Utopian Wool Gatherer

I have nothing of note to say, but I'M GONNA SAY IT ANYWAY!!!

[Utopian Wool Gatherer @___cheech___]

@Michael90599642 @mrkphllps1 What's shite, MichaelNumbers?

[Utopian Wool Gatherer @___cheech___]

@Fred__Lang @BradRTorgersen Better than Patrick Stewart? Steady on...

[Utopian Wool Gatherer @___cheech___]

@ituajiv @jonathanitua1 Oh, my word!

[Utopian Wool Gatherer @___cheech___]

@mattcoyney Deffo a thing. Which then morphed to "..
and Peter Beardsley's got a big chin"

[Utopian Wool Gatherer @___cheech___]

@wild_horse Who THE FUCK decided letting the Germans have an army again was a good idea?

[Utopian Wool Gatherer @___cheech___]

@Mativenko80 @Ofcom Christ. The Apprentice really is responsible for some of the most reprehensible cunts.

[Utopian Wool Gatherer @___cheech___]

@BannedVids *dong dong*
"Clean up on Aisle 1"

[Jackie Singh @HackingButLegal]

This conversation is playing out in homes across the nation.

[Utopian Wool Gatherer @___cheech___]

@TruthFactChecks @ZiaYusufUK Far left fascist! No such thing. Idiot

[Utopian Wool Gatherer @___cheech___]

@chesscom Don't need to play to know that I've lost

[Utopian Wool Gatherer @___cheech___]

@SuellaBraverman No they're not. Desperate stuff.

[Utopian Wool Gatherer @___cheech___]

@RobertJenrick You're just agitating discontent. Shame on you. Divide and conquer: the oldest trick in the book. We see you.

[Robert Jenrick @RobertJenrick]

Ceuta is our future if we don’t secure our border.

These men are on their way to Calais.

[Utopian Wool Gatherer @___cheech___]

@PDXFato @stevemilton @Romain_Molina It wasn't the best world cup ever. Even the '94 tournament was better. Too many teams; political interference; splitting the games into quarters to name a few reasons.

[Thanos Angelopoulos @Th_Angelopoulos]

Four kids kicking flowers in a park, and somehow it has already been worked out how they'll turn out later in life.

That's nonsense, utter nonsense.

I'm not saying they did nothing. It's a horrible wee thing to do and they probably know it. Or maybe they don't. Either way that isn't a decent argument. It's not even an argument, it's moralising nonsense. The argument is where this comes from, and that gets it backwards every single time.

Right, let's do this properly, shall we?

Working class kids in this country are being left behind. White working class kids are very much included. That isn't a feeling, it's the figures, and it has been for years.

In England, in the last full school year, kids on free school meals were suspended at a rate of 26.66 suspensions per 100 pupils. Kids who weren't on free school meal? At a rate of 5.41. Permanently excluded, 0.32 against 0.05.
Poor kids get permanently excluded at more than 6 times the rate. And by the time they sit their GCSEs they're 19 months behind. Widest since the series started in 2013.

Scotland's no much better either. Of last year's leavers, 27.9% from the poorest fifth of areas went into higher education. From the richest fifth, 63.9%. The gap in leaving school with even one Higher is 37.7% .

Three months after leaving, 6.4% from the poorest areas were unemployed against 1.7% from the richest. Exclusions, 23.9 per 1,000 in the poorest fifth, 6.2 in the richest.

Then there's the bit almost nobody cares about. Reduced timetables. Somewhere between 39,000 and 43,000 kids in England on a reduced timetable in one autumn term, and of the primary ones put on it by the school, over 90% had additional needs. The government's own rules say you're not allowed to use it to manage behaviour. In Scotland there isn't even a national figure.

So a boy gets sent home at lunch time, every day, from October. He is not excluded on paper. He doesn't appear anywhere. And 4 years later somebody films him in a park acting dafty, and says "look, he will become a fascist". Piss off.

To reverse that we need funding in schools and not snobby comments and stupid attitudes. For examples; Newham, one of the poorest boroughs in England. Its poor kids finished primary last year with no gap at all. None. At GCSE, 3.9 months, smallest in the country.

Then go to West Berkshire, which is not poor, and it's 25.7 months. The poor place beat the rich one by 22 months. And it isn't a London trick either. The two biggest improvements in the country since 2019 were Salford, which closed its GCSE gap by 4.7 months, and Plymouth, by 4.4.

Middlesbrough, 82% white at the last census and about as deprived as England gets, has a primary school gap of around 5 to 7 months when the national figure is 10, and it has cut it by 2 months since 2019.

Same story every time. It is not who the kids are. It is what is round about them. Scotland has done the same thing and can prove it. In the mid 2010s about 14% of full time first degree entrants at Scottish universities came from the poorest fifth of areas. By 2023-24 it was 16.7%. Count the college routes in and it's 19.2%, against a 20% target for 2030.

