Tony Cowards

The trouble with getting a job in bomb disposal nowadays is that it’s all about ticking boxes.

Your regular reminder that football wasn’t invented in 1992. The youngest top flight goalscorer remains Jason Dozzell whilst playing for that lot from Suffolk in 1984 😉

@ST81 Not really sure how replying with a historical fact is taking something as a personal attack but, hey ho, have a lovely day. :)

@TonyCowards Oh, a whataboutism? I don't care. I mentioned something, and you seem to have taken it as a personal attack.

Does Farage remember that Winston Churchill was instrumental in setting up the European Court of Human Rights and so is, infinitely, more “woke”, than a beaver.

@ST81 You know that during the war he also suggested that the U.K. and France become one country with joint sovereignty?

@TonyCowards I'm sure when old Winston did that he didn't imagine Eurocrats telling us what we can and can't do with our own laws. #proudleaver

@EADT24 He made a very mild inbreeding joke in response to a heckle, something which almost every single comedian has done, including myself and I was born in Suffolk, since time immemorial. A complete non story and, literally, happens at every single comedy night in the U.K.

Top comedian makes dig at Suffolk during UK tour ift.tt/MkV9hmy

@GavinThorpe5 @RealTimVine It saying “one must” implies that more “may” be a goalkeeper.

@RealTimVine Yes, one goalkeeper only. But a team could start with 7 players if they really wanted.

Genuine question. Is there anything in the written rules of football that says you can NOT play two goalkeepers? Obviously this drops number of outfield players to nine. I get that. #football

@RealTimVine More importantly is there a rule preventing players using hair gel and shaving their head to make a “divot” on the top of their head then getting their goalkeeper to place the ball in the “divot” so they can walk the ball up the field and, potentially, into the goal?

Sheriff Chris Swanson, the elected Sheriff of Genesee County, Michigan, is a career law-enforcement officer, not a pundit. He became nationally known in 2020 for prioritizing de-escalation during protests. What he says about the Minneapolis shooting directly exposes how bad MAGA-era policing policies fail. Swanson calls the shooting tragic but predictable. Masked federal agents in unmarked vehicles confronted a 37-year-old woman, gave unclear commands, and then fired three shots as her car was backing up and turning away. The agent who fired was not hit, not run over, and not in the vehicle’s path. Two shots were fired as the car was already driving away. That is not lawful deadly force. That is bad policy producing bad outcomes. Swanson is blunt about the force continuum. You do not shoot people who are fleeing. You do not shoot when you are not in danger. “Tough on crime” slogans do not override use-of-force standards, no matter how loudly MAGA politicians repeat them. What follows is worse. After the woman was shot and crashed, Swanson saw no attempt at life-saving aid. No urgency. No trauma response. He contrasts this with his own deputies, who once returned fire on a suspect who had already killed two people, then immediately tried to save his life anyway. That is professional policing. What happened in Minneapolis was not. He also points to missing body cams and officers leaving the scene instead of securing it for investigation. These are not accidents. They are the results of policies that reward aggression and optics over training and accountability. Swanson makes one thing clear. Calling this out is not anti-police. Blind loyalty is what damages law enforcement. Accountability is what protects it.

