Martin

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

Americans invented a word for their corruption so that it wouldn't sound like corruption.

They called it lobbying.

In most of the world, if a corporation hands a politician money and the politician then votes in that corporation's interest, we have a name for that.

The name is bribery.

The person goes to prison, or is supposed to, or at least has to conduct the transaction in a parking garage at midnight with an envelope.

In America, the transaction happens in broad daylight. It is filed with the Federal Election Commission. It is legal. It is protected, since 2010, by a Supreme Court ruling that defined the exchange of money for political access as free speech.

They looked at bribery and called it speech.

They looked at corruption and called it democracy.

And then they sent ambassadors to other countries to lecture those governments about transparency and rule of law.

The audacity is not incidental to the system.

The audacity is the system.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

A man who spent thirty years reviewing sports cars has taught this country more about its own food than every minister, union and campaign of the last fifty years combined.

Here is what five series of Clarkson's Farm put in front of the public, and not one line of it is opinion.

- A thousand acres, worked flat out for a year, made a profit of £144. Under forty pence a day.
- By year six the same farm was losing money, weather and prices turning a projected £37,000 into a five grand loss.
- A crop can drown in the field after months of work and take everything with it, and nobody is coming to help.
- The farmer is the only man in the food chain who sells at a price he does not set. The supermarket sets it. He takes it or he takes nothing.
- The council can shut his restaurant, refuse his car park and stop him selling his own food off his own land.
- The subsidy he was told to lean on can be closed overnight, the big estates first through the door, the small farms locked out.
- One outbreak of bovine TB can lock a farm down for months, banned from buying or selling a single cow, through no fault of its own.
- Rear pigs with real care and the butcher's maths can still make them a loss, so the animals go and the loss stays.
- The margins are so thin that a rich man buys farmland not to earn from it but to shelter money that earns elsewhere. The shelter exists precisely because the farming does not.

Now hold that against the story you were sold. Greedy farmers. Subsidised for doing nothing. Wrecking a countryside they are somehow also the custodians of.

There is no profit. That was the reveal. A show that set out to be funny accidentally filmed the slow strangling of the people who feed us, and the country watched it happen and finally understood what its cheap food actually costs.

Clarkson has now admitted the plainest part out loud: it is the television money keeping Diddly Squat alive, and most farms do not have a television show. Britain grows about sixty per cent of its own food and the average farmer is past sixty. That is why both numbers are heading the wrong way.

It took a Lamborghini tractor and a man doing it for a laugh. Fifty years of earnest campaigning could not manage it.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

Here is what I actually cannot explain:

The year is 2003.

The United States invades Iraq on the basis of "weapons of mass destruction" that do not exist.

This is not a matter of interpretation. It is documented.

The intelligence was manipulated.

The case was fabricated.

The people who fabricated it knew it was fabricated.

Some of them have said so, on record, in memoirs that were reviewed positively in the same newspapers that helped sell the war.

One million people died.

The country was destroyed. The infrastructure, the institutions, the social fabric.

ISIS emerged from the power vacuum.

The region destabilized in ways still producing casualties today.

Not one person went to prison.

The architects of the decision became senior fellows at think tanks.

They wrote books.

They appeared on television as "serious foreign policy voices."

Some of them are now presented as "voices of reason" in the anti-Trump discourse.

And the next time the same government, with many of the same institutional actors, said there was a foreign threat that required military response, a significant portion of the population believed them.

That is what I cannot explain.

Not the lie.

Governments lie.

The bottomless, renewable, apparently inexhaustible willingness to be lied to again.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

The textbook version of the American Revolution is a masterclass in selective principle.

It teaches that: taxation without representation is tyranny. That a people have the right to abolish a government that fails to serve them. That armed resistance to unjust authority is not only permissible but noble. That the spark of liberty, once lit, cannot be extinguished by any empire, however powerful.

These principles are taught as universal.

They are applied as particular.

When Haitians applied them in 1791, enslaved people reasoning that taxation without representation is tyranny, that a people have the right to abolish a government that fails to serve them, that armed resistance to unjust authority is noble, the American government refused to recognize their republic and maintained a trade embargo for sixty years.

