Hellina Handcart

Crazy cat lady, love animals, nature, gardening, history, interesting photos and politics. #FBPE #FBPPR Now also at @[email protected] on Mastodon.

[Hellina Handcart @KathGraham2]

Hi, if you’ve followed me and I’ve not yet followed you back please bear with me! I was stuck at the 5000 limit for ages but can now follow more so I’m working my way through everyone but it’s taking some time so thank you in advance for your patience.

[Paul Powlesland @paulpowlesland]

Illegal sewage outfalls are a major issue on the River Roding, as they are around much of the country. The EA has not brought any prosecutions for illegal sewage discharges on the Roding this century.

In 2022, I discovered an illegal sewage outfall on the Aldersbrook discharging raw shit into the river. I reported it to the EA, who did absolutely nothing. I then had to campaign in my spare time for 3 years to get the outfall fixed, attending meetings with the council & Thames Water & dealing with journalists. Eventually, the campaign worked & Thames Water spent £1 million fixing the outfall.

Subsequently, I realised that the EA had no idea where all the illegal sewage outfalls on the river were, or which were most harmful. I therefore went out on the river myself with a bucket, in a pair of waders to find & analyse all the illegal outfalls on the river. I found dozens of them, spilling over a billion litres of raw sewage illegally into the river every year. I have given the exact locations of all the illegal outfalls to the EA & they’ve done sweet FA. Raw sewage continues to pour into the river illegally & unchecked every minute of every day of the year, & parts of the river are now ecologically dead, as well as having e-coli levels more than 250 times the safe limit.

[Paul Powlesland @paulpowlesland]

Last year there was a huge oil spill on the Roding. I first discovered the slick drifting past my boat & spent a day tracing it upstream to a tributary, where it was pooling behind an EA sluice. I rang it in to the EA hotline as a serious & urgent incident, but a day later they had done nothing (I later found out they had gone to the site, couldn’t see the massive slick of oil & didn’t bother to call me).

With a massive rain storm threatening to wash the oil into the Roding, I decided to act. I fashioned a home made oil boom, got my wellies on & used a bucket to fill two 80 litre barrels with the thick engine oil.

When the EA teams attended a day later, they told me off for entering the river & removing the oil & they took away the boom I made (as it was a “flood risk” apparently), causing the remaining oil to wash into the river. They never found the source of the oil, brought any prosecution or put anything in place to stop it happening again. In all they made things worse through their actions.

[Paul Powlesland @paulpowlesland]

The EA has allowed invasive species like Himalayan Balsam to spread out of control, with no plan whatsoever to even contain this damaging plant, let alone eliminate it from our river. Every year that the plant is allowed to spread, the problem gets worse & harder to solve, with the rare marshes along the river now at seriously damaged & risking destruction.

Local volunteers have stepped up to act where they have failed, organising small groups on WhatsApp to take responsibility for different sections of the river & destroy as many of the plants as possible before they set seed. Over this last summer alone, there have been dozens of events, where volunteers have walked & waded along the river to laboriously remove these plants. The EA has offered us no support whatsoever in this massive & important task.

[Paul Powlesland @paulpowlesland]

The River Roding is one of the worst rubbish polluted rivers in the country. Not only does it flow through many large urban centres, but the action of the tides sucks up rubbish from across the Thames Estuary & drops it on the Roding. In some places, the rubbish is so thick it completely covered river channels like the Aldersbrook. The authorities have not removed rubbish from the river in decades. When I asked the EA if they could remove the rubbish, they said it was “too dangerous” & also forbid volunteers from doing it as well, meaning we had to trespass, climb fences & scale ladders to remove the rubbish ourselves.

Without any permission, funding or assistance from government, I have led volunteers out onto all parts of the lower river & together we have removed thousands of bags of rubbish. At least local councils helped us by taking the rubbish away, whereas the EA had done absolutely nothing, despite the fact most people would assume removing rubbish from rivers is one of its key duties.

[Paul Powlesland @paulpowlesland]

This is the worst “strong support” I’ve ever received.

However, the malevolent uselessness of @EnvAgency is not limited to the recent incident on the Aldersbrook. Over the last 10 years I have been battling, along with hundreds of dedicated local volunteers, to protect & restore the River Roding against all the odds. The Environment Agency has not lifted a finger to help in these actions & indeed has often been a blocker to our work on the river.

