Brian Salmon

Sports reporter, write for @TheWorldGames (all 40 sports) +other sport websites.
Prolific traveller and sports volunteer, cyclist and quizzer

[Brian Salmon @flyingking2]

Six years ago, I had stopped exercising, was unfit and overweight. For the next two weeks I will be cycling 700 km across Spain. What enabled me to undertake this epic challenge?
https://t.co/vjA4iXgPCS @ShepwayST @Martin_A_Salmon #Spain #CaminodeSantiago

[Brian Salmon @flyingking2]

This is a brilliant, easy to understand explainer about economics. Basically any time governments tighten regulations or find wasteful ways to spend YOUR money, you or your children lose.

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

Communism never needed to win the Cold War. It just needed a discipline that makes central planning sound like science. That discipline exists. It's called macroeconomics, and it's the most effective tool the planners ever built. No tanks, no gulags. Just equations, a PhD, and a monopoly on money.

Here's why. Macroeconomics rests on a handful of primitives: core concepts presented as self-evident truths, on which the whole edifice is built. Remove them one by one, and nothing is left standing. Let's go.

GDP. The sacred metric, the one that decides whether a government succeeded or failed. Except it measures activity, not wealth. A hurricane that flattens a city makes GDP go up, because everything has to be rebuilt. Bastiat explained this back in 1850 with the broken window: you see the glazier's work, you don't see what the owner would have done with his money if the window had stayed intact. Worse, government spending enters GDP at cost, regardless of whether it's useful. A bureaucrat filling out forms nobody reads "produces" exactly as much as his salary. Keynes himself, in the General Theory, explained that burying banknotes in old coal mines and letting private enterprise dig them back up would cure unemployment. When your main metric can't tell the difference between digging holes and creating value, it's not a measuring tool. It's a justification tool.

The aggregate. All of macro rests on the idea that you can add up things that don't add up. "Demand." "Investment." "Consumption." As if a waiter and an engineer building a datacenter were doing the same thing because they sit in the same column. The economy only exists in its structure: who produces what, for whom, with what capital, at what moment. Aggregation erases exactly what matters. It's like studying a forest by computing the average height of the trees.

The representative agent. For decades, the models guiding central banks assumed a single household representing the entire population. One. Eight billion people with different tastes, plans, constraints and knowledge, reduced to a single equation. But the economy is heterogeneity. If everyone were identical, nobody would trade anything.

Equilibrium. The models describe an economy that tends toward a stable state. Reality never stops. Every day an entrepreneur discovers an opportunity, another goes bankrupt, a technology makes a job obsolete. The economy is a discovery process, not a state. Building your theory on equilibrium is like studying a river by assuming it doesn't flow.

The multiplier. The Keynesian primitive par excellence: one dollar of government spending creates more than one dollar of activity. If that were true, France would be the richest country on earth. It spends around 57% of GDP through the state, the highest in the OECD, with debt above 110% of GDP and anemic growth for twenty years. Many empirical studies find a multiplier below 1, sometimes close to zero. Of course they do: every dollar the state spends was first taken from someone, either today through taxes or tomorrow through debt.

The paradox of thrift. They tell you saving is dangerous because it reduces demand. It's the exact opposite. Savings are tomorrow's capital. They fund the factory, the machine, the startup. No civilization ever got rich by eating its seed corn. A theory that turns prudence into a vice and spending into a virtue isn't an economic theory. It's a theory of debt.

The general price level. Inflation is measured by an average index, chosen and calculated by the state. In the eurozone, the official index doesn't even include the cost of owning your home. The biggest expense of your life, missing from the measurement. And an average hides everything: when money printing sends real estate and stocks to the moon while TVs get cheaper, the index says "inflation under control." The young guy who can't buy an apartment says something else.

The 2% target. They present as a success a policy whose explicit goal is to destroy the value of your money. At 2% a year, your savings lose half their purchasing power in 35 years. That's the target. Not the failure. The target.

The natural rate. Central bankers set rates based on a "neutral interest rate," r-star. Nobody has ever observed it. It's estimated by models, with enormous error bands, by the very people who set the rates. They steer the economy by a variable that's invisible and that they compute themselves. It's an astrologer reading the future in a star chart he drew himself.

