The Madness Of Griffons

Yesterday, Russian authorities reported that the fire at Tuapse was extinguished. Ukrainian Defense Forces took note of that and remedied the situation.

Scurvy killed more British sailors than France and Spain ever did. 🇬🇧 The Royal Navy's greatest enemy wasn't cannon fire. It was a disease. In 1747 a Scottish naval surgeon named James Lind had a theory. He took twelve sailors suffering from scurvy aboard HMS Salisbury. Divided them into six pairs. Gave each pair a different remedy the navy believed in... Cider, vinegar, seawater. And gave one pair two oranges and one lemon a day. After six days, five pairs were unchanged. The sixth pair were almost recovered. 🍊 Lind had just conducted the first clinical trial in recorded history. Every medicine you have ever taken was tested using his method. He published his results in 1753. The Admiralty ignored him for forty years. Meanwhile Captain James Cook used citrus on his second voyage. He lost only one sailor to scurvy in three years at sea. The Admiralty noted it. Did nothing. Tens of thousands of sailors died of a disease that had already been cured. In 1794 one admiral finally acted. He ordered lemon juice issued to every sailor aboard HMS Suffolk for a twenty three week voyage to India. Not one case of scurvy. The following year the Royal Navy made it standard issue. Every sailor. Every ship. Scurvy vanished from the fleet almost overnight. ⚓ Then the Navy switched from lemons to West Indian limes... Cheaper and easier to source from British colonies. Limes carry a fraction of the vitamin C that lemons do. American sailors watching British sailors drink their lime rations had a name for it. They called us limeys. And it stuck. Ten years later, at Trafalgar, Britain's navy was at full strength. The French and Spanish fleets were not. One Scottish surgeon. Twelve sailors. Two oranges and a lemon. James Lind died in 1794. One year before the navy he served finally adopted his cure. He invented the clinical trial. He saved more British sailors than any admiral in history. Your ancestors proved the truth. Did they teach you that? It's time to prove the truth again. Your support pays for the research, production and hours it takes to get it right. proudofus.co.uk/support Be part of us. Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧

Meet a Ukrainian hero you’ve never heard of before. Iryna Ivaniush “Liutyk” (Buttercup). And remember — this war didn’t start in February 2022. A soft name — but a hard reality behind it. She worked under fire, pulling wounded from the “grey zone”, where seconds decide life 1/8

@Hush_Kit The chances of anything coming from Mars... Is a million to one they said.

What is this? Wrong answers only

@HARU_FCMA You made a nice job of an unusual subject 👍

Sword 1/72 Short SB.6 Seamew 完成とします 実機のスタイルと同様の完成度ではありますが(爆) さぁ 次に行きましょう

@Free_Media_Hub I was about to suggest using a make up brush but it looks like you have come to a similar conclusion.

Dust is a killer here 😦📸🇬🇧

🧵 1/7 On the first day of WW2 he shot down a German aircraft. Then he landed beside it and saved the crew. 51 years later they met again. This is the story of Stanislaw Skalski.

🧵 6/7 The war ended in 1945. Skalski was offered a permanent commission in the RAF. He could have stayed in Britain as a celebrated war hero. Instead he chose to go home. Poland had been liberated from the Nazis but the Soviets had installed a communist government. In 1948 Skalski was arrested and charged with being a British spy. He was tortured. Beaten. Starved. In 1950 the communist government sentenced him to death. He spent years in a prison cell waiting to be executed. His mother personally begged the communist president for her son's life. His sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. He was finally released in 1956 after Stalin died. Eight years in prison for the crime of fighting the Nazis for the Allies.

🧵 1/7 One of Japan's greatest aces called him a genius in the air. The Americans called him an unknown pilot of extraordinary ability. This is the story of Kaneyoshi Muto 武藤金義.

Oh wow, Hitler His/Her Absolutely brilliant.

