As its hosting the World Cup this year.... Europeans see Americans take on NATO as them complaining that their favourite Quarterback isn't playing for the USA Soccer team.

Funny moments in the last day it so Irish claiming the Falklands should be Argentinian as they're near to the country Argentinians complaining about British colonialism when their entire country is basically a Spanish colony Americans complaining about British imperialism whilst their country wages an illegal war for geopolitical gain

Argyle Fans: Argyle TV is shit - waste of money Argyle: Ok we'll trim the staff Argyle Fans: YOU CAN'T DO THAT !!!

Too on point not to share, “Aussie reply to Trump rant about NATO not being there for us. Mate. You run a country with 600,000 homeless people sleeping on the street tonight. A country where 40% of adults can't cover a $400 emergency without borrowing money. A country where insulin costs more than a car payment and people are rationing it to survive. A country where medical debt is the number 1 cause of bankruptcy. A country where women are dying in hospital car parks because doctors are too scared of abortion laws to treat a miscarriage. You lock up more of your own citizens than any nation on earth. More than China. More than Russia. More than North Korea. The land of the free has 2 million people in cages, and a quarter of them haven't even been convicted of anything. They're just too poor to make bail. Your life expectancy is going backwards. You're the only developed nation where that's happening. Your infant mortality rate is worse than Cuba's. Your kids do active shooter drills between maths and English while you sell the gunmaker's stock to your mates. Your minimum wage hasn't moved in 15 years. You've got teachers working 2 jobs and veterans sleeping under bridges and you just spent a trillion dollars flattening a country that didn't attack you. And you’ve got a convicted felon, adjudicating raping, paedophile protecting, porn star shagging insurrectionist running the biggest dumpster fire war campaign since the Taliban thanked you very much for losing again. And you're calling Greenland poorly run? Greenland has universal healthcare. Free education. One of the lowest incarceration rates in the world. Nobody goes bankrupt there because they got sick. Nobody dies in a waiting room because their insurance said no. "NATO wasn't there when we needed them." When exactly was that, champ? September 11? Because NATO invoked Article 5 for the first and only time in history FOR YOU. Soldiers from dozens of countries deployed, fought, bled, and died in Afghanistan FOR YOU. Australia wasn't even in NATO and we still showed up. For 20 years. And you pulled out at 2am without telling anyone and left them to deal with the mess. So maybe before you start calling other countries poorly run, have a look at your own backyard, you spray-tanned aluminium siding salesman. The only thing poorly run in this picture is your fucking mouth. Credit (borrowed from) Jim Scroggins - original author 📷 unknown”

MAGA thinks Europe can't defend itself without America. Here's what they don't know. 1. France and Britain have 515 nuclear warheads and 8 nuclear missile submarines. 2. European defence spending hit €481 billion this year. That's more than Russia and China spend combined. The EU's ReArm Europe plan is mobilising another €800 billion. 3. European countries have over 1.7 million active troops. Russia has 1.3 million. 4. EU and UK air forces fly over 1,400 combat aircraft. Their navies have five aircraft carriers, over 60 submarines, more than 120 frigates and destroyers. 5. Europe has over 6,000 artillery pieces and that's before the biggest rearmament wave since the Cold War. Poland alone is adding 212 new howitzers. 6. The British SAS invented modern special forces. The US copied them to build Delta Force. From France's Foreign Legion to Poland's GROM, Europe's elite units are among the deadliest on earth. 7. Europe already has joint military commands ready to fight. The UK leads a 10-nation rapid reaction force across Northern Europe and the Arctic. Finland alone can mobilise 900,000 trained reservists all prepared to fight in arctic conditions. 8. Europe has its own satellite navigation (Galileo), its own defence programme (75 active projects) and is building its own rapid deployment force. The "helpless Europe" story was never about defence. It was about keeping Europe dependent and buying American weapons, relying on American intelligence, following American foreign policy. Thanks to Trump, that now ends.

