The Madness Of Griffons retweeté
The Madness Of Griffons
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The Madness Of Griffons
@TGriffons
Av Geek rebel, aviation heretic and trouble maker. Occasional modeller. Pro Europe. Still popping in here but posting on Bluesky at: @tmogriffons.bsky.social
Inscrit le Mayıs 2021
1.2K Abonnements545 Abonnés
The Madness Of Griffons retweeté

The oldest hatred is back, and I am absolutely done with this shit. Get angry and then get angrier.
open.substack.com/pub/mrandrewfo…

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The Madness Of Griffons retweeté

@Free_Media_Hub Special tip.
Heat up your pork pie in the oven, the flavour is pure heaven.
Add potato cooked to your preference and pork gravy (plus green things I guess for health reasons) for a full meal.
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The Madness Of Griffons retweeté

Yesterday, Russian authorities reported that the fire at Tuapse was extinguished.
Ukrainian Defense Forces took note of that and remedied the situation.
Anton Gerashchenko@Gerashchenko_en
The fire at the sea terminal in Russian Tuapse was extinguished after burning for 3.5 days. Russian media claimed it was just a small fire, nothing special, then admitted that over 150 people and 49 units of equipment were used to deal with it.
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The Madness Of Griffons retweeté

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. 🙏🇬🇧
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The Madness Of Griffons retweeté

@Hush_Kit The chances of anything coming from Mars... Is a million to one they said.
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@HARU_FCMA You made a nice job of an unusual subject 👍
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@Free_Media_Hub I was about to suggest using a make up brush but it looks like you have come to a similar conclusion.
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The Madness Of Griffons retweeté
The Madness Of Griffons retweeté

🧵 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.
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The Madness Of Griffons retweeté
The Madness Of Griffons retweeté
The Madness Of Griffons retweeté

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.
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The Madness Of Griffons retweeté

‼️🇷🇺 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
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The Madness Of Griffons retweeté
The Madness Of Griffons retweeté

😔 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.
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The Madness Of Griffons retweeté
The Madness Of Griffons retweeté

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🫡
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