Too much screentime for kids.

Are kids able to read anything further than three sentences or more exactly do they EVER read more than three sentences strung together? Like … things called ideas, instruction, information?

We as adults are kidding ourselves and more particularly kids themselves are kidding us all that this is ‘work’ or education or learning … when it is mostly anything but. I don’t mean the bright kids or those from motivated households, but I mean the kids from households where theres never any utterance of anything remotely connected to learning.

I can think of instances in even my limited social interaction where the adults seem apparently unable to contribute anything to a childs intellectual development. And then of course once age sixteen has passed them by and the exams fizzled to nothing everyone exhibits collective blindness as to how a valuable life opportunity/ waymarker has been allowed to drift past beyond reach. A vacuum of any hope to human potential.

We also as adults in this present age collectively somehow retain this silly notion that a laptop is ‘now essential’ for learning …. WHAT UTTER RUBBISH. What most average kids learn, or more correctly attempt to learn in a day I’m sure could quite easily be typed on one side of a sheet of A4; maybe even A5.

Perhaps the Russians are right on this, no child under eighteen is allowed to use a mobile phone.

Paper and books retain the images, facts and explanations forever, no matter how many times it takes until eventually ‘it sinks in’ and I know this myself from at later middle age still retaining the pleasure of ‘finding things out’ to quote Richard Feynman, making it a hobby to memorise things, little bits of foreign language, technical theory of various sorts. How we learn has been a fascination of mine most of my life, half a century and more. It is the ability to open the page again, to revisit again and again that sets it into ones mind, the weak point of screen based learning is that mostly its a once only experience, theres no pages to flick! Another weak point of screen learning is that theres too much faffing about to find what it is you want, I reckon any serious for instance medical student or professional engineer intending to pass exams will jettison the screen for a hard copy set text in book form, but anyway they will be bright and know the material already when plunged into exam prep.

And what of writing itself, gone is the effort and eventual mastery of a ‘good hand’ likewise the ability to make quick and efficient sketches and so many times we realise already kids and young adults can barely spell. Theres too many lame excuses from all concerned why this that and the other cannot be made to happen. The antidote is called hard effort and application and this means the ordinary and the struggling are now worse off than they have ever been and to my mind certainly book based learning can be called the most efficient reward for time spent, little in life that is valuable is gained without a little pain or effort.

Minds eye visualisation is hardly mentioned but once developed sets you apart from the vast majority, its also my experience minds eye visualisation is much reduced by an overwhelming reliance on a screen. This I believe is under-reported and under-researched.

I came from a ‘humble’ background, I recall vividly over fifty years ago meeting a slick new potential uncle that was technically literate (college ‘n suchlike) and could actually recall and set down on paper circuit diagrams and explain it all and most certainly had this ten year old enthralled.

Another case in point, an ex g/f has two grandchildren, age ten and fifteen, which up until December a web fascination fed only from a phone screen is now a laptop and x-box for the just turned ten year old girl (!) and a self bought laptop a few months ago for the boy of fifteen that now spends all night camped out in the parked caravan; I wonder at what time he eventually gets to sleep? I’ve already highlighted to the grandmother the dangers of all this, the reality of web addiction, and so what happens is yet more addictive gizmos are bought for them! Am I speaking a language they understand, does it sink in …. obviously not!

I predict the lively bright ten year old girl within three months will be solemn, uncommunicative and increasingly obese. She will be obsessed with the utterly pointless so called ‘social media’ and hobby activity will be a thing of the past. Progress? I think not.

The bright and advantaged will fly ahead as more than ever, the ordinary the slow are increasingly an underclass, disadvantaged by the over zealous application of screens and keyboards. Art, creativity and handicraft, modelmaking and inventive play for the younger kids and striving to make things with their hands and make them better each time is increasingly looking to be practically a Victorian oddity in its total abandonment. So does this mean the effort to do better with increasing skill in hand eye co-ordination and visualition are becoming near extinct … looks to be so!

