Black Joan

morning

Was anyone in Bushy Park at just after 5am when the clouds and sky pinked up briefly? It was well worth getting up early for! 21.05.26 @theroyalparks @SallyWeather @itvweather @LBRUT @Teddington_Town @ThePhotoHour @Visit_Richmond1

Good morning from West Runton

The justice system is in huge decline. Gang rapists handed youth rehabilitation orders instead of prison. Two juries fail to convict Manchester Airport attackers. Police cuff stabbed boy and let him bleed to death in the street. All this week. When does it stop?

22nd May 2026 05.17

@DickDelingpole 🙏

My father, Malcolm, died yesterday morning at 6.35. 91 years old. Fantastic life, well lived and a blessedly swift departure. We should all be so lucky. Please pray for his soul.

A solar farm just opened where a beef farm used to be. This is a real sentence about a real place. In Lincolnshire, near Glentworth, on land that grew British food for six hundred years. 1,214 hectares of grazing pasture and cropland, the size of Heathrow Airport, now under panels for the next forty years. It is called Tillbridge Solar. It was approved in October 2025. The locals were against it. The local council was overruled by central government. The farmer who used to graze cattle on that land will not be grazing cattle on that land in your lifetime. Down the road, Springwell Solar got the nod the same month. 1,280 hectares. The largest in the country. Same story. Beef and arable, gone. This is happening everywhere. CPRE found that 59% of England's biggest solar farms are on productive farmland. In one Lincolnshire district, 7% of the land is now solar panels. Three solar farms, Sutton Bridge, Goosehall, and Black Peak, are built entirely on the highest grade of agricultural land we have. Now here is the part nobody mentions at the dinner party. The roofs of the warehouses on the A1 are empty. The supermarket distribution centres are empty. The Amazon sheds, the MoD car parks, the industrial estates outside every town in England, all empty. CPRE's own numbers show that putting panels on the roofs we already have would meet the entire 2035 solar target on its own. The panels are not going on the roofs. The panels are going on Lincolnshire because leasing one field from one farmer is easy, and leasing a thousand roofs from a thousand owners is hard. The shortcut is the pasture. You will not be told to stop eating beef. You will simply find that the farm that produced it is now a power station, and the beef in the supermarket has come from Kansas, and it costs more, and the cow is no longer in the field, because the field is no longer a field. Cover the roofs. Leave the pasture.

@DailyMail @CPSUK @ShabanaMahmood @DavidLammy @GBNEWS @TalkTV So you can get 3 years for a ‘tweet’ and let off for gang rape 🤔 @JudiciaryUK .. This isn’t going away !!

House Sparrow having a puddle bath... 😁😍🐦

'The Empire, Leicester Square' by George Hyde Pownall (1866 - 1939) macconnal-mason.com/artwork-detail…

A German neuroscientist published a book in 2012 arguing that smartphones are quietly producing the first generation in human history whose brains will shrink before they turn 30, and the media spent the next decade trying to destroy him for saying it. His name is Manfred Spitzer. He runs the Psychiatric University Hospital in Ulm and directs Germany's largest transfer center for neuroscience and education. The book is called Digitale Demenz, which translates as Digital Dementia, and it became one of the best-selling popular science books in German history almost the moment it was published. The press hated him for it. He was called Germany's most controversial brain scientist, accused of being a Luddite, a moral panic merchant, and a fearmonger who hated children. None of that stopped the book from being translated into more than a dozen languages, and almost none of it engaged with the actual neuroscience he was citing. The phrase digital dementia did not even start with him. It started with South Korean doctors in the late 2000s, who noticed something strange in their clinics. Patients in their twenties were arriving with memory complaints that had previously only shown up in much older adults. Forgetting numbers they used to know by heart. Losing the ability to recall directions in cities they had lived in for years. Struggling to remember conversations from earlier the same day. The doctors connected it to the rise of smartphone use, which had hit South Korea harder and earlier than almost any other country on Earth. Spitzer picked up the phrase and built an entire book around the neuroscience that explained it. The core thesis is brutally simple. The brain behaves like a muscle. It grows when you use it, and it atrophies when you do not. Every cognitive task you outsource to a device is a task your brain is no longer practicing, and the neural circuits responsible for that task are no longer being reinforced. Over time, they weaken in exactly the same way an unused muscle weakens. Spitzer was not arguing that smartphones would give you Alzheimer's. He was arguing that decades of cognitive outsourcing would produce a measurable decline in the underlying machinery, long before any clinical diagnosis would catch it, and that the decline was already showing up in young adults. The mechanism is what made him impossible to dismiss. By the early 2010s, there was already deep evidence that the brain physically remodels itself in response to use. London taxi drivers who had memorized the entire street map of the city had measurably larger hippocampi than the average person, which is the brain region responsible for spatial memory. Musicians who practiced for thousands of hours had thicker auditory cortices. Spitzer's argument was just the dark side of the same finding. If the brain grows in response to use, then it must shrink in response to neglect. And if every cognitive task adults used to perform with their own memory, navigation, arithmetic, attention, and reading was now being handled by a glowing rectangle in their pocket, then the regions responsible for all of those tasks were quietly being underused for the first time in human evolutionary history. Then the supporting data started landing. A 2020 study at McGill University tracked 50 regular drivers and measured GPS use. The heavy users had weaker spatial memory than the rest, and when researchers retested a subset three years later, those users had declined the fastest. The same hippocampus London cabbies had built up by ignoring shortcuts was being slowly hollowed out in everyone else by accepting them. A 2024 MIT study scanned the brains of people writing essays with and without ChatGPT. The AI group showed 55 percent weaker brain connectivity than the group writing on their own. 83 percent of the ChatGPT users could not recall a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier. The damage stayed even when the tool was taken away. A 2024 paper out of Norway recorded EEG scans of students writing words by hand versus typing them. The handwriting condition lit up the entire learning network. The typing condition produced almost nothing. Every one of these findings is exactly what Spitzer predicted in 2012. The most uncomfortable line in his book is the one almost nobody in the German press wanted to print. He pointed out that the people building these devices were not letting their own children use them. Steve Jobs did not let his kids near an iPad. Bill Gates capped his children's screen time at 30 minutes a day. The senior engineers at Google were sending their kids to Waldorf schools that banned screens entirely. The people who knew the most about what these products were doing to the developing brain were the ones protecting their own families from them, and almost nobody on the outside was asking why. The generation he was warning about is now in their twenties. The first cognitive scans of what we did to them are starting to come back, and the pattern is exactly what he said it would be. The brain you were born with is not the brain you will die with. You are training it every day. The only question is which direction.

