Nigel Rushman

Applying UnCommon Thinking to Deliver Common Sense Blog: Working at the intersection of Soft Power, Commerce and Sport

[Adam Grant @AdamMGrant]

Emotional intelligence is not about avoiding strong reactions. It’s about being less reactive.

Reactions are hard to control—they’re rapid and visceral. Responses are easier to delay and modify.

A key to emotion regulation is expanding the distance between feelings and actions.

[Shruti @heyshrutimishra]

Elon just created 4,400 millionaires in a single day.

400 of them are now worth over $100 million.

These aren't VCs. They're SpaceX employees, and the list includes welders, technicians, and cafeteria staff, because for two decades the company paid every level of the workforce in stock instead of higher salaries.

Juan Hernandez immigrated from Mexico and took a $28 an hour contractor welding job in 2015. He says he didn't even know what SpaceX was. The company gave him a $10,000 equity grant and let him buy more shares through payroll deductions. That stake is now worth $880,000.

Trevor Hise's parents wanted him to take a stable job at General Electric. He picked SpaceX instead, stayed 12 years, and accumulated over 100,000 shares. At the $135 listing price that's $13.5 million. He's 37 and semiretired. His words: "The magnitude of this has been ridiculous."

The most telling detail came before the listing. Over 100 employees quietly banded together and negotiated a group wealth management deal covering up to $5 billion, because none of them had ever needed a wealth manager before.

Software IPOs have minted millionaires for 30 years. This is the first one where the money went to the factory floor.

[Nigel Rushman @nrushman]

@ElsaSofia__AI ‘I’m reaching out’ or “I hope you are doing well” guarantee a delete from me. That level of illiteracy rarely warrants reading further.

[Nigel Rushman @nrushman]

@Nuked4Every1 Its a prank!
No, it's not a real incident. That video making the rounds on X showing a British police officer stuck upside down on a fence with an unfortunate stain on his shorts is completely staged.

It’s actually a comedy prank designed to film the public's bewildered reaction

[Nigel Rushman @nrushman]

@therealmissjo @CanonFrancais Wouldn't that be great in the UK! Starmers thought police wouldn't allow it though.

[News Uncut: Straight Talk, Hard Truths @newsuncut_]

@PatrickChristys The reactions of Starmer, Khan and Mahmood are all contrasted in this piece at News Uncut:

[The British Patriot @TheBritLad]

So, just to make sure I've got this right...

I can punch and break a female police officer nose on camera, and get away with it.

But if I write a few words on the internet I can go to prison for over 2 years.

Got it.

[Julia Hartley-Brewer @JuliaHB1]

How on earth has Angela Rayner been "cleared" by HMRC?

She didn't pay the extra £40,000 stamp duty that was due. She didn't take the specialist tax advice on her flat purchase that she was advised to take.

She failed to pay the extra stamp duty that she, as Housing Secretary, had brought in for second home purchasers.

For HMRC not to issue a fine means they judged her decision as "reasonable care" having been taken, or it was possibly "careless", but not a "deliberate" underpayment.

She clearly did not take "reasonable care" to ensure her tax was correct. And if it was "careless", it was *deliberate* carelessness.

Do you seriously think that if YOU underpaid your taxes by £40,000 as the then Deputy Prime Minister did, that you would get away without a fine?

Sorry, but this stinks.

[໊ @mellowjnr_]

Hmmm… Ok this is interesting 🤔

[Nigel Rushman @nrushman]

There is so much knowledge, so much OSINT. idiculous not to use it. That’s why I built HTT | Rushmans Decision Intelligence. Coupled with Human Dynamic Calibration it is a powerhouse. Available to all with challenges and opportunities. Very gratifying to see its use multiplying.

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

Starmer and Hermer Built the Machine Together. Now They Run the Country.

