AliD

A big fan of the truth

[Ricky Gervais @rickygervais]

This wasn't allowed in public incase it offended anyone. So please don't retweet it. Thanks 🙏https://t.co/1stbtsNZG1

[Matt Van Swol @mattvanswol]

🚨#BREAKING: Two boys on paddle-boards are being praised as heroes after heartwarming footage emerged of them RESCUING A DROWNING RACCOON during the Texas storms.

The two boys, Tucker and Owen saw the raccoon being sucked under by the current, scooped it out of the water, saving it's life.

The animal crawled underneath Tucker's legs, hiding from the rain and the storm.

They paddled him all the way to shore through the storm and let him go.

Absolutely awesome!!!!!! ❤️

[S★ @xxyllinn]

I don’t want to "download the app" to pay for parking. I don’t want to "create an account" to see a menu. I don’t want to "provide feedback" on a 30-second interaction. I just want to exist in the physical world without a digital leash.

[AliD @AliD65088336]

@griptmedia Sickening

[gript @griptmedia]

An FOI request has revealed that 116,000 animals were slaughtered in Ireland without being stunned, under exemptions provided for Halal and other forms of non-stun slaughtering of livestock.

https://t.co/fABs83PVpu

[Lucy Biggers @LLBiggers]

Climate doomer fact check!!!

[Julie Bindel @bindelj]

New laws in Afghanistan, introduced by the Taliban, mean that men can now marry girls at any age – there is no limit. Male relatives can arrange this with other men, and it’s only once the girls reach puberty that, in extremely limited circumstances, they can ask a court to dissolve the marriage. What’s happening in that country is horrific, and it begs the question why Amnesty are not putting all of their resources into tackling this latest child abuse atrocity.

[John McGuirk @john_mcguirk]

Over on Bluesky, where all the moderate sensible people went to flee extremism on X, our man in Sweden is angry at RTE for showing photos of beaches during the hot weather. Correspondents agree, saying that media should show photos of people in hospitals.

[Krisztina Maria @KrisztinaMaria]

TEXTBOOK EXAMPLE: WHY ISLAM AND WESTERN VALUES CANNOT COEXIST

A man calling himself Abu Khadijah has spent the past 24 hours in my comment sections.

His problem? That I postede a video from the sea on a hot summer day wearing bikini bottoms and a sports top (I was out exercising and always end the session with a swim in the ocean). He calls it “underwear”. And then he asks the question that reveals everything:

“Call up that man again, the one who ALLOWS his woman to show herself like that in public. A cuckold maybe?”

Read that again. Allows.

In his world a man owns his woman’s body. She needs permission to walk into the ocean. A man who does not control his wife’s clothing is not a man, he is a “cuckold”. And a woman who decides over her own body is indecent.

This is not an opinion. It is a system. It is exactly the mindset that forces millions of women into hijab, niqab and burka from Tehran to Kabul - and the western world.

Women are beaten, jailed and killed for less than a sports top. Do you remember Mahsa Amini? She died - where killed over a strand of hair.

And now men with that mindset sit in Europe lecturing Western women on decency. On our beaches. In our comment sections.

Notice the double standard. He lives in a part of the world built on freedom, equality and women’s right to decide over their own lives.

He enjoys all of it. But the values? Those he despises. Western women in bikinis (or less if they want) are “indecent”.

Western men who respect their wives’ freedom are “weak” and “simps”.

And here is the pattern I want you to see.

Every single time I criticize political Islam, the attack goes straight to my body and my looks. Never the argument. Always the body or other personal attacks. And right behind them come their useful helpers from the left, nodding along.

Why? Because I criticize Islam. Because I refuse to march in their Palestine demos. Because I will not applaud Middle Eastern regimes and dictatorships. That is my real crime in their eyes.

Think about that alliance for a second. Self-declared feminists (men and women) siding with men who believe a woman needs her husband’s permission to swim.

My husband and I have been together for 20 years. He is the strongest man I know. Precisely because he would never dream of “allowing” me anything. We are equals. That is what strong men are: secure enough to love a free woman who is committed to him and only him.

Men who need to control women to feel like men are not strong. They are afraid.

So no, Abu Khadijah and likeminded. I ask no one for permission. I am a free woman in a free civilization. And it will never be your value system’s civilization. Never. Read that again!

[Robin Monotti @robinmonotti]

Robert F. Kennedy Jr explains the Ukraine war in terms that are never seen in Western journalism, but why can't anyone else say this?

[Laura Perrins BL @LPerrins]

Simon Harris TD believes that Irish culture is exactly the same as Islamic culture in its treatment of women, that Irish men in general treat their female family members, friends and co-workers in the same manner as say the Taliban treat theirs. If this is what Simon Harris TD really believes, it’s a repulsive opinion and he should resign. If he doesn’t think this, I am happy to correct the record.
https://t.co/k3hhCTfc7p

[Ben Scallan 🇮🇪 @Ben_Scallan]

👇

[AliD @AliD65088336]

@griptmedia Ok, dont talk about race or ethnicity, let's discuss culture, ideology and religion in relation to violence against women.

