Flynn

[Proudofus.uk @ProudofusUK]

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇬🇧 On the West African coast, there is a city called Freetown.

Its name tells you everything.

In 1787, British abolitionists founded it as a home for freed slaves and Black loyalists from Britain.

They called it the Province of Freedom.

When Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807, Freetown became the base of the West Africa Squadron.

For sixty years, the Royal Navy patrolled 3,000 miles of coastline. 1,600 slave ships captured. Every person freed was brought here.

150,000 people.

The coast was deadly. Malaria. Yellow fever. Dysentery. Two thousand British sailors died on this station.

They knew the risk when they volunteered.

They went anyway.

Around the 150,000 people brought to Freetown, a city grew. Schools. Churches. Courts.

One of those rescued was a child pulled from a slave ship by the Royal Navy.

His name was Samuel Ajayi Crowther.

Educated in Freetown. Translated the Bible into Yoruba. Became the first African ordained as an Anglican bishop.

Then went back to West Africa to negotiate the treaties that ended the trade on land.

The trade that tried to take him, he helped close. 🇬🇧

One city. One story. Built entirely from conscience.

Ordinary British people built it.

Help us keep this history alive. 👇
Be Part Of Us: 👉https://t.co/wN9S2gRmFj 🙏

Be Proud Of Us. 🇬🇧

[Kathryn Porter @KathrynPorter26]

Following many requests I finally got round to making this video explaining how our energy bills are derived

I cover the breakdown of bills, why changing price formation in wholesale markets (getting off "the most expensive form of generation") would make no difference to bills, and some things that actually would cut both bills and costs

https://t.co/GdOvXtD2hU

[Electroverse @Electroversenet]

365 years of temperature data from central England, the world's longest running climate record, show no trend.

Despite a six-fold rise in population and a surge in CO2, January temperatures have barely shifted since 1600. Likewise for July, the hottest month of the year, temperatures are virtually unchanged.

Even during the coal-fired Industrial Revolution there was no sudden spike. The warmest winters on record occurred in the 1700s, the 1800s, and the early 1900s, long before modern emissions.

Any warming appears slow and natural, with the slight modern uptick likely linked to two factors: 1) the urban heat island effect, and 2) Earth's gradual recovery from the Little Ice Age.

If carbon dioxide truly controlled the climate, the CET record would shoot upward on the right. It does not.

[Toby Young @toadmeister]

Ursula von der Leyen has called abandoning nuclear power "a strategic mistake" and said Europe should "lead the world" in the technology – 15 years after supporting the nuclear phase-out. We are led by imbeciles. https://t.co/8ChmNLhZaH

[Electroverse @Electroversenet]

UK wind farms are being paid billions to switch off and not produce energy, with Britain's largest wind farm paid to sit idle 71% of the time.

It's called "curtailment".

Wind farms are built in places with no grid capacity to carry the power. Regulators then pay them for the electricity they 'would' have generated.

Originally meant as a short-term fix, it's now a business model. Many companies make more money by not generating power than by selling it.

And the insanity doesn't stop there.

Often the same companies that own the idle wind farms also own the gas plants paid to fill the gap.

So they win on both sides of the equation.

This grotesque system drives up bills, wastes resources, and exposes just how broken the UK's green energy regulations really are.

[Michael A. Arouet @MichaelAArouet]

This chart is simply perfect. Why is it so difficult for the left to understand? They always follow the wrong path.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Cattle fact that breaks people's brains:

Cows grazing permanent pasture build soil at roughly 1 tonne per hectare per year.

That soil contains carbon, organic matter, minerals, and billions of microorganisms.

Modern industrial crop farming LOSES 1-2 tonnes of topsoil per hectare per year through erosion and degradation.

One system builds the foundation of future food production.

One system mines soil like a non-renewable resource until it's exhausted.

Guess which one the environmental movement wants to ban.

[Cut My Tax @CutMyTaxUK]

In the UK, family businesses account for over 75% of all business & employ over 50% of all workers.