Karoline Leavitt: “They were tested and they failed.” Here’s the thing about NATO that apparently needs explaining to the most powerful government on earth: it is not a taxi. You do not ring NATO. You do not place an order. You do not specify delivery within 72 hours and then stand in the Rose Garden bewildered that nothing has turned up. NATO is a collective defence alliance built on the radical concept that its members are, in fact, members, with votes and opinions and sovereign militaries they get to deploy according to their own national interests. This is written down. It has been written down since 1949. The documents are available in English. Nobody in this administration has read them. Let’s go back to Greenland for a moment, because this is apparently where the rot set in. Trump wanted Greenland. Just wanted it. Asked if he could have it. Was told no, it belongs to Denmark, which is a NATO ally, which means the whole thing was always going to be diplomatically awkward at best and catastrophically self-defeating at worst. His response was not to reflect on this. His response was to decide that NATO was a large problem. An alliance of thirty-two nations that has kept the peace in Europe for seventy-five years was, in his assessment, getting in the way of his property acquisition. This tells you everything you need to know about how the man thinks. And it tells you everything about who he hired to think alongside him. Every serious leader in history, every CEO worth the title, every general who ever won anything, has operated on the same basic principle: hire people smarter than yourself. Steve Jobs did it. Churchill did it. Every remotely competent executive who ever ran anything of consequence understood that your job is not to be the cleverest person in the building. Your job is to find the cleverest people in the building and then get out of their way. Surround yourself with people who will tell you when you’re wrong. Who know things you don’t. Who have read the documents.Trump inverted this entirely. A cabinet selected not for expertise but for loyalty. Not for knowledge but for the willingness to perform agreement. Pete Hegseth at Defence. A communications team that announces things with confidence at a ratio entirely disconnected from understanding. An administration where the qualification for the job was, essentially, never making the man at the top feel inadequate. The outcome of this philosophy is Karoline Leavitt at a podium reading four words as though she had just solved something. Delivered with the serene confidence of someone who has never had to sit in a room and actually work out what NATO is, how it functions, why it was built, or what the word collective means in the context of collective defence. They were tested and they failed. Europe is not shaking its fist. Europe is shaking its head. Slowly. Wearily. In the way you do when you’ve explained something seventeen times and the person across the table still hasn’t got it and you’ve finally accepted that they never will. The allies are building their own defence architecture now, with people in the room who have read the documents. They stopped waiting for Washington to grow into the role some time ago. And somewhere in all of this, Greenland is still Danish. Still will be tomorrow. NATO is still an alliance of sovereign nations who get to say no. Still will be next week. And the White House is still staffed by people who find both of these facts baffling. Some things don’t change just because you haven’t understood them.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ ​ Stay connected, Follow Gandalv @Microinteracti1

General Dan Caine, Trump’s handpicked Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, boast is not the flex he thinks it is. 10,000 missions. Sounds like an impressive display of independent US airpower until you see where they actually flew from. Some flew from carriers in the Arabian Sea, primarily the USS Abraham Lincoln. But one carrier can only generate around 70-80 sorties a day. The USS Gerald R. Ford? Damaged by fire and pulled out for repairs. Its replacement is still sailing from Norfolk, Virginia. You can’t run a war from one ship. 62 bomber missions. Only 18 flew from the US. Most of the remaining 44? RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire, England. A British airfield in the Cotswolds is the heart of America’s bomber war against Iran. The F-35s and F-15Es? RAF Lakenheath, Suffolk. The F-15E shot down over Iran last week? 48th Fighter Wing based in England. The F-16 Wild Weasels suppressing Iranian air defences? Spangdahlem Air Base, Germany. The munitions? Likely drawn from US stockpiles at Ramstein, Germany. The aerial refuelling tankers that made all of it possible? Around 50 across the UK, Germany and Portugal. Another 35 in Spain, Italy, Greece and Bulgaria. That’s 85 tankers on European NATO soil. The US has zero permanently based fighters in the Middle East. Outside of one operational carrier, every fighter that flew over Iran came from or through European NATO bases. Without European NATO this war could not have been fought. That is not an opinion. It is a logistics fact. Trump told the world “the United States does not need the help of anyone.” Except the overwhelming majority of the 10,000 missions was only made possible thanks to the European NATO allies he spent two months insulting Maybe General Caine should remind Trump who actually holds all the cards. Has he even said thank you yet?

Trump is demanding European allies deploy warships to the Strait of Hormuz. Within days, apparently. Because that’s how alliance management works now: you spend years insulting your partners, undermining NATO, cosying up to the man trying to dismantle the European security order, and then you pick up the phone and expect a naval coalition by Thursday. Europe found the large middle finger. This was entirely predictable to anyone who has been paying attention, which excludes most of the people currently surprised by it. You don’t get to treat allies like freeloaders for years and then expect them to sail their ships into a conflict zone on your timeline for your war that they didn’t ask for and don’t want. That’s not how alliances work. That’s not how anything works. The Europeans have their own threat environment to manage. Russia is still parked on the eastern edge of the continent. Defence budgets are being rebuilt from scratch. And the ask is to detach naval assets and send them to the Persian Gulf to provide cover for a military operation that Washington launched without consulting anyone, against a country that poses no direct threat to Europe, in service of objectives that shift depending on what mood Trump is in that morning. France just repatriated its gold. Germany has been quietly rearming. The message from Brussels to Washington has been consistent for months now, delivered in the polite diplomatic language that means exactly what you think it means. They’re not coming.