[Diana Alastair💚🤍💜 ⚢ ❌❌✡️ @sappholives83]

This is MMA fighter Sean McInnes. When Anne Marie Boyle asked him to leave her alone, he punched her in the face so hard that he broke her cheekbone and her eye socket, knocked her unconscious, and left her with a life-altering brain injury.

He was given less than two years behind bars.

It would be a real shame if this post was widely circulated and impacted his career in a negative way.

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Derik M. was on the McMurdo Station in Antarctica as a US Coast Guard in 2017, when he spotted a family of penguins.

Suddenly, a piece of the ice broke and the clip turned out to be one of the most thrilling ever filmed.

[The Curious Tales @thecurioustales]

Most people look at an opal and see a pretty stone. What they're actually looking at is a frozen accident of time so improbable it borders on impossible.

Five million years for one centimeter. Read that again slowly. The opal sitting in a ring on someone's finger represents a span of geological patience that predates the entire human species. Modern humans have existed for roughly 300,000 years. The little gem catching light on a jeweler's velvet cushion has been quietly assembling itself for sixteen times longer than we've walked upright.

To understand why opals are so strange, you have to understand what they are at the molecular level, because they break a fundamental rule of what we call a "gemstone."

Diamonds, rubies, emeralds, sapphires. Every classic gem you can name is a crystal. Its atoms lock into a rigid, repeating lattice, the same geometric pattern extending in every direction. That ordered structure is exactly what gives crystals their hardness, their cleavage planes, their fire.

Opal refuses all of that. It has no crystal lattice. It's classified as a mineraloid, an amorphous solid, the same structural category as glass. At the microscopic level it's built from countless tiny spheres of silica, each one impossibly small, stacked together like cosmic billiard balls. And the magic, the entire reason opal does the thing it does, comes from how perfectly those spheres arrange themselves.

When the silica spheres are uniform in size and pack into an orderly three dimensional grid, light entering the stone gets diffracted. The gaps between the spheres act like a natural grating, splitting white light into its component colors and bouncing them back at the eye. The size of the spheres determines which colors appear. Smaller spheres throw blues and violets. Larger ones release the rare reds and oranges that make certain opals worth more than diamonds by weight.

This means the color in an opal is not pigment. There is no red dye, no green mineral, no blue compound. The stone is essentially colorless silica and water. Every flash of fire you see is pure structure, pure geometry, light itself being sorted by architecture too small to see. You are watching physics, not chemistry. The opal is a lens disguised as a jewel.

Now layer the water back into the picture.

That 6 to 10% water content is doing something almost no other gemstone does. It means opal is partly liquid history. The water trapped inside is ancient groundwater, sealed in during formation millions of years ago, fluid that touched a prehistoric world. And because that water is structurally part of the stone, opals can literally die. Take an opal from a humid environment to an extremely dry one and the water can escape over time. The stone crazes, cracks into a web of fractures, and the play of color fades forever. A diamond is functionally immortal. An opal can dehydrate and pass away like something that was once alive.

There is a poetry buried in the formation process that most people never consider. Opals form when silica rich water seeps into cracks, voids, and cavities in rock, then slowly evaporates and deposits its silica load, layer by microscopic layer, over those incomprehensible timescales. Which means an opal is a fossil of empty space. It's the cast of an absence, water patiently filling a wound in the earth and turning the scar into the most colorful substance the planet produces.

Some of the most spectacular opals on Earth take this even further. In parts of Australia, opal has replaced the bones of dinosaurs and the shells of ancient sea creatures, molecule by molecule, preserving the exact shape of a creature dead for a hundred million years but rendering it in rainbow fire. There exist opalized seashells, opalized teeth, opalized pinecones. Death and deep time and light, fused into a single object you could hold in your palm.

When you grasp all of this, the casual phrase "it's just a gemstone" collapses entirely. Each opal is a five million year exposure of liquid that touched a vanished world, an amorphous structure that bends light through pure architecture, a partially living thing that can crack and die if you treat it carelessly, and sometimes a tombstone for an animal that breathed before the first primate existed.

We mine these from the ground, polish them, and sell them in shops next to mass produced trinkets, rarely pausing to register that we're trading in compressed eternity.

The planet spent five million years per centimeter making something beautiful with no audience in mind.

We just got lucky enough to dig it up and notice.

[Bernie @Artemisfornow]

Right then … as Ross Clark points out, the claim that 2,700 people were killed by the heat is bollocks. (Technical term)

It was presented as an actual death toll. It wasn’t. It was a modelling exercise and er.… not actual mortality

UKHSA found NO excess mortality during the May heatwave.

And in the 2 published ONS weeks covering most of June’s heatwave, death registrations were actually 918 BELOW expected.

But the hysterical headlines pushed the narrative as if it was fact. As always, question everything.

[Steve Kirsch @stkirsch]

IMPORTANT. Please REPOST.

One HONEST country. One. In the WHOLE world.

[james fahey @jamesfahey15]

From Brenda Power the Irish Daily Mail. Spot on.

[Something Different with John and Sarah @JohnandSarahIrl]

"I'm sick of that shite" - @sarahcatryan loses it with her co-host in the aftermath of the Jamey Carney killing and asks: "How many women are our politicians willing to martyr?"

From this week's episode, online now: