Katharine Thomson

Traditional singer and aging hippie.

[Juvejuvellup @juvejuvellup]

@VoicesofWW2 He wasn’t Spanish—he was Catalan! We Catalans suffered the hatred and repression of Franco’s fascists, which led to a million people going into exile; that is why this man—whose story is well-known in Catalonia—fought so hard against fascism.

[Voices of WW2 @VoicesofWW2]

In 1941, a Spaniard walked into the British embassy in Madrid and offered to spy on the Nazis.

The British turned him down.

So he went to the Germans instead, pretended to be a loyal fascist, and got hired as a German spy. His plan was to lie to them for the rest of the war.

It worked better than anyone could have imagined.

His name was Juan Pujol García. Before the war he had tried his hand at running a chicken farm and a movie theater. He had no spy training. What he had was a deep hatred of both fascism and communism after the Spanish Civil War, and an incredible imagination.

The Germans gave him a codename, invisible ink, money, and orders to go to Britain and recruit spies.

He didn't go to Britain.

He went to Lisbon, Portugal, and made everything up.

Using a tourist guidebook, maps, magazines, newsreels, and a British railway timetable from the library, he wrote long, detailed reports about life in England. Military movements. Morale. Ports.

He'd never been there. He made mistakes. He didn't understand British money. He once reported that dockworkers in Glasgow would do anything for a liter of wine.

The Germans loved him anyway.

Then British codebreakers reading German messages noticed something strange. The Germans were hunting for a convoy that didn't exist, based on a report from some agent in Britain they'd never heard of.

The British went looking for this mystery spy. They found Pujol. In 1942 they finally took him on and brought him to London.

Now he had real help. MI5 gave him the codename Garbo, after the actress, because they thought he was the greatest actor in the world.

Together with his British handler, Pujol built a fake spy network for the Germans. It eventually had 27 imaginary agents. Each had a name, a personality, a job, and a backstory. A Welsh nationalist. A Venezuelan student. A Greek sailor. Some of them recruited their own imaginary sub-agents.

When they needed to explain why one agent had gone quiet, they killed him off. They even put a fake obituary in a Liverpool newspaper. The Germans reportedly paid a pension to his widow.

Who also didn't exist.

Then came D-Day.

Hours before the landings, the British let Pujol send a message warning the Germans that the invasion was coming in Normandy. It was timed so it would arrive too late to matter, but it made him look brilliant.

Three days later he sent the most important message of his career. Normandy was a trick, he said. The real invasion was still coming, at Calais, led by a huge army under General Patton.

That army was fake too. But the Germans believed him.

German forces that could have been rushed to Normandy were held back near Calais for weeks, waiting for an attack that never came.

The Germans were so grateful they awarded him the Iron Cross.

A few months later, King George VI made him a Member of the Order of the British Empire.

He's one of the only people known to have been decorated by both sides of the war.

After the war, afraid of revenge from surviving Nazis, he faked his own death from malaria in Africa and disappeared to Venezuela, where he lived quietly running a shop.

For decades the world thought he was dead.

In 1984, a British writer tracked him down. Pujol came back to Normandy for the 40th anniversary of D-Day and met veterans who had landed on the beaches.

Some of them thanked him.

[Ferox Ghillie @FerroxGhilie]

Both of these fields were discovered 2004/5 and very quickly assessed to be huge and viable.

‘Running out of oil and gas in 5 years’, was a deliberate lie.

[Lakota Man @LakotaMan1]

Old MAGA white lady says I should “go back to my own country” if I don’t like Donald Trump’s America.

So, I parked my buffalo in her driveway, set up my teepee on her front yard and said “I’m home, what’s for dinner?”

[kat @yslnadi]

“why don’t women just report?”

we do. y’all just don’t give a shit.

[Nyrae @TemiXo_1]

"If we make tampons free women will abuse the system" fuck you think we're gonna do? Start eating tampons?

[Lonestarmango @lonestarmango]

OUCH..

[🌼 Random Kiwi 🌼 🇳🇴🇳🇿🇺🇸 @RandomKiwiNZ]

The best tweet I’ve seen today. So true!

[sixfootcandy @sixfootcandy]

My husband purposely does a terrible job on the laundry, hoping I’ll get annoyed and take over.

This time, I just said, “Looks like you’ll be doing all the laundry until you figure it out,” and I’ve never seen a man reconsider his life choices so fast.