Now, the high priests.

Piketty. His entire thesis fits in r > g: the return on capital exceeds growth, so inequality mechanically explodes. Problem: he compares the return on a stock with the growth of a flow. Piketty's r is a gross return, before taxes, before heirs consume it, before it's split among children, before bankruptcies. In real life, fortunes don't compound forever: companies die, heirs spend, capital depreciates. And when you look closely at the rise in the capital-to-income ratio, a large share of it comes from housing. In other words, from rising real estate prices, fueled by low interest rates and supply choked by regulation. The inequality Piketty denounces is largely manufactured by the monetary and zoning policies he never questions. He treats the fever by adding more virus. And he doesn't hide his conclusion: in Capital and Ideology, he calls for a progressive wealth tax up to 90% on the largest fortunes, "temporary ownership," and "participatory socialism." He calls it moving beyond capitalism.

Zucman. Same confusion, tax edition. The Zucman tax: 2% a year on wealth above €100 million, the French version of the billionaire tax he's been pushing with Saez in the US for years. Except a large fortune isn't a pile of cash sitting somewhere. It's not money being held. It's shares in companies, valued at the last trade price. A stock of claims on future flows. A founder whose startup is worth a billion on paper, but pays no dividends, would have to come up with $20 million in cash every year. From where? By selling shares. Which means gradually losing control of his company, to foreign funds that don't pay the tax. And if every large fortune sells at once, prices drop, and the wealth the tax claimed to measure evaporates. Taxing a stock as if it were a flow is exactly Piketty's mistake. That's not a coincidence. It's the same school of thought.

Now take each primitive and look at where it leads. Demand is insufficient? The state must spend. Saving is dangerous? Tax it, or erode it with inflation. GDP is slowing? Stimulus. Prices fluctuate? A committee must set the price of money. Inequality is rising? Tax capital. Every single concept, without exception, leads to the same conclusion: more power for the state and for those who run it. Not one primitive of macroeconomics ever concludes "leave people alone."

A science discovers results it didn't expect. Macro always lands in the same place. That's the mark of a doctrine, not of knowledge. It's not a tool for understanding the economy. It's a tool for running it. And running the economy from a central office, with centralized money and centralized credit, is exactly what the Communist Manifesto proposed in 1848. Plank five: centralization of credit in the hands of the state, through a national bank with an exclusive monopoly.

Communism didn't die in 1991. It changed its vocabulary. It no longer talks about class struggle. It talks about aggregate demand, multipliers and taxing capital. It no longer wears a cap. It wears a PhD. And it no longer seizes the factories. It seizes the unit of measurement of everything the factories produce.

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

“L’UE n’a RIEN à voir”, Jean ? Vraiment ?

Tu couvres Bruxelles depuis trente ans, alors je vais t’ouvrir les yeux sur ce que tu ne vois plus.

Commençons par la Pologne. Le cœur de la crise, c’est le Tribunal constitutionnel. Qui a déclaré que ce tribunal n’était pas un tribunal indépendant ? La Cour de justice de l’Union européenne, le 18 décembre 2025, saisie par la Commission européenne. Pourquoi la Commission l’avait-elle attaqué ? Parce qu’en 2021, ce tribunal avait osé dire que la Constitution polonaise primait sur le droit européen. Le ministre de la Justice de Tusk l’a dit lui-même : cet arrêt “oblige” l’État polonais à agir. Bruxelles n’a pas envoyé la police devant le Tribunal. Bruxelles a signé le permis.

Maintenant, la vraie question. Pas “le PiS avait-il raison ?”, pas “Orbán était-il corrompu ?”. La seule question qui compte : quand un peuple dit non, quand un peuple vote mal, quand un gouvernement déplaît, que se passe-t-il ? Regarde les faits. Ils pointent tous dans la même direction.