In 2007, two barristers worked without pay on a case that would change the legal landscape for every British soldier who had served in Iraq. Keir Starmer and Richard Hermer appeared as interveners in Al-Skeini v Secretary of State for Defence, representing eleven human rights organisations including Amnesty International and Liberty. Their argument was that the European Convention on Human Rights should apply to British forces operating overseas. They lost in the Court of Appeal. They appealed to the House of Lords. They lost again. But the legal principle they had argued for eventually prevailed at the European Court of Human Rights, and what followed was the Iraq Historic Allegations Team, sixty million pounds of public money, seven years of investigations, and not a single prosecution. The soldiers it pursued were, in almost every case, found to have acted properly.

Starmer believed in it enough to do it for free. Johnny Mercer, who spent years dismantling the consequences, put it plainly. Starmer had insisted on doing it for free. That is not the behaviour of a barrister following the cab rank rule. That is ideological conviction.

Hermer's conviction, it subsequently emerged, was not without financial reward once the machinery was running. Documents obtained by the Daily Telegraph show that having helped establish the legal architecture pro bono in 2007, Hermer then used that same architecture to pursue Iraqi claims against British soldiers at £450 an hour, fifty percent higher than the only other KC involved in the group action. He set his success fee at the maximum level permitted, one hundred percent of his normal rate. The MoD's own lawyers challenged his fees as excessive and said he was too junior to command that rate. He is thought to have earned around six figures from the broader group action. The claims he was pursuing were eventually ruled to be deliberate lies. The soldiers were fully exonerated.

Sergeant Richie Catterall had been cleared of wrongdoing by the British Army in 2003 for a fatal shooting in Basra. The Army found he had acted in self-defence. The legal precedent Starmer and Hermer established triggered two further investigations spanning thirteen years. A 2016 inquiry again concluded he had acted in self-defence and found a false document had been created to shift blame onto the military. Catterall was finally exonerated. He told the Telegraph he was gutted that Starmer had helped bring the case against him and that the Prime Minister owed him an apology.

Starmer is now Prime Minister. Hermer is now Attorney General, appointed by Starmer personally, elevated to the House of Lords specifically for the role, chosen over Emily Thornberry who had held the shadow brief. The former head of the Army, General Sir Peter Wall, has said Hermer's role in the Al-Sweady claims was tantamount to treason. A former commanding officer of 22 SAS said Hermer must step down. The Bar Standards Board has been asked to investigate. Nigel Farage has reported Hermer to the House of Lords standards commissioner.

The Troubles Bill that is now subjecting Northern Ireland veterans to the same lawfare is not an accident of policy. The process that drove Fred, a special forces veteran, to attempt suicide after his medical records were handed to terrorists' families was not an oversight. The machine that cost sixty million pounds and produced no prosecutions was not a mistake. Starmer and Hermer built it together, one working for free out of conviction, the other later working for maximum fees out of the same conviction, and now both occupy the positions from which they can ensure the machine keeps running.

[Susan Hall AM @Councillorsuzie]

If anyone thinks that Angela Rayner would make a good PM please watch this interview with the superb @afneil - spoiler, she doesn’t have a clue.

[Nigel Rushman @nrushman]

@durov @anomsiiwa I think you will find critical thinking left western democracies years ago along with common sense. It has been chased away by the Chinese and the ‘useful idiots’ of the left.

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

We can all see him, John! His illegal ships sailed through the Channel yesterday unmolested.
You and Starmer vowed to stop illegal Russian oil tankers using the Channel. Two 'shadow fleet' vessels were off Britain's south coast yesterday, escorted by a Russian warship (frigate Admiral Grigorovich).
All the Royal Navy could rustle up was a lightly-armed support ship (RFA Tideforce, an auxiliary tanker) which could do no more than watch them head for the Black Sea as they passed Dover.
So much for your government’s promise to 'go after' the sanction-breaking ships 'even harder'.
All mouth and no trousers.

[Nigel Rushman @nrushman]

The First 90 Days Are a Trap https://t.co/0fprNAV1Kw

[Nigel Rushman @nrushman]

The CEO of America’s largest public hospital system says he is prepared to replace radiologists with AI once the regulatory landscape catches up.

