Sports reporter, write for @TheWorldGames (all 40 sports) +other sport websites. Prolific traveller and sports volunteer, cyclist and quizzer
Kent, UK, World
Joined December 2012
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Brian Salmon retweeted
“L’UE n’a RIEN à voir”, Jean ? Vraiment ?
Tu couvres Bruxelles depuis trente ans, alors je vais t’ouvrir les yeux sur ce que tu ne vois plus.
Commençons par la Pologne. Le cœur de la crise, c’est le Tribunal constitutionnel. Qui a déclaré que ce tribunal n’était pas un tribunal indépendant ? La Cour de justice de l’Union européenne, le 18 décembre 2025, saisie par la Commission européenne. Pourquoi la Commission l’avait-elle attaqué ? Parce qu’en 2021, ce tribunal avait osé dire que la Constitution polonaise primait sur le droit européen. Le ministre de la Justice de Tusk l’a dit lui-même : cet arrêt “oblige” l’État polonais à agir. Bruxelles n’a pas envoyé la police devant le Tribunal. Bruxelles a signé le permis.
Maintenant, la vraie question. Pas “le PiS avait-il raison ?”, pas “Orbán était-il corrompu ?”. La seule question qui compte : quand un peuple dit non, quand un peuple vote mal, quand un gouvernement déplaît, que se passe-t-il ? Regarde les faits. Ils pointent tous dans la même direction.
Quand un peuple dit non, on le fait revoter ou on le contourne. Le Danemark rejette Maastricht en 1992 : on le fait revoter en 1993. L’Irlande rejette le traité de Nice en 2001 : on la fait revoter en 2002. La France et les Pays-Bas rejettent la Constitution européenne en 2005 : elle revient en 2007 sous le nom de traité de Lisbonne, sans référendum. L’Irlande rejette Lisbonne en 2008 : on la fait revoter en 2009. Les Pays-Bas rejettent l’accord d’association avec l’Ukraine en 2016 : il est ratifié quand même. La Grèce vote non à 61 % au plan de la troïka en juillet 2015 : huit jours plus tard, elle signe un plan encore plus dur. Six peuples, six non, aucun n’a tenu. En trente ans, un non n’a jamais été une réponse. Seulement un brouillon.
Quand un gouvernement déplaît, on coupe l’argent. Les fonds européens de la Pologne sont gelés sous le PiS. Tusk arrive : débloqués en deux mois. Les fonds de la Hongrie sont gelés sous Orbán, 17 milliards d’euros. Orbán perd le 12 avril 2026 : accord pour débloquer plus de 16 milliards fin mai, sept semaines plus tard. Mêmes traités, même pays, même argent. Seul le gouvernement a changé.
Et ce n’est même pas caché. En septembre 2022, à trois jours des élections italiennes, Ursula von der Leyen est interrogée sur une possible victoire de la droite. Sa réponse : “Si les choses vont dans une direction difficile, j’ai parlé de la Hongrie et de la Pologne, nous avons des outils.” La présidente de la Commission prévient un peuple de ce qui l’attend s’il vote mal.
Quand une élection gêne, on la neutralise. En 2011, la BCE envoie à Rome une lettre qui dicte la politique économique de l’Italie. Quelques mois plus tard, Berlusconi tombe et Mario Monti, ancien commissaire européen que personne n’a élu, prend sa place. La même année, Papandréou annonce un référendum en Grèce. Il l’abandonne sous la pression de Paris et Berlin, et il est remplacé par Loukas Papadímos, ancien vice-président de la BCE, lui non plus élu. Fin 2024, l’élection présidentielle roumaine est annulée. Thierry Breton, ancien commissaire européen, commente sur RMC : “On l’a fait en Roumanie”, en ajoutant qu’il faudrait le faire en Allemagne si nécessaire.
Quand une décision engage des peuples, on ne leur demande rien. Pour le Mercosur, la France vote contre et se fait mettre en minorité. L’accord est découpé pour contourner les parlements nationaux, puis appliqué provisoirement sans attendre l’avis de la Cour. Pour l’immigration, le Pacte impose une “solidarité obligatoire” : tu accueilles ou tu paies. Pas un seul peuple consulté.
Quand on veut savoir, on te ferme la porte. La présidente de la Commission négocie par SMS avec le patron de Pfizer le plus gros contrat de l’histoire de l’UE. Elle refuse de les communiquer. En mai 2025, le Tribunal de l’Union européenne juge ce refus illégal.
Prends n’importe lequel de ces faits isolément, et tu trouveras toujours une excuse : la crise, l’état de droit, l’urgence, la technique. Mets-les bout à bout. Trente ans, des dizaines de cas, et pas une seule fois l’arbitrage n’a penché du côté du vote populaire contre Bruxelles. Une erreur, c’est un accident. Dix erreurs dans le même sens, c’est un système.
Et un système a toujours une idéologie. Celle de l’UE n’est même pas cachée : il suffit de lire ses propres textes.
