Letem Avit 🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🇺🇦

If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, perhaps you’ve misunderstood the situation...

[Letem Avit 🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🇺🇦 @LetemAvit]

@SamCKx He was democratically elected, now we will have someone who wasn’t, largely because of media frenzy and misinformation. It’s outrageous, and people applaud this.

[Letem Avit 🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🇺🇦 @LetemAvit]

@realDonaldTrump This guy just wants to be loved. The wars, diplomatic rows, crazy ideas, he feels like nobody loves him. He’s striking out and hurting people because he’s hurt and he wants everyone to feel like he does.
He’s also massively ripping off America, obviously, so there’s that.

[Letem Avit 🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🇺🇦 @LetemAvit]

@OrevaZSN In the words of Douglas Adams, time is an illlusion. Lunchtime, doubly so.

[James Tate @JamesTate121]

The Aussies are bringing game. 🤣🤣🤣👏👏👏

[Letem Avit 🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🇺🇦 @LetemAvit]

@ARCRaidersGame what is going on with rats right now?? Absolutely insane! Got much, much worse over the past few weeks.

[Letem Avit 🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🇺🇦 @LetemAvit]

@OrevaZSN Many people look, fewer see

[The Culturist @the_culturist_]

Tom Bombadil is the most mysterious character in The Lord of the Rings.

He's the oldest being in Middle-earth and completely immune to the Ring's power — but why?

Bombadil is the key to the underlying ethics of the entire story, and to resisting evil yourself...

Tom Bombadil is an enigmatic, merry hermit of the countryside, known as "oldest and fatherless" by the Elves. He is truly ancient, and claims he was "here before the river and the trees." He's so confounding that Peter Jackson left him out of the films entirely.

This is understandable, since he's unimportant to the development of the plot. Tolkien, however, saw fit to include him anyway, because Tom reveals a lot about the underlying ethics of Middle-earth, and how to shield yourself from evil.

The hobbits meet Bombadil early on in their quest, before they reach Bree and the Prancing Pony Inn. He rescues Merry and Pippin from Old Man Willow, and invites the hobbits to stay at his house in the Old Forest.

There, the hobbits realize something strange about him: the Ring has no power over Bombadil whatsoever.

When he wears it, he remains visible. He treats it as a plaything, making it disappear with a magic trick. Indeed, at the Council of Elrond, Gandalf rejects the idea of giving the Ring to Tom, for he would likely misplace it or forget about it entirely.

So just who is he, exactly?

When Frodo asks this very question to Tom's wife Goldberry, she simply responds "He is." It's a cryptic answer that echoes God's famous answer to Moses in the Book of Exodus: "I am who I am."

Thus, many theorize that Bombadil is God, some kind of angelic being, or even the spirit of the Music of the Ainur (due to the fact that he is constantly singing). But Tolkien's letters reveal something considerably more interesting…

In April 1954, Tolkien wrote:

"The story is cast in terms of a good side, and a bad side, beauty against ruthless ugliness, tyranny against kingship… but both sides in some degree, conservative or destructive, want a measure of control.But if you have, as it were, taken a 'vow of poverty', renounced control, and take your delight in things for themselves without reference to yourself… then the questions of the rights and wrongs of power and control might become utterly meaningless to you, and the means of power quite valueless…"

So, Bombadil is a representation of what it means to take pure delight in the world around you — to experience people and things simply as they are, without any thought for what they could be or how you could use them. And this is why the Ring has no power over him.

To Bombadil, the One Ring is simply a ring, and the possibilities of what can be achieved through its power are of no importance. He is able to resist its evil precisely because he is entirely content with the world around him.

At the end of the story, having accomplished what he set out to do in Middle-earth, Gandalf pays Tom a visit before returning to the Undying Lands:

"I am going to have a long talk with Bombadil: such a talk as I have not had in all my time."

If Bombadil is the epitome of simply enjoying life and being, Gandalf is the epitome of doing. He guides the hobbits, fights the Balrog, and runs up and down Middle-earth to help destroy the One Ring.

But now that he's finally liberated from doing, he immediately heads to Bombadil's. He does so with a sense of relief, as if he's at last able to access a purer and higher mode of being — a sort of innocence that cannot be fully experienced by those consumed by doing.

Of course, by this Tolkien doesn't disparage the value of action. The entirety of LOTR displays the importance of rising up against evil, even in the face of all odds. But with the inclusion of Bombadil, he does remind readers that fighting isn't all there is.