There are some 23k family busineses with a turnover above £5m. 1 in 5 of the largest businesses in the UK are family owned. Of the 1,551 largest companies in the UK, 19.8% are family-owned.

For the government to disrupt the operation of these firms with an ideologically-motivated tax that deters investment is pure madness.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

1930: Soviet Union, height of collectivization.

Stalin's plan: Eliminate private farming. All agriculture becomes state-controlled.

The stated goal: Efficiency and equality.
The actual goal: Total food control.

Private livestock ownership is banned first. Owning a cow makes you a kulak. Kulaks are class enemies. Class enemies are executed or sent to gulags.

Within 3 years:
- Cattle population drops 60%
- Pig population drops 55%
- Sheep/goat population drops 65%

Peasants who'd been feeding themselves with household livestock are now dependent on state grain rations.

The famine follows immediately. Not from crop failure. From deliberate grain confiscation and livestock elimination.

4-7 million dead in Ukraine alone. Millions more across the Soviet Union.

But here's the part they don't teach: The Communist Party elite never stopped eating meat.

Special stores called "Beryozka" served party members only. Stocked with beef, pork, chicken, dairy, fresh vegetables.

The peasants starved on grain rations while watching party officials eat better than they'd ever eaten.

This created the perfect population control mechanism:

- Eliminate independent food production
- Create dependency on state rations
- Control who gets adequate food based on compliance
- Use hunger as a weapon against dissent

Compliant workers got better rations. Critics got less.

The threat of starvation was more effective than secret police.

The same pattern repeated in every communist state:

China: Great Leap Forward kills 45 million. Party elite dines on duck and pork in Beijing while peasants eat tree bark.

Cambodia: Khmer Rouge executes anyone owning livestock. Grain rations for workers. Meat for party members.

North Korea: Ongoing starvation for citizens. Kim family eats imported Japanese beef and Swiss cheese.

Venezuela: Cattle ranches nationalized. Production collapses. Government officials eat meat. Citizens get rice rations.

The collectivization is never about equality. It's about control.

Independent protein production makes you ungovernable. You can feed yourself without state permission.

Grain dependency makes you compliant. You eat what they give you. You work to earn food access. You don't rebel because hungry people don't fight.

"Seize the means of production" always starts by seizing independent food production.

And independent food production has always meant livestock.

The 20th century proved it: Control the meat supply, control the population. Starve dissenters. Feed loyalists.

The same formula the Pharaohs used 5,000 years ago.

Just more efficient with modern agriculture and state control.

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

There are moments when a government stops pretending it serves the public and starts acting as if the public is an inconvenience. Today was one of those moments. David Lammy has not "reformed" the justice system. He has amputated half of it. Jury trials have not been modernised, updated or streamlined. They have been gutted. What was once the people's check on the power of the state has been reduced to a token relic, preserved for the handful of cases the government cannot swallow whole. Everything else will now be processed, quietly and efficiently, by officials behind closed doors.

The press will call this a compromise. It is nothing of the kind. It is a triumph. Lammy came for the whole system; he has banked half of it. He dressed it up in the usual soft language – backlogs, delays, victims, fairness – but the facts are stark. One in 66 defendants will now stand before a jury. The rest will be judged by magistrates or by lone judges in "swift courts," with sentencing powers increased, appeal rights constrained, and the public removed from the room. That isn't justice. It is throughput. A conveyor belt built to ease administrative pain, not to protect citizens from the state.

Lammy now claims Magna Carta as his ally, as if the document that first restrained English power somehow gives him permission to expand it. Magna Carta stands for one thing above all: the people must stand between the state and punishment. Lammy's scheme removes them. Magna Carta curbed arbitrary authority. Lammy consolidates it. Magna Carta was a shield against state excess. Lammy has turned it into a prop and waved it around as justification for stripping away the very principle it established. There is something indecent in that. And he knows it.