Le 22 novembre 2023, le Parlement européen adopte une résolution pour réviser les traités. Le but : supprimer le droit de veto des États dans de nombreux domaines et transférer de nouvelles compétences à Bruxelles. Dans ses références officielles, il cite le Manifeste de Ventotene. Ce texte de 1941, coécrit par Altiero Spinelli, un ancien communiste, annonce que la révolution européenne devra être socialiste. Il écrit aussi que la propriété privée devra être “abolie, limitée, corrigée, étendue au cas par cas”. Quand Giorgia Meloni a lu ces passages devant le Parlement italien en mars 2025, la gauche a crié au scandale. Les fact-checkeurs ont pourtant dû l’admettre : chaque phrase est bien dans le texte. C’est cette référence-là que le Parlement européen a choisi d’inscrire dans sa résolution de 2023.
Regarde ensuite la méthode. Bruxelles avait décrété qu’à partir de 2035, plus aucune voiture thermique neuve ne pourrait être vendue à 450 millions d’Européens. Il a fallu la fronde de sept États et de toute l’industrie automobile pour qu’elle recule en décembre 2025. En 2020, l’UE a émis pour la première fois une dette commune massive, 750 milliards d’euros, que nos enfants rembourseront. Aucun référendum. Chaque crise sert le même objectif : la dette Covid, l’énergie, la santé, la défense. La direction ne change jamais : vers le centre.
Et où se fabrique cette vision ? Pas dans un complot. Dans un annuaire public. Ursula von der Leyen siégeait au conseil d’administration du Forum de Davos, et elle y figurait encore au moment d’être désignée présidente de la Commission. Christine Lagarde, présidente de la BCE, y siège toujours, et Davos veut en faire sa présidente. C’est là que Klaus Schwab a lancé en 2020 son “Great Reset” : profiter de la crise du Covid pour réinitialiser l’économie mondiale. Mêmes salles, mêmes gens, même idée : gérer le monde d’en haut.
Voilà pourquoi je dis que ce projet est communiste dans son ADN. Pas le communisme des chars et des goulags. Le communisme de méthode : une avant-garde éclairée qui sait mieux que toi ce qui est bon pour toi. Elle planifie ta voiture, ton énergie, ta monnaie, tes frontières, et elle traite chaque vote contraire comme une erreur à corriger. Le Manifeste de Ventotene appelait ça la dictature du parti révolutionnaire. Aujourd’hui, ça s’appelle la Commission.
Et je ne suis pas seul à le voir. Elon Musk demande l’abolition de l’UE et le retour de la souveraineté aux nations. La stratégie de sécurité nationale des États-Unis écrit noir sur blanc que l’Union européenne sape la liberté politique et la souveraineté des peuples. Alex Karp répète que l’Europe a abandonné la course à l’IA et que son modèle de régulation est exactement ce qu’il ne faut pas faire. Si tu penses être plus lucide que ces gens-là sur un sujet aussi profond, tu es juste un peu naïf.
Donc à partir de maintenant, trois possibilités : tu es corrompu, tu es stupide, ou tu es enfin éclairé.
Ne me remercie pas.
unavailable
Brian Salmon retweeted
There were five slave trades. You were taught about only one. 🏴🇬🇧
One. The Atlantic. Twelve million Africans shipped to the Americas. Britain banned it in 1807, then hunted it for sixty years.
Two. The Barbary trade. A million Europeans taken to North Africa. Britain bombarded Algiers in 1816.
Three. The Saharan trade. A thousand years of caravans north across the desert. Britain had its northern end banned. Tripoli, 1857.
Four. The East African trade. Twenty thousand people a year through one customs house. Britain forced the market shut. 5 June 1873.
Five. The Ottoman trade. Raiders sold Eastern Europeans south for three hundred years. Britain made the Sultan ban it in 1854.
It cost sixty years and two thousand sailors. Nobody else fought all five. 🙏🇬🇧
It isn't over. Mauritania only made it a crime in 2007. Fifty million people are in slavery today.
Someone has to remember who started the fight. ⚓🇬🇧💪
Brian Salmon retweeted
.@andyburnham, with respect, you treat the British public with contempt if you expect us to swallow this.
Britain has the dearest industrial electricity in the IEA, and you want us to blame 1986. You say we pay some of the highest energy bills in Europe because we privatised the basics, and you blame conflict overseas. But the data supports neither claim.
British industrial gas prices sit below the IEA median. Industrial electricity does not. In 2023 British industry paid 25.85p per kWh against an IEA average of 17.7p. Over the last decade the premium over the median has run between 17% and 49%. In 2024 we had the highest industrial electricity prices of any IEA member with data available. If gas were the cause, we would be near average. We are at the top. Wholesale costs drove most of the rise since 2021, but they cannot explain why we pay more than our neighbours for the same gas.
