steve luckwell

[Prem Sikka @premnsikka]

Sainsbury's boss eyes bumper £7.3m payday as shoppers reel from higher food prices.

Up from £5.4m last year – 200 times average employee pay.

Govts preach pay restraint to workers, silence on exec pay, shareholder returns.

Let workers vote on exec pay.
https://t.co/S0tClkOEur

[Derrick Evans @DerrickEvans4WV]

This is INSANE.

AIPAC controls 76% of the members of Congress, regardless of which party they belong to.

There’s def a uniparty, but it looks much different than I could have ever imagined.

I NEVER looked or paid attention to any of this until they took out Thomas Massie.

[Feargal Sharkey @Feargal_Sharkey]

"Picturesque river polluted with sewage just 13 days after being given official bathing status."

Yep the River Avon at Salisbury was designated as a bathing spot on 15th May and just 13 days later on the 28th the EA have to issue a pollution warning due to E. coli levels. What a shambles.

https://t.co/nC3WWbwgt6

[Maxi @AllForProgress_]

This past week, on a test bed in Britain, a Rolls-Royce jet engine ran at full take-off power on pure hydrogen, putting out water vapour instead of carbon.

Nobody on Earth had managed it before. It is the sort of thing that ought to stop the country in its tracks, and it will be forgotten by the weekend.

Leave aside the recent paroxysms of renewed net-zero insanity from Derelict Ed and the pervasive atmosphere of offended envy that greets much homegrown achievement nowadays in Britain. This engineering is a wonder, and it's British to the bone.

We gave the world the jet engine in the first place - Frank Whittle, a Coventry man and an RAF officer, patented it in 1930 while the Air Ministry assured him it was a curiosity. Rolls-Royce is today one of perhaps three firms anywhere that can build a large aero engine at the outer edge of the possible, and it has just done what most of the industry swore was twenty years away.

As usual, you marvel at how little the people who govern us had to do with it. The engineers in Derby are world-class; the stewardship above them is third-rate. They pulled off a global first while paying the most expensive industrial electricity in the developed world to keep the power on over the bench - a weight no German, American or Gulf rival has to carry. We produce frontier brilliance on the shop floor and fritter it away at the despatch box, and we have done for two generations.

That is the maddening shape of modern Britain: brilliance from below, sub- (or, indeed, ultra-) mediocrity from above. The people here who actually make things are still among the best in the world; the state that is meant to back them treats a firm like Rolls-Royce as a photocall today and a takeover target tomorrow, and prices its energy as though it would prefer the next plant were built in Texas.

Progress starts from the other end. Give these people what every rival government gives its champions and we beg ours to do without: the cheap, abundant power their competitors already enjoy, a supply chain built around them, and a state that guards a national asset rather than auctioning it. The hard part of a British revival - the talent, the nerve, the engineering - is already done, and was done again this week, by people who deserve a far better country than the one currently sitting above them.

We just taught an engine to breathe fire and exhale water. The least we owe the men and women who managed it is a government and a state as brilliant as they are.

[Cat @catdeans]

This is awful. The last ever Denby Pottery going to the kiln. Why is there not uproar? Where’s the government in this?? We all have Denby in our homes, in family heirlooms, as our history and now it’s closing through lack of support, such a sad sad day. #SaveDenby @denbypottery

[Jeff Weniger @JeffWeniger]

More than half the S&P 500's total value is now in stocks priced above 10x sales. This was once considered an outlandish valuation, as it leaves little room for error. The list includes Nvidia, Apple, GOOG, MSFT, Broadcom, Tesla, Micron, Eli Lilly, AMD, Oracle and 57 more.

[DD Geopolitics @DD_Geopolitics]

PM Edi Rama said that no amount of protesters can stop him, so the Albanians took that as a challenge!!!

Protests against Kushner's Epstein Island 2.0 continue into the night.

[Artur Nadolny @ArturNadol7566]

FORMER PM LOBBIED FOR A COLLAPSING FINANCE FIRM AND GOT A CABINET SEAT AS A THANK YOU

David Cameron left Downing Street in 2016. By 2020 he was back in the group chat, hammering out 45 messages to ministers, civil servants and the Bank of England in just over a month on behalf of Greensill Capital, a finance firm that had helpfully given him an adviser salary of $1 million a year, shares, and a $700k bonus. He wanted Greensill plugged into £10 billion of emergency Covid loan schemes. He was very keen. He sent a lot of texts.