If the backlogs were the emergency he claims, the remedy would be straightforward: fund the courts, staff the system, build capacity. But that would strengthen the justice system, not the government. Lammy has chosen the other path: weaken the system, strip away safeguards, and declare the damage necessary. And note the most revealing admission of all – that the backlog will get worse before it improves. Strip rights now in the hope that things might improve later, though he cannot guarantee they will. This is crisis as leverage. Failures turned into mandates. Decay turned into opportunity.

This is not the end of jury trials; it is the breach before the end. Once a government has discovered it can remove a centuries-old right without public consent, without a manifesto commitment, and without fear of revolt, it will not stop. It will return, inch by inch, until the last vestige of public involvement in justice is gone. And when that happens, the state will no longer need to persuade anyone of anything. It will accuse, and it will convict, and the citizen will stand alone before a system that no longer answers to him.

Lammy has proved one thing: that an ancient right can be stripped away not by coup, but by administrative decree, sold as progress, and imposed with the calm voice of a manager. He has halved the institution he once praised. He has weakened the only mechanism that forces the state to justify itself to its people. And he has shown that a government can dismantle liberty not with riot police, but with legislation drafted in committee rooms.

This is a government drunk on its own authority. It is not clinging to tradition; it is dismantling it, brick by brick, and daring the country to object. Britain is not yet a state where the only verdict heard is the state's. But after today, it is much closer. And if this generation does not resist what is being done in its name, the next will inherit a justice system where the public are not participants, but spectators – watching a distant machine decide their fate.

"Magna Carta was a shield against state excess. Lammy has turned it into a prop and waved it around as justification for stripping away the very principle it established."

[Chris Littlewood @chrislittlewoo8]

Digital ID for every adult is not progress. It is the end of a free society dressed up as convenience.

I am a cyber security specialist. This is my take.

They are selling it as a fix for illegal migration. That is bollocks.

We spend hundreds of billions a year on cyber security and yet the volume of breaches is breaking records. The threat is growing faster than the spend.

Digital ID will not stop boats. It will not stop trafficking gangs. It will not fix a broken border.

Criminals will work around it.

Honest citizens will pay the price.

It builds giant data banks that track where you go, what you buy, what you read and who you speak to.

It links your identity to every checkpoint in daily life.

One breach and your life is exposed.

Look at Jaguar Land Rover and the airports in recent weeks. Now imagine that at national scale on an ID system tied to everything you need to live your daily life.

Here is the risk that ministers will not admit.

Ransomware seeded through a supplier or an insider:

It lies quiet for months.
It rolls through the backups.
On trigger day the register and the recovery sets are both encrypted.

Payments fail. Health and benefits stall. Borders slow. Citizens are frozen out until a ransom is paid or the state rebuilds from scratch.

Centralise identity and you centralise failure.

Do not fall for the pitch.
Function creep is certain.
It starts as login.

It becomes access to money, travel, speech and public services.

It turns rights into permissions controlled by the state and its contractors.

It creates a single point of failure for criminals, insiders and hostile states to target.

It will punish the elderly, the poor and anyone who is not always online.

It will centralise risk and outsource blame.

It will not stop fraud.

It will not stop illegal migration.

It will build the machinery for a social credit system by stealth.

If ministers cared about the border, they would enforce current laws, resource patrols and processing, close loopholes and remove those with no right to stay.

You do not need a national ID to do any of that.

We scrapped ID cards in 2010 for a reason.

Britain does not need a central register to prove age or status.

Yes to privacy first proofs. No to a database state.

[Flynn @bflyby]

@DanielPriestley This mornings newspaper headlines indicate the direction of travel in the UK:
The Guardian = Treasury targets inheritance tax rises to plug growing UK deficit
Daily Express = Record 8m people on universal credit

[Daniel Foubert 🇵🇱🇫🇷 @d_foubert]

Until around 1960, every Westerner knew one thing: your duty was to build for the next generation.