Policy can. Taxes and levies on household electricity rose 59% in real terms between 2017 and 2025, when they made up 23% of the average bill. One Oxford Institute for Energy Studies estimate puts policy related costs at 33% of the pre-tax electricity bill once contracts for difference, carbon charges and the capacity market are counted. The government's own analysis has supported British industry paying £86 per MWh from this year, against £69 in France and £60 in Germany.
The relief your government announced in April was a transfer. It scrapped a levy funded efficiency scheme and moved 75% of the domestic cost of the Renewables Obligation onto general taxation. The cost did not disappear. The Treasury now collects it from the same households through tax.
Then the grid. The typical household is on a price cap of £1,723 a year, up £60 since July. Networks made up about 30% of the spring price cap, and Ofgem has set out a further expansion of local networks for 2028 to 2033, paid for by households through higher charges.
Your answer is Great British Grid. It will be funded from Great British Energy's existing budgets and will work with the private sector and network companies. That means no new money, no new cable and one more public body. Your own government has also acknowledged that its buy British approach to grid contracts could add cost, yet no full impact assessment has been carried out. You promise European prices within a decade. You have not shown us the bill.
You speak of lost control. You were a cabinet minister when the Climate Change Act passed in 2008. Ed Miliband, its author, later set the Clean Power 2030 target. Britain refuses new North Sea licences and imports gas it could produce at home. Gas remains the marginal source that sets the wholesale electricity price, so every turbine added on this model leaves the bill tied to gas while households fund the cables and backup behind it.
Public ownership has been tried locally. Nottingham's Robin Hood Energy cost taxpayers an estimated £38m. Bristol Energy, closed this week, left a final bill of £39.3m. Both were Labour-run councils. Solar panels on a library roof are pleasant. They will not move a national price.
Bills fall when costs fall. Remove levies that don't belong on electricity. Licence new North Sea fields. Build nuclear on time. Then publish what your plan costs and who pays for it.
"Burnham was a cabinet minister when the Climate Change Act passed in 2008. Ed Miliband, its author, later set the Clean Power 2030 target."
I want to be honest about how we’ve got to a place where British billpayers are paying some of the highest energy costs in Europe.
Over the past 40 years, we’ve given up control of our necessities, outsourced our essentials and privatised the basics. Water, transport, housing. And of course, energy.
Now the public are paying the price. We haven’t invested in the infrastructure we need. Conflict overseas has pushed up energy costs and it’s hurting our businesses and families.
That’s why we need to take back greater control of our energy system.
This week, I announced Great British Grid, which will speed up connections and push down bills.
We’re also giving mayors, local leaders and communities a stronger role. With funding for People’s Power projects, communities will be able to build solar panels on libraries and town halls, hydro schemes in rivers or publicly owned windfarms on local land.
But it’s not just energy we need stronger public control over. It’s also water, housing, transport and care.
So we’re repealing the ban on public ownership of water companies. We’re building more council homes than this country has seen since the end of World War Two.
We’re reforming the leasehold system so families aren’t squeezed for every penny. And we’re opening up home ownership for first time buyers who can’t rely on the bank of mum and dad.
This week I also announced my determination to introduce a National Care Service, to put people above profit and to give pensioners peace of mind.
Together, we’ll rewire the country from top to bottom so that it works for all people in all places.
That is the only way to put Britain back on the right path. It’s the only way to put power back in people’s hands. And it’s the only way we will bring hope again.
Brian Salmon retweeted
One moment to leave my box then I'll get back in it.
If you're uneducated enough to have an issue with the British government rightly making this statement, lemme put it very simply:
-49,000 slave owners, approx 0.19% of the population at the time, were given money to buy them out of owning slaves. British taxpayers paid to free the slaves.
-For decades during the 19th century, Britain dedicated 1/6th of it's entire Navy specifically to seek and capture other nations' slave ships to free the slaves on board. The economic cost was bore by the taxpayer. 2,000 British sailors lost their lives.
-During the US Civil War, Pres Lincoln blockaded Cotton exports from the USA. This put more than half a million working Britons out of already very poorly paid work. After months, the mill owners worked a deal with the US govt to reopen trading. More than half a million working class Britons voted AGAINST the deal citing that they didn't ever want to work with goods produced from slavery again.
About half as many (24,000 ish) Brits died from malnourishment, disease etc in the affected cotton factory communities as a direct result of that action as ever owned slaves.
-Britain paid £400,000 to Spain to convince it to stop its slave trade. It also placed diplomatic pressure on France to stop them too.
Of every empire that ever took part in slavery, Britain is the ONLY ONE that grew a conscience, stopped its own, and then set out to stop everybody else without any outside encouragement.
And it is also the only one that has maintained a successful and genuinely beneficial diplomatic network to lift up and empower its former territories- the Commonwealth- which has helped ex-colonies outperform their peer nations in almost every way ever since.
Not to mention endless and unwavering humanitarian relief when a hurricane rips through their islands every season, or when an earthquake buries their brothers and sisters under their own houses.
The British taxpayer has bore the cost of all of that. Britons voted in favour of that responsibility in the 19th century, decades before anybody else grew a conscience of their own- even African Kingdoms such as the Asanti Empire who only stopped slaving when Britain took over Ghana and made it illegal.
