Picking up bits to either take a closer look at them or hurl them away. Mainly reproduce what comes along. Always hoping and working for the better.
Joined March 2010
- Tweets553
- Following110
- Followers44
- Likes783
Silent Factor retweeted
I can hardly imagine anyone who hasn’t seen this photograph. But it was taken on this day in 2000.
I cannot believe the photo is 26 years old now.
The boy in the photograph was Fares Odeh. He was just 14 years old.
Ten days after this image was captured, Fares went out again to throw stones at Israeli tanks, seeking to avenge the killing of his 17-year-old cousin.
An Israeli sniper shot him in the neck, killing him.
And there is another chilling detail to this photograph.
The photo changed Israeli tank doctrine. In August 2001, The Jerusalem Post quoted an anonymous tank doctrinist saying tank personnel were now instructed to fire upon rock-throwers.
Silent Factor retweeted
Palestinian Culture must and will survive. Its natural beauty is indestructible, as is the spirit.
Sliman Mansour was a leading Palestinian artist whose work captured the Palestinian people’s culture of steadfastness in the face of their ongoing struggles for recognition, rights, and freedom.
Silent Factor retweeted
The former British home secretary and buddhist daughter of a Kenyan descendant of Goan Catholics, and a Mauritian Hindu descendent of Tamil, born in Harrow, studied in New York, married to a Jewish South African who lived In Israel says multiculturalism has failed.
Silent Factor retweeted
A 92-year-old war widow being arrested for holding a sign and calling Andy Burnham a bastard is the kind of image that should stop people cold.
She lived through a world war. She buried a husband who served. Now she’s being lifted off the pavement because she refuses to stay quiet about Gaza.
Free speech for the powerful. Handcuffs for the old woman who still has a conscience.
Lift the ban. Stop arming it. Stop pretending this is normal.
Silent Factor retweeted
Hussam Ebu Safieh, "İsrail'in rehineler için ölüm cezası" ile öldürülecek olan Filistinli doktorlardan biridir (diğer 95 doktor arasında).
Onu öldürmelerine izin verme.
Bunu yeniden yayınlayın.
Silent Factor retweeted
"Israel" ha convertido la Franja de Gaza en el lugar con más niños amputados del mundo, más de 40.000 niños palestinos han sido heridos, perdiendo extremidades, en 3 años, en una media de 36 niños amputados al día.
Elegir el silencio ante la barbarie, es elegir la barbarie.
Silent Factor retweeted
“In an all-corrupt society, a righteous man cannot exist without being branded as criminal.”
- Marquis de Sade
The Marquis de Sade suggests that when a society becomes deeply corrupt, a person who remains righteous may be condemned simply for refusing to conform. His statement challenges the idea that society’s laws and standards always reflect what is morally right. When dishonesty, corruption, or abuse of power become accepted as normal, those who resist them may be viewed as disloyal, troublesome, or even criminal.
The Marquis’s message also highlights the difference between legality and morality. Something can be legal without being morally just, just as something can be prohibited without being morally wrong. History has shown that laws and social standards can themselves become unjust, meaning that following the rules does not automatically make an action ethical.
The Marquis ultimately argues that morality should not be determined solely by what society approves or condemns. When institutions become corrupt, individual conscience may require people to question authority and refuse to participate in wrongdoing. In such circumstances, the person society labels a “criminal” may actually be the one standing against injustice.
However, being condemned by society does not automatically make someone righteous. A person’s actions must still be judged independently through reason and ethical principles. The deeper point is that society’s judgment is not always the same as moral truth, especially when the society doing the judging has itself become corrupt.
Silent Factor retweeted
Michael Faraday was a blacksmith's son and a bookbinder's apprentice who was never regarded as a gentleman by the society he transformed.
On Davy's European tour of 1813–15 he travelled as scientific assistant and de facto valet, made to eat with the servants at the insistence of Davy's wife, and nearly went home early. He went on to discover electromagnetic induction, the laws of electrolysis, benzene, and the magneto-optical effect, and, with William Whewell, to coin the words electrode, cathode and ion. He then declined nearly every honour that came his way: he twice refused the presidency of the Royal Society, declined burial in Westminster Abbey, and stated publicly on several occasions that he would not accept a knighthood, though no record survives of one ever being offered.
He was a Sandemanian, and the refusals were religious rather than modest in the ordinary sense, since he regarded the pursuit of worldly reward as against scripture. The sharpest instance came during the Crimean War, when the British government asked him whether poison gas could be produced for use against Russian forces. His answer was that it was entirely feasible, and that he would have nothing whatever to do with it.
Silent Factor retweeted
Your tattoo isn’t just decorative ink: it’s a permanent trigger that keeps your immune system locked in a lifelong cycle of chronic inflammation.
