S. Kennedy

[S. Kennedy @kenners61]

Remember this.

[Carole Cadwalladr @carolecadwalla]

Ok. Deep breath.

I think we may look back on this as the first Great Information War. Except we're already 8 years in.

The first Great Information War began in 2014. The invasion of Ukraine is the latest front. And the idea it doesn't already involve us is fiction, a lie.
1/

[Women's Rights Network - WRN @WomensRightsNet]

Sometimes we have to just pinch ourselves to remind us that this 👇 is actually real.
➡️Yes, there are men who want to put their nipples into babies' mouths to suckle them with their secretions.
➡️Yes, there are organisations and individuals who encourage this disgusting practice.
➡️No, they aren't all being arrested. Why not?
Anyway, here's WRN's own Dr Alice Hodkinson also of @biologyinmed speaking to @joshxhowie of @GBNEWS about this very issue.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Britain grows 60 per cent of its own food by value, down from 65 the year before. The top five things it still grows well are all animals.

Defra's own breakdown, by product:

- Milk: 105%
- Mutton and lamb: 99%
- Eggs: 89%
- Beef and veal: 85%
- Poultry meat: 83%
- Cereals: 79%
- Pig meat: 65%
- Fresh vegetables: 53%
- Fresh fruit: 15%

Thirty years of being told to eat more plants and fewer animals, and we can barely grow the plants. Fifteen per cent of our own fruit. Half our own veg.

This is not bad luck. Two thirds of British farmland cannot grow a crop at all, being too wet, too steep, too thin or too cold. It grows grass instead, faster and for more months of the year than almost anywhere on earth. We are a rain-fed grass factory on the edge of an ocean, and the only machine that turns grass into human food walks about on four legs.

We are not good at this by accident either. This is the country that produced the Hereford, the Aberdeen Angus, the Shorthorn, the Jersey and the Suffolk, then exported them to build the herds of America, Argentina, Australia and New Zealand. A great deal of the beef on earth traces back to a British field.

The last time it mattered, the state understood all of this perfectly.

Britain went into the Second World War producing about a third of the calories its people ate, with U-boats sinking the rest. Bacon, butter and sugar were on the ration by 8 January 1940.

Pigs and poultry were cut hard. Cattle numbers held.

Because a pig and a hen eat grain a human could have eaten, and a cow eats grass no human ever could. When the ships stopped coming, the ruminant was the animal worth keeping, and Whitehall worked that out inside a year.

From July 1940 the National Milk Scheme put a pint a day into every child under five and every nursing mother. Country under blockade, everything else on coupons, and the one thing the state made certain reached a child was milk out of a cow standing in a British field.

Every acre now coming out of grazing for panels, offsets and mosaics is coming out of the only half of that list we can actually deliver.

Nobody is proposing we reduce our reliance on Spanish lettuce. They are proposing to reduce the herd.

There is no version of this island where we grow our own almonds. There is every version where we feed ourselves off grass, and we have done it for four thousand years.

Do not let anybody talk you into importing the one thing we have never needed to buy.

[MedievalistMatt @medievalistmatt]

Can't forget that!

[Liz Webster @LizWebsterSBF]

Trump’s Iran war is forecast to cost every British household £2,400 by next year £70.4bn in lost spending power.

And that doesn’t capture the full fertiliser and food shock still moving through farms and supply chains.

Food security is household economics, national security and defence.

Britain is about to learn what food insecurity actually looks like as prices soar, choices shrink, empty shelves dominate and millions become unable to afford a healthy diet.

War, fertiliser disruption, extreme weather and Brexit trade barriers are colliding just as British food production is being allowed to decline.

The government has wasted the time it had to prepare for this shitshow.

[Biology in Medicine @biologyinmed]

We were very pleased to be asked to speak about this. It’s very important to be able to say that men are not women.
Men cannot breastfeed.
Men and women are different - who knew 🤔

[GBC @GBC_Press]

🚨 BREAKING:

Greenland PM Jens-Frederik Nielsen:

"If we had to choose between the US and Denmark right now, we choose Denmark. We choose NATO. We choose the Kingdom of Denmark. We choose the EU."