Quand un peuple dit non, on le fait revoter ou on le contourne. Le Danemark rejette Maastricht en 1992 : on le fait revoter en 1993. L’Irlande rejette le traité de Nice en 2001 : on la fait revoter en 2002. La France et les Pays-Bas rejettent la Constitution européenne en 2005 : elle revient en 2007 sous le nom de traité de Lisbonne, sans référendum. L’Irlande rejette Lisbonne en 2008 : on la fait revoter en 2009. Les Pays-Bas rejettent l’accord d’association avec l’Ukraine en 2016 : il est ratifié quand même. La Grèce vote non à 61 % au plan de la troïka en juillet 2015 : huit jours plus tard, elle signe un plan encore plus dur. Six peuples, six non, aucun n’a tenu. En trente ans, un non n’a jamais été une réponse. Seulement un brouillon.

Quand un gouvernement déplaît, on coupe l’argent. Les fonds européens de la Pologne sont gelés sous le PiS. Tusk arrive : débloqués en deux mois. Les fonds de la Hongrie sont gelés sous Orbán, 17 milliards d’euros. Orbán perd le 12 avril 2026 : accord pour débloquer plus de 16 milliards fin mai, sept semaines plus tard. Mêmes traités, même pays, même argent. Seul le gouvernement a changé.

Et ce n’est même pas caché. En septembre 2022, à trois jours des élections italiennes, Ursula von der Leyen est interrogée sur une possible victoire de la droite. Sa réponse : “Si les choses vont dans une direction difficile, j’ai parlé de la Hongrie et de la Pologne, nous avons des outils.” La présidente de la Commission prévient un peuple de ce qui l’attend s’il vote mal.

Quand une élection gêne, on la neutralise. En 2011, la BCE envoie à Rome une lettre qui dicte la politique économique de l’Italie. Quelques mois plus tard, Berlusconi tombe et Mario Monti, ancien commissaire européen que personne n’a élu, prend sa place. La même année, Papandréou annonce un référendum en Grèce. Il l’abandonne sous la pression de Paris et Berlin, et il est remplacé par Loukas Papadímos, ancien vice-président de la BCE, lui non plus élu. Fin 2024, l’élection présidentielle roumaine est annulée. Thierry Breton, ancien commissaire européen, commente sur RMC : “On l’a fait en Roumanie”, en ajoutant qu’il faudrait le faire en Allemagne si nécessaire.

Quand une décision engage des peuples, on ne leur demande rien. Pour le Mercosur, la France vote contre et se fait mettre en minorité. L’accord est découpé pour contourner les parlements nationaux, puis appliqué provisoirement sans attendre l’avis de la Cour. Pour l’immigration, le Pacte impose une “solidarité obligatoire” : tu accueilles ou tu paies. Pas un seul peuple consulté.

Quand on veut savoir, on te ferme la porte. La présidente de la Commission négocie par SMS avec le patron de Pfizer le plus gros contrat de l’histoire de l’UE. Elle refuse de les communiquer. En mai 2025, le Tribunal de l’Union européenne juge ce refus illégal.

Prends n’importe lequel de ces faits isolément, et tu trouveras toujours une excuse : la crise, l’état de droit, l’urgence, la technique. Mets-les bout à bout. Trente ans, des dizaines de cas, et pas une seule fois l’arbitrage n’a penché du côté du vote populaire contre Bruxelles. Une erreur, c’est un accident. Dix erreurs dans le même sens, c’est un système.

Et un système a toujours une idéologie. Celle de l’UE n’est même pas cachée : il suffit de lire ses propres textes.

Le 22 novembre 2023, le Parlement européen adopte une résolution pour réviser les traités. Le but : supprimer le droit de veto des États dans de nombreux domaines et transférer de nouvelles compétences à Bruxelles. Dans ses références officielles, il cite le Manifeste de Ventotene. Ce texte de 1941, coécrit par Altiero Spinelli, un ancien communiste, annonce que la révolution européenne devra être socialiste. Il écrit aussi que la propriété privée devra être “abolie, limitée, corrigée, étendue au cas par cas”. Quand Giorgia Meloni a lu ces passages devant le Parlement italien en mars 2025, la gauche a crié au scandale. Les fact-checkeurs ont pourtant dû l’admettre : chaque phrase est bien dans le texte. C’est cette référence-là que le Parlement européen a choisi d’inscrire dans sa résolution de 2023.

