High finance, low politics and rogue archaeology. British Gaullist. “This is a niche and disturbing take”
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Joined February 2012
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Mark retweeted
I am not a fan of Lula's foreign policy, and a lot is unknown about the Serbian student movement. But both just proved that voters can alter what feels like a historical shift
Mark retweeted
I think @andyburnham wants to rejoin the EU. Not spin. It's incredibly bold to even raise free movement. Perhaps testing the water to see if public opinion on immigration has changed. The Europeans are paying attention
Mark retweeted
In 2002, British commandos roared up a Spanish beach in their amphibious landing craft and leapt ashore brandishing assault rifles and mortars.
Bemused Spaniards in the town of La Linea de la Concepcion watched as 45 Commando unit began deploying 'tactically' in the sand.
1/3
Mark retweeted
In 1941, a Spaniard walked into the British embassy in Madrid and offered to spy on the Nazis.
The British turned him down.
So he went to the Germans instead, pretended to be a loyal fascist, and got hired as a German spy. His plan was to lie to them for the rest of the war.
It worked better than anyone could have imagined.
His name was Juan Pujol García. Before the war he had tried his hand at running a chicken farm and a movie theater. He had no spy training. What he had was a deep hatred of both fascism and communism after the Spanish Civil War, and an incredible imagination.
The Germans gave him a codename, invisible ink, money, and orders to go to Britain and recruit spies.
He didn't go to Britain.
He went to Lisbon, Portugal, and made everything up.
Using a tourist guidebook, maps, magazines, newsreels, and a British railway timetable from the library, he wrote long, detailed reports about life in England. Military movements. Morale. Ports.
He'd never been there. He made mistakes. He didn't understand British money. He once reported that dockworkers in Glasgow would do anything for a liter of wine.
The Germans loved him anyway.
Then British codebreakers reading German messages noticed something strange. The Germans were hunting for a convoy that didn't exist, based on a report from some agent in Britain they'd never heard of.
The British went looking for this mystery spy. They found Pujol. In 1942 they finally took him on and brought him to London.
Now he had real help. MI5 gave him the codename Garbo, after the actress, because they thought he was the greatest actor in the world.
Together with his British handler, Pujol built a fake spy network for the Germans. It eventually had 27 imaginary agents. Each had a name, a personality, a job, and a backstory. A Welsh nationalist. A Venezuelan student. A Greek sailor. Some of them recruited their own imaginary sub-agents.
When they needed to explain why one agent had gone quiet, they killed him off. They even put a fake obituary in a Liverpool newspaper. The Germans reportedly paid a pension to his widow.
Who also didn't exist.
Then came D-Day.
Hours before the landings, the British let Pujol send a message warning the Germans that the invasion was coming in Normandy. It was timed so it would arrive too late to matter, but it made him look brilliant.
Three days later he sent the most important message of his career. Normandy was a trick, he said. The real invasion was still coming, at Calais, led by a huge army under General Patton.
That army was fake too. But the Germans believed him.
German forces that could have been rushed to Normandy were held back near Calais for weeks, waiting for an attack that never came.
The Germans were so grateful they awarded him the Iron Cross.
A few months later, King George VI made him a Member of the Order of the British Empire.
He's one of the only people known to have been decorated by both sides of the war.
After the war, afraid of revenge from surviving Nazis, he faked his own death from malaria in Africa and disappeared to Venezuela, where he lived quietly running a shop.
For decades the world thought he was dead.
In 1984, a British writer tracked him down. Pujol came back to Normandy for the 40th anniversary of D-Day and met veterans who had landed on the beaches.
Some of them thanked him.
Mark retweeted
Sama says "I no longer think we're gonna be able to just patch all the bugs."
If accurate, this means 2 things:
1) The internet as we know it is over.
2) We very, very obviously need to stop AI advancement **before** the same becomes true of bio.
Mark retweeted
Ukraine just repatriated 270 POWs from Russian captivity.
He has “Jew” carved into his back.
These are the people are president says are “fine“ on Ukraine. That Witkoff calls “humanitarian.”
Mark retweeted
The cyberpocalypse is going to hit British politics like an asteroid. So many people have heads buried so far in the sand (just look at what Parliament spends its time discussing...)
Mark retweeted
🚨Wes Streeting only talked about how the UK needs to prepare for food shortages and cyber attacks, because I asked him when the government was going to start its national conversation on defence during a question and answer session at the opening of a gun hall.
If the defence secretary hadn’t given such a meaningful reply (thank you @wesstreeting), then no government minister would have spoken out publicly about this topic on the day that the Cabinet Office finally published its new advice on being ready for emergencies.
This long-awaited “Be Ready” moment was meant to be a really important signal - launching a three year campaign to shift the whole of our society to a footing that is more resilient to any kind of shock.
Instead, no government minister had been scheduled to speak publicly today specifically to launch this vital piece of work.
It was just going to be a website update and a written statement to Parliament.
This does not send the signal that getting the UK ready for any potential disaster - up to and including war - is a top priority for our new prime minister…
skynews-defence.noosphere.ap…
Mark retweeted
Bucha. It was a genocide, recognized by everyone. They buried hundreds of people. They tortured people. We found the grave. There were, I believe, around 500 people. When we liberated those towns near Kyiv, there emerged this, you know, this kind of hatred for the Russians, right at that moment. Not even at the moment when they started the full-scale war. Back then nobody understood what it really was yet. People understood what this war was and what Putin did personally when we found those mass graves of tortured adults, children. I mean they didn't just kill them, they tortured and killed them.
