Mark Heng🇮🇪🇺🇸🇬🇧🎨🎸

Illustrator-caricaturist-painter-artist in Limerick, Ireland!

[Mark Heng🇮🇪🇺🇸🇬🇧🎨🎸 @MarkHengArtist]

@FrankOnTheRadio Hi Frank,Sky Portrait Show Dublin Heat-Thanks for speaking up for me, made my day! @MarkHengArtist

[Mark Heng🇮🇪🇺🇸🇬🇧🎨🎸 @MarkHengArtist]

@abigailJ_billy My daughter got scammed out of €500 for nonexistent Taylor Swift tickets. Kept her hoping with very convincing texts. Tricky bastards.

[Mark Heng🇮🇪🇺🇸🇬🇧🎨🎸 @MarkHengArtist]

@seanonolennon The ease of digital cut’n’paste in both music and movies has produced a lot of lazy output. Hey, why play the second chorus differently? Just cut’n’paste the first one and maybe add some tambourine loops!

[𝐍𝐢𝐨𝐡 𝐁𝐞𝐫𝐠 🇮🇷 ✡︎ @NiohBerg]

🔴 I normally never ask people to share my content, but this one is important, so please share:

I have just stumbled across a huge smuggler network on Tiktok. It's insane.

They openly post their phone numbers and advertise their "services" on the platform, getting thousands of likes and replies full of prospective illegal immigrants. This includes forged passports, so called safe routes into Europe, and food/drinks and rooms to sleep on the way.

It's a massive operation.

Smugglers film the men they're smuggling, ask them if they're "happy customers", and boast about the accommodation and food provided while they do their smuggling.

The migrants are mainly Afghan men, as are the smugglers. Many obtain fake Iranian passports, which is why many "Iranian" criminals in the West are actually Afghans with fake identities. They arrive in the West presenting themselves as Iranian, so that when many of them commit rape and murder, it gets falsely pinned on Iranians.

Once again, illegal immigration is a BOOMING BUSINESS on Tiktok, and nothing seems to be done to stop it.

They're so confident and secure in their operation that they're not only literally using Western social media to facilitate this - they post their own contact info and expect nothing to happen to them.

Tiktok and social media giants have a responsibility to shut this down. The invasion of the West is being advertised on Western platforms and apps.

It's MADNESS.

[Mark Heng🇮🇪🇺🇸🇬🇧🎨🎸 @MarkHengArtist]

@fabyollaverass https://t.co/Be5WVwLFds You're welcome.

[Mark Heng🇮🇪🇺🇸🇬🇧🎨🎸 @MarkHengArtist]

@paulpowlesland @clogdykewindmil @EnvAgency £2 BILLION????!!! Wow, they must SURELY have some AMAZING achievements to show for it...

[Sarah Ludford 🇬🇧 🇮🇪🇪🇺 🇺🇦 @SarahLudford]

“Perhaps most annoyingly, my application to restock eels on the Roding was rejected because reintroducing them would interfere with the EA’s monitoring of their continued decline.”
😩

[Mark Heng🇮🇪🇺🇸🇬🇧🎨🎸 @MarkHengArtist]

@Sargon_of_Akkad Hi Carl, slightly off topic, but could you please bring attention to @paulpowlesland who has been threatened by the Environment Agency with 2 years imprisonment for...cleaning up a river.

[Mark Heng🇮🇪🇺🇸🇬🇧🎨🎸 @MarkHengArtist]

@paulpowlesland @lotuseaters_com @lotuseatersnews @Sargon_of_Akkad

[Paul Powlesland @paulpowlesland]

Dear @EnvAgency.

In February this year, after 4 years of asking you to look after the Aldersbrook, I led a team of volunteers to do your job for you & clean out tonnes of silt & leaves, as well as hundreds of bags of rubbish. Through the effort of community volunteers & donations, & at zero cost to the taxpayer, we turned a forgotten silted up ditch back into a river again.

Last nights intense rain storm showed why our actions are the very definition of “strengthening water resilience”. A huge amount of rain fell in a short time, but the restored section of the Aldersbrook has been able to hold 100’s of thousands of litres more water, stopping this water running into the Roding, & thereby *reducing* local flood risk. The first photograph below is of the Aldersbrook after the rains this morning- a big contrast to the area before we did the work.

Perhaps more importantly, this water, instead of running straight off into the Roding & hence the sea is now being held in the Aldersbrook & gradually released so it can be used by nature. It is feeding marshes, trees & wildlife, topping up groundwater & helping to reduce our flood/drought cycle. If you want to strengthen water resilience, we need thousands more projects like the Aldersbrook around the country.

So the question I ask you, Environment Agency, is why you are threatening me with two years imprisonment, rather than offering to meet & discuss how we can work together to restore the Roding & its tributaries, which could become a blueprint for you cooperating with local river guardians nationwide?