And they do fine once they're in. The share of those students finishing with a first or a 2:1 has gone from 66% to 75%.

Nobody's culture changed in ten years. A target got set, college routes got funded, institutions were made to report on it, and the number moved. It's stalled a bit lately and this year's 18% milestone is looking tight, which tells you the same thing from the other side. Take the money away and it stops moving.

Just fucking think about what's actually round a kid who has zero support in place in a scheme or a neighborhood left to rot for 20 years. From damp the landlord won't fix to somebody in the house drinking, or using, or ill, or working double shifts and never in.

And then add a school running short on staff and resources, and a waiting list for every service you could name, and the youth club shut, because youth services in England are down 76% since 2010, and half the youth workers are gone, and 1 in 12 councils hasn't got a youth centre left at all.

And it doesn't stop with him. That's the bit people miss. It goes round again.

The OECD reckons it takes 5 generations for a child born into the poorest tenth in this country to climb to average income. Five. That is not a family that made bad choices one Tuesday, that is a hundred and fifty years.

Nearly three quarters of the children of graduates here go to university. About a fifth of the kids from low income families do. So the boy on the half day grows up and has his own boy, and that wean starts exactly where his da started, same street, same damp, same waiting list, same nothing to do all day.

Round and round it goes. And every time it comes round, somebody films it and stigmatise the working class for being fucked over due to the enforced austerity. Then the boy does something "antisocial" and everyone acts like it fell out the sky. Piss off.

Now, I'm not saying don't criticise behaviour. Criticise it. Some of it is rotten, and the people living next door to it know that better than anybody online does, because they're the ones putting up with it. But behaviour on its own explains nothing. If that's all you've got, you're reading the surface of the water and calling it the sea.

And here's how you know it's the wrong tool. The hardest anti-migrant politics in this country comes from people who are impeccably behaved. Polite. Employed. Mortgage paid. With large inheritances. Never kicked a flowerbed in their lives, wouldn't dream of it.

They vote for it, they fund it, they put it into law. If being a wee nuisance at 15 predicted your politics at 45, the well-mannered would be safe, and they are absolutely not.

So the forecast doesn't even work on its own terms.

It runs the other way too, by the way. Kids written off at 14 turn into perfectly decent adults all the time, when somebody reaches them in time. That's what the Newham number is. And the Salford number. And the Scottish one. Those aren't miracles. They're just kids who got a chance at the right moment instead of a prediction.

Punching down at kids is the easiest thing going and it has never once fixed anything. It doesn't matter who's doing it or which direction it's coming from. Nobody in history started caring about school because a stranger online wrote them off at 15. What works is dull and it costs money. Staff. Buildings that open. Something at the end worth having. And we know it works, because everywhere it has actually been tried, it worked.

Four kids and a flowerbed is not the fascist mobs in Glasgow or elsewhere attacking normal people or immigrant. Don't put them in the same sentence.

Grow the fuck up, and put your snobby attitudes away. You can't do anti-racist politics without working class consiouncess.

Sources for anyone interested in data:

DfE suspensions and exclusions 2024/25 https://t.co/Smqlzi1ciV

EPI Annual Report 2026, local authority gaps https://t.co/awMjNqkyHn

Scottish Gov leaver attainment and destinations 2024-25 https://t.co/Fc2rMFstEC

Scottish Gov attendance and exclusions 2024-25 https://t.co/4xPWHSBFEm

SFC Report on Widening Access 2023-24 https://t.co/mt2BVc9hQT

SFC on the widening access 2030 target https://t.co/0mlCGeoUW7

OECD, A Broken Social Elevator? https://t.co/iV7OwjJiZy

FFT Datalab on part-time timetables https://t.co/JhCNICmIIt

DfE attendance guidance, p25 https://t.co/RlmS3pkBQG

CYPCS on part-time timetables https://t.co/WnVQcRMMws

ONS Census 2021, Middlesbrough https://t.co/ZmTG9Ee4E5
YMCA State of Play 2026 https://t.co/aOML6npZZ8

[Utopian Wool Gatherer @___cheech___]

@officer_secret If only there was a word to describe this sensation

[Utopian Wool Gatherer @___cheech___]

@vrexec "the customer is always right" isn't the saying. You got that wrong.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am a retail holder of the $TRUMP coin. I run one wallet on one exchange, no fund, no firm behind me, just me. I bought at launch. $4,000. My whole bonus. That was the first buy. I want to be clear it was only the first.

People say I lost money. They have it backwards. The money did not leave me. It arrived. Before the coin I was nobody. I sold flooring. I ate lunch in my truck. Then his name went on a coin and I put $4,000 into it and for the first time in 41 years I was inside something. The coin did not take my life. It gave me one.

I print the chart every morning. I print it at 5:40, before work, on the good paper, and I laminate the days that mattered. Launch day is laminated. The $73 day is laminated. I keep them in a binder I carry everywhere so I can hand him the numbers if I ever get close enough. I know how he likes it. Printed. In his hand. I am ready.

