Amanda Bishop

ME n my BOYS (& shoes)-I organised sports events @SBReventsUK: 2015-2024: 1yr Runstreak, SwimChannel(Pool), 70.3 tri x3, 100k/24hrs, 26.2 VMLM, 12in12 half mara

[The Touchline | 𝐓 @TouchlineX]

🚨 𝗕𝗥𝗘𝗔𝗞𝗜𝗡𝗚: The Belgian federation has released a new statement:

"After learning through media reports of FIFA’s decision to lift the automatic suspension of player Balogun, the RBFA sent a letter to FIFA requesting a copy of the decision, an explanation of the process that had been followed, and setting out its position regarding the applicable regulations."

"As its only response, FIFA sent a letter to the RBFA stating that it considered this correspondence to constitute an appeal, that a judge had been appointed, and that the RBFA had only a few hours to complete that appeal. No information whatsoever was provided by FIFA."

"All of this occurred while FIFA simultaneously refused to respond to the RBFA’s legitimate requests."

"Furthermore, during the match coordination meeting, FIFA deliberately removed the section concerning the automatic suspension of players from its presentation. This topic had nonetheless been part of all such meetings before each of the previous four matches. The RBFA questioned FIFA, both orally and in writing, about the reasons for this change, yet once again received no response."

"To be clear, as of this moment, the RBFA has still not received any decision or any explanation from FIFA regarding this matter. It therefore has no alternative but to challenge the player's eligibility for the upcoming match."

"Regardless of the sporting outcome of this match, the RBFA is deeply saddened by the course of events and will continue to fight in the coming hours, days and months in defence of the fundamental principles of ethics, fair competition, and the interests of football as a whole."

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

The president admits he doesn’t know what a red card means, calls the referee ‘suspect,’ and confirms he personally asked FIFA to overturn it because it hit ‘our best player.’ Corruption confessed on camera. A dysfunctional country hosting a tournament it doesn’t understand and can’t win without rigging. The US has nothing left to do in football

[Ben Maguire MP @BenMaguireMP]

🚨 I was DISGUSTED this week to see former South West Water boss Susan Davy given a £270,000 bonus after her COMPLETE record of failure. ❌

Meanwhile, my North Cornwall constituents lack even the most basic upgrades to sewage waste infrastructure.

[Geoffrey Lean @GeoffreyLean]

Madness. Putting solar panels over car parks, as is required in France, makes every kind of sense. It generates clean power, provides shade to the cars, and protects countryside from solar farms. But the Government has inexplicably rejected it.

https://t.co/TbfDeoV1UF

[Paul Powlesland @paulpowlesland]

Victory for common sense (for now, at least)…

It’s a relief that @EnvAgency have finally realised that prosecuting volunteers for cleaning & restoring a river (that they had left to rot) without permission was not a good look, so they have dropped their charges in favour of a ‘warning’. Thank you for all your support & encouragement, from across the country, the political spectrum & around the world. I’m certain that the comms disaster suffered by the EA over this was crucial in getting them to begin to see sense at last.

This is, however, not the end of the story. The River Roding & its tributaries, like most rivers in the UK have still been abandoned & in parts left to die by the Environment Agency, with no plans to even put a stop to the serious environmental crimes taking place (like illegal sewage dumping), let alone to begin the process of restoration that the river so desperately needs.

I am therefore seeking a meeting with the EA’s Chief Executive to ask (1) that the EA instead use its prosecuting powers for good, to demand a detailed plan from Thames Water to fix all illegal sewage discharges in years, not decades & (2) that the EA turns this whole saga into a good outcome by using the River Roding as a pilot scheme for how the EA can work with, rather than against, grassroots river guardians, to provide the protection & restoration our rivers so desperately need.

I hope they will accept these very reasonable requests. But if not, I will continue to defy the EA, & will not be seeking their permission or authorisation to continue to care for & restore the river I love.

[Morgan Barrett @MorganBarrettX]

Jeremy Clarkson’s Farm show on Amazon is the most radicalizing piece of mainstream media I’ve ever seen

Just one example (bear with me):

Badgers became a protected species in Britain 40+ years ago.

