Harry

Has spines. With a soft tummy. Mostly I keep a low profile.....

[Ben Burville @Sealdiver]

https://t.co/TqCFjI2fXr

[Ben Tavener @BBCBenTavener]

Rodney Mims Cook Jr - the man charged with overseeing Trump’s ballroom and arch projects - was in no mood to speak to the press in St Petersburg today. Marco Rubio said he was “unaware” a US delegation was at the International Economic Forum, once dubbed “Putin’s Davos”. Surreal!

[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.

[Farmers Weekly @FarmersWeekly]

Have a good day. ❤️❤️

🎥 Katryna Shell

[The Hormuz Letter @HormuzLetter]

BREAKING: Trump's "Project Freedom" collapsed after Saudi Arabia and Kuwait suspended US military access to their bases, airspace, and overflight rights, per NBC News and Ryan Grim.

The Kingdom blocked the US from flying aircraft out of Prince Sultan Airbase or through Saudi airspace, completely grounding the operation and removing the air defense umbrella protecting ships in transit.

Saudi leadership was "furious" after Trump announced Project Freedom on Truth Social without notifying them. Qatar and Oman were also blindsided, with Trump only contacting them after the operation began. A direct call between Trump and Crown Prince MBS failed to resolve the situation.

[Malcolm Nance @MalcolmNance]

This is accurate.

[Endre Stølsvik @stolsvik]

@harryjsisson Hah! Had to see for myself! Checks out! Here's four:

[sᥕᥱᥱ𝗍 𝗍һіᥒg❤️‍🔥(𝙰𝚜𝚒𝚊) @55SweetThing]

Never forget Reagan’s reaction to a balloon popping during a speech he gave in West Berlin, 1987- just six years after being shot and wounded in a real assassination attempt by John Hinckley, Jr.

[Harry @luaimear]

A clear account of the legal issues when the US continues a war beyond 60 days for which Congress has not given its approval. Those 60 days expire today.

[Concerned Veterans for America @ConcernedVets]

Concerned Veterans for America calls on Congress to conduct their War Powers obligations under the WPR and the U.S. Constitution.

Operation Epic Fury’s 60-day mark will hit soon; it’s time for Congress to step up.

[Harry @luaimear]

@sonsofliberty66 @nicksortor In Britain if anyone traces their family back enough generations it is almost certain that they will find they have a royal in their ancestors. This article by the BBC explains how a link to royalty is not that special at all.https://t.co/G9VYLXJ9vZ

[Harry @luaimear]

@ArinzeOkpala2 @nicksortor It's the 6th state visit by a British monarch, not the 2nd:
1939 King George VI (Roosevelt)
1957 Queen Elizabeth II (Eisenhower)
1976 QEII (Ford)
1991 QEII (Bush)
2007 QEII (Bush)
2026 King Charles III (Trump)

[Harry @luaimear]

@JayinKyiv It was a fire on an industrial estate called Trafford PARK. Not the same as Trafford CENTRE which is a shopping centre. First reported on 24th. It's just an accidental fire at an industrial unit which stored chemicals. Terrorists? Hardly!

[Harry @luaimear]

@mostlyotters Great to see you're back. Your fabulous photographs have been missed!

[Buitengebieden @buitengebieden]

Wait for it.. 😊

[Grifty @TheGriftReport]

Wiltshire farmer Ann Maidment, 42, has brilliantly exposed the “ridiculous” government waste licensing system, by registering her prize cow Beau Vine as an official rubbish disposer.

It took just five minutes online and cost £184. The Environment Agency approved it instantly. No ID, no business checks, no criminal record verification, just a tick-box promise of no environmental offences.

Her family cattle farm in north Wiltshire has been repeatedly hit by fly-tippers dumping everything from asbestos to kitchen waste.

Ann’s message is simple: “A system that cannot stop a cow cannot stop a criminal.”

Fly-tipping now costs Britain £1 billion a year, with 1.26 million incidents last year alone, many carried out by licensed “carriers” who then illegally dump on rural land.

Farmers are left with tens of thousands in clean-up bills while the system smooths the path for organised crime.

Government now promises tougher checks… but the cow licence proves it’s been wide open for years.

[The Bulwark @BulwarkOnline]

"Allies are not just contributors of material support; they are sources of legitimacy, shared purpose, and sustained political will." Ukraine understands that. Do we?

New from @MarkHertling:
https://t.co/YvQYbUBOXw

[Harry @luaimear]

Looks like the whole topic of Iran is getting under Trump's skin. He closes out a question on Iran with "Out" and thumb jerk towards the exit.

He's worried.

[Acyn @Acyn]

Trump refuses to take questions on Iran

Trump: Out

[OSINTtechnical @Osinttechnical]

The US dropped a Friday night notice lifting sanctions on Russian oil for another month.

Comes just 2 days after Treasury Secretary Bessant said the US would not renew the waiver.

[Harry @luaimear]

@TokyoTom2020 @YouTube That video is 5 years old.

[Harry @luaimear]

The value of USAF losses now estimated to exceed $2.5 billion. On a war the US chose to start and which has resulted in the closure of the Strait of Hormuz
Meantime the cost to the US of belonging to NATO is well under $1 billion, about which they complain bitterly.

[Egypt's Intel Observer @EGYOSINT]

Update on U.S. Air Force losses in the Iran War — Operation Epic Fury (April 9, 2026):

Total losses are now estimated to exceed $2.5 billion, with actual replacement costs likely to climb even higher.

— Four F-15E Strike Eagles have been lost, one over Iran and three downed by friendly fire over Kuwait.

— An A-10 Warthog was shot down while providing close air support (CAS) for combat search and rescue (CSAR) operations.

— An F-35 Lightning II fighter aircraft was damaged by an Iranian surface-to-air missile (SAM).

— An E-3 Sentry AWACS aircraft was completely destroyed at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia.

— Two KC-135R aerial refueling aircraft have crashed, including one destroyed at Prince Sultan Air Base.

— Six additional tankers were damaged, one in an incident over Iraq and five at Prince Sultan Air Base.

— 24 MQ-9 Reaper drones have crashed or been shot down by Iranian forces since February 28.

— One HH-60M helicopter was damaged in an FPV drone attack on Camp Victory in Iraq.

— Two HH-60W helicopters were damaged during CSAR operation in Iran.

— Two MC-130J Commando II aircraft were destroyed during a combat search and rescue (CSAR) mission in Iran.

— Four AH-6 Little Bird helicopters were lost in the same operation.

— Two CH-47F Chinook heavy-lift helicopters were destroyed in Iranian strikes on Camp Buehring, Kuwait.

— One MQ-4C Triton drone crashed in the Persian Gulf off Iran on April 9.