Jenny 🦖🪐🐡

Amateur Astrophotographer 🦖Gardener, DIver, Mum currently employed in Household Management but not very good at it.

[Chris Rose @ArchRose90]

A Bulgarian man has now been found guilty of assaulting a 12-year-old Scottish girl.

@HumzaYousaf when can we expect your apology?

[Nick Wallis @nickwallis]

Sharing this in the partial hope that the BBC has turned a corner and might be willing to employ me going forward despite me making this point. Tbf no other org would, and I still love it:

"This is the BBC just lying to everyone"

https://t.co/hE7GMEfvpW

[Jenny 🦖🪐🐡 @jmfdiver]

@RobertJenrick I think there is a case for bringing back capital punishment

[The British Patriot @TheBritLad]

🚨BREAKING: Reform UK has JUST banned Pride & LGBTQ+ promotions from Essex libraries.

They say they are putting books & learning FIRST, not woke indoctrination.

This is a win for common sense.

[Suffragent @Suffragent_]

Shabana Mahmood has CONDEMNED the Henry Nowak protests in Southampton, saying those responsible will be arrested.

Meanwhile, here she is on a pro-Palestine protest which turned violent and forced a supermarket to close.

She has since deleted this video. Please don't RT it.

[Suella Braverman @SuellaBraverman]

Several serving and former Hampshire Police Officers have told me that ‘we had it drummed into us about our white privilege and unconscious bias’.

Training was outsourced to a third party company and the trainer ‘was deeply hateful of white people and our culture.’

Officers have reported to me about being furious but unable to complain out of fear for their jobs.

This is exactly why I blocked the Race Action Plan as Home Secretary.

It is disgraceful that this stuff went on in policing. And the PCC and CC need to be held to account.

[Jenny 🦖🪐🐡 @jmfdiver]

@aimkeyx It’s simple, you don’t like it don’t play it. Those of us that like it, and we are not all on pc, will continue. Move on

[Andy Coates @AndyWoodturner]

Call from: 07418 366 175
"Can I speak to Andy, please?"
Who is this?
"I'm Sam from the British Medical Association."
No you're not.
"Yes I am."
No you're not.
"Yes I am."
You're really not. Go away. Blocking your number...
End call and block number...

[Jenny 🦖🪐🐡 @jmfdiver]

@ShabanaMahmood You are still not listening

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

Farmers have figured out that the cheapest pesticide is a strip of flowers.

When you plant wildflowers through a crop field, not just around the edge but in strips running through the middle, you get ladybugs, lacewings, hoverflies, and parasitic wasps living in the field instead of visiting it.

They eat the aphids, the caterpillars, and the mites for free, all summer long.

In controlled trials, fields with tailored flower strips had leaf-beetle numbers 40 to 50% lower and crop damage cut by around 60%, enough to drop below the threshold where spraying was even considered worth it.

The flowers attract a standing army to our fields.

We spent decades engineering chemicals to kill the insects eating the crop, when the insects that eat those insects would have worked for the price of seed.

[Caro Betts @BettsCaro]

@jk_rowling Do women exist?

UK Labour: That’s debatable

I’m not confident that’ll go down well in Wigan 🙄

[Sall Grover @salltweets]

Yep.

[Sall Grover @salltweets]

I am absolutely devastated
Men who claim to be women have more rights than actual women in Australia.
It is women who are being discriminated against, not the men who claim to be us.

But in a sense, nothing has changed: we will all wake up tomorrow & men will still not be women.

[Sharron Davies HoL MBE @sharrond62]

When people show you who they are believe them.. not paid his council tax, not a fully registered hypnotherapist, suggested he could magically grow women’s breasts, not a Red Cross spokesperson, failed to work for MOT (acted a part) & we’re probably only just getting started!

[Aleix Roig @astrocatinfo]

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗛𝗼𝗿𝘀𝗲𝗵𝗲𝗮𝗱 𝗻𝗲𝗯𝘂𝗹𝗮 𝟮𝗵𝟰𝟱’ 𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿 𝗮 𝟴𝟱% 𝗠𝗢𝗢𝗡 🌔

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

A short history of the great British improvement.

They came for beef dripping. We got margarine, then seed oils, then a cardiac ward in every hospital.

They came for butter. They told your grandmother it would kill her husband. The replacement was a tub of palm oil emulsified with rapeseed and a yellow dye, and her husband died of a heart attack in 1989 anyway.

They came for full-fat milk. We got skimmed milk, a vitamin D deficiency epidemic in children, and a cereal aisle fortified to plug the gap.

They came for mutton, the meat that fed every shepherd, miner, and mill worker for six hundred years. We got a chicken breast injected with water and a turkey twizzler.

They came for the kipper. We got a Findus boil-in-the-bag, dyed orange, and a fish oil capsule sold at the chemist to make up for the omega-3 nobody is eating.

They came for wool. We got polyester fleece, and microplastics in human placentas. Every one tested. Sixty-two out of sixty-two.

They came for leather. We got synthetic shoes that delaminate in eighteen months, and a high street with no cobbler.

They came for the cotton nappy. We got the disposable, and a landfill that will outlast the child wearing it.

They came for the cast iron pan handed down three generations. We got Teflon, and a forever chemical now found in 98% of British rivers.

They came for the wooden bowl your grandmother kneaded dough in. We got Tupperware, then BPA, then "BPA-free" plastic containing compounds we have not yet bothered to measure.

Now they are coming for the cow herself. The replacement is a textured pea isolate, extruded in a factory in the American Midwest, packaged in plastic, and marketed as the ethical option by a company called Cargill, who happen to be the third-largest meat processor in the United States.

Every traditional material we have been told to give up was working perfectly, for free, for centuries. Every industrial replacement has been worse for the body, worse for the land, and considerably better for the shareholders of the company that sold it.

