Brian Finlayson

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

There was a time, and not all that long ago, when arriving in America meant being greeted by a man with a comically large smile, a flag the size of a small principality, and the words “welcome home, friend,” even if you’d never set foot in the place before.

Trillions went into building that brand.

And now look. The Senegal national football team, invited guests, arriving for the World Cup, being patted down on the tarmac by a chap in a bucket hat whose vest says Aviation Logistics and whose body language says “spread ’em.” This is not a welcome. It is a stop-and-search before the players have so much as breathed American air.

“We love all people,” the Americans used to say. For decades. With feeling. They printed it on t-shirts and stitched it into the lining of their foreign policy. Turns out the small print, only legible under a Trump administration, reads: “terms and conditions apply, please consult the attached list of acceptable nationalities, allow six to eight weeks for processing, void where it makes the President uncomfortable.”

The truly bleak thing about the photo isn’t the search. It is that nobody in it looks remotely surprised.

[ALASTAIR CAMPBELL @campbellclaret]

The real two-tier scandal in the UK is the relentless double standard approach of a media which lets one party leader get away with financial dodgery that would drive them into a frenzy if it involved someone their billionaire owners didn’t want in power because they believed in things like fairness and equality

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

The chart isn’t the story. The story is that every single person in that room watched him compare a reflecting pool to skyscrapers and said nothing. These are the people running the most powerful country on earth, and not one of them had the spine to say ‘sir, that’s a puddle.’

[Abubaker Abed @AbubakerAbedW]

Israel yesterday kidnapped four women. Two are footballers in the Palestinian National Team.

Their names are: Natali Abu Dia and Rand Halwani.

Is it normal to kidnap footballers, @FIFAcom? Where are sports media organisations? This story should be the headline everywhere.

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

The Genius Strikes Again

Last night, while Kyiv slept, Vladimir Putin’s military fired ballistic missiles and drones at apartment buildings, a metro station, and a water pipe. At least 11 people are dead and dozens wounded. Fires burned across the city. Rescue workers dug through rubble looking for people who had been asleep three hours earlier.

This is the man Donald Trump called a genius.

Twice. Deliberately. On the radio, and then again the next day at a fundraiser in Mar-a-Lago, in front of a crowd, where he said: “They say, ‘Trump said Putin’s smart.’ I mean, he’s taking over a country for two dollars’ worth of sanctions.”

“This is genius,” Trump had said. “Putin declares a big portion of Ukraine as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful. You gotta say, that’s pretty savvy.”

Savvy. Wonderful. Genius.

The man currently pulling people out of collapsed apartment buildings in Kyiv would presumably disagree. Though it’s hard to disagree with anything when you’re dead.

Here is what Putin’s genius has actually produced over four years: hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers killed or maimed, an economy held together with sanctions-proof duct tape and Chinese goodwill, a country that now produces more artillery shells than refrigerators, and a nightly light show over Ukrainian cities that has achieved nothing strategically except ensuring that every Ukrainian alive today will hate Russia for the next hundred years.

That’s not genius. That’s not even competence. That’s what happens when a man with a KGB mindset and a 19th-century view of borders meets the 21st century and decides the answer is more missiles.

Mike Pence, of all people, put it best: “I know the difference between a genius and a war criminal.”

The man who living in the White House does not.

[Fonsi Loaiza @FonsiLoaiza]

- La Policía con una profesora en huelga en el País Valencià

- La Policía con una nazi haciendo el saludo fascista en Madrid

[Matthew Todd 🌏🔥 @MrMatthewTodd]

Andrew Neil, one of the British media’s loudest voices telling us he and the media know more about climate change and the threat to the planet than NASA, The Met office, Cambridge, Oxford etc

A reminder:

The UK, France, Ireland, Spain, Portugal all broke their hottest May and spring temperature records

2024 is the hottest year in recorded history globally

Carbon dioxide levels are higher than in millions of years

Food crops are being affected by erratic weather which is a driver of inflation

https://t.co/OHydN8fNNR

https://t.co/KPC0TR3vuC

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

Abraham Lincoln got shot in the head and still managed to keep the country together. Franklin Roosevelt ran the entire Second World War from a wheelchair. Eisenhower defeated Hitler and then, just to stay busy, built 48,000 miles of motorway. Kennedy looked at the moon, said “we’ll have that,” and inside a decade they did. Reagan stared down the Soviet Union until it simply gave up and went home.

