Abi Harrison 🌍🌻🤪🤯🏳️‍🌈

Abi Harrison — Artist & geek, she/her. Brand, design, content & UX. Digital Product Owner. Opinions about plenty of things.

[Abi Harrison 🌍🌻🤪🤯🏳️‍🌈 @abilovesyoumost]

@BBC6Music going off tonight! Paradise mix indeed 😍

[Jody McIntyre @jodymcintyre_]

A 1988 article describes how Jonathan Kestenbaum’s IDF battalion was charged with bringing a Palestinian town “to heel”.

“Electricity was cut off. Outsiders, especially journalists, were banned.”

Kestenbaum now sits as a Labour Party peer in the House of Lords.

[Jody McIntyre @jodymcintyre_]

In one anecdote, Labour peer Jonathan Kestenbaum remembers detaining a group of teenage Palestinians and then being asked by another Israeli military officer: “How many dogs have you brought?”

Kestenbaum writes: “Once the man opposite you is a dog, anything goes.”

[Ryan Grim @ryangrim]

This is genuinely insane.

[Rutger Bregman @rcbregman]

This sounds nice, but it's a great way to undermine the welfare state.

The strongest welfare states in the world (the Nordics) tax everyone, including nurses. And they give everyone universal healthcare, childcare, pensions, education in return.

When the middle class has skin in the game, they defend the system. When welfare is 'just for the poor', it becomes a poor program: stigmatized, underfunded, easy to gut.

That's why billionaires keep pushing this idea. The real scandal isn't that this nurse pays $12k.

It's that Jeff Bezos pays $0.

[Heidi Matthews @Heidi__Matthews]

Flotilla participants are arriving at Istanbul airport. This is what Israel military and prison personnel did to them.

[Power to the People ☭🕊 @ProudSocialist]

US billionaires keep spewing the same lie about how the US needs more data centers to “compete with China,” so I’m going to keep repeating the truth:

The US already has 5,381 data centers to China’s 449 and has more data centers than nearly every other country combined.

The US needs social housing, universal health care, and modern infrastructure to compete with China, not data centers.

That’s how China surpassed the US by investing in its people instead of wars, data centers, and oligarchs like the US.

[Saul Staniforth @SaulStaniforth]

Israel is spending more and more on propaganda but support for Israel around the world is declining. Why? "Because Israels PR spin is up against somethng it cannot control, what audiences can see with their own eyes"

[Sarah Wilkinson @swilkinsonbc]

The israelis are smashing safety cameras on the @gbsumudflotilla in European waters — they do NOT own Cyprus, NOR the Mediterranean

[sarah @sahouraxo]

This is Qana in South Lebanon today.

An ancient village with over 3,000 years of history — where Jesus performed the miracle of turning water into wine.

Israel is wiping it off the map.

Not a peep from the “civilized world.”

Not a word from the “international community.”

[Rushi @rushicrypto]

If capitalism is so great, why do corporations need so many tax breaks, subsidies, exemptions, grants, legal protections, bailouts, and trade protections?

When citizens need these things, why is it socialism?

[Mohamad Safa @mhdksafa]

This’s Cuba and there’s no electricity

The U.S is starving millions of people in Cuba. The U.S. is laying siege cruelly cut off all fuel, power is out, leaving hospitals without electricity. Dialysis patients, babies in NICU, and others will die. This’s a crime against humanity.

[Dr Rahmeh Aladwan @doctor_rahmeh]

Mossad booby‑trapped 21,000 communication devices with explosives, sent them to Lebanon through shell companies, and detonated them remotely — killing dozens (including children) and injuring over 3,400.

• The devices exploded in people's hands, on their faces, and in their pockets.

• They did it over two consecutive days.

• On day two, the explosives went off while Lebanese families were at the funerals of those killed the day before.

• The attack inflicted roughly 3,000 injuries in a single hour on the first day alone.

This terrorist attack was the largest simultaneous mass‑detonation in history by the number of individual bombs.

'israelis' joke about it to this day.

If you didn't boycott Apple for the Congo, boycott it now.

[Good Law Project @GoodLawProject]

NHS campaigner reveals how spy-tech giant Palantir tried to secretly hire influencers to smear Good Law Project.

Listen to The Shadow Contract now: https://t.co/YoCZoUP7E9

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper.

Her name is Audrey van der Meer.

She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth.

The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time.

Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen.

Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task.

When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once.

The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected.

When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely.

Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG.

Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events.

The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem.

Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next.

Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve.

Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews.

Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad.

Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page.

A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched.

The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall.

The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down.

The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page.

That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it.

Two studies. Two countries. Same answer.

Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast.

Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth.

You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick.

The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew.

Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

[Tom London @TomLondon6]

A large number of Jews in the UK and millions of Jews globally are furious and disgusted at the way the issue of antisemitism is weaponised by Israel and the Western Establishment

You never hear THESE Jews on @BBCNews ⁦@BBCr4today⁩

The BBC is complicit

[jamiemcintyre @jamiemcintyre21]

Can anyone explain to me why Israel and only Israel is able to order people from another country to evacuate their home? Anyone?

Israel has issued an evacuation order for Tyre, Lebanon, displacing 200,000 more people. Tyre is an ancient Phoenician city with Roman ruins and a hippodrome.

[𐌁𐌉Ᏽ 𐌕𐌉𐌌𐌉 @OrevaZSN]

We're in a weird era where a guy gets publicly shamed for running his sprinklers on a Tuesday, while a data center the size of a Costco quietly drains a reservoir so AI can generate a picture of your cat as a medieval knight. And the data center gets a tax incentive for it.

[Abi Harrison 🌍🌻🤪🤯🏳️‍🌈 @abilovesyoumost]

How many others in power? There’s a serious problem globally that’s just getting worse. Corrected the headline. So muge rage!

Former North Dakota State Senator Sentenced for going to Prague and paying to Rape Children 2011 - 2021. https://t.co/jnyIRjil9K

[Clare Hinchcliffe @Subversivite]

It's extraordinary that my daughter was acquitted on all charges after damaging drones in an Israeli-owned weapons factory, which she told the jury she was proud to do.

And now she has a lot to say... 1/6
https://t.co/PtKrvfBISj