Lex Greensill, the firm's founder, had been given a desk inside Downing Street during Cameron's premiership. After Cameron left office, Greensill hired him. BBC @BBCPanorama later reported Cameron made around $10 million promoting the business. His spokesman said the figure was not accurate. He did not provide a different figure.

Greensill Capital collapsed in March 2021. Criminal investigations are ongoing in Germany and Switzerland. Billions went missing. 440 jobs went with it.

Cameron was investigated and cleared. The lobbying rules he was cleared under were the same rules his own government had blocked efforts to strengthen. MPs said his conduct showed a significant lack of judgment.

Rishi Sunak was Chancellor at the time and received Cameron's messages. He later became Prime Minister. He then appointed Cameron Foreign Secretary in November 2023, handing him a peerage on the same day to make him eligible for the job, because that is how things work here.

Transparency International @TransparencyUK called the scandal a case study in why lobbying rules need to be dragged into daylight. Parliament nodded, filed it, and moved on.

Nobody involved appears to have noticed anything unusual.

SOURCES
@BBCPanorama @BBC @guardian @FT @TransparencyUK

[BladeoftheSun @BladeoftheS]

Crazy isn't it Jeremy Corbyn's Labour party had an 'antisemitism crisis' and now Zack Polanski's Green Party does.

While Nigel Farage's Reform party, with Nigel Farage and loads of Nazi lovers, doesn't.

It's like it's some kind of scam used against Left Wing parties.

[Doc Jazz ✌ طارق @docjazzmusic]

‼️🛑I honestly hate to say it, but Thomas Massie is literally putting his life on the line. And I actually believe he knows this quite well.

It makes his stance even more heroic.

His decision to commemorate the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty on its 59th Anniversary, after having been defeated by Jewish money in Congress, is the single most courageous move I have ever seen a sitting American politician make during my lifetime.

It's a stuck up middle finger against 'Israel' and all it stands for, for the following reasons:

💥 the deliberate murder of American servicemen in plain sight by the Israeli air force is solidly proven, which means that the Ziønist influencers have zero arguments to present to counter it;

💥 he is doing it without this being in any way 'necessary', or 'called for', as 58 anniversaries have already passed unnoticed and unmentioned;

💥 he will have actual survivors from the attack present, which is a feature one can thing bring nothing up against;

💥 the effect of this act of insurgency is bound to create powerful ripples on social media, even if mass media try to ignore or downplay it.

Many liberals on the Democrat side will remain silent. Most of those are on the 'has the right to exist and defend itself' boat anyway. Which, I should take another opportunity to say, is utterly fucked up anyway.

Some of them will nevertheless get a powerful wake-up call, and realize that standing up against oppression takes precedence and priority over ideological differences in this time frame.

The main effect however, will take place on the Republican side. For most Republicans, the army is sacrosanct. Many of them have never heard of the USS Liberty tragedy. Many will truly be shaken to the core.

All I can do is pray for Thomas Massie.

And here is what I would say to him if I could see him face to face: "Massie, this is the courageous act of a real man, a true patriot, and a genuine revolutionary. You are a Lion among men. May God be with you."

[IRAN Embassy in Austria @IraninAustria]

Reporters, frustrated by the repeated ceasefire violations carried out by the United States in #Iran and the Israeli regime in #Lebanon and #Gaza, are pressing #Trump to define what a ceasefire actually means.

Trump responds: "That's a different part of the world. In that part of the world, a ceasefire means you're shooting in a more moderate manner."

Beyond the blatant racism and insult embedded in Trump's remarks toward the people of West Asia, his words inadvertently reveal a brutal truth. From the perspective of terrorist entities like the U.S. and Israeli regimes, commitments carry no weight. A ceasefire, in their lexicon, is merely an expectation for the other side to stop fighting—while they reserve the right to continue their aggression.

⚠️Iran is going to treat them with their own medicine until they are forced to return to the true meaning of ceasefire.

[Feargal Sharkey @Feargal_Sharkey]

"Sewage companies failed to report 126 serious spills last year. Worst offender was Anglian Water, with 23 undisclosed emergency dumps of raw waste."

WHAT, water companies lying to the regulator to cover their own asses? Surely not?!

And the @EnvAgency does what exactly?

https://t.co/8ZGkT3NaLj

[Shadow of Ezra @ShadowofEzra]

Thomas Massie says the conspiracy theorists were right again about Section 224 of the NDAA, which he says will merge the United States military with the IDF.

Massie says the provision is treasonous and warns that it will force the United States to compromise its own security for Benjamin Netanyahu's demands.

"The difference between a conspiracy theory in Washington has been reduced from six months to six days."