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

In England, you're allowed to clear about 20 metres of silt and rubbish out of a river on your own. Anything past that needs a permit from the Environment Agency. Paul Powlesland's volunteers cleared a 250-metre stretch of the River Roding with a hired digger, which is why a barrister who hauled out 200 bags of trash is now under criminal investigation.

The Roding runs through east London. Powlesland lives on a boat moored on it, and for years he and a group of volunteers have pulled out shopping trolleys, needles, old appliances, even weapons. Kingfishers, herons and dragonflies came back to water that used to be buried under junk. This one job took 10 days and a digger that cost £1,000 to hire.

The rule that caught him is oddly specific. Under England's water rules, scooping silt off the bottom of a river the agency officially manages counts as a "flood risk activity", and the law treats that the same as building a structure in the water. Do it without a permit and the offence carries up to two years in prison. The agency says it is also looking at waste the volunteers left on the floodplain. Powlesland is an environmental lawyer who has used these exact laws to protect rivers and trees, and a conviction could cost him his licence to practise.

The agency's reasoning isn't unreasonable. Dredging done badly can push flooding onto people downstream and wreck the habitat that protected animals need, which is what the permit is meant to prevent. The 20-metre allowance is there for small jobs. And no decision to prosecute has actually been made.

While investigators were knocking on a volunteer's door within a week of his cleanup, water companies discharged raw sewage into England's rivers and seas for a combined 3.6 million hours in 2024, more than 400 years of spilling packed into a single year. Only 14% of English rivers are in good health. Between 2015 and 2025, the Environment Agency investigated water companies for pollution 11,474 times. Fifty-eight of those ended in a prosecution. For serious pollution over the last five years, the number of water companies actually taken to court and convicted is zero.

So the message comes out backwards. Spend ten days and a thousand pounds making a river cleaner and an officer turns up within the week. Pump sewage into that same river for years and the chance of seeing a courtroom is close to zero.

[Mark Heng🇮🇪🇺🇸🇬🇧🎨🎸 @MarkHengArtist]

@paulpowlesland @EnvAgency @Sargon_of_Akkad @lotuseaters_com @lotuseatersnews More government waste, incompetence, and malice. Please share @paulpowlesland 's story.

[Paul Powlesland @paulpowlesland]

“What’re you in for mate?”

“Cleaning a river without a permit. What about you?”

@EnvAgency is really plumbing new depths of malevolent uselessness here.

[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”.

[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?

[La China @ChinaNipona]

Disney nos vendió la misma animación durante años...

[Robbie @Robbie_Reasons]

The Somerset Farmhouse of 1 North Street, Williton were approached by a "food influencer" that wanted to charge them £2,000 for a review.

They put out a video of Sally eating a sausage roll instead 😆.

Lets make Sally and the Somerset Farmhouse famous for free.

[Melissa Chen @MsMelChen]

There was this girl in my middle school - let’s call her Bird Girl - who lived in her own world.

Every break, every lunch, every stolen moment between classes, she’d be glued to the window or draped halfway over the balcony railing, binoculars pressed to her face, making eerie, flawless bird calls toward the trees.

Mynahs answered her. Crows cawed back. One afternoon a hawk actually circled low over the basketball court while she let out this low, throaty whistle. The whole class went dead silent for a beat… then erupted in laughter.

We were brutal.

Kids shouted “Tweety!” down the hallway loud enough for everyone to hear. Teachers rolled their eyes and snapped at her to stop staring out the window and “focus.” She wasn’t into boys, lip gloss, or whatever trends we were all chasing. She was deep into ornithological facts. She was so weird.

In eighth grade, that was social suicide.

Looking back, it makes me cringe. Because I'm old enough now to recognize that how a society treats kids with weird interests and obsessions reveals a lot.

Would we shame the obsession out of her? Force her to shrink until she fit the mold? Or would we let her stay strange?

America, at its best, has usually chosen the third option. Not perfectly, not always. But enough for the weird ones to survive and eventually thrive.

The kid coding games instead of chasing parties. The teenager out in the garage building drones on weekends. The quiet girl collecting worms and soil samples outside.

Conformist cultures crush that spark early. They treat outliers like defects, but what they really are is the next breakthrough. Or perhaps the next startup. Maybe the next big star. The next moonshot that started with some kid getting roasted for talking to pigeons.

Weird is an asset.

It's great for Samuel that his classmates and now the internet are celebrating him.

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

The elegant geometry of this parallel piped layer cake

[Mark Heng🇮🇪🇺🇸🇬🇧🎨🎸 @MarkHengArtist]

Even the animals in Japan are polite.

[Nature Unedited @NatureUnedited]

At an aquarium in Japan, after closing time, some clever little otter pups help their grandpa tidy up their toys. As a reward, he gives them ice cubes