Jonathan O'Leary

Catholic Dad Grandad & Catenian

[Douglas McWilliams @DMcWilliams_UK]

(1/3) Report for Civitas by McW brothers out tonight. Shows UK manufacturers pay £16.6 billion directly for energy. At US prices they would pay £5.2 billion; Chinese £6.4 billion and even the most expensive, at German prices £11.3 billion.

[David Collier @mishtal]

A question:
More than 30 Christians have just been murdered in Nigeria by Islamist gangs. Yesterday, a mass burial was held.

Eleven of the victims were Christian children - butchered with machetes.

So why doesn't @BBCNews (or the rest ofUK media) want to tell you about it?

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

This is what the Mr Polanski and his Greens mean by ‘sorting out the press.’ They mean state control — the aim of authoritarians on the Right and Left everywhere.

[Dr. Maalouf ‏ @realMaalouf]

It has been 50 years since this photo was taken. Palestinian terrorists invaded the Lebanese Christian town of Damour and massacred 582 Christian civilians.

It was an apocalypse, said a priest who survived the massacre.

“They were coming in thousands, shouting ‘Allahu Akbar! Let us attack them for the Arabs, let us offer a holocaust to Mohammad.’

They were slaughtering everyone, men, women and children.”

Men were lined up against the walls of their homes and gunned down.

Women were tortured and gang-raped.

Babies were shot in the back of the head.

Pregnant women had their babies cut out of the womb.

Just one of the many massacres committed against Christians by Palestinians. This is how Muslims became the majority in Lebanon.

[Sr. Mary Joseph Calore, SSCJ @sscjusa]

STORY CREDIT: The Historian's Den on Facebook

On September 18, 1918, during the Battle of Épehy, this moment was captured during the Allies' Hundred Days Offensive, the final, decisive push of World War I on the Western Front. Near the village of Épehy in northern France, Allied forces launched an attack against heavily fortified German outposts guarding the formidable Hindenburg Line.

Fought through grueling trench conditions and heavy artillery barrages, the operation succeeded in breaking through Germany's outer defenses, clearing the path for the major Allied offensive that ultimately forced the Armistice in November 1918.

Photographed by British official war photographer Second Lieutenant Thomas Keith Aitken (Imperial War Museum collection, item Q 11336), the image captures a poignant display of shared humanity amidst the horrors of war. Military chaplains and medical stretcher-bearers on both sides worked tirelessly under extreme peril, often exposing themselves to heavy fire to tend to the wounded and administer last rites.

Here, a British padre kneels in prayer over a fatally wounded German combat medic, illustrating how personal empathy, faith, and basic human dignity persisted even between enemy combatants during the bloodiest closing months of the conflict.

[Toby Young @toadmeister]

With green subsidies now accounting for three quarters of the price of electricity, the cost of Net Zero to the public is much higher than politicians are willing to admit, say Professor Gordon Hughes and Dr Lee Moroney.
https://t.co/3E7WPCCJP9

[Peter Clack @PeterDClack]

It must now be seen as the greatest blunder in human history. And it was all done on purpose. No public relations campaign can change that.

Yes, the world is still a bit warmer. CO₂ is still a bit higher. But NASA satellites have revealed the recent rise in carbon dioxide has sparked the greatest expansion of green leaf area 'in recorded history'.

The entire human story has been about our dogged survival in a harsh, dangerous world, thanks mainly to sheer luck. Our species is thriving in today's warmer Holocene interglacial cycle, which has lasted 11,700 years. This covers the entire rise of all human civilisation, every single empire, every invention and everything that makes us modern, from razor blades to spaceships.

The observable data throughout geological history suggests that today's cooler temperatures lie mostly within natural variability. The natural world invented the miracles of multicellular life and DNA on its own. It doesn't need human intervention. The Earth will run its course despite our interference.

However, many are unaware that we still are living in the Late Cenozoic Ice Age, beginning 33.9 million years ago when permanent ice sheets formed on Antarctica. Ice ages may be rare, but we are in one, whether we like it or not. Earth has seen just five major ice ages in its long history - the Huronian, Cryogenian, Andean-Saharan, Karoo, and today's Late Cenozoic Ice Age.

Today's global average temperature is estimated at 15°C, but this is not hot in geological terms. Our modern era sits deep within a major cold trough. It is up to 10 degrees cooler than the long-term average range of 18–26°C.

It was the Industrial Revolution though, that kicked off the modern world, beginning around 1750. And the discovery of coal, oil and gas created the most successful period in human history. We have medical miracles and the astonishing technology to prove it.

CO₂ levels over 250 years from 290 ppm to 426 ppm have created a massive spreading green canopy. Agriculture has exploded beyond anything ever seen before. It has not caused a global disaster.

And Net Zero, by the way, has never been fully explained - other than swapping promissory notes at annual summits worth trillions of dollars. There is every likelihood it will not change a thing. It's nothing more than a throw of the dice. Yet the error strewn 'transition' to wind-solar is expected to cost $275 trillion - equal to 2.5 times global GDP.

