Cellular Song @CellularSong

The Cheques Go Out. The Men Arrive. The Women Pay the Price. The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office published its aid allocations without apology or embarrassment. Afghanistan receives £192 million. Somalia £143 million. Yemen £142 million. Sudan £141 million. Nigeria £138 million. The Treasury writes the cheques. The Foreign Secretary insists the money saves lives. Neither of them will say what the figures actually represent. Afghanistan is governed by a regime that in April 2024 announced the enforcement of stoning and flogging for women accused of adultery. The UN's own Special Rapporteur describes a system of institutionalised discrimination amounting to gender apartheid. Girls are banned from secondary education. Women have been stripped from public life by decree. Britain sends £192 million a year, routed through NGOs the Taliban has simultaneously banned women from working for, which rather defeats the stated purpose. Somalia ranks second on the Open Doors World Watch List for Christian persecution, behind only North Korea. Christians identified in the country face torture or death. Women and girls face forced marriage and sexual violence as instruments of social control. The Somali parliament has repeatedly failed to pass legislation on FGM and sexual violence. Britain sends £143 million. Yemen, where FGM affects up to 84 percent of women and girls in some governorates, and where apostasy carries the death penalty, receives £142 million. Sudan, which has 15 million women and girls who have undergone FGM, receives £141 million. Nigeria, whose northern states operate sharia courts with apostasy laws punishable by death, and where 14 million women and girls have undergone FGM, receives £138 million. Five of the ten top recipients of British aid appear in the Open Doors top ten for Christian persecution. The government knows this. The figures are its own. The same government presides over the Channel. Between 2018 and 2024, 147,568 people arrived illegally by small boat. Of those for whom data was recorded, 76 percent were males aged 18 to 39. In 2024, the leading nationalities were Afghans, Syrians and Iranians. In the first half of 2025, 70 percent of those crossing were young males from Afghanistan, Sudan and Iran. They arrive without verified documents. They arrive without verified ages. They are processed at Manston and dispersed into communities across Britain, often into hotels operating with minimal supervision. The crime record is now a matter of parliamentary record. Louise Casey's report into rape gangs identified asylum seekers among those involved in the sexual exploitation of young British girls. The five nationalities most likely to cross the Channel saw a 110 percent increase in sexual offence convictions between 2021 and 2024. Foreign nationals account for one in seven sexual offence convictions while comprising one in ten of the population. In London, they account for over 40 percent of sexual assault charges while comprising 25 percent of the population. The Sun found 339 charges in six months across only half the asylum hotels in operation. The Mail on Sunday found 708 charges across a third. A YouGov poll found 93 percent of Britons support the deportation of illegal migrants convicted of rape and violent crime. Ninety-three percent. The highest rate of support was in Scotland, at 97 percent. The British public has arrived at a verdict. The political class is still writing the briefing notes. Britain is funding, at scale, some of the most repressive and misogynistic regimes on earth. Britain is simultaneously admitting, without adequate screening, large numbers of young men formed in those same societies. The connection is not complicated. The refusal to state it plainly is a political choice, made in the full knowledge of the consequences, and those consequences are being borne by British women. "Britain is funding some of the most repressive and misogynistic regimes on earth."

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Two headlines, two papers @Independent blames a mother for her toddlers death while the father was looking after him @DailyMail frames a man raping his daughter as ‘romping’. She tragically went on to kill herself The British media is in the gutter @IpsoNews @MichelleDewbs

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. @LouiseRawAuthor

4 days ago

I will be pursuing a press complaint against you @DailyMail for this revolting, dangerous, damaging headline. His poor daughter went to live with him after a difficult life, hoping for love and stability. He got her blind drunk & raped her. She killed herself. Shame on you.

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Desperate stuff from a ‘senior Labour figure.’ There’s no world in which Andy Burnham as a woman is a useful metaphor. And it’s grim to imply that senior Tory women are trying to be more “male”. It’s regressive gender stereotypes. (From @spectator)

Great news. The Labour Party has finally found a woman they fancy as leader. It's a man who'll be 'a female PM in all but sex.' A senior figure in the party actually thought that was a good thing to say out loud. ✍️ @ShippersUnbound

No podemos considerar la #IA como moralmente neutra. En realidad, todo artefacto técnico lleva consigo decisiones y prioridades: lo que mide, lo que ignora, lo que optimiza y el modo en que clasifica personas y situaciones. El discernimiento ético no se puede limitar a preguntarse si usamos un determinado sistema para un fin bueno o malo, sino que debe interrogarse también sobre el modo en el que está diseñado y qué idea de persona y de sociedad queda inscrita en los datos y en los modelos que lo guían. #MagnificaHumanitas

From an open swimming bore ...

