Owned by cat 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🇺🇦🇵🇸🦕

Migrant living in Wales. Retired academic. Socialist.

[Sir Michael Take CBE @MichaelTakeMP]

Reform choosing their next by election candidate:

[Hunter Biden @HunterBiden]

The Lessons I Learned from My Dad

I am not the man my father is.
I am trying. Some days closer. Some days farther.
He never sat me down and explained these lessons. He lived them. I’m still learning them.

Show up.
The kitchen table. The hospital room. The funeral. The picket line. The call from the son who won’t answer.
Show up.
Most days that’s the whole job.
My whole life I watched him do it. Not for cameras. Not for headlines. Not because there was something in it for him. He showed up because someone needed him.

I learned that grief doesn’t make you special.
My father buried a wife and daughter. He buried a son. Yet he never treated grief as a claim on other people’s sympathy. Instead, it made him notice theirs.
A mother who lost a child. A father sitting beside a hospital bed. A kid scared about what comes next. A son who lost his mother, his sister, his brother.
He always noticed.

I learned that power is not the point.
The people who chase power eventually confuse the office with themselves.
My father never did.
Whether he was a county councilman, a senator, vice president, or president, he was the same man.
The title changed.
He didn’t.

I learned that family comes first.
The train from Wilmington wasn’t symbolism.
It was every night.
He read to us. Showed up to games. Sat through hospital rooms. Waited up for children who were lost.
And when the day came that the country and the family could not both have him at full strength, he chose family. He relinquished the last chapter of how he wanted to be remembered. And he never complained about it.

Most of all, I learned that love is not soft.
Love is discipline.
Love is showing up at one in the morning when nobody is watching.
Love is answering the phone.
Love is staying.
Love is getting back up after life knocks you down and doing it all again tomorrow.
That love saved my life.
I’ve failed at many of these lessons, sometimes in very public ways.
He loved me anyway.

That’s the last lesson.
I am not trying to become my father.
I am trying to carry what he gave me.
And if I can do that, even imperfectly, that will be enough.

Happy Father’s Day, Dad. I love you.

[Read some Piaget please! @prof_curiosity1]

https://t.co/wAm1ZwPYGu

[Sir Humphrey @pinstripedline]

In future generations, academics will spend countless hours trying to interpret the British class system via the medium of the Daily Telegraph - two articles from the same day!

[The Bulwark @BulwarkOnline]

A Christian Nationalist event leaned into its "bad boy" energy everything from a single's mixer for "based" attendees to a publishing house that sold Nazi propaganda—wait, what?

Check out the latest from @willsommer's False Flag here:
https://t.co/cLlEJRCEOw

[Sall Grover @salltweets]

I may never stop laughing 😂

[Julie Bindel @bindelj]

Massive: https://t.co/xTZp4x1qWg

[The BMJ @bmj_latest]

Clinicians at a general practice in Brighton have inappropriately prescribed puberty blockers and hormone treatments to 78 children, an official investigation report has found
https://t.co/s95sIAvN5W

[Adam Grant @AdamMGrant]

The smarter women are, the more hostility they face.

In the U.S. & China, the higher women’s IQs, the less they're liked—and the more they’re undermined by coworkers. Men pay no price for being bright.

It's long past time to recognize female intellect as an asset, not a threat.

[Schrödinger's Lesbian ⚢ @IsleLesbos]

Another one to remember. Jean O’Leary calling out the misogyny of drag, addressing Rivera directly at NYC Gay Pride 1973. Have a listen. Lesbians were already fighting against the misogyny inherent in drag culture back then. Same old misogyny today. Even worse as men skin walk us

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

Every single person who still cringes at the memory of trying to bullshit their way through an interview or exam question: today, the slate is wiped clean. Set down your burden of shame. Nothing - nothing, I say - could touch this.

[Emma Harriet Nicholson @Baroness_Nichol]

Trades’ Unions ……

[Dennis Noel Kavanagh @Jebadoo2]

1/ I went to Parliament to watch the Women and Equalities Committee. The chair of the EHRC Mary-Ann Stephenson (MAS) and CEO John Kirkpatrick were giving evidence, the other adults in the room were Rosie Duffield and Rebecca Paul MP. Other than that it was the slow kid's table.

[Owned by cat 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🇺🇦🇵🇸🦕 @welshdragon319]

@ForWomenScot I think this deserves a Nobel Prize for Mansplaining

[Owned by cat 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🇺🇦🇵🇸🦕 @welshdragon319]

@shularises classy. “the white man demands” does he? not even remotely racist. and what’s with the dude’s accent? racism becoming a pastime of the posh folk now is it?

[Julie Bindel @bindelj]

Here are the utter bellends, doing their usual social justice warrior, Complex PTSD schtick, sent to me by a disgusted student who wanted to LISTEN TO @michaelpforan

[Julie Bindel @bindelj]

https://t.co/zpnFxP45yh
An angry student, who wanted to hear your lecture, sent me these clips.
https://t.co/CX4e7lhJCz

[Owned by cat 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🇺🇦🇵🇸🦕 @welshdragon319]

@michaelpforan As a former student of @UniofOxford I am so very sorry Michael. The university has failed you and all those students who wish to attend your lectures.