You reparationsit types don't harass modern-day Turks over the 6-8 million slaves that passed through the Ottoman Slave trade, or modern-day Ghanaians for the millions that the Ghana and Asanti empires captured, abused, and traded in the Trans-Sharan and Transatlantic trades. You don't even get on at the Arab and African countries who still enable slavery today. Why?
There is no other demographic/nation/country for which people feel so empowered to blame the crimes of the most miniscule proportion of its ancestry, which were undone and atoned for by exponentially more of its ancestry, on an entire diaspora that has lived for generations with no direct culpability in said crimes.
Every population in the world has been a victim to another population at a given time. The following paragraph should be the one that sticks from this whole rant:
The working class, poor, destitute British man and woman who rotted in workhouses for centuries had more in common with their African slave counterparts than they ever did their compatriot masters. That's exactly why they bloody well did something about it. British people en masse stood WITH the slaves. Not with their feet on their necks.
Reparationism towards the British nation is just politics of division, meant to absolve commonwealth governments of their own failures towards their people at the expense of a population who have never committed the crime they are demanding reparations for, and whose ancestors paid the human and economic price for for the last 2 centuries.
This is the last post I'll make on the matter.
🚨 BREAKING
The UK Government says it “does not and will not pay reparations” for Britain's role in the transatlantic slave trade.
The remarks were made today by a spokesperson for Prime Minister Andy Burnham as Jamaica steps up its campaign for reparatory justice.
#Reparations #Jamaica #JamRadioNews #AndyBurnham
Brian Salmon retweeted
🚨📉THE SLOW DEATH OF BRITAIN:
We have shit water companies so we buy bottled water.
We have rubbish police so we hire private security.
We have terrible healthcare so we pay private hospitals instead.
Airbnbs in Cornwall pay council tax but get no rubbish collection, so they pay Biffa on top.
An awful lot of firemen are now volunteers.
NHS dentists don’t really work anymore, so you go private or you pull it out yourself.
Our roads are littered with potholes nobody fills. Your privately funded tyres and suspension are the collateral.
You are forced under threat of criminal prosecution to fund the BBC, and it’s so bad you pay for streaming to get news or entertainment anyway.
Your bins are collected fortnightly, so you drive to the tip. The tip now requires a booking, a permit and proof you live in the county.
Garden waste is a separate annual subscription. On top of the council tax that used to cover it.
Your GP surgery is an 8am phone lottery, so you pay £40 to an app to speak to a doctor in a different time zone.
CAMHS has a two year waiting list, so parents remortgage for private assessments.
Your child’s SEN provision is a legal entitlement, so you hire a solicitor to sue the council for it. The council spends more fighting you than the support would have cost.
Physio is a forty week wait. Your back does not have forty weeks.
Schools teach in portable cabins bolted to the playground because the actual building is held up by aerated concrete and hope.
Half of them are technically insolvent.
Parents fund the reading books, the glue sticks, the photocopier, the roof and increasingly the teachers wages - all via a PTA raffle and local fundraisers.
The state offers “free” childcare hours that don’t cover the nursery’s costs, so the nursery bills you a “top up fee” for the free thing.
Shoplifting under £200 is functionally legal, so Tesco hires guards - who crucially don’t even try to stop it - and you pay for them in the price of the milk.
999 takes an hour, so you buy the Ring doorbell, gather the evidence, file the report and get a crime number for the insurance you also pay for.
Court backlogs run to years, so anyone with money settles privately and everyone else gets nothing.
Legal aid is gone. Represent yourself.
Passport and DVLA backlogs are chronic, so the state sells you a fast track service to escape the queue the state created.
The trains are late whoever owns them, so you drive on the roads with the potholes.
Public toilets are shut, so you buy a coffee you don’t want.
The library is staffed by pensioners working for free.
Street lights are switched off at midnight to save money in a country with a burglary charge rate near zero.
You pay National Insurance for fifty years and they move the pension age.
You pay the adult social care precept every year and then sell your mother’s house to pay for adult social care.
Leaseholders pay for a “waking watch” because the state signed off the cladding and then billed the residents to fix it.
Social housing sits on the most valuable land in Britain, allocated by need rather than proximity to work, 48% of zone 1 social housing is occupied by foreigners mostly welfare dependent - while the nurses, teachers and other workers who keep zone 1 running commute ninety minutes each way from Kent because we stopped building anything in 1979.
Every one of these is a service you have already bought. The receipt is your payslip.
The tax burden is heading for its highest sustained level since the 1940s. The service level is the worst in living memory.
You are not overtaxed or underserved. You are actually BOTH, simultaneously, and the gap between the two is where your standard of living went.
The state has become a subscription you cannot cancel and cannot use.
Brian Salmon retweeted
Most people know the Army stormed Normandy. The Navy bombarded the shore. The Air Force owned the sky.
Nobody thinks about the Coast Guard.
They should.