Oh.

This unqualified bore says his secondhand opinions are “not up for debate.” Yes they are. At a university all opinions are up for debate. If you cannot defend your opinions rationally, either they are indefensible or you are too stupid to defend them. In either case you have no right to force them on students who have expressed their wish to attend a lecture by doing so. thetimes.com/uk/education/a…

We’ve come a long way baby or at least we thought we had. I found this letter in the house that I bought

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.

"Concern that pellets clean-up 'could take years'." Remember those millions of plastic beads dumped onto Camber Sands by Southern Water last November, the stuff that contains any number of heavy metals, lead, arsenic, etc. What's happened since, CEO gone to jail, any directors being prosecuted? Of course not. It's the EA who's in charge. bbc.co.uk/news/articles/…

I for one am shocked that a geezer who claimed he could grow women’s breasts via hypnosis might not have been operating on the up and up

Politics UK @PolitlcsUK

2 months ago

🚨 NEW: Zack Polanski was not a full member of the National Council of Hypnotherapy despite telling clients he was [@thetimes]

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A very inebriated man just sat down next to me at the train station and said: “Alright, gorgeous.” I didn’t like the look of him, so I got up and moved. “Couldn’t get away quick enough, could you love?” he shouted after me, laughing. Then he stood up. For a moment I thought he was going to follow me. He didn’t - but as he staggered off in the other direction, he hollered across the station: “She needs to be f**ked up the arse, that one.” This is the reality women are navigating - every day, often without saying a word about it. And yet we’re told that if a man puts on a dress and calls himself Susan, any discomfort we feel about sharing intimate spaces makes us the problem.

One of the ways we know these men know he’s not a woman is that they’ll listen to him.

This is why I think trying to run a global liberal news organisation is so tricky. The cultures between British and American liberal journalism are so different, with different attitudes towards objectivity and where you draw the line between fact and opinion.

Charles Arthur @charlesarthur

2 months ago

Guardian US opinion columnist on left; Guardian UK sports writer on right. Both articles published on the same day, three hours apart. Never seen the schism within the organisation laid out so clearly. (A number of UK staff think some US staff are bonkers.)

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Oh dear, poor Alan Cumming feels betrayed by feminism's defence of women's rights from incursions by men - however they identify. Do these men ever hear themselves?! Do they think feminism is for them, defined on their terms?! (Rhetorical questions, I already know the answer).

Sam Taylor @staylorish

3 months ago

Alan Cumming on how women have ruined feminism for him.

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The UK 🇬🇧 just voted in favour of the Islamic Republic of Iran's nomination to a U.N committee that shapes policy on...women's rights....terrorism prevention The IRGC remains legal in the UK WHAT ARE WE DOING!!! 🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧🤷🤷🤷😩😩😩

🚨Iran: 10 Political Executions in 8 days With the execution of January protester Ali Fahim this morning, the regime has now hanged 10 political prisoners and protesters in just over a week: 🗓️Mon (Mar 30): Mohammad Taghavi, Akbar Daneshvarkar 🗓️Tue: Babak Alipour, Pouya Ghobadi 🗓️Thu: Amir Hossein Hatami 🗓️Sat: Abolhassan Montazar, Vahid Bani-Amerian 🗓️Sun: Shahin Vahedparast, Mohammad Amin Biglari 🗓️Mon (Apr 6): Ali Fahim #IranRevolution2026‌

SIMAY AZADI TV @en_simayazadi

3 months ago

🚨 Breaking | Iran News alert Iran’s regime has executed another detainee from the January 2026 uprising: Ali Fahim. State judiciary claims he was involved in attempting to access a military armory in Tehran, aiming to "overthrow the system." In less than two weeks, Iran's

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Now this is one wild story. The amount of lawsuits coming down the pipeline with stories like this is going to be astronomical.

Again. And again, the question is why. Because corrupt autocrats stick together? The fake "conservative values" propaganda? Or simply because Putin desperately needs to keep Orbán to sabotage the EU and the Trump admin seems to do whatever Putin wants?

Anne Applebaum @anneapplebaum

3 months ago

JD Vance is heading to Hungary to endorse Viktor Orban. Here is a description of the corrupt regime, and the bizarre, post-reality campaign, that the US administration now supports: theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/03/…

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