When Vietnamese people applied them, a people have the right to determine their own government, foreign rule without consent is tyranny, resistance is legitimate, America sent 500,000 troops.

When Palestinians apply them. When Congolese apply them. When Bolivians apply them.

Instability. Terrorism. A threat to regional security.

The principle is yours when you use it.

It is a threat when someone else does.

That is not a principle.

That is a privilege dressed in the language of principle.

And the textbook teaches the language without ever mentioning the dress.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

Every generation of the American ruling class has had a word for revolution when it happens somewhere else.

In the 1950s the word was: communist.
In the 1960s the word was: communist.
In the 1970s the word was: communist.
In the 1980s the word was: communist.
In the 1990s the word was: instability.
In the 2000s the word was: terrorism.
In the 2010s the word was: populism.
In the 2020s the word is: authoritarianism, when the revolt succeeds, and extremism when it doesn't.

The word changes.

The function of the word never changes.

The function is to place the thing outside the category of legitimate political action.

To make it something to be managed, contained, or crushed rather than something to be understood as a rational response to conditions that are, in fact, intolerable.

George Washington was not called a populist.

George Washington was called a founding father.

The difference between a founding father and a terrorist is not the act.

It is whether the people writing the history needed the act to succeed.

[Daniel Mayakovski @DaniMayakovski]

Marco Rubio: "Si no enfrentamos el socialismo y lo derrotamos, destruirá este país."

Soldados de EEUU: "Me alisté al ejército de EEUU por pobreza, el estado nos ofrece atención médica, vivienda; ofrecen a los soldados socialismo para ir al extranjero a defender el capitalismo".

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

Here's a thought experiment they don't teach in American schools.

Imagine a foreign power, significantly stronger than the United States, decided after a disputed intelligence assessment that the American government posed a threat.

It assembled a coalition, invaded, removed the government, disbanded the military, releasing hundreds of thousands of armed men into unemployment, and installed a transitional authority composed largely of exiles who had been living in the foreign power’s country for twenty years.

It then spent the next decade conducting night raids on American homes.

It ran detention facilities where Americans were held without charge and in some cases tortured.

It operated checkpoints in American cities where American citizens were stopped, searched, and sometimes killed by foreign soldiers who did not speak English and could not distinguish a civilian from a combatant and in many cases did not particularly try.

A generation of American children grew up in this environment.

Would you describe those children's resulting hostility to the foreign power as:

(A) A rational response to their lived experience

or

(B) Evidence of a cultural pathology that requires theological and anthropological analysis?

You already know the answer.

You knew it before I finished the sentence.

The exercise is only necessary because the question is never asked the right way around.

[John Hughes @yogijunior3]

Seen this multiple times now. It’s amazing that simply expressing a bit of resistance gets such coverage. That shows you the absolute subjugation of our puppet politicians and bought media. If you know this lady make sure you buy her a large drink👏

[Howard Beckett @HowardRBeckett]

A Scotland 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 fan at the World Cup sees an 🇮🇱 flag & shouts for a Free Palestine 🇵🇸:

‘I was a nurse in Gaza 🇵🇸’
‘I volunteered’
‘I saw it for myself’
‘It is a genocide’

Refusing to be silenced 👏

A Flower of Scotland 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 🇵🇸

[Mukhtar @I_amMukhtar]

This legend is Irish-born Ceire Ní Ghribín. She travelled to Rafah, Gaza, where she treated children, which is why she stood her ground and doubled down on her socials.

"There were three guys with an Israeli flag who had no reason to be bringing politics into a Scotland vs Brazil game, and I stand by what I said. I was there. It’s a genocide... I should’ve added ‘Free Lebanon’ too."

[David Henry @DavidDhenry]

Dear #SNP members, you have allowed the party to be infiltrated by transgender ideology and dishonest politicians. You have sat back and allowed the Yes donations to be stolen said nothing and continued to ignore repeated breaches of the party rules.