I had two years ago when lockdown started produced two very good worksheets for them, intending to get them hopefully with my input to lay their work out better on paper, twenty questions or topics or mini projects were covered … did either of them do anything from this attention of mine ….. nothing, zilch.

Jaron Lanier who knows all about things tech implores us all to dump the screen and keyboard to dump facebook and phony titled ‘social media’ … and how very right he is.

postscript, lets bullet point a few ideas of what troubles me of endless screentime for kids and the obscenity of mindless parents desperate to buy them more crap at every opportunity …

reduced attention span.
inability to follow a thread of educational information or explanation nor any desire to do so.
reduced vocabulary.
a world view and view of life formed by less than ideal pundits and other such nonsense makers, advertising and clever attention grabbing algorithms.
reduced interaction with parents and family relations, no sense of past, no anecdotal recollection.
becoming isolated from realtime face to face human interaction, losing the ability to evaluate who is kosha, who is spouting nonsense or fantasy.
impaired ability with pen and paper, cannot sketch, writing poor, atrocious layout on paper.
blind to any decent tutoring coming from another adult, if it don’t come off a screen they just don’t want to know.
seldom if ever visiting the same page twice ie for reinforcement of material learnt.
a world devoid of Art, of the achievements of human endeavour, many things of beauty and creativity since the Stone Age all eradicated in a generation.
hanging on to extremely trivial social media posts, curled up in a chair with zero exercise.
an acute sense of living in the here and now, trivia rules okay; history eliminated.
kids do nothing to please their elders, their focus or loci is the screen.
and parents that are no different from the kids.

Not a pretty picture is it?

Why cannot we …

Why can not we have what has nurtured and enthralled us for centuries?

Why does it have to be the next ‘big thing’ ie its only the next big thing that will fulfill us, the shit of Meta, social networking junkery or whatever is riding on the crest of technology?

I’d prefer to read a page of text, a few lines of poetry, perhaps the distilled essence of most likely an old man long dead; or a picture from the Renaissance or almost anymost century accompanied with a worthwhile and educated commentary.

Why has human experience been watered down to one technological and morose thrill after another?

Devised by incomplete humans to engender an army of other incomplete humans.

Think, read, learn …. theres more to life than the web!

I’m not sure a straightforward re-wilding is the answer.

You’ll not get many if any people that work in the countryside to agree with re-wilding. Its another one of those subjects turned into something emotive, something that its no longer so easy to get the activists to embrace the full story. I wonder if the web has aided tribalism? …. of course it has.

A myriad of life can exist in a multi-purpose landscape, goodness how difficult it would be to fight ones way through sheep walk turned to hawthorn scrub. Nor do I want to have my progress straight-jacketed into pre-cut walks and pathways. Nature and all its little participants is very clever, theres a habitat for just about everybody, barring of course the hopeful additions that we heard Chris mention yesterday, Lynx, goodness what else and oh yes he tells us bears and wolves! Oh dear, how silly. I always think it a bit corny when an army of kids are enrolled to march upon The Palace!

In a practical real-life situation it has been the fifty years of excessive drainage on upland areas that to my mind has caused great harm, eradicating the upland sponge that minimises flooding. Likewise for decades farmers were paid to eradicate old hedges. How silly and blind!

Another point that I’ve never heard anyone speak of is the universal municipal spraying at any feature of grassed pathways, ie signposts, lampposts, fencing, kerb edges, all of these are microhabitats for tiny things which in turn would be a source of food. I’m talking about the nooks and crannies that have been rendered useless, not neccessarilly a complete re-wilding as per recent experiments. Here of course I am assuming the insect count is down compared with unsprayed, I must be vigilant here, as a great byword of mine is ‘don’t assume’, which is probably the most basic and elementary understanding in any rational and scientific treatment of any subject or situation.