This one will require a stiff drink. In the early 1990s, the government came up with a clever idea. Instead of borrowing money cheaply to build hospitals, schools, and roads, it would get the private sector to build them and then pay the private sector back over 25 to 30 years. The Private Finance Initiative. PFI. The attraction was obvious. You got a shiny new hospital today. The bill didn't show up on the government's books. The cost was deferred into the future. Politicians got ribbon-cutting ceremonies without the awkward conversation about borrowing. It was, in effect, the nation's credit card. Buy now, pay later. Except the interest rate was extraordinary. The total capital value of everything built under PFI was around £50 billion. As of March 2024, there were 665 PFI contracts still running across the UK, with roughly £136 billion in remaining payments stretching out to the early 2050s. These are payments public bodies are contractually locked into. Hospitals, schools, councils, government departments. Paying for buildings that in many cases were constructed twenty or thirty years ago. And the terms are extraordinary. PFI contracts were structured so the private sector would not just build the facility but manage its services. Cleaning. Maintenance. Catering. Portering. These services are bundled into long-term contracts with built-in inflation increases that the public sector cannot renegotiate, cannot exit without paying massive penalties, and often cannot even fully scrutinise because of commercial confidentiality clauses. In one case raised in Parliament, a hospital was charged £333 to change a lightbulb. That isn't an urban myth. It was cited in Hansard. The NHS has been hit hardest. According to parliamentary analysis, the capital cost of NHS PFI projects was around £13 billion. The total repayments are estimated at around £80 billion. And the peak of NHS PFI annual repayments isn't even here yet. It arrives in 2029. The bills are still going up. In 2020-21, NHS trusts paid £457 million purely in interest charges on PFI contracts. Not services. Not maintenance. Interest. In the last five years, NHS trusts have handed over more than £1.8 billion in PFI interest alone. We Own It calculates that money would have covered the starting salaries of over 50,000 new doctors. One NHS trust, Essex Partnership, has reportedly paid back 27 times what was originally borrowed. Some hospitals are spending more on PFI repayments than on medicines for patients. And remember, these repayments come out of the same NHS budget that's supposed to fund patient care, staff, and equipment. Scotland got it just as badly. Audit Scotland reported that Scottish taxpayers will pay a cumulative £40 billion for PFI assets worth just £9 billion. North Ayrshire Council will have paid £440 million by 2038 for four schools that cost £83 million to build. Now here's what makes this worse. Many of these contracts are starting to expire. The buildings are being handed back to the public sector. And the NAO has warned of significant risks around the handback process, including cases where public bodies were dissatisfied with the condition of assets being returned to them. Decades of payments. And some of these buildings may come back needing significant further investment. So what actually happened? The government could have borrowed money at significantly lower rates to build these hospitals and schools itself. Sovereign borrowing has always been cheaper than private finance. Instead, it paid the private sector to borrow at a premium and passed the inflated cost on to the taxpayer. The private sector took the profit. The taxpayer took the risk. The buildings are now ageing. The debts are still being paid. And the services that were supposed to benefit are being squeezed partly because so much of their budget is locked into contractual obligations they cannot escape. PFI wasn't investment. It was an accounting trick. A way for governments to build things without the borrowing showing up in the national debt figures. It made politicians look fiscally responsible while loading future generations with obligations they had no say in and no ability to renegotiate. Both parties did this. The Conservatives created PFI in 1992. Labour massively expanded it after 1997. More than 700 projects were signed. The coalition eventually wound it down. The current government scrapped the latest version. But the contracts remain. The payments continue. And the damage is already done. This is what it looks like when a country chooses to buy its infrastructure on hire purchase instead of investing properly. You lock in above-market rates for decades. You lose control of the assets. You tie the hands of future governments. And when the bill keeps coming due, you're told there's no money for doctors, teachers, or social care. There was always money. It just went somewhere else.

‼️🇷🇺 Massive setback for Russia’s 5th-gen fighter program A fire has crippled a key production facility for the Sukhoi Su-57, destroying infrastructure used to build stealth-critical components. Early reports suggest this could halt or severely disrupt production, raising fresh doubts over Russia’s most advanced fighter program. Source: Defense Blog

Timeline Break Father teaching daughter how to play drums decided to take it up a notch 💕

😔 So incredibly sad… Rest in peace, Melika Azizi (2008 - 2026). This brave 18-year-old from Masal, Iran, was executed by the Islamic Regime on Nowruz — a time meant for renewal and celebration — under the charge of “Moharebeh” (enmity against God). Her “crime”? Participating in protests and allegedly burning regime symbols during the January 2026 demonstrations. She was violently arrested, reportedly beaten, and faced a system that silences young voices with death. In court, she refused to stay silent, boldly telling the judge she couldn’t ignore the bloodshed of so many others. A young life full of potential, stolen away. This is heartbreaking. We must remember her name. The world needs to see the cruelty of this regime.