Worse still when the #SNPGOODGUYS in 2020 tried to fix the problem you ignored them then you attacked them when they left the corrupt #SNP your attacks were then focused on the Alba Party. You ignored the accounts which proved money had been stolen.

Many of you continue to ignore reality preferring to blame Yoons, the Media or some invisible enemy. Rather than open your eyes and ears to actual facts. You are the enemy of truth. It's you as a cult member who's prepared to ignore criminality and blame everyone else.

Nicola Sturgeon has conned you, she has never acted as a responsible party leader and instead prevented action to open up the party accounts. Thanks to your blind support the party has been robbed and Scotland's progress to independence has been prevented.

Now the only question is when will you apologise to the #SNPGOODGUYS?

Regards
David Henry

[Alt Mhor @AltMhor]

@MrsBr0wn_82 https://t.co/n04OrRJE3l

[Cat Brown 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🚜🇬🇧🇮🇪🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 @MrsBr0wn_82]

🚨🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 BREAKING: SNP insiders drop bombshell Two former finance officials have come forward saying Nicola Sturgeon and the top brass bullied them for raising serious questions about the party books back in 2021.

They flagged almost 400 grand in dodgy payments and over one and a half million unaccounted for all tied to Peter Murrell.

Leaked video of Sturgeon warning everyone not to dig into the accounts proves she was well aware of these concerns and tried to silence anyone asking questions.

This comes days after Murrell got sent down for years.

Police Scotland confirmed that they had enough evidence to arrest and possibly charge Sturgeon, but when the evidence was presented to COPFS they ruled the case insufficient for prosecution.

The case against Nicole Sturgeon IMO needs reopened, her refusal to comment during police interviews stinks to high heaven.

If she has nothing to hide why not help the police by answering honestly what she did or didnt know?

Instead she choose to go NO COMMENT.

its mind-blowing to me people still defend this 🤯

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

A century ago, one in every four big trees in the eastern forests of America was a chestnut, and every autumn the country under them ate for free.

The American chestnut was a giant, a hundred feet tall, and there were close to four billion of them from Maine to the Deep South. Each autumn they dropped a carpet of sweet nuts so thick you raked it up by the sackful. Families roasted them all winter. Hogs and cattle were turned loose in the woods to fatten on them for nothing. Turkey, deer and bear lived off the same mast. The timber, straight and rot-proof, built the barns, the fence posts and the furniture. One tree fed the people, fattened the livestock, carried the wildlife through winter, then built the house.

Then in 1904 a blight arrived on imported Asian chestnut stock, spotted first on the trees at the Bronx Zoo. It moved through the forest at fifty miles a year, and by the 1940s it had killed close to four billion trees, nearly every mature chestnut on the continent. One of the worst ecological catastrophes in the country's history.

Here is the part that should stop you. The tree is not quite dead. The old roots still send up shoots, year after year, that the blight cuts down before they grow tall enough to fruit. A century on, the stumps are still trying, and still failing.

A free harvest that fed a continent every autumn for thousands of years, gone in forty, and still reaching for a sky it will never reach again.

[Joanna Cherry KC @joannaccherry]

Murrell would not have got away with what he did for so long without the hostility to debate, transparency & scrutiny enforced by the SNP leadership & their cronies & the harassment & intimidation of those who dared to speak up. That is why we need an independent inquiry. 3/3.

[Morgan Barrett @MorganBarrettX]

Jeremy Clarkson’s Farm show on Amazon is the most radicalizing piece of mainstream media I’ve ever seen

Just one example (bear with me):

Badgers became a protected species in Britain 40+ years ago.

The population has exploded and now frequently transmits tuberculosis to cows

But farmers can’t cull the badger population to protect their cattle because the government still considers them to be endangered

Instead of addressing the root cause, the UK has the most batshit testing regime for cattle

There’s no TB vaccine. So the cattle have to get tested. The vets administering the test have to measure welts on the cows neck. Whether a cow lives or dies comes down to a vet trying to discern 1mm on a caliper (reactive vs non reactive).

If a cow tests positive, the farm (already running on super thin margins) is quarantined and starts hemorrhaging money.

