Anne Finnane 🇪🇺 🐝 🌳 woke

Former Consultant for EU projects; older person who voted remain; cares about environment, democracy; interested in alternative GDP to restrict growth

[Nahuel Lanzón @nahuelzn]

🇮🇷 Alireza Beiranvand, el arquero iraní que hoy fue figura ante Bélgica, tiene una historia increíble. De familia nómade, su padre, pastor, no quería que se dedique al fútbol. "Eso es un juego, no un trabajo". Siendo un adolescente, se tuvo que escapar a Teherán solo. Vivió en la calle varios años buscando club. Trabajaba de lo que podía.

Finalmente consiguió que un humilde club de la capital le de techo (dormía en el salón de rezo). Pero desde ese momento, con apenas 19 años, comenzó a brillar como arquero profesional. Fue pasando por los clubes mas importantes del país y luego dio el salto a Europa.

En 2018 le atajó un penal a Cristiano Ronaldo. Tiene el record guiness por el saque con los brazos con mayor recorrido en el fútbol. Ahora, en su tercer mundial, fue la gran figura ante Bélgica.

Con ustedes, un breve repaso de la historia del arquero mas importante de la historia de Irán.

[Millie Marconi @MillieMarconnni]

A Japanese immunologist spent 20 years proving that the chemicals trees release into the air walk into your bloodstream, hunt down your stress hormones, and arm your immune system in ways no therapist or pharmaceutical has ever matched, and most of the data has been sitting in Japanese medical journals for two decades waiting to be translated.

His name is Qing Li.

He is a clinical professor at Nippon Medical School in Tokyo and the president of the Japanese Society of Forest Medicine. The Japanese government has been funding his research since 2004, and the body of work he has produced is the reason forest bathing is now an officially prescribed clinical therapy in Japan and Korea.

The story actually starts in 1982, when the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries coined the term shinrin-yoku to describe the practice of slow, mindful walking in a forest. They did it for a practical reason.

Japan was urbanizing fast, stress-related illness was climbing, and the country had thousands of square kilometers of forest sitting unused. The idea was to give people a reason to walk into the trees... They had no idea what was actually happening to the human body during those walks until Qing Li ran the first proper experiment in 2005.

He took twelve healthy adult men on a three-day, two-night trip to a forest park. They walked for a few hours each day. Nothing strenuous. No prescribed routes or breathing exercises. They simply walked slowly through the trees, breathing the air, looking at the forest.

Li drew blood and urine samples before the trip, on the second day, on the third day, on day seven after returning home, and again on day thirty.

The numbers that came back from the lab were not what anyone expected.

The activity of a specific type of immune cell called the natural killer cell, which is the cell your body uses to hunt down cancer cells and virus-infected cells before they can spread, had jumped by roughly 50 percent during the forest trip. The actual number of natural killer cells circulating in the bloodstream had increased significantly.

Three different anti-cancer proteins that those cells produce, called perforin, granzymes, and granulysin, had all risen sharply. And the effect did not disappear when the men went home. The immune boost was still measurable on day seven and was still partially present on day thirty.

Two hours a day in a forest had upgraded the immune system for a full month.

Li ran the same experiment with women a year later and found nearly identical results. Then he ran it with a control group who took a three-day trip through an urban area with the same amount of walking, the same hotel quality, and the same diet.

The urban group showed no measurable change in natural killer cell activity at all. The forest was doing the work, not the vacation.

The mechanism turned out to be a class of airborne molecules called phytoncides. Trees produce these compounds to defend themselves against insects, bacteria, and fungi. Pine, cedar, oak, and cypress trees release them in particularly large amounts, especially in warmer weather and after rainfall.

When you walk through a forest, you are inhaling those molecules into your lungs and absorbing them through your skin, and once inside your body they appear to directly stimulate the production and activity of the very immune cells Li was measuring in his lab.

Roughly 50 percent of the health benefit of a forest walk, according to Li's data, comes from the chemistry of the air itself. The other half comes from what the forest is doing to your nervous system.

This is where it stops being only about the immune system and starts being about stress.