The United States Coast Guard is not a combat force. Their entire purpose, the reason they exist, is to save people from the sea. They are trained to swim into storms, to pull drowning sailors from sinking ships, to run toward disaster when everyone else is running away.
On June 6, 1944, the Germans gave them more drowning men than they had ever seen in their lives.
The Coast Guard brought 800 men to Normandy. Five major assault transports were USCG-crewed. Eleven tank landing ships. Twenty-four troop carriers running soldiers directly onto Omaha and Utah Beaches. The USS Bayfield served as the command ship for the entire Utah Beach sector, the nerve center through which an entire army was directed ashore. The USS Samuel Chase led the assault group landing the 1st Infantry Division, the Big Red One, onto the eastern flank of Omaha.
But the thing almost nobody knows about is Rescue Flotilla One.
60 small Coast Guard cutters, nicknamed Matchbox ships because of how easily they burned, were assigned a single mission: pull men out of the water. As the landing craft were torn apart by German fire, as soldiers drowned in the surf under the weight of their own equipment, as wounded men on the beach were swallowed by the incoming tide, Rescue Flotilla One was already moving.
Their swimmers jumped into the Channel. Tethered to their boats by lines, they swam toward the men going under, grabbed them, and dragged them back. They did this 2,000 yards from shore. Under active German machine gun fire. Under mortar fire. Under artillery.
Again and again, all day long.
Two miles offshore a lookout spotted men from a sunken British landing craft floating in the Channel. One cutter went to them and pulled 24 soldiers and four Royal Navy sailors from the water before they went under.
One Coast Guard LCI was hit 25 times by German fire and kept going. Coxswain Delba Nivens kept driving his craft toward the beach after a grenade caught fire aboard his boat.
By the end of June 6, Rescue Flotilla One had pulled 400 men out of the sea.
400 men who would have drowned. 400 men who went home. 400 men whose families exist today because a Coast Guardsman jumped into the English Channel under machine gun fire and refused to let go.
Out of 800 Coast Guardsmen at Normandy, 15 were killed.
Every branch that fought on D-Day deserves its place in history. But the men who spent that day swimming between the dead to find the living, tethered to a burning ship with the whole weight of the German army trying to kill them, did something that has no good word for it.
They saved people. That's what they were built for.
On the worst day in the history of the sea, they were exactly who they were supposed to be.
Brian Salmon retweeted
He died alone.
73 years old. A hospital bed in Tucson, Arizona. November 2, 2025.
No wife holding his hand. No children at the door. No friends in the waiting room.
Nobody came.
His name was Darrell Lee Arelt. And for the last hours of his life, the richest, most powerful nation on Earth had no idea one of its soldiers was slipping away in the dark.
Because that's what he was.
A soldier.
Second Lieutenant Darrell Arelt. United States Army. Vietnam.
He went when his country called. He came home to a country that looked away. Vietnam veterans got no parades. No "thank you for your service." No welcome home. Just silence, and sometimes worse.
And now, half a century later, here was that same silence again. A forgotten lieutenant, about to be lowered into the ground with no one to fold a flag for.
The hospital had no next of kin to call. The funeral home had no family to notify. The government had a name for a man like this.
"Unaccompanied veteran."
Read that again.
Unaccompanied.
A man who once raised his right hand and swore his life to this country was going to be buried like he never mattered at all.
Then one man said no.
His name is Nick De Gennaro. He owned the little mobile home park where Darrell had quietly lived for four and a half years. When Nick learned this old soldier was going to be put in the earth alone, two days before Christmas, something in him refused.
So he made a decision. He and his wife would go. Just the two of them, if that's what it came to. A veteran would not be buried alone. Not on his watch.
And then he did one small thing.
He posted about it online.
What happened next will put a lump in your throat.
The post traveled. Veterans saw it. Bikers saw it. Firefighters saw it. The American Legion saw it. In 72 hours, the whole of Southern Arizona knew the name Darrell Arelt.
December 23, 2025. Noon. The Arizona Veterans Memorial Cemetery in Marana.
Nick expected two people.
Hundreds came.
Hundreds.
Bikers thundered in by the dozen. The Marana Police Department came in uniform. The Northwest Fire District came. The American Legion came. National Guardsmen came. Active-duty soldiers came.
And the old men came. Vietnam veterans in their seventies. Korean War veterans. Men who could barely stand at attention anymore, standing at attention anyway, for a brother they had never once met.
One of them, James Harmon, looked in his rearview mirror as he drove in. Thirty cars behind him. Forty. A river of headlights flowing to the grave of a stranger.
"As we were driving in," he said, "I'm going, oh my God, this is great."
These were the men America forgot in 1970. And here they were, refusing to let America forget one of their own in 2025.
Another vet, Ed Lytle, stood at the grave and said the words that should be carved in stone:
"No veteran should be buried alone. They've always got a family. I may not have known him then. But he's still a brother."
Darrell Arelt got everything that day.
An honor guard. White gloves. A folded flag.
