Penelope Marshall

Philosophy: The improbable path of writing and thinking as an entire way of life.

@KathyParr101 The very fact Reem is asking the question flags low intelligence.

So many people tweeting the same derogatory comments about pensioners. Almost as if it's been deliberately co-ordinated ...

@londonette Tarzan's loin cloth must be too tight.

Interesting to see that Michael Heseltine, age 93, thinks the world is controlled by the “Trump and Israel”. Not China, India, Qatar? thetimes.com/article/9918aa…

@nypost BY WHO, JOHN, BY WHO?

‘Harry Potter’ actor John Lithgow says JK Rowling’s trans views have been ‘twisted and misrepresented’ trib.al/bYf2wWu

@theafroaussie Najay, can you offer citations of which court declared it Genocide? I'm interested to find outthe legal precedent, thanks.

“Genocide is a lie”

@Never_Again2020 Precisely!

On the antisemitic hard-left, everyone and everything they don't like is 'Zionist' and 'Zionism'. They've misappropriated both words and redefined them as pejorative substitutes for 'Jew' and 'Judaism'.

@richardpbacon How?

You are just a bully now.

@Mendelpol @CraigMurrayOrg 🤣🤣🤣Openly Antisemite, why would he be bothered?

.@CraigMurrayOrg sitting in front of a Hezbollah flag.. Doesn't seem too bothered..

If a generation paid National Insurance contributions for decades under the explicit promise of a decent state pension in return, while simultaneously facing much lower real wages, far higher relative housing costs when raising families and far more limited access to generous workplace pensions compared to today, would it truly be fair to tell them now, in retirement, that they should downsize their family home simply because they didn't save enough privately?

Can I ask why, if a pensioner has worked all their life, they only have the state pension to rely on? Didn’t decide to save ? Put away for a rainy day ? Sounds like poor planning to me. And yes if your children have flown the nest and you, or you and your spouse are knocking around in a 3 or 4 bedroom house you bought decades ago- SELL it. You’ll have more than enough to live on.

@BBCLookEast Why is the BBC using homophobic slurs in their headlines? @Ofcom

Queer author devastated after school removes book bbc.in/4txVnOZ

There Are No Solutions, Only Trade-Offs The human mind craves resolution. Faced with disorder, it reaches instinctively for the language of “solutions”, clean, decisive, final. A problem exists; therefore, a solution must be found. This is the grammar of optimism, but it is also the grammar of illusion. In reality, most of what we call solutions are merely rearrangements of costs. They do not eliminate problems; they relocate them. To say “there are no solutions, only trade-offs” is not cynicism. It is clarity. Every policy, every invention, every moral stance carries a price. The only meaningful question is not whether a proposal works, but for whom, at what cost, and over what time horizon. When governments attempt to lower housing costs, for instance, they often impose controls that make rents affordable in the short term. Yet those same controls can discourage construction, reducing supply and worsening the problem over time. The “solution” contains within it the seeds of a different failure. What has occurred is not resolution, but substitution. This pattern is universal. Economic growth lifts millions out of poverty, but often at the cost of environmental degradation. Strong policing can reduce crime, but risks encroaching on civil liberties. Expansive welfare systems provide security, but may dampen incentives that sustain productivity. In each case, the language of solutions obscures the underlying reality: one good is being purchased with another. The refusal to acknowledge trade-offs is not harmless, it is dangerous. It invites the public to believe in costless benefits, to demand outcomes that cannot coexist and to condemn leaders who fail to deliver the impossible. When trade-offs are denied, they do not disappear; they become hidden. And hidden costs are invariably borne by those least able to recognise or resist them. Consider technological progress. The digital age has democratised information, accelerated communication, and transformed entire industries. Yet it has also eroded privacy, shortened attention spans, and concentrated power in new and often opaque ways. To frame technology as a “solution” to human limitation is to ignore the new limitations it introduces. Every gain has a shadow. This principle extends beyond policy and technology into personal life. Choosing a career is not solving the problem of livelihood; it is trading freedom for stability, or stability for ambition. Committing to a relationship is not solving loneliness; it is exchanging solitude for obligation, and autonomy for connection. Even leisure is a trade-off, time spent in rest is time not spent in pursuit. What distinguishes serious thinking from wishful thinking is the willingness to confront these trade-offs directly. Serious thinking asks: which costs are acceptable? Which are not? Who decides? It recognises that progress is not the elimination of constraints, but the intelligent navigation of them. The language of solutions persists because it is comforting. It promises finality, a sense that the struggle can end. But the human condition offers no such resolution. Scarcity ensures that choices must be made, and choices ensure that something must always be given up. To abandon the myth of solutions is not to surrender hope. It is to replace naïve hope with disciplined judgment. It forces a shift from asking, “How do we fix this?” to asking, “What are we willing to trade for improvement?” That question is harder, less satisfying, and far more honest. In the end, the world does not present us with problems paired neatly with solutions. It presents us with competing goods, conflicting priorities, and limited resources. Wisdom lies not in imagining these tensions away, but in choosing among them with open eyes. There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs and the sooner that is understood, the better our choices will be. #ThomasSowell #Economics

