Rowena Vaughan

Straight-talking, practical advice and clever interior solutions. Fulham and Home Counties. BIID associate, and landscape artist

[EnglishNed @TheEnglishNed]

#ElonMusk a look at what has happened to the Westminister Bridge, Ellesmere Port that Tommy and Elon put on the map. The raise the Colors team are being targeted, please share! Link - https://t.co/E4w0JoYg60

[Ranty Man @RanTeeThree]

Imagine for a moment that the government introduced legislation that said you needed to produce ID for you to be allowed out of your house and explained that it was to protect children.

That's what Starmer is proposing for the Internet.

[Firas Modad @firasmodad]

Meaning that every single camera on your device is now a piece of spyware for the government.

Previously, it was just spyware for electronic intelligence services.

[Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ]

New. England school data. 2025-26 year.

% of children who don't speak English as their first language:

Leicester 56%
Slough 51%
Luton 50.3%
Manchester 44%
Birmingham 40%
Nottingham 39%
Blackburn 39%
Bradford 34%
Oldham 32%
Wolverhampton 31%
Derby 31%
Bolton 31%
Newcastle 28%
Stoke-on-Trent 26%
Walsall 25%
Middlesbrough 22%

I've deliberately left out London

[David Shaw @David90shaw]

🚨 Starmer is about to ban under 16s from social media. And the establishment is already pushing to extend it to under 18s.
They want you to believe this is about protecting children. It is not. To enforce an age limit on social media every single user in Britain will be forced to upload their passport to a government approved database just to prove they are allowed to speak online.
They are not building a child safety net. They are building a national ID database through the back door and using your children as the excuse to do it.
First they arrested people for tweets. Then they monitored legal posts. Now they want your passport before you are allowed to have an opinion. RT if you see exactly what they are building. 🇬🇧

[Peter Hitchens @ClarkeMicah]

When will it sink in? A sovereign country with nearly a thousand years of history is being abolished in a slow-motion revolution. I warned of this nearly 30 years ago, and all I got was mockery and patronising sneers.

[Bernie @Artemisfornow]

🚨WARNING the bit Starmer isnt telling you is... this sort of device technology is called Client-Side Scanning.

It is already built into the Ofcom regulated Online Safety Act through “accredited technology” notices. The EU has been pushing similar rules through its Child Sexual Abuse Regulation, known as “Chat Control”.

It basically means phone companies and platforms can be pushed to scan messages, images and content BEFORE you send them, then either allowing them to be sent or blocking/reporting them.

Once the precedent is set, "to protect children", it can easily be widened to block whatever government decides is “harmful”.

And that's how you go from child safety to state approved speech.

TA DAAAA 🚨

[Wings Over Scotland @WingsScotland]

Remember: that's NOT the purpose of this law. The purpose of this law is to make you and I verify our identities on social media.

[Tasting History @TastingHistory1]

Tomato Soup Cake from 1934

[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

[Double Down News @DoubleDownNews]

Palantir. IT'S WORSE Than You Think @carolecadwalla

[Emily Wilding Davison🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 @Wommando]

🇬🇧 I live in a country where depraved sickos caught with 1000s of the most horrific images and videos of babies and toddlers being r-ped walk free -

And a young man who threw a traffic cone that hit no one, is jailed for 3-5 years.

[Lozzy B 🇦🇺𝕏 @TruthFairy131]

Violent African Valdo Calocane stabbed to death Barnaby Webber & Grace O'Malley on 13 June 2023 in Nottingham, before killing Ian Coates & trying to kill three others.

The Nottingham Inquiry heard how murderer Calocane refused consent for toxicology samples while he was in custody after the attacks & only the victims were tested for drugs & alcohol.

On Wednesday, Grace's father said it was "disgusting" that the bodies of his daughter, her friend & fellow student Barnaby were tested for drugs & alcohol after they were killed while the actual murderer was not.

The Western world is in complete moral decay, we have Two tier Policing, antiwhite laws & a broken justice system.

Our cities are war zones & our people are being slaughtered on our streets.

Enough is enough.

[Handre @Handre]

Milton Friedman's greatest regret.

The federal government discovered the perfect crime in 1943: make employers collect taxes before workers ever see their paychecks. You think you earn $60,000 per year, but you actually earn $75,000 and hand over $15,000 to politicians without ever touching it. The psychological difference is enormous.

Before payroll withholding, Americans wrote quarterly checks directly to the Treasury. Picture yourself sitting at your kitchen table, writing a $3,750 check to the IRS every three months. The pain was immediate and visceral. Politicians faced constant pressure to justify every dollar because citizens felt the extraction in real time.

Withholding transforms this concrete loss into an abstract accounting entry. Your employer becomes an unpaid tax collector, and you never experience the actual cost of government. Worse, most people celebrate their tax refunds as government generosity rather than recognizing them as interest-free loans they provided to politicians. The Treasury collects your money throughout the year, spends it immediately, then returns your own cash and receives gratitude.

This system enables the explosion in government spending you witness today. Defense contractors billing $640 for toilet seats, agricultural subsidies for corn syrup, and congressional salaries for 535 people who rarely show up to work. When taxation feels painless, voters stop demanding accountability for how their money gets spent.