The population has exploded and now frequently transmits tuberculosis to cows

But farmers can’t cull the badger population to protect their cattle because the government still considers them to be endangered

Instead of addressing the root cause, the UK has the most batshit testing regime for cattle

There’s no TB vaccine. So the cattle have to get tested. The vets administering the test have to measure welts on the cows neck. Whether a cow lives or dies comes down to a vet trying to discern 1mm on a caliper (reactive vs non reactive).

If a cow tests positive, the farm (already running on super thin margins) is quarantined and starts hemorrhaging money.

Jeremy Clarkson’s cow (pregnant with twins) has an inconclusive test so it’s separated from the herd. It receives a second inconclusive test so they have to kill it (before it can give birth to the twins).

Now here’s the kicker: the autopsy reveals no sign of TB. It was a healthy cow needlessly killed

So - silver lining the farm should be removed from quarantine, right? WRONG - it’s still under quarantine and has to keep testing and can’t sell its beef

Kafkaesque doesn’t even begin to describe how f’d up it is for British farmers

[Paul Powlesland @paulpowlesland]

I’m sorry, this is total bollocks. I have been looking after my river for a decade and you have done absolutely nothing to support me and the other hundreds of volunteers who give up their free time to do your job for you and to stop the river we love from dying.

This picture is the part of the Aldersbrook that we haven’t yet restored. Do you agree that allowing one of the ancient rivers of London to disappear beneath a layer of sewage, silt, rubbish & knotweed is a disgrace? If so, when can we expect EA teams down in the river to sort it out?

[Kemi Badenoch @KemiBadenoch]

It is NOT ok to experiment on kids as young as 11 and make irreversible changes to their bodies.

We must protect children from dangerous ideology.

Conservatives will not just sit back and let this happen. I refuse to believe MPs, if given the chance, would let this continue. That is why we will force a vote, not just to pause this trial but to stop it completely.

[James Davis @jamesdavis6939]

One by one, sports are restoring fairness in their female categories. Sadly, there are holdouts, and parkrun is one of them.

It would make for great publicity if you did the right thing parkrun. Women and girls must have their own category at parkrun, with no males allowed.

[Claire Coutinho @ClaireCoutinho]

The Government have quietly announced that they will push ahead with their Puberty Blocker Trial.

Children as young as 11 will be given drugs that can lead to loss of fertility and bone density.

No child can consent to this. The trial must be stopped.

[Maxi @AllForProgress_]

On a stretch of the River Roding in Barking strewn with waste and detritus, a barrister named Paul Powlesland did something the British state has spent decades failing to do: he cleaned it and made it look like a river again. He now faces legal action.

Yep. He and a group of volunteers hired a digger for £1,000 of their own money and hauled more than 200 bags of filth out of the water - packaging, broken appliances, used needles, even weapons. By any sane reckoning it was a small act of public good, civic spirit at its most potent and wholesome.

For his trouble, he received a letter from the Environment Agency informing him that he is under investigation for working without a permit, an offence that carries up to two years in prison.

The same Environment Agency that found the will to come after a volunteer for cleaning a river without the right paperwork has not, on that same river, prosecuted a single one of the illegal sewage spills that have fouled it for years. Not one. It's too fat, scrofulous, and indolent to fight the sort of people who'd do this. But it has energy to spare for the man with the digger and the bin bags because they expect he's likely to be a reasonable sort of Englishman who pays his taxes and honours procedure, however unreasonable it may be, when levied upon him.

Protecting rivers? They have no interest in that.

This is the thing about our institutions that the public grasps in its bones and the people who run them never will. Our institutions fail, and the manner of their failing is the worst part of it - the bloodless, box-ticking, permission-withholding callousness of bodies that have forgotten they exist to achieve anything at all.

They should all be cleared out; every decision-making body in the building responsible for the dereliction of duty, and for daring to persecute a member of the public, must be hollowed out. The whole thing started from scratch.

Better yet, I'll tell you what an outfit like Progress will do once it gains power; we'll put people like @paulpowlesland in charge of the very body now threatening to jail him. The institutions meant to look after this country - the Environment Agency and a dozen like it - are dying of exactly the defensive, do-nothing culture that sent that letter. They need to be run by people like him who actually give a toss. People with the brains to understand the problem and the plain human instinct to go and fix it themselves, while the rest stand on the bank writing their little sociopathic missives to the ones who already did.