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

>be activist
>work it out one evening, properly, on your own
>the cow is the problem
>methane, water, land, the lot
>stop eating cows and you have personally saved the planet
>feel lighter already
>almond milk in the coffee on Monday
>two thirds of America's bees trucked into one valley for three weeks, ground sinking twenty-eight feet
>fine, oat milk, British even
>crop sprayed with herbicide a fortnight before cutting, to kill it evenly
>fine, coconut milk
>picked by a chained macaque with its teeth pulled out
>fine, soy
>beans bathed in a petroleum solvent, protein stripped out with acid
>drop the milk entirely, just eat plants
>avocado from a province drinking out of a tanker
>purée from a region under documented forced labour
>olive oil harvested at night through a roost of migrating songbirds
>chocolate with a million and a half children in it
>go for a walk to clear your head
>field, thirty cows, one bloke, grass, rain
>mfw the only supply chain you could see the whole of was the one you gave up

[Niall Harbison @NiallHarbison]

I’ve been suffering from the worst depression for about 10 days now. Maybe a month really in total but it’s been a dark fog for 10 days. I’ve really had to dig so deep to try and get through it.

As deep as I did when I had to give up drinking and ended up in hospital. As deep as when Tina, Snoop, Jumbo and Derek died within a few months.

This wave of darkness has been especially bad. I’ve had to use all the tools I know. Breathing exercises. Walking alone. Talking to friends. It’s extra frustrating as I try to do everything right and it still keeps coming. As anybody who suffers knows the symptoms hitting me are…

🧠 Brain moving in slow motion. Thoughts are like molasses. Indecision. Lethargy etc.

😴 Incredibly poor sleep. Waking with anxiety 2-3 times a night.

😬 Small panic attacks where I can feel my heart thinking it might stop or explode.

😖 Extreme irritability. Even with my dogs and people and things I like.

I like to share it because I think it can help others. People will say I have a lot on my plate with hospital builds and the scope of what we are doing. But to be honest I know how hard it is for a mother trying to get 2 kids to school. A young chef (used to me) who is addicted to booze and doesn’t know who to tell. An elderly person with a life of anxiety and no social circle. Every type of person in every walk of life can suffer. Since I’ve shared it I get messages from executives, sports people, performers, celebs and some of the most outwardly confident people in life. It can hit anybody.

The 2 things I think about the most to try beat it are Tina and some of the dogs we’ve helped. Tina will get me through this tough phase and I’ll keep my promises to her. The other dogs in their homes with their wonderful humans show me why we do this. I need to get my spark back to help all those future dogs.

To those who support and send me messages and leave comments it helps more than you’ll ever know. One of these mornings the sun will rise and things will click back to normal. It always does.

Please look after yourselves and be kind to others as you never know what someone might be going through. ❤️

[Women's Space Ireland @WomensSpaceIre]

Thank you @GBNEWS for covering this; no Irish broadcaster has yet done so (that we know of):

@rtenews @morningireland @drivetimerte @kevinbakhurst @newstalk @NTBreakfast @PatKennyNT @VirginMediaNews
https://t.co/msy8YwE2Mp

[Feargal Sharkey @Feargal_Sharkey]

Just to add to Henry’s ire the £1.8 million a year CEO of Anglian Water, is Mark Thurston former CEO of, wait for it, wait for it, HS2.

I’ll just leave that thought there shall I.

[Dr. Dame Katy Denise CH GBE 🏳️‍⚧️🇳🇬🪑 @damekatydenise_]

Time line cleanser. 💋

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Britain is two colours this month, and the line between them is a fence.

Green on one side, with cattle standing on it in the last week of August. Bleached on the other, where the plough went through. Same weather, same rain, same sun, same soil under both.

One photograph, and it took the worst drought in the record to print it.

England had 6.5mm of rain in July, ten per cent of the average and less than half the previous record of 13.4mm set in 1911, in a series going back to 1836. Wales had 9.3mm against a previous record of 22.6mm. Southern England had 1.9mm, the driest month it has ever recorded. Drought was declared across the whole of Wales and about half of England, and over twenty-four million people went under hosepipe restrictions.

Nobody irrigated the grass. There is no pump, no borehole, no abstraction licence and no pipe on a grazing field, and there never has been. It got what fell on it, which was nothing, and it is still green.

The reason is under the surface. Permanent pasture is a living root mass that has been there for years, holding the structure open, holding the water, holding the soil in place, feeding the fungi and worms that keep the whole thing spongy. A cropped field is bare ground for a large part of the year, worked and turned and left, and when the crop fails there is nothing holding it. It goes to concrete, then it goes to dust, and the next strong wind decides where it goes after that.