Regarde ensuite la méthode. Bruxelles avait décrété qu’à partir de 2035, plus aucune voiture thermique neuve ne pourrait être vendue à 450 millions d’Européens. Il a fallu la fronde de sept États et de toute l’industrie automobile pour qu’elle recule en décembre 2025. En 2020, l’UE a émis pour la première fois une dette commune massive, 750 milliards d’euros, que nos enfants rembourseront. Aucun référendum. Chaque crise sert le même objectif : la dette Covid, l’énergie, la santé, la défense. La direction ne change jamais : vers le centre.

Et où se fabrique cette vision ? Pas dans un complot. Dans un annuaire public. Ursula von der Leyen siégeait au conseil d’administration du Forum de Davos, et elle y figurait encore au moment d’être désignée présidente de la Commission. Christine Lagarde, présidente de la BCE, y siège toujours, et Davos veut en faire sa présidente. C’est là que Klaus Schwab a lancé en 2020 son “Great Reset” : profiter de la crise du Covid pour réinitialiser l’économie mondiale. Mêmes salles, mêmes gens, même idée : gérer le monde d’en haut.

Voilà pourquoi je dis que ce projet est communiste dans son ADN. Pas le communisme des chars et des goulags. Le communisme de méthode : une avant-garde éclairée qui sait mieux que toi ce qui est bon pour toi. Elle planifie ta voiture, ton énergie, ta monnaie, tes frontières, et elle traite chaque vote contraire comme une erreur à corriger. Le Manifeste de Ventotene appelait ça la dictature du parti révolutionnaire. Aujourd’hui, ça s’appelle la Commission.

Et je ne suis pas seul à le voir. Elon Musk demande l’abolition de l’UE et le retour de la souveraineté aux nations. La stratégie de sécurité nationale des États-Unis écrit noir sur blanc que l’Union européenne sape la liberté politique et la souveraineté des peuples. Alex Karp répète que l’Europe a abandonné la course à l’IA et que son modèle de régulation est exactement ce qu’il ne faut pas faire. Si tu penses être plus lucide que ces gens-là sur un sujet aussi profond, tu es juste un peu naïf.

Donc à partir de maintenant, trois possibilités : tu es corrompu, tu es stupide, ou tu es enfin éclairé.

Ne me remercie pas.

[Proudofus.uk @ProudofusUK]

There were five slave trades. You were taught about only one. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇬🇧

One. The Atlantic. Twelve million Africans shipped to the Americas. Britain banned it in 1807, then hunted it for sixty years.

Two. The Barbary trade. A million Europeans taken to North Africa. Britain bombarded Algiers in 1816.

Three. The Saharan trade. A thousand years of caravans north across the desert. Britain had its northern end banned. Tripoli, 1857.

Four. The East African trade. Twenty thousand people a year through one customs house. Britain forced the market shut. 5 June 1873.

Five. The Ottoman trade. Raiders sold Eastern Europeans south for three hundred years. Britain made the Sultan ban it in 1854.

It cost sixty years and two thousand sailors. Nobody else fought all five. 🙏🇬🇧

It isn't over. Mauritania only made it a crime in 2007. Fifty million people are in slavery today.

Someone has to remember who started the fight. ⚓🇬🇧💪

[Brian Salmon @flyingking2]

So distressing to see Lille my favourite city in France become a war zone. It is a beautiful, prosperous, friendly place with stunning architecture. But tonight the entire city centre has been trashed and looted. Absolutely disgusting behaviour.

[Brian Salmon @flyingking2]

Excellent article showing that renewable energy sources total cost of construction is extravagantly high, environmentally damaging and has to be made by consuming far more fossil fuels than will be generated. A complete scam

[Peter Clack @PeterDClack]

The world consumes roughly 28 million tonnes of copper every year—a mass equivalent to five Great Pyramids of Giza.

Yet that refined metal is just the tip of the iceberg of a far more monstrous physical reality. Beneath those 28 million tonnes of copper sits a massive geological footprint: billions of tonnes of blasted rock, colossal volumes of chemical tailings, vast energy expenditures and trillions of litres of water. This is all fresh, relentless demand.