@Nanaakua1 🤣🤣🤣

I find it interesting reading some of the comments that some people think you can only be white and British 🙄

The Free Palestine Movement Is a Moral Revolt Against the West Itself Let’s drop the pretence: what parades across Western streets under the banner of “Free Palestine” is not simply activism. It is a moral insurrection, one that targets not just a foreign state, but the ethical foundations of the civilisation in which it thrives. This movement does not merely criticise policy. It seeks to invert morality itself. For centuries, the Judeo-Christian West has rested on a set of uncompromising principles: that human life has inherent value, that individuals are morally accountable for their actions, and that evil is not excused by grievance. These ideas were not decorative, they were civilisational guardrails. They separated justice from vengeance, law from chaos. The modern Free Palestine movement tears at those guardrails with open contempt. It replaces moral judgement with ideological tribalism. Under its logic, the moment a group is labelled “oppressed,” it is granted a kind of moral immunity. Atrocities are reframed as “resistance.” Murder becomes “context.” Barbarism is laundered through rhetoric until it is not merely excused, but celebrated. This is not a distortion at the margins. It is the core operating principle. What makes this especially corrosive is where it is happening. These are not arguments emerging from failed states or authoritarian regimes. They are being advanced in the heart of liberal democracies, by people who enjoy the protections of the very system they denounce. Freedom of speech, rule of law, individual rights, these are treated not as achievements to be preserved, but as tools to be exploited in service of their dismantling. There is a deep parasitism here: a movement sustained by the freedoms of the West while working to erode the moral legitimacy of those freedoms. Even more alarming is the intellectual collapse that accompanies it. Complexity is discarded because it is inconvenient. History is flattened into a cartoon. One side is assigned absolute innocence, the other absolute guilt. Facts that complicate the narrative are ignored or suppressed. The goal is not understanding, it is mobilisation. And mobilisation requires simplicity, outrage, and a steady erosion of truth. The result is a generation trained not to think, but to feel on command. To chant rather than reason. To substitute moral posturing for moral substance. This is not activism in any serious sense, it is performance, backed by a worldview that cannot withstand scrutiny. But the most dangerous aspect is the double standard. The movement holds Western societies to impossible, often self-contradictory moral expectations while granting their adversaries a free pass for conduct that would otherwise be universally condemned. This is not justice. It is moral cowardice dressed up as compassion. A civilisation cannot survive this asymmetry. When it judges itself by its highest ideals but judges others by their lowest excuses, it places itself at a permanent disadvantage, morally, politically, and psychologically. And that is precisely what we are witnessing: a steady loss of moral confidence. A reluctance to assert basic distinctions, between deliberate violence and lawful defence, between responsibility and victimhood, between truth and propaganda. Once those distinctions collapse, everything collapses with them. The uncomfortable reality is that the Free Palestine movement, in its current form, is not a plea for justice. It is a rejection of the very standards that make justice possible. It is not reformist, it is corrosive. It does not strengthen the moral fabric of the West; it unravels it. Civilisations are not destroyed overnight. They are hollowed out, idea by idea, standard by standard, until nothing remains but the shell. What we are seeing now is not the end, but the process. And the process is accelerating. The question is whether the West will recognise what is happening before the damage becomes irreversible, or whether it will continue to applaud its own moral disarmament, mistaking surrender for virtue. #Morality #Antisemitism

@Steve_Cooke Exactly!

"Zionist" meaning anyone who criticised Craig Murray for his despicable claim that the antisemitic attack on Hatzola's Jewish community ambulance service was a "false flag" operation.