[Itsmasel @Itsmasel2]

Grangemouth's promised £200 million has been really worrying me, so you can imagine my relief this morning when i heard Burnham is putting £220 million to repair England's potholes, to all the fuds who voted labour in Grangemouth & surrounding districts how'd that work out GIRFUY

[surdog007 @godrus]

@SamaHoole 🌹Kennedy was lobotomized by her father.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

On the sixteenth of December 1960 a twelve-year-old boy was put on a table in a San Jose hospital, given electric shocks until he was unconscious, and had an ice pick hammered through the thin bone above each eye and swept from side to side through the front of his brain, because his stepmother had told the doctor he was defiant. The doctor's fee was two hundred dollars.

Howard Dully was a big, clumsy, daydreaming boy whose mother had died when he was five, and his father had married a woman called Lou who could not stand him. She took him to six psychiatrists. All six told her the problem was not the boy. The seventh was Walter Freeman, who had performed more lobotomies than any man alive, who drove between state hospitals in a van he called the lobotomobile doing them by the dozen in an afternoon, with no gloves and no surgical training, and who had once done twenty-five in a day. Freeman's notes on Howard, which Howard did not read for forty-four years, record the symptoms. He objects to going to bed. He turns the lights on when there is broad daylight. He does not react to love or to punishment. He has a savage streak. On that evidence, and Lou's signature, and two hundred dollars, Freeman wrote that the boy would benefit from a transorbital lobotomy and did it four days later.

Howard remembers the table. He remembers waking with two black eyes and a fever and no idea what had been done to him, because nobody told him, then or ever. His father never spoke of it. Lou put him into a state institution the following year, and the boy with the holes in his brain spent the next forty years in and out of asylums, juvenile halls, a jail, halfway houses and the street, drinking, drifting, never quite able to say why he was the way he was, with a photograph that existed somewhere of a doctor in a suit standing over a child with a steel spike in each eye socket.

At fifty-six, driving a school bus, he went to find out. He found his file in Freeman's archive at a university in Washington, in the doctor's own handwriting, and read for the first time what his stepmother had said and what the doctor had agreed to. He went to see his father, who was eighty, and asked him why he had let it happen, and his father said he had been bullied into it. Howard told the story on the radio in 2005 and five million people listened to a man weep over a piece of paper.

Walter Freeman was not a quack. He was a professor of neurology, the man who had brought the lobotomy to America, and the operation had won its inventor the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1949. The journals published him. The hospitals booked him. The newspapers called it a miracle. He did it to three and a half thousand people, nineteen of them children, and he kept doing it until 1967, when a patient died on the table and the hospital took his privileges away, and he spent his last years driving the country in the van looking up his old patients to prove it had worked.

That is what settled science looked like from inside, to a twelve-year-old. A mother's complaint, an expert's confidence, a procedure with a prize behind it, two hundred dollars, and a lifetime nobody could give back.

The same institutions now tell you what your child should eat, in the same voice, with the same certainty, and the leaflet has a logo on it. Howard Dully is in his seventies and still cannot say what was taken. Nobody ever apologised.

[Linda McC. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 @lindamccorr]

We now know that the government lied to Scots in 2014 about our oil running out. This is reason alone to have another referendum.

[‏ً @justjargons]

I just heard someone in this coffee shop talking to their friend, “these folks are using their food stamps to buy junk food”. I said “excuse me for being nosey, but billionaires are using their money to buy kıds.”

My latte tastes better now

[Dfw_camo @dontplay_z]

I think the reason y'all believe Women lie about Rape is because y'all have had UNCLEAR sexual situations and don't want to be labelled a Rapist. Like when you waited until that girl was piss drunk to take her home or When that Girl who said no 20 times finally sad YES.

[The National @ScotNational]

The SNP have hit out at the BBC ahead of a Question Time show which is due to debate Scottish oil and gas without any Scottish representation on the panel

SNP MSP Laura Mitchell said the BBC line-up was the 'perfect representation of the story of Scotland’s energy – zero Scottish say over our own resources'

[Dr Julia Grace Patterson💙 @JujuliaGrace]

I’m so fed up of reading articles where people demand that the NHS starts preparing for winter.

It’s the end of October. Politicians should have started preparing in March 🚨

[Marco Haggiscio @mark1mph]

Hang on a minute ………. If there’s Five refineries in England, why would any oil coming from Rosebank be sent to Belgium for refining …….. something stinks here and it involves closure of Grangemouth and UK GOV and Jim Ratcliffe. 🤬🤬🤬🤬🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

[Joey Swoll @TheJoeySwoll]

No, our parents raised us better than that. 👊🏼