Good quality front gardens are in great decline, concrete slabs, block paving and gravel as standing for cars has eliminated I guess a full half of what might have been a convenient hop off point and source of food for garden birds. A decent garden much like the washing line is becoming a rare thing. Even rarer is the ability to allow leaf litter to remain, to be adding an extremely beneficial upper organic layer that returns soil to what it should be, it was never intended to be naked.

I wonder to what extent ‘nature’ is taught in schools, I know in my early 1970’s UK Secondary School it was poorly dealt with. I could do a far better job myself. If art, practical handicraft (ie wood and metalwork) have been near eradicated and music in great decline at state schools then what of nature study?

My usual hobbyhorse of diatoms is a no-fail way to get kids interested.

My clothes pegs are of bamboo…

Sounds like an excellent cryptic password for two spies meeting but in fact its the reality of a new pack of pegs for my washing line. They are of bamboo, good pegs too, stronger more longer lasting than the previous softwood always pinging apart junk. A joy to use actually.

So there it is, bamboo has infiltrated into what would be a mundane and seemingly simple article for use in an English garden, something initially we think parochial but in fact universal, what country on Earth could function without clothes pegs! I wish the manufacturer well in their effort, a good at a reasonable price product, not plastic either, the plastic pegs as they remain outside 365 eventually degrade and snap.

If only more households were so keen on outdoor drying and the clothes line as I am, the wind is free, it does a good job at drying my laundry, sometimes maybe the indoor (wait for it …) bamboo pole strung up in my kitchen is needed in the winter months to help things along; people regard me as a man always with fresh pressed shirts, never a mess.

I do not have a functioning washing machine, the near never ending spin cycle irritated me so once the m/c itself failed to work it was a blessed relief. I enjoy laundry by hand, it was all our forbears had and so its good enough for me. I also think of carbon footprint. Looking around this small estate where I live neither immediate neighbour puts anything out on the line, I wonder if many do this at all? Thinking of our forebears, surely its obvious a Biblical lifestyle would have solved all this planets problems, but I would think too late now for what ever changes we can make.

postscript … COP26 Glasgow coming up, well intentioned but I fear just a ‘talking shop’ and platitudes and mission statements will abound but the nett effect I fear … ‘not much’.

How many ton of carbon will it take to mount, hold and assemble all the likely bods from around the globe for this climate love-fest?

Andrew Glikson writes with sense over on http://arctic-news.blogspot.com highlighting the difficulty of … a) climate scientists making themselves heard and … b) the fear of being defunded or dismissed.

http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2021/10/glasgow-and-global-warming-to-2c-and-beyond.html

Who are you on the web?

I know folk that elaborate and near fantasise whilst i have to stand there in all amicability listening to their preposterous stories, previous roles in employment, outlandish car insurance claims, bogus university courses and general misinformation.

So to what extent do these bright bunnies fantasise online? Who do they align themselves with? What is real if anything? And what image do they wish to project?

If all they indulge in is a form of role play on sites thankfully I’ll never click then so what, thank goodness I’m bright and quick enough not to get mired down in such nonsense, neither do I have such a great need to belong nor to appear anything other than what I actually am.

But there are ‘serious actors’ to use an irritating and trendy expression, we had the predictable story this morning on bbc radio 4 news of surprise surprise the Russians with thousands of bogus accounts have been planting masses of phoney material onto discussion pages of various websites, masquerading as concerned comment from US citizens but just wishing to skew what should be real opinion; I suppose Ivan wanting to demonstrate the degeneracy of the west and our values are failing. All comes back to the useful ‘nonsense vehicle’ trump and how Ivan hitched a free ride culminating in the dreadful scenes of Jan 6th. Another instance of the web gaining too great a hold over what we read, what hopefully we evaluate and spit out again.

My evening window …

… is open!

But no moths in two hours whatsoever have entered into my kitchen and this is from a large garden full of established shrubs and including beyond countless various nooks and crannies.

There is something wrong, that is for sure.

But a google search reveals next to nothing of up to the minute (or year) moth decline here in the UK.