Russian troops surrendered to robots. Drones and ground bots took a Russian position without infantry and without losses on Ukraine’s side — Telegraph. Zelenskyy: For the first time in the history of this war, an enemy position was taken exclusively by unmanned systems. 1/

Guote from a citizen of Ukraine about President Zelensky: "What Zelensky is doing now at the international level, no president of Ukraine could have even dreamed of, it is simply an epochal figure, I am proud of our leader, he literally saved Ukraine in 2012, when he collected aid from all over the world, and continues to do so every day, respect!" 🇺🇦❤️ He is Legend🫡

Her husband was burnt alive inside a church during the recent attack on Christians in Nigeria. One witness said: “Fulani herdsmen came to our church and set it ablaze with people inside.” While European leaders roll out the red carpet for Islamists and cry about “Islamophobia,” innocent Christians in Nigeria are being burned alive in their own churches by Fulani jihadists. Macron, Scholz, Starmer, von der Leyen – where is your outrage? Your silence is complicity in Christian genocide. Watch the full report and share it everywhere! The genocide must stop! youtu.be/IH7-fBEEQgI

Never forget: an illegal war still rages in Europe. The UK continues to stand with Ukraine – and we will not let Putin win.

In Nazi-occupied Athens, a Gestapo officer sat across from a small woman in a nun’s habit. He asked his question. She stared back with a blank, uncomprehending expression. He asked again, sharper this time. She tilted her head, straining as if the words were slipping away from her. Still nothing. Frustrated, he raised his voice, leaning in close. She watched his lips with the same helpless confusion. Finally, the officer gave up in disgust, gathered his papers, and stormed out. What he never knew—what almost no one in Athens knew—was that this woman was Princess Alice of Battenberg, great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria, born at Windsor Castle into the beating heart of European royalty. She had been profoundly deaf since childhood. But her royal family had refused to hide her. Instead, they taught her to lip-read in English, German, French, and Greek. She became one of the finest lip-readers in Europe. She understood every single word the Gestapo officer said. And at that very moment, she was hiding a Jewish family—Rachel Cohen and her two children—in her home. Princess Alice had already lived a life few royals could imagine. During the Balkan Wars and the First World War, she left palace comforts behind to nurse the wounded near the front lines, earning the Royal Red Cross from King George V. She married Prince Andrew of Greece and gave birth to five children, including a son named Philip, born on a kitchen table in Corfu in 1921. But revolution, exile, poverty, and heartbreaking betrayal followed. Her husband abandoned the family. At forty-five, she suffered a severe mental breakdown and was forcibly committed to a Swiss sanatorium. When she finally emerged, she returned alone to Athens, converted to Greek Orthodoxy, and lived as a nun—dressed in simple gray, serving the poor with quiet devotion. Then came the German occupation in 1941. When the Nazis began rounding up Greek Jews for deportation and death, Princess Alice did not hesitate. She opened her door to the Cohen family, old friends of the Greek royal house. For over a year, she sheltered Rachel, Tilde, and Michael in her small residence while the terror outside grew ever closer. She sold her last pieces of jewelry to buy food—not only for those she hid, but for starving neighbors as well. In her nun’s habit, she moved through the city like a ghost, working with the Red Cross to deliver aid, all while protecting her secret guests with calm, unshakable resolve. When suspicion finally brought the Gestapo to her door, Princess Alice performed her greatest act of courage. The woman who could read lips in four languages sat silently before the officer, pretending to be nothing more than a frail, confused old nun. She said nothing. And because of that sacred silence, the Cohen family survived until Athens was liberated in 1944. Years later, in 1947, she stood quietly at her son Philip’s wedding to the future Queen Elizabeth II—thin, dressed in gray, a figure of sacrifice amid the royal splendor. She spent her final years in Athens, founding a nursing order and giving away everything she had. When a military coup forced her to leave Greece in 1967, she reluctantly joined her son at Buckingham Palace. She died there in 1969 at the age of eighty-four, leaving behind no possessions—only a legacy of love and quiet bravery. Her final wish was fulfilled in 1988 when her remains were laid to rest in Jerusalem, on the Mount of Olives. In 1994, Prince Philip accepted Israel’s highest honor on her behalf: Righteous Among the Nations. He later reflected that it never occurred to his mother that what she had done was extraordinary. To her, helping those in mortal danger was simply what a human being—especially one who feared God more than the Nazis. Princess Alice of Battenberg, born into the grandeur of Windsor Castle, chose instead the path of radical compassion. When the Gestapo came looking for the truth, they found only silence. BRAVA!❤️

STOP SCROLLING. The regime is about to hang a wife and husband together for wanting freedom. Bita Hemmati and Mohammadreza Majidi-Asl (34) were arrested together, tortured into forced confessions, and sentenced to death. Chanting against the mullahs and throwing stones during the January uprising. Bita would be the first woman executed from these protests. This is how the Islamic Republic stays in power: by destroying families at the gallows. Your silence is the rope.