When we liberated Bucha, I said, bring every journalist here. Don't touch anything, just bring the journalists. The whole world simply has to see this. Imagine finding a mass grave in the U.S. or in Britain, God forbid, with 500 tortured people, adults, kids, dogs, animals shot dead. I mean, they held hunting sprees there from military vehicles. People were running, they were shooting, just hunting, playing games. They literally just played with people, like slavery. So how, after this, can you listen to Putin? And how, after this, can you forgive?
From The Diary of a CEO podcast with Steven Bartlett. (2/3)
Mark retweeted
🚨This is well worth downloading - it is a v useful guide about the kind of supplies you and your household might need to be self sufficient for 72 hours in the event of an emergency - from a flood or a power cut to war:
beready.campaign.gov.uk/wp-c…
Mark retweeted
Ireland, I’m unbelievably disappointed and disillusioned with you. I’m beginning to think it was all fake and that we are actually the most insincere fuckers in Europe. The thousand welcomes and the so-called “craic” all seem sickeningly fake to me now.
There’s a reason our most brilliant artists hated the place.
There comes a time when even a nation must look at itself honestly.
Mark retweeted
Holocaust survivor Edith Steiner and Scottish commando John MacKay, who met after WWII in 1945 and married on July 17, 1946. Their enduring love story spanned over 71 years until Edith passed away in 2017....
John MacKay was a 23-year-old Scottish soldier when he helped liberate prisoners from Nazi concentration camps. He met Edith (known as Eci) at a dance held for survivors. They later described it as love at first sight.
. . . . .
She had endured the unimaginable, losing 39 members of her family to the horrors of the Holocaust. At just 20 years old, Edith Steiner had survived the terrifying selections of Josef Mengele, bearing scars that time could never fully erase.
Yet, among the ashes of a broken world, she found the man who would hold her hand for the next seven decades.
It was 1944, and the world was locked in relentless conflict.
John Mackay, a 23-year-old Scottish commando who had already pulled off a daring escape from a prisoner-of-war camp in North Africa, was part of the Allied unit that intercepted a column of prisoners being marched away from Auschwitz.
As the Nazi guards fled into the surrounding woods, John locked eyes with the young Hungarian woman. He did not know her name yet, but he knew right then that he could not simply walk away.
A few weeks after the liberation, a village dance was organized to celebrate their newfound freedom.
John had faced heavy enemy fire without flinching, but the thought of talking to Edith left him completely terrified. Hoping to play it safe, he asked his friend to walk across the room and see if she would dance with him.
Edith, carrying a fiery spirit that even the camps could not extinguish, looked right at the messenger.
She sent back a sharp reply, saying, "No, tell him if he wants a dance, he must ask me himself!"
Hearing those words, John did not hesitate a second time.
He walked straight over, asked for her hand, and they danced into a future neither had dared to dream of during the dark days of war.
When the war finally ended, John brought Edith home to Scotland.
They were married on July 17, 1946, beginning a vibrant life together that took them from Edinburgh to Liverpool, and eventually to the quiet hills of Pitlochry.
There, they operated the Atholl Arms Hotel as a true team in every sense of the word.
They shared everything—the hard work of building a business, the joy of raising their children, Sharon and Peter, and the pride of watching seven grandchildren and five great-grandchildren grow up around them.
Their bond was something incredibly rare to witness.
Even after 70 years of marriage, they were famous in their community for their sweet habits, especially making sure to hold hands whenever they stepped out of the house together.
Reflecting on their incredible journey, their daughter Sharon once said,
"Their devotion to each other is so clear to everyone who meets them. It is an example of an incredibly rare and beautiful love."
Edith passed away peacefully at the age of 92 on June 26, 2017, shortly after celebrating their 71st wedding anniversary.
She had been ill with pneumonia, and John, true to the unspoken promise he made back in 1944, stayed right by her side until her very last breath.
Devastated by the loss of his soulmate, 96-year-old John followed his beloved Edith shortly after her passing, leaving a legacy of courage, devotion, and a bond that death itself could not break.
While Edith and John are no longer here, the love they built stands as a powerful reminder for all of us. Their journey proves that even when history brings unbearable tragedy, love gives us the strength to rebuild, heal, and find joy again.
#archaeohistories
Mark retweeted
Remember when Alameda CEO Sam Trabucco royally bombed an interview when Tether, the largest financial fraud in history, came up as a question in August 2021?
Come to find out, Sam Bankman-Fried was in fact not paying for his Tethers, Deltec Bank, which is owned by Tether, extended him a multi-billion dollar line of credit to which he could then buy billions of Tethers that Tether would just print out of thin air.
Imagine how much faster Alameda/FTX would have blown up if more reporters asked about FTX/Alameda's connection to the Tether fraud.
It's this failure to ask hard questions which remains to this day and will inevitably allow another massive fraud to blow up in everyone's faces.
Mark retweeted
welcome to life kids, here’s your screen. you absolutely have to learn how to use this thing because your entire professional and social life will be plugged into it. just don’t get lost in the infinite addiction portal that is also on there for some reason haha ok kids have fun
This is an incredible project: NBC News asked parents to check their kids' YouTube history during school hours — and the results show kids are spending huge chunks of the day watching videos that have nothing to do with learning
nbcnews.com/specials/hooked-…