Luckily my garden displays maturity, complex planting ie a great jumble of many different things and many many niche environments, all mostly never disturbed by any human ie me.

As per usual after the summer solstice the nights seem to be cutting in quickly. This is not something I revel in, luckily a couple of nights ago I treat myself to a car ride up to where for near twenty years we fed horses and me n whatever pet dog went round on our circular walk of an hour. The place is loaded with memories, I fully realise the value of this ‘extra-curricular activity’ and am moving toward when time permitting to ‘get out more’ to stay in touch with this focus of location from years gone past.

The June shutdown of birdsong seemed early this year, I generally name it as the ‘June 13th shutdown’, but this year things seem a bit off course, earlier. A pigeons nest I suspect rock pigeon, was found destroyed and eggs scattered in my garden this morning. I wonder at the new tenants in the let property next door, very cat orientated but also I suspect against garden birds and their song. Why do I think this …. leylandii next door felled to zilch, I suspect her complaints, a dark woman I suspect wanting her own way, I doubt she’ll have much to do with me. Also obviously ‘very set in their ways’, as if at thirty five going on seventy.

Good news is that both birdboxes on rear of house host bee colonies. My garden provides lots of flowering plants, but I look further afield at neighbouring gardens and its a pathetic spectacle, I look around and all is barren, ignorant nothingness and I reckon the birds, insects and small animals likewise think the same. I think its fair to say they vote with their feet so to speak and most winged things flock to my place.

A valuable link …

… re climate change, arctic ice loss and ice thinning.

Arctic sea ice’s dramatic transformation revealed through 42 years of satellite data – ABC News

You have to realise thinning can occur from underside as well as from the top. The former I’m guessing will be the downfall of the Antarctic ice shelves as they are levered away from the parent body, its a different set-up down south so to speak.

The action is in the Arctic as we read in the above, the highest and lowest extremes in Siberia at one same location has now set new records and sat imagery shows the depletion and the near non-existance of multi-year ice. You can add my tears to the ever increasing sea level.

Arctic News (arctic-news.blogspot.com) is also a valuable read. Locations such as the shallow Laptev Sea are forever burnt into my mind. I’ve a £1k wager with friend Gary who is a little sceptical of the severity of my forecast that if we have not reached 3deg C or above by end of 2026 then I will hand him £1k cash, no quibble. I don’t want it to be so but we must all realise the severity of what is happening with multiple feedback loops, all self and mutually reinforcing to greater and higher levels, its a lethal chemistry set we should never have set in motion, as if all the ingredients are present and its one big joke to see how we exploit, extract and set in motion the inevitable. If only we could have lived as in a Biblical simplicity.

There are so many factors and components and values feeding into the active equation that is planetary science, remember our space on this spinning ball of eight inches diameter scales at one thousandth of an inch ie 0.001in equivilant to a cigarette paper licked and placed on a childs eight inch toy ball.

There is nothing we do re carbon emission that will take any effect inside of a decade, the latest scares and truths in fact are many, loss of the aerosol masking effect, arctic methane, loss of high altitude cloud cover, and my own pet hobby horse of (near never reported) of the loss of the oceanic plankton particularly diatoms, quite ironic as it is ancient diatoms that form the basis for 70% of the worlds oil and gas supplies.

Arch clown, otherwise now realised to be a ‘stand-up president’ as in comedian namely trump should be tried at The Hague for his four year climate denial, this is a crime against humanity, four valuable years lost.

What would help is a universal one child policy, a move from the American burger culture, to live close to work and abandon your car in whatever form it takes petrol or electric, none of them are particularly green. Everything starts and rests with the individual, I deliberately have hand washed my laundry for the last couple of years, its no problem to me as luckily I have a clean job, here in north east England works fine, a quick wring and the washing line does the rest, none of the endless tumbling and spinning of the electrical machine.