This could have built up to 27,500 nuclear power stations worldwide, ending any doubts about pure energy.

Global temperatures have risen by around 1.4°C since the Industrial Revolution 250 years ago. This came after the end of the 500-year Little Ice Age in Europe, the coldest spell in 10,000 years. Cold usually brings famine, misery and an early death.

Until the past few decades, most people only learned about CO₂ in biology classes at school. It is where we discovered this trace gas is the building block of complex life, the engine of photosynthesis and the oxygen we breathe.

The CO₂ miracle isn't taking a bank holiday.

[Lord Mongrove @Bishop_Beesley]

A quick reminder that our government is spending £8Billion on the junk science of carbon capture but can't find a couple of million for Jodrell Bank and real science.

The former is of course a money laundering scheme to kick back money to political doners, the latter isn't.

[PeterSweden @PeterSweden7]

The mainstream media has tried to portray the wildfires that is happening in Europe now as a result of climate change.

France just announced they have arrested 162 people in connection with starting fires.

[Ben Graham @BenGrahamUK]

Pakistan has its own space programme, yet we send it £133 million a year in aid while shutting down Britain's largest space telescope because we “can't afford” a few million.

This telescope helped inspire generations of scientists.

If we keep cutting investment in our own scientific infrastructure while other nations push ahead, we'll only fall further behind.

I hope this decision is reversed. Britain should be investing in its future, not dismantling it.

[Sachin Jose @Sachinettiyil]

"At the root of the collapse of the West, there is a cultural identity crisis... Many countries today ignore their own history. This self-suffocation naturally leads to a decadence that opens the path to new, barbaric civilizations." -

Robert Cardinal Sarah

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Jeremy Clarkson made £144 farming a thousand acres in his first year.

In year six he lost five thousand.

His own words to his land agent: dispiriting enough to clear a hundred and forty-four quid at the start, and here we are six years on, down five grand. The harvest had been projected at thirty-seven thousand profit. Weather and prices took it.

Now look at what that thousand acres has behind it that yours does not.

One of the best land agents in the country. A farm manager who has worked that ground since he was a teenager. A farm shop with a queue down the lane, a pub, bestselling books, more than a quarter of a million in subsidy across three years, and a television production paying for the entire thing to be filmed.

It is the most commercially advantaged thousand acres in Britain, and the farming still loses money.

That figure should end every conversation about British agriculture, and it is the one number that never makes it onto a campaign graphic. Not the glyphosate. Not the pig housing. The margin.

Because everything people object to on a farm grows straight out of it. The field pushed to the very edge. The hedge that came out because the government paid to have it removed. The shed instead of the yard. The supermarket contract signed below cost because the alternative was no contract. Nobody intensified out of malice. They were priced into it over sixty years by a policy that decided cheap groceries mattered more than a countryside, and by a retail sector that kept the difference.

Britain now grows around sixty per cent of its own food. More than a third of British farmers are past sixty-five.

The man with the Amazon cheque cannot make a thousand acres pay.

The seventy-year-old with three hundred and no film crew is doing it anyway, and being told by people who have never sold a tonne of anything that he is the problem.

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

1. Transfer the tens of billions earmarked for net zero to defence and supply chain resilience, to create a major industrial/defence sector, thereby creating skilled jobs in UK, rather than China (as net zero does)
2. Radical tough love welfare reform to get 1m people of working age into work, thereby cutting the welfare bill and increasing the tax base. Coupled with massive expansion of German-class STEM skill apprenticeships.
3. Radical reform of planning laws to stop nimbys/greens from thwarting every major infrastructure development. Put judges/courts in their place when it comes to such matters.
4. Put rocket boosters under high-speed rail link between Leeds-Manchester-Liverpool. Brook no opposition/delay.
5. Unleash North Sea oil/gas + slash energy bills by removing all green levies. New breed of gas-fired and smaller nuke generating stations.
Much more to suggest. But this should be good for starters.

[Lord (David) Alton @DavidAltonHL]

Some welcome common sense here...

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

Aren’t you the minister for safeguarding women against violence?
And you have to apologise for what you tweeted after a fellow female politician was violently murdered?
Isn’t that a resigning matter?

[Proudofus.uk @ProudofusUK]

⚓🇬🇧🇳🇱

For 300 years, corsairs came to enslave Europeans.

Not from a colony. From Europe's own coasts.🏴‍☠️

Spain, Italy, France, even Ireland and Iceland felt their reach.

One historian's estimate puts the number enslaved above a million across the centuries.

That figure is disputed. In both directions. What is not disputed: every government paid ransom, and paid again, and the raids never stopped.

🕊️ In 1816 Britain tried one more time, through words alone. The Dey of Algiers agreed to stop. For a while, it held.