When an empire lets a federal execution play out in the middle of a neighborhood street, in the snow, on camera, and then tells you it did not happen, you are not watching strength. You are watching decomposition. For centuries, America trained itself on a single catechism: the white woman will be protected. She was the sacred siren. The alarm that summoned the mob. The alibi for the lynching tree. The moral shield for segregation, occupation, and war. They burned towns for her. They strung men up for "looking at her wrong." They marched armies across oceans "to defend her honor." Now look at what that myth is worth. A 37-year-old woman. A mother of three. A poet who wrote about life and care and small, ordinary things. Sitting in a red SUV on a Minneapolis street. Waving masked men to drive around her car. Surrounded by multiple ICE agents. Conflicting orders barked through the glass. One tells her to go. One screams at her to get out. A gloved hand jerks at the door. She inches forward to escape a scene that should never have existed. The muzzle rises. The windshield flowers with fractures. The snow drinks what the Constitution was supposed to protect. By the time her child’s school day is over, his mother is already a body in a hospital. Within hours, the president is online, turning her last seconds into a campaign prop. He tells the country she "viciously ran over" an officer the video never shows being hit. He swears the man is barely alive, clinging to life in a hospital bed, While the same footage shows him walking away intact and driving himself from the scene. The truth is not in doubt. It is simply discarded. And on the platform owned by Elon Musk, a platform already under scrutiny for AI-generated image abuse targeting women, the clip is fed into the machine. Chopped. Captioned. Wrapped in influencer sermons about "terrorism," "law and order," and "she had it coming." Trump lies. Elon lies. Their ecosystems repeat it. Not because they are confused. Not because they misread the angle. But because the goal is no longer to persuade. The goal is to train. To train millions of people to say "self-defense" when a federal agent in a mask empties rounds into a windshield on a residential street. To train them to call a terrified woman "a domestic terrorist" for trying to get away from men who have turned her neighborhood into a war zone. To train them to treat a dead mother as a special effect that can be edited in post. This is what doom actually looks like. Not a single night of collapse. A slow, public lobotomy. An ICE agent steps into the frame like an executioner, fires into a car, and walks away. Cable news debates his "split-second decision." The White House calls her death "a tragedy of her own making." Commentators cash in on the clip, lecturing the country about respecting armed men in masks. An empire that once promised to kill for its fantasy of the pure white mother cannot even pretend her life matters when the trigger is one of its own. The myth is gone. Only the machinery is left. Do not confuse that with stability. A state that can watch a mother shot in the head on camera, see the snow stained, hear the eyewitnesses, and still choose the official story over its own eyes is not confident. It is addicted. Addicted to impunity. Addicted to the feeling that there is no act so obscene that it cannot be laundered with the right chyron and the right post on the right app. If this is what they do to the people they were raised to see as "theirs," to the face they once swore to protect at any cost, imagine what they will continue to do to those they were taught to fear. To Black neighborhoods. To immigrants. To Muslims. To anyone who was never written into the myth at all. This is not law and order. It is a firing squad with HR paperwork. A kill shot with a press release stapled to it. And a country that chooses, deliberately, to believe the men who lie about the tape instead of the tape, to side with the gun instead of the woman it killed, is not choosing safety. It is choosing the grave over the mirror. And once you have trained a population to deny what the lens shows, what the blood on the snow proves, what the children without a mother will live with, you have already buried the republic. You are just watching how long the corpse can keep moving.

@FightingOnFilm Nonsense

🎬ONE WORD REVIEW! The boys are back next week with a review of the recent streaming release ‘Der Tiger’. Drop your one word reviews below! 👇

@wgloipp @James1940 He trained my grandfather at HMS Valkyrie on the Isle of Man.

@James1940 Pertwee was RN, wasn't he?

No. Do tell…

Like this post if you are appalled at Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (AKA Little Tommy Robinson) pleading with Trump to invade Britain and overthrow our democratically elected government. Repost if you would be happy if he was arrested for treason.

@guywalters Even if it did I fail to see how a nation with no history of amphibious warfare would be able to send enough forces across 100 miles of sea and land them on a well defended island? Russia couldn’t successfully invade the country next door.

The USA arrested the head of a drug cartel, not a head of state. How does that give a green light for China to invade Taiwan? Struggling to give a shit, TBH.

Just went for my 101 Binary course, turns out I need to do the other four courses first.

Repost if you’d like to see the return of traditional British values. Things like tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs. Politeness. A sense of fair play. Multicultural tolerance. Mutual respect. Humour and wit. Kindness and generosity. Merry Christmas to all.

@Dozibugger “A tea” pot stand?

Most of you know that I am a generous guy. This year I got my mother-in-law this new pot stand for her kitchen. I hope she likes it. #MerryChristmas2025

@DeeWardRottal @BpsmithUk @mikerflinn He said “were affected” but I take your point that more could be affected in the future.

@TonyCowards @BpsmithUk @mikerflinn He said only 375 farms would be affected by the budget in total not per year - I was explaining that there are more than that will be affected and by about 4-500 fold.

We can now see clearly just how much #GasLighting has been going on from the Farmers, Tories & Reform. The UK has *209,000 farms*. Only *375* were affected by the Budget change to Inheritance Tax. That number has now been reduced to *185*. #SlowHandClap👏 theguardian.com/environment/20…

@DeeWardRottal @BpsmithUk @mikerflinn How many of those are being inherited per year though? Are you expecting all of the owners of those farms to die simultaneously?

@BpsmithUk @mikerflinn Looks like you might need to multiply that figure by 4-500 times to be accurate

If kids treated waiting staff and chefs they way they treated parents who are preparing their dinner they would be eating a LOT of bogeys, saliva and wee.

@RetroITFC Stabs? Wellys more like!

On this day in 1996, Paul Mason stabs home in the 1-1 draw against Stoke City at Portman Road. #itfc