Duncan Bannatyne backing away from Andy Burnham tells you something important. This is not some niche online row. This is where Labour’s problem with normal voters becomes impossible to hide. Burnham has spent years cultivating the image of a straight-talking, sensible, working-class Labour figure. Less Westminster. More real world. A politician who “gets it”. Then he backs self-ID and questions guidance protecting women’s toilets for biological women. That is the dividing line. Because for millions of people, this is not complicated. Women’s toilets are for women. Female-only spaces exist for a reason. Privacy matters. Boundaries matter. Biology matters. Labour politicians keep pretending this is an obscure culture-war trap. It isn’t. It is a basic test of whether they can say something true when activists are watching. Burnham failed that test. And if he cannot defend women’s spaces without equivocation, why should anyone believe he has the courage to lead the country?

Ladybank Fire Day 10 and the air pollution seems worse than ever. Not clear why authorities are relying on the Cupar air quality fixed site which is 5 miles from the site. Why not deploy mobile monitoring sites to Communities 1 mile from the site ?

It’s World Bee Day! We have lots of gorgeous bee friendly plants at Starbank Park. The alliums, lupins, cerinthe (honeywort) are all looking at their best just now and bee friendly!! 🐝 #worldbeeday @StarbankPark

THE NOTTINGHAM VICTIMS WERE FAILED BY THE NHS TWICE. THE SECOND TIME WAS AFTER THEY DIED. In June 2023, a man called Valdo Calocane walked through Nottingham in the early hours of the morning and stabbed three people to death. Barnaby Webber and Grace O'Malley-Kumar were 19-year-old university students. Ian Coates was a 65-year-old school caretaker. Calocane was a paranoid schizophrenic who had been failing to take his medication, had a warrant out for his arrest, and had been slipping through the cracks of the NHS and police for years. He was eventually detained indefinitely in a high-security hospital. Their families had barely had time to bury them before NHS staff at Nottingham University Hospitals Trust @nottmhospitals started accessing the victims' confidential medical records with no legitimate reason whatsoever. 150 staff in total went into those files. The trust says 48 of them had a good reason to be there. Barnaby's mother Emma Webber says that number is way too high and the families are formally challenging it. Three years later, the results of the investigation are in. 11 staff have been dismissed. 12 received final written warnings. Two got first written warnings. Doctors, nurses, admin staff. Most of those sacked were nurses. Not one doctor lost their job. Medical Director Dr Manjeet Shehmar has apologised. The Information Commissioner's Office has been notified. The Nursing and Midwifery Council and the General Medical Council will now decide if anyone gets struck off. Investigations are still ongoing into staff who accessed the files of the three survivors, Wayne Birkett, Sharon Miller and Marcin Gawronski. And it is not just the NHS. A separate investigation found Ministry of Justice staff had illegally accessed court files connected to the same case. A special constable with Nottinghamshire Police was sacked earlier for watching bodycam footage from the aftermath of the attacks. Emma Webber said the scale of it was shocking and heartbreaking. She also said she expects the numbers to rise as the investigation continues. Three people were murdered. Then the very institutions that were supposed to serve justice and protect their dignity spent years rifling through their private records. The Nottingham Inquiry is still running. Dr Shehmar gives evidence this month. The families are still waiting for proper accountability. Sources: NUH @nottmhospitals | @BBCNews | @LBC | @GBNEWS

Hemingway at work, impeded by cat.

@Sargon_of_Akkad At least three typos in that . . . 🙄

A viewer from Makerfield emailed this to me today. He received this letter from Hope Not Hate through his door, and they appear to be actively campaigning for Andy Burnham and the Labour Party.

Albrecht Dürer (21 May 1471 – 6 April 1528) The Great Piece of Turf