Theres approx five hundred posts on this paid for blog, please explore.

nooks and crannies …

… these are the things we have lost that insects, bees and butterflies crave as their winter locations, our slick modernity offers them nothing. No tree is allowed to weather and decay as nature intended, offering a multitude of opportunities for new insects and molds and organisms to appear on the altered now declining tree, a home for bats perhaps; a tree or at least some trees surely must be allowed to follow its natural cycle that can offer a new feast and home to so many living things. In the liability culture and ‘tidy’ malaise that seems to be taken up by everyone from municipal gardeners to householders all must be cut down, levelled and rendered sterile, all trees young, exemplified by the dreaded ‘rowan’ of municipal planting. Likewise our habitations and structures offer next to nothing for the tinier members of the natural world.

So what do I do to counter this ignorance of ecology, this ignorance of the living world? I allow things to decline and rot, I create jumbles of prunings in quiet areas of my garden, I stack same length cut limbs and branches from small trees say eighteen or twenty four inches long topped with roofing felt and a couple of bricks at many places at the perimeter of my garden. I allow bees to take over the various nest boxes if they so wish, which reminds me I’d better get another birdbox made and installed this weekend.

Each autumn I often can find say six nests dotted around this medium size semi-urban garden and also know each nest box generally produces two clutches a year; my garden is alive with the sound of garden songbirds, all it needs is common sense and to read a little to pick up the basics, all gardens should be like mine! But how many people nowadays enjoy the contents of an instructional or non-fiction book, especially kids, so much lost!

A great thrill a few years ago was seeing the queen bee fly in her flightless workers one by one piggy back into the commandeered dry and waterproof birdbox I’d made myself, theres lots of thing I make myself, its my particular mindset and approach to life, its the way I was brought up.

For bee and insect and butterfly overwintering I sometimes wrap up bundles of umbellifer stems with string and place them in unvisited parts of wherever. I specifically allow leaf litter to remain, essential for healthy worms and soil, the latter being much more complex and beautiful than most people realise, likewise the blackbird for instance craves to turn over a mature long established leaf layer. Daily I feed birds at my own garden and the location for my list below.

A location nearby which was once a pit heap wsaste ie spoil heap, then a waste infill site is now reclaimed and wooded and since moving here thirty years ago I’ve introduced two dozen native north British species over the last twenty years plus, at 7th May 2021, this is all done to help insects and therefore bird life.

honeysuckle
foxglove (wild collected seed)
bluebells
teasel (from an old pit site a mile away)
common spotted orchid (from a nearby pit yard two miles away)
round leaved orchid (from motorway services)
cranesbill
avens (geum) from Beacon Hill (now being much over-exploited by greedy holiday lets)
red campion (silene) from Wooler
cowslip (from the motorway verge at the Seaham turn-off, relevant to my wife Christine)
primrose
dog violet
ragged robin
cow parsley
pignut
angelica
wild carrot
milk parsley
unwittingly … thatching reed
yellow flag iris ( lots and as botanists say ‘successful’)
common polypody (ie a common fern, at the stonework of the outfall, my wifes ashes etc)
round leaved mint
sweet chestnut from seed (failed, too much shade)
wood sorrel (failed, I think doomed to failure anyway)
goatsbeard … now gone due to overzealous cutting of verges, lets collect more seed this summer etc
snowdrop seed five years ago and waiting
blue whelted thistle
knapweed (very useful for hoverflies)
marsh marigold – latest addition May 2021 – I’m sure will thrive.
enchanters nightshade
my wifes ashes

So far a list of thirty items!

And I’m sure theres more but cannot recall; each of the above would be a deliberate effort with wild collected material. I shall try again with the round leaved mint, I know of a roadside location where I can obtain complete rooted material, its wonderful for bees, as is the glorious, valuable and much unappreciated knapweed. Likewise I need to get back over to the donor pit yard for the common spotted, ten years ago I had hundreds and now much dwindled to a couple of dozen. I would have thought the reclaimed / disturbed land would suit them.

All done by me and cost nowt …. no app no screen no signal !!! Its what my Dad would call ‘good with his hands’.