Grass does not die in a drought either. It shuts down, waits, and comes back inside a fortnight of proper rain, which is a trick no cereal on earth can perform. The yellow in that far field is a failure. The brown in a grazed sward is a nap.

And on the hills where the grazing has been taken off, the fire came. Conwy Mountain went up and thirty-six homes were evacuated, hundreds of acres of Snowdonia scorched around the Sychnant Pass, because the fuel was standing there with nothing eating it.

We are told the plan is fewer ruminants and more crops, and that everything will be better on the other side of it.

America ran that experiment already. The southern plains carried grass and grazing animals for ten thousand years, then got ploughed up for wheat in one generation, and by the mid thirties the topsoil was in the sky over New York. The federal government eventually bought back 11.3 million acres of ruined farmland at about four dollars and forty cents an acre, sowed it back to grass, and in 1960 turned the best of it into the National Grasslands.

Nearly four million acres of them. Grazed by cattle to this day, under permit, because grass with animals on it was the only thing that ever held that ground down.

We have the photographs. We have the dust storms on film. We have a federal agency that exists because of it, and a public land designation created specifically to admit the mistake.

Ninety years on, our answer to a drought is to talk about taking the animals off and putting the plough in.

Look at the fence line. The evidence is a foot either side of it.

[Second Chance Animal Hospital And Sanctuary @scahs_tawf]

🫏💔 OUR DREAM? REPLACE DONKEY CARTS WITH MOTOR CARTS—AND FREE DONKEYS FROM LABOUR.

Until we have enough funding to reach them all, Second Chance is making their working lives safer NOW.

Owners around our sanctuary are bringing their donkeys to us for FREE treatment, hoof trimming and welfare care. We treat wounds early, help prevent painful harness injuries and teach owners how to care for their animals before suffering becomes agony.

And something important is happening: owners are now coming to US for help. ❤️

🔁 SHARE + FOLLOW @SecondChanceTAWF. Help us protect more donkeys today—and hopefully free them from labour tomorrow. 🫏❤️

https://t.co/bLe7whPBU0

[Liz Webster @LizWebsterSBF]

🇺🇸 Trump wanted to make Canada 🇨🇦 America’s “51st state”.

Instead, he may have permanently severed one of the closest relationships in the world. Nine million fewer Canadian visits, American goods shunned and almost half of Canadians now view the American people unfavourably.

Bullying has consequences.

[Stella O'Malley @stellaomalley3]

Just heard of another desistance!

Nearly every week these days, exhausted mothers send me messages on WhatsApp, Twitter, Substack, email and Facebook to tell me their child has FINALLY desisted.

It typically comes after years of unbearable, exhausting, patient, loving effort. The parents learn painfully about when to speak and when to stay silent. There are many often many fights.

What’s amazing is that desistance is happening so much more often these days than ever before

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Somebody put the bison on the village group at ten past nine on a Sunday night, under the heading Concerns re: Rhug footpath, and by Tuesday the thread had produced a rota.

The post was reasonable and not written in bad faith. There are bison a field from a public right of way. There are children on that path. Nobody asked the village. Replies, in order:

"Sorry but is that path safe or not. I walk it with my grandson every Saturday and I'd like a straight answer."

"They can clear a six foot fence from standing. Look it up."

"They can. They don't. Same as saying a horse can kick you."

"He's seven. I'm not gambling on the difference."

"Mine's four and he's been up there twice. They held eighty yards off. The ginger one watched us the whole way along the wall."

"Is that the one that was born up there?"

"That's her. First one born on that ground in six thousand years."

"Six thousand?"

"Before the wood was a wood. There were bison here and then there weren't, and she's the first since."

"And she's just up the lane."

"She's just up the lane."

"Right but it approached a member of the public. That's my point."

"She's four months old and she approaches everything. Last week it was a woodpecker. She lost."

"Can we be serious"

"I am being serious. Friday she did a full lap of the clearing with all four feet off the ground at once and went into the wallow sideways."

"Why are they even up there. Nothing eats brambles."

"They do. A cow puts her head down and mows. A bison takes bark, shoots, elder, and shoves through scrub instead of going round it, and the ground behind her is a different ground."

"South margin was solid blackthorn two years ago. It isn't now."