Crucially, up to 75% of that copper never enters individual turbines, solar panels or electric vehicles. It goes into the invisible grid infrastructure required to link everything together and make it function. When you trace 28 million tonnes of copper backward into the Earth, the true scale and cost is staggering.

The drive to overhaul the global energy structure rests on a profound misunderstanding of physics: it treats energy supply as a 'software' problem while ignoring the devastating raw material gridlock caused by manufacturing billions of solar panels and over a million wind turbines, with hundreds of thousands more in the pipeline.

When an energy system shifts from reliable, high-density fuels—hydrocarbons and uranium—to low-density, intermittent sources like wind and solar, the physical apparatus needed to capture, convert, stabilise and transmit that diffuse flux just explodes.

It becomes an absurd trade-off: expending colossal amounts of finite, high-grade fossil fuels upfront simply to dig up materials for low-density generators—generators that can never run a steel mill, power an ocean cargo vessel or sustain international air travel.

Mining is already a vast consumer of continuous energy. As global copper ore grades decline—frequently dropping to 0.5% or lower—the mass of rock that must be dug, hauled, and crushed grows exponentially per unit of recovered metal.

Crushing rock alone accounts for roughly 3% to 4% of total global electricity consumption. Demanding billions of additional tonnes of processed metal creates a self-defeating loop: huge volumes of reliable, baseline power are consumed just to extract the raw materials needed to construct weather-dependent hardware.

Yet the primary metals drain does not come from the turbines or arrays themselves. It stems from the enormous physical web needed to transport that energy across vast distances. Diffuse generators located hundreds of kilometres from cities require unprecedented volumes of step-up transformers, substations, high-voltage transmission lines and regional grid overhauls.

The heavy overhead wiring looping across the landscape regularly dwarfs the metal required to build the turbine in the first place. Because two centuries of industrial civilisation have already extracted the highest-grade deposits, meeting future demand forces miners to dig deeper, crush harder and manage billions of tonnes of toxic slurry.

This is a twin crisis: the escalating physical cost of ore recovery on the front end, and an unprecedented tsunami of industrial e-waste bound for landfills on the back end. The physical limits of this model are not dictated by how much metal remains in the crust, but by the soaring energy penalty required to dig them up and refine them.

Heavy industrial processes—blast furnaces, chemical synthesis, cement production and deep-shaft mining—all need continuous, high-temperature thermal energy and uninterrupted high-voltage power. Intermittent turbines and panels cannot reliably deliver that dense power to sustain heavy industry, let alone an entire national economy.

The ultimate irony is that the staggering industrial muscle needed to build, maintain, and periodically replace these diffuse energy systems relies entirely on the coal, oil and gas they were meant to replace.

The dream of a fully weather-dependent industrial grid ignores physical reality. It overlooks a looming nightmare of endless ore extraction, refining bottlenecks, and perpetual grid expansion.

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

.@andyburnham, with respect, you treat the British public with contempt if you expect us to swallow this.

Britain has the dearest industrial electricity in the IEA, and you want us to blame 1986. You say we pay some of the highest energy bills in Europe because we privatised the basics, and you blame conflict overseas. But the data supports neither claim.

British industrial gas prices sit below the IEA median. Industrial electricity does not. In 2023 British industry paid 25.85p per kWh against an IEA average of 17.7p. Over the last decade the premium over the median has run between 17% and 49%. In 2024 we had the highest industrial electricity prices of any IEA member with data available. If gas were the cause, we would be near average. We are at the top. Wholesale costs drove most of the rise since 2021, but they cannot explain why we pay more than our neighbours for the same gas.

Policy can. Taxes and levies on household electricity rose 59% in real terms between 2017 and 2025, when they made up 23% of the average bill. One Oxford Institute for Energy Studies estimate puts policy related costs at 33% of the pre-tax electricity bill once contracts for difference, carbon charges and the capacity market are counted. The government's own analysis has supported British industry paying £86 per MWh from this year, against £69 in France and £60 in Germany.

The relief your government announced in April was a transfer. It scrapped a levy funded efficiency scheme and moved 75% of the domestic cost of the Renewables Obligation onto general taxation. The cost did not disappear. The Treasury now collects it from the same households through tax.