As soon as the ink is injected into your skin, your body recognizes the pigment particles as foreign invaders. Immune cells called macrophages immediately swarm the area and attempt to swallow them up. But because they can’t actually break down the ink, the macrophages eventually die, releasing the pigment back into the surrounding tissue, only for a new wave of macrophages to arrive and repeat the process.
This endless cycle is what keeps the tattoo permanently visible, while also maintaining a state of ongoing, low-level inflammation in the skin.
Over time, some of these ink particles migrate through the lymphatic system and accumulate in the lymph nodes, placing constant stress on the body’s defense mechanisms. Emerging research suggests this internal ink buildup may interfere with normal immune function, potentially reducing the effectiveness of certain vaccines, including mRNA types. Additionally, many tattoo inks contain heavy metals like nickel and cobalt. Combined with the chronic inflammation, this has been linked to a modestly elevated risk of lymphoma and skin cancer.
While tattoos remain a powerful form of self-expression, they represent a complex, decades-long biological conflict between your immune system and foreign substances embedded in your skin.
[Nielsen, C., Jerkeman, M., & Jöud, A. S. (2024). Tattoos as a risk factor for systemic lymphoma: A population-based case-control study. eClinicalMedicine]
Silent Factor retweeted
Satellite records show the Earth has become a greener planet over the last four decades, with CO₂ fertilisation as the primary driver.
NASA’s own 2016 analysis (and follow-ups) put global greening it at 25–50% of vegetated land, showing significant leaf-area increase; 70% of that is tied to rising CO₂. On 2020, NASA set a modern satellite-era record for greenness. Even dry desert margins and drylands (like the Sahel, south of the Sarara Desert) have greened in places.
Many major staple crops have also shown far larger gains since 1960: wheat yields have risen roughly 225%, maize 196% and rice 146%. Total cereal production is up 280% since 1961 while land use grew far less (Our World in Data).
CO₂ fertilisation is a contributor, but the Green Revolution (varieties, fertiliser, irrigation and mechanisation) did much of the heavy lifting.
Commercial greenhouse operators enrich CO₂ to 1,000 to 1,500 ppm, but the optimum sweet spot for is 550 ppm. Typical yield increase are 20–40% for many crops; and tomatoes, cucumbers and lettuce can hit the higher end of that range. Every 100 ppm boosts growth by 13–16% (from covariance and meta-analyses).
Much of the Earth's land area is inaccessible for agriculture, so a warming climate could open up these regions. Permanent ice and snow cover 10%, tundra a few percent and the Taiga/Boreal forest around 11–17%. Combined, this represents 25–35% of all the world's land area.
Another measurable benefit from higher crop yield is a sharp decline in famine deaths. These have fallen dramatically in both absolute and per-capita terms since the mid-20th century, even as world population more than doubled. Food production per person has risen, a genuine success (Our World in Data).
A large and lucrative economic industry has grown around the climate crisis agenda. Quality and additionality problems in carbon credits are also well-documented.
Carbon markets operate as a pure wealth-transfer and compliance mechanism, instead of a precision climate tool. There are many examples of credits that have been low-quality or non-additional.
Climate crisis alarmist, Al Gore, established his Generation Investment Management company, which invests heavily in climate-finance and 'natural climate solutions'. He has advocated carbon pricing and markets for years, earning hundreds of millions of dollars.
The planet is greener, plants like the extra CO₂ and produce yields have risen sharply, largely because of that extra CO₂.
The greening phenomenon has been well known since at least 2016, yet it is treated as an inconvenient footnote rather than a central fact.
Silent Factor retweeted
🇺🇸 Hundreds of thousands of Americans took to the streets demanding an end to U.S. funding for Israel.
The pressure is no longer coming from abroad. It is coming from inside America.
Silent Factor retweeted
Juries now have refused to send Palestine Action astivists to jail as well as Tony Greenstein. His speech to the Jury that refused to send him to jail for ‘terrorism’ worth reading in whole, but here is an excerpt:
‘In the second world war, the Nazis walled the Jews of Warsaw, half a million of them into a ghetto — a sealed district, starved and diseased, from which the trains left for the Treblinka death camp. And in 1943 the young Jews who remained did something nobody expected. With a handful of smuggled pistols, against tanks and the SS, they rose. They knew they could not win. They rose because it was better to die resisting than to be led away quietly. It is one of the proudest moments in Jewish history.
The last surviving commander of that uprising was a man named Marek Edelman. And in his old age, Edelman wrote to the Palestinian resistance and addressed them as fellow fighters — much to Israel’s annoyance. When he died, Poland gave him a state funeral, a fifteen-gun salute, the President gave the oration. Israel did not send the lowliest clerk at the Israeli Embassy. Edelman wasn’t a Zionist.