Let me explain something to the MAGA crowd, because clearly someone needs to. They seem to think NATO is cosmic room service. You pick up the phone, say “hello, we’re having a bit of a war here,” and thirty-one countries march to your rescue. A continental Uber for military adventures. That is not how it works. Article 5 is a mutual defense clause. The clue is in the word mutual. And it has been triggered exactly once in NATO’s entire history. After September 11. When America was attacked. Not Europe. America. Every NATO member showed up. They went to Afghanistan. They fought. They bled. They died. In America’s war. On America’s behalf. Now imagine they hadn’t. Over 1,100 allied soldiers died in Afghanistan. British, Canadian, German, Danish, Polish. And yes, even Ukrainian soldiers, who had no NATO obligation whatsoever. Gone. Without them, those are American names on those graves. Sons from Ohio. Fathers from Georgia. Kids from Nebraska who never came home. Then there is the money. NATO allies spent over 100 billion dollars on a war that started on American soil. Without that, Washington pays every cent. On top of the 2 to 3 trillion the war already cost. And without allied bases across Europe and Central Asia, American supply lines collapse entirely. Without British forces in Helmand and Canadians in Kandahar, the Taliban reconstitutes in three years instead of ten. The gaps get filled one way. More American deployments. More American coffins arriving at Dover. Afghanistan was bloody. But NATO took the hit. Without them, every single one of those casualties would have had an American name. Trump called allies like these losers. Suckers. If you are a certain kind of broken person, that probably makes sense to you. But for the rest of us, what those soldiers did has a different name. Honor. The bond between men who have been in the same dirt, under the same fire. Between Brits and Americans, Frenchmen and Norwegians, Canadians and Danes. Not a diplomatic relationship. A blood bond. Brotherhood forged in places most people will never see and cannot imagine. In that culture, you do not mock a fallen ally. You do not sneer at the dead. It is the lowest thing a human being can do. Trump did it to a standing ovation. If you are a MAGA supporter travelling to NATO countries, understand this. There are no friendly pats on the back waiting for you. No one will buy you a beer. The governments who share your worldview sit in Minsk, Moscow and Pyongyang. Brutal dictatorships where journalists disappear, elections are theatre and dissent is a medical condition treated in basements. Not London. Not Paris. Not Rome, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Berlin or Ottawa. You have abandoned the open societies, the free press, the rule of law, the places where people actually want to live. You traded the best of civilization for a very small, very dark room. Frankly, it serves you right.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

The “sensible” centrist mindset: Sunak meeting Meloni = Bad! Starmer meeting Meloni = “4D chess stuff. His best move since becoming PM.”

Am I the only one who's noticed that the cost of living crisis and foodbanks have been removed from the narrative since July?

Let’s just get one thing very clear. It is NOT Suella Braverman who has incited a counter protest, it is those who have desecrated war memorials, openly called for jihad, defended terrorist organisations, spewed hate speech toward Jewish people and anti-British sentiment that are the ones incited it. Don’t organise a protest on a weekend of national remembrance and cultural significance. It’s disrespectful and intolerant of the culture of the vast majority of British people in this country. You can keep poking a sleeping lion but don’t be surprised when it bites you.

Absolutely bonkers

WTF is this rubbish all about ?

I WANT YOUR HELP I've noticed a number of Tory MP & councillors removing mention of them being Tories from their social media profiles. I'd like to collate them and do some statistical work on this (you know I like numbers!) CAN YOU SCREENSHOT ANY YOU FIND AND POST HERE? 🙏🏼

Burgon trotting out the same old nonsense week after week...

Are ALL Americans really that dumb when it comes to all things British and Royal Family? Do they really think it's all Netflix and TV Movies ? I've never read so much ill informed crap online.

#TrafficUpdate at #PortofDover at 1504hrs. Freight is running freely, tourist is moving through French Border controls with an approximate 30 minutes wait time. A20 and A2 approach roads to the port are free flowing.