I don't know the first thing about Paul. I've never met him. I don't know what his political preferences are, the shape of his beliefs, what else we would agree or disagree on. None of that means a thing to me. He's a good man, and the right kind of man to make things work; and Progress is an attempt to make the country work, not a club made to serve a certain type or belief profile. A country is made to work by the people who, whatever their politics, cannot walk past a problem without trying to solve it. There are such people everywhere in Britain - on the rivers, in the schools, the wards, the workshops - and almost none of them are running anything, because the institutions have been built to keep that exact kind of person out.

Drop the case against him. Then go further: find the hundred other Paul Powleslands the country is currently ignoring or threatening, and give them the keys. Put the responsibility and the authority, together, in their hands. Britain will be cleaned up - its rivers, and a great deal besides - in no time. It will be done by the people willing to get in the water, not by the ones writing letters about permits from the bank.

[Julia Hartley-Brewer @JuliaHB1]

Appalling decision

[Nina Wysocka @realninawysocka]

Jeremy Clarkson says the government’s reported plan to impose a 9pm social media curfew on 16 and 17 yr olds makes no sense.

“You don’t trust them to be on social media after 9pm, yet you’re happy for them to vote. How does that work? Am I taking crazy pills?” Clarkson asked.

[World Cup 2026 @ofootball__]

After the game ended, Japanese fans stayed in the stadium to collect paper and waste.

Respect, Japan. 🇯🇵

[Cat @catdeans]

This is awful. The last ever Denby Pottery going to the kiln. Why is there not uproar? Where’s the government in this?? We all have Denby in our homes, in family heirlooms, as our history and now it’s closing through lack of support, such a sad sad day. #SaveDenby @denbypottery

[TheBossRoss 🇪🇺 🧶 ❄ 📷 6x💉 @BettinaSRoss1]

So what happens when Reform take over your local council?

This.

#KentCountyCouncil

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper.

Her name is Audrey van der Meer.

She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth.

The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time.

Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen.

Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task.

When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once.

The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected.

When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely.

Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG.

Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events.

The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem.

Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next.

Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve.

Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews.

Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad.

Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page.

A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched.

The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall.

The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down.

The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page.

That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it.

Two studies. Two countries. Same answer.

Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast.

Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth.

You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick.

The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew.

Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

[Maeve Halligan @MaeveHalligan]

"No, I don't subscribe to this 'kindness' - I'll tell the truth instead."

I spoke at the Cambridge Union last night about LGBs, children's safety and women's rights. Full video here:

[BSAT Properties @BSAT_Properties]

I was on a train in Tokyo. We stopped between stations. Announcement in Japanese, then in English: "We apologize for the delay. We will resume shortly."

The delay was maybe 3 minutes. Not a big deal.

When the train started moving again, another announcement: "We sincerely apologize for the delay. We were stopped for 3 minutes and 20 seconds. This is unacceptable. Thank you for your patience."

Three minutes and twenty seconds. They measured it exactly. And called it unacceptable.

When I got off at my stop, there were station staff on the platform bowing and handing out delay certificates.

I took one out of curiosity. It was an official document stating that the train had been delayed by 3 minutes and 20 seconds, signed and stamped.

The staff member said in English "for your employer. So they know the delay was not your fault."

I said I'm a tourist, I don't need it. He looked confused. "But the delay affected you. You deserve an apology."

Three minutes. They were treating a three-minute delay like a major incident.

Later I mentioned this to a Japanese friend. They said "oh yes, delay certificates are normal. Trains are supposed to be exactly on time. If they are late, they must apologize."

I said three minutes isn't late, it's nothing. My friend said "in Japan, three minutes is late. On time means on time. Not approximately on time."

They said the train company probably investigated why there was a 3-minute delay. "They will find the cause and fix it so it doesn't happen again."

I kept the certificate. It's framed in my apartment now. A reminder that somewhere in the world, people care about three minutes.

© 6IX.

[SOS Whitstable @SOSWhitstable]

If you can go to jail for fly tipping, why shouldn't prison be an option for a far greater and more permanent assault on the environment?

Water companies pollute because they operate without fear. Instill that fear and watch them change.