"Taps" rising slow and clean over the desert.
And a 21-gun salute, cracking into the Arizona sky, fired by men who had never met him, for a life they had only just learned existed.
Half a century after his country forgot to say thank you, hundreds of strangers stood in the December sun and said it all at once.
Nick was handed the flag. The flag that's supposed to go to a man's family.
He's still keeping it. He says if anyone ever knew Darrell, a week from now, a year from now, ten years from now, they can come and it's theirs.
So let me tell you what kind of country this is.
This is a country that will fill a cemetery for a man nobody remembered to love.
This is a country where bikers and cops and firefighters and broken old soldiers will drop everything, two days before Christmas, so one forgotten veteran does not go into the ground alone.
You can criticize America all you want. Go ahead.
But understand this.
On this soil, no soldier is ever truly alone.
Not one.
Not ever.
Rest easy, Lieutenant.
Your country was late.
But your country came. 🇺🇸
Brian Salmon retweeted
In 1893, NYC - A woman in her mid-twenties walks through streets so crowded with humanity they hum like a living organism.
She's following a child. A girl, maybe ten years old, who burst into her nursing class that afternoon begging for help. Her mother is sick. There's no money for a doctor. Will someone please come?
So Lillian Wald goes.
She climbs narrow staircases in a tenement building where the air itself feels tired. The girl opens a door, and Lillian steps into a room that will rewrite the rest of her life.
Ten people. Three hundred twenty-five square feet. A woman lying in a bed that barely qualifies as one, surrounded by peeling walls and the kind of desperation that doesn't announce itself with noise, it just sits there, heavy and inescapable.
Lillian had grown up comfortable. Books on the shelves. A father who ran a thriving business. She'd been bright enough to apply to Vassar at sixteen, turned away only because of her age. When she finally entered nursing school at twenty-two, she excelled. Methodical. Caring. Brilliant at what she did.
But nothing prepared her for this.
She leaves that apartment and enrolls in medical school the next morning. Then she does something even more radical. She quits medical school and moves to the Lower East Side. Not to study poverty. To live inside it.
In 1893, she and her colleague Mary Brewster invent a profession that didn't exist: the public health nurse. Someone who brings healthcare directly into homes, into the places hospitals will never reach and the people who can't afford to ask for help.
Two years later, the Henry Street Settlement opens its doors.
By 1913, it's become something almost unimaginable. Seven buildings. Ninety-two nurses. Two hundred thousand home visits every single year.
But Lillian Wald doesn't stop at nursing. She walks into meetings with presidents. She helps create the U.S. Children's Bureau in 1912, the first federal agency dedicated to children. She co-founds movements to end child labor and protect working women. When the Spanish Flu tears through America in 1918, she leads the Red Cross response, mobilizing an army of nurses she's spent decades training.
She built all of it because one afternoon, a frightened child asked for help and Lillian Wald refused to look away.
Lillian Wald didn't just respond to that moment in 1893. She let it consume her in the best possible way. She moved into the neighborhood, lived among the families she served, and refused to accept that zip codes should determine who gets to survive preventable illness. The Henry Street Settlement became a command center for social change, offering not just medical care but education, job training, and community organizing.
When she opened the Settlement's doors to early NAACP meetings, she risked her funding and her reputation in a deeply segregated America. When World War I created a nursing shortage, she helped professionalize the field and expand training programs nationwide. The Visiting Nurse Service of New York, which she co-founded, still operates today and remains one of the largest nonprofit home healthcare organizations in America.
Here's something remarkable: Lillian Wald never married, never had children of her own, but she's responsible for changing childhood in America. Before her advocacy, five-year-olds worked in coal mines. There was no federal oversight of child welfare. She didn't just dream of a better system; she walked into the White House and made Theodore Roosevelt believe in it too.
When she died in 1940, Carnegie Hall held her memorial. Twenty-five hundred people came. The profession she named, the agencies she founded, and the model of community-based healthcare she pioneered are all still here, more than 130 years later, quietly saving lives in the same neighborhoods where a young nurse once followed a frightened child up a narrow staircase and refused to forget what she saw.
© Women Stories
#drthehistories
Brian Salmon retweeted
People really undervalue how insanely lucky we are to live in the same era as Elon Musk.
Taken together his companies are the modern equivalent of founding Ford, Standard Oil, Bell Labs, NASA, and Boeing at the same time.
- Electric vehicles at global scale with Tesla.
- Reusable rockets and space infrastructure with SpaceX.
- Brain computer interfaces with Neuralink.
- Frontier AI with xAI.
This is industrial history happening in real time. He’s the 10x Rockefeller of our generation except instead of consolidating industries he’s building multiple foundational businesses of the next century.
Most generations never get to watch someone rebuild multiple foundational industries from scratch. We get to complain about tweets and politics while living through the equivalent of the second industrial revolution.
History will be very kind here. We should probably appreciate it while it is still unfolding.