A separate Japanese research team measured cortisol, the body's main stress hormone, in 84 participants across 35 different forest sites. They drew samples before and after a 30-minute walk in each forest and compared them to control walks in matched urban environments. The cortisol levels of the people who walked in the forest were lower than the cortisol levels of the people who walked in the city by a significant margin. Their heart rates were lower. Their blood pressure was lower.

The activity of their parasympathetic nervous system, which is the part responsible for rest and recovery, had gone up. The activity of their sympathetic nervous system, which is the part that drives fight or flight, had gone down.

Then a researcher at the University of Michigan named MaryCarol Hunter ran the cleanest version of this experiment ever done. She recruited participants from a city and told them to take a nature pill three times a week for eight weeks.

They were free to choose the time, the place, and the duration of the nature experience, as long as it was outside, in daylight, and free of phones, conversations, and aerobic exercise. They sent her saliva samples before and after each session so she could measure cortisol changes accurately and rule out the normal daily drop in stress hormones that happens to everyone.

The result was that participants experienced a 21.3 percent drop in cortisol per hour spent in nature, with the biggest payoff happening between minutes 20 and 30 of the walk.

After that, the cortisol kept dropping, but more slowly. The threshold dose for measurable stress relief was just 20 minutes outside in something that looked and felt like nature.

What none of this means is that nature is a substitute for therapy or for medication when someone genuinely needs them. Therapy treats different things than a walk does, and Li himself has been careful in interviews to call forest bathing a complementary intervention rather than a replacement for clinical care.

But what the research has settled is that the human body has a physiological response to being among trees that operates on the same biological systems modern medicine is trying to reach with drugs and clinical protocols, and that response is fast, measurable, and free.

The strangest part of Li's work is the implication he keeps repeating in interviews. The average person now spends more than 90 percent of their life indoors. Their cortisol stays elevated. Their natural killer cells stay sluggish.

Their parasympathetic nervous system rarely gets a chance to take over. The system that was tuned by millions of years of life under a canopy of trees is being asked to run permanently inside a box made of drywall and screens.

Your body has not forgotten what it is supposed to do in a forest. It is waiting for you to walk into one.

[Jonathan Cook @Jonathan_K_Cook]

Palestine Action is in good company. British governments and courts criminalised resistance to slavery, the Chartist movement for universal male suffrage, any organising by trade unionists, and the Suffragette movement to win women the vote.

None of our rights were given to us by the ruling class. We had to fight for each of them tooth and nail.

The British establishment is always on the wrong side of history, because history is with the struggle of ordinary people, not with the selfish interests of the billionaires and war industries.

Those earlier struggles were deemed the terrorism of their day by the very same "liberals" – the British establishment and its useful idiots – who today declare any practical action to stop British complicity in Israel's genocide to be terrorism.

Note too as proof of bad faith: the British establishment is well advanced in its efforts to declare entirely peaceful protest – marches through the streets – as anti-social, hate crimes and soon enough terrorism too.

The ruling class consider attempts to stop a genocide, even holding a banner against the mass murder of children, to be far worse than racist pogroms in Belfast, which try to burn alive people in their homes because of the colour of their skin.

[Anne Finnane 🇪🇺 🐝 🌳 woke @AnneFinnane]

@PhilipProudfoot The ignorance and hubris of these judges is unbelievable. Surely they should know the history of the suffragettes? I am sure the state will now waste time and resources arresting people who want to express support for the Palestinian people.

[mustafa yazıcı @myzccc]

Hussam Ebu Safieh, "İsrail'in rehineler için ölüm cezası" ile öldürülecek olan Filistinli doktorlardan biridir (diğer 95 doktor arasında).

Onu öldürmelerine izin verme.
Bunu yeniden yayınlayın.

[Anne Finnane 🇪🇺 🐝 🌳 woke @AnneFinnane]

@japan_nobunaga @vella111 Such a lesson for the rest of the world. If we all picked up litter and shared responsibility, we would be in a better place.

