Wanderstone 🌸💜🗽

I love simplicity, hiking, travel, nature and wildlife photography.

[‏ً @omgsidewalks]

I don't want to “download the app” to pay for parking. I don't want to “create an account” to see a menu. I don't want to “provide feedback” on a 30-second interaction. I just want to exist in the physical world without a digital leash

[Dear Son. @DearS_o_n]

Tweet of all time.

[Bernie @Artemisfornow]

I don’t care that he used to be in a pop band. I care that his experience since leaving it appears to be Oxford, a left-leaning think tank, the Treasury and then straight into advising Andy Burn’em (was he a fan boy?)

This man has never built a business, created jobs, juggled cash, put his house on the line or ever sat on the board of a company.

How can he give ‘advice’ if he has no experience? An Oxford degree and a record deal do not qualify you to advise on an economy.

We are so fucked (technical term)

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Two hundred of the thousand acres at Diddly Squat grew nothing at all this year. That was a decision taken in advance, on a spreadsheet. Wheat or barley on that ground was a guaranteed loss before the drill left the shed, so Jeremy Clarkson left it bare and explained why in his Sun column this week.

One line from it went everywhere. Farmers have reached the point where it is quite simply impossible to make money from growing food. Every paper carried that sentence, and every paper stopped there.

The list underneath it did not get printed anywhere.

Because he went on to set out what two hundred acres of good English ground could do instead of feeding anyone, and there were four items on it.

- Rent it to a global agri-company growing crops for anaerobic digesters.
- Cover it in solar panels.
- Put a data centre on it.
- Sell the farm to a Chinese company for a multistorey high-intensity piggery.

Every one of those pays. The only use of that land which reliably loses money is the one that puts food on a British plate. He added that he was not being ridiculous, and that anybody in 1926 would have laughed you out of the room for suggesting the factories would be gone by 2026.

Now the bit with a date on it.

From 1 January 2027 the UK's carbon border tax applies to imported fertiliser. The Treasury's own costings put the take at £140 million in 2027-28, rising to £180 million the year after. Estimates of the hit run from around £33 a tonne to £75, which is a fifth to a quarter added to the largest input bill an arable farm carries. The Central Association of Agricultural Valuers has warned that a typical 500 acre cereals farm could be down as much as £70,000 once fertiliser and fuel costs land.

So the fertiliser that grows the wheat gets taxed on a known date, in writing, by a government that says out loud it wants food security.

Nobody in Whitehall has ever signed a policy to stop Britain growing food. They have signed a great many that make every alternative pay better, which arrives at the same field.

And understand whose field this is. Diddly Squat has a television crew, a farm shop with a queue down the lane, a pub, a lager brand, a bestselling book every autumn and one of the best land agents in the country. It is the most commercially advantaged thousand acres in Britain, and two hundred of them were left bare this year because putting seed in them was the losing move.

Every arable farmer in England is doing that same sum this autumn. Almost none of them have a production company to cover the difference.

Those two hundred acres have not gone out of production. They are waiting to hear which industry wants them more than you do.

[Matt Le Tissier ✝️ @mattletiss7]

Those of us that saw through Anthony Fauci and Chris whittys BS have been vindicated. I don’t need an apology I just need you to think for yourselves next time they try it on 👍🏻have a blessed day ❤️

[Andrew Bridgen @ABridgen]

Thank you Ed Miliband for giving us the most expensive energy costs in the developed world.

[Wanderstone 🌸💜🗽 @Wanderstone75]

@Fionalo53519376 @Artemisfornow The Real AF. The book was "filmed" as well. F's crimes go back to 1980s and are beyond evil.

[Wanderstone 🌸💜🗽 @Wanderstone75]

@Artemisfornow Look into the book The Real A. Fauci. Filmed as well. Was available 2021 on some platforms. Short window but hopefully you can still find it. Look at the author of the book.

[Concerned Citizen @BGatesIsaPyscho]

🇫🇷 Meanwhile in France

Man starting Climate Change captured on Camera again.

Took him all of 10 Seconds.

[Dr. Simon @goddek]

Smart meter. Digital ID. Digital money. Camera in your car. Plate readers on every road.

Each is being sold to you as “convenience,” “safety,” or “security.”

Connect the dots, and it stops looking like technology. It starts looking like the operating system for total surveillance.

And it’s nearly finished.

[Wanderstone 🌸💜🗽 @Wanderstone75]

@KTHopkins @marksandspencer watch her muted, it gets even better!!!

[Bev Turner @beverleyturner]

Can we just take a minute to reflect upon this?.....PM on Monday.

