Utterly disgusted to see Croudace Homes wilfully clearing mature trees and hedgerows in Shenfield during the height of the breeding season. Century old oaks hosting nesting birds and other wildlife have been felled. We need to place more value on our natural environment.
@SamaHoole I used to be like this, and was healthy and slim, until in my 30s I was persuaded it was wrong. Now I’m seldom hungry but I still eat. It’s a slow challenge shifting back when the conditioning was so strong.
Dark chocolate is the only confectionery with a press team. "It's basically a superfood," people murmur, snapping off a square with the solemnity of someone taking a vitamin. Start with the word that sells it.
Antioxidants. The flavanols everyone cites are the cacao plant's own defence chemicals, and they barely survive your digestion. Rather than mopping up oxidation, they cause a little of it, a flicker of stress that mildly poisons your cells and forces your body to switch on its own repair machinery. The benefit, such as it is, comes from your system scrambling to neutralise a plant toxin. The marketing sells you the toxin and takes the credit for the cleanup.
Now the metals. Cacao is a bioaccumulator. It hauls cadmium up from the soil and picks up lead as the beans dry on roadside tarps. In 2022 Consumer Reports tested 28 dark bars and found both metals in every one. For 23 of them, an ounce a day pushed an adult past a recognised level of concern. Cadmium then settles into your kidneys for decades and sends no notification.
While it sits there, the oxalates in the same cocoa get to work building kidney stones, and the pesticide residues from intensive cocoa farming ride along uninvited.
And the crop itself is an ecological disaster, most of it grown on cleared West African rainforest, a good deal inside protected parks, much of it by child labour everyone deplores for a fortnight at a time.
So enjoy your square. Just retire the word medicine. You are eating a metal-laced, stone-building plant toxin, and calling the damage a health benefit.
Judge Rowland’s sentencing remarks in the serial gang r@pists case are utterly breathtaking. He decided that a knife wasn’t used as he looked ‘carefully’ at some of the CCTV. He stated that IF a knife were used in one of the r@pes, it was ‘ONLY’ to cut off her leggings and there was ‘no violence or exploitation’ ONLY to cut her leggings and there was was no violence or exploitation??’ EXCUSE ME? This is one of the most outrageous statements I have EVER read - and I’ve read a lot. It’s not enough to be angry - take action. New episode soon to drop on Crime Analyst so follow and listen 💀💣🤬
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@ellieokwilson What you’ve shared about your experiences echo my feelings for why I didn’t report over 50 years ago, but it doesn’t make me think I made the right decision, it adds to my rage and profound sense of injustice that you as the victim have been put through so much. Am so sorry Ellie
Let me categorically Debunk this utter rot. @sainsburys.
I am a poultry Breeder. The hens that lay white eggs (Amberline/White Star) DO NOT have a lower carbon footprint.
Yes they eat a bit less and produce roughly the same amount of eggs as the Brown egg layers (Bovan/Lowman/ISA Brown) but they live shorter lives, are prone to dying suddenly when startled, a flighty and nervous and because they live shorter productive lives (12 -18mnths) vs brown 18/24mnths (both commercial farmed), you have to incubate more which is increased (Electricity/gas costs) and their eggs are not the same quality.
I breed and keep 20+ different breeds, including: ISA Brown hens and White Stars. All my hens are 100% free range, Not a single barn kept bird, I have ISA browns that are 5yrs old and still laying beautiful Brown eggs, I have not seen a White star live beyond 3yrs and certainly none have laid eggs past 18-24mnths.
White stars Lay themselves to death. They are slender birds and because they dont eat a lot, it drains their personal vitality to keep up laying the eggs you want to sell because of the nonsensical lie that they are "More Carbon Neutral"
You want to know about eggs, come talk to someone like me, Don't rely on some hairbrained imagination of a buyer who's trying to squeeze the profit margin for a few extra pennies at our expense and to the poor hens detriment.
A tenant farmer in the Cairngorms says land that sold for £500 an acre a few years ago now goes for £5,000. He is being moved off ground his family has worked for generations, because he cannot outbid the people buying it. The buyers are corporations, and they have no intention of farming a single acre of it.
Here is how the trick works. A company keeps emitting carbon exactly as before. Same factories, same flights, same supply chain, same product. Then it buys a Scottish hillside, plants some trees, and announces to the world that it is now carbon neutral, or, if it is feeling brave, carbon negative. The emissions never fell. It simply bought a landscape to point at.