[Liza Rosen @LizaRosen0000]

https://t.co/uiAxTyc3d5
Muslims in Britain kidnapped and raped white British girls to celebrate Islam’s Eid.

The British police did nothing against the Pakistani rapists and ordered victims to avoid being Islamophobic or xenophobic when describing their rapists, or face hate crime charges.

Don't stop sharing this until everyone sees it.

The police, politicians, and Pakistani gangs must be imprisoned!

These crimes against humanity were committed for diversity, under the guise of inclusion and multicultural enrichment.

This madness must stop!

[Nigel Rushman @nrushman]

UK govt are profiteering at the expense of the consumer. Fuel duty and VAT are percentages. They are raking it in because if the increase. Ripping people off. They could reduce the percentages to help.

[Nigel Rushman @nrushman]

@MirzaMogul007 There was a lot more traffic last week

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

A Parliament of Charity Workers and Lobbyists. In a Time of War.

Of 238 new Labour MPs elected in July 2024, 72 worked in the charitable sector, 72 were political employees and 70 worked in communications or lobbying. Roughly ninety percent have never worked in defence, manufacturing, engineering, medicine or law enforcement. A parliamentary source quoted in the Sunday Times put it plainly. If only we had the same number with defence or military experience, maybe we'd be in a different place.

Maybe. But the problem runs deeper than defence spending. It runs to the question of what kind of person ends up in parliament, what professional formation shapes their instincts, and whose interests they are constitutionally equipped to represent.

Charity sector workers are trained to see the world through the lens of vulnerable groups, international obligations and institutional compassion. Political employees are trained to manage narratives and avoid uncomfortable truths. Communications and lobbying professionals are trained to advance the interests of whoever is paying them. Not one of those professional backgrounds prepares you for the question of how to defend a sovereign nation, manage a border, hold a foreign state accountable or protect a citizen from an Iranian proxy group that is firebombing Jewish ambulances on British streets.

The parliament that responded to the Golders Green firebombing by debating the language used to describe it is a parliament staffed by people whose entire professional lives have trained them to manage perception rather than confront reality. The government that rolled out an anti-Muslim hostility definition while twenty Iranian backed terrorist plots were being planned on British streets is a government whose instinct is accommodation rather than accountability. The thirty six MPs who wrote to the Parliamentary Commissioner demanding Nick Timothy's investigation were not all acting from professional instinct. Several have documented histories of antisemitic language or associations. Others represent constituencies where the Muslim vote is the primary electoral consideration.

The Sunday Times source suggests the problem is defence spending priorities. It is that. But it is also the Trafalgar Square response, where Keir Starmer reached for Tommy Robinson rather than engaging with a theological argument he knew he could not answer. It is the Attorney General deploying his Jewish identity to provide cover for a false equivalence he knew to be false. It is the parliamentary machinery mobilised to silence the people naming what is happening while the people doing it operate without consequence. All of it flows from the same source. A political class whose professional formation is compassion, accommodation and message management, governing in a moment that requires clarity, resolve and the willingness to say plainly what the evidence shows.

Britain is not short of intelligence assessments. MI5 has thwarted twenty Iranian plots. The Walney report documented Iranian influence operations in the charitable sector. The security services know what is happening. The problem is not knowledge. It is the absence of the professional formation, the instincts, the language and the willingness that would allow the people in power to act on what they know.

Ninety percent of the new Labour intake came from charities, political offices and communications agencies. They were never going to see it coming. And even now that it has arrived, on the streets of Golders Green, in the WhatsApp groups of the Green Party, on the Embankment where death to America was chanted on a Sunday afternoon, they are still reaching for the tools their professional lives gave them. Compassion. Accommodation. Message management. And the instruction not to take the bait.

"Ninety percent of the new Labour intake came from charities, political offices and communications agencies."