Then the grid. The typical household is on a price cap of £1,723 a year, up £60 since July. Networks made up about 30% of the spring price cap, and Ofgem has set out a further expansion of local networks for 2028 to 2033, paid for by households through higher charges.

Your answer is Great British Grid. It will be funded from Great British Energy's existing budgets and will work with the private sector and network companies. That means no new money, no new cable and one more public body. Your own government has also acknowledged that its buy British approach to grid contracts could add cost, yet no full impact assessment has been carried out. You promise European prices within a decade. You have not shown us the bill.

You speak of lost control. You were a cabinet minister when the Climate Change Act passed in 2008. Ed Miliband, its author, later set the Clean Power 2030 target. Britain refuses new North Sea licences and imports gas it could produce at home. Gas remains the marginal source that sets the wholesale electricity price, so every turbine added on this model leaves the bill tied to gas while households fund the cables and backup behind it.

Public ownership has been tried locally. Nottingham's Robin Hood Energy cost taxpayers an estimated £38m. Bristol Energy, closed this week, left a final bill of £39.3m. Both were Labour-run councils. Solar panels on a library roof are pleasant. They will not move a national price.

Bills fall when costs fall. Remove levies that don't belong on electricity. Licence new North Sea fields. Build nuclear on time. Then publish what your plan costs and who pays for it.

"Burnham was a cabinet minister when the Climate Change Act passed in 2008. Ed Miliband, its author, later set the Clean Power 2030 target."

[Wild Wasteland Memes @Wasteland_Memes]

One moment to leave my box then I'll get back in it.

If you're uneducated enough to have an issue with the British government rightly making this statement, lemme put it very simply:

-49,000 slave owners, approx 0.19% of the population at the time, were given money to buy them out of owning slaves. British taxpayers paid to free the slaves.

-For decades during the 19th century, Britain dedicated 1/6th of it's entire Navy specifically to seek and capture other nations' slave ships to free the slaves on board. The economic cost was bore by the taxpayer. 2,000 British sailors lost their lives.

-During the US Civil War, Pres Lincoln blockaded Cotton exports from the USA. This put more than half a million working Britons out of already very poorly paid work. After months, the mill owners worked a deal with the US govt to reopen trading. More than half a million working class Britons voted AGAINST the deal citing that they didn't ever want to work with goods produced from slavery again.

About half as many (24,000 ish) Brits died from malnourishment, disease etc in the affected cotton factory communities as a direct result of that action as ever owned slaves.

-Britain paid £400,000 to Spain to convince it to stop its slave trade. It also placed diplomatic pressure on France to stop them too.

Of every empire that ever took part in slavery, Britain is the ONLY ONE that grew a conscience, stopped its own, and then set out to stop everybody else without any outside encouragement.

And it is also the only one that has maintained a successful and genuinely beneficial diplomatic network to lift up and empower its former territories- the Commonwealth- which has helped ex-colonies outperform their peer nations in almost every way ever since.

Not to mention endless and unwavering humanitarian relief when a hurricane rips through their islands every season, or when an earthquake buries their brothers and sisters under their own houses.

The British taxpayer has bore the cost of all of that. Britons voted in favour of that responsibility in the 19th century, decades before anybody else grew a conscience of their own- even African Kingdoms such as the Asanti Empire who only stopped slaving when Britain took over Ghana and made it illegal.

You reparationsit types don't harass modern-day Turks over the 6-8 million slaves that passed through the Ottoman Slave trade, or modern-day Ghanaians for the millions that the Ghana and Asanti empires captured, abused, and traded in the Trans-Sharan and Transatlantic trades. You don't even get on at the Arab and African countries who still enable slavery today. Why?

There is no other demographic/nation/country for which people feel so empowered to blame the crimes of the most miniscule proportion of its ancestry, which were undone and atoned for by exponentially more of its ancestry, on an entire diaspora that has lived for generations with no direct culpability in said crimes.

Every population in the world has been a victim to another population at a given time. The following paragraph should be the one that sticks from this whole rant:

The working class, poor, destitute British man and woman who rotted in workhouses for centuries had more in common with their African slave counterparts than they ever did their compatriot masters. That's exactly why they bloody well did something about it. British people en masse stood WITH the slaves. Not with their feet on their necks.