⚡ Then in May 1816, around 200 fishermen under British protection were massacred at Bona. Britain had run out of patience.

Admiral Lord Exmouth was given a fleet. And Britain did not sail alone: a Dutch squadron joined him, under Vice-Admiral van Capellen. British and Dutch, sailing as one force.

💥 August 1816. The combined fleet stood off the walls of Algiers. Exmouth sent his terms in. The Dey refused. At half past two, the guns opened fire.

For nine hours, British and Dutch guns hammered the harbour defences. The corsair fleet in harbour was destroyed at anchor. Allied casualties, British and Dutch together, passed 900 killed and wounded. It was a hard fight, not an easy one.

By morning the defences lay silent. Exmouth demanded surrender. The Dey accepted.

🔓 1,083 slaves were freed at Algiers itself. Men and women of many nations and many faiths. The Dey repaid around 80,000 pounds sterling in ransom money.

Counting earlier releases that year, around 3,000 people walked free across all of 1816. Not walking free in a single day. Freed across the whole of that year.

The treaty broke the back of a 300-year system. It did not end the raids overnight. Raiding returned in the years after, on a smaller scale. It was the French conquest of Algiers, from 1830, that finally ended it for good.

Britain and the Netherlands had broken a system three centuries old. Not for empire. For people who had no one else to answer for them.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

British and Dutch sailors stood against a system nobody else had stopped.

Knowing their story, you stand a little taller.

We are the home of British heroes. There is a place for you with us. 👇🙏

👉 https://t.co/wN9S2gRmFj 👈

Be part of us. ☝️🇬🇧
Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧

[Proudofus.uk @ProudofusUK]

🇬🇧 THEY TOLD YOU A STORY. 🇬🇧

Colonisers. Slavers. Oppressors. And you were supposed to feel ashamed.

Not for what you done... But for WHO YOU ARE. 🇬🇧

So we tested it. Britain wrote everything down, so we opened the books. 📖

Turns out fewer than 1 man in 10 could vote in the year Britain banned the slave trade. No woman could. Your ancestors could hang for stealing a sheep, get shipped across the world for petty theft, or go down a mine at 8 years old. In Manchester, the average age of death in a labouring family was 17.

They weren't running the slave trade. They were underneath it too.

Which is what makes what happened next worth knowing.

In 1772 an enslaved man named James Somerset walked free from an English court, because English law couldn't hold a slave.

In 1791, 300,000 families just stopped buying slave sugar. No march, no riot, just a decision made at 300,000 kitchen tables.

In 1792, 519 petitions carrying 390,000 names hit Parliament, most signed by people who couldn't vote themselves.

In 1807, Britain banned the trade.

Then the slave owners sent Britain a bill for the 800,000 people they still held. 💷 £20 million. About 40% of the entire government budget at the time.

The Treasury says it wasn't paid off until 2015. So if your family paid British tax before then, they helped buy 800,000 people their freedom.

From 1808 the Royal Navy spent 60 years hunting slave ships at sea: 1,600 stopped, 150,000 people freed, and 1,600 British sailors dead, mostly of disease, buried thousands of miles from home. ⚓

In 1816 they ended two centuries of Barbary corsairs enslaving Europeans.

In 1896 a war that lasted 38 minutes ended slavery in Zanzibar. 🇹🇿

Almost every country on Earth outlaws slavery today.

That fight was paid for largely at British expense, by British hands.🇬🇧

So why haven't you heard any of this?

Because within living memory, someone rewrote the story. You got taught the crime. Not the cure.

The powerful exploited the world. They exploited their own people first. It was those people who ended slavery. 🇬🇧

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

History got rewritten once, in living memory, by no one who was ever named or held to account.

We are ordinary people doing what ordinary people have always done. Opening the books. Refusing to look away.

This is how we fight back. Fact by fact. Story by story. Name by name.

We are the home of British heroes. There is a place for you in it.

If you can afford to support what we do: https://t.co/rih7iKwnvf

Be part of us. ☝️🇬🇧 Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧

[James Melville 🚜 @JamesMelville]

“Net Zero: Let’s make UK energy the most expensive in Europe, shut our factories, destroy jobs and local economies, plaster solar panels over thousands of acres of farmland, spend £billions turning off wind turbines because we can’t use their energy supply, spend £30 billion on carbon capture machines, ban new oil and gas licenses in the North Sea but spend £40billion buying North Sea oil and gas from Norway, blame cow burps, reduce red meat consumption and freeze pensioners so global CO2 drops by 0.0003%. But we will also build hundreds of AI data centres that guzzle natural resources and energy. China’s still building coal plants like it’s 1950 but at least we get to feel superior while the rest of the world laughs over our sheer stupidity. Genius.”

[Laura Dodsworth @BareReality]

Look to the Middle East. Then look to Europe.

[Blue Labour @blue_labour]

Reform are neck and neck with Labour with trade unionists. The excellent @dsnorthnorth explains why.