I feel that …

Theres no reason for me to be here posting links and info these days. The worlds media lampoons and highlights the trump idiocy, or more accurately the trump deception and power play. trump is indeed clever, a sort of very much non-academic mobster savvy cleverness that is in fact difficult to pin down.

I’ve been away from news and media for two days and the search results for trump latest has shocked me, the con-man in chief is so far down the tubes as to be near unfathomable or more properly near incredible in his twistedness. Up is down, right is wrong, bad is good …… straight from DC Comics.

I wish trump the illest of luck as may a million or ten million others both in the States and countless others around the globe wish this sad and useless imposter. Wow, were simple folk taken in … and of course so many dirty Republicans and hangers-on lapped up the instant glory (and power). Integrity and morality need a more current currency.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8320797/Donald-Trump-claims-DID-pandemic-plan-makes-press-secretary-brandish-it.html#v-8895734953622024853

I’m sickened at the dregs that come forward to hang on to the ‘Idiot in Chiefs’ coat tails, it genuinely does get worse and worse.

‘cors …

… cleaner skies will mean more immediate climate heating, oh dear. And my previous post and link for Sam Carana ie Arctic news blogspot focus on the huge release of methane from what looks to be an earthquake in the Arctic. Yuck.

Driving thro my nearby town tonight (NE UK) was a trifle upsetting considering how we still mingle for shopping and for instance many small businesses such as car repair seem to still have human interactions; I cannot help but feel pub and restaurant closure ie trifling but valuable human interactions will create a whole bundle of frustrations and eventual anger. I’m okay, I pretty well live the exact social distancing lifestyle that the Government would so wish us all to pursue, but I’m not sure the average person would wish to live as I do. In fact I know they would not and could not.

Boris has promised vast amounts of citizen wage aid, but be warned he will want his price ie stringent shutdowns as and when he thinks fit.

My heart bleeds for front-line Doctors and nurses … despite the pure lies and blindness of Government Press Briefings … we hear several times over each day from NHS frontline workers that the correct PPE is not present and is pathetically unsuitable, short of the decent minimum.

And where is TEST-TEST-TEST which we were implored to pursue? Its a bit like UK ‘Foot and Mouth’ in that all the hard lessons learnt from the experience of 1969 were ignored thirty years later.

A term seemingly forgotten is bio-security, quite handy actually, its what we all should aim for. Something else we should aim for is NOT to excessively stockpile, methinks there will be much waste, lots ending up in the bin, after all … its difficult to get excited at the prospect of yet more pasta based meals. Luckily I’ve started to get into Indian and Pakistani cooking, I’ve a couple of excellent charity shop books here and once you are ‘tooled up’ ie have the necessary herbs and spices you are able to create so much beautiful taste and often without using meat of any form. Heres so far my rock-bottom must have …..

mustard seed and fennel seed.

olive oil.

cumin seed with hot fried sweet potato ‘twiglet sized’ pieces.

fresh coriander.

try supermarket jars of Indian sauce (try Saag Masala) … you can use red onion, leek and broccoli for an instant meal. Garam masala is part of the toolkit as well as additional coconut milk. I also make my own chapati and Peshwari nan … all v quick and simple.

Besan flour too can make a simple bhaji or vegan burger which is wonderful with say an onion chutney.

I also use Ajiwan seed in my trad brit suet crust or for my nan bread mix.

I also enjoy a sea food pilaf (ie white wine, smoked haddock, mussels, chicken, rice, chicken stock).

a beef skirt casserole with chopped parsnip and carrot for flavour, don’t forget a couple of cloves, also Kalo beef stock ie low salt.

as a treat, crushed chilled raspberry with carnation, ground cinnamon and ground nutmeg.

try to add fresh garlic and ginger wherever possible, fresh diced fig also fine chopped red onion, leek, spring onion; fresh ground black pepper and sea salt. This is all as can be termed ‘Natures Medicine Chest’.