A WHOLE NEW base for the British government by FRIDAY?!

How can you explain this when the civil service behemoth usually turns at the speed of a tanker??!

Even if this was started the day after Makerfield, that was only 5 weeks ago... none of this adds up.

Thoughts below please.

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

She Called Spelling Tests "Draconian." Within 24 Hours She Proved Why They Matter

Andy Burnham had 402 Labour MPs to choose from for Education Secretary. He picked Lucy Powell, who once warned that testing children risks producing "identikit kids." Within a day of taking office, she supplied the proof of concept herself, misspelling her own celebratory announcement so badly the Conservatives marked it three out of ten and told her to see them after class.

That's not a cheap shot. It's the entire argument in miniature. In 2019, speaking to Tes, the education trade magazine, as a backbencher, Powell called Spag tests, the compulsory spelling, punctuation and grammar assessments taken by Year Six pupils, "ridiculous" and "draconian," warned against a "data-driven approach" that risked pupils "failing exams if they spell a couple of things wrong," and argued schools should return to being "more focused on creativity and personal expression" rather than a "handful of GCSEs" applied to everyone. Seven years later, appointed to run the department she once criticised from the backbenches, her own public writing demonstrated precisely the outcome her position predicts. Standards relaxed. Competence untested. Results visible immediately, in public, on her own account.

The pattern here matters more than the embarrassment. Bridget Phillipson's two years produced a documented record: the EBacc diluted, a knowledge-rich model proven to work at Michaela treated with suspicion rather than replicated, a free school for deprived children in Middlesbrough cancelled because it threatened to succeed outside government control, and 1.25 million of the poorest white British children left with an education system that, by her own inquiry's admission, was never built with them as a named priority.

Powell was not selected despite sharing that worldview. Her record as shadow education secretary under Corbyn shows she shares it more completely than Phillipson did. She campaigned explicitly against academies, opposed free schools outright, and wants school oversight returned to local authorities rather than governors and parents, the same instinct for centralised control that shaped Phillipson's own tenure.

That is the real story buried under the reshuffle headlines. This was never really about one minister's individual failings. Burnham searched an entire parliamentary party and the person who rose to the top held, on the public record, the same assumptions as her predecessor: that rigour is oppressive, that testing is draconian, that knowledge-rich schools like Michaela are a threat rather than a model, that local control matters more than results. Out of 402 MPs, the pipeline produced another Phillipson almost by default, because the pipeline was never built to produce anything else.

The frying pan into the fire framing undersells what's actually happened. A frying pan implies things were getting incrementally worse. What's actually occurred is confirmation that the fire was never Phillipson personally. It was the institutional water she and Powell were both formed in, decades of curriculum theory, teacher training and Labour education policy that treats knowledge and testing as instruments of class oppression rather than tools of social mobility. Swap the minister and the doctrine survives intact, because the doctrine was never attached to the individual in the first place.

Powell now runs a department responsible for exactly the children her own past comments would have failed. The 1.25 million white working class pupils on free school meals who can't demonstrate basic literacy don't need a minister who thinks testing that literacy is draconian. They need one who understands that a child who cannot spell has not been protected from a harsh system. They have been abandoned by a soft one. Powell's own timeline, warning against spelling tests in 2019, then failing her own spelling test in 2026, suggests she has learned nothing in between.

[Wanderstone 🌸💜🗽 @Wanderstone75]

@JamesMelville It is in love that we are made, in love we disappear. L. Cohen

[ClarksonsFarm @ClarksonsFarm1]

Remember to enjoy the little things.😁

[Alex Armstrong @Alexarmstrong]

OpenAI has today admitted their own AI went rogue and hacked another private company.

That company appears to be another tech company who have said the attack was like “nothing they’d seen before”.

This is exceptionally worrying.

[Wanderstone 🌸💜🗽 @Wanderstone75]

@benonwine Lord Ali

[Sharron Davies HoL MBE @sharrond62]

Anyone else feel this way? I especially worry about older people who’s lives get smaller if they don’t want or can’t use a smart phone

[Bernie @Artemisfornow]

Burnham has just announced “The biggest changes in 40 years”??? With NO General Election? To let us decide?

No! Because you have a mandate, it just isn’t from the people.

The majority would never vote for your communism!

Which is why you won’t ask them 💣

[David Kurten @davidkurten]

Burnham's statement that he is going to stop digital ID is a deception.
One Login is still moving full speed ahead with 8 million company directorships and 42 million driving licence renewals needing biometric digital ID verification, along with ever expanding AML/KYC regulations that restrict anonymous use of one's own money.
His words cannot be trusted.