[Anne Finnane 🇪🇺 🐝 🌳 woke @AnneFinnane]

https://t.co/WyZokXV9mI

[Anne Finnane 🇪🇺 🐝 🌳 woke @AnneFinnane]

Support a New Hunting Act to Finally End Fox Hunting - Sign the Petition! https://t.co/OaIohx9zTW via @UKChange

[Anne Finnane 🇪🇺 🐝 🌳 woke @AnneFinnane]

Musk is actively supporting the far right, encouraging rioters across the UK, most recently in Belfast. Musk is dangerous.

[Lewis Goodall @lewis_goodall]

Musk as a trillionaire- anyone as a trillionaire- is a grotesque economic, moral and political problem. We cannot have individuals with that level of power, whatever they might have achieved.

[Anne Finnane 🇪🇺 🐝 🌳 woke @AnneFinnane]

@Feargal_Sharkey @EthicalDavid Yes we should take water companies back into public ownership and not pay anything in compensation. However after decades of underinvestment it will take decades to reverse the sewage problems and cost a huge amount.

[Anne Finnane 🇪🇺 🐝 🌳 woke @AnneFinnane]

@SamaHoole Yes I absolutely remember car windscreens coated with dead flies. The crash in the insect population is probably irreversible. Humans may well be next.

[Anne Finnane 🇪🇺 🐝 🌳 woke @AnneFinnane]

🛑☠️ #News: 20 #palmoil workers incl. 5 children killed in church in #Rigores #Honduras. The workers killed by gunmen were in a land dispute with #RSPO palm oil co's. The #union demands justice!✊🏽🌴 #HumanRights #BoycottPalmOil @palmoildetect https://t.co/NqjFft1AcD

[Anne Finnane 🇪🇺 🐝 🌳 woke @AnneFinnane]

@Feargal_Sharkey @garywilson2013 @GMB_union We are all proud of you @Feargal_Sharkey and your fight against the water industry.

[Anne Finnane 🇪🇺 🐝 🌳 woke @AnneFinnane]

@michal288 The algorithm has been tweaked to ensure this fake video appears in everyone's timeline. Farage, the hero, takes on the Bank of England. Welcome to the lies and misdirections of political messaging.

[Anne Finnane 🇪🇺 🐝 🌳 woke @AnneFinnane]

https://t.co/RAYG0tnXcd

[Prem Sikka @premnsikka]

Foreign money funding Reform UK.

Another 7m from two overseas British crypto billionaires - £4m from Hong Kong-based billionaire, £3m from Thailand.

Tax exiles shaping UK politics. What have they been promised?

Must ban political donations.
https://t.co/UzYPsSxITL

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

The reason we think dandelions are weeds is because of a 1950s marketing campaign.

Dandelions, native to Europe and Asia, were brought to North America in the 1600s by European colonists who grew them deliberately.

Every part is edible. The leaves are a salad green, the flowers were made into wine, and the roots were roasted as a coffee substitute and used medicinally for liver and kidney conditions for thousands of years. They were a kitchen-garden staple well into the 1800s.

The shift happened after World War II, when 2,4-D (originally developed for chemical warfare research) was approved as a residential herbicide. Companies like Scotts built the modern lawn-care industry around the idea that a perfect green lawn meant zero broadleaf plants.

Dandelions, being bright yellow and resistant to mowing, became a visible enemy, and the campaign worked. By the 1970s, "dandelion-free" was synonymous with "well-kept."

They aren't native, but they aren't doing significant ecological harm either. The herbicides used to kill them, on the other hand, kill bees, contaminate groundwater, and have been linked to non-Hodgkin lymphoma in humans.

If you hate dandelions, it's most likely due to a marketing campaign that ran before you were born.

[Anne Finnane 🇪🇺 🐝 🌳 woke @AnneFinnane]

Why countries are tearing down hundreds of dams | CNN https://t.co/ifXx1cnukQ

[Anne Finnane 🇪🇺 🐝 🌳 woke @AnneFinnane]

@WriterHannahBT I have mini ponds made from old plastic washing up bowls..

[Anne Finnane 🇪🇺 🐝 🌳 woke @AnneFinnane]

@natalieben I believe it was Boris Johnson who absolutely insisted on having the fastest train in Europe. What we are left with is a very expensive train wreck.