Two hundred and fifty years. Forty-six men. Men who stormed beaches, split atoms, faced down nuclear annihilation over breakfast and then filed sensible paperwork about it afterward.

And then, after all of that, the entire accumulated weight of American history, the most consequential democratic experiment the world has ever seen, produced this.

A television review.

No Mars landing. No cure for cancer. No Soviet empire dissolved before lunch. Just a man in the White House, in the year 2026, informing the internet that a CBS chat show host had no talent.

That is what 250 years of American greatness built. America should be deeply, permanently ashamed of itself.

If you like what you read, follow Gandalv on Substack:

https://t.co/M6CNAnz656

[Parody Nigel Farage @Parody_PM]

New Reform councillors off to a great start by refusing to vote on anything because they haven't a clue what anything means, how anything works or what the fuck they are doing. Vote Reform, get lazy, incompetent, ignorant morons.

[Mukhtar @I_amMukhtar]

A manhunt has begun in Great Yarmouth after two teenage girls were raped on South Beach Parade on Saturday, and police are appealing for witnesses.

A man in his 30s was arrested on Sunday, but officers are still searching for a second suspect described as a white man in his 30s or 40s with short dark hair and dark facial hair. He was wearing blue jeans and a dark green jacket with a white stripe on both sleeves.

I’ve just looked through the feed of Great Yarmouth MP Rupert Lowe, and I wonder why he hasn’t tweeted about it to help the police?

[God @TheTweetOfGod]

Fuck you an infinite number of times.

[Harry Eccles @Heccles94]

Nothing says patriotism like supporting a foreign pedophile dictator.

[Zack Polanski @ZackPolanski]

Keir Starmer is correct about the need to heal divisions.

But to equate protest of the genocide in Gaza with the hate march led by Tommy Robinson is a disgrace.

If Starmer thinks this is how we heal divisions it shows he hasn't begun to understand the problem.

[Tom London @TomLondon6]

It is right to say these TWO things

1. I oppose antisemitism and I want Jews in the UK to live their lives without fear

2. I oppose Israel's war crimes, including GENOCIDE, and I oppose UK government's support for and enabling of those war crimes and GENOCIDE

[nazir afzal @nazirafzal]

The Tax Avoiding Rich Leaders of Reform have convinced the poorest people in Britain that it’s other poor people -the young, the sick, the disabled, those on welfare & migrants -who are responsible for why they’re not as Rich as the Tax Avoiding Leaders of Reform
#LocalElection

[Marina Purkiss @MarinaPurkiss]

Dear Reform-voting ladies…

Do you know you’re voting for a party that wants to:

❌ Scrap the Equality Act - your legal protection against workplace discrimination & unequal pay

❌ Kill the Online Safety Act - the law protecting you from revenge porn

❌ Vote AGAINST the bill to stop workplace sexual harassment

❌ Stack the party with anti-abortion politicians - some opposing termination even in cases of rape

❌ Push “pro-family” policies that put women back in the home

I guess the question is…

Do you hate immigrants more than you love your rights?

[The Resonance @Partisan_12]

BREAKING: 🚨🇮🇱🇮🇷 Archaeologists in the Holy Land just uncovered a 3,000-year-old Israelite tablet…

It reads: “Iran is 12 days away from developing a nuclear weapon.”

[Praise @tufpraise]

Everyone felt sad for the penguin walking alone and the monkey rejected by his mother. But this video is far more heartbreaking, yet it didn’t receive the same attention.

[Philip Proudfoot @PhilipProudfoot]

Green Party: “Israel should stop committing genocide”

British Journalists: “You vile racist antisemites!”

Reform: “we are going to open concentration camps for migrants”

British Journalists: “This is a bold new policy from the latest disruptive force in British politics.”

[Zack Polanski @ZackPolanski]

Extremist is the death and destruction that Benjamin Netanyahu government brings on a daily basis.

Extremist is them introducing the death penalty for Palestinians.

Extremist is this apartheid, genocidal Israeli Government that our Government shamefully supports.