[Double Down News @DoubleDownNews]

“It’s insane, we have a rogue US military contractor handling our most sensitive data. Palantir has a contract running our nuclear missile program. We have no national security.”

Palantir. IT'S WORSE Than You Think @carolecadwalla

[Emoluments Clause @Emolclause]

#BREAKING: Rep Madeleine Dean: “…I said to him, Mr Acting Attorney-General [Todd Blanche], when are you going to prosecute? So far we have one dead guy [#Epstein] and one woman in a Summer Camp [Ghislaine Maxwell]. When are you going to prosecute those who victimized, trafficked, abused, raped girls and women, more than a thousand of them? He blamed the victims. He said they really haven’t come forward with the names…right then I knew the coverup was complete.”😳

[╰┈➤ 🇮🇪 Brònzy 🇮🇪 @BronzyGuevara]

Albania has officially drawn the
line, Sazan 'lsland is being cleared. In an stunning turn of events, Albanian authorities have
launched an active enforcement operation to kick
out foreign developers and private security
personnel occupying Sazan Island. The decisive
action marks a total collapse of the controversial €1.4 billion luxury real estate deal that aimed to turn the protected national marine reserve and
former military base into an exclusive private playground for global elites,
The eviction comes after four consecutive weeks of historic
hundred-thousand-strong protests that completely
shut down the capital city of Tirana, refusing to allow their native coastlines and ecologically sensitive wetlands to be privatized by foreign
investors, the Albanian public unified under a
single, unyielding demand: "Albania is not for sale, the courts faced with a historic political crisis, mounting
domestic fury, and a widening anti-corruption
investigation by special prosecutors (SPAK), the
government was forced to pivot, by deploying state forces to reclaim Sazan lsland, Albania has
sent a clear message to international billionaires
and foreign developers trying to bypass environmental protection laws, This historic victory for citizen-led activism proves that the collective voice of a nation can successfully overpower backroom corporate deals and protect sovereign land.
The people spoke, and the
government had to listen.

[Feargal Sharkey @Feargal_Sharkey]

"Southern Water sparks fury with ‘absolutely disgusting’ sewage dumping plans."

So Southern Water's big plan to fix the sewage scandal is simply to extent their pipework and dump it further out to sea, no I'm not kidding, just as the good people of Whitstable. @SOSWhitstable

https://t.co/XZjO15OAqu

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

There was once a bird in America so numerous it darkened the sky for days when it passed, and it was the cheapest meat in the country. Then, inside a single lifetime, every last one of them was gone.

The passenger pigeon. Three to five billion of them, the most abundant bird in North America, possibly in the world. Flocks a mile wide that took hours to fly over. And because there were so many, they were the meat of the poor, netted by the thousand, packed into barrels, and shipped by the railway carload into New York and the other growing cities to be sold for next to nothing.

It was free protein on a scale that is hard to even picture now. A working family fed itself on a bird that cost a few cents because the sky was full of them and always had been.

The railroad and the telegraph were what finished it. Hunters could now find a nesting site by wire and ship the slaughter to market by rail, and they did, year after year, faster than the birds could breed. The flocks thinned, then collapsed, then were simply gone. The last wild one was shot around 1900.

On the first of September 1914, a bird named Martha died alone in a cage at Cincinnati Zoo, and the most numerous species on the continent was extinct. They froze her in a block of ice and sent her to the Smithsonian.

From more birds than anyone could count to none at all, in about fifty years, because we treated something free and infinite as though it could never run out. The poor lost a meal. Everyone lost the bird. Nobody got either back.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Activist: "Methane is eighty times worse than CO2. Your cows are a disaster."

Farmer: "Eighty times over how long?"

Activist: "However long. Eighty times worse, end of."

Farmer: "Eighty is the twenty-year figure. Over a hundred it's thirty, because the stuff is mostly gone in twelve. You've quoted a number for a gas that doesn't last long enough to earn it."

Activist: "It's still up there heating things."

Farmer: "Then it breaks back into the CO2 the grass pulled out last spring. A stable herd refills the same puddle it empties. Your exhaust digs a fresh hole every mile and fills in none."

Activist: "So you admit it's potent."

Farmer: "Potent and gone, like a firework. Fossil carbon is quiet and forever, like a debt. You scream at the firework and wave the debt straight through."

Activist: "..."

Farmer: "You picked the loudest number with the shortest fuse to attack the one carbon that cleans up after itself. Burp and all, she's nearer neutral than your boiler will ever get."

[Harry Eccles @Heccles94]

This is a reminder that supermarkets made £230,000,000,000 last year, making £12,000,000,000 for shareholders