Milton Friedman helped design withholding as a wartime emergency measure and later called it his greatest regret. Free market economists recognized that the psychological pain of direct taxation creates political pressure for fiscal restraint. The temporary always becomes permanent in government hands, and the emergency justification disappears while the extraction mechanism remains forever.

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

In the 1990s, Canadian ecologist Suzanne Simard made a groundbreaking discovery that challenged everything we thought we knew about how forests work. While studying managed forests in British Columbia, she noticed something puzzling: when birch trees were removed to promote the growth of valuable Douglas firs, the firs did not flourish as expected, they actually struggled and grew more slowly.

Determined to understand why, Simard traced the movement of nutrients using radioactive carbon isotopes. What she found was astonishing. Trees were actively sharing resources through vast underground fungal networks known as mycorrhizae. These delicate, thread-like fungi connect the roots of different trees across the forest floor, forming a complex web that allows the exchange of carbon, water, nutrients, and even chemical signals, sometimes between entirely different species.

She discovered that older, larger trees often serve as central "hubs" or "mother trees," supporting younger saplings by redistributing vital resources and helping the entire ecosystem remain resilient. When these key trees are removed, the underground network weakens, and the health of the remaining forest declines.

Simard’s research overturned the traditional Darwinian view of forests as battlegrounds of ruthless competition. Instead, she revealed a far more sophisticated reality: forests operate as highly cooperative systems where trees communicate, support one another, and even warn neighboring trees about threats like drought, disease, or insect attacks.

What appears to the human eye as a silent, still forest is, in truth, a vibrant, interconnected living network, built not on isolation and rivalry, but on deep connection and mutual aid.

[HeCheated.org @hecheateddotorg]

What I desperately want people to know about Robert "Gabrielle" Ludwig was that he was not attending college when he decided to join this team.

He already had a well established career (his boss even paid for his cosmetic surgeries), was twice divorced, and had his own children

He signed up for meaningless online college credits just SO HE COULD PLAY BASKETBALL with this women's team.

He was in his 50s while the majority of his teammates were teenagers. This is a two-year community college.

He set two school records for rebounds at the time.

I'm still waiting for the case of the 50-year-old woman who the doctor describes as obese and who hasn't played basketball since high school setting records after joining the collegiate men's team.

[Peter Clack @PeterDClack]

A staggering 7 to 8 billion solar panels have been deployed globally—but up to 90% of them are currently on a direct trajectory toward disposal.

While modern solar panels are technically made of roughly 95% recyclable materials (glass, aluminum, copper, and silicon), recycling currently runs at a steep economic loss.

* The cost: Processing runs $500–$1,000 per tonne ($10 to $40 per panel).
* The yield: The value of recovered materials doesn't even cover the transport fees.

Compared with minimal landfill fees, economics dictate that burial is the default option. But the world is rapidly running out of room, and governments are beginning to panic.

We are already seeing a preview of this crisis in the wind sector, where an expected 43 million tonnes of turbine blade waste by 2050 has led several European nations—including Austria, Germany, Finland, and the Netherlands—to actively ban decommissioned blades from landfills.

Solar is hitting the same wall. Panels built over two decades ago are reaching the end of their 20-to-24-year lifespans, while many more become economically obsolete and are replaced long before that.

This has created a massive regulatory catch-22: To prevent heavy metals like lead and cadmium from potentially leaching into groundwater, jurisdictions like Victoria, Australia, have implemented strict bans on putting solar panels into landfills, classifying them as hazardous e-waste.

Yet, with recycling remaining economically non-viable, we are creating an impossible bottleneck. While industry bodies like the IEA maintain that leaching risks from broken panels are negligible and within safety limits, the sheer volume of impending waste tells a different story.

If it costs too much to recycle, and it is illegal to landfill, where do several billions of panels go?

The 'clean energy' solution is rapidly staring down the barrel of a multi-generational hazardous waste problem.

Image: Last year, the world built more new solar capacity than every other power source combined - Shutterstock.

[Dr Rahmeh Aladwan @doctor_rahmeh]

To make sure British citizens realise what's going on, Palantir can now:

• Build and run the National Firearms Registry, tracking the addresses and medical files of 500,000 gun and explosives holders across all 43 police forces.

• Map your digital footprint by trialling police systems (like Project Nectar) that pull your texts, call logs, emails, and social media data into a single profile.

• Track your physical movements by linking live number plate trackers, CCTV locations, and mobile phone tower pings.

• Process unverified intelligence by feeding anonymous tips and police notes about who you meet into automated linking models.

• Profile police officers using data-matching tools that actively scrape the device logs, vehicle uses, and system logins of a force's own employees.

• Access direct NHS data through a £330 million contract, using admin privileges that let engineers view patient environments before the files are scrambled (pseudonymised).

This is the same Palantir used to coordinate the largest simultaneous terrorist attack in history by the IOF in Lebanon.

This is the same Palantir used by the IOF since 2014 and actively being used in Gaza.

[Silkie Carlo @silkiecarlo]

Put simply, the Labour Government is introducing ID checks for the internet.

No one in a democracy should need to show their passport just to get online.