Bombadil reminds us that while it's important to strive and *do*, it is just as important to occasionally step back and *be*. Indeed, your ability to do so plays a crucial role in helping you resist the allure of evil…

Read the full piece here:

https://t.co/aqK2daehIL

The unsung hero of The Lord of the Rings...

[Letem Avit 🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🇺🇦 @LetemAvit]

@JDVance You’re a bit stuck because you’re clearly a bit more clever than most of your supporters but nobody outside the US fails to see exactly who you are and what you stand for. Internationally, nobody is buying what you’re selling.

[Letem Avit 🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🇺🇦 @LetemAvit]

@campbellclaret Absolutely this. Media hype in this country has always been bad but beyond ridiculous now.

[Letem Avit 🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🇺🇦 @LetemAvit]

@HonestFrank Now following you to find out the answer but on a train tmrw so not sure how this situation is going to turn out to be honest. Applaud your work tho.

[Letem Avit 🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🇺🇦 @LetemAvit]

@elonmusk Complete and utter nonsense. Stop spouting this drivel, you absolute melt.

[Channel 4 News @Channel4News]

Economist Mariana Mazzucato says Brexit led to businesses leaving the UK, shrank market opportunities and damaged investment.

She tells The Fourcast that Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson have still not been held accountable for what she calls one of the country's biggest economic mistakes.

Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson have both denied lying to the public.

[Cherry @Cherryopenmind]

This is what elite, world-class investigative journalism looks like:

Carole Cadwalladr and her team at The Nerve have forensically stripped the mask off the British political establishment.

The pattern they found in The Harborne Receipts is nothing short of terrifying. Millions of pounds flow from a crypto-billionaire into the pockets of Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage, and like clockwork, weeks later, those exact politicians start pushing laws to benefit the crypto industry.

It is the exact same playbook Donald Trump used in America. It is cash-for-policy, clear as day.

While the billionaire-owned press tries to distract us with culture wars and theatre, true journalists follow the money.

This is the toxic soil that is destroying our democracy from within.

Absolute honour to see her back in action!

[David__Osland @David__Osland]

Fortunately, Britain has a Bermuda-registered mass circulation newspaper owned by a French-domiciled billionaire, a television station owned by a Dubai hedge fund and a political party backed by a Thailand-based crypto tycoon to remind us of the importance of patriotism

[Letem Avit 🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🇺🇦 @LetemAvit]

@depressionlesss Just get some cats and be nice to them, they’ll love you. No luck in it really. Great tweet tho, as always. The simplicity and purity of pet love is where life is, not in big things going on.

[Letem Avit 🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🇺🇦 @LetemAvit]

@Number10cat Tweet of the day 👌

[Larry the Cat @Number10cat]

Not sure who's sillier on this site, Elon Musk for claiming history's most infamous far right dictator was a socialist, or the climate change sceptics for saying this temperature in May is fine because a few million years ago the surface of the planet was molten lava.

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

If you have a bug zapper up, it's time to take that shit down.

A landmark University of Delaware study (Frick and Tallamy, 1996) counted nearly 14,000 insects killed by residential bug zappers over a single summer.

Mosquitoes were 31 of them. A mere 0.22%.

The other 99.78% were moths, beetles, midges, fireflies, and the night-shift pollinators your yard depends on.

Mosquitoes don't navigate by light. They find you by your carbon dioxide, body heat, and skin chemistry. Your bug zapper is invisible to them and lethal to almost everything else.

Harvard Medical School's Zika page specifically warns against bug zappers because they may increase mosquito populations by killing the predators that eat them.

What actually works: eliminate standing water within 100 feet of where you spend time outside.

Bug zappers are 1970s technology built on a 1970s misunderstanding of mosquitoes. It's time to take it down.

[Carole Cadwalladr @carolecadwalla]

Fantastic to see this @nerve_news investigation trending.

The crypto millions fuelling Britain’s far-right turn (the exact same playbook as Trump) requires much, much more scrutiny.

[The Daily Britain @dailybritainonx]

21 kicked out. 28 defected. 39 resigned. 5 suspended. 1 disqualified. 5 lost seats. That's approximately 99 Reform UK councillors and representatives who have left the party.

22 of them since the local elections just two weeks ago. The party claims "some of the strongest vetting in the country."

Here's the full list 👇