Jeremy Clarkson’s cow (pregnant with twins) has an inconclusive test so it’s separated from the herd. It receives a second inconclusive test so they have to kill it (before it can give birth to the twins).

Now here’s the kicker: the autopsy reveals no sign of TB. It was a healthy cow needlessly killed

So - silver lining the farm should be removed from quarantine, right? WRONG - it’s still under quarantine and has to keep testing and can’t sell its beef

Kafkaesque doesn’t even begin to describe how f’d up it is for British farmers

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Want to know the single most efficient use of British land?

Forget almonds. The climate here would take one look at an almond tree and file a formal complaint.

Forget avocados. Be serious.

Forget quinoa. We can grow it, technically, in the way you can technically play the violin wearing oven gloves.

The answer is grass. It covers roughly two-thirds of British farmland, most of it too wet, too steep or too poor to grow a single crop a human can eat. Useless ground, agriculturally speaking, except for two machines that turn it into food.

Those machines are the cow and the sheep. The cow works the lower pasture, the sheep the hills too steep and bleak for anything else, and between them they take grass no human could survive on and turn it into complete protein, saturated fat and the fat-soluble vitamins your brain runs on, through a gut that has been doing the job, unmodified, for forty million years.

We are told these animals are the problem.

They are the only reason that land feeds anyone at all.

[Unpopularfootyx @Unpopularfootyx]

🚨🎙️ ZLATAN IBRAHIMOVIĆ ON LIONEL MESSI'S INFLUENCE ON ARGENTINA AFTER THEIR WIN OVER AUSTRIA:

“I'm obsessed with watching Messi.

Not because he's my friend.

Not because of nostalgia.

Because after all these years, I'm still trying to understand how one player can control a football match without touching the ball every minute.

I watched Argentina today and the first thing I noticed wasn't the scoreline.

It was the way Austria reacted whenever Messi moved.

One step to the left, defenders follow.

One drop into midfield, the entire shape changes.

One glance over his shoulder panic.

That's not football.

That's psychological warfare.

And that's why I laugh when people reduce him to goals and assists.

They don't understand what they're watching.

Messi isn't just Argentina's best player.

He's Argentina's system.

He's their confidence.

He's their belief.

He's the reason every teammate walks onto the pitch thinking the impossible is possible.

People ask me about the GOAT debate.

What debate?
Seriously.

What debate?

For me, there isn't one.

The debate exists because television needs content and social media needs arguments.

When I watch football, I don't see a debate.

I see Messi.

Then I see everybody else.

That doesn't mean other legends weren't incredible.

It means I've never seen another player influence a match, a team and an entire generation of football the way Messi has.

And today was another reminder.

He didn't need a hat-trick.

He didn't need to score from 40 yards.

He just needed to be Lionel Messi.

And suddenly Argentina looked like a completely different team.

That's greatness.

Not when everything depends on you.

When everybody becomes better because you're there.

I've played against great players.

I've played with great players.

But Messi is the only player I've ever watched and genuinely thought:

'This isn't normal.'

The scary thing?

Opponents know exactly what he's going to do.

And they still can't stop it.

That's why I don't waste my time with comparisons anymore.

Some players become legends.

Some players become icons.

Messi became a category of his own.

And after today's performance, if you're still asking me who the greatest footballer of all time is...

You're asking the wrong question.

The right question is:
Will football ever produce another one like him?”

[Swati Gupta @hrswatigupta]

My card was skimmed in Bangkok. $2,000 gone.

My bank said "investigation takes 90 days, don't expect much."

Visa's global rules say I owe $0 from day one. The bank was using my money to fund their fraud investigation.

One email. Reversed in 48 hours.

Here is the sentence that ends the delay:

[Saul Staniforth @SaulStaniforth]

Anne Read: "of course I do not class myself as a terrorist. I accept that I am classed as one by a govt that supports terrorist regimes"

Trudi Warner: "One of the tricks that authoritarian govts play is to label opponents.. as terrorists"

Both women were arrested yesterday.