Reparationism towards the British nation is just politics of division, meant to absolve commonwealth governments of their own failures towards their people at the expense of a population who have never committed the crime they are demanding reparations for, and whose ancestors paid the human and economic price for for the last 2 centuries.

This is the last post I'll make on the matter.

[Dolly Parton @DollyParton]

A message from the family of Dolly Parton.

[Brian Salmon @flyingking2]

@scievision369 Wonderful, clear explanation.
Thanks for taking the time to post.

[Anglo Futurism Capital 🇬🇧🐿️ @RollingHedge]

🚨📉THE SLOW DEATH OF BRITAIN:

We have shit water companies so we buy bottled water.

We have rubbish police so we hire private security.

We have terrible healthcare so we pay private hospitals instead.

Airbnbs in Cornwall pay council tax but get no rubbish collection, so they pay Biffa on top.

An awful lot of firemen are now volunteers.

NHS dentists don’t really work anymore, so you go private or you pull it out yourself.

Our roads are littered with potholes nobody fills. Your privately funded tyres and suspension are the collateral.

You are forced under threat of criminal prosecution to fund the BBC, and it’s so bad you pay for streaming to get news or entertainment anyway.

Your bins are collected fortnightly, so you drive to the tip. The tip now requires a booking, a permit and proof you live in the county.

Garden waste is a separate annual subscription. On top of the council tax that used to cover it.

Your GP surgery is an 8am phone lottery, so you pay £40 to an app to speak to a doctor in a different time zone.

CAMHS has a two year waiting list, so parents remortgage for private assessments.

Your child’s SEN provision is a legal entitlement, so you hire a solicitor to sue the council for it. The council spends more fighting you than the support would have cost.

Physio is a forty week wait. Your back does not have forty weeks.

Schools teach in portable cabins bolted to the playground because the actual building is held up by aerated concrete and hope.
Half of them are technically insolvent.

Parents fund the reading books, the glue sticks, the photocopier, the roof and increasingly the teachers wages - all via a PTA raffle and local fundraisers.

The state offers “free” childcare hours that don’t cover the nursery’s costs, so the nursery bills you a “top up fee” for the free thing.

Shoplifting under £200 is functionally legal, so Tesco hires guards - who crucially don’t even try to stop it - and you pay for them in the price of the milk.

999 takes an hour, so you buy the Ring doorbell, gather the evidence, file the report and get a crime number for the insurance you also pay for.

Court backlogs run to years, so anyone with money settles privately and everyone else gets nothing.

Legal aid is gone. Represent yourself.

Passport and DVLA backlogs are chronic, so the state sells you a fast track service to escape the queue the state created.

The trains are late whoever owns them, so you drive on the roads with the potholes.
Public toilets are shut, so you buy a coffee you don’t want.

The library is staffed by pensioners working for free.

Street lights are switched off at midnight to save money in a country with a burglary charge rate near zero.

You pay National Insurance for fifty years and they move the pension age.

You pay the adult social care precept every year and then sell your mother’s house to pay for adult social care.

Leaseholders pay for a “waking watch” because the state signed off the cladding and then billed the residents to fix it.

Social housing sits on the most valuable land in Britain, allocated by need rather than proximity to work, 48% of zone 1 social housing is occupied by foreigners mostly welfare dependent - while the nurses, teachers and other workers who keep zone 1 running commute ninety minutes each way from Kent because we stopped building anything in 1979.

Every one of these is a service you have already bought. The receipt is your payslip.

The tax burden is heading for its highest sustained level since the 1940s. The service level is the worst in living memory.

You are not overtaxed or underserved. You are actually BOTH, simultaneously, and the gap between the two is where your standard of living went.

The state has become a subscription you cannot cancel and cannot use.

[Brian Salmon @flyingking2]

We are now officially living in a parallel universe.
There once was a time in Germany when they:

Sold lots of cars
Made sure the trains ran on time
Never missed in a penalty shootout!