Here’s some examples of the “strong support” we’ve received from the Environment Agency over the years… 🧵

[Sir Norman of Nowhere. 🏴‍☠️ @Normanjam67]

The worst time of my life came when I became chronically ill and had to claim benefits for the first time in my life
I was left destitute twice by the DWP, and had to rely on Foodbanks to feed my family
I failed 2 work capability assessments, even though I was virtually bedbound

[Disability News Service @johnpringdns]

Proportion of claimants who succeed with PIP claim plunges by nearly a quarter since Labour’s election win
#PIP #Labour #DWP
@Hossylass
https://t.co/EOb0RnfyZp

[dominic dyer @domdyer70]

A £1 beach toy is costing seals their lives. Campaigners warn plastic flying rings are being lost and drifting into the sea. The founder of the Seal Research Trust Sue Sayer is now taking the fight to Westminster, calling for a UK-wide ban.
“They lead to slow, painful deaths - especially for young seals”

More here: https://t.co/b72eyr1aqw

[Paul Powlesland @paulpowlesland]

The Environment Agency should definitely be worried now. My Daily Mail status has been upgraded from yesterday’s “do-gooder” to today’s “well-meaning”.

[Linda @t7_linda]

I have an adult son with an intellectual disability. He recieves(d) services throgh the province. Access to a social worker, disability programs, a support worker.
Several months ago someone in disability servces closed his file and ended his access to services. The story from their end is he called and did this himself.
He's intellectually incapable of this task (hence the disability and high need for support)
To say trying to get his services reinstated has been frustrating would be an understatement.
Today I lost my shit. The rudeness and utter incompetence from a supervisor tasked with overseeing these vulnerable adult files blew my mind
I have a university degree and am director at a tech company and I can't budge these people to re-instate his services without going through a re-application process, re-assesment and lengthy wait
What is it like for persons with learning challenges and no advocate?
How many times are services just abrubptly ended and no one checks to see what happened to that vulnerable adult?
No one from disability supports has checked on my son or questioned this apparent decision of his to "end his services". They just cut him off, closed his file and make him fight to regain access.
Its appalling

[Paul Powlesland @paulpowlesland]

Good news! After decades of ignoring rampant environmental crime on the Roding, @EnvAgency has finally decided to act.

Bad news! It’s not against Thames Water for illegally dumping billions of litres of sewage in the Roding, or the waste criminals who have dumped thousands of tonnes of rubbish on its banks, but against myself & a small volunteer charity for… restoring a river without a permit!

Within a week of the magnificent work of River Roding Trust volunteers completing the arduous work of restoring 250 metres of the Aldersbrook this winter, EA investigators had been down to the site and rattled off a letter threatening us with prosecution for doing the work without a permit. This is despite the fact that the Trust have repeatedly asked the EA to do this vital work on the Aldersbrook themselves & they have refused. It is also despite the fact that they have not investigated the huge illegal sewage outlet on the Cranbrook a few hundred metres away, which illegally discharges 750,000,000 litres of raw sewage straight into the River Roding every year.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Your phone charger can electrocute a toddler who pokes a fork into the socket. The British plug cannot. That difference comes from a 1947 engineering project that refused every shortcut and turned a household plug into one of the most deliberately safe objects ever mass-produced.

Britain published BS 1363 in 1947, built for the post-war housing boom. The country was wiring millions of new homes at once and needed one standard that would work safely for everyone. They picked the most paranoid option available.

The earth pin (the large top prong) is longer than the other two. When you push a British plug in, the earth pin goes in first. Inside the socket, it presses a lever that opens two metal shutters covering the live and neutral slots. A fork pushed into an empty British socket hits only shutters. The shutters block it.

The two conducting pins are also coated in plastic for their lower half. A plug halfway out of the wall is still safe to touch. You would have to pull it completely clear before any live metal is exposed.

Inside every plug is its own fuse. UK homes wire their sockets in a loop called a ring circuit, which runs at 32 amps, enough to melt a lamp's cord if the cord fails. So each plug carries a fuse matched to the appliance: 3 amps for a lamp, 13 for a kettle. When something goes wrong in your appliance's wiring, only that plug's fuse blows.

The standard US plug (flat two-pin or three-pin) has none of the pin coating and no individual fuse. American building codes began requiring shuttered outlets in new construction in 2008, decades after Britain made shutters standard. Even those newer shuttered versions lack pin coating and plug-level fuses.

Britain's plug is bulky because a fuse, a shutter mechanism, insulated pins, and three contact prongs all need room. The plug looks the way it does because safety engineers refused to sacrifice any of those features to make it smaller, and that decision is now 79 years old.

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

For more than 20 years, Norwegian neuroscientist Audrey van der Meer has investigated how handwriting shapes the human brain.

In a landmark 2024 study published in Frontiers in Psychology, her team used high-density EEG caps to monitor brain activity in students while they either wrote by hand with a digital pen or typed on a keyboard.

The difference was dramatic. Handwriting produced a powerful, synchronized burst of neural activity across widespread regions of the brain, linking areas involved in memory formation, sensory processing, and deep learning. In contrast, typing the exact same content caused this rich cognitive network to largely shut down. Because typing uses repetitive, uniform keystrokes, it demands little spatial or cognitive effort, leaving key learning centers quiet and disengaged.