Brian Salmon retweeted
Dogs' reactions to becoming vegetarian.
teapawt.net/GigaBasedDad/status/19…
Brian Salmon retweeted
I watched you today, Tommy, as you walked on the blood-soaked ground where innocent lives were stolen, among the photos of the Children of Light - those brutally murdered at Nova. I saw you reading each name, quietly crying, wiping away tears, angry, filled with raw, genuine emotion. Your eyes were shining.
As someone who has spent the past two years gathering the testimonies and footage of the worst massacre Israel has faced since the Holocaust - as an Israeli - I want to say thank you.
Thank you for coming. Thank you for caring. Thank you for going there - to see with your own eyes and to feel it in your heart. Thank you, @TRobinsonNewEra
Brian Salmon retweeted
🚨 Digital ID on One Login is a national security disaster 🚨
The Government wants to mandate Digital ID for jobs, benefits, tax, even NHS access, all built on the One Login backbone.
Here is the reality in 2025:
• 29 April One Login still not compliant with cyber standards for critical services.
• 13 May lost its own trust certification.
• 16 May a red team proved attackers could gain privileged access without detection.
• Users now reporting the GOV.UK ID Check app installing on phones without consent (screenshots below).
And we are supposed to trust this platform with the keys to our entire lives?
If as many of us suspect, One Login is already compromised, then ransomware would not just hit one company.
It would lock up the whole nation in one strike:
• Employers blocked from hiring.
• Benefits and pensions frozen.
• NHS logins dead.
• Banking and tax locked.
• Everyday life paralysed.
This is not modernisation.
It is like opening a kids playground in a minefield without clearing the mines and then forcing every child to play there.
Digital ID on One Login is reckless, dangerous, and wide open to abuse.
Not here. Not ever.
#NoToDigitalID
Brian Salmon retweeted
Based on my analysis of the thread and UK electoral laws:
The thread claims 8 Scottish Labour MPs received unreported £10k donations from Labour Together during the 2024 election. Searches confirm these aren't listed on the Electoral Commission's site, but some appear in MPs' financial interests registers.
Potential offences: Under PPERA 2000, unreported campaign donations over £1,500 could breach reporting rules, risking fines or up to 1 year in prison. Fraud or conspiracy in Scotland might apply if intent to deceive is proven, but sources show no ongoing probe.
Consequences if convicted: Fines, imprisonment (up to 10 years for fraud), disqualification from office, or by-elections.
Diverse reports note past fines for Labour Together but no new evidence of offences.
Brian Salmon retweeted
Digital ID for every adult is not progress. It is the end of a free society dressed up as convenience.
I am a cyber security specialist. This is my take.
They are selling it as a fix for illegal migration. That is bollocks.
We spend hundreds of billions a year on cyber security and yet the volume of breaches is breaking records. The threat is growing faster than the spend.
Digital ID will not stop boats. It will not stop trafficking gangs. It will not fix a broken border.
Criminals will work around it.
Honest citizens will pay the price.
It builds giant data banks that track where you go, what you buy, what you read and who you speak to.
It links your identity to every checkpoint in daily life.
One breach and your life is exposed.
Look at Jaguar Land Rover and the airports in recent weeks. Now imagine that at national scale on an ID system tied to everything you need to live your daily life.
Here is the risk that ministers will not admit.
Ransomware seeded through a supplier or an insider:
It lies quiet for months.
It rolls through the backups.
On trigger day the register and the recovery sets are both encrypted.
Payments fail. Health and benefits stall. Borders slow. Citizens are frozen out until a ransom is paid or the state rebuilds from scratch.
Centralise identity and you centralise failure.
Do not fall for the pitch.
Function creep is certain.
It starts as login.
It becomes access to money, travel, speech and public services.
It turns rights into permissions controlled by the state and its contractors.
It creates a single point of failure for criminals, insiders and hostile states to target.
It will punish the elderly, the poor and anyone who is not always online.
It will centralise risk and outsource blame.
It will not stop fraud.
It will not stop illegal migration.
It will build the machinery for a social credit system by stealth.
If ministers cared about the border, they would enforce current laws, resource patrols and processing, close loopholes and remove those with no right to stay.
You do not need a national ID to do any of that.
We scrapped ID cards in 2010 for a reason.
Britain does not need a central register to prove age or status.
Yes to privacy first proofs. No to a database state.
Brian Salmon retweeted
There are only two possible theories for life’s origin: blind chance or intentional design.
The problem for naturalists is that the more we learn about life, the more impossible their theory becomes.
But just how unlikely is it?
Here’s why life is 100% designed🧵
Brian Salmon retweeted
Media coverage is fuelling a backlash against e-bikes. But often, the stories aren't even about e-bikes at all.
Last week, the BBC reported that an "e-bike" was involved in a serious incident. But it was actually a high-powered electric motorbike.