The chart says I am down 94%. The chart is a test. Every drop is a question the coin is asking me, and the question is always the same. Are you still here. And I answer it every morning by not selling. 940 mornings now. I have never missed one.

They lost $4 billion. 2 million people, $4 billion, gone. I did not lose. You cannot lose what you refuse to sell. My accountant said the word "unrealized." I told him some things are not meant to be realized. Some things are meant to be believed. He sent me a bill. I did not print it.

The family kept 80% of the coins. The haters mail me that number like it is a knife. 80%. He kept 80% of his. I kept 100% of mine. Between the two of us that is a man who believes and a man who would die for the belief, and I will let you guess which one brought a folding chair to the launch party and which one I would still take a bullet for.

I bought more. After the bonus I refinanced. I will say it plainly because a coward would not. I took $30,000 out of the house, and then I took the house. The 529 that was for my daughter, I moved it. College is 18 years of somebody else's plan for her. The coin is faith, and faith compounds, and when it comes back it comes back for her too, 10 times over, and she will understand that I did not spend her future, I invested it in the only man who ever kept his word to people like us.

She is 9. She asked me on the phone, the last call before the phone got shut off, Daddy is the money coming back, and I said yes, baby, and she said but when, and there was something in how she said when that I have decided not to think about, because doubt is the only thing that can actually take the money, and I will not let her doubt cost us the recovery. I have run the math for her on the good paper. It is in the binder, page one, so it is the first thing she sees when she is old enough to understand what I built for her. The math has us up 10x by the time she is 19. She will thank me at 19. I have the page ready.

I sold the truck I ate lunch in. I sleep in the bus now. It is not losing the house, it is lightening the load, and a lighter man moves faster when the coin turns. The window faces east, toward Washington, and that is close enough for now.

I have stopped eating lunch. Not for money, though it is also for money. It is discipline. He does not eat when he is working and I am working, we are both working, and hunger is just the body asking are you still here, same as the chart, and I answer it the same way. I am still here. I am down to a notch past the last hole on the belt and I punched a new one with the launch-day pen. Every notch is a floor the coin has not broken through. I am the chart now. I go down and I do not sell.

76% of the big buyers were foreign. UAE money. Good. The whole world is coming to where I already am. I was here before the world. Down is just early spelled by a coward.

My wife asked what I governed. I told her I hold a governance position. She asked if we could eat the governance position. I opened the app so she could see the future and she looked at the number and she took the kids to her mother's. I understood. The ones closest to you leave first. That is in all the stories. You do not get to be the man who stayed unless everyone else goes, so her leaving is not the coin failing, it is the coin choosing me, and someday she reads about the nine of us and she knows she was married to one.

We are nine now. The group chat was 400 at launch. The other 391 sold, or blocked me, or "moved on," which is the word people use for the day their faith ran out. Nine of us left. We count ourselves at 6 a.m. like monks. Nine. A church starts with fewer.

The Ledger is not in the sock drawer anymore. I wear it. Around my neck, under the shirt, at work, in the shower, cold storage against the skin, because a relic should be carried and not stored. It holds $200 worth of a collectible with no intrinsic value and I guard it like the last true thing on earth, because it is.

He is all that matters. I wrote that in a letter I have not sent. I have the whole thing planned. A rally, a rope line, I get to the front because I am always at the front now, I have the time, and I hand him the binder open to the page with my numbers on it, and he looks down, and he sees a man who never sold, not once, not at $73 and not at $7 and not at the number I do not type, and he puts his hand on my shoulder and he says you. You are the one who stayed. And every person who ever moved on, my wife, the 391, the accountant with his unrealized, they see it on the television, they see him know me, and they understand what they walked away from one morning too early.

I rehearse the part where he says my name. I have not told him my name yet. But he will know it. Men like him always know the ones who stayed.

So no. There is no loss. There is a man who reported $1.2 billion from the coins last year, and there is me on a bus with a laminated binder and a relic on a string. He kept the money. I kept the belief. One of those is running out and I have done the math and it is not mine, it is the food, but that is a different number and I do not laminate that one.

I am rotating into the governance token Friday. World Liberty. The real infrastructure. My cousin says it is the same people who ran the first one into the ground. Of course it is the same people. Who else would I trust with the recovery. You do not change pilots in the descent.

I am so early it looks like being late.

Still holding. Still his.

The chair rides up front with me now, in the seat where my daughter used to go. I keep it clean.

I talk to it on the long stretches. I tell it the coin is coming back. It never argues. It never asks me when.

The chair stayed. I am teaching it everything I know.

When the money comes back, it comes back for the chair too.

[Utopian Wool Gatherer @___cheech___]

@teadrinker68 @officialnucky @bushontheradio Even if I take my Dad?

[Utopian Wool Gatherer @___cheech___]

@mc04ttc @RightNUFC @AldiUK No idea, the lot of em. Used to buy local, and it was lower in quality and twice the price.