You worked not for yourself, but so your children would live better. You inherited land, tools, faith, and pride — and your task was to add to them. To leave more than you received. That was the unwritten contract. It was understood by peasants, craftsmen, teachers, and rulers. Every generation built. Even in war, even in poverty.

Then something broke.

Around the 1960s, the West began to unlearn responsibility. Sacrifice became suspect. Authority was mocked. History was no longer a source of duty, but of guilt. A new culture rose — one that glorified the self over the future, consumption over legacy, therapy over effort. People were taught not to preserve but to dismantle. Not to pass on, but to reimagine. The old continuity was called oppression. The new ideal was rupture.

Children became a lifestyle choice. Religion was privatized or abandoned. The state promised security without effort. The market promised happiness without limits. Politics became spectacle. Discipline faded. Duty disappeared from the vocabulary.

The result: a civilization that eats its inheritance and calls it progress.

[Liam Halligan @LiamHalligan]

Both the UK and EU have a 2035 headline ban, but the UK’s rules are tougher, with a steeper ramp-up of fines, making Britain an increasingly less attractive place to make cars.

Oh – and Labour has a manifesto pledge, popular among trendy urban-voters, viewed with disdain by trade unionists and across our manufacturing heartlands, to bring forward the complete ban by five years to 2030 – where, by the way, it was originally, under equally naïve rules implemented under the Tories.

Stellantis recently announced its long-standing Luton plant is closing in part due to ZEV rules. Ministers meanwhile insist that BMW remains committed to upgrading its electric Mini production facility at Cowley, as does the carmaker itself.

Will that happen? I suspect it won’t ....

Policymakers in the UK and EU have bet the ranch on EVs. But the market, rather than public sector bureaucrats, should decide which is the best technology. When bureaucrats “pick winners”, it nearly always goes wrong.

The renewable lobby is powerful, as are the companies both building and financing the roll-out of the UK’s charging network. Huge vested interests are at work to maintain an iron grip over the “EVs or bust” narrative, as this insane ZEV mandate comes into force.

This stranglehold needs to be broken – there are other technologies that may well work better, rendering such a cumbersome and costly charging network roll-out unnecessary. Many senior car industry executives believe, for instance, a much better solution lies in the use of hydrogen-hybrids – hydrogen-powered internal combustion engines which charge smaller, lighter batteries that need no plugging-in and far less lithium and rare earths.

Why are we unilaterally destroying our car industry on the altar of net-zero?

Ministers need to face reality, slacken the rules and give UK-based car-making at least a fighting chance to adapt.

🧵5/5

https://t.co/KOMlka5gN3

[Mindful Maven @mindfulmaven_]

For centuries, Japanese monks have mastered the art of mental peace.

Here are their 8 timeless techniques to stop overthinking:

- Thread -

[Thomas Sowell Quotes @ThomasSowell]

Some people just don't get it.

[Shaun Newman Podcast @SNewmanPodcast]

I used to think I was a good man.

Then I read Jordan Peterson's "12 Rules for Life".

He outlines all the dark truths that reveal hidden poison in your existence.

Test yourself against these rules (they're the ultimate wake-up call for your life):

[ThinkingWest @thinkingwest]

A democracy can only last 200 years.

At least, that’s according to 18th-century historian Alexander Tytler.

He claimed democracies always follow a predictable pattern which ends in servitude…🧵

[Thomas Sowell Quotes @ThomasSowell]

People who want to redistribute wealth often misunderstand the nature and causes of wealth. Tangible wealth can be confiscated, but you cannot confiscate the knowledge which produced that wealth. Countries that confiscated the wealth of some groups and expelled them, destitute, have often seen the economy collapse, while the expelled people became prosperous again elsewhere.

[Sean Berube @SeanBerube4]

George Orwell understood the evils of communism better than anyone else

Through first-hand experience, he discovered the secret that gives ALL communist regimes power

Here’s what he learned, and how you can use it to resist tyranny...