These neurological differences have a direct effect on how we process and remember information. Earlier research by Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer at Princeton University reached similar conclusions. Students who took notes by hand consistently outperformed those using laptops on conceptual understanding tests. Handwriting forces active listening, critical thinking, and real-time summarization, while typing often leads to verbatim transcription with minimal processing.

Our brains function as part of an embodied biological system. Replacing rich physical actions with effortless digital keystrokes may deliver short-term convenience, but it comes at the expense of deeper cognitive engagement.

The solution is simple and timeless: pick up a pen.

[Van der Meer, A. L. H., et al. (2024). Handwriting versus typing: A neurophysiological comparison of brain activity during learning. Frontiers in Psychology, 15. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1234567]

[𐌁𐌉Ᏽ 𐌕𐌉𐌌𐌉 @OrevaZSN]

I saw a post on Reddit that said that “The underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth.” And I don’t think I’ve ever seen AI described so incisively.

[Zoe Gardner @ZoeJardiniere]

So Derbyshire police is under criminal investigation for using AI to fabricate evidence in a case (unclear whether intentionally or not)😩

Can we please say AI HAS NO PLACE WHATSOEVER IN POLICING now once & for all & before things get MUCH worse?

[Dale Vince @DaleVince]

They say banning trail hunting will mean thousands of hounds have to die.
But they already kill them.

Our hidden camera footage shows hunt staff tossing the bodies of healthy dogs into skips like rubbish. Routinely. Casually.

Britain is a nation of animal lovers. These people aren't.

The government is consulting on a ban right now, but it closes on the 18th of June. Five minutes of your time could end this for good.

Have your say: https://t.co/Zvl4uWdNPQ

[@medicalmodelwithabriochebun @medicalmodelbri]

‼️‼️ BRITISH PUBLIC ‼️‼️

There’s a public consultation that you might not even be aware of which will impact YOU and your family .

The @gmcuk is working hard to destroy medicine and PAs are working hard to keep the ‘associate’ title

This is your opportunity to respond .

[Kathryn Porter @KathrynPorter26]

This really worries me

A month ago in Wales I suffered a ruptured aneurysm in my abdomen. I lost over 2 units of blood

But the Welsh ambulance service refused to send an ambulance. I was still breathing so apparently didn't need one

I spent 7 hours lying on the ground in a car park. Every time I moved I threw up from the pain. The owners of the car park called 999 6x

One of the people there was a fireman. He couldn't believe that 999 treated each call as a separate incident and couldn't see the details or link to previous calls. He was frustrated because they could see I was seriously ill but you can't see internal bleeding and so there was no way to persuade 999 that it actually was an emergency

Eventually my husband arrived by taxi, journey of more than 3 hours from our home

He gave me my pain meds (the car park people were worried about liability and I was too ill to get them myself). This meant I was able to crawl into the car and he drove me to A&E

He got me into a wheelchair. We waited 75 minutes to see a doctor. I was shivering, heaped with blankets and threw up all over the floor

As soon as a doctor looked at me I was taken straight to resus. The next day I was transfered by blue light ambulance to another hospital, had a blood transfusion and spent 5 days on the high dependency unit

If my husband hadn't been able to come and look after me I have no idea how I would have survived. As it was I nearly didn't

I would not have been able to get myself to hospital nor would I have been able to log into some digital triage system

This scheme seems to assume if you're seriously ill you'll arrive by ambulance and if not you're well enough to navigate a digital portal

My experience suggests that's a dangerous assumption

A week later, back home in England I had another ruptured aneurysm. This time an ambulance came in 2 hours and again I was taken straight to resus

It wasn't the same because I had a recent diagnosis of a ruptured aneurysm so we could tell 999 I was almost certainly bleeding internally. But I was too ill to get myself down the stairs and out to the car. We still needed that ambulance and I still wouldn't have been able to fiddle around with an ipad

Proper triage REQUIRES an actual doctor to look at the patient. It takes a matter of minutes to differentiate between a life threatening emergency and not a life threatening emergency. That's not minutes to get a diagnosis but to know that the person is stable or not stable and if not that needs immediate attention

Seriously ill people can't do it themselves. It doesn't matter how smart or articulate they are normally. Or how tough. Expecting people to manage their own emergency care isn't what a modern health service should do

https://t.co/RMi7L44fUy

[@medicalmodelwithabriochebun @medicalmodelbri]

3 GPs suspended from the @gmcuk register and their GP practice registration cancelled by @CareQualityComm due to serious patient safety concerns .

❌APs working out of scope

❌PAs not managing care or advising patients appropriately - not picked up by the GP

[Disability News Service @johnpringdns]

TW: Suicide
The death of David Panther is the latest tragedy to be linked with universal credit. Almost no-one appears to be paying attention to these deaths and the growing evidence of harm, particularly to those with mental distress
#UniversalCredit #DWP
https://t.co/Bpx3fPw40j