[Crazy Vibes @CrazyVibes_1]

When the President of France visited the United States in April 1960, he asked the FBI to help him find a man.
The man he was looking for was an American citizen. He was sixty-four years old. He had been awarded fifteen French military decorations and — six months earlier, in a ceremony in Paris — had been made a Knight of the Légion d'honneur, the highest civilian honor France can give. The medal had been pinned to his chest by the President himself, who had publicly called him un véritable héros français. A true French hero.
The FBI located the man within a few days.
He was operating an elevator at Rockefeller Center in New York City.
The elevator operator's name was Eugene Bullard. He had been born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1895, the son of a man whose own father had been a slave.

He had run away from Columbus at the age of eleven, after watching a white mob nearly lynch his father.
He spent the next several years drifting through the American South. At sixteen, he stowed away on a German freighter at Norfolk, Virginia. He landed in Aberdeen, Scotland. From there he made his way to London, where he learned to box. By 1913, at eighteen, he was prizefighting in Paris.
When Germany invaded France in August 1914, Bullard was nineteen years old. He had no legal obligation to fight. He had no French citizenship.
He went to the recruiting office on October 19, 1914, and signed up for the French Foreign Legion.
He spent the next eighteen months as an infantryman in some of the worst fighting of the war — at the Somme, at Champagne, at Verdun. He was wounded three times. The third wound, on March 5, 1916, tore open his thigh and left him with permanent damage to his leg.
He was twenty years old. The doctors told him he would not return to the infantry.
He decided he wanted to fly.

In a Paris café in the spring of 1916, while he was recovering, Bullard mentioned to three white American friends that he was thinking of joining the French air service. A Mississippian named Jeff Dickson laughed.
Gene, Dickson said, you know damn well there aren't any Negroes in aviation.
Bullard answered: Sure do. That's why I want to get into it. There has to be a first to everything, and I'm going to be the first.
Dickson bet him two thousand dollars he would not make it.
Bullard took the bet. He earned his pilot's license on May 5, 1917. He won the bet.
He reported to the front in August 1917 and flew approximately twenty combat missions over the next three months in a SPAD VII. The fuselage was painted with a bleeding heart pierced by a knife and the French phrase Tout le Sang qui Coule est Rouge — All Blood that Flows is Red.
He carried, on every combat flight, a small capuchin monkey named Jimmy in the front of his flight jacket.
The French press began calling him L'Hirondelle Noire — the Black Swallow.

When the United States entered the war in 1917, Bullard immediately applied to transfer to the U.S. Army Air Service.
His application was rejected.
The U.S. Army Air Service had a policy, in 1917, of not accepting Black pilots. The other American pilots flying for France in his unit, all of them white, were transferred to the U.S. Air Service.
He was the only one who was not.

For the next twenty years, he was one of the most familiar faces in the Montmartre nightlife of Paris between the wars. He owned a nightclub called L'Escadrille. He spoke fluent French, English, and German. Hemingway drank there. Fitzgerald drank there. Langston Hughes drank there. Josephine Baker performed there. Louis Armstrong was a personal friend.
When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Bullard was forty-four. His fluent German and his ownership of a nightclub frequented by German officers made him useful to the French Resistance. He became an intelligence agent — eavesdropping in his own bar on conversations between German officers who did not know he understood every word.
When France fell in June 1940, friends in the Resistance smuggled him across the Spanish border before the Gestapo could arrest him.
He came back to the United States for the first time in twenty-eight years.
He arrived in New York with thirty dollars in his pocket and a permanent limp.

He did not return to a hero's welcome. He returned to a country that had no idea who he was.
He worked at a perfume counter. He worked as a security guard. He worked at the Staten Island shipyards. By the late 1940s, he had taken the job that he would hold for most of the rest of his life.
He operated the elevator at Rockefeller Center.
He was wearing the elevator uniform on the day a producer from NBC came down from the studios upstairs to ask if he was the man Charles de Gaulle had been looking for.
A few weeks later, NBC sent a film crew to interview him in the lobby. The studios where NBC produced The Today Show were on the floors above. He had operated the elevator that took the network executives up to those studios every morning for nearly ten years. He had not been recognized as he did it.
He went back to operating the elevator the following Monday.

He died of stomach cancer on October 12, 1961, three days after his sixty-sixth birthday.
He was buried in the French War Veterans' section of Flushing Cemetery, in Queens, in the uniform of the French Foreign Legion. The casket was draped with the French flag.
In 1994 — thirty-three years after his death — the United States Air Force formally commissioned Eugene Jacques Bullard as a Second Lieutenant, posthumously.
It was the first commission the U.S. military had ever offered him.
He had been the first Black combat pilot in American history.
The French had been calling him a hero since 1917.
The Americans got around to it in 1994.