Here's how it got changed..🧵
ALT Former Wigan Athletic youth player jailed for mowing down pensioner
Brian Salmon retweeted
Happy #StGeorgesDay 🏴
No country has had a greater or more positive impact on the globe
England's Top 10 Gifts to the World - my speech: youtu.be/5RQ8IK3j3vs
Summary:
1. Industrial Revolution: the greatest leap forward in human development in 12,000 years
2. Railways (above and underground): Transformed society. Crucial to the creation of modern nations (India, Canada, USA etc.) and cities
3. Sport: No country created or codified more sports and had a bigger impact on notions of sportsmanship.
This is not a trivial subject. Globally, sport is arguably the greatest source of national pride, identity, unity and social cohesion.
4. Birthplace of the world's two dominant forms of democracy: Westminster Parliamentary democracy but also the roots of American "Presidential" democracy.
Almost every democracy in the world uses one of these two forms.
5. Common Law
6. English language: the world's first true lingua franca (which should now perhaps be renamed "lingua Anglia")
7. English liberty (aka the rights of Englishmen).
English liberty is very different to Greek or Roman liberty. The United States of America was founded upon the principles of English liberty. The concepts have shaped the Anglosphere and much of the world.
8. Capitalism.
The Italians and Dutch were pioneers of early forms of capitalism, but modern "industrial capitalism" was born in the industrial revolution and no one did more than the English & Scots to spread it globally.
The global spread of capitalism has seen the greatest eradication of poverty in human history. In 1820, 94% of the world lived in poverty. Today it is only 9.6%.
9. English Protestantism (Anglicanism, Methodism, Quakerism etc.).
Protestantism is one of the great secrets of the success of the Anglosphere, primarily through the promotion of literacy and individualism. Scottish Protestantism clearly also equally important.
10. The British Empire.
The British Empire was the primary means by which the great achievements of England, Britain and the West were spread to the four corners of the globe.
If I had to pick a Top 3 from the above list, I would say that nothing did more to advance civilisation and lift the world's poor out of poverty and sickness than England's three greatest gifts:
Top 3
1. The Industrial Revolution
2. The spread of capitalism and
3. The British Empire
However, without Protestantism it may have taken far longer for the world to benefit from these - and other countries may have taken the lead on the industrial revolution and capitalism.
These are merely my Top 10. There are of course many other achievements one could list (from the WWW right down to the invention of the suit: the first global standardized dress - and the international dress code of finance).
England can also lay claim to arguably the two most influential figures after Jesus Christ:
Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin
Here's my recent New Culture Forum speech (published yesterday) on this topic: youtu.be/5RQ8IK3j3vs
Brian Salmon retweeted
There is an ocean of evidence that the universe was designed
Yet atheist "scientists" refuse to accept reality
Here are the biggest problems that secular science can't explain (and what the obvious answers are)... 🧵
Brian Salmon retweeted
Graham Stuart, MP for Beverley and Holderness delivers a great speech in the parliamentary inheritance tax on family farms debate:
It is possible to challenge one’s Government. I said to my Whips then that the best service we could do the Government was to prevent them from doing something stupid, harmful and alienating to voters. I hope that Government Members can see that, because the Opposition cannot change this. People outside say to me, “Can we get this changed?” It is actually up to Labour MPs. They have the majority. Democracy is not about having a majority and doing what one likes. Democracy is about listening and doing what the now Prime Minister told the NFU when he said:
“You deserve a Government that listens, that heeds early warnings”.
There are one or two warnings about. Listen, change: if the Government change, four years on, no one will remember the U-turn. Whatever civil servants say—they are always very keen to stick with a policy—if it is wrong, stop doing it. And this is wrong. In the minute and 20 seconds I have left, let me say why it is so wrong. We have touched on the various elements, but I am not sure we have pulled it all together.
We have a really peculiar group of businesspeople in this country; they are called farmers. They take a return on capital—the millions they have invested in their farms—that is typically less than 1%. There is nobody that I am aware of—no business I was ever involved in—that would remotely consider continuing in an industry that paid less than 1%. These farmers take a pittance and get up at 4 o’clock in the morning for the privilege. They look after the animals and it does not matter if they are ill; they cannot carry their employment rights and go, “I’m not well, I shouldn’t have to go out,” because the cows do not care: they have to go out and look after them, and then they get less than 1% return.
Those farmers, the most beneficent public-minded businesspeople in the whole country, then provide excellent food at among the lowest prices in Europe. If ever there were a business that we would not want to go and mess with, it is these—I should not say it, because I will make enemies of them.
We must understand how remarkable it is that there is a whole group of businesspeople who take practically nothing from their business, work all the hours God gives, and provide us with some of the finest food in the world at among the lowest prices in Europe. Why would we want to mess with that? Not only do they do that, but they brainwash their children from the earliest age so that they carry on doing it. These people are in indentured service to the nation, providing food while making very little profit. They do it willingly and, in fact, love it: it is their life. To go and mess with them out of some stupid, socialist spite is ridiculous and absurd, and Government Members know that—the hon. Member for North Northumberland certainly does, and he should lead his colleagues to tell the Chancellor to change course, just as we did in 2012 when George Osborne got it wrong.”