Edelman, who led the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising against the Nazis, described Gaza as a ghetto. I have used his comparison for years before October 2023. Two million people, most of them refugees or the children of refugees, sealed into a strip of land under blockade for 16 years, where the majority are children who have never once been allowed out. When I wrote “ghetto,” I meant a ghetto. My blog supported the Uprising just as I would have supported the slave uprisings of the 19th century. That is a political opinion. It was a political opinion on 7 October 2023, and it is a political opinion now.
And here is the crazy thing. Read section 1 of the Terrorism Act 2000 and ask what it would have made of the Warsaw Ghetto fighters. If this Act had existed in 1944, they could have been classified as terrorists. So could the French Resistance.’
greghadfield.medium.com/tony…
Silent Factor retweeted
“No matter what the universe has in store, it cannot take away from the fact that you were born. You’ll have some joy and some pain, and all the other experiences that make up what it’s like to be a tiny part of a grand cosmos. No matter what happens next, you were here. And even when any record of our individual lives is lost to the ages, that won’t detract from the fact that we were. We lived. We were part of the enormity. All the great and terrible parts of being alive, the shocking sublime beauty and heartbreak, the monotony, the interior thoughts, the shared pain and pleasure. It really happened. All of it. On this little world that orbits a yellow star out in the great vastness. And that alone is cause for celebration.”
― Sasha Sagan, For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World
Silent Factor retweeted
LEDs are more energy-efficient, yet they also pose a threat to human health.
For the past two decades the global shift toward energy-efficient light-emitting diodes has drastically altered how we light our homes and offices. While highly beneficial for reducing electricity bills, these lights emit a narrow spectrum dominated by short blue wavelengths and entirely lack the long-wavelength red and infrared light found in natural sunlight and older incandescent bulbs.
Emerging research led by Professor Glen Jeffery at University College London shows that our cells’ powerhouses, the mitochondria, rely on these missing red wavelengths to function. Without them, mitochondrial respiration is suppressed, leading to systemic infrared starvation that can disrupt cellular energy production, cause chronic inflammation, and accelerate aging.
This lack of natural spectrum light is more than a matter of eye strain; it has deep metabolic consequences. Studies show that exposing the body to specific red and near-infrared light stimulates mitochondria to consume more glucose and oxygen, dramatically reducing blood glucose spikes and regulating insulin levels. Conversely, prolonged indoor exposure to red-deficient, blue-heavy LEDs is linked to metabolic dysfunction and cellular degeneration, contributing directly to chronic conditions such as type 2 diabetes, cognitive decline, and vision loss.
As public health researchers warn of this modern environmental hazard, experts suggest reintroducing balanced full-spectrum lighting or simple red-light exposure to help restore our natural metabolic rhythms and protect long-term health.
[Barrett, E. M., & Jeffery, G. (2026). LED lighting (350-650nm) undermines human visual performance unless supplemented by wider spectra (400-1500nm+) like daylight. Scientific Reports, 16(1), 3061. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-026-35389-6]
Silent Factor retweeted
Ludwig von Mises sat down in 1920 and published a paper that ended the intellectual case for socialism, even if the socialists took another seven decades to notice.
The argument was precise. Mises showed that without private ownership of the means of production, there are no real prices for capital goods. Without prices, you cannot calculate profit and loss. Without profit and loss, economic planners have no way of knowing whether they are creating value or destroying it. They are flying blind, spending real resources with no feedback mechanism telling them whether the factory, the railway, or the grain depot was worth building. Every allocation becomes a guess dressed up as a decree.
This, he called the Socialist Calculation Problem, and nobody answered it. Oskar Lange tried in 1936, proposing that socialist planners could simulate prices by trial and error. Mises read this and was unimpressed (charitably put). Lange assumed you could reproduce the function of market prices without the institution that generates them: private property, genuine exchange, real skin in the game. You cannot fake the signal and expect accurate information.
The Soviet Union spent seventy years proving Mises right. Chronic shortages, misallocated steel, surplus winter boots in Georgia in July, famine engineered by committees convinced they understood grain supply better than the price system. The USSR collapsed in 1991 under the weight of precisely the inefficiencies Mises predicted in Vienna in 1920.
You are watching this play out again today, every time a government sets energy prices, rent ceilings, or pharmaceutical price caps, and then expresses shock at the resulting shortages. The calculation problem did not expire with the Soviet Union. Bureaucrats who override price signals recreate the same blindness Mises identified. Mises told you exactly what would happen.
Silent Factor retweeted
جريمة حرب مروعة، شاهد كيف يطلق الجنود الإسرائيليون النار على فلسطيني مقيد ومعصوب العينين وغير مسلح من نقطة فارغة.
أنتم الآن شاهدون على فظائع عصرنا التي ارتكبتها إسرائيل!