Jojo

[BladeoftheSun @BladeoftheS]

This is Lord Rothermere the owner of the Daily Mail.

He lives in a massive mansion in the English countryside, but he pays no tax here because he identifies as French.

While the Daily Mail is registered in Bermuda and pays no tax anywhere.

That is his ‘Patriotism’.

[ALASTAIR CAMPBELL @campbellclaret]

If the press and telly ignore this one as much as they have tried to ignore so many of his other scandals we will know for sure we live in a two tier media country

[Larry the Cat @Number10cat]

@RealDonKeith Cat check: This incident is from January 2024 - there was a Conservative government at the time
https://t.co/X9RwQUo25g

[SubRosa )✿( Magick @subrosamagick.bsky.social @SubRosaMagick]

She was 57 years old.
White hair. No carefully managed image. No media training designed to make her more palatable. Just thirty years of accumulated knowledge and the calm, unhurried authority of a woman who had spent her life mastering her subject.
She sat on a BBC panel, answered questions about immigration and politics, cited evidence, made arguments — and then went home.
The next morning, her inbox looked like a crime scene.
Her name is Mary Beard — Cambridge professor, classicist, one of the most respected scholars of ancient Rome and Western civilisation alive. And the internet had decided that a woman speaking with quiet authority on television needed to be punished for it.
The messages were not criticism. They were not debate. They were rape threats. Death threats. Coordinated campaigns of personal destruction targeting her appearance, her age, her voice — anything that could be used to remind her that spaces like the one she had just occupied were not meant for her.
Most people would have gone quiet.
Mary Beard went further in.
She did what scholars do when they find a pattern that disturbs them: she followed it backward. Through decades. Through centuries. Through millennia. All the way back to some of the oldest texts in Western civilisation.
And she found it had always been there.
In Homer's Odyssey — one of the foundational works of Western literature, nearly three thousand years old — there is a scene that most readers pass over without registering its quiet violence. Penelope comes downstairs and asks the poet to sing a different song. Her own son, Telemachus, cuts her off. He orders her back to her room and tells her plainly: speech is the business of men.
She goes.
Mary Beard read that scene and recognized it immediately.
Not as ancient history. As a pattern.
In ancient Rome, women who dared to speak in public were not described as orators or thinkers. They were described as noise — disorderly sound, something that did not deserve to be called language or argument. Their voices were not speech. Their thoughts were not thoughts.
In the medieval world, women who claimed public authority were labeled as witches.
Elizabeth I — Queen of England, ruler of a nation — had to rhetorically reshape herself into something masculine just to be taken seriously as the leader of her own country.
The silencing of women who speak with authority was not invented by social media. It was not a modern pathology or a cultural accident. It was built deliberately, over centuries, into the very foundations of how Western civilisation defined who gets to speak, what authority sounds like, and who is allowed to take up space in public life.
Mary Beard had found something important.
In 2017, she published Women & Power: A Manifesto — short enough to read in an afternoon, substantial enough to reframe everything you thought you understood about why this keeps happening.
Her argument was precise and devastating.
The problem is not that women lack the ability to lead. The problem is that the model of leadership itself — the template for what public authority looks, sounds, and feels like — was built by men over centuries and has never been redesigned. When a woman enters public life and doesn't fit that template, she is not failing. The template was never built for her. It was built specifically to exclude her, and it has been doing exactly that, efficiently and continuously, for three thousand years.
The solution, Beard argued, is not to teach women to perform power the way men have always performed it. The solution is to dismantle and rebuild the very concept of what power is allowed to look like.
She kept teaching. She kept writing. She kept appearing on television — white-haired, unhurried, carrying her decades of authority without performing it, without packaging it for comfort, without apologizing for it.
The threats continued.
But other messages began arriving too. Letters from women and girls who had spent their entire lives feeling that every door was slightly too narrow, every table slightly too high, every room slightly reluctant to make space for them. Women who had spent years wondering what was wrong with them — why they couldn't quite fit, couldn't quite belong, couldn't quite be taken seriously no matter how much they knew or how hard they worked.
They read the book and understood, perhaps for the first time, that nothing had ever been wrong with them.
The room had been designed without them in mind.
That is not a personal failing.
That is a three-thousand-year-old architectural decision.
And one Cambridge professor with white hair and a calm voice — who refused to go quiet when the internet told her to — spent her career documenting it, naming it, and handing that knowledge to everyone who needed to hear it.
Telemachus told Penelope that speech was the business of men.
He was wrong then.
He is still wrong now.
And Mary Beard has three thousand years of evidence to prove it.
via The Inspireist

#FeministFriday #HERstory

[Supertanskiii @supertanskiii]

Just in case you weren’t aware, the so called “patriots” are now calling Henry Nowak’s sister a “mud shark race traitor” because she has a mixed race child.

The “protests” in Southampton aren’t about his death.

They’re about rabid racism and male violence.

[Parody Nigel Farage @Parody_PM]

It's OK everyone - no need to feel pure cold rage at this one.

[Feargal Sharkey @Feargal_Sharkey]

Since Thames Water is once again staring down a gun barrel, the £3 billion bailout it had runs out later this year, I thought it might be timely to remind us all of the “Economically illiterate”, cost govt comes up with to renationalise the water industry, you remember the £100 billion.

It is of course made up nonsense produced by a think tank in a report which was bought and paid for my United Utilities, Anglian Water, Severn Trent Water and South West Water.

By their calculations it would now cost £26,659,419,800 to nationalise Thames Water. 🤣🤣🤣

What a joke.

[ClarksonsFarm @ClarksonsFarm1]

Brilliant!🤣

[Keir Starmer @Keir_Starmer]

This is a harrowing and brave testimony.