"There's violets in it."

"Nobody consulted us about the violets either"

"Every one alive came off twelve animals. Twelve, in the world, by the twenties. Nine of them are behind that wall and one of them was born here."

"Is there anywhere you can see her properly"

"Top boundary, mornings. Bring nothing and stand still."

"Right, but the stile is rotten and that IS a safety issue"

"Now that I'll agree with."

Four people volunteered. There is a rota for the top boundary and somebody is ringing the estate about the stile, and the man who started the thread has Thursdays.

The estate never replied, because the estate has no idea the group exists.

Freya was on the south margin throughout, going through the thorn the way she goes through everything, which is to lean until something gives and then stand in the gap and lean again.

Seren had dug a second wallow on high ground where water has never once gathered, and was lying in the dry hole she made on purpose, delighted.

[Liz Webster @LizWebsterSBF]

🇨🇦 🇺🇸 This is fascinating and rather cheering 📣

👑 Trump’s behaviour is producing a lasting psychological separation between Canadians and Americans.

💥 Nine million fewer Canadian visits to the US in the past year.
💥 Canadian wine disappearing from shelves.
💥 Canadians deliberately avoiding American products and holiday destinations.
💥 Polling showing 79% of Canadians now view Trump unfavourably but almost half, 48%, also view the American people unfavourably.
Mark Carney’s conclusion: “America has changed.”

🔥 Trade disputes can be settled and tariffs reversed, but once citizens lose trust in the neighbouring country itself, the damage becomes cultural and generational. Even traditional snowbirds are choosing Spain (my Canadian friends swapped Palm Springs for Spain), Portugal rather than the US.

Trump wanted Canada to feel small and dependent. Instead, he has strengthened Canadian patriotism, encouraged economic diversification and persuaded many Canadians that their closest neighbour is no longer a dependable friend.

[Larry the Cat @Number10cat]

Lots of the usual right wing accounts on here naively commenting on Iceland's referendum on negotiating to join the EU.

Iceland is already much more closely aligned to the EU than Britain - it is part of the single market and within the Schengen border free zone, meaning the free movement of goods and people. People from Iceland can live and work anywhere they like within the EU and vice versa.

So why have they narrowly rejected negotiating for full membership? In a world - fish. Fishing is a big deal to Iceland (as anyone old enough to remember the cod wars will attest). It contributes around 12% of the country's GDP and 40% of its export earnings.

In case you're wondering fishing contributes about 0.12% of the UK's GDP. EU fishing boats continue to access UK waters post Brexit, because the UK wants to export seafood to the EU (British consumers aren't keen on the most common catches)

So ask those celebrating Iceland's freedom if they'd be happy for the UK to have the same deal...

[Women's Voices Australia @womensvoicesau]

In December 2020 there was much handwringing behind the scenes in the Association of Breastfeeding Mothers @AssnBFMothers, a UK breastfeeding charity, over this article in the Daily Mail which revealed that @LLLGB was helping men to lactate and use babies as their props to 'affirm' their gender. All breastfeeding charities in the UK were set up to provide single sex support to support women with breastfeeding - woman-only endeavours and body processes. Today four breastfeeding charities are supporting men to lactate with the exception of @MoMaBfing which was created after La Leche League forced out some of its Leaders who dissented.

The response of three members below shows that experienced counsellors are violating the charity's mission statement to aid men who were at best confused and at worst using their baby as a sex toy. The peer supporters, the entry level trained volunteers knew how the wind was blowing and they were silenced if they held an opposition view. Some volunteers are transactivists who actively pursue dissenters online. The Association of Breastfeeding Mothers has some particularly virulent activists within the charity trolling women who dissent.

There were two options afforded to those volunteers who objected: stay quiet or leave. Anyone who defied those options were pushed out the door.

The "small supply" that this counsellor claimed this man could make was about 10ml per 'feed' - a 5 day old baby needs 30 - 60 ml every 2 to 3 hours. This 'small supply' would be produced after suppressing testosterone with a drug like spironolactone, taking estrogen and progesterone to mimic the pregnancy and birth while using a breast pump on a daily regimen before the baby is born to create a 'milk' supply. Once the baby is born, the baby would substitute for a pump. He must continue to take large doses of estrogen, continue spironolactone and use domperidone, an anti-emetic, which has been shown to affect babies, to continue to produce starvation quantities of 'milk'.

