wanted to roll out AI provided by Palantir to try and speed up tasks in the Met like searching through reports, searching through phone data. Sadiq Khan, mayor of London, said, no, that's not happening. You've been blocked from doing it. So what does that mean?

ROWLEY: I'm having to shrink the Metropolitan Police because of our budget, so we've shrunk by 3,300 people in 3 years. We're going to lose another 1,150 people this year. We had a plan to avoid doing any damage to the policing of the streets by using technology to automate behind the scenes, as well as improving what officers could do. Now that's been blocked we're going to be taking between 500 and 700 officers out of frontline services equivalent…. 500 to 700 officers and staff who were part of delivering services to London, maybe from call handling through to street policing, we're going to have to reduce that. That will have an effect on the streets of London. That's why we were trying to do a sort of a sort of rapid tech procurement to make a difference for Londoners.”

SOPHY RIDGE: Will it make London less safe?

SIR MARK ROWLEY: “Well, we're going to be smaller at the end of the year. So it'll be less safe at the end of the year than it was otherwise.”

[David Wolfson @DXW_KC]

Faced with a choice between a Defence Secretary who wanted to spend more on our armed forces, a Chancellor who wouldn’t, and an Attorney General who enjoys suing them, the Prime Minister decided he could do without … the Defence Secretary.

[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.

[Danny Shaw @DannyShawNews]

NEW. The woman who was strangled, beaten and raped by Paul Quinn in Salford in 2003 is a "hero", said Mr Justice Bright.

His remarks at the start of the sentencing hearing at Manchester Crown Court must be read. I don't think I've read anything like them before from a judge in a Crown Court:

[Kyle Sheldon ⚽️🇺🇸 @kylesheldon]

Is this the best World Cup team photo of all time?

Bravo, Norway 🇳🇴⚔️

[Richard Hollis @UsedCarHead]

@TeamUnion_UK @chhcalling He retired and his seat was still won by his party, so I think that makes him a winner, perhaps you might try listening now…

[Nick Timothy MP @NJ_Timothy]

Today we remember the Battle of Danny Boy, where our soldiers fought with huge bravery.

Instead of celebrating them as the best of us, Lord Hermer went after them.

He knew allegations of war crimes were almost certainly baseless.

And Starmer handpicked him as Attorney General.

[Andrew Griffith MP @griffitha]

What laws would you pass to make our country better and actually FIX things, not just rehearse the problem statement yet again?

With the Kings Speech in Parliament this week, we Conservatives have set out constructive plans of what we would do.

And yes, much of it reverses mistakes made by previous Conservative administrations as well as a failed Westminster consensus of more than 20 years because changed leadership means a different approach. That is precisely the point.

That list:

•Welfare Reform Bill
•Back Our High Streets Bill
•Get Britain Working Bill
•Reducing Bureaucracy Bill
•Save British Industry Bill
•Cheap Energy Bill
•Get Britain Drilling Bill
•ECHR (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill
•Human Rights Act (Repeal) Bill
•Protecting Our Borders Bill
•Rights and Responsibilities of Citizenship Bill
•Take Back Our Streets Bill
•Sovereign Defence Fund Bill
•Protect Our Veterans Bill
•Restoring School Standards Bill
•Youth Opportunity Bill

[Stella Doves🦖 🇬🇧 💚🤍💜 @StellaDoves]

Your mandate was to implement the policies in your manifesto.
You didn't have a mandate to destroy the country!
You were NOT given a mandate to:
💠Remove winter fuel allowance for the elderly
💠Allow abortions up till birth
💠Implement digital ID
💠Remove jury trials
💠Assist the suicide of our elderly or infirm
💠Prosecute our veterans
💠Tax us to oblivion
💠Make our country a laughing stock
💠Implement suicidal Net Zero - Increasing our electricity bills to the point of being the most expensive in the world at 3x America's prices, decimating our competitiveness on the world stage.
💠Refuse to control our borders, how many gangs have you actually smashed?

AND many more... Your party is a traitorous disgrace & will be removed & replaced at the earliest opportunity.