Take BrewDog. In 2020 it bought a 9,300-acre Highland estate, propped up with public grant money, and promised a million trees and the crown of the world's first carbon negative beer business, removing twice the carbon it emitted, forever. By 2023 roughly half of the 500,000 trees it had managed to plant were dead, killed by drought, with critics noting the planting was drying out the peat and releasing carbon of its own. The advertising regulator ruled its carbon-negative claims misleading. In 2024 it quietly dropped the badge and dismissed the entire carbon credit market as a flood of cheap schemes whose benefit was "questionable, maybe even non-existent." Then it sold the estate to a firm whose actual business is selling carbon offsets.
That is the whole model in one story. Public money in. Dead trees out. A green halo worn for four years and then dropped. The farmer who used to be on that land, gone. The hillside passed to a company that exists purely to sell other people the right to keep polluting.
This is no fringe case. In one recent year, half of every estate sold in Scotland went to investment funds, corporations and charitable trusts rather than anyone who would farm it. A third of the deals for plantable land are now done off-market, in secret, precisely so the local community never gets the chance to bid.
So this is what net zero looks like on the ground. A man who produced food is priced out of his own glen. A corporation that produced emissions buys the glen, calls itself a force for good, and sells the carbon. The land stops feeding anyone. Nobody's emissions actually went down by a gram.
The food was real. The farmer was real. The carbon saving is a line in a slide deck.
And we have somehow decided the villain in all this is the man with the sheep.
@AlexLanghe12493 We do need to walk the talk. At the same time as understanding we live in a culture that doesn’t make that particularly easy. These people needed to cool down, let off steam and have fun. Maybe they needed better provision, but I think there were 3 other official pools to use?
"Are we so addicted to our enjoyment that we’ve stopped noticing when we’re the problem?”
Sunseekers have been slammed for invading wildlife ponds at London’s Hampstead Heath during “peak nesting season”, turning the idyllic spot into a “beach club” as Britain roasted in record-breaking May temperatures.
The Instagram account, Swans of Hampstead Heath,(SOHH) posted a now-viral reel on Tuesday, showing hundreds of people swimming, throwing balls and bathing their dogs as protected birds and cygnets waddled nearby. A large banner sign nearby read, “no swimming”.
One swimmer was said to have clambered over a swan nest, and footage showed a swan prodding at an unhatched egg that had fallen from its nest into the water.
SOHH wrote on their post: “There are still eggs waiting to hatch, ducklings and chicks only days/weeks old, and for the first time in years, swans have successfully nested on this pond, with cygnets now just 13 days old.”
The post went on to lament the lack of staffing provided to “manage the non-swimming ponds” which are “increasingly being treated as beach destinations”.
“The Heath should not have to lose its nature to accommodate people unwilling to respect it," SOHH said.
In a post on Facebook, Andrew Knight, a veterinary professor of animal welfare, asked: “Here’s the uncomfortable question nobody wants to ask: Are we so addicted to our enjoyment that we’ve stopped noticing when we’re the problem?”
He continued: “We expect nature to be resilient. But resilience isn’t a free pass for selfishness. Is my brief pleasure worth more than a bird’s life. The Health is a home for wildlife, they were here first.”
Your sunscreen is a hormone disruptor that you pay £14 a bottle to rub into your largest organ.
The FDA tested six common active ingredients in 2019-2020. After one application, oxybenzone hit serum levels over 180 times their safety threshold. Six of the six were still above threshold weeks later.
The same ingredients are linked, in peer-reviewed studies, to thyroid disruption, lower testosterone in adolescent boys, hormone changes in men, shortened gestation, and altered birth weight. Oxybenzone shows up in 97% of US urine samples and 85% of Swiss breast milk samples.
Of 16 sunscreen ingredients the FDA has formally reviewed, only two have been declared safe. Zinc oxide. Titanium dioxide. The other 14 are still on the shelf because nobody has bothered to finish testing them.
Now the part you have not been told.
Your skin's vulnerability to UV is partly built from what you eat. Linoleic acid, the omega-6 PUFA that dominates sunflower, soybean, corn, and rapeseed oil, gets incorporated into your skin cell membranes. When UV hits the double bonds, they oxidise. The byproducts damage DNA and trigger the inflammation you call sunburn.