This is all for the man to separate an infant from its mother so that a man can usurp the mother's relationship. Let us aside the fact that the baby is not a prop for a man to claim his is woman for the moment. These women are ignoring the coercion of the mother when they fully well know that intimate partner violence frequently begins or intensifies during pregnancy and the post partum period.
Mothers matter.
Mothering matters.
And a man is never a mother.

The end product apart from the emotional abuse of the mother and the physical abuse of the baby is the destruction of the breastfeeding relationship for the mother and baby. A baby cannot survive on 10ml of 'milk' every 2 hrs and the mother will lose her ability to produce milk if the baby is not suckling at the breast as often and as long as necessary to create her baby's milk supply. Breastfeeding failure is a major contributor to post partum depression in women.

Soon, the man will give up his,let's not call it his fetish, endeavour because a crying hungry baby that is never satisfied will never 'affirm' his identity. The most plausible outcome is that the baby is fed with formula going forward. The worst outcome doesn't bear thinking about.

Note how the counsellor's response shows that this is all about his 'feelings'. Not about the mother or the baby. Note her righteous indignation which feeds the vicious online trolling by transactivists, including some transactivists within the Association of Breastfeeding Mothers. Complaints about the behaviour of these online trolls led to a mere slap on the wrist from the ABM's Central Committee.

At the time I made it clear that when the public finds out about what the charity has been promoting, the public would be disgusted.

In 2020 it was useless to complain to the @ChtyCommission as it is also captured by transactivists. But the time has come for these breastfeeding and birth organisations to be defunded or return to their Charitable Objects which include but is not limited to promoting "the physical and psychological health of mothers and children through education in the techniques of breastfeeding."

Today, with the clarification of 'woman' as a sexed reality in the EA2010, it is time that the Charity Commission itself is cleared out of activists and that this quango starts to do it's job properly or itself be dissovled and replaced by one that will remove transactivists from these breastfeeding charities.

#SexMatters

[Genevieve Gluck @WomenReadWomen]

I mostly agree with you, but I disagree on the term "gender dysphoria," which I think is inaccurate, and has caused - by way of the creation of a self-serving formal diagnosis - a body dysmorphia spike in young people.

Philosopher Ian Hacking coined the term the "looping effect" to describe a feedback loop wherein creating a psychiatric classification shapes how people understand themselves.

Once a formal diagnosis exists, people begin adopting its reported behaviors and symptoms, which in turn expands the official definition of the disorder itself.

The original usage of "gender identity" as described by sexologist John Money referred explicitly to sexual positions, to such an extent that he actually had a castrated 6 year-old boy engage in "sexual rehearsal play" with his brother. Money instructed David Reimer, who he called Brenda, to act out the female sexual role.

Because gender identity ideology concepts were created by sexologists who worked with, and often expressed support for, sex offenders, I do not trust the term "gender dysphoria," and note that it was picked up, decades ago, by transvestites with a castration fetish in a bid to pathologize, and therefore normalize, a sexual fetish that depends on unwilling public participation.

"Gender dysphoria" is an alteration of "body dysmorphia" while removing any element of the physical: gender is a subjective and ill-defined concept, and dysphoria merely refers to a feeling of general discontent. Whereas "body dysmorphia" is more concrete and addresses the distress about the physical form.

Loosening the terminology has allowed men with sexual pathologies to hide behind distressed girls.

Similarly, "gender dysphoria" obliterates the sexed differences in experience and motivation for males and females. Men's reasons for wanting to have breasts to play with, for instance, as compared to a young woman struggling with an eating disorder.

The term also entirely glosses over the element of sexual abuse that is often involved in cases of young people who believe they are "in the wrong body".

A belief system and medical process created by sexologists and through sex offender treatment therapy has ultimately led to the sterilization of young people who often have experienced some form of sexual abuse, even if merely exposure to violent pornography at a young age.

The term "gender dysphoria" was applied to men who wished to be castrated, which is an extension of a body modification fetish.

Decades ago there were so few females expressing a desire to "transition" that sexologists discussed among themselves how they could seek them out. They needed female patients in order to normalize the male castration fetish.

It turns out that all they had to do was create a vague enough term, and the social contagion, backed by the apparent legitimacy of the medical establishment, could finally wrap its sickly arms around girls and young women.