Andrew Jackson

I'm a parody of myself, in case anyone wonders if this is really me.

[Andrew Jackson @andyjax63]

My brother killed himself, he suffered from body dysmorphia, they ran a story with the headline "Death of Mr Ugly" #dontbuythesun

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Fun fact.

When you get a sunburn, when the damage to the DNA of the cells cannot be repaired, your skin cells essentially "commit suicide" through a process called apoptosis to prevent turning into cancer cells.

[NHS Million @NHSMillion]

If you want to annoy Mike Graham then please give us a follow and share this so others can too

Thank you 🙏

[Gerry Samuels @GerrySamuels12]

Lots of Boomers seem to be remembering the summer of 1976 with rose tinted spectacles, & think that they ‘just got in with it’

Let’s have a look at what the newspapers of the day had to say in 1976….

🧵

[Jamie Kay @TheRealJamieKay]

Restore or Reform voter?

[Sarah Bee🐝 @BirrelleBee]

I swear on everything Holy, I would not leave that window for a month. 😭❤️

[Alex Horne @AlexHorne]

Not true. Never worn a cardigan.

[Maxi @AllForProgress_]

Drive through almost any corner of the English countryside and sooner or later you pass a ruin: a roofless abbey, a row of broken arches open to the weather, a few worked stones in a field where something vast once stood. We are so used to these skeletons that we file them under scenery. In truth each one is a crime scene, and the oldest warning we have about what the English state does when it decides its own people are there to be harvested.

The fashionable comparison this season is the Civil War: the 1640s, the king against his parliament, the long slide to the sword. The state-as-enemy-of-the-nation. I think it's the wrong century. To see our situation as it actually is, go back a hundred years earlier, to the 1530s, and to the largest seizure of wealth in English history before the modern age - the Dissolution of the Monasteries.

The monasteries were far more than churches. They were the welfare state of their day, among the many other pillars-of-society which they constituted. They ran the hospitals and fed the poor at the gate. They schooled the clever sons of nobodies, took in travellers, lent money, employed half the county, and held perhaps a fifth of the land in England in a kind of standing trust for the people around them. They were the accumulated institutional capital of the nation, built up across four centuries.

In barely four years, the state took the lot.

The way it was done is the whole point. First the audit: Thomas Cromwell sent his men to value every religious house in the land down to the candlesticks - the Valor Ecclesiasticus, a Domesday Book drawn up for plunder. Then the justification: the same men came back with lurid dossiers of monkish vice and idleness, much of it invented and all of it deeply useful, because a thing you mean to destroy must first be declared rotten. Then the disposal. The proceeds went nowhere near the poor who had depended on the place. The land was sold, fast and cheap, to the Crown's creditors and courtiers and the rising, grasping gentry - a new class of men bound to the regime by the very loot they were handed, a good many of whose descendants sit on the same acres now.

When the north rose against it, in the Pilgrimage of Grace, the rising was put down and its leaders hanged on the strength of a royal pardon that was never meant to be honoured.

The result, for ordinary people, was a disaster that took generations to undo. The hospitals shut. The poor relief evaporated. England filled with vagrants and beggars - "sturdy beggars", in fact, which the same government then set about whipping through the streets - because the institutions that had carried the poor had been cashed in for the king's wars and the courtiers' estates. It took the better part of a century, and the Elizabethan Poor Law, to rebuild a fraction of what those four years had wrecked.

This is the English disease in its purest form, and a man ought to know his own country's worst habit when he sees it come round again. The English state has never had much need of tanks or secret police. Its signature is subtler. It finds the institutions ordinary people rely on, declares them corrupt or inefficient or unaffordable, audits them, hollows them, and transfers their substance - the money, the land, the power, the security - to the class that runs the machine.

You have watched it done. The hospitals, the courts, the high streets, the post offices, the savings, the very safety of the streets - audited, downgraded, closed, sold, or left to rot, while the apparatus sitting on top of it all has swollen to £400 billion a year and answers to nobody you can name. The monks are long gone and the method is immortal.

The ruins in the field are a gravestone, but they are also evidence, and evidence is always useful. Once a people learns to recognise the method - the audit, the manufactured rot, the fire-sale to insiders, the whole business wrapped in the word "reform" - it stops working on them.