There are few mornings in the year that carry the quiet weight and the quiet promise, of Easter Sunday. It arrives not with the urgency of deadlines or the noise of celebration alone, but with something steadier: the idea that renewal is possible, even after long and difficult seasons. Easter is, at its core, a statement about reversal. What seemed final is not final. What appeared lost is not lost. Across centuries, cultures, and circumstances, that message has endured not because life is easy, but precisely because it is not. The persistence of Easter speaks to a basic human recognition: that despair, however convincing in the moment, does not always have the last word. Spring reinforces this truth in plain sight. The ground, once hardened by winter, yields again. Light returns earlier each day without asking permission. Trees that looked lifeless begin, quietly and without announcement, to change. Nature does not argue for renewal, it demonstrates it. For individuals, Easter offers a useful pause. It invites a simple but often neglected question: what, in one’s own life, might be capable of beginning again? Not in grand, unrealistic transformations, but in practical, observable ways. A repaired relationship. A habit set right. A decision made with more clarity than before. Renewal, in reality, is usually incremental, not dramatic, but it is no less significant for that. There is also a social dimension. Easter gatherings, whether around a table, in a church, or on a walk through a brightening city, serve as reminders that renewal is not solely an individual project. Communities, too, depend on the willingness of people to forgive, to rebuild, and to move forward without being permanently anchored to what went wrong. A happy Easter, then, is not merely a cheerful greeting. It is a recognition of something sturdier: that life contains within it the capacity to recover, to restore, and to continue with purpose. That idea, tested repeatedly over time, remains one of the more reliable sources of hope available to us. And that is reason enough to mark the day. #Easter

@DreyfusJames 🤣🤣🤣

🤣 See? If true, even Pink News can’t sustain the impossible tightrope walk that involves full adherence to their demands… This is how the bully in the playground always ends up… Friendless & impotent…

Mr Hitchens, you warn that Britain must not subordinate itself to an American president you liken to an ayatollah. Yet you have long argued that Britain’s deep involvement in the Ukraine conflict serves no vital British interest and has been driven by reckless Western (especially American) policy. If deference to American leadership is so dangerous when it comes to a state visit or royal flattery, why was it not equally dangerous when Britain followed Washington’s lead in provoking, prolonging, and arming a war on Europe’s eastern flank that has cost thousands of lives and billions in treasure with no clear strategic gain for the United Kingdom?

PETER HITCHENS: Charles shouldn't kowtow to American Ayatollah Trump dailymail.co.uk/debate/article…

If the AP described the mass displacement of Shiite families from southern Lebanon, many of whom fled Israeli evacuation orders issued after Hezbollah's rocket fire into Israel, as 'evictions' amid local sectarian tensions and fears of Hezbollah infiltration, why would labelling it 'ethnic cleansing' be the more precise historical term, rather than a consequence of an armed group's decision to embed military operations among civilians and provoke a broader conflict?

An “eviction” happens when you don’t pay rent. The term you are looking for @AP is ethnic cleansing.

If local traditions in southern Lebanon identify a 1st-century site as the tomb of Simon Peter (Shamoun al-Safa), while the overwhelming weight of early Christian historical sources and archaeological findings point to his martyrdom and burial in Rome beneath what is now St. Peter's Basilica, what criteria should we use to determine which claim better preserves the apostle's actual legacy and does emphasizing one over the other risk undermining shared interfaith reverence for verifiable history?

This is over a year old, but it has still only ever been seen by a minority of my followers, so I hope you will forgive me it you are seeing it again.

Mr. Hitchens, you have long maintained that NATO's eastward expansion and Western policy goaded Russia into invading Ukraine, making the conflict a predictable tragedy born of provocation rather than unprovoked aggression. If a sovereign nation’s right to choose its alliances and defend its borders against a larger neighbour’s demands for neutrality, territorial concessions and influence is treated as an intolerable provocation warranting invasion, what principle exactly distinguishes this from the historical pattern of great powers bullying smaller neighbours into submission and how would you persuade the people of a country facing annexation or vassalage that yielding to such 'realism' truly serves justice or long-term peace rather than merely rewarding the aggressor?

Why should our King be made to visit this rude, ungrateful and vainglorious President? Call off the Royal visit. My column in The Mail on Sunday today.

If a government's increasing restrictions on LGBT expression and assembly mark the beginning of its slide into fascism, as you suggest happened in Russia starting with the 2006 Moscow Pride ban, what do we make of other societies that have maintained or even strengthened similar cultural and legal boundaries around sexuality and family without descending into totalitarian control, mass purges, or expansionist wars?

Russia’s slide into fascism began with weaponisation of homophobia Putin copied from the Nazis. They scapegoated Jews. He scapegoated LGBTs It began with 2006 ban on Moscow Pride. Then ban on LGBT propaganda & symbols. LGBT now branded "extremist" novayagazeta.eu/articles/2026/…