The pattern is not subtle, and the people running it are not embarrassed.

Your great-grandmother is no longer here to call it.

You are.

[Jenny 🦖🪐🐡 @jmfdiver]

@Keir_Starmer You are still not listening to the people of this country like the idiots before you.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

A sit-down with Keith.

Q: Keith, how would you describe your role on the farm?

Keith: [chews]

Q: Some have called you destructive. How do you respond to that?

Keith: [chews bramble]

Q: There is a campaign in some quarters to reduce British livestock numbers by 50% by 2030. Have you considered the implications for goats specifically?

Keith: [looks at the gate]

Q: Several of your peers in the broader livestock community have argued that the methane critique misrepresents biogenic carbon cycles. Do you agree?

Keith: [ate the corner of the notebook]

Q: ...Right. Could you comment on the role of small-scale goat farming in maintaining British scrub-pasture mosaic ecosystems?

Keith: [escaped]

The interview ended at 11.42am.

Keith was located at 2pm, three fields away, in the corner of a neighbour's paddock, eating a thistle.

Asked again, on his return, to comment on the methane critique, Keith produced manure.

This was taken as the official position.

The official position has, on review, more empirical support than most of the policy documents currently in circulation.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Let's check in on Beatrice.

Beatrice is a four-year-old Light Sussex hen in the back garden of a retired widower in a Yorkshire village. She arrived three years ago with three other hens, brought by his daughter to "give him something to look after." It worked. He talks to them. He pretends, to himself, that he doesn't.

Beatrice has been busy this morning.

5.42am. Beatrice exits the coop first. She is always first. The other three hens, by long arrangement, wait. The arrangement was not agreed in writing. The arrangement is, by every working measure, in force.

5.51am. Beatrice locates a slug on the lower lavender. She eats the slug. The label on a supermarket egg box would describe Beatrice as "vegetarian-fed." Beatrice has not read the label. The slug, by 5.52am, is no longer the slug.

6.18am. Beatrice eats a worm turned up by the man's spade in the vegetable bed. The man is digging the bed because Beatrice has, by long observation, taught him that digging the bed at 6.15am produces worms, which produces hens nearby, which produces a small social arrangement that the man has come to look forward to.

7.04am. Beatrice eats a beetle. She eats it with the considered focus of a hen who knows that beetle protein is, by every measure, the highest-quality protein available to her, and that the beetles do not, on the whole, last long once identified.

8.30am. Beatrice lays an egg. The egg weighs 64 grams. It contains, by every available analysis: a complete amino acid profile, choline, lutein, zeaxanthin, B12, vitamin D, vitamin A, selenium, iodine, and cholesterol of the kind that the human body, contrary to forty years of dietary advice, regulates by itself. The egg is, by every honest nutritional measure, one of the most complete single foods on earth. The man eats it for breakfast at 8.45am.

10.00am. Beatrice eats the man's vegetable peelings. Carrot tops. Cabbage stalk. The end of a leek. A small piece of stale bread. This is, in industrial poultry terms, an unauthorised diet. In actual hen terms, it is the diet hens evolved on for several thousand years before anyone thought to feed them only one thing.

11.30am. Beatrice kills a rat. It is the second rat she has killed this year. She does not eat the rat (rats are too large) but she does, with great commitment, prevent it from getting near the feed. Beatrice is, by quiet local agreement, the most effective pest-control system in the village.

1.15pm. Beatrice naps in a dust bath of her own construction. The dust bath has been positioned, by Beatrice, in the precise spot in the garden that gets afternoon sun for the longest. She did not ask the man's permission. She did not need to.

3.40pm. The man, in the kitchen, calls her name.

Beatrice comes.

She does not come for the daughter. She does not come for the postman. She comes for the man.

Things Beatrice has, in one ordinary day, debunked:

That hens are vegetarian. They are not. They are obligate omnivores, and the supermarket "vegetarian-fed" label is, by every honest reading, a deficiency diet sold at premium prices.

That eggs are bad for you. Forty years of dietary advice, substantially walked back since 2015. Eggs are now, in most modern guidelines, considered one of the most nutrient-dense foods available.

That chicken farming is, by definition, cruel. Industrial poultry, in many cases, is. Beatrice's life is not. The honest argument targets the system, not the species.

That backyard hens spread disease. The disease vector data points overwhelmingly at intensive operations. Beatrice's three companions and the half a million UK households who keep small flocks are not the problem.

That eggs are a luxury. The man pays approximately £15 a year per hen in feed. He gets, in return, around 280 eggs, two dead rats, a worked vegetable bed, a dust bath in the right spot, and a small quiet relationship with a creature who comes when he calls.

Beatrice is, by every honest measure, the smallest unit of working agriculture in Britain.

She is also, by quiet local consensus, the reason the man still cooks a proper breakfast.

Eat the egg.

Be the hen.

Resource the backyard.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

That cashew cream sauce on your "compassionate" pasta has a story.

Cashew shells contain cardol and anacardic acid. Both are caustic. Both burn human skin on contact. Cashews cannot be sold in their shell for this reason. They have to be removed by hand.

In India, the workers who do this are mostly women. They are typically not given gloves, because gloves slow the work down and reduce output. They develop chronic burns and open sores on their hands. Some are missing fingers from acid damage. Half a million women are estimated to work in the Indian cashew industry under these conditions.

In Vietnam, Human Rights Watch documented that a substantial portion of cashew processing was carried out by detainees in forced-labour drug rehabilitation centres. Refusal to work was punished with beatings, electric shocks, and isolation. Pay was a few dollars a month, often deducted for "food and lodging."

This is the supply chain behind a vegan cheese substitute marketed as cruelty-free.

A Hereford eating grass in a field doesn't even rank in the same conversation.