The English have rebuilt everything that was stripped from them before: the parish relief, the friendly societies, the great Victorian foundations, the hospitals and schools of the last century, every one of them raised by people who refused to accept that the floor under ordinary life was gone for good. We will do it again. The first step is to stop calling the men selling the country reformers, and to call them what Cromwell's men were: looters with a jolly good filing system.

[Shutts 🇲🇽 🇨🇼 🇺🇾 🇳🇴 @Shuttsapalooza]

By far my favourite Scotland vs Brazil story is the referee saying “Good luck, may the best team win” to both captains before the game in 1982 and Graeme Souness replying “I fucking hope not”

[THE NERVE @thenerve_news]

Farage's £5m problem: do any of his defences hold up?

Nigel Farage has offered a succession of explanations for failing to declare a £5m gift he received in 2024 from crypto-billionaire Christopher Harborne. We examined whether any of these match what the rules actually say ⤵️

[Mike H @mikoh123]

Nigel Forage has an absolute car crash on #bbcbreakfast in an interview which he says nobody cares about his £5 million pound gift, tries to deflect by comparing what Sally Nugent spends her wag s on, how she earns and accuses the BBC of putting him in danger.

[Chris Phillips @CJPhillips1982]

A real long shot but can people retweet this please.

Yesterday all my items were stolen in Eastbourne including my stats book which has 20 years worth of details in. Laptops, phones, clothes, shavers etc can all be replaced but this can’t and is useless to anyone else. It’s in a plastic folder you can see in the left hand side of this photo. Can anyone in that neck of the woods please keep an eye out. I’m gutted about this.

[jaye @stalinejay]

SOOOO PERFECT TIMING

[معلومات تفيد ®️ @mlqbnmmd3]

السنجاب كان خائفاً من الرعد ، حياة السنجاب 🐭🤯!!.

[Blairy @Blair_54q0]

Here's me commentary on an epic boat fail 🎙

[Dan Walker @mrdanwalker]

@BobbyManzi Hey Bobby
It’s normally at about this point that the Daily Mail would write an article about the BBC ‘wasting’ money sending staff to cover a World Cup. Hard for them to win isn’t it?

[Hugh Laurie @hughlaurie]

Thanks for your critique, Janet. We actually tried a couple of episodes where House (Hugh Laurie) (please put the brackets in the right place) gets it right first time, but they were only 6 minutes long. NBC weren’t happy. Then we tried some where House never gets it right and the patient dies. The audience wasn’t happy.

One could apply your trenchant analysis to other art forms: JS Bach wrote 30 Goldberg variations on the same chord structure; Frida Kahlo painted 50 portraits of herself; Henry Moore, what??

The point is, or was, variations on a theme; if all you see is hospital, medical blah blah, then it wasn’t meant for you.

Nonetheless, I look forward to your first novel!

[Cats with Aura 😺 @catwithaura]

I saw a hungry stray cat and tried to feed it. But she just left, came back with her baby, and watched while it ate

[Thanos Angelopoulos @Th_Angelopoulos]

I call BS.

The facts are these:
Henry Nowak told officers he'd been stabbed. He told them he couldn't breathe. An officer replied, “I don't think you have, mate”. They dragged him along the ground and handcuffed him. He died before anyone called an ambulance.

No DEI course teaches you to ignore a dying man. Officers have a duty to assess injured persons, call for medical assistance, and not take one party's word as gospel. They failed on all three.

This is incompetence repackaged as ideological victimhood. “DEI made us feel certain ways” shifts anger from officers who let a teenager die onto a culture-war target. That's their defence strategy.

Henry told them he was dying. They didn't listen. They didn't follow protocol. That's a conduct and skill problem, not a DEI problem.

[Red Media @RedMedia_us]

Woman goes viral after laughing at a MAGA preacher who said homosexuality is a sin":

"Are we being serious right now? I think you are trolling.🤣🤣"

[Nature Unedited @NatureUnedited]

These people rescued a baby goat after finding it trapped in a pit and cared for it overnight.

The next day, while searching for its owner, they came across a herd of goats that looked remarkably similar.

Then this happened.