The girls at the heart of this case have shown extraordinary bravery and strength in heinous circumstances.

This is an appalling case and it is right that law officers are urgently reviewing the sentences.

https://t.co/yyMoWkcwdJ

[Adrian Edmondson ❎ @AdrianEdmondson]

So bored of news outlets trying to write the news rather than report it.

[Steve Skojec @SteveSkojec]

He’s dead on.

[Jojo @jojosmith70]

@ChefReactions It's often harder when you feel you "should" be happy. Just enjoy the highs, be kind to yourself on the lows and always remember that the lows will pass.

[CrémantCommunarde #NION💙🤍🩷 @0Calamity]

I WANT MY COUNTRY BACK!🇬🇧
A young woman made a confused report to the police that she was raped by a group of men on her way home from a club, and believes it happened between 2.00am-4.00am outside a church.
The woman is unwell and is hospitalised, and no doubt a rape kit is administered to preserve any physical evidence.
Meanwhile - quite rightly - the police put out a call for any witnesses or dashcam footage, which is standard operating procedure.
Then the far right get involved.
When no descriptions are released by the police, they start saying that it is because the perpetrators must be asylum seekers/Muslims/immigrants.
A social media account invents a description of them wearing flip-flops - taken to mean sliders that a lot of young black guys wear.
More and more wild conspiracies are circulated, including the police deliberately not releasing descriptions (rather than doing their job of taking forensic evidence at the claimed scene of crime and examining CCTV footage from every angle available to them from the night-club to the alleged scene of crime and beyond)
Then a convicted kidnapper, former drug dealer and former "Raise the Flags" grifter - all the same person, btw - puts out a call to arms on social media, for people to attend a protest at 5.00pm one afternoon.
The usual hotel-shouting suspects turn up from all over the South East. They riot. The police issue a statement saying they still don't have any evidence to confirm the crime was committed as claimed.
They attack an HMO simply because it is an HMO, even though they have been told that there are no asylum residences in Epsom. Turns out it was housing vulnerable people.
They identify what they believe must be an asylum hotel - first a Premier Inn. Nope. Then a Travelodge, where they demand entry to check who they have staying there and demand to see their "books".
A few days later, the police make a further statement, and a woman with a microphone demands to know what the outcome of any medical checks on the woman complainant was.
Read that paragraph again: a WOMAN with a MICROPHONE is asking the police to reveal MEDICAL EVIDENCE relating to a potential RAPE VICTIM to a crowd of braying flag-bedecked football casuals and racists.
The far right grifters and their hard-of-thinking followers still maintain this is a police cover-up while simultaneously sharing evidence of where other asylum-seekers or migrants have been convicted, so obviously the police didn't cover up those crimes, Einstein.
The leader of the Pink Ladies - newly defected to Reform UK - shares photos of some completely different migrants in another area of the country and claims they are the photos the police are hiding from us all, because the police don't want you to know about migrants who commit crimes, (even though she was, obviously, sharing yesterday the reports of the terrible rape that happened in Brighton where the police arrested and prosecuted three asylum-seekers.)
And now we know the poor woman was, in fact, the victim of some form of head injury which left her presumably very confused and frightened and had mistakenly made a report to the police.
And there are STILL Einsteins out there claiming it was a cover up.
I WANT MY COUNTRY BACK FROM THESE DANGEROUS PEOPLE, AND THEIR PSYCHOTIC CHEER-LEADERS.
I WANT MY COUNTRY BACK FROM THE HATEFUL GREMLINS THAT FILL MY TIMELINE WITH THEIR DELUDED CRAP DAY AFTER DAY!
I WANT MY COUNTRY BACK FROM A GOVERNMENT THAT, INSTEAD OF CALLING OUT THIS APPALLING ESCALATION OF HATRED AND BIGOTRY, PLAYS ALONG WITH IT IN THE HOPE OF GAINING VOTES!

[David__Osland @David__Osland]

Instead of letting Thames Water off the hook for £123m in fines, I've got another idea. Why not ban it from paying a penny in dividends until it stops dumping shit in rivers?

[Feargal Sharkey @Feargal_Sharkey]

Yet more corruption exposed.

In 2024 98%, yes 98% of all serious water company pollution incidents got downgrade by the Environment Agency to minor.

Time to end the charade, to call an end to the farce. Time for public ownership.

[Briana Rose Lee 🌹☮ @BrianaRoseLee]

The girls in the ICE detention centers are pregnant. They weren’t pregnant when they went in. We need DNA samples of every single ICE agent to match who is raping these girls. Why is this not happening?

[🇨🇦 Nico Carney, Purr Minister of Canada @CarneyPurr67561]

I'd like to assure the Catnadian people and their staff that this government is working to help unfreeze @Number10cat's Twitter account.

Please continue to spread the word, especially the members of the press and Parliament who follow me.

#FreeLarryTheCat

[Feargal Sharkey @Feargal_Sharkey]

Law suit against South West Water by the people of Exmouth, Budleigh Salterton and Lympstone is now expanding to include the towns of Dawlish, Sidmouth, Teignmouth, Newquay and Penzance.

Tell your friends.

https://t.co/Ay9pATeF4r

[Feargal Sharkey @Feargal_Sharkey]

Enough of the bullshit, enough of the rhetoric, enough of the fiddling around the edges, enough of rearranging the deckchairs, enough of pointless commissions and even more pointless reports, enough of the lying, enough of the deceit, enough of the gaslighting, enough of the masquerade, enough of the pretending it's time for govt to get a grip, to show leadership, to show determination, to do the right thing, to act.

It's time to put the water industry back into public ownership and the time to do that is now.

But have they got the balls?!