[Brian Salmon @flyingking2]

The big difference between Thomas Tuchel and Gareth Southgate. Having a one goal lead in the 85th minute, there is no way under Southgate that an England counter attack would result in FIVE England players in the penalty box. So refreshing not seeing England sit back to defend.

[Brian Salmon @flyingking2]

Wonderful practical joke by FIFA, trying to persuade us that a country called Curaçao actually exists. To make it believable they showed a rerun of the 2014 World Cup semifinal between Brazil and Germany, just swapping the colour of Brazils shirts and shorts!

[Hidden History @HiddenHistoryYT]

Most people know the Army stormed Normandy. The Navy bombarded the shore. The Air Force owned the sky.

Nobody thinks about the Coast Guard.

They should.

The United States Coast Guard is not a combat force. Their entire purpose, the reason they exist, is to save people from the sea. They are trained to swim into storms, to pull drowning sailors from sinking ships, to run toward disaster when everyone else is running away.

On June 6, 1944, the Germans gave them more drowning men than they had ever seen in their lives.

The Coast Guard brought 800 men to Normandy. Five major assault transports were USCG-crewed. Eleven tank landing ships. Twenty-four troop carriers running soldiers directly onto Omaha and Utah Beaches. The USS Bayfield served as the command ship for the entire Utah Beach sector, the nerve center through which an entire army was directed ashore. The USS Samuel Chase led the assault group landing the 1st Infantry Division, the Big Red One, onto the eastern flank of Omaha.

But the thing almost nobody knows about is Rescue Flotilla One.

60 small Coast Guard cutters, nicknamed Matchbox ships because of how easily they burned, were assigned a single mission: pull men out of the water. As the landing craft were torn apart by German fire, as soldiers drowned in the surf under the weight of their own equipment, as wounded men on the beach were swallowed by the incoming tide, Rescue Flotilla One was already moving.

Their swimmers jumped into the Channel. Tethered to their boats by lines, they swam toward the men going under, grabbed them, and dragged them back. They did this 2,000 yards from shore. Under active German machine gun fire. Under mortar fire. Under artillery.

Again and again, all day long.

Two miles offshore a lookout spotted men from a sunken British landing craft floating in the Channel. One cutter went to them and pulled 24 soldiers and four Royal Navy sailors from the water before they went under.

One Coast Guard LCI was hit 25 times by German fire and kept going. Coxswain Delba Nivens kept driving his craft toward the beach after a grenade caught fire aboard his boat.

By the end of June 6, Rescue Flotilla One had pulled 400 men out of the sea.

400 men who would have drowned. 400 men who went home. 400 men whose families exist today because a Coast Guardsman jumped into the English Channel under machine gun fire and refused to let go.

Out of 800 Coast Guardsmen at Normandy, 15 were killed.

Every branch that fought on D-Day deserves its place in history. But the men who spent that day swimming between the dead to find the living, tethered to a burning ship with the whole weight of the German army trying to kill them, did something that has no good word for it.

They saved people. That's what they were built for.

On the worst day in the history of the sea, they were exactly who they were supposed to be.

[Brian Salmon @flyingking2]

@littlemore20 @FXMC1957 The Beehive terminal is still standing but now used as office space. It can be seen from the outside, but interior visits are limited to making enquiries about leasing office space!

[Brian Salmon @flyingking2]

@AmbJapanUK Glad you enjoyed my home town.
Did you get to see Yoko Ono's Earth Peace artwork on top of and in front of the Grand Hotel along The Leas lawn?

[Brian Salmon @flyingking2]

They should also commit to refer the UK to the @IntlCrimCourt to investigate Crimes against Humanity. It meets the threshold, widespread acts against civilians tolerated by the State.
Starmer, Brown, Burnham, Cooper, Phillips, Davies etc should all be investigated and sent to The Hague for trial, plus every corrupt and evil politicians, police chiefs, social workers that covered up these appalling crimes.

[Brian Salmon @flyingking2]

Woeful defence from St Helens women in the first quarter of the Womens Challenge Cup Final. Wigan Warriors have hardly any to work for any of their four tries. Amy Hunter in particular has been given te freedom of Wembley.
Saints need to drastically tighten up the defence