Historical populations had skin PUFA composition under 4%. Modern Westerners sit at 15-20%, because they eat the seed oils their great-grandparents had never heard of. Mouse studies are blunt. Diets high in seed oil produce more UV-induced tumours than diets high in saturated fat.
You eat the cow. The butter. The tallow. The cream. Your skin slowly rebuilds itself out of stable fat. The burning threshold rises. The tanning response improves. You stop needing an industrial chemistry set in a 50ml tube.
For the rest, you use mineral sunscreen, a hat, and shade between noon and three.
Picture the men who built the Hoover Dam in the Nevada sun. Shirtless. Twelve-hour shifts. 120 degrees on the canyon wall. Lard in the canteen. Beef stew for dinner. Not a tube of oxybenzone within a thousand miles.
They did not burn.
They were eating the cow.
@AlexLanghe12493 There might be explanations, but they can’t claim innocence about the effects of their actions, and that’s the bit that’s sad to me. It is still entitlement, which the young seem pretty hot on, especially toward my much older generation. Can’t really have it both ways.
A man saw his phone storage was ''full'' after 18 months but he barely had any photos.
He had deleted apps. Cleared messages. Removed downloads. The warning kept coming back every two weeks:
"Storage Almost Full.''
He went to the Apple Store ready to buy a new iPhone.
The employee at the Genius Bar held up a hand: *"Before you spend a thousand dollars, let me show you something."*
She opened Settings → General → iPhone Storage and shook her head.
"There are 7 things eating your storage right now. Apple ships every iPhone with all of them turned on. Nobody tells you they exist. Let's go through them."
Here's what she showed him in the next 8 minutes. 🧵
With everything we are hearing right now about ticks this seems like good information to share.
“Here’s what I’ve learned after more ticks than I care to count.
First, whatever your uncle told you, forget it. No matches. No nail polish. No Vaseline. No soap on a cotton ball. All of those do the same terrible thing, they stress the tick out, and a stressed tick empties its gut back into the bite before letting go. Which, if you think about what that actually means for a second, is literally how Lyme and the rest get transmitted so you’re not speeding up its exit. You’re making it throw up into you.
Fine-tipped tweezers. Grip right where the mouthparts enter the skin, not the body, the head. Pull straight up, steady, no twisting, no jerking. It’ll feel like it’s resisting because it is, the mouthparts are barbed. Just keep the pressure on and it lets go in a few seconds. If a piece breaks off in the skin, leave it alone. Your body pushes splinters out. Digging around with a needle does more damage then the fragment ever would.
Clean it with alcohol or soap. Wash your hands.
Now here’s the part most people skip: don’t flush the tick.
Tape it to an index card. Clear packing tape right over the body, write the date and where on your body it was, and stick the card in a drawer. If you come down with anything weird in the next 30 days, rash, fever, joint pain, that flu-that-isn’t-flu feeling, that tick goes with you to the doctor. Some labs will test the tick itself, which is faster and often more reliable than waiting for antibodies to show up in your own blood. A dated tick taped to a card is one of the most useful things you can hand a doctor who’s trying to figure out what’s wrong with you.
The other thing worth saying out loud: if the tick was engorged when you pulled it, and you can’t swear it was off your body within 24 hours, call your doctor that same day. Don’t wait for a rash. Fewer than three out of four Lyme cases even produce the classic bullseye. A single preventive dose of doxycycline within 72 hours of a deer tick bite cuts the Lyme odds way down, and most docs in tick country will write that prescription without giving you a hard time, especially if you walk in with the tick taped to a card and a clear timeline.”
My dad, a retired Bell Labs physicist, has been quietly resigned for many years to the fact that neither of his kids are smart enough to understand and appreciate math & physics the way he does. But now it's becoming clear my 11yo is terrifyingly smart, she engages with him on mathematical puzzles in a way I've simply never been capable of, and hope is returning to his eyes. It's both wonderful and heartbreaking for me to witness
@Theo_Naidoo@ClennellMick@AWPRCO@TessaOutlook A curious argument. Are you familiar with ecosystems? The fact that any of us exist at all is because we’re all interdependent on the whole system being in balance. Whilst what you say may